Chapter V

by Henry James

　　When Newman related to Mrs. Tristram his fruitless visitto Madame de Cintre, she urged him not to be discouraged,but to carry out his plan of "seeing Europe" during the summer,and return to Paris in the autumn and settle down comfortablyfor the winter. "Madame de Cintre will keep," she said;"she is not a woman who will marry from one day to another."Newman made no distinct affirmation that he would come back to Paris;he even talked about Rome and the Nile, and abstained from professingany especial interest in Madame de Cintre's continued widowhood.This circumstance was at variance with his habitual frankness,and may perhaps be regarded as characteristic of the incipient stageof that passion which is more particularly known as the mysterious one.The truth is that the expression of a pair of eyes that were atonce brilliant and mild had become very familiar to his memory,and he would not easily have resigned himself to the prospectof never looking into them again. He communicated to Mrs. Tristrama number of other facts, of greater or less importance, as you choose;but on this particular point he kept his own counsel.He took a kindly leave of M. Nioche, having assured him that,so far as he was concerned, the blue-cloaked Madonna herselfmight have been present at his interview with Mademoiselle Noemie;and left the old man nursing his breast-pocket, in an ecstasywhich the acutest misfortune might have been defied to dissipate.Newman then started on his travels, with all his usual appearanceof slow-strolling leisure, and all his essential directnessand intensity of aim. No man seemed less in a hurry, and yetno man achieved more in brief periods. He had certain practicalinstincts which served him excellently in his trade of tourist.He found his way in foreign cities by divination, his memorywas excellent when once his attention had been at allcordially given, and he emerged from dialogues in foreign tongues,of which he had, formally, not understood a word, in fullpossession of the particular fact he had desired to ascertain.His appetite for facts was capacious, and although many of thosewhich he noted would have seemed woefully dry and colorless tothe ordinary sentimental traveler, a careful inspection of the listwould have shown that he had a soft spot in his imagination.In the charming city of Brussels--his first stopping-place afterleaving Paris--he asked a great many questions about the street-cars,and took extreme satisfaction in the reappearance of thisfamiliar symbol of American civilization; but he was also greatlystruck with the beautiful Gothic tower of the Hotel de Ville,and wondered whether it would not be possible to "get up"something like it in San Francisco. He stood for half an hourin the crowded square before this edifice, in imminent dangerfrom carriage-wheels, listening to a toothless old cicerone mumblein broken English the touching history of Counts Egmont and Horn;and he wrote the names of these gentlemen--for reasons best knownto himself--on the back of an old letter.

　　At the outset, on his leaving Paris, his curiosity had not been intense;passive entertainment, in the Champs Elysees and at the theatres,seemed about as much as he need expect of himself, and although,as he had said to Tristram, he wanted to see the mysterious,satisfying best, he had not the Grand Tour in the least on his conscience,and was not given to cross-questioning the amusement of the hour.He believed that Europe was made for him, and not he for Europe.He had said that he wanted to improve his mind, but he would have felta certain embarrassment, a certain shame, even--a false shame, possibly--if he had caught himself looking intellectually into the mirror.Neither in this nor in any other respect had Newman a high senseof responsibility; it was his prime conviction that a man's lifeshould be easy, and that he should be able to resolve privilege intoa matter of course. The world, to his sense, was a great bazaar,where one might stroll about and purchase handsome things;but he was no more conscious, individually, of social pressure thanhe admitted the existence of such a thing as an obligatory purchase.He had not only a dislike, but a sort of moral mistrust,of uncomfortable thoughts, and it was both uncomfortable and slightlycontemptible to feel obliged to square one's self with a standard.One's standard was the ideal of one's own good-humored prosperity,the prosperity which enabled one to give as well as take.To expand, without bothering about it--without shiftless timidityon one side, or loquacious eagerness on the other--to the fullcompass of what he would have called a "pleasant" experience,was Newman's most definite programme of life. He had always hatedto hurry to catch railroad trains, and yet he had always caught them;and just so an undue solicitude for "culture" seemed a sort of sillydawdling at the station, a proceeding properly confined to women,foreigners, and other unpractical persons. All this admitted,Newman enjoyed his journey, when once he had fairly entered the current,as profoundly as the most zealous dilettante. One's theories,after all, matter little; it is one's humor that is the great thing.Our friend was intelligent, and he could not help that. He loungedthrough Belgium and Holland and the Rhineland, through Switzerlandand Northern Italy, planning about nothing, but seeing everything.The guides and valets de place found him an excellent subject.He was always approachable, for he was much addicted to standingabout in the vestibules and porticos of inns, and he availed himselflittle of the opportunities for impressive seclusion which are soliberally offered in Europe to gentlemen who travel with long purses.When an excursion, a church, a gallery, a ruin, was proposedto him, the first thing Newman usually did, after surveyinghis postulant in silence, from head to foot, was to sit downat a little table and order something to drink. The cicerone,during this process, usually retreated to a respectful distance;otherwise I am not sure that Newman would not have bidden himsit down and have a glass also, and tell him as an honest fellowwhether his church or his gallery was really worth a man's trouble.At last he rose and stretched his long legs, beckoned to the manof monuments, looked at his watch, and fixed his eye on his adversary."What is it?" he asked. "How far?" And whatever the answer was,although he sometimes seemed to hesitate, he never declined.He stepped into an open cab, made his conductor sit beside himto answer questions, bade the driver go fast (he had a particularaversion to slow driving) and rolled, in all probabilitythrough a dusty suburb, to the goal of his pilgrimage.If the goal was a disappointment, if the church was meagre, or the ruina heap of rubbish, Newman never protested or berated his cicerone;he looked with an impartial eye upon great monuments and small,made the guide recite his lesson, listened to it religiously,asked if there was nothing else to be seen in the neighborhood,and drove back again at a rattling pace. It is to be fearedthat his perception of the difference between good architectureand bad was not acute, and that he might sometimes have beenseen gazing with culpable serenity at inferior productions.Ugly churches were a part of his pastime in Europe, as wellas beautiful ones, and his tour was altogether a pastime.But there is sometimes nothing like the imagination of these peoplewho have none, and Newman, now and then, in an unguided strollin a foreign city, before some lonely, sad-towered church,or some angular image of one who had rendered civic servicein an unknown past, had felt a singular inward tremor.It was not an excitement or a perplexity; it was a placid,fathomless sense of diversion.

　　He encountered by chance in Holland a young American, with whom,for a time, he formed a sort of traveler's partnership.They were men of a very different cast, but each, in his way,was so good a fellow that, for a few weeks at least, it seemedsomething of a pleasure to share the chances of the road.Newman's comrade, whose name was Babcock, was a youngUnitarian minister, a small, spare neatly-attired man,with a strikingly candid physiognomy. He was a nativeof Dorchester, Massachusetts, and had spiritual charge of a smallcongregation in another suburb of the New England metropolis.His digestion was weak and he lived chiefly on Graham breadand hominy--a regimen to which he was so much attachedthat his tour seemed to him destined to be blighted when,on landing on the Continent, he found that these delicacies didnot flourish under the table d'hote system. In Paris he hadpurchased a bag of hominy at an establishment which called itselfan American Agency, and at which the New York illustrated paperswere also to be procured, and he had carried it about with him,and shown extreme serenity and fortitude in the somewhat delicateposition of having his hominy prepared for him and servedat anomalous hours, at the hotels he successively visited.Newman had once spent a morning, in the course of business,at Mr. Babcock's birthplace, and, for reasons too recondite to unfold,his visit there always assumed in his mind a jocular cast.To carry out his joke, which certainly seems poor so longas it is not explained, he used often to address his companionas "Dorchester." Fellow-travelers very soon grow intimate but itis highly improbable that at home these extremely dissimilarcharacters would have found any very convenient points of contact.They were, indeed, as different as possible. Newman, who neverreflected on such matters, accepted the situation withgreat equanimity, but Babcock used to meditate over it privately;used often, indeed, to retire to his room early in the eveningfor the express purpose of considering it conscientiouslyand impartially. He was not sure that it was a good thingfor him to associate with our hero, whose way of taking lifewas so little his own. Newman was an excellent, generous fellow;Mr. Babcock sometimes said to himself that he was a noblefellow, and, certainly, it was impossible not to like him.But would it not be desirable to try to exert an influence upon him,to try to quicken his moral life and sharpen his sense of duty?He liked everything, he accepted everything, he found amusementin everything; he was not discriminating, he had not a high tone.The young man from Dorchester accused Newman of a fault whichhe considered very grave, and which he did his best to avoid:what he would have called a want of "moral reaction."Poor Mr. Babcock was extremely fond of pictures and churches,and carried Mrs. Jameson's works about in his trunk;he delighted in aesthetic analysis, and received peculiarimpressions from everything he saw. But nevertheless in hissecret soul he detested Europe, and he felt an irritating needto protest against Newman's gross intellectual hospitality.Mr. Babcock's moral malaise, I am afraid, lay deeperthan where any definition of mine can reach it.He mistrusted the European temperament, he suffered fromthe European climate, he hated the European dinner-hour;European life seemed to him unscrupulous and impure.And yet he had an exquisite sense of beauty; and as beauty was ofteninextricably associated with the above displeasing conditions,as he wished, above all, to be just and dispassionate,and as he was, furthermore, extremely devoted to "culture,"he could not bring himself to decide that Europe was utterly bad.But he thought it was very bad indeed, and his quarrelwith Newman was that this unregulated epicure had a sadlyinsufficient perception of the bad. Babcock himself reallyknew as little about the bad, in any quarter of the world,as a nursing infant, his most vivid realization of evilhad been the discovery that one of his college classmates,who was studying architecture in Paris had a love affairwith a young woman who did not expect him to marry her.Babcock had related this incident to Newman, and our hero hadapplied an epithet of an unflattering sort to the young girl.The next day his companion asked him whether he was verysure he had used exactly the right word to characterizethe young architect's mistress. Newman stared and laughed."There are a great many words to express that idea," he said;"you can take your choice!"

　　"Oh, I mean," said Babcock, "was she possibly not to be consideredin a different light? Don't you think she really expected himto marry her?"

　　"I am sure I don't know," said Newman. "Very likely she did;I have no doubt she is a grand woman." And he began to laugh again.

　　"I didn't mean that either," said Babcock, "I was only afraid that I mighthave seemed yesterday not to remember--not to consider; well, I think Iwill write to Percival about it."

　　And he had written to Percival (who answered him in a reallyimpudent fashion), and he had reflected that it was somehow,raw and reckless in Newman to assume in that off-hand mannerthat the young woman in Paris might be "grand." The brevityof Newman's judgments very often shocked and discomposed him.He had a way of damning people without farther appeal,or of pronouncing them capital company in the face ofuncomfortable symptoms, which seemed unworthy of a man whoseconscience had been properly cultivated. And yet poor Babcockliked him, and remembered that even if he was sometimesperplexing and painful, this was not a reason for giving him up.Goethe recommended seeing human nature in the most various forms,and Mr. Babcock thought Goethe perfectly splendid.He often tried, in odd half-hours of conversation to infuseinto Newman a little of his own spiritual starch, but Newman'spersonal texture was too loose to admit of stiffening.His mind could no more hold principles than a sieve canhold water. He admired principles extremely, and thoughtBabcock a mighty fine little fellow for having so many.He accepted all that his high-strung companion offered him,and put them away in what he supposed to be a very safe place;but poor Babcock never afterwards recognized his gifts amongthe articles that Newman had in daily use.

　　They traveled together through Germany and into Switzerland, where forthree or four weeks they trudged over passes and lounged upon blue lakes.At last they crossed the Simplon and made their way to Venice.Mr. Babcock had become gloomy and even a trifle irritable;he seemed moody, absent, preoccupied; he got his plans into a tangle,and talked one moment of doing one thing and the next of doing another.Newman led his usual life, made acquaintances, took his ease in the galleriesand churches, spent an unconscionable amount of time in strollingin the Piazza San Marco, bought a great many bad pictures, and for afortnight enjoyed Venice grossly. One evening, coming back to his inn,he found Babcock waiting for him in the little garden beside it.The young man walked up to him, looking very dismal, thrust out his hand,and said with solemnity that he was afraid they must part. Newman expressedhis surprise and regret, and asked why a parting had became necessary."Don't be afraid I'm tired of you," he said.

　　"You are not tired of me?" demanded Babcock, fixing him with hisclear gray eye.

　　"Why the deuce should I be? You are a very plucky fellow.Besides, I don't grow tired of things."

　　"We don't understand each other," said the young minister.

　　"Don't I understand you?" cried Newman. "Why, I hoped I did.But what if I don't; where's the harm?"

　　"I don't understand you," said Babcock. And he sat down and rested his headon his hand, and looked up mournfully at his immeasurable friend.

　　"Oh Lord, I don't mind that!" cried Newman, with a laugh.

　　"But it's very distressing to me. It keeps me in a state of unrest.It irritates me; I can't settle anything. I don't think it's good for me."

　　"You worry too much; that's what's the matter with you," said Newman.

　　"Of course it must seem so to you. You think I takethings too hard, and I think you take things too easily.We can never agree."

　　"But we have agreed very well all along."

　　"No, I haven't agreed," said Babcock, shaking his head."I am very uncomfortable. I ought to have separated from youa month ago."

　　"Oh, horrors! I'll agree to anything!" cried Newman.

　　Mr. Babcock buried his head in both hands. At last looking up,"I don't think you appreciate my position," he said."I try to arrive at the truth about everything. And then yougo too fast. For me, you are too passionate, too extravagant.I feel as if I ought to go over all this ground we havetraversed again, by myself, alone. I am afraid I have madea great many mistakes."

　　"Oh, you needn't give so many reasons," said Newman."You are simply tired of my company. You have a good right to be."

　　"No, no, I am not tired!" cried the pestered young divine."It is very wrong to be tired."

　　"I give it up!" laughed Newman. "But of course it will neverdo to go on making mistakes. Go your way, by all means.I shall miss you; but you have seen I make friends very easily.You will be lonely, yourself; but drop me a line, when you feellike it, and I will wait for you anywhere."

　　"I think I will go back to Milan. I am afraid I didn't do justice to Luini."

　　"Poor Luini!" said Newman.

　　"I mean that I am afraid I overestimated him. I don't thinkthat he is a painter of the first rank."

　　"Luini?" Newman exclaimed; "why, he's enchanting--he's magnificent!There is something in his genius that is like a beautiful woman.It gives one the same feeling."

　　Mr. Babcock frowned and winced. And it must be added that this was,for Newman, an unusually metaphysical flight; but in passingthrough Milan he had taken a great fancy to the painter."There you are again!" said Mr. Babcock. "Yes, we had better separate."And on the morrow he retraced his steps and proceeded to tonedown his impressions of the great Lombard artist.

　　A few days afterwards Newman received a note from his late companionwhich ran as follows:--

　　My Dear Mr. Newman,--I am afraid that my conduct at Venice,a week ago, seemed to you strange and ungrateful, and Iwish to explain my position, which, as I said at the time,I do not think you appreciate. I had long had it on my mindto propose that we should part company, and this step was notreally so abrupt as it seemed. In the first place, you know,I am traveling in Europe on funds supplied by my congregation,who kindly offered me a vacation and an opportunity to enrichmy mind with the treasures of nature and art in the Old World.I feel, therefore, as if I ought to use my time to the verybest advantage. I have a high sense of responsibility.You appear to care only for the pleasure of the hour,and you give yourself up to it with a violence which Iconfess I am not able to emulate. I feel as if I must arriveat some conclusion and fix my belief on certain points.Art and life seem to me intensely serious things, and in ourtravels in Europe we should especially remember the immenseseriousness of Art. You seem to hold that if a thing amusesyou for the moment, that is all you need ask for it, and yourrelish for mere amusement is also much higher than mine.You put, however, a kind of reckless confidence into your pleasurewhich at times, I confess, has seemed to me--shall I say it?--almost cynical. Your way at any rate is not my way, and itis unwise that we should attempt any longer to pull together.And yet, let me add that I know there is a great deal to be saidfor your way; I have felt its attraction, in your society,very strongly. But for this I should have left you long ago.But I was so perplexed. I hope I have not done wrong.I feel as if I had a great deal of lost time to make up.I beg you take all this as I mean it, which, Heaven knows,is not invidiously. I have a great personal esteem for youand hope that some day, when I have recovered my balance, we shallmeet again. I hope you will continue to enjoy your travels,only do remember that Life and Art are extremely serious.Believe me your sincere friend and well-wisher,

　　Benjamin Babcock

　　P. S. I am greatly perplexed by Luini.

　　This letter produced in Newman's mind a singular mixtureof exhilaration and awe. At first, Mr. Babcock's tenderconscience seemed to him a capital farce, and his travelingback to Milan only to get into a deeper muddle appeared,as the reward of his pedantry, exquisitely and ludicrously just.Then Newman reflected that these are mighty mysteries, that possiblyhe himself was indeed that baleful and barely mentionable thing,a cynic, and that his manner of considering the treasures of artand the privileges of life was probably very base and immoral.Newman had a great contempt for immorality, and that evening,for a good half hour, as he sat watching the star-sheen onthe warm Adriatic, he felt rebuked and depressed. He was at a losshow to answer Babcock's letter. His good nature checked hisresenting the young minister's lofty admonitions, and his tough,inelastic sense of humor forbade his taking them seriously.He wrote no answer at all but a day or two afterward he foundin a curiosity shop a grotesque little statuette in ivory,of the sixteenth century, which he sent off to Babcock withouta commentary. It represented a gaunt, ascetic-looking monk,in a tattered gown and cowl, kneeling with clasped hands andpulling a portentously long face. It was a wonderfully delicatepiece of carving, and in a moment, through one of the rentsof his gown, you espied a fat capon hung round the monk's waist.In Newman's intention what did the figure symbolize?Did it mean that he was going to try to be as "high-toned" as the monklooked at first, but that he feared he should succeed no betterthan the friar, on a closer inspection, proved to have done?It is not supposable that he intended a satire upon Babcock'sown asceticism, for this would have been a truly cynical stroke.He made his late companion, at any rate, a very valuable little present.

　　Newman, on leaving Venice, went through the Tyrol to Vienna,and then returned westward, through Southern Germany.The autumn found him at Baden-Baden, where he spent several weeks.The place was charming, and he was in no hurry to depart;besides, he was looking about him and deciding what to dofor the winter. His summer had been very full, and he satunder the great trees beside the miniature river that tricklespast the Baden flower-beds, he slowly rummaged it over.He had seen and done a great deal, enjoyed and observeda great deal; he felt older, and yet he felt younger too.He remembered Mr. Babcock and his desire to form conclusions,and he remembered also that he had profited very little by hisfriend's exhortation to cultivate the same respectable habit.Could he not scrape together a few conclusions? Baden-Baden wasthe prettiest place he had seen yet, and orchestral music inthe evening, under the stars, was decidedly a great institution.This was one of his conclusions! But he went on to reflectthat he had done very wisely to pull up stakes and come abroad;this seeing of the world was a very interesting thing.He had learned a great deal; he couldn't say just what,but he had it there under his hat-band. He had done what he wanted;he had seen the great things, and he had given his mind a chanceto "improve," if it would. He cheerfully believed that ithad improved. Yes, this seeing of the world was very pleasant,and he would willingly do a little more of it. Thirty-six yearsold as he was, he had a handsome stretch of life before him yet,and he need not begin to count his weeks. Where should he takethe world next? I have said he remembered the eyes of the ladywhom he had found standing in Mrs. Tristram's drawing-room;four months had elapsed, and he had not forgotten them yet.He had looked--he had made a point of looking--into a greatmany other eyes in the interval, but the only ones he thoughtof now were Madame de Cintre's. If he wanted to see moreof the world, should he find it in Madame de Cintre's eyes?He would certainly find something there, call it this worldor the next. Throughout these rather formless meditationshe sometimes thought of his past life and the long array of years(they had begun so early) during which he had had nothing in hishead but "enterprise." They seemed far away now, for his presentattitude was more than a holiday, it was almost a rupture.He had told Tristram that the pendulum was swinging backand it appeared that the backward swing had not yet ended.Still "enterprise," which was over in the other quarter woreto his mind a different aspect at different hours. In its traina thousand forgotten episodes came trooping back into his memory.Some of them he looked complacently enough in the face;from some he averted his head. They were old efforts,old exploits, antiquated examples of "smartness" and sharpness.Some of them, as he looked at them, he felt decidedly proud of;he admired himself as if he had been looking at another man.And, in fact, many of the qualities that make a great deed were there:the decision, the resolution, the courage, the celerity,the clear eye, and the strong hand. Of certain otherachievements it would be going too far to say that he was ashamedof them for Newman had never had a stomach for dirty work.He was blessed with a natural impulse to disfigure with a direct,unreasoning blow the comely visage of temptation. And certainly,in no man could a want of integrity have been less excusable.Newman knew the crooked from the straight at a glance, and the formerhad cost him, first and last, a great many moments of lively disgust.But none the less some of his memories seemed to wear atpresent a rather graceless and sordid mien, and it struck himthat if he had never done anything very ugly, he had never,on the other hand, done anything particularly beautiful.He had spent his years in the unremitting effort to add thousandsto thousands, and, now that he stood well outside of it,the business of money-getting appeared tolerably dry and sterile.It is very well to sneer at money-getting after you have filledyour pockets, and Newman, it may be said, should have begunsomewhat earlier to moralize thus delicately. To this it may beanswered that he might have made another fortune, if he chose;and we ought to add that he was not exactly moralizing.It had come back to him simply that what he had been lookingat all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that ithad not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.

　　During his stay at Baden-Baden he received a letter from Mrs. Tristram,scolding him for the scanty tidings he had sent to his friends of the Avenued'Iena, and begging to be definitely informed that he had not concoctedany horrid scheme for wintering in outlying regions, but was comingback sanely and promptly to the most comfortable city in the world.Newman's answer ran as follows:--

　　"I supposed you knew I was a miserable letter-writer, and didn't expectanything of me. I don't think I have written twenty letters of purefriendship in my whole life; in America I conducted my correspondencealtogether by telegrams. This is a letter of pure friendship;you have got hold of a curiosity, and I hope you will value it.You want to know everything that has happened to me these three months.The best way to tell you, I think, would be to send you my half dozenguide-books, with my pencil-marks in the margin. Wherever you finda scratch or a cross, or a 'Beautiful!' or a 'So true!' or a 'Too thin!'you may know that I have had a sensation of some sort or other.That has been about my history, ever since I left you. Belgium, Holland,Switzerland, Germany, Italy, I have been through the whole list,and I don't think I am any the worse for it. I know more about Madonnasand church-steeples than I supposed any man could. I have seen somevery pretty things, and shall perhaps talk them over this winter,by your fireside. You see, my face is not altogether set against Paris.I have had all kinds of plans and visions, but your letter has blown mostof them away. 'L'appetit vient en mangeant,' says the French proverb,and I find that the more I see of the world the more I want to see.Now that I am in the shafts, why shouldn't I trot to the end of the course?Sometimes I think of the far East, and keep rolling the names of Easterncities under my tongue: Damascus and Bagdad, Medina and Mecca.I spent a week last month in the company of a returned missionary,who told me I ought to be ashamed to be loafing about Europe when thereare such big things to be seen out there. I do want to explore,but I think I would rather explore over in the Rue de l'Universite. Doyou ever hear from that pretty lady? If you can get her to promise shewill be at home the next time I call, I will go back to Paris straight.I am more than ever in the state of mind I told you about that evening;I want a first-class wife. I have kept an eye on all the pretty girlsI have come across this summer, but none of them came up to my notion,or anywhere near it. I should have enjoyed all this a thousand timesmore if I had had the lady just mentioned by my side. The nearestapproach to her was a Unitarian minister from Boston, who very soondemanded a separation, for incompatibility of temper. He told me Iwas low-minded, immoral, a devotee of 'art for art'--whatever that is:all of which greatly afflicted me, for he was really a sweet little fellow.But shortly afterwards I met an Englishman, with whom I struck up anacquaintance which at first seemed to promise well--a very bright man,who writes in the London papers and knows Paris nearly as well as Tristram.We knocked about for a week together, but he very soon gave me upin disgust. I was too virtuous by half; I was too stern a moralist.He told me, in a friendly way, that I was cursed with a conscience;that I judged things like a Methodist and talked about them like an old lady.This was rather bewildering. Which of my two critics was I to believe?I didn't worry about it and very soon made up my mind they were both idiots.But there is one thing in which no one will ever have the impudenceto pretend I am wrong, that is, in being your faithful friend,

　　#p align="right"> C. N."