A Small Boy And Others

A SMALL BOY b OTHERS A SMALL BOY OTHERS By HENRY JAMES CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS New York A SMALL BOY 6-OTHERS IN the attempt to place together some particu lars of the early life of William James and present him in his setting, his immediate native and domestic air s so that any future gath ered memorials of him might become the more intelligible and interesting, I found one of the consequences of my interrogation of the past assert itself a good deal at the expense of some of the others. For it was to memory in the first place that my main appeal for particulars had to be made 1 had been too near a witness of my broth ers beginnings of life, and too close a participant, by affection, admiration and sympathy, in what ever touched and moved him, not to feel myself in possession even of a greater quantity of signifi cant truthj a larger handful of the fine substance of history than I could hope to express or apply. To recover anything like the full treasure of scat tered, wasted circumstance was at the same time to live over the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare 3 with whatever sadder and sorer i 2 A BOY intensities with whatever poorer and passages after the manner of every ones experi ence and the effect of this In was to dis crimination among the parts of my subject and again difficult - so inseparably and beauti fully they seemed to hang together the com prehensive case to decline mutilation or refuse to be treated otherwise than handsomely This meant that aspects began to multiply and images to swarm so far at least as they showed to appre ciation as true terms and happy values and that I might positively and exceedingly rejoice in my relation to most of them using itfor all that, as the phrase is, it should be worth To knock at the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide to see the world within begin to compose with a grace of its own round the primary figure see it people itself vividly and insistently Such then is the circle of my com memoration and so much these free and copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were to my sense the blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of differences and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us to that fond fancy pleads for pres ervation, and that in respect to what 1 of myself as possessing 1 think I shall be ashamed, as of a cold impiety, to find any element alto gether negligible. To which 1 may add perhaps A 3 that I struggle under the drawback. Innate and inbred of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and recovered moment, as who should say, in the vivid image and the very scene the light of the only terms in which life has treated me to experience. And I cherish the moment and evoke the image and repaint the scene though meanwhile indeed scarce able to convey how prevailingly and almost exclusively, during years and years, the field was animated and the adventure conditioned for me by my brothers nearness and that play of genius in him of which 1 had never had a doubt from the first. The first then since I retrace our steps to the starts for the pleasure, strangely mixed though it be 5 of feeling our small feet plant themselves afresh and artlessly stumble forward again the first began long ago, far off, and yet glimmers at me there as out of a thin golden haze with all the charm for imagination andmemory, of pressing pursuit rewarded, of distinctness in the dimness, of the flush of life in the grey, of the wonder of consciousness in everything everything having naturally been all the while but the abject little matter of course...