A BACKWARD GLANCE.

( MEMORIES )

by

EDITH WHARTON

Je veux remonter le penchant de mes belles années...

Châteaubriand: *Mémoires d'Outre Tombe.*

Kein Genuss ist vorübergehend.

Goethe: *Wilhelm Meister*

TENTATIVE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FOR MEMOIRS.

Country house Jones grandfather.

" " Rhinelander grandfather.

Pencraig, my father's country place.

Gardens, the Mount, Lenox

Great grandfather and grandmother, two portraits of each.
Two grandfather portraits.

Portraits: my father, my mother.

Two or three of me.

Henry James (unpublished)

Group of young men friends in New York.

# I.

## The Background.

My little-girl life, safe, uneventful, monotonous, was cradled
in the bourgeois affluence of the middle-class world, the only one about
which, according to Goethe, it is impossible to write poetry. It was born
into a little self-contained society that was "good" in the most prosaic
sense of that elastic term, and its interest, for the generality of
observers, lies only in the fact of its sudden and total extinction, for
the imaginative few in the recognition that certain irreplaceable moral
treasures went with it. Let me try to call it back...

On both sides of my family, as far as I know, my Colonial
ancestry goes back for nearly three hundred years, and on both sides the
colonists in question seem to have been identified since early days
with New York, though the earliest of my mother's Stevens forbears went
first to Massachusetts. Not being, I suppose, of the stripe of religious
fanatic or political reformer to breathe easily in that passionate
province, the first Stevens's grandsons transferred their activities
to the easy-going atmosphere of New York, where people seem from the
outset to have been more interested in making money and acquiring real
estate than in Predestination and witch burning. I have always wandered
how much of their greater suavity of manners and tolerance of judgment
these old colonists of Manhattan may not have owed to the fact that
the Church of England (so little changed under its later name of Epis-
copal Church of America) provided from the first the prevalent form of
worship, so that something of the matchless beauty of an ancient rite
protected our ancestors from what Huxley called the "fissiparous tendency
of the Protestant sects", and spared them the sanguinary wrangles over
uncomprehended points of dogma, and all those extravagances of self-

3.

nucleus I have, as far as I remember, no blood relationship with it. The
Schermerhorns, Joneses, Pendletons, on my father's side, the Stevenses,
Ledyards, Rhinelanders on my mother's, the Gallatins on both, seem all
to have belonged to the same prosperous class of merchants, bankers and
lawyers. It was a society from which all dealers in retail business were
excluded as a matter of course. The man who "kept a shop" was more rigor-
ously shut out of polite society in the original Thirteen States than in
post-revolutionary France — witness the surprise (and amusement) of
the Paris solicitor, Moreau de St Méry, who, fleeing from the Terror, came
to Philadelphia, where he earned a living by keeping a bookshop, and for
this reason, though his shop was used as a kind of club by the most blue-
blooded of his fellow _émigrés_, and Talleyrand and the Marquis de la Tour
du Pin were among his intimates, yet could not be invited to the ball
given to celebrate Washington's inauguration. Indeed, so little had the
Revolution revolutionized a society at once middle-class and provincial
that no retail dealer, no matter how palatial his shop-front or how tempt-
ing his millions, was received in New York society until long after I was
grown up.

In his delightful "Walter Scott" Mr. John Buchan, attempting to
excuse Scott's inability to create a lifelike woman of his own class,
says that, after all, to the men of his generation, gentlewomen were "a
toast", and little else. Nothing could be more true. Child-bearing was
their task, fine needlework their recreation, being respected their
privilege. It was only in aristocratic society, and in the most sophistic-
ated capitals of Europe, that they had tacitly added to this repertory a
good many private distractions. In the upper middle class "the ladies,
God bless'em", sums it up. And so it happens that I know less than nothing
of the particular virtues, gifts and modest accomplishments adorning the
anonymity of the young women with pearls in their looped hair or cambric

4.

ruffs round their slim necks, who prepared the way for my generation. A few shreds of anecdote, no more than the faded flowers between the leaves of a great-grandmother's Bible, are all that remain to me.

Of my lovely great-grandmother Rhinelander (Mary Robart) I know little except that she was of French Huguenot descent, as her spirited profile declares, and properly jealous of her rights; for if she chanced to drive to New York in her yellow coach with its fringed hammer-cloth at the same hour when her daughter-in-law, from lower down the East River, was taking the same road, young Mrs. Rhinelander's carriage had to take the old lady's dust all the way, even though her horses were faster and her errand might be more urgent. I may add that once, several years after my marriage, a new coachman, who did not know my mother's carriage by sight, accidentally drove me past it on the fashionable Ocean Drive at Newport, and that I had to hasten the next morning to apologize to my mother, whose only comment was, when I explained that the coachman could not have known the offense he was committing: "You might have told him".

One of my great-grandmothers, Lucretia Ledyard, (the wife of Brigadier General Stevens, who commanded the artillery, and was on Washington's staff), lost her "handsome sable cloak" one day when she was driving out General Washington in her sleigh. On another occasion, when she was walking on the Battery with Alexander Hamilton, the latter glanced seaward, and suddenly exclaimed: "My God, madam, there are the British!"

Among the men of my family, her husband, General Stevens appears to have had the most conspicuous career. There are letters from Washington and Lafayette showing how highly they esteemed him as a friend and as a soldier. When the war of Independence was over he sheathed his sword, became an "India merchant", and made a fortune which enabled him to build a handsome house on Long Island, which he called "Mount Buona-

23.

of that name. On the evenings when Mr. Bedlow came I was always led in
with the dessert, my red hair curled into sausages, the sleeves of my
best frock looped up with pink coral, and allowed to sit on his knee
while he "told me mythology". What blessings I have since called down on
that awakener of the childish imagination! I cannot say why fairy-stories,
even Mother Goose, even Andersen's tales and the Contes de Perrault, left
me inattentive and indifferent, while the domestic dramas of the Olympians
roused all my creative energy; but so it was. Perhaps I scented an in-
definable condescension (and often a great lack of discernment) in the
stories which big people have invented about little ones; but besides
that, the doings of children were always intrinsically less interesting
to me than those of grown-ups, and I felt more at home with the gods and
goddesses of Olympus because they seemed to have behaved so much like the
ladies and gentlemen who came to dine, whom I saw riding and driving in
the Bois de Boulogne, and about whom I was forever weaving stories of
my own.

The other memorable Parisian event concerns this inventing of
stories. The passion for imagining tales (about grown-up people, "real
people", I called them — children always seemed to me incompletely
realized) had burned in me since my first conscious moments; I cannot
remember the time when I did not want to "make up" stories. But it was
in Paris that I seem to have found what was apparently the necessary
formula for these improvisations. Oddly enough, I had no desire to write
my tales down (even had I known how to write, which as yet I didn't).
From the first I had to have a book in my hand to "make up" with; and
from the first it had to be a certain sort of book. The page had to be
closely printed, with rather heavy black type, and not much margin.Certain
densely printed novels in the early Tauchnitz editions, Harrison Ains-
worth's for instance, would have been my richest sources of inspiration

24.

had I not hit one day on something even better: Washington Irving's "Alhambra". These shaggy volumes, printed in close black characters on rough-edged yellowish pages, and bound in coarse dark-blue paper covers (probably a production of the old Galignani Press in Paris) must have been a relic of our Spanish adventure. Washington Irving was an old friend of my family's, and his collected works, in comely type and handsome binding, adorned our library shelves at home. But these would probably not have been of much use to me as a source of inspiration. The rude companion of our travels was the very book I needed; I had only to open it for the Pierian fount to flow. There was richness and mystery in the thick black type, a hint of bursting overflowing material in the serried lines and scant margin. To this day I am instinctively bored by the sight of widely spaced type, and a little islet of text in a sailless sea of white paper.

Well — the right book once in hand, making-up was ecstasy. At any moment the impulse might seize me; and then, if the book was in reach, I had only to walk the floor rapidly with it, turning the pages as I walked, to be swept off full sail on the sea of dreams. The fact that I could not read added to the completeness of the illusion, for from those mysterious blank pages I could evoke whatever my fancy chose. Parents and nurses, peeping at me through the cracks of doors (I always had to be alone to "make up"), noticed that I often held the book upside down, but that I never failed to turn the pages, and that I turned them at about the right pace for a person reading aloud as passionately and precipitately as was my habit.

There was something almost ritualistic in the performance. The call came regularly and imperiously; and though sometimes when it caught me at inconvenient moments, I would struggle against it conscientiously — for I was beginning to be a very conscientious little girl — the struggle

25.

was always a losing one. I had to obey the furious Muse; and there are
deplorable tales of my abandoning the "nice" playmates who had been
invited to "spend the day", and rushing to my mother with the desperate
cry: "Mamma, you must go and entertain that little girl for me. I've
got to make up."

My parents, distressed by my solitude (for my two brothers were
by this time grown up and away, and I was alone at home) were always
trying to establish relations for me with "nice children", and I was
willing enough to play in the Champs Elysées with such specimens as were
produced, or to meet them at little parties or dancing classes; but I did
not like them to intrude on my privacy, and there was not one of them I
would not have renounced forever rather than have my "making up" interfer-
ed with. What I really preferred was to be alone with Washington Irving's
Alhambra and my dream.

The peculiar purpose for which books served me probably made
me indifferent to what was in them. At any rate, I can remember feeling
no curiosity about it. But my father, by dint of patience, managed to
drum the alphabet into me; and one day I was found sitting under a table
in the drawing-room, absorbed in a volume which I did not appear to be
using for extemporization. My unusual immobility attracted attention, and
when asked what I was doing, I replied quietly that I was reading. This
statement was received with incredulity; but on being called upon to read
a few lines aloud I appear to have responded to the challenge with perfect
fluency, and it was then discovered that the work over which I was poring
was a play by Ludovic Halévy, called "Fanny Lear", which was just then
having a succès de scandale owing to the fact that the heroine was what
ladies of my mother's day called "one of those women". From that day on-
ward the books I used for "making up" were carefully inspected before
being entrusted to me; and an arduous business it must have been, for no

27.

ear — the abstract type of an ancestress as the function was then
understood.

I always recall her seated in an armchair, her undimmed eyes bent over some exquisitely fine bit of needle-work. I hope she sometimes went for a walk or a drive, and enjoyed a few glimpses of grown-up society; but for me she exists only as a motionless and gently smiling figure, whose one gesture was to lay aside her stitching for her ear-trumpet when I approached her. When she was with us I was constantly in her room; and my way of returning her affection was to read aloud to her. I had just discovered a volume of Tennyson among my father's books, and for hours I used to shout the "Idyls of the King" and "The Lord of Burleigh" through the trumpet which my long-suffering ancestress held up in a soft sallow hand. Not being more than six or seven years old I understood hardly anything of what I was reading, or rather I understood it in my own way, which was most often not the poet's; as for instance, in the line from "The Lord of Burleigh", "and he made a loving consort", I read concert for consort, and concluded (being already addicted to rash generalisations) that a gentleman's first act after marriage was to give his spouse a concert, in gratitude for which attention "a faithful wife was she". But I enjoyed all the glorious sonorities as much as if I had known what they meant, and perhaps even more, since my own interpretations so often enriched the text; and I imagine that such shrill scraps of my queer pronunciation as travelled through the windings of her trumpet troubled my grandmother more than they did me. To one whose preferred poetic reading was "The Christian Year", the "Idyls of the King" must have been almost as full of mystery and obscurity as Browning was to the next generation, and the rhythmic raptures tingling through me probably woke no echo in the dear old head bent to mine with such attentive tenderness.

Retrospect
MEMORIES
I.
Preface
Lininary

The readers (and I should doubtless have been among them) who twenty years ago would have smiled at the idea that time could transform a group of *bourgeois* Colonials and their republican descendants into a sort of social aristocracy, are now better able to measure the formative value of nearly three hundred years of social observance: the concerted living up to long-established standards of honour and conduct, of education and manners. The value of duration has *slowly* begun to assert itself against the welter of change, and sociologists without a drop of old American blood in them have been the first to recognise what the traditions of three centuries have contributed to the moral wealth of our country. Even negatively, they have acquired, with the passing of time, an unsuspected value. When I was young it used to seem to me that the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would ever again be poured. Now I see that one of its uses lay in preserving a few drops of an old vintage too rare to be savoured by a youthful palate; and I should like to atone for my unappreciativeness by trying to revive that faint fragrance.

If it had been suggested to me, before 1914, that I ought to write my reminiscences, I should have answered that my life had been too uneventful to be worth recording. Indeed, I had never even attempted to record it for my own amusement, and the fact that until 1918 I never kept even the briefest of diaries has greatly hampered this attempted reconstruction.

Not until successive social upheavals, culminating in the catastrophe of 1914, had "cut all likeness from the name" of my old New York, did I begin to see its pathetic picturesqueness. My little world suffered its first change in the 'eighties, with the invasion of

II

the earliest detachment of big money-makers from the West, soon to be
followed by the lords of Pittsburg. But this gradual infiltration did
not greatly affect old manners and customs, since the dearest ambition
of the newcomers was to assimilate existing traditions. Social life, in
fact, with us as in the rest of the world, went on with hardly per-
ceptible changes till the war tore down all the old frame-work, and
a sudden what had seemed unalterable rules of conduct to my generation
became as oddly far-off, as quaintly arbitrary, as the domestic habits
of the Pharaohs. Between my Huguenot great-great-grandfather, who came
from the French Palatinate to participate in the founding of New Ro-
chelle, and my own father, who died in 1882, there were fewer fundament-
al differences in point of view than between my father and the post-war
generation of Americans. The fact that I was born into a world in which
telephones, motors, electric light, central heating (except by hot-air
furnaces), X-rays, cinemas, radium, aeroplanes and wireless telegraphy
were not only unknown but still mostly unforeseen, constitutes at first
sight the most striking difference between then and now; but the really
vital change is that, in my youth, the Americans of the original states,
who in moments of crisis still shaped the national point of view, were
the heirs of an old tradition of European culture which the country has
now totally rejected. This rejection (which Mr. Walter Lippmann regards as
the chief cause of the country's present moral empowerment) has open-
ed a gulf between those days and these. The compact and homogeneous world
of my youth has receded into a past from which it can only be dug up in
bits by the assiduous relic-hunter; and its smallest fragments begin
to be worth collecting and putting together before the last of those
who knew the living structure are swept away with it.

30.

bauen!" The cry suggested something fresh and leafy and adventurous, like a Mayne Reid story or "The Swiss Family Robinson"; and it has remained with me as a picturesque instance of the way in which racial character colours alien formulas.

But suddenly all the story-telling and garland-weaving ended. One morning, climbing a woodland path with my governess and some other children, I was seized by an agony of pain -- and after that for many long weeks my life was a confused and feverish misery. I was desperately ill with typhoid fever, and the fact is worth mentioning only because of one incredible circumstance. All the doctors of Wildbad (they were doubtless few) had already been mobilized, save one superannuated practitioner, and he had never before seen a case of typhoid! His son, also a doctor, was with the army; and all that his father could do was to despatch bulletins to him, asking how I was to be treated. The replies, one may suppose, were long in arriving; and in the interval death came near. It was close upon me when a celebrated Russian physician arrived at Wildbad for the day, at the call of a princely patient. My parents persuaded him to see me, and he prescribed the new treatment: plunging the patient in baths of ice-cold water. At the suggestion my mother's courage failed her; but she wrapped me in wet sheets, and I was saved.

7.

My childish world, though so well filled, nevertheless lacked completeness, for my friend Foxy had not come to Europe with us. The absence of my dog left a void so profound that at last my parents took pity on me and bought me a Florentine lupetto, as white as Foxy, but much smaller. By that time (I think in 1870) we had exchanged Paris for Florence, and he was known as Florence Foxy. He was the

31.

delightful companion of a comparatively dull winter; for the return
to Italy did not bring back the joys of Rome. To begin with, Florence
was much colder and less sunny; there were no children to replace the
jolly Pincianites, and the Cascine Gardens are associated only with
sedate walks with my elders, monotonous enough if I had not had Foxy
to race with, and violets to gather...

As the other high lights of those gray months I remember chiefly
the increased enchantments of "making up" and, a long way beneath
them in the scale of pleasures, the hours spent with a charming young
lady who taught me Italian. My lessons amused me, and the new language
came to me as naturally as breathing, as French and German had already.
It is a pity so few parents know what a fortune they could bestow on
their children by giving them the chance to learn the modern languages
in babyhood, when a nurse-maid or a playmate is the only professor
needed, and the speech acquired is never lost, however deeply and for
how many years it may lie embedded below the surface.

But acquiring Italian, though it has since been the source
of such joys, seemed at the time as nothing compared with the central
ecstasy of "making up". Learning to read, instead of distracting me
from this passion, had only fed it; and during that Florentine winter
it became a frenzy. We were lodged in the shabby high-ceilinged piano
nobile of an hotel overlooking the Arno, close to the Ponte Vecchio,
Our vast and cheerless suite was scantily furnished with threadbare
carpets and heavy consoles and sofas; but the long vista of rooms, each
communicating with the next through tall folding doors, was a matchless
track for my peripatetic hours. When the grown-ups went out, and Doyley
was safe in her room with her sewing, I had the field to myself; and I
can still call up the rapture (far greater than any I have ever felt
in writing) of pouring forth undisturbed the tireless torrent of my

32.

stories. The "Faster, faster, O Circe, Goddess" of "The Strayed
Reveller", always evokes for me those youthful gallops around the race-
course of my imagination. The speed at which I travelled was so great
that all my mother's attempts to take down my "stories" were unsuccessful, and posterity will never know what it has lost! All I can remember
is that my tales were all about what I still designated as "real people"
(that is, grown-up people resembling in appearance and habits my family
and their friends, and involved in the daily coil of "things that might
have happened"). My imagination was still closed to the appeal of the
purely fabulous and fairy-like, and though I was already an ardent
reader of poetry I had as yet no desire to write it. But all that was
soon to be changed; for the next year we were to go gome to New York,
and I was to enter into possession of my father's library.

34b

imaginative child already caught in the toils of romance; and it is no
wonder I remember it better than my studies. Not that I was not eager to
learn; but my illness, and the long and weary convalescence following it,
had made my parents unduly anxious about my health, and they would not
allow me to be taught anything that required sustained mental effort.
Even committing to memory, and preparing lessons in advance, were for-
it was thought that I read too much (as if a born reader could), and that
my mind must be spared all "strain". This was no doubt partly due to the
exaggerated solicitude of parents for a late-born child, and partly to
a natural reaction against the severe discipline of their own early train-
ing. The sentimental theory that children must not be made to study any-
thing that does not interest them was already in the air, and reinforced
by the fear of "fatiguing" my brain after so severe an illness, it made

35.

my parents turn my studies into play. The result was to deprive me of
the irreplaceable grounding of Greek and Latin (given to an earlier
inertion as a matter of course), to weaken my power of mental con-
centration, except on subjects naturally interesting to me, and to
leave unchecked a restless curiosity which made it difficult to fix my
thoughts even on these, for any length of time. Of benefits I see only
one. There are probably few of my contemporaries for whom the enforced
committing to memory of masterpieces has not forever robbed some of
the loveliest of their bloom; but learning by heart being forbidden
me, the great poetry — English, French, German and Italian — came to
me fresh as the morning, with the dew on it, and has never lost that
early radiance.

The drawbacks were far greater than this one advantage.
But for the wisdom of Fräulein Bahlmann, my beloved German teacher,
who saw which way my fancy turned, and fed it with all the wealth of
German literature, from the Minnesingers to Heine, instead of imprison-
ing me in the tales of Lamothe-Fouqué and Grimm — but for this, and
the leave to range in my father's library, my mind would have starved
at the age when the mental muscles are most in need of feeding.

I used to say in after years that in my childhood I had been
taught only two things: the modern languages and good manners. Now
that I have lived to see both these branches of culture dispensed with,
I perceive that there are worse systems of education. But in justice
to my parents I ought to have named a third element in my training:
a reverence for the English language as spoken according to the best
usage. Usage, in my childhood, was as authoritative an element in speak-
ing English as tradition was in social conduct. And it was because our
little society still lived in the reflected light of a large and long-
established culture that my parents, who were nothing less than in-

36.

tellectual, who read little and studied not at all, nevertheless spoke
their mother tongue with a most scrupulous perfection, and insisted
that their children should do likewise.

This preservation of the best tradition of spoken English —
an easy idiomatic English, never pedantic and never "literary" — was
no doubt partly due to the fact that, in the old New York families of
my parents' day, the children's teachers were often English. My mother
and her sisters and brother had English tutors and governesses, and
my own brothers were educated at home by an extremely cultivated English
tutor. In my mother's family, more than one member of the generation
preceding hers had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge, and one of my
own brothers went to Cambridge.

Even so, however, I have never quite understood how two
people so little preoccupied with letters as my father and mother had
such sensitive ears for pure English. The example they set me was never
forgotten; I still wince under my mother's ironic smile when I said
that some visitor had stayed "quite a while", and her dry: "Where did
you pick _that_ up?" The wholesome derision of my grown-up brothers saved
me from pomposity as my mother's smile guarded me against slovenliness;
I still tingle with the sting of their ridicule when, excusing myself
for having forgotten something I had been told to do, I said, with an
assumption of grown-up dignity (a _etat_ ten or eleven): "I didn't know
that it was _imperative_."

Such elementary problems as (judging from the letters I
receive from unknown readers) disturb present-day users of English in
America — perplexity as to the distinction between "should" and
"would", and such half-educated pedantry as saying "gotten" and "you
would better" — never embarrassed our speech. We spoke naturally,
instinctively good English, but my parents always wanted it to be

37.

better, that is, easier, more flexible and idiomatic. This excessive
respect for the language never led to priggishness, or precluded the
enjoyment of racy innovations. Long words were always smiled away as
pedantic, and any really expressive slang was welcomed with amusement --
but used as slang, as it were between quotation marks, and not carelessly
admitted into our speech. Luckily we all had a lively sense of
humour, and now that my brothers were at home again the house rang with
laughter. We all knew by heart "Alice in Wonderland", "The Hunting of
the Snark", and whole pages of Lear's "Nonsense Book", and our sensitivity
to the quality of the English we spoke doubled our enjoyment of the
incredible verbal gymnastics of those immortal works. Dear to us also,
though in a lesser degree, were "The Innocents Abroad", Bret Harte's
parodies of novels, and, in their much later day, George Ade's "Arty",
and the first volumes of the unforgettable Mr. Dooley. I cannot remember
a time when we did not, every one of us, revel in the humorous and
expressive side of American slang; what my parents abhorred was not the
deliberately picturesque use of new terms, if they were vivid and
expressive, but the habitual slovenliness of those who adopted the slang
of the year irrespective of its quality, and without having any idea
that they were not speaking in the purest tradition. But above all
abhorrent to ears piously attuned to all the inflexions and shades of
meaning of our rich speech were such mean substitutes as "back of" for
behind, "dirt" for earth (i.e., a "dirt road"), "any place" for anywhere, or slovenly phrases like "a great ways", soon, alas, to be
followed by the still more inexcusable "a barracks", a woods", and even
"a strata", "a phenomena", which, as I grew up, a new class of the uneducated rich were rapidly introducing into polite speech.

I have often asked myself how, in a family on both sides so
essentially unliterary, this reverence for good English had persisted.

38.

It was more than reverence, and nearer: it was love. My parents' ears were wounded by an unsuitable word as those of a musician are hurt by a false note. My mother, herself so little of a reader, was exaggeratedly scrupulous about the books I read; not so much (and here is the point) the "grown-up" books as those written for children. I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English _without the authors' knowing it_. That was the point: you could do what you liked with the language if you did it consciously, and for a given purpose — but if you went shuffling along, trailing it after you like a rag in the dust, tramping over it, as Henry James said, like the emigrant tramping over his kitchen oil-cloth — that was unpardonable, there deterioration and corruption lurked. I remember it was only with reluctance, and because "all the other children read them", that my mother consented to my reading "Little Women" and "Little Men"; and my ears, trained to the fresh racy English of "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Princess and the Goblin", were exasperated by the laxities of the great Louisa.

But the mystery of our love of Good English is still partly unexplained — unless indeed its solution be found in the background of books which still formed an essential part of the life of the old New York world. In my grand-parents' day every gentleman had what was called "a gentleman's library". In my father's day, these libraries still existed, though as a rule they formed only the background of life; but, even in our case, good editions of Macaulay, Prescott, Motley, Sainte Beuve, Augustin Thierry, Victor Hugo, the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, Ruskin, Coleridge, had been added to the rows of earlier French and English classics in their stately calf bindings. Were any of these books ever read? Not often, to my knowledge; but they were there; they represented a standard; and perhaps some mysterious emanation disengaged

39.

itself from them, obscurely fighting for the protection of the languages
they had illustrated.

I have spoken of standards; [4] the word perhaps gives me
my clue. When I said, in my resentful youth, that I had been taught only
languages and manners, I did not know how closely, in my parents' minds,
the two were related. Everything in my bringing-up was based on the rules
of what was then called "good breeding". One was polite, considerate of
others, careful of the accepted formulas of conduct, because such were
the principles of the well-bred. And I imagine that the regard of my
parents for the niceties of speech was unconsciously based on the same
motive. They treated their language with the same rather ceremonious
courtesy as their friends. It would have been "bad manners" to speak
"bad" English, and "bad manners" were the unpardonable offense.

This fastidiousness of speech, which embraced not only idiom
but enunciation, came, as I afterward found, chiefly from my mother's
side of the family, and my father probably acquired it under her
influence, for his people, though they spoke good English, had dis-
agreeable voices, which obviously no one had been at the pains to
correct. Wherever, as in my father's case, there was a strong admixture
of Dutch blood, I have noticed in old New Yorkers flat voices and a
careless diction. My mother's stock was English and Welsh, without Dutch
blood, and this may account for the greater sensitiveness of all her
people to the nuances of English speech. In an article on Conrad which
appeared in the *Times Literary Supplement* after his death, the author
said (I quote from memory): "Conrad had worshipped the English language
all his life like a lover, but he had never romped with her in the
nursery"; and this is what it was my own good fortune to do.

But I have wandered away from Pencraig without having
described my little-girl life there. It would seem to the modern child

40.

incredibly tame and uneventful, for it was marked chiefly by the simple joys of swimming and riding. My mother, like most married women of her day, had long since given up riding, my father had always (I imagine) cared more for boating and duck-shooting than for any other outdoor pursuits, and there was no one to ride with me but the coachman — nor was our end of the island a happy place for equestrianism. Nevertheless I enjoyed scampering on my pony over the hard dull roads; but swimming in our own rock-sheltered cove was better fun because it was done in the jolly company of brothers, cousins and young neighbours. My father and brothers had a passion for sailing, and there were always two or three "cat-boats" moored off our point; but I did not share this taste. To be merely a passenger was too sedentary, and I felt no desire to learn to manage the boat myself, being too wrapt in dreams to care to burden my mind with so exact a science.

Best of all I liked our weekly walks with Mr. Rutherford over what we called the Rocks — the rough moorland country, at that time without roads or houses, extending from the placid blue expanse of Narragansett bay to the gray rollers of the Atlantic. Every Sunday he used to collect the children of the few friends living near us, and take them, with his own, for a tramp across this rugged country to the sea.

Yet what I recall of these rambles is not so much the comradeship of the other children, or the wise and friendly talk of our guide, as my own secret sensitiveness to the landscape — something in me that was tremblingly and inarticulately awake to every detail of wind-warped fern and wide-eyed rose, yet more profoundly alive to a unifying magic beneath the visible scene, a power with which I was in deep and solitary communion whenever I was in the presence of wild nature. It was the tremor that had first stirred in me when my uncle took me to the spring

52.

but mysteriously enough, Richardson was lacking, save for an abridged
version of "Clarissa Harlowe" (a masterly performance, as I remember
it). No doubt Richardson, with Smollett and Fielding, fell to my uncle's
share, and were too much out-of-date to be thought worth replacing. Thus,
except for Scott, there was a great gap until one came to Washington
Irving, that charming hybrid on whom my parents' thoughts could dwell
at ease, because, in spite of the disturbing fact that he "wrote", he
was a gentleman, and an old friend of the family. It is one of the most
perplexing things about the attitude of my parents toward literature,
that, while they held it in great esteem, they were nervously appre-
hensive of those who produced it. Washington Irving, Fitz Greene Halleck
and William Dana were the only representatives of the disquieting art
whom they seemed to regard as uncontaminated by it; though Longfellow,
they admitted, if a popular poet, was nevertheless also a gentleman.
As for Herman Melville, a cousin of the Van Rensselaers, and qualified
by birth to figure in the best society, he was doubtless excluded from
it by his deplorable Bohemianism, for I never heard his name mentioned,
or saw one of his books. Banished probably for the same reasons were
Poe, that drunken and demoralized Baltimorean, and the brilliant wastrel
Fitz-James O'Brien, who was still further debased by "writing for the
newspapers". But worse still perhaps, in my parents' eyes, was the case
of such unhappy persons as Joseph Drake, author of "The Culprit Fay",
balanced between "fame and infamy", as not quite of the best society,
and writing not quite the best poetry. I cannot hope to render the tone
in which my mother pronounced the names of such unfortunates, or, on
the other hand, that of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who was so "common" yet so
successful. On the whole, my mother doubtless thought, it would be
simpler if people one might be exposed to meeting would refrain from
meddling with literature.

79.

After a new turn thus given to my tireless visual curiosity lent an interesting purpose to our Italian travels, and there after we always devoted our spring holidays to increasing our knowledge of eighteenth century painting and architecture. In these pleasant explorations our most frequent companion was Egerton Winthrop, and in my long experience of comrades of the road I have known only one other as responsive to every beauty, as philosophic over every disappointment or discomfort. Among many good wanderings in his company I remember especially a long drive from Florence to Urbino and the Adriatic, by way of San Marino, San Leo, Loreto, Ancona, Pesaro and Rimini: a quick motor-jaunt nowadays, with smooth roads leading to comfortable inns, but forty years ago a toilsome expedition, full of the enchantments of discovery, but also of fatigue and discomfort, since the well-organized travel of coaching days was over, and the inns in towns off the direct railway routes had sunk to the last degree of wretchedness.

At other times the Paul Bourgets were our companions on these delightful wanderings. Soon after his marriage (about 1893, I think) Bourget had been commissioned by Gordon Bennett to write for the New York Herald the series of articles on the United States which were subsequently published in the volume entitled "Outremer". For this purpose he and his charming young wife came to America, and it happened by a lucky accident that a friend in Paris gave them a letter for me. Bourget had been specially ordered to Newport for his "fashionable watering place" article, and as soon as they arrived they came to lunch, and our long and unbroken friendship began.

When, some years later, we first joined them for an Italian tour, Bourget had already published his "Sensations d'Italie", and was still under the spell of mediaeval Italy; but perhaps his wife was even more sensitive to what I might call the minor magic of scenes and places,

7.

Rice, Allen Thorndike, 74-75

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 333

Ripon, Marchioness of, 220, 222

Roberts, Morley, 252

Robinson, Edward, 148, 156-158

Rome, life in, 28-31

Roosevelt, Theodore, 277, 311-317

Rosebery, Earl of, 224

Rutherfurd, Lewis and Winthrop, 46

Rutherfurd, Margaret, 46

Rutherfurd, Louisa, 46

Sagamore, 316

Saint-Hélier, Lady, 213-216

Schermerhorn, 58, 78

Schlumberger, Gustave,

Scott, Geoffrey, 327-329, 347, 375-378

Ségur, Marquis de, 269

Seillière, Baron Ernest, 269

Serao, Mathilde, 275-277

Simmons, Ronald, 364

Son at the Front, A, 369

Spain, travels in, 31-32, 370-371

Spring-Rice, Sir Cecil, 80-82

Stevens, Mrs. Lucretia (Austin Ledyard), 15-16

Stevens, Major-General Ebenezer, 8, II-14

Stocks, 342-344

Sturgis, Howard, 224-239, 255, 296, 300, 364-365

Sturgis, Mrs. Henry, 252

8.

Summer, 294, 356

Suydamp Mr.Lydig, 4

Taigny, Olivier, 270, 273

Tales of Men and Ghosts, 293

Tardieu, André, 272

Tempest, Marie, 166

Terry, Daisy, (Mrs. Winthrop Chanler), 29

Thompson, Francis, 222

Thurn and Taxis, Princess of, 333

Tillet, Marquis du, 273

Touchstone, the, 125

Trevelyan, Sir George, 215, 218, 222

Tyler, Royall, 348, 359-359

Tyler, Mrs. Royall, 348-349

Valley of Decision, the, 128-129, 208

Vanadis, yacht, cruise on, 99

Van Alen, James, 96, 99

Vaudoyer, Jean-Louis, 354-355

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 222-223

Wells, H.G., 220

Wharton, Edward, marriage to, 89-91

White, Henry, 223, 317, 319

White, Mrs. Henry, 46, 223

Whitney, Payne, 350

Winthrop, Egerton, 92-96, 102-103, 296, 325

Wright, Wilbur, 319

Writing of Fiction, the, 199