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PARTISAN REVIEW
son Henry refers to his father's handicap and couples the latter's ac–
ceptance of it with a further resignation to the lack of worldly recogni–
tion the message of his books received. The similarity to the son's own
fate is again noteworthy, not merely for their both having been
neglected by the general public-a circumstance already mentioned
-but for their common lot of infirmity.
The particular infirmity of the son must at the very outset be
recognized as having established itself upon fertile soil. Henry was
apparently always unsure of himself.
As
a boy his incapacity for
athletics and for schoolwork equally stood out in his impressions al–
though he occupied the place of favorite in his mother's affections.
He was especially aware of a certain inferiority to his older and more
energetic brother William- he has said as much-and William has in
counterpart written in one of his letters (cf. 16, Vol. I, p. 288) about
"innocent and at bottom very powerless-feeling Harry." But the ac–
cic.lent which offered this general orientation a specific date and place
for its disclosure is still inescapably important.
No better description of it could possibly be given than that
which the victim has himself provided. He is speaking in
Notes of a
Son and Brother
of his year at the Harvard Law School, and of the
inception of his literary career. He continues (pp. 296 ff.) :
Two things and more had come up-the biggest of which, and very
wondrous as bearing on any circumstance of mine, as having a grain of
weight to spare for it, was the breaking out of the [Civil] War. The
other, the infinitely small affair in comparison, was a passage of personal
history the most entirely personal, but between which, as a private
catastrophe or difficulty, bristling with embarassments, and the great
public convulsion that announced itself in bigger terms each day, I felt
from the very first an association of the closest, yet withal, I fear, almost
of tht1 least clearly expressible. Scarce at all to be stated, to begin with,
the queer fusion or confusion established in my consciousness during the
soft spring of '61 by the firing on Fort Sumter, Mr. Lincoln's instant first
call for volunteers and a physical mishap, already referred to as having
overtaken me at the same dark hour, and the effects of which were to
draw themselves out incalculably and intolerably. Beyond all present
notation the interlaced, undivided way in which what had happened
to me, by a turn of fortune's hand, in twenty odious minutes, kept com–
pany of the most unnatural-! can call it nothing less-with my view of
what was happening, with the question of what might still happen, to
everyone about me, to the country at large : it so made of these marked
disparities a single vast visitation. One had the sense, I mean, of a huge
comprehensive ache, and there were hours at which one could scarce
have told whether it came from one's own poor organism, still so young
and so meant for better things, but which had suffered particular wrong,
