Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard by Roger Austen

As usual, Charles was an outsider. Rather than living with the other boys in the school dormitory on 12th Street, he lived apart in a vine-covered cottage down by the water. But, of course, he wanted very much to belong. At night he would stroll past the dormitory and "look up at the long rows of lighted windows and wish myself a happy habitantthey always seemed happyfor I began to feel that I was more like a parlor boarder than a member of the fraternity." As an outsider, it was all the

 

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easier for Charles to fantasize about the glamorous, self-assured young men who, as insiders, were the school's leaders and heroes. Stoddard recalled that boarding school had always seemed like an "enchanted realm," where "the manlier boys were natural rulers and all the others their willing votaries. I know that it is the nurserynot to say the hotbedof the emotions" (CRP).
In this particular "hot-bed," Charles apparently found the image of "Tom" in a classmate so spellbinding that Stoddard was to remember him for years and to confide about him in a long letter to W. D. Howells in 1892. Howells, with whom Stoddard had developed a warm friendship, had written playfully: "Whenever we feel gay or sad, we say, we wish Stoddard were here. Does everybody like you, and does it make you feel badly? Are you sure that you are worthy of our affection? If you have some secret sins or demerits, don't you think you ought to let us know them, so that we could love you less?" 10 In reply, Stoddard offered a sketch titled "The Spell-binder" as ''one of the reasons why I should be despised and rejected." Although written in a tone of condescension and exaggeration meant to suggest that he was now greatly amused at his schoolboy silliness, the vignette has at its core an anguish that must at one time have been all too real. For what it reveals of Stoddard's inner life, it deserves to be quoted at length:
Once there was a fellow at school who caught my eye and held it. He seemed to me little less than Godlike. I had never before seen such eyes, such curly hair, such a haughty mien in a youth of eighteen or nineteen. He had scorn of everybody and everythingsave only himself.
Me he ignored utterly even while I worshiped silently in his presence and secretly wished that I might die for his sake; for his briefest pleasure I felt that I would joyfully return to dust. Such is the heart of youth when it has been touched by the spirit of romance!
At the close of his first term at school he, one day, wanted a match: we were all in the campus in Holiday attire; all in high spirits and most of the fellows were at his feet. I worship silently and apartas was my wont.
O, Blessed Day! It chanced that there wasn't a match in the crowd. But I was not in the crowd; I was never in the crowd; I had a match. Having become desperate in his fruitless search for a match he, at the last moment, discovered me. I thought I heard a voice from heaven crying for a match. Kismet! My hour had come! He asked me in the doubtfullest way if I had a match and I produced one. It was the proudest moment of my life. The dews of joy were damp upon my brow; my heart turned over with delight. I wished I were a match that he might strike my head against something and consume me at the tip of his cigarette.

 

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He condescended to take my trembling match and turned away without uttering one syllable of thanks. Had I been a paper matchbox he could not have treated me with less [sic] indifference.
My admiration of his haughtiness was boundless. I felt that I had not lived in vain. The one word, the one moment had attoned [sic] for the draining of a cup of bitterness that was forever brimming over.
Although it seems quite likely that in reality the episode had ended here, in embellishing the tale for Howells, Stoddard added an improbable plot reversal and an obscure moral:
A second term was drawing to a close. I was still unnoticed; yet all this time I would have dragged myself at the