|
Discriminations of the prosaic order had little to do with my first and all but sole vision of the American soldier in his multitude, and above all—for that was markedly the colour of the whole thing—in his depression, his wasted melancholy almost; an effect that somehow corresponds for memory, I bethink myself, with the tender elegiac tone in which Walt Whitman was later on so admirably to commemorate him. The restrictions I confess to are abject, but both my sense and my aftersense of the exhibition I here allude to had, thanks to my situation, to do all the work they could in the way of representation to me of what was most publicly, most heroically, most wastefully, tragically, terribly going on. It had so to serve for my particular nearest approach to a "contact" with the active drama—I mean of course the collectively and scenically active, since the brush of interest against the soldier single and salient was an affair of every day—that were it not for just one other strange spasm of awareness, scarce relaxed to this hour, I should have been left all but pitifully void of any scrap of a substitute for the concrete experience. The long hot July 1st of '63, on which the huge battle of Gettysburg had begun, could really be—or rather couldn't possibly not be—a scrap of concrete experience for any group of united persons, New York cousins and all, who, in a Newport garden, restlessly strolling, sitting, neither daring quite to move nor quite to rest, quite to go in nor quite to stay out, actually listened together, in their almost ignobly safe stillness, as to the boom of far-away guns. This was, as it were, the War—the War palpably in Pennsylvania; not less than my hour of a felt rage of repining at my doomed absence from the sight of that march of the 54th Massachusetts out of Boston, "Bob" Shaw at its head and our exalted Wilky among its officers, of which a great sculptor was, on the spot of their vividest passing, to set the image aloft forever. Poor other visitations, comparatively, had had to suffice for me; I could take in fact for amusing, most of all (since that, thank goodness, was high gaiety), a couple of impressions of the brief preliminary camp life at Readville during which we admired the charming composition of the 44th of the same State, under Colonel Frank Lee, and which fairly made romantic for me Wilky's quick spring out of mere juvenility and into such brightly-bristling ranks. He had begun by volunteering in a company that gave him half the ingenuous youth of the circle within our social ken for brothers-in-arms, and it was to that pair of Readville afternoons I must have owed my all so emphasised vision of handsome young Cabot Russell, who, again to be his closest brother-in-arms in the 54th, irrecoverably lost himself, as we have seen, at Fort Wagner. A dry desert, one must suppose, the life in which, for memory and appreciation made one, certain single hours or compressed groups of hours have found their reason for standing out through everything, for insistently living on, in the cabinet of intimate reference, the museum, as it were, of the soul's curiosities—where doubtless at the same time an exhibition of them to mere other eyes or ears or questioning logical minds may effect itself in no plain terms. We recognise such occasions more and more as we go on, and are surely, as a general thing, glad when, for the interest of memory—which it's such a business to keep interesting—they constitute something of a cluster. In my queer cluster, at any rate, that flower of the connection which answers to the name of Portsmouth Grove still overtops other members of its class, so that to finger it again for a moment is to make it perceptibly exhale its very principle of life. This was, for me, at the time, neither more nor less than that the American soldier in his multitude was the most attaching and effecting and withal the most amusing figure of romance conceivable; the great sense of my vision being thus that, as the afternoon light of the place and time lingered upon him, both to the seeming enhancement of his quality and of its own, romance of a more confused kind than I shall now attempt words for attended his very movement. It was the charmingest, touchingest, dreadfullest thing in the world that my impression of him should have to be somehow of his abandonment to a rueful humour, to a stoic reserve which could yet melt, a relation with him once established, into a rich communicative confidence; and, in particular, all over the place, of his own scanted and more or less baffled, though constantly and, as I couldn't not have it, pathetically, "knowing" devices. The great point remained for me at all events
that I could afterwards appear to myself to have done nothing but establish
with him a relation, that I established it, to my imagination, in several
cases and all in the three or four hours—even to the pitch of the last
tenderness of friendship. I recover that, strolling about with honest and
so superior fellow-citizens, or sitting with them by the improvised couches
of their languid rest, I drew from each his troubled tale, listened to
his plaint on his special hard case—taking form, this, in what seemed to
me the very poetry of the esoteric vernacular—and sealed the beautiful
tie, the responsive sympathy, by an earnest offer; in no instance waved
away, of such pecuniary solace as I might at brief notice draw on my poor
pocket for. Yet again, as I indulge this memory, do I feel that I might
if pushed a little rejoice in having to such an extent coincided with,
not to say perhaps positively anticipated, dear old Walt—even if I hadn't
come armed like him with oranges and peppermints. I ministered much more
summarily, though possibly in proportion to the time and thanks to my better
luck more pecuniarily; but I like to treat myself to making out that I
can scarce have brought to the occasion (in proportion to the time again
and to other elements of the case) less of the consecrating sentiment than
he. I like further to put it in a light that, ever so curiously, if the
good Walt was most inwardly stirred to his later commemorative accents
by his participating in the common Americanism of his hospital friends,
the familiar note and shared sound of which formed its ground of appeal,
I found myself victim to a like moving force through quite another logic.
It was literally, I fear, because our common Americanism carried with it,
to my imagination, such a disclosed freshness and strangeness, working,
as I might say, over such gulfs of dissociation, that I reached across
to their, these hospital friends', side of the matter, even at the
risk of an imperilled consistency. It had for me, the state in question,
colour and form, accent and quality, with scarce less "authority" than
if instead of the rough tracks or worn paths of my casual labyrinth I had
trod the glazed halls of some school of natural history. What holds me
now indeed is that such an institution might have exemplified then almost
nothing but the aspects strictly native to our social and seasonal air;
so simply and easily conceivable to the kindly mind were at that time these
reciprocities, so great the freedom and pleasure of them compared with
the restrictions imposed on directness of sympathy by the awful admixtures
of to-day, those which offer to the would-be participant among us, on returns
from sojourns wherever homogeneity and its entailed fraternity, its easy
contacts, still may be seen to work, the strange shock of such amenities
declined on any terms. Really not possible then, I think, the perception
now accompanying, on American ground, this shock—the recognition, by any
sensibility at all reflective, of the point where our national theory of
absorption, assimilation and conversion appallingly breaks down; appallingly,
that is, for those to whom the consecrated association, of the sort
still at play where community has not been blighted, strongly speaks. Which
remarks may reinforce the note of my unconsciousness of any difficulty
for knowing in the old, the comparatively brothering, conditions what an
American at least was. Absurd thus, no doubt, that the scant experience
over which I perversely linger insists on figuring to me as quite a revel
of the right confidence.
Return
to "The Wound Dresser Remembered" table of contents
|