第51章 Chapter 2(2)

He took life in general higher up the stream; so far as he was n't actually taking it as a collector he was taking it decidedly as a grandfather. In the way of precious small pieces he had handled nothing so precious as the Principino, his daughter's first-born, whose Italian designation endlessly amused him and whom he could manipulate and dandle, already almost toss and catch again, as he could n't a correspondingly rare morsel of an earlier pate tendre. He could take the small clutching child from his nurse's arms with an iteration grimly discountenanced, in respect to their contents, by the glass doors of high cabinets. Something clearly beatific in this new relation had moreover without doubt confirmed for him the sense that none of his silent answers to public detraction, to local vulgarity, had ever been so legitimately straight as the mere element of attitude--reduce it, he said, to that--in his easy weeks at Fawns. The element of attitude was all he wanted of these weeks, and he was enjoying it on the spot even more than he had hoped: enjoying it in spite of Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches; in spite of the small worry of his belief that Fanny Assingham had really something for him that she was keeping back; in spite of his full consciousness, overflowing the cup like a wine too generously poured, that if he had consented to marry his daughter, and thereby to make, as it were, the difference, what surrounded him now WAS exactly consent vivified, marriage demonstrated, the difference in fine decidedly made. He (148) could call back his prior, his own wedded consciousness--it was n't yet out of range of vague reflexion. He had supposed himself, above all he had supposed his wife, AS married as any one could be, and yet he wondered if their state had deserved the name, or their union worn the beauty, in the degree to which the couple now before him carried the matter. In especial since the birth of their boy in New York--the grand climax of their recent American period, brought to so right an issue--the happy pair struck him as having carried it higher, deeper, further; to where it ceased to concern his imagination at any rate to follow them. Extraordinary, beyond question, was one branch of his characteristic mute wonderment--it characterised above all, with its subject before it, his modesty: the strange dim doubt, waking up for him at the end of the years, of whether Maggie's mother had after all been capable of the maximum. The maximum of tenderness he meant--as the terms existed for him; the maximum of immersion in the fact of being married. Maggie herself was capable; Maggie herself, at this season, was, exquisitely, divinely, the maximum: such was the impression that, positively holding off a little for the practical, the tactful consideration it inspired in him, a respect for the beauty and sanctity of it almost amounting to awe--such was the impression he daily received from her. She was her mother, oh yes--but her mother and something more; it becoming thus a new light for him, and in such a curious way too, that anything more than her mother should prove at this time of day possible.

(149)He could live over again at almost any quiet moment the long process of his introduction to all present interests--an introduction that had depended all on himself, like the "cheek" of the young man who approaches a boss without credentials or picks up an acquaintance, makes even a real friend, by speaking to a passer in the street. HIS real friend, in all the business, was to have been his own mind, with which nobody had put him in relation. He had knocked at the door of that essentially private house, and his call, in truth, had not been immediately answered; so that when, after waiting and coming back, he had at last got in, it was, twirling his hat, as an embarrassed stranger, or, trying his keys, as a thief at night. He had gained confidence only with time, but when he had taken real possession of the place it had been never again to come away. All of which success represented, it must be allowed, his one principle of pride. Pride in the mere original spring, pride in his money, would have been pride in something that had come, in comparison, so easily. The right ground for elation was difficulty mastered, and his difficulty--thanks to his modesty--had been to believe in his facility. THIS was the problem he had worked out to its solution--the solution that was now doing more than all else to make his feet settle and his days flush; and when he wished to feel "good," as they said at American City, he had but to retrace his immense development. That was what the whole thing came back to--that the development had not been somebody's else passing falsely, accepted too ignobly, for his. To think how servile he might have been was absolutely to respect (150) himself, was in fact, as much as he liked, to admire himself, as free. The very finest spring that ever responded to his touch was always there to press--the memory of his freedom as dawning upon him, like a sunrise all pink and silver, during a winter divided between Florence, Rome and Naples some three years after his wife's death. It was the hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in particular that he could usually best recover--the way that there above all, where the princes and popes had been before him, his divination of his faculty had gone to his head. He was a plain American citizen staying at an hotel where sometimes for days together there were twenty others like him; but no pope, no prince of them all had read a richer meaning, he believed, into the character of the Patron of Art He was ashamed of them really, if he was n't afraid, and he had on the whole never so climbed to the tip-top as in judging, over a perusal of Hermann Grimm, where Julius II and Leo X were "placed" by their treatment of Michael Angelo.