Coronado Beach, Cal.
Wednesday March 29th
1905.
I needn’t take precious time with marking & re-marking here how the above effort to catch up with my “impressions” of the early winter was condemned to speedy frustration & collapse. I struggled, but it all got beyond me,—any opportunity for the process of this little pressing, this sacred little record & register—but the history is written in my troubled & anxious, my always so strangely, more or less aching, doubting, yearning, yet also more or less triumphant, or at least, uplifted heart. Basta! I sit here, after long weeks, at any rate, in front of my arrears with an inward accumulation of material of which I feel the wealth, & as to which I can only invoke my familiar demon of patience, who always comes, doesn’t he? when I call. He is here with me, in front of this green Pacific—he sits close & I feel his soft breath, which cools & steadies & inspires, on my cheek. Everything sinks in: nothing is lost; everything abides & fertilizes & renews its golden promise, making me think, with closed eyes of deep & grateful longing when, in the full summer days of L.H., my long dusty adventure over, I shall be able to [plunge?] my hand, my arm, in, deep & far, & up to the shoulder—into the heavy bag of remembrance—of suggestion—of imagination—of art—& fish out every little figure & felicity, every little fact & fancy that can be to my purpose. These things are all packed away, now, thicker than I can penetrate, deeper than I can fathom, & there let them rest, for the present, in their sacred cool darkness, till I shall let in upon them the mild still light of dear old L.H.—in which they will begin to gleam & glitter & take form like the gold & jewels of a mine. X X X X X X X X X
The question, however, is with, is of, what I want now, & how I need to hark back, & hook on, to those very 1st little emotions & agitations & stirred sensibilities of the first Cambridge hours & days & even weeks—though it’s really a matter, for any acuteness, for any quality, of but the hours, the very first, during which the charm of the brave handsome autumn (I woo it, stretching a point with soft names,) lingered & hung about, & made something of a little medium for the sensibility to act in. That was a good moment, genuine so far as it went & just enough, no doubt, under an artful economy, to conjure with. What it is a question of at present is the putting together, with some blessed little nervous intensity of patience, of a Third Part to the “New England: An Autumn Impression” now begun in the N.A. Review. I drop out Boston—to come in later (next,) into “Three Cities,” the three being B., Philadelphia & Washington. There is absolutely no room here to squeeze in a stinted, starved little Boston picture. Oh, the division is good, I see—the “three” will do beautifully, and so for winding up the little “New England,” will Cambridge & its accessories. I feel as if I could spread on C., & that is my danger, as it’s my danger everywhere. For my poor little personal C., of the far-off unspeakable first years, hangs there behind, like a pale pathetic ghost, hangs there behind, fixing me with tender, pleading eyes, eyes of such exquisite, pathetic appeal, & holding up the silver mirror, just faintly dim, that is like a sphere peopled with the old ghosts. How can I speak of Cambridge at all, e.g., without speaking of dear J. R. L. & even of the early Atlantic, by ah, such a delicate, ironic implication?—[to] say nothing of the old Shady Hill & the old Quincy St. & those days that bring tears, & the figure, for Shady Hill, the figure & presence, of J. N., & of S. N., & even of G. W. C., & the reminiscence of that night of Dickens, & the emotion, abiding, that it left with me. How it did something for my thought of him & his work—& would have done more without the readings, the hard charmless readings, (or à peu près) that remained with me. (This is of course an impossible side-issue, but one just catches there the tip of the tail of such an old emotion of the throbbing prime!) The point for me (for fatal, for impossible expansion,) is that I knew there, had there, in the ghostly old C. that I sit & write of here by the strange Pacific, on the other side of the continent, l’initiation première (the divine, the unique;) there & in Ashburton Place (which I just came in time to have that October or November glimpse of before seeing its site swept bare a month ago.) Ah, the “epoch-making” weeks of the spring of 1865!—from the 1st days of April or so on to the summer (partly spent at Newport &c, partly at North Conway!) Something—some fine, superfine, supersubtle mystic breath of that may come in perhaps in the Three Cities, in relation to any reference to the remembered Boston of the “prime.” Ah, that pathetic, heroic, little personal prime of my own, which stretches over into the following summer at Swampscott—’66, that of the Seven Weeks War, & of unforgettable gropings & findings & sufferings & strivings & play of sensibility & of inward passion there. The hours, the moments, the days, come back to me—on into the early autumn before the move to Cambridge & with the sense, still, after such a lifetime, of particular little thrills & throbs & daydreams there. I can’t help, either, just touching with my pen-point (here, here, only here,) the recollection of that (probably August) day when I went up to Boston from Swampscott & called in Charles St for news of O. W. H., then on his 1st flushed & charming visit to England, & saw his mother in the cool dim matted drawingroom of that house (passed, never, since, without the sense,) & got the news, of all his London, his general English, success & felicity, & vibrated so with the wonder & romance & curiosity & dim, weak tender (oh tender!) envy of it, that my walk up the hill, afterwards, up Mount Vernon St & probably to Athenaeum was all coloured & gilded & humming with it, & the emotion, exquisite of its kind, so remained with me that I always think of that occasion, that hour, as a sovereign contribution to the germ of that inward romantic principle which was [to] determine, so much later on, (ten years!) my own vision-haunted migration. I recall, I can feel, now the empty August St, the Mt. Vernon St. of the closed houses & absent “families” & my slow, upward, sympathetic, excited stroll there, & my sense of the remainder of the day in town,—before the old “cars” for the return home—so innocently to make a small adventure: “vision”-haunted as I was already even then: linking on to which somehow, moreover, too, is the memory of lying on my bed at Swampscott, later than that, somewhat, & toward the summer’s end, & reading, in ever so thrilled a state, George Eliot’s Felix Holt, just out & of which I was to write, & did write, a review in the Nation. (I had just come back from a bad little “sick” visit to the Temples somewhere—I have forgotten the name of the place—in the White Mountains; & the Gourlays were staying with us at S., & I was miserably stricken [by] my poor broken, at least unbearable, & unsurvivable, back of those (& still, under fatigue, even of these) years.[)] To read over the opening pages of Felix Holt makes, even now, the whole time softly & shyly live again. Oh, strange little intensities of history, of ineffaceability; oh delicate little odd links in the long chain, kept unbroken for the fingers of one’s tenderest touch! Sanctities, pieties, treasures, abysses! X X X X X X X
But these are wanton lapses & impossible excursions; irrelevant strayings of the pen, in defiance of every economy. My subject awaits me, all too charged & too bristling with the most artful economy possible. What I seem to feel is that the Cambridge tendresse stands in the path like a waiting lion—or, more congruously, like a cooing dove that I shrink from scaring away. I want a little of the tendresse, but it trembles away over the whole field—or would if it could. Yet to present these accidents is what it is to be a master: that & that only. Isn’t the highest deepest note of the whole thing the never-to-be-lost memory of that evening hour at Mount Auburn—at the Cambridge Cemetery when I took my way alone,—after much waiting for the favouring hour—to that unspeakable group of graves? It was late, in November; the trees all bare, the dusk to fall early, the air all still (at Cambridge, in general, so still;) with the western sky more & more turning to that terrific deadly pure polar pink that shows behind American winter woods. But I can’t go over this—I can only, oh, so gently, so tenderly, brush it & breathe upon it—breathe upon it & brush it. It was the moment; it was the hour; it was the blessed flood of emotion that broke out at the touch of one’s sudden vision & carried me away. I seemed then to know why I had done this; I seemed then to know why I had come—& to feel how not to have come would have been miserably, horribly to miss it. It made everything right—it made everything priceless. The moon was there, early, white & young, & seemed reflected in the white face of the great empty Stadium, forming one of the boundaries of Soldiers’ Field, that looked over at me, stared over at me, through the clear twilight, from across the Charles. Everything was there; everything came; the recognition, stillness, the strangeness, the pity & the sanctity & the terror, the breath-catching passion & the divine relief of tears. William’s inspired transcript, on the exquisite little Florentine urn of Alice’s ashes, William’s divine gift to us, & to her, of the Dantean lines—
Dopo lungo esilio & martir
Venne a questa pace—
took me so at the throat by its penetrating rightness, that it was as if one sank down on one’s knees in a kind of anguish of gratitude before something for which one had waited with a long, deep ache. But why do I write of the all unutterable & the all abysmal? Why does my pen not drop from my hand on approaching the infinite pity & tragedy of all the past? It does, poor he[l]pless pen, with what it meets of the ineffable, what it meets of the cold Medusa-face of life, of all the life lived, on every side. Basta, basta! X X X X