as was the custom in French society of the Middle Class. Her mind was methodic, her affection all-embracing.

Henri List was reticent as to his past, but the family gossip had it that as a young man he was educated for the Catholic priesthood, rebelled at the job and ran away from home.

The intervening years between this hegira and his arrival in Geneva, Switzerland, are a blank. There seems to have been some lack of clearness as to his vocation in Geneva; was he a Professor of Greek in the University, or did he coach rich young English gentlemen through their university course? In any event he was highly educated, and he prospered. It was further gossiped that, having met Anna Mattheus⁠—considerably older than he⁠—who kept a store filled with a sumptuous stock of choice linens and laces, he courted her. It was sneeringly said he married her for her money. At any rate, they were well to do, and lived in a marble house with large grounds called La Maison des Paquis. Here three children were born to them, in order of arrival: Andrienne, Jennie and Jules. The narrator has in his possession a small oval card with perforated edge, on the plain field of which is drawn with colored pencils, a park-like view, with house half-hidden among the trees. On the back, in the handwriting of her mother, is the notation “Terrace de la Maison des Paquis faites par Andrienne en 1849”⁠—(that is at the age of fourteen). According also to family gossip, there seems to be no doubt that Henri List was tainted with cupidity. He speculated and finally lent ear to the wiles of a Jew. He ventured his all. The enterprise strangely and suddenly lost its credit, and the house of List tottered and collapsed in irretrievable ruin. Anna List borrowed money of her relatives to take the family to America, to forget the past and start anew in a strange land. Little wonder that Grandfather was reticent. It required a span of years for the narrator to pick up little by little the thread of the story.

As to Patrick Sullivan; he had no secrets, but his memory did not extend much back of his twelfth year. He said his father was a landscape painter, a widower, and he an only child. That together they used to visit the county fairs in Ireland. That at one of these fairs he lost his father in the crowd and never saw him again. Thus at the age of twelve he was thrown upon the world to make his way. With a curious little fiddle, he wandered barefoot about the countryside, to fiddle here and there for those who wished to dance; and of dancing there was plenty. Thus traveling he saw nearly all of Ireland. This wandering life must have covered a number of years. The period that emerges from the wander-period seems obscure in transition, but his attention must have focused on dancing as an art. As to the grim determination of his character, his pride and his ambition, there can be no doubt; but what chain of influences took him to London is not known. Arrived there, he placed himself under the tutelage of the best⁠—most fashionable⁠—masters, and in due time set up an academy of his own. Not content with this advance, which was successful, he must needs reach the heights of his art, and in Paris, the center of fashion, took instruction of the leading masters. In those days dancing was a social art of grace, of deportment, and of personal carriage. It had many branches of development, from the simple polka to highly figurative formations, in social functions, upward to its highest and most poetic reach in the romantic classical ballet. It was an art of elegance that has passed with the days of elegance. Artificial it largely was, yet humanizing, and beneficent. In such wise must the social value of the dance, of the dancing master, and the academy of a day long since past be visualized, to be understood in this day.

This young Irishman had another grand passion. To him the art of dancing was a fine art of symmetry, of grace, of rhythm; but parallel to this ran a hunger for Nature’s beauty. He must have been a pagan, this man, for in him Nature’s beauty, particularly in its more grandiose moods, inspired an ecstasy, a sort of waking trance, a glorious mystic worship. In this romantic quest, he had, through a series of years, footed it over a considerable part of Switzerland.

It seems strange at first glance that these highly virile and sensitive powers should be embodied in one so unlovely in person. His medium size, his too-sloping shoulders, his excessive Irish face, his small repulsive eyes⁠—the eyes of a pig⁠—of nondescript color and no flash, sunk into his head under rough brows, all seemed unpromising enough in themselves until it is remembered that behind that same mask resided the grim will, the instinctive ambition that had brought him, alone and unaided, out of a childhood of poverty.

Naturally enough he had not found time to acquire an “education,” as it was then called and is still called. He, however, wrote and spoke English in a polite way, and had acquired an excruciating French. Hence by the standards of his time in England he was no gentleman as that technical term went, but essentially a lackey, a flunkey or social parasite. Perhaps it was for this reason he revered book-learning and the learned. He knew no better.

It is probable that, about this time, the lure of America, goal of the adventurous spirit, the great hospitable, open-armed land of equality and opportunity, had been acting on his imagination. This is surmise. The fact, of which there is documentary evidence, is this: that on the 22nd day of July, 1847, he took passage at London for Boston in the good ship Unicorn of 550 tons register burden.

Вы читаете The Autobiography of an Idea
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату