’,
it falls into the category of Shorter Novels – under an indulgence not
extended to several of its compeers.
The Reverberator,
which figured at birth (1888) in half a dozen numbers of
Macmillan’s magazine
may be described, I suppose, beyond any fiction here reproduced, as a
jeu d’esprit:
I can think at least of none other on the brow of which
I may presume to place that laurel. And yet as I cast about me for the
nameable grounds of the hospitality I thus give it I find myself think of it
in other rich lights as well; quite in the light of an exemplary anecdote,
and at the same time quite in that of a little rounded drama. This is to
press hard, it might seem, on so slight a composition; but I brave the
extravagance under the interest of recognising again how the weight of
expatiation is ever met in such cases – that of the slender production
equally with that of the stout – by a surface really much larger than
the mere offered face of the work. The face of the work may be small in
itself, and yet the surface, the whole thing, the associational margin and
connexion, may spread, beneath the fond remembering eye, like nothing more
noble than an insidious grease-spot. It is of the essence of the anecdote to
get itself told as it can – which truth represented clearly the best
chance of life for the matter involved in
The Reverberator;
but also it is of the essence of the drama to conform to logic, and the
pages I here treat of may appear at moments not quite predominantly sure
either of their luck or of their law. This, however, I think, but to a
cursory glance, for I perhaps do them a wrong in emphasising their anecdotic
cast. Might I not, certainly, have invoked for them in some degree the
anecdotic grace I would n’t have undertaken them at all; but I now
see how they were still to have been provided for if this had failed them.The anecdote consists, ever, of something that has oddly happened to some one, and the first of its duties is to point directly to the person whom it so distinguishes. He may be you or I or any one else, but a condition of our interest – perhaps the principal one – is that the anecdote shall know him, and shall accordingly speak of him, as its subject. Who is it then that by this rule the specimen before us adopts and sticks to? Something happens, and to a certain person, or, better, to a certain group of persons, in The Reverberator, but of whom, when it comes to the point, is the fable narrated? The anecdote has always a question to answer – of whom necessarily is it told? Is it told here of the Proberts or of the Dossons? To whom in the instance before us does the principal thing, the thing worth the telling, happen? To the fatal Mr Flack, to Francie Dosson and her father and sister, lumping them, on the ground of their ‘racial consciousness’, all together? – or to the cluster of scandalised Parisians in general, if not to the girl’s distracted young lover in particular? It is easy, alas, to defy a clear statement on this head to be made (“No, I can’t say whom or what or which I’m about: I seem so sometimes to be about one set and sometimes about another!” the little story is free to plead) whereby anecdotic grace does break down. Fortunately there remains another string, a second, to my bow: I should have been nowhere, in the event of a challenge, had I not concomitantly felt my subject, for all its slightness, as a small straight action, and so placed it in that blest drama-light which, really making for intelligibility as nothing else does, orders and regulates, even when but faintly turned on; squares things and keeps them in happy relation to each other. What ‘happens’, by that felicity, happens thus to every one concerned, exactly as in much more prodigious recitals: it’s a case – just as we have seen it before, in more portentous connexions and with the support of mightier comparisons – of the planned rotation of aspects and of that ‘scenic’ determination of them about which I fear I may already have been a bore.
After which perhaps too vertiginous explanatory flight I feel that I drop indeed to the very concrete and comparatively trivial origin of my story – short, that is, of some competent critical attribution of triviality all round. I am afraid, at any rate, that with this reminiscence I but watch my grease-spot (for I cling to the homely metaphor) engagingly extend its bounds. Who shall say thus – and I have put the vain question but too often before! – where the associational nimbus of the all but lost, of the miraculously recovered, chapter of experience shall absolutely fade and stop? That would be possible only were experience a chessboard of sharp black-and-white squares. Taking one of these for a convenient plot, I have but to see my particle of suggestion lurk in its breast, and then but to repeat in this connexion the act of picking it up, for the whole of the rest of the connexion straightway to loom into life, its parts all clinging together and pleading with a collective friendly voice that I can’t pretend to resist: “Oh but we too, you know; what were we but of the experience?” Which comes to scarce more than saying indeed, no doubt, that nothing more complicates and overloads the act of retrospect than to let one’s imagination itself work backward as part of the business. Some art of preventing this by keeping that interference out would be here of a useful application; and would include the question of providing conveniently for the officious faculty in the absence of its natural caretakers, the judgment, the memory, the conscience, occupied, as it were, elsewhere. These truants, the other faculties of the mind without exception, I surmise, would then be free to remount the stream of time (as an earnest and enquiring band) with the flower of the flock, the hope of the family, left at home or ‘boarded out’, say, for the time of the excursion. I have been unable, I confess, to make such an arrangement; the consequence of which failure is that everything I ‘find’, as I look back, lives for me again in the light of all the parts, such as they are, of my intelligence. Or to express the phenomenon otherwise, and perhaps with still more complacency for it, the effort to reconstitute the medium and the season that favoured the first stir of life, the first perceived gleam of the vital spark, in the trifle before us, fairly makes everything in the picture revive, fairly even extends the influence to matters remote and strange. The musing artist’s imagination – thus not excluded and confined – supplies the link that is missing and makes the whole occasion (the occasion of the glorious birth to him of still another infant motive) comprehensively and richly one. And this if that addition to his flock – his effusive parental welcome to which seems immediately to cause so splendid and furnished and fitted a world to arch over it – happens to be even of so modest a promise as the tiny principle of The Reverberator.
It was in a grand old city of the south of Europe (though neither in Rome nor yet in Florence) long years ago, and during a winter spent there in the seeing of many people on the pleasantest terms in the world, as they now seem to me to have been, as well as in the hearing of infinite talk, talk mainly, inexhaustibly, about persons and the ‘personal equation’ and the personal mystery. This somehow had to be in an odd, easy, friendly, a miscellaneous, many-coloured little cosmopolis, where the casual exotic society was a thing of heterogeneous vivid patches, but with a fine old native basis, the basis that held stoutly enough together while the patches dangled and fluttered, stitched on as with thread of silver, pinned on as with pearls, lasting their time above all and brightening the scene. To allude to the scene, alas! seems half an undertaking to reproduce it, any humoursome indulgence in which would lead us much too far. Nor am I strictly – as if I cultivated an ideal of strictness! – concerned with any fact but that of the appearance among us, that winter, of a charming free young person, superlatively introduced and infinitely admired, who, taken to twenty social bosoms, figured ‘success’ in a form, that of the acclaimed and confident pretty girl of our prosaic and temperate climes, for which the old-world salon, with its windows of iridescent view and its different conception of the range of charm, had never much provided. The old-world salon, in our community, still, when all was said, more or less imposed the type and prescribed the tone; yet to the charming stranger even these penetralia had not been closed, and, over them, to be brief, she had shed her influence, just as among them, not less, she had gathered her harvest. She had come, in fine, she had seen and had conquered; after which she had withdrawn with her spoil. Her spoil, to put it plainly, had been a treasure of impressions; her harvest, as I have said, a wealth of revelations. I made an absence of several weeks, I went to Florence and to Rome, but I came back in the spring – and all to encounter the liveliest chatter of surprise that had perhaps ever spent itself under the elegant massive ceilings for which the old-world salons were famous. The ingenious stranger – it was awfully coming to light – had written about them, about these still consciously critical retreats, many of them temples harbouring the very altar of the exclusive; she had made free with them, pen in hand, with the best conscience in the world, no doubt, but to a high effect of confidence betrayed, and to the amazement and consternation of every one involved, though most of all, naturally, to the dismay of her primary backers.
The young lady, frankly, a graceful amateur journalist, had made use of her gathered material; she had addressed to a newspaper in her native city (which no power on earth would induce me to designate, so that as to this and to the larger issue, not less, of the glamour of its big State-name, I defy all guesses) a letter as long, as confidential, as ‘chatty’, as full of headlong history and limping legend, of aberration and confusion, as she might have indited to the most trusted of friends. The friend trusted had been, as happened, simply the biggest ‘reading public’ in the world, and the performance, typographically bristling, had winged its way back to its dishonoured nest like some monstrous black bird or beetle, an embodiment of popping eyes, a whirl of brandished feathers and claws. Strange, it struck me, to tell the truth, the fact itself of ‘anybody’s knowing’, and still more of anybody’s caring – the fact itself, that is, of such prompt repercussion and recognition: one would so little, in advance, have supposed the reverberation of the bomb, its heeded reverberation, conceivable. No such consequence, clearly, had been allowed for by its innocent maker, for whose imagination, one felt sure, the explosion had not been designed to be world-shaking. The recording, slobbering sheet, as an object thinkable or visible in a medium so non-conducting, made of actual recognition, made even of the barest allusion, the falsest of false notes. The scandal reigned, however, and the commotion lasted, a nine days’ wonder; the ingenuous stranger’s name became anathema, and all to the high profit of an incorrigible collector of ‘cases’. Him in his depth of perversity, I profess, the flurry of resentment could only, after a little, affect as scarce more charged with wisdom than the poor young lady’s miscalculated overflow itself; so completely beside the question of the finer comparative interest remained that of the force of the libel and that of the degree of the injury. The finer interest was in the facts that made the incident a case, and the true note of that, I promptly made sure, was just in the extraordinary amount of native innocence that positively had to be read into the perpetrated act. The couple of columns in the vulgar newspaper constituted no document whatever on the manners and morals of the company of persons ‘betrayed’, but on the other hand, in its indirect way, flooded ‘American society’ with light, became on that side in the highest degree documentary. So it was, I soon saw, that though the perpetrated act was in itself and immediately no ‘situation’, it nevertheless pointed to one, and was for that value to be stored up.
It remained for a long time thus a mere sketched finger-post: the perpetrated act had, unmistakeably, meant something – one could n’t make out at first exactly what; till at last, after several years of oblivion, its connexions, its illustrative worth, came quite naturally into view. It fell in short into the wider perspective, the very largest fund of impressions and appearances, perhaps, that the particular observer’s and designer’s mind was to have felt itself for so long queerly weighted with. I have already had occasion to say that the ‘international’ light lay thick, from period to period, on the general scene of my observation – a truth the reasons and bearings of which will require in due course to be intelligibly stated; everything that possibly could, at any rate, managed at that time (as it had done before and was undiscourageably to continue to do) to be international for me: which was an immense resource and a happy circumstance from many points of view. Therefore I may say at once that if no particular element or feature of the view had struck me from far back as receiving so much of the illumination as the comparative state of innocence of the spirit of my countryfolk, by that same token everything had a price, was of immediate application and found itself closely interwoven, that could tend to emphasise or vivify the innocence. I had indeed early to recognise that I was in a manner shut up to the contemplation of it – really to the point, it has often seemed to me these pages must testify, of appearing to wander, as under some uncanny spell, amid the level sands and across the pathless desert of a single and of a not especially rich or fruitful aspect. Here, for that matter, comes in one of the oddest and most interesting of facts – as I measure it; which again will take much stating, but to which I may provisionally give this importance, that, sketchily speaking, if I had n’t had, on behalf of the American character, the negative aspects to deal with, I should practically, and given the limits of my range, have had no aspects at all. I shall on a near pretext, as I say, develop the sense of this; but let it now stand for the obvious truth that the negative sides were always at me, for illustration, for interpretation, and that though I looked yearningly, from time to time, over their collective head, though, after an experimental baffled sniff, I was apt to find myself languish for sharper air than any they exhaled, they constantly gave me enough, and more than enough, to ‘tackle’, so that I might even well ask myself what more miscellaneous justice I should have been able to render.
Given, after this fashion, my condition of knowledge, the most general appearance of the American (of those days) in Europe, that of being almost incredibly unaware of life – as the European order expressed life – had to represent for me the whole exhibitional range; the particular initiation on my own part that would have helped me to other apprehensions being absolutely bolted and barred to me. What this alternative would have stood for we shall immediately see; but meanwhile – and nothing could have been at once more inevitable, more logical and more ridiculous – I was reduced to studying my New Yorkers and my Bostonians, since there were enough of these alone and to spare, under the queer rubric of their more or less stranded helplessness. If asked why I describe in such terms the appearances that most appealed to me, I can only wonder how the bewildered state of the persons principally figuring in the Americano-European prospect could have been otherwise expressed. They come back to me, in the lurid light of contrast, as irresistibly destitute of those elements of preparedness that my pages show even the most limited European adventure to call into play. This at least was, by my retrospect, the inveterate case for the men – it differed only for certain of the women, the younger, the youngest, those of whom least might at the best have been expected, and in the interest of whose ‘success’ their share of the characteristic blankness underwent what one might call a sea-change. Conscious of so few things in the world, these unprecedented creatures – since that is what it came to for them – were least of all conscious of deficiencies and dangers; so that, the grace of youth and innocence and freshness aiding, their negatives were converted and became in certain relations lively positives and values. I might give a considerable list of those of my fictions, longer and shorter, in which this curious conversion is noted. Suffice it, at all events, in respect to the show at large, that, even as testifying but to a suffered and suffering state, and working beauty and comedy and pathos but into that compass, my procession of figures – which kept passing, and indeed kept pausing, by no act of my own – left me with all I could manage on my hands.
This will have seemed doubtless a roundabout approach to my saying that I seized the right connexion for our roaring young lioness of the old-world salons from the moment I qualified her as, in spite of the stimulating commerce enjoyed with them, signally ‘unaware of life’. What had she lacked for interest? what had her case lacked for application? what in the world but just that perceived reference to something larger, something more widely significant? What was so large, what so widely significant in its general sphere, as that, ‘otherwise’ so well endowed and appointed, as that, altogether so well constituted and introduced, she could have kept up to the end (the end of our concern with her) the state of unawareness? Immense at any rate the service she so rendered the brooding critic capable of taking a hint from her, for she became on the spot an inimitable link with the question of what it might distinguishably be in their own flourishing Order that could keep them, the passionless pilgrims, so unaware? This was the point – one had caught them in the act of it; of a disposition, which had perhaps even most a comic side, to treat ‘Europe’, collectively, as a vast painted and gilded holiday toy, serving its purpose on the spot and for the time, but to be relinquished, sacrificed, broken and cast away, at the dawn of any other convenience. It seemed to figure thus not only as a gorgeous dressed doll, the most expensive plaything, no doubt, in the world, but as a living doll, precisely, who would speak and act and perform, all for a ‘charge’ – which was the reason both of the amusement and of the cost. Only there was no more responsibility to a living doll than to a dead – so that, in fine, what seemed most absent from the frolic intercourse was the note of anything like reciprocity: unless indeed the so prompt and frequent newspaperisation of any quaint confidence extracted by pressure on the poor doll’s stomach, of any droll sight of powers set in motion by twitch of whatever string, might serve for a rendering of that ideal. It had reached one’s ear again and again from beyond the sea, this inveteracy, as one might almost call it, of the artless ventilation, and mainly in the public prints, of European matter originally gathered in under the supposed law of privilege enjoyed on the one hand and security enjoyed on the other. A hundred good instances confirmed this tradition that nothing in the new world was held accountable to anything in the old, that the hemispheres would have been as dissociated as different planets had n’t one of them, by a happy miracle, come in for the comparatively antique right of free fishing in the other.
It was the so oft-attested American sense of the matter that was meanwhile the oddity – the sense on the part of remote adventurous islanders that no custom of give-and-take between their bustling archipelago and the far, the massed continent was thinkable. Strangely enough, none the less, the continent was anecdotically interesting to the islands – though as soon as these were reached all difference between the fruit of the private and the fruit of the public garden naturally dropped. More than all was it striking that the ‘naturalness’ was all of American making – in spite, as had ever seemed to me, of the American tradition to the contrary; the tradition that Europe, much rather, had originally made social commerce unequal. Europe had had quite other matters on her hands; Europe had, into the bargain, on what might n’t be newspaperised or otherwise ventilated, quite her own religion and her own practice. This superstition held true of the fruits of curiosity wherever socially gathered, whether in bustling archipelagos or in neighbouring kingdoms. It did n’t, one felt, immensely signify, all the while; small harm was done, and it was surely rare that any was intended; for supreme, more and more, is the blest truth – sole safety, as it mostly seems, of our distracting age – that a given thing has but to be newspaperised enough (which it may, at our present rate of perfection, in a few hours) to return, as a quick consequence, to the common, the abysmal air and become without form and void. This life of scant seconds, as it were, by the sky-scraping clock, is as good for our sense and measure of the vulgar thing, for keeping apprehension down and keeping immunity up, as no life at all; since in the midst of such preposterous pretensions to recorded or reflected existence what particular vulgarity, what individual blatancy, can prevail? Still over and above all of which, too, we are made aware of a large new direct convenience or resource – the beautiful facility thus rendered the individual mind for what it shall denominate henceforth ignoring in the lump: than which nothing is more likely to work better, I suggest, toward a finer economy of consciousness. For the new beauty is that the lump, the vast concretion of the negligible, is, thanks to prodigious expensive machinery working all ad hoc, carefully wrought and prepared for our so dealing with it; to the great saving of our labour of selection, our own not always too beguiled or too sweetened picking-over of the heap.
Our ingenious young friend of the shocked saloons – to finish her history – had just simply acted in the tradition; she had figured herself one of the islanders, irresponsible in their very degree, and with a mind as closed to the ‘coming back’ of her disseminated prattle as if it would have had in fact to be wafted from another planet. Thus, as I say, the friendliest initiations offered her among ancient seats had still failed to make her what I have called ‘aware’. Here it was that she became documentary, and that in the flash of some new and accessory light, the continued procession of figures equally fallible, yet as little criminal, her bedimmed precedent shone out for me once more; so that when I got my right and true reference, as I say, for the instance commemorated in The Reverberator, and which dangled loosely from the peg supplied by the earlier case, this reference was much more directly to the pathetic than to anything else. The Dosson family, here before us, are sunk in their innocence, sunk in their irremediable unawareness almost beyond fishing out. This constituted for handling them, I quite felt, a serious difficulty; they could be too abandoned and pathetic, as the phrase is, to live, and yet be perfectly true; but on the other hand they could be perfectly true and yet too abandoned for vivification, too consentingly feeble to be worth saving. Even this, still, would n’t materially limit in them the force of the characteristic – it was exactly in such formless terms that they would speak best for the majority of their congeners; and, in fine, moreover, there was this that I absolutely had to save for the love of my subject-matter at large – the special appeal attached to the mild figure of Francina. I need scarcely point out that ‘round’ Francie Dosson the tale is systematically constructed; with which fact was involved for me the clear sense that if I did n’t see the Francie Dossons (by whom I mean the general quaint sisterhood, perfectly distinguishable then, but displaced, disfeatured, ‘discounted’ to-day, for all I know) as always and at any cost – at whatever cost of repetition, that is – worth saving, I might as well shut up my international department. For practically – as I have said already more than enough to convey – they were what the American branch of that equation constantly threw me back upon; by reason indeed of a brace of conditions only one of which strictly inhered in the show itself.
In the heavy light of ‘Europe’ thirty or forty years ago, there were more of the Francie Dossons and the Daisy Millers and the Bessie Aldens and the Pandora Days than of all the other attested American objects put together – more of them, of course I mean, from the moment the weird harvester was at all preoccupied with charm, or at all committed to ‘having to have’ it. But quite apart from that truth was always the stiff fact, against which I might have dashed myself in vain, that I had n’t the data for a right approach to the minor quantities, such as they might have been made out to be. The minor quantities appeared, consistently, but in a single light – that of promiscuous obscure attendance on the Daisies and Bessies and Francies; a generalised crepuscular state at best, even though yielding little by little a view of dim forms and vague differences. These adumbrations, sufficient tests once applied, claimed identities as fathers, mothers, even sometimes as satellites more directly ‘engaged’; but there was always, for the author of this record, a prompt and urgent remark to be made about them – which placed him, when all was said, quite at his ease. The men, the non-European, in these queer clusters, the fathers, brothers, playmates, male appendages of whatever presumption, were visible and thinkable only as the American ‘business-man’; and before the American business-man, as I have been prompt to declare, I was absolutely and irredeemably helpless, with no fibre of my intelligence responding to his mystery. No approach I could make to him on his ‘business side’ really got near it. That is where I was fatally incompetent, and this in turn – the case goes into a nutshell – is so obviously why, for any decent documentation, I was simply shut up to what was left me. It takes but a glance to see how the matter was in such a fashion simplified. With the men wiped out, at a stroke, so far as any grasp of the principle of their activity was concerned (what in the name of goodness did I, or could I, know, to call know, about the very alphabet of their activity?), it was n’t the elder woman I could take, on any reckoning, as compensatory: her inveterate blankness of surface had a manner all its own of defying the imagination to hover or to hope. There was really, as a rule, nothing whatever to be done with the elder woman; not only were reason and fancy alike forewarned not to waste their time, but any attempt upon her, one somehow felt, would have been indecorous and almost monstrous. She was n’t so much as in question; since if one could work it out for the men that the depreciated state with which they vaguely and, as it were, somnolently struggled, was perhaps but casual and temporary, might be regarded in fact as the mere state of the medal with its right face accidentally turned down, this redemption never glimmered for the wife and mother, in whom nothing was in eclipse, but everything rather (everything there was at all) straight in evidence, and to whom therefore any round and complete embodiment had simply been denied.
, written in the year 1870, the earliest date to which anything in the whole present series refers itself, strikes me to-day, and by the same token indescribably touches me, with the two compositions that follow it, as sops instinctively thrown to the international Cerberus formidably posted where I doubtless then did n’t quite make him out, yet from whose capacity to loom larger and larger with the years there must already have sprung some chilling portent. Cerberus would have been, thus, to one’s younger artistic conscience, the keeper of the international ‘books’; the hovering disembodied critical spirit with a disengaged eye upon sneaking attempts to substitute the American romantic for the American real. To that comparatively artless category the fiction I have just named, together with Madame de Mauves and The madonna of the future, belong. As American as possible, and even to the pitch of fondly coaxing it, I then desired my ground-stuff to remain; so that such situations as are thus offered must have represented my prime view of the telling effect with which the business-man would be dodged. He is dodged, here, doubtless, to a charm – he is made to wait as in the furthest and coldest of an infinite perspective of more or less quaint antechambers; where my ingenuous theory of the matter must have been that, artfully trifled with from room to room and from pretext to pretext, he might be kept indefinitely at bay. Thus if a sufficient amount of golden dust were kicked up in the foreground – and I began to kick it, under all these other possible pretexts, as hard as I knew how, he would probably never be able, to my confusion, to break through at all. I had in the spring of 1869, and again in that of 1870, spent several weeks in England, renewing and extending, with infinite zest, an acquaintance with the country that had previously been but an uneffaced little chapter of boyish, or – putting it again far enough back for the dimmest dawn of sensibility – of infantine experience; and had, perceptively and æsthetically speaking, taken the adventure of my twenty-sixth year ‘hard’, as A passionate pilgrim quite sufficiently attests.
A part of that adventure had been the never-to-be-forgotten thrill of a first sight of Italy, from late in the summer of 1869 on; so that a return to America at the beginning of the following year was to drag with it, as a lengthening chain, the torment of losses and regrets. The repatriated victim of that unrest was, beyond doubt, acutely conscious of his case: the fifteen months just spent in Europe had absolutely determined his situation. The nostalgic poison had been distilled for him, the future presented to him but as a single intense question: was he to spend it in brooding exile, or might he somehow come into his ‘own’? – as I liked betimes to put it for a romantic analogy with the state of dispossessed princes and wandering heirs. The question was to answer itself promptly enough – yet after a delay sufficient to give me the measure of a whole previous relation to it. I had from as far back as I could remember carried in my side, buried and unextracted, the head of one of those well-directed shafts from the European quiver to which, of old, tender American flesh was more helplessly and bleedingly exposed, I think, than to-day: the nostalgic cup had been applied to my lips even before I was conscious of it – I had been hurried off to London and to Paris immediately after my birth, and then and there, I was ever afterwards strangely to feel, that poison had entered my veins. This was so much the case that when again, in my thirteenth year, re-exposure was decreed, and was made effective and prolonged, my inward sense of it was, in the oddest way, not of my finding myself in the vague and the uncharted, but much rather restored to air already breathed and to a harmony already disclosed. The unnatural precocity with which I had in fine ‘taken’ to Europe was to be revealed to me later on and during another quite languishing American interval; an interval during which I supposed my young life to have been made bitter, under whatever appearances of smug accommodation, by too prompt a mouthful – recklessly administered to one’s helplessness by responsible hands – of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Why otherwise so queer a taste, always, in so juvenile, so generally gaping, a mouth? Well, the queer taste doubtless had been there, but the point of my anecdote, with my brace of infatuated ‘short stories’ for its occasion, is in the infinitely greater queerness it was to take on between the summer of ’70 and that of ’72, when it set me again in motion.
As I read over A passionate pilgrim and The madonna of the future they become in the highest degree documentary for myself – from all measure of such interest as they may possibly have at this time of day for others I stand off; though I disengage from them but one thing, their betrayal of their consolatory use. The deep beguilement of the lost vision recovered, in comparative indigence, by a certain inexpert intensity of art – the service rendered by them at need, with whatever awkwardness and difficulty – sticks out of them for me to the exclusion of everything else and consecrates them, I freely admit, to memory. Madame de Mauves and Louisa Pallant are another matter; the latter, in especial, belongs to recent years. The former is of the small group of my productions yielding to present research no dimmest responsive ghost of a traceable origin. These remarks have constituted to excess perhaps the record of what may have put this, that and the other treated idea into my head; but I am quite unable to say what, in the summer of 1873, may have put Madame de Mauves. Save for a single pleasant image, and for the fact that, dispatched to New York, the tale appeared, early in the following year, in The galaxy, a periodical to which I find, with this, twenty other remembrances gratefully attached, not a glimmer of attendant reference survives. I recall the tolerably wide court of an old inn at Bad-Homburg in the Taunus hills – a dejected and forlorn little place (its seconde jeunesse not yet in sight) during the years immediately following the Franco-Prussian war, which had overturned, with that of Baden-Baden, its altar, the well-appointed worship of the great goddess Chance – a homely enclosure on the ground-level of which I occupied a dampish, dusky, unsunned room, cool, however, to the relief of the fevered muse, during some very hot weather. The place was so dark that I could see my way to and from my inkstand, I remember, but by keeping the door to the court open – thanks to which also the muse, witness of many mild domestic incidents, was distracted and beguiled. In this retreat I was visited by the gentle Euphemia; I sat in crepuscular comfort pouring forth again, and, no doubt, artfully editing, the confidences with which she honoured me. She again, after her fashion, was what I might have called experimentally international; she muffled her charming head in the lightest, finest, vaguest tissue of romance and put twenty questions by. Lousia Pallant, with still subtler art, I find, completely covers her tracks – her repudiation of every ray of legend being the more marked by the later date (1888) of her appearance. Charitably affected to her and thus disposed, if the term be not arrogant, to hand her down, I yet win from her no shadow of an intelligible account of herself. I had taken possession, at Florence, during the previous year, of a couple of sunny rooms on the Arno just at the point where the Borg’ Ognissanti begins to bore duskily westward; and in those cheerful chambers (where the pitch of brightness differed so from that of the others just commemorated) I seem to have found my subject seated in extreme assurance. I did my best for it one February while the light and the colour and the sound of old Italy played in again through my open windows and about my patient table after the bold loud fashion that I had had, from so much before, to teach myself to think directly auspicious when it might be, and indirectly when it might n’t.