Chapter VII

I find markedly relevant at this point a letter from Newport in the autumn of '61 to another correspondent, one of a series several other examples of which no less successfully appeal to me, even though it involve my going back a little to place three or four of these latter, written at Geneva in 1860. Mrs. William Tappan, primarily Caroline Sturgis of Boston, was for long years and to the end of her life our very great friend and one of my father's most constant and most considered interlocutors, both on the ground of his gravity and on that of his pleasantry. She had spent in Europe with her husband and her two small daughters very much the same years, from early in the summer of '55 till late in the autumn of '60, that we had been spending; and like ourselves, though with less continuity for the time, she had come to live at Newport, where, with no shadow of contention, but with an admirable intelligence, of the incurably ironic or mocking order, she was such a light, free, somewhat intellectually perverse but socially impulsive presence (always for instance insatiably hospitable) as our mustered circle could ill have spared. If play of mind, which she carried to any point of quietly-smiling audacity that might be, had not already become a noted, in fact I think the very most noted, value among us, it would have seated itself there in her person with a nervous animation, a refinement of what might have been called soundable sincerity, that left mere plump assurance in such directions far in the lurch. And she was interesting, she became fairly historic, with the drawing-out of the years, as almost the only survivor of that young band of the ardent and uplifted who had rallied in the other time to the "transcendental" standard, the movement for organised candour of conversation on almost all conceivable or inconceivable things which appeared, with whatever looseness, to find its prime inspirer in Emerson and become more familiarly, if a shade less authentically, vocal in Margaret Fuller. Hungry, ever so cheerfully and confidently hungry, had been much of the New England, and peculiarly the Boston, of those days; but with no such outreaching of the well-scoured empty platter, it probably would have struck one, as by the occasional and quite individual agitation of it from some ruefully-observed doorstep of the best society. It was from such a doorstep that Caroline Sturgis had originally taken her restless flight, just as it was on such another that, after a course of infinite freedom of inquiry and irony, she in the later time, with a fortune inherited, an hospitality extended and a genial gravity of expression confirmed, alighted again, to the no small re-enrichment of a company of friends who had had meanwhile scarce any such intellectual adventures as she was to retain, in a delicate and casual irreverence, the just slightly sharp fragrance or fine asperity of, but who might cultivate with complacency and in support of the general claim to comprehensive culture and awareness unafraid the legend of her vicarious exposure.

Mr. Frank Sanborn's school, which I have already mentioned and to which the following alludes, was during the years immediately preceding the War, as during those of the War itself, the last word of what was then accounted the undauntedly modern, flourishing as it did under the patronage of the most "advanced" thought. The "coeducational" idea had up to that time, if I mistake not, taken on no such confident and consistent, certainly no such graceful or plausible form; small boys and big boys, boys from near and boys from far, consorted there and cohabited, so far as community of board and lodging and of study and sport went, with little girls and great girls, mainly under the earnest tutoring and elder-sistering of young women accomplished as scholarly accomplishment in such cases was then understood, but with Mr. Sanborn himself of course predominantly active and instructional, and above all with the further felicity of the participation of the generous Emerson family by sympathy and interest and the protective spread of the rich mantle of their presence. The case had been from the first a frank and high-toned experiment, a step down from the tonic air, as was so considerably felt, of radical conviction to the firm ground of radical application, that is of happy demonstration--an admittedly new and trustful thing, but all the brighter and wiser, all the more nobly and beautifully workable for that. With but the scantest direct observation of the attempted demonstration--demonstration, that is, of the excellent fruit such a grafting might produce--I yet imagine the enacted and considerably prolonged scene (it lasted a whole decade) to have heaped perfectly full the measure of what it proposed. The interesting, the curious, the characteristic thing was just, however, I seem to make out--I seemed to have made out even at the time--in the almost complete absence of difficulty. It might almost then be said of the affair that it hadn't been difficult enough for interest even should one insist on treating it as sufficiently complicated or composed for picture. The great War was to leave so many things changed, the country over, so many elements added, to say nothing of others subtracted, in the American consciousness at large, that even though the coeducational idea, taking to itself strength, has during these later years pushed its conquests to the very verge of demonstration of its inevitable limits, my memory speaks to me of the Concord school rather as of a supreme artless word on the part of the old social order than as a charged intimation or announcement on the part of the new. The later arrangements, more or less in its likeness and when on a considerable scale, have appeared, to attentive observation, I think, mere endlessly multiplied notes of the range of high spirits in the light heart of communities more aware on the whole of the size and number of their opportunity, of the boundless spaces, the possible undertakings, the uncritical minds and the absent standards about them, than of matters to be closely and preparedly reckoned with. They have been, comparatively speaking, experiments in the void--the great void that may spread so smilingly between wide natural borders before complications have begun to grow. The name of the complication before the fact is very apt to be the discovery--which latter term was so promptly to figure for the faith that living and working more intimately together than had up to then been conceived possible would infinitely improve both the condition and the performance of the brother and sister sexes. It takes long in new communities for discoveries to become complications--though complications become discoveries doubtless often in advance of this; the large vague area, with its vast marginal ease, over which confidence could run riot and new kinds of human relation, elatedly proposed, flourish in the sun, was to shift to different ground the question the Concord school had played with, during its term of life, on its smaller stage, under the great New England elms and maples and in the preoccupied New England air.

The preoccupation had been in a large measure, it is true, exactly with such possibilities, such bright fresh answers to old stale riddles, as Mr. Sanborn and his friends clubbed together to supply; but I can only, for my argument, recover the sense of my single visit to the scene, which must have been in the winter of '62-'63, I think, and which put before me, as I seem now to make out, some suggested fit of perversity--not desperate, quite harmless rather, and almost frivolously futile, on the part of a particular little world that had been thrown back upon itself for very boredom and, after a spell of much admired talking and other beating of the air, wanted for a change to "do" something. The question it "played" with I just advisedly said--for what could my impression have been, personally if indirectly gathered, and with my admirably communicative younger brother to testify, but that if as a school, in strict parlance, the thing was scarce more than naught, as a prolonged pastime it was scarce less than charming and quite filled up in that direction its ample and original measure? I have to reckon, I here allow, with the trick of what I used irrepressibly to read into things in front of which I found myself, for gaping purposes, planted by some unquestioned outer force: it seemed so prescribed to me, so imposed on me, to read more, as through some ever-felt claim for roundness of aspect and intensity of effect in presented matters, whatever they might be, than the conscience of the particular affair itself was perhaps developed enough to ask of it. The experience of many of the Concord pupils during the freshness of the experiment must have represented for them a free and yet ever so conveniently conditioned taste of the idyllic--such possibilities of perfect good comradeship between unsuspected and unalarmed youths and maidens (on a comprehensive ground that really exposed the business to a light and put it to a test) as they were never again to see so favoured in every way by circumstance and, one may quite emphatically say, by atmosphere. It is the atmosphere that comes back to me as most of all the making of the story, even when inhaled but by an occasional whiff and from afar--the manner of my own inhaling. In that air of charmed and cultivated good faith nothing for which the beautiful might be so presumingly claimed--if only claimed with a sufficiently brave clean emphasis--wouldn't have _worked_, which was the great thing; every one must have felt that what was aspired to did work, and as I catch the many-voiced report of it again (many-voiced but pretty well suffused with one clear tone, this of inflections irreproducible now) I seem to listen in convinced admiration, though not by any means in stirred envy, to the cheerful clatter of its working. My failure of envy has, however, no mite of historic importance, proving as it does nothing at all but that if we had, in the family sense, so distinctly turned our back on Europe, the distinctness was at no point so marked as in our facing so straight to such a picture, by which I mean to such an exhibition, as my father's letter throws off. Without knowledge of the letter at the time I yet measured the situation much as he did and enjoyed it as he did, because it would have been stupid not to; but from that to any wishful vision of being in it or of it would have been a long jump, of which I was unabashedly incapable. To have broken so personally, so all but catastrophically, with Europe as we had done affected me as the jump sufficient; we had landed somewhere in quite another world or at least on the sharp edge of one; and in the single particular sense could I, as time then went on, feel myself at all moved, with the helpless, the baffled visionary way of it, to push further in. What straight solicitation _that_ phase of the American scene could exert--more coercive to the imagination than any we were ever again, as Americans, to know--I shall presently try to explain; but this was an intensely different matter.

I buried two of my children yesterday--at Concord, Mass., and feel
so heartbroken this morning that I shall need to adopt two more
instantly to supply their place; and lo and behold you and William
present yourselves, or if you decline the honour Ellen and Baby.
Mary and I trotted forth last Wednesday, bearing Wilky and Bob in
our arms to surrender them to the famous Mr. Sanborn. The yellowest
sunshine and an atmosphere of balm were all over the goodly land,
while the maple, the oak and the dogwood showered such splendours
upon the eye as made the Champs Elysees and the Bois appear
parvenus and comical. Mrs. Clark is a graceless enough woman
outwardly, but so tenderly feathered inwardly, so unaffectedly kind
and motherly toward the urchins under her roof, that one was glad
to leave them in that provident nest. She has three or four other
school-boarders, one of them a daughter of John Brown--tall, erect,
long-haired and freckled, as John Brown's daughter has a right to
be. I kissed her (inwardly) between the eyes, and inwardly heard
the martyred Johannes chuckle over the fat inheritance of love and
tenderness he had after all bequeathed to his children in all good
men's minds. An arch little Miss Plumley also lives there, with
eyes full of laughter and a mouth like a bed of lilies bordered
with roses. How it is going to be possible for my two boys to
pursue their studies in the midst of that bewilderment I don't
clearly see. I am only sure of one thing, which is that if I had
had such educational advantages as that in my youth I should
probably have been now far more nearly ripe for this world's
business. We asked to see Miss Waterman, one of the teachers
quartered in the house, in order to say to her how much we should
thank her if she would occasionally put out any too lively spark
she might see fall on the expectant tinder of my poor boys' bosoms;
but Miss W. herself proved of so siliceous a quality on
inspection--with round tender eyes, young, fair and womanly--that I
saw in her only new danger and no promise of safety. My present
conviction is that a general conflagration is inevitable, ending in
the total combustion of all that I hold dear on that spot. Yet I
can't but felicitate our native land that such magnificent
experiments in education go on among us.

Then we drove to Emerson's and waded up to our knees through a
harvest of apples and pears, which, tired of their mere outward or
carnal growth, had descended to the loving bosom of the lawn, there
or elsewhere to grow inwardly meet for their heavenly rest in the
veins of Ellen the saintly and others; until at last we found the
cordial Pan himself in the midst of his household, breezy with
hospitality and blowing exhilarating trumpets of welcome. Age has
just the least in the world dimmed the lustre we once knew, but an
unmistakable breath of the morning still encircles him, and the
odour of primaeval woods. Pitchpine is not more pagan than he
continues to be, and acorns as little confess the gardener's skill.
Still I insist that he is a voluntary Pan, that it is a condition
of mere wilfulness and insurrection on his part, contingent upon a
mercilessly sound digestion and an uncommon imaginative influx, and
I have no doubt that even he, as the years ripen, will at last
admit Nature to be tributary and not supreme. However this be, we
consumed juicy pears to the diligent music of Pan's pipe, while
Ellen and Edith softly gathered themselves upon two low stools in
the chimney-corner, saying never a word nor looking a look, but
apparently hemming their handkerchiefs; and good Mrs. Stearns, who
sat by the window and seemed to be the village dressmaker, ever and
anon glanced at us over her spectacles as if to say that never
before has she seen this wondrous Pan so glistening with dewdrops.
Then and upon the waves of that friendly music we were duly wafted
to our educational Zion and carefully made over our good and
promising and affectionate boys to the school-master's keeping. Out
into the field beside his house Sanborn incontinently took us to
show how his girls and boys perform together their worship of
Hygeia. It was a glimpse into that new world wherein dwelleth
righteousness and which is full surely fast coming upon our
children and our children's children; and I could hardly keep
myself, as I saw my children's eyes drink in the mingled work and
play of the inspiring scene, from shouting out a joyful Nunc
Dimittis. The short of the story is that we left them and rode home
robbed of our plumage, feeling sore and ugly and only hoping that
they wouldn't die, any of these cold winter days, before the
parental breast could get there to warm them back to life or cheer
them on to a better.

Mrs. William Hunt has just come in to tell the good news of your
near advent and that she has found the exact house for you;
instigated to that activity by one of your angels, of the Hooper
band, with whom she has been in correspondence. I don't thank angel
Hooper for putting angel Hunt upon that errand, since I should like
to have had the merit of it myself. I suspect the rent is what it
ought to be: if it's not I will lay by something every week for you
toward it, and have no doubt we shall stagger through the cold
weather.

I gather from the above the very flower of my father's irrepressible utterance of his constitutional optimism, that optimism fed so little by any sense of things as they were or are, but rich in its vision of the facility with which they might become almost at any moment or from one day to the other totally and splendidly different. A less vague or vain idealist couldn't, I think, have been encountered; it was given him to catch in the fact at almost any turn right or left some flagrant assurance or promise of the state of man transfigured. The Concord school could be to him for the hour--there were hours and hours!--such a promise; could even figure in that light, to his amplifying sympathy, in a degree disproportionate to its genial, but after all limited, after all not so intensely "inflated," as he would have said, sense of itself. In which light it is that I recognise, and even to elation, how little, practically, of the idea of the Revolution in the vulgar or violent sense was involved in his seeing so many things, in the whole social order about him, and in the interest of their being more or less immediately altered, as lamentably, and yet at the same time and under such a coloured light, as amusingly and illustratively, wrong--wrong, that is, with a blundering helpless human salience that kept criticism humorous, kept it, so to speak, sociable and almost "sympathetic" even when readiest. The case was really of his rather feeling so vast a rightness close at hand or lurking immediately behind actual arrangements that a single turn of the inward wheel, one real response to pressure of the spiritual spring, would bridge the chasms, straighten the distortions, rectify the relations and, in a word, redeem and vivify the whole mass--after a far sounder, yet, one seemed to see, also far subtler, fashion than any that our spasmodic annals had yet shown us. It was of course the old story that we had only to _be_ with more intelligence and faith--an immense deal more, certainly--in order to work off, in the happiest manner, the many-sided ugliness of life; which was a process that might go on, blessedly, in the quietest of all quiet ways. _That_ wouldn't be blood and fire and tears, or would be none of these things stupidly precipitated; it would simply have taken place by _enjoyed_ communication and contact, enjoyed concussion or convulsion even--since pangs and agitations, the very agitations of perception itself, are of the highest privilege of the soul and there is always, thank goodness, a saving sharpness of play or complexity of consequence in the intelligence completely alive. The meaning of which remarks for myself, I must be content to add, is that the optimists of the world, the constructive idealists, as one has mainly known them, have too often struck one as overlooking more of the aspects of the real than they recognise; whereas our indefeasible impression, William's and mine, of our parent was that he by his very constitution and intimate heritage recognised many more of those than he overlooked. What was the finest part of our intercourse with him--that is the most nutritive--but a positive record of that? Such a matter as that the factitious had absolutely no hold on him was the truest thing about him, and it was all the while present to us, I think, as backing up his moral authority and play of vision that never, for instance, had there been a more numerous and candid exhibition of all the human susceptibilities than in the nest of his original nurture. I have spoken of the fashion in which I still see him, after the years, attentively bent over those much re-written "papers," that we had, even at our stupidest, this warrant for going in vague admiration of that they caught the eye, even the most filially detached, with a final face of wrought clarity, and thereby of beauty, that there _could_ be no thinking unimportant--and see him also fall back from the patient posture, again and again, in long fits of remoter consideration, wondering, pondering sessions into which I think I was more often than not moved to read, for the fine interest and colour of it, some story of acute inward difficulty amounting for the time to discouragement. If one wanted drama _there_ was drama, and of the most concrete and most immediately offered to one's view and one's suspense; to the point verily, as might often occur, of making one go roundabout it on troubled tiptoe even as one would have held one's breath at the play.

These opposed glimpses, I say, hang before me as I look back, but really fuse together in the vivid picture of the fond scribe separated but by a pane of glass--his particular preference was always directly to face the window--from the general human condition he was so devoutly concerned with. He _saw_ it, through the near glass, saw it in such detail and with a feeling for it that broke down nowhere--that was the great thing; which truth it confirmed that his very fallings back and long waits and stays and almost stricken musings witnessed exactly to his intensity, the intensity that would "come out," after all, and make his passionate philosophy and the fullest array of the appearances that couldn't be blinked fit together and harmonise. Detached as I could during all those years perhaps queerly enough believe myself, it would still have done my young mind the very greatest violence to have to suppose that any plane of conclusion for him, however rich and harmonious he might tend to make conclusion, could be in the nature of a fool's paradise. Small vague outsider as I was, I couldn't have borne _that_ possibility; and I see, as I return to the case, how little I really could ever have feared it. This would have amounted to fearing it on account of his geniality--a shocking supposition; as if his geniality had been thin and _bete_, patched up and poor, and not by the straightest connections, nominal and other, of the very stuff of his genius. No, I feel myself complacently look back to _my_ never having, even at my small poorest, been so _bete_, either, as to conceive he might be "wrong," wrong as a thinker-out, in his own way, of the great mysteries, because of the interest and amusement and vividness his attesting spirit could fling over the immediate ground. What he saw _there_ at least could be so enlightening, so evocatory, could fall in so--which was to the most inspiring effect within the range of perception of a scant son who was doubtless, as to the essential, already more than anything else a novelist _en herbe_. If it didn't sound in a manner patronising I should say that I saw that my father saw; and that I couldn't but have given my own case away by not believing, however obscurely, in the virtue of his consequent and ultimate synthesis. Of course I never dreamed of any such name for it--I only thought of it as something very great and fine founded on those forces in him that came home to us and that touched us all the while. As these were extraordinary forces of sympathy and generosity, and that yet knew how to be such without falsifying any minutest measure, the structure raised upon them might well, it would seem, and even to the uppermost sublime reaches, be as valid as it was beautiful. If he so endeared himself wasn't it, one asked as time went on, through his never having sentimentalised or merely meditated away, so to call it, the least embarrassment of the actual about him, and having with a passion peculiarly his own kept together his stream of thought, however transcendent and the stream of life, however humanised? There was a kind of experiential authority in his basis, as he felt his basis--there being no human predicament he couldn't by a sympathy more _like_ direct experience than any I have known enter into; and this authority, which concluded so to a widening and brightening of the philosophic--for him the spiritual--sky, made his character, as intercourse disclosed it, in a high degree fascinating. These things, I think, however, are so happily illustrated in his letters that they look out from almost any continuous passage in such a series for instance as those addressed in the earlier time to Mrs. Tappan. His _tone_, that is, always so effectually looks out, and the living parts of him so singularly hung together, that one may fairly say his philosophy _was_ his tone. To cite a few passages here is at the same time to go back to a previous year or two--which my examples, I hold, make worth while. He had been on a visit to Paris toward the winter's end of '60, and had returned to Geneva, whence he writes early in April.

So sleepy have I been ever since my return from Paris that I am
utterly unfit to write letters. I was thoroughly poisoned by
tobacco in those horrid railway carriages, and this with want of
sleep knocked me down. I am only half awake still, and will not
engage consequently in any of those profound inquiries which your
remembrance always suggests.

I am very sorry for you that you live in an excommunicated country,
or next door to it; and I don't wonder at your wanting to get away.
But it is provoking to think that but for your other plan
Switzerland might possess you all for the summer. It is doubtless
in part this disappointment that will unsettle us in our present
moorings and take us probably soon to Germany. What after that I
have no idea, and am always so little wilful about our movements
that I am ready the young ones should settle them. So we may be in
Europe a good while yet, always providing that war keep smooth his
wrinkled front and allow us quiet newspapers. They must fight in
Italy for some time to come, but between England and France is the
main point. If _they_ can hold aloof from tearing each other we
shall manage; otherwise we go home at once, to escape the universal
spatter that must then ensue.

What is the meaning of all these wars and rumours of wars? No
respectable person ever seems to occupy himself with the question,
but I can't help feeling it more interesting than anything in Homer
or Plato or the gallery of the Vatican. I long daily with
unappeasable longing for a righteous life, such a life as I am sure
is implied in every human possibility, and myriads are bearing me
company. What does this show but that the issue is near out of all
our existing chaos? All our evil is fossil and comes from the mere
persistence of diseased institutions in pretending to rule us when
we ought to be left free to be living spirits of God. There is no
_fresh_ evil in the world. No one now steals or commits murder or
any other offence with the least relish for it, but only to revenge
his poor starved opportunities. The superiority of America in
respect to freedom of thought over Europe comes from this fact that
she has so nearly achieved her deliverance from such tyrannies. All
she now needs to make her right is simply an intelligent
recognition of her spiritual whereabouts. If she had this she would
put her hand to the work splendidly. You and I when we get home
will try to quicken her intelligence in that respect, will do at
any rate _our_ best to put away this pestilent munching of the tree
of knowledge of good and evil, and persuade to the belief of man's
unmixed innocence.

Which, it will easily be seen, was optimism with a vengeance, and marked especially in the immediacy, the state of being at hand for him, of a social redemption. What made this the more signal was its being so unattended with visions the least Apocalyptic or convulsional; the better order slipping in amid the worse, and superseding it, so insidiously, so quietly and, by a fair measure, so easily. It was a faith and an accompanying philosophy that couldn't be said not to be together simplifying; and yet nothing was more unmistakable when we saw them at close range, I repeat, than that they weren't unnourished, weren't what he himself would, as I hear him, have called the "flatulent" fruit of sentimentality.

His correspondent had in a high degree, by her vivacity of expression, the art of challenging his--as is markedly apparent from a letter the date of which fails beyond its being of the same stay at Geneva and of the winter's end.

If I had really imagined that I had bored you and your husband so
very little while I was in Paris in December I should long since
have repeated the experiment; the more surely that I want so much
to see again my darling nieces and delight myself in the abundance
of their large-eyed belief.... Our Alice is still under
discipline--preparing to fulfil some high destiny or other in the
future by reducing decimal fractions to their lowest possible rate
of subsistence, where they often grow so attenuated under her rapid
little fingers that my poor old eyes can no longer see them at all.
I shall go before long to England, and then perhaps--! But I shan't
promise anything on _her_ behalf.

You ask me "why I do not brandish my tomahawk and, like Walt
Whitman, raise my barbaric yawp over the roofs of all the houses."
It is because I am not yet a "cosmos" as that gentleman avowedly
is, but only a very dim nebula, doing its modest best, no doubt, to
solidify into cosmical dimensions, but still requiring an "awful
sight" of time and pains and patience on the part of its friends.
You evidently fancy that cosmoses are born to all the faculty they
shall ever have, like ducks: no such thing. There is no respectable
cosmos but what is born to such a vapoury and even gaseous
inheritance as requires long centuries of conflict on its part to
overcome the same and become pronounced or educated in its proper
mineral, vegatable or animal order. Ducks are born perfect; that is
to say they utter the same unmodified unimproved quack on their
dying pillow that they uttered on their natal day; whereas cosmoses
are destined to a life of such surprising change that you may say
their career is an incessant disavowal of their birth, or that
their highest maturation consists in their utter renunciation of
their natural father and mother. You transcendentalists make the
fatal mistake of denying education, of sundering present from past
and future from present. These things are indissolubly one, the
present deriving its consciousness only from the past, and the
future drawing all its distinctive wisdom from our present
experience. The law is the same with the individual as it is with
the race: none of us can dodge the necessity of regeneration, of
disavowing our natural ancestry in order to come forth in our own
divinely-given proportions. The secret of this necessity ought to
reconcile us to it, however onerous the obligation it imposes; for
that secret is nothing more nor less than this, that we cosmoses
have a plenary divine origin and are bound eventually to see that
divinity reproduced in our most familiar and trivial experience,
even down to the length of our shoe-ties. If the Deity were an
immense Duck capable only of emitting an eternal quack we of course
should all have been born webfooted, each as infallible in his way
as the Pope, nor ever have been at the expense and bother of
swimming-schools. But He is a perfect man, incapable of the
slightest quackery, capable only of every honest and modest and
helpful purpose, and these are perfections to which manifestly no
one is born, but only _re_-born. We come to such states not by
learning, only by _unlearning_. No natural edification issues in
spiritual architecture of this splendour, but only a natural
demolition or undoing. I dimly recognise this great truth, and
hence hold more to a present imbecility than to a too eager
efficiency. I feel myself more fit to be knocked about for some
time yet and vastated of my natural vigour than to commence cosmos
and raise the barbaric yawp. Time enough for that when I am fairly
finished. Say what we will, you and I are all the while at school
just now. The genial pedagogue may give you so little of the ferule
as to leave you to doubt whether you really are there; but this
only proves what a wonderful pedagogue it is, and how capable of
adapting himself to everyone.

His friend in Paris found herself at that time, like many other persons, much interested in the exercise of automatic writing, of which we have since so abundantly heard and as to which she had communicated some striking observations.

...Your letter is full of details that interest but don't
fascinate. I haven't a doubt of a single experience you allege, and
do not agree with your friend Count S. (your writing of this name
is obscure) that the world of spirits is not an element in your
writing. I am persuaded now for a long time of the truth of these
phenomena and feel no inclination to dispute or disparage them; but
at the same time I feel to such a degree my own remoteness from
them that I am sure I could never get any personal contact with
them. The state of mind exposing one to influences of this nature,
and which makes them beneficial to it, is a sceptical state; and
this I have never known for a moment. Spiritual existence has
always been more real to me (I was going to say) than natural; and
when accordingly I am asked to believe in the spiritual world
because my senses are getting to reveal it I feel as if the ground
of my conviction were going to be weakened rather than
strengthened. Of course I should have very little respect for
spiritual things which didn't ultimately report themselves to
sense, which didn't indeed subside into things of sense as
logically as a house into its foundations. But what I deny is that
spiritual existence can be directly known on earth--known otherwise
than by correspondence or inversely. The letter of every revelation
must be directly hostile to its spirit, and only inversely
accordant, because the very pretension of revelation is that it's a
descent, an absolute coming down, of truth, a humiliation of it
from its own elevated and habitual plane to a lower one.

Admit therefore that the facts of "spiritualism" are all true;
admit that persons really deceased have been communicating with you
about the state of Europe, the approaching crisis and the persons
known to us whom you name; in that case I should insist that, to
possess the slightest spiritual interest, their revelation should
be re-translated into the spiritual tongue by correspondences;
because as to any spirit knowing or caring to know those persons,
or being bothered about any crisis of ours, that is to me simply
incredible. Such matters have in each case doubtless some spiritual
or substantial counterpart answering in every particular to its
superficial features; and Wilkinson and Emerson, for instance, with
the others, are of course shadows of some greater or less spiritual
quantities. But I'll be hanged if there's the slightest _sensible_
accord between the substance and the semblance on either hand. Your
spirits, no doubt, give you the very communications you report to
me; only Wilkinson spiritually interpreted and Emerson spiritually
interpreted mean things so very different from our two friends of
those denominations that if our spiritual eye were for a moment
open to discern the difference I think it highly probable--I'm sure
it is infinitely possible--we should renounce their acquaintance.

But I have harped on this string long enough; let me change the
tune. Your spirits tell you to repose in what they are doing for
you and, with a pathos to which I am not insensible, say "Rest now,
poor child; your struggles have been great; clasp peace to your
bosom at last." And as a general thing our ears are saluted by
assurances that these communications are all urged by philanthropy
and that everyone so addressing us wants in some way to help and
elevate us. But just this is to my mind the unpleasant side of the
business. I have been so long accustomed to see the most arrant
deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence that the moment
I hear a profession of good-will from almost any quarter I
instinctively look about for a constable or place my hand within
reach of the bell-rope. My ideal of human intercourse would be a
state of things in which no man will ever stand in need of any
other man's help, but will derive all his satisfaction from the
great social tides which own no individual names. I am sure no man
can be put in a position of dependence upon another without that
other's very soon becoming--if he accepts the duties of the
relation--utterly degraded out of his just human proportions. No
man can play the Deity to his fellow man with impunity--I mean
spiritual impunity of course. For see: if I am at all satisfied
with that relation, if it contents me to be in a position of
generosity toward others, I must be remarkably indifferent at
bottom to the gross social inequality which permits that position,
and instead of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man
to myself, in the interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the
sake of the profit it yields to my own self-complacency. I do hope
the reign of benevolence is over; until that event occurs I am sure
the reign of God will be impossible. But I have a shocking bad cold
that racks my head to bursting almost; I can't think to any
purpose. Let me hear soon from you that I have not been
misunderstood. I wouldn't for the world seem wilfully to depreciate
what you set a high value on. No, I really can't help my judgments.
And I always soften them to within an inch of their life as it is.

The following, no longer from the Hotel de l'Ecu, but from 5 Quai du Mont Blanc, would indicate that his "Dear Queen Caroline," as he addresses her, was at no loss to defend her own view of the matters in discussion between them: in which warm light indeed it is that I was myself in the after years ever most amusedly to see her.

Don't scold a fellow so! Exert your royal gifts in exalting only
the lowly and humbling only the proud. Precisely what I like, to
get extricated from metaphysics, is encouragement from a few
persons like yourself, such encouragement as would lie in your
intelligent apprehension and acknowledgment of the great _result_
of metaphysics, which is a godly and spotless life on earth. If I
could find anyone apt to that doctrine I should not work so hard
metaphysically to convince the world of its truth. And as for being
a metaphysical Jack Horner, the thing is contradictory, as no
metaphysician whose studies are sincere ever felt tempted to
self-complacency or disposed to reckon himself a good boy. Such
exaltations are not for him, but only for the artists and poets,
who dazzle the eyes of mankind and _don't_ recoil from the darkness
they themselves produce--as Dryden says, or Collins.

Mrs. Tappan, spending the month of June in London, continued to impute for the time, I infer (I seem to remember a later complete detachment), a livelier importance to the supernatural authors of her "writing" than her correspondent was disposed to admit; but almost anything was a quickener of the correspondent's own rich, that is always so animated, earnestness. He had to feel an interlocutor's general sympathy, or recognise a moral relation, even if a disturbed one, for the deep tide of his conviction to rise outwardly higher; but when that happened the tide overflowed indeed.

MY DEAR CAROLINA--Neither North nor South, but an eminently free
State, with no exulting shout of master and no groan of captive to
be heard in all its borders, but only the cheerful hum of happy
husband and children--how do you find London? Here in Geneva we are
so saturate with sunshine that we would fain dive to the depths of
the lake to learn coolness of the little fishes. Still, we don't
envy your two weeks of unbroken rain in dear dismal London. What a
preparation for doing justice to Lenox! You see I know--through
Mary Tweedy, who has a hearty appreciation of her London
privileges. How are A. D. and all the rest of them? _Familiar_
spirits, are they not, on a short acquaintance?--and how pleasant
an aspect it gives to the middle kingdom to think you shall be sure
to find there such lovers and friends! Only let us keep them at a
proper distance. It doesn't do for us ever to accept another only
at that other's own estimate of himself. If we do we may as well
plunge into Tartarus at once. No human being can afford to commit
his happiness to another's keeping, or, what is the same thing,
forego his own individuality with all that it imports. The first
requisite of our true relationship to each other (spiritually
speaking) is that we be wholly independent of each other: then we
may give ourselves away as much as we please, we shall do neither
them nor ourselves any harm. But until that blessed day comes, by
the advance of a scientific society among men, we shall be utterly
unworthy to love each other or be loved in return. We shall do
nothing but prey upon each other and turn each other's life to
perfect weariness.

The more of it then just now the better! The more we bite and
devour each other, the more horribly the newspapers abound in all
the evidences of our disgusting disorganisation, the
disorganisation of the old world, the readier will our dull ears be
to listen to the tidings of the new world which is aching to
appear, the world wherein dwelleth righteousness. Don't abuse the
newspapers therefore publicly, but tell everybody of the use they
are destined to promote, and set others upon the look-out. A. D. is
a very good woman, I haven't a doubt, but will fast grow a better
one if she would let herself alone, and me also, and all other mere
persons, while she diligently inquires about the Lord; that is
about that lustrous universal life which God's providence is now
forcing upon men's attention and which will obliterate for ever all
this exaggeration of our personalities. It is very well for lovers
to abase themselves in this way to each other; because love is a
_passion_ of one's nature--that is to say the lover is not
self-possessed, but is lifted for a passing moment to the level of
the Lord's life in the race, and so attuned to higher issues ever
after in his own proper sphere. But these experiences are purely
disciplinary and not final. All passion is a mere inducement to
action, and when at last activity really dawns in us we drop this
faculty of hallucination that we have been under about persons and
see and adore the abounding divinity which is in all persons alike.
Who will then ever be caught in that foolish snare again? I did
nothing but tumble into it from my boyhood up to my marriage; since
which great disillusioning--yes!--I feel that the only lovable
person is one who will never permit himself to be loved. But I have
written on without any intention and have now no time to say what
alone I intended, how charming and kind and long to be remembered
you were all those Paris days. Give my love to honest William and
tell my small nieces that I pine to pluck again the polished
cherries of their cheeks. My wife admires and loves you.

From which I jump considerably forward, for its (privately) historic value, to a communication from Newport of the middle of August '63. My father's two younger sons had, one the previous and one at the beginning of the current, year obtained commissions in the Volunteer Army; as a sequel to which my next younger brother, as Adjutant of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, Colonel Robert Shaw's regiment, the first body of coloured soldiers raised in the North, had received two grave wounds in that unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner from which the gallant young leader of the movement was not to return.

Wilky had a bad day yesterday and kept me busy or I shouldn't have
delayed answering your inquiries till to-day. He is very severely
wounded both in the ankle and in the side--where he doesn't heal so
fast as the doctor wishes in consequence of the shell having made a
pouch which collects matter and retards nature. They cut it open
yesterday, and to-day he is better, or will be. The wound in the
ankle was made by a cannister ball an inch and a half in diameter,
which lodged eight days in the foot and was finally dislodged by
cutting down through (the foot) and taking it out at the sole. He
is excessively weak, unable to do anything but lie passive, even
to turn himself on his pillow. He will probably have a slow and
tedious recovery--the doctors say of a year at least; but he knows
nothing of this himself and speaks, so far as he does talk, but of
going back in the Fall. If you write please say nothing of this; he
is so distressed at the thought of a long sickness. He is vastly
attached to the negro-soldier cause; believes (I think) that the
world has existed for it; and is sure that enormous results to
civilisation are coming out of it. We heard from Bob this morning
at Morris Island; with his regiment, building earthworks and
mounting guns. Hot, he says, but breezy; also that the shells make
for them every few minutes--while he and his men betake themselves
to the trenches and holes in the earth "like so many land-crabs in
distress." He writes in the highest spirits. Cabot Russell, Wilky's
dearest friend, is, we fear, a prisoner and wounded. We hear
nothing decisive, but the indications point that way. Poor Wilky
cries aloud for his friends gone and missing, and I could hardly
have supposed he might be educated so suddenly up to serious
manhood altogether as he appears to have been. I hear from Frank
Shaw this morning, and they are all well--and admirable.

This goes beyond the moment I had lately, and doubtless too lingeringly, reached, as I say; just as I shall here find convenience in borrowing a few passages from my small handful of letters of the time to follow--to the extent of its not following by a very long stretch. Such a course keeps these fragments of record together, as scattering them would perhaps conduce to some leakage in their characteristic tone, for which I desire all the fulness it can keep. Impossible moreover not in some degree to yield on the spot to _any_ brush of the huge procession of those particular months and years, even though I shall presently take occasion to speak as I may of my own so inevitably contracted consciousness of what the brush, with its tremendous possibilities of violence, could consist of in the given case. I had, under stress, to content myself with knowing it in a more indirect and muffled fashion than might easily have been--even should one speak of it but as a matter of mere vision of the eyes or quickened wonder of the mind or heaviness of the heart, as a matter in fine of the closer and more inquiring, to say nothing of the more agitated, approach. All of which, none the less, was not to prevent the whole quite indescribably intensified time--intensified through all lapses of occasion and frustrations of contact--from remaining with me as a more constituted and sustained act of living, in proportion to my powers and opportunities, than any other homogeneous stretch of experience that my memory now recovers. The case had to be in a peculiar degree, alas, that of living inwardly--like so many of my other cases; in a peculiar degree compared, that is, to the immense and prolonged outwardness, outwardness naturally at the very highest pitch, that was the general sign of the situation. To which I may add that my "alas" just uttered is in the key altogether of my then current consciousness, and not in the least in that of my present appreciation of the same--so that I leave it, even while I thus put my mark against it, as I should restore tenderly to the shelf any odd rococo object that might have slipped from a reliquary. My appreciation of what I presume at the risk of any apparent fatuity to call my "relation to" the War is at present a thing exquisite to me, a thing of the last refinement of romance, whereas it had to be at the time a sore and troubled, a mixed and oppressive thing--though I promptly see, on reflection, how it must frequently have flushed with emotions, with small scraps of direct perception even, with particular sharpnesses in the generalised pang of participation, that were all but touched in themselves as with the full experience. Clear as some object presented in high relief against the evening sky of the west, at all events, is the presence for me beside the stretcher on which my young brother was to lie for so many days before he could be moved, and on which he had lain during his boat-journey from the South to New York and thence again to Newport, of lost Cabot Russell's stricken father, who, failing, up and down the searched field, in respect of his own irrecoverable boy--then dying, or dead, as afterwards appeared, well within the enemy's works--had with an admirable charity brought Wilky back to a waiting home instead, and merged the parental ache in the next nearest devotion he could find. Vivid to me still is one's almost ashamed sense of this at the hurried disordered time, and of how it was impossible not to impute to his grave steady gentleness and judgment a full awareness of the difference it would have made for him, all the same, to be doing such things with a still more intimate pity. Unobliterated for me, in spite of vaguenesses, this quasi-twilight vision of the good bereft man, bereft, if I rightly recall, of his only son, as he sat erect and dry-eyed at the guarded feast of our relief; and so much doubtless partly because of the image that hovers to me across the years of Cabot Russell himself, my brother's so close comrade--dark-eyed, youthfully brown, heartily bright, actively handsome, and with the arrested expression, the indefinable shining stigma, worn, to the regard that travels back to them, by those of the young figures of the fallen that memory and fancy, wanting, never ceasing to want, to "do" something for them, set as upright and clear-faced as may be, each in his sacred niche. They have each to such a degree, so ranged, the strange property or privilege--one scarce knows what to call it--of exquisitely, for all our time, facing us out, quite blandly ignoring us, looking through us or straight over us at something they partake of together but that we mayn't pretend to know. We walk thus, I think, rather ruefully before them--those of us at least who didn't at the time share more happily their risk. William, during those first critical days, while the stretcher itself, set down with its load just within the entrance to our house, mightn't be moved further, preserved our poor lacerated brother's aspect in a drawing of great and tender truth which I permit myself to reproduce. It tells for me the double story--I mean both of Wilky's then condition and of the draughtsman's admirable hand.

But I find waiting my father's last letter of the small group to Mrs. Tappan. We were by that time, the autumn of 1865, settled in Boston for a couple of years.

MY DEAR CARRY--Are you a carry_atid_ that you consider yourself
bound to uphold that Lenox edifice through the cold winter as well
as the hot summer? Why don't you come to town? I can't _write_ what
I want to say. My brain is tired, and I gladly forego all writing
that costs thought or attention. But I have no day forgotten your
question, and am eager always to make a conquest of you; you are so
full both of the upper and the nether might as always greatly to
excite my interest and make me feel how little is accomplished
while you are left not so. I make no prayer to you; I would have no
assistance from your own vows; or the pleasure of my intercourse
with you would be slain. I would rather outrage than conciliate
your sympathies, that I might have all the joy of winning you over
at last. Hate me on my ideal side, the side that menaces you, as
much as you please meanwhile, but keep a warm corner in your regard
for me personally, as I always do for you, until we meet again.
It's a delight to know a person of your sense and depth; even the
_gaudia certaminis_ are more cheering with you than ordinary
agreements with other people.

On which note I may leave the exchange in question, feeling how equal an honour it does to the parties.