When an excursion, a church, a gallery, a ruin, was proposed to him, the first thing Newman usually did, after surveying his postulant in silence, from head to foot, was to sit down at 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 him sit down and have a glass also, and tell him as an honest fellow whether his church or his gallery was really worth a man's trouble.
At last he rose and stretched his long legs, beckoned to the man of 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 him to answer questions, bade the driver go fast (he had a particular aversion to slow driving) and rolled, in all probability through a dusty suburb, to the goal of his pilgrimage.
If the goal was a disappointment, if the church was meagre, or the ruin a 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 feared that his perception of the difference between good architecture and bad was not acute, and that he might sometimes have been seen gazing with culpable serenity at inferior productions.
Ugly churches were a part of his pastime in Europe, as well as beautiful ones, and his tour was altogether a pastime.
But there is sometimes nothing like the imagination of these people who have none, and Newman, now and then, in an unguided stroll in a foreign city, before some lonely, sad-towered church, or some angular image of one who had rendered civic service in 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 seemed something of a pleasure to share the chances of the road.
Newman's comrade, whose name was Babcock, was a young Unitarian minister, a small, spare neatly-attired man, with a strikingly candid physiognomy.He was a native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and had spiritual charge of a small congregation in another suburb of the New England metropolis.
His digestion was weak and he lived chiefly on Graham bread and hominy--a regimen to which he was so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be blighted when, on landing on the Continent, he found that these delicacies did not flourish under the table d'hote system.In Paris he had purchased a bag of hominy at an establishment which called itself an American Agency, and at which the New York illustrated papers were also to be procured, and he had carried it about with him, and shown extreme serenity and fortitude in the somewhat delicate position of having his hominy prepared for him and served at 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 long as it is not explained, he used often to address his companion as "Dorchester." Fellow-travelers very soon grow intimate but it is highly improbable that at home these extremely dissimilar characters would have found any very convenient points of contact.
They were, indeed, as different as possible.Newman, who never reflected on such matters, accepted the situation with great equanimity, but Babcock used to meditate over it privately;used often, indeed, to retire to his room early in the evening for the express purpose of considering it conscientiously and impartially.He was not sure that it was a good thing for him to associate with our hero, whose way of taking life was 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 amusement in everything; he was not discriminating, he had not a high tone.
The young man from Dorchester accused Newman of a fault which he 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 peculiar impressions from everything he saw.But nevertheless in his secret soul he detested Europe, and he felt an irritating need to protest against Newman's gross intellectual hospitality.
Mr.Babcock's moral malaise, I am afraid, lay deeper than where any definition of mine can reach it.
He mistrusted the European temperament, he suffered from the 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 often inextricably 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.