Chapter XIV: Florida 422 (15)

It was in succession to this, doubtless, that he found himself consulting the obscure oracle of the old State House or Capitol, seat of the Confederate legislature, strange intellectual centre of the general enterprise. I scarce know in what manner I had expected it to regale either my outward or my inward sense; one had vaguely heard that it was “fine” and at the height, or in the key, of the old Virginian dignity. The approach to it had been adorned, from far back, moreover, as one remembered, with Crawford’s celebrated monument to Washington attended by famous Virginians—which work indeed, I promptly perceived, answered to its reputation, with a high elegance that was quite of the mid-century, and yet that, indescribably archaic, made the mid-century seem remote and quaint and queer, as disconnected from us as the prolific age of Cyprus or of Crete. It is positive that of the “old” American sculpture, about the Union, a rich study might be made. What shall I say of this spot at large, and of the objects it presented to view, if not that here, where all the elements of life had been most in fiery fusion, everything was somehow almost abjectly frigid and thin? The small shapeless Square, ancient acropolitan seat, ill placed on its eminence, showed, I recollect, but a single figure in motion—that of a gentleman to whom I presently put a question and who explained to me that the Capitol, masked all round in dense scaffolding, though without a labourer visible, had been “very bad,” a mere breakable shell, and was now, from top to bottom, in course of reconstruction. The shell, one could see, was empty and work suspended; and I had never, truly, it seemed to me, seen a human institution so coldly and logically brought low as this memorial mass, anything rewritten so mercilessly small as this poor passage of a great historic text. The effect was as of a page of some dishonoured author—printed “on grey paper with blunt type,” and when I had learned from my informant that a fairly ample white house, a pleasant, honest structure in the taste of sixty or eighty years since, had been Jefferson Davis’s official residence during part of the War, every source of interest had been invoked and had in its measure responded. The impression obeys, I repeat, a rigorous law—it irremediably fades, it melts away; but was there not, further, as a feature of the scene, one of those decent and dumb American churches which are so strangely possessed of the secret of minimizing, to the casual eye, the general pretension of churches?

The extent to which the American air affects one as a non-conductor of such pretensions is, in the presence of these heterogeneous objects, a constant lively lesson. Looking for the most part no more established or seated than a stopped omnibus, they are reduced to the inveterate bourgeois level (that of private, accommodated pretensions merely) and fatally despoiled of the fine old ecclesiastical arrogance. This, the richest attribute they elsewhere enjoy, keeps clear of them only to betray them, so that they remind one everywhere of organisms trying to breathe in the void, or of those creatures of the deep sea who change colour and shrink, as one has heard, when astray in fresh water. The fresh water makes them indeed pullulate, but to the loss of “importance,” and nothing could more have fallen in with that generalization, for the restless analyst, than the very moral of the matter, as he judged, lately put before him at the national capital. Washington already bristles, for the considering eye, with national affirmations—big builded forms of confidence and energy; but when you have embraced them all, with the implication of all the others still to come, you will find yourself wondering what it is you so oddly miss. Numberless things are represented, and one interest after the other counts itself in; the great Congressional Library crowns the hill beside the Capitol, the Departments and Institutes cover their acres and square their shoulders, the obelisk to the memory of Washington climbs still higher; but something is absent more even than these masses are present—till it at last occurs to you that the existence of a religious faith on the part of the people is not even remotely suggested. Not a Federal dome, not a spire nor a cornice pretends to any such symbolism, and though your attention is thus concerned with a mere negative, the negative presently becomes its sharp obsession. You reach out perhaps in vain for something to which you may familiarly compare your unsatisfied sense. You liken it perhaps not so much to a meal made savourless by the failure of some usual, some central dish, as to a picture, nominally finished, say, where the canvas shows, in the very middle, with all originality, a fine blank space.

For it is most, doubtless, the æsthetic appetite in you—long richly fed elsewhere—that goes unassuaged; it is your sense of the comprehensive picture _as_ a comprehensive picture that winces, for recognition of loss, like a touched nerve. What is the picture, collectively seen, you ask, but the portrait, more or less elaborated, of a multitudinous People, of a social and political order?—so that the effect is, for all the world, as if, with the body and the limbs, the hands and feet and coat and trousers, all the accessories of the figure showily painted, the neat white oval of the face itself were innocent of the brush. You marvel at the personage, you admire even the painting—which you are largely reduced, however, to admiring in the hands and the boots, in the texture of accompanying table-cloth, inkstand, newspaper (introduced with a careless grace) and other paraphernalia. You wonder how he would look if the face _had_ been done; though you have compensation, meanwhile, I must certainly add, in your consciousness of assisting, as you apprehensively stand there, at something new under the sun. The size of the gap, the intensity of the omission, in the Washington prospect, where so much else is representative, dots with the last sharpness the distinct _i_, as it were, of one of the promptest generalizations of the repatriated absentee. The field of American life is as bare of the Church as a billiard-table of a centre-piece; a truth that the myriad little structures “attended” on Sundays and on the “off” evenings of their “sociables” proclaim as with the audible sound of the roaring of a million mice. Or that analogy reinsists—of the difference between the deep sea of the older sphere of spiritual passion and the shallow tide in which the inhabiting particles float perforce near the surface. And however one indicates one’s impression of the clearance, the clearance itself, in its completeness, with the innumerable odd connected circumstances that bring it home, represents, in the history of manners and morals, a deviation in the mere measurement of which hereafter may well reside a certain critical thrill. I say hereafter because it is a question of one of those many measurements that would as yet, in the United States, be premature. Of all the solemn conclusions one feels as “barred,” the list is quite headed, in the States, I think, by this particular abeyance of judgment. When an ancient treasure of precious vessels, overscored with glowing gems and wrought, artistically, into wondrous shapes, has, by a prodigious process, been converted, through a vast community, into the small change, the simple circulating medium of dollars and “nickels,” we can only say that the consequent permeation will be of values of a new order. Of _what_ order we must wait to see.

All of which remarks would constitute a long excursion, I admit, from the sacred edifice by the Richmond street, were it not for that saving law, the enrichment of each hour on the American scene, that wings almost any observed object with a power to suggest, a possible social _portée_, soaring superior to its plain face. And I seem to recover the sense of a pretext for incurable mooning, then and there, in my introduction, but little delayed, to the next in the scant group of local lions, the usual place of worship, as I understood, of the Confederate leader, from his proper pew in which Jefferson Davis was called, on that fine Sunday morning of the spring-time of 1865, by the news of Lee’s surrender. The news had been big, but the place of worship was small, and, linger in it as one would, fraternize as one would with the mild old Confederate soldier, survivor of the epic age, who made, by his account, so lean a living of his office of sexton, one could but moodily resent, again, its trivialization of history—a process one scarce knows how to name—its inaccessibility to legend. Perhaps, after all, it represented, in its comfortable “denominational” commonness, the right scene of concentration for the promoters of so barren a polity, that idea of the perpetual Southern quarantine; but no leaders of a great movement, a movement acclaimed by a whole nation and paid for with every sacrifice, ever took such pains, alas, to make themselves not interesting. It was positively as if legend would have nothing to say to them; as if, on the spot there, I had seen it turn its back on them and walk out of the place. This is the horse, ever, that one may take to the water, but that drinks not against his will. That was at least what it came back to—for the musing moralist: if the question is of legend we dig for it in the deposit of history, but the deposit must be thick to have given it a cover and let it accumulate. It was on the battlefields and in all the blood-drenched radius that it would be thick; here, decidedly, in the streets of melancholy Richmond, it was thin. Just so, since it was the planners and plotters who had bidden unsuccessfully for our interest, it was for the sacrificed multitude, the unsophisticated, irresponsible agents, the obscure and the eminent alike, that distinction might be pleaded. _They_ were buried, if one would, in the “deposit”—where the restless analyst might scratch, all tenderly, to find them.

He had fortunately at this moment his impression as to where, under such an impulse, he had best look; and he turned his steps, as with an appetite for some savour in his repast still too much withheld to that Museum of the relics of the Confederacy installed some years since in the eventual White House of Richmond, the “executive mansion” of the latter half of the War. Here, positively, the spirit descended—and yet all the more directly, it seemed to me, strange to say, by reason of the very nudity and crudity, the historic, the pathetic poverty of the exhibition. It fills the whole large house, each of the leagued States enjoying an allotted space; and one assuredly feels, in passing from room to room, that, up and down the South, no equal area can so offer itself as sacred ground. Tragically, indescribably sanctified, these documentary chambers that contained, so far as I remember, not a single object of beauty, scarce one in fact that was not altogether ugly (so void they were of intrinsic charm), and that spoke only of the absence of means and of taste, of communication and resource. In these rude accents they phrased their interest—which the unappeased visitor, from the moment of his crossing the general threshold, had recognized in fact as intense. He was at his old trick: he had made out, on the spot, in other words, that here was a pale page into which he might read what he liked. He had not exchanged ten words of civility with a little old lady, a person soft-voiced, gracious, mellifluous, perfect for her function, who, seated by her fire in a sort of official ante-room, received him as at the gate of some grandly bankrupt plantation—he had not surrendered to this exquisite contact before he felt himself up to his neck in a delightful, soothing, tepid medium, the social tone of the South that _had_ been. It was but the matter of a step over—he was afloat on other waters, and had remounted the stream of Time. I said just now that nothing in the Museum had beauty; but the little old lady had it, with her thoroughly “sectional” good manners, and that punctuality and felicity, that inimitability, one must again say, of the South in her, in the patriotic unction of her reference to the sorry objects about, which transported me as no enchanted carpet could have done. No little old lady of the North could, for the high tone and the right manner, have touched her, and poor benumbed Richmond might now be as dreary as it liked: with that small observation made my pilgrimage couldn’t be a failure.

The sorry objects about were old Confederate documents, already sallow with time, framed letters, orders, autographs, extracts, tatters of a paper-currency in the last stages of vitiation; together with faded portraits of faded worthies, primitive products of the camera, the crayon, the brush; of all of which she did the honours with a gentle florid reverence that opened wide, for the musing visitor, as he lingered and strolled, the portals, as it were, of a singularly interesting “case.” It was the case of the beautiful, the attaching oddity of the general Southern state of mind, or stage of feeling, in relation to that heritage of woe and of glory of which the mementos surrounded me. These mementos were the sorry objects, and as I pursued them from one ugly room to another—the whole place wearing the air thus, cumulatively, of some dim, dusty collection of specimens, prehistoric, paleolithic, scientific, and making one grope for some verbal rendering of the grey effect—the queer elements at play wrote themselves as large as I could have desired. On every side, I imagine, from Virginia to Texas, the visitor must become aware of them—the visitor, that is, who, by exception, becomes aware of anything: was I not, for instance, presently to recognize them, at their finest, for an almost comic ambiguity, in the passionate flare of the little frontal inscription behind which the Daughters of the Confederacy of the Charleston section nurse the old wrongs and the old wounds? These afflictions are still, thus, admirably ventilated, and what is wonderful, in the air, to-day, is the comfort and cheer of this theory of an undying rancour. Every facility is enjoyed for the publication of it, but as the generation that immediately suffered and paid has almost wholly passed away, the flame-coloured _idea_ has flowered out of the fact, and the interest, the “psychologic” interest, is to see it so disengage itself, as legend, as valuable, enriching, inspiring, romantic legend, and settle down to play its permanent part. Practically, and most conveniently, one feels, the South is reconciled, but theoretically, ideally, and above all for the new generation and the amiable ladies, the ladies amiable like the charming curatrix of the Richmond Museum, it burns with a smothered flame. As we meanwhile look about us there, over a scene as sad, throughout, as some raw spring eventide, we feel how something of the sort must, in all the blankness, respond morally and socially to a want.

The collapse of the old order, the humiliation of defeat, the bereavement and bankruptcy involved, represented, with its obscure miseries and tragedies, the social revolution the most unrecorded and undepicted, in proportion to its magnitude, that ever was; so that this reversion of the starved spirit to the things of the heroic age, the four epic years, is a definite soothing salve—a sentiment which has, moreover, in the South, to cultivate, itself, intellectually, from season to season, the field over which it ranges, and to sow with its own hands such crops as it may harvest. The sorry objects, at Richmond, brought it home—so low the æsthetic level: it was impossible, from room to room, to imagine a community, of equal size, more disinherited of art or of letters. These about one were the only echoes—daubs of portraiture, scrawls of memoranda, old vulgar newspapers, old rude uniforms, old unutterable “mid-Victorian” odds and ends of furniture, all ghosts as of things noted at a country fair. The illiteracy seemed to hover like a queer smell; the social revolution had begotten neither song nor story—only, for literature, two or three biographies of soldiers, written in other countries, and only, for music, the weird chants of the emancipated blacks. Only for art, I was an hour later to add, the monument to General Lee by M. Mercié of Paris; but to that, in its suburban corner, and to the strange eloquence of its isolation, I shall presently come. The moral of the show seemed to me meanwhile the touching inevitability, in such conditions, of what I have called the nursing attitude. “What on earth—nurse of a rich heroic past, nurse of a fierce avenging future, nurse of any connection that would make for any brood of visions about one’s knee—wouldn’t one have to become,” I found myself inwardly exclaiming, “if one had this great melancholy void to garnish and to people!” It was not, under this reflection, the actual innocent flare of the altar of memory that was matter for surprise, but that such altars should strike one, rather, as few and faint. They would have been none too many for countenance and cheer had they blazed on every hilltop.

The Richmond halls, at any rate, appeared, through the chill of the season, scantly trodden, and I met in them no fellow-visitor but a young man of stalwart and ingenuous aspect who struck me so forcibly, after a little, as exhaling a natural piety that, as we happened at last to be rapt in contemplation of the same sad glass case, I took advantage of the occasion to ask him if he were a Southerner. His affirmative was almost eager, and he proved—for all the world like the hero of a famous novel—a gallant and nameless, as well as a very handsome, young Virginian. A farmer by occupation, he had come up on business from the interior to the capital, and, having a part of his morning on his hands, was spending it in this visitation—made, as I gathered, by no means for the first time, but which he still found absorbing. As a son of the new South he presented a lively interest of type—linguistically not least (since where doesn’t the restless analyst grope for light?)—and this interest, the ground of my here recalling him, was promptly to arrive at a climax. He pointed out to me, amid an array of antique regimentals, certain objects identical with relics preserved in his own family and that had belonged to his father, who, enrolled at the earliest age, had fought to the end of the War. The old implements before us bore the number of the Virginia regiment in which this veteran had first seen service, and a question or two showed me how well my friend was acquainted with his parent’s exploits. Enjoying, apparently—for he was intelligent and humorous and highly conversable—the opportunity to talk of such things (they being, as it were, so advantageously present there with a vague Northerner), he related, felicitously, some paternal adventure of which I have forgotten the particulars, but which comprised a desperate evasion of capture, or worse, by the lucky smashing of the skull of a Union soldier. I complimented him on his exact knowledge of these old, unhappy, far-off things, and it was his candid response that was charmingly suggestive. “Oh, I should be ready to do them all over again myself!” And then, smiling serenely, but as if it behoved even the least blatant of Northerners to understand: “That’s the kind of Southerner _I_ am!” I allowed that he was a capital kind of Southerner, and we afterwards walked together to the Public Library, where, on our finally parting, I could but thank him again for being so much the kind of Southerner I had wanted. He was a fine contemporary young American, incapable, so to speak, of hurting a Northern fly—_as_ Northern; but whose consciousness would have been poor and unfurnished without this cool platonic passion. With what other pattern, personal views apart, _could_ he have adorned its bare walls? So I wondered till it came to me that, though he wouldn’t have hurt a Northern fly, there were things (ah, we had touched on some of these!) that, all fair, engaging, smiling, as he stood there, he would have done to a Southern negro.

IV

The Public Libraries in the United States are, like the Universities, a challenge to fond fancy; by which I mean that, if, taken together, they bathe the scene with a strange hard light of their own, the individual institution may often affect the strained pilgrim as a blessedly restful perch. It constitutes, in its degree, wherever met, a more explicit plea for the amenities, or at least a fuller exhibition of them, than the place is otherwise likely to contain; and I remember comparing them, inwardly, after periods of stress and dearth, after long, vacant stretches, to the mast-heads on which spent birds sometimes alight in the expanses of ocean. Their function for the student of manners is by no means exhausted with that attribute—they project, through the use made of them, twenty interesting sidelights; but it was by that especial restorative, that almost romantic character I have just glanced at, that I found myself most solicited. It is to the inordinate value, in the picture, of the non-commercial, non-industrial, non-financial note that they owe their rich relief; being, with the Universities, as one never wearied of noting, charged with the _whole_ expression of that part of the national energy that is not calculable in terms of mere arithmetic. They appeared to express it, at times, I admit, the strange national energy, in terms of mere subjection to the spell of the last “seller”—the new novel, epidemically swift, the ubiquity of which so mirrors the great continental conditions of unity, equality and prosperity; but this view itself was compatible with one’s sense of their practical bid for the effect of distinction. There are a hundred applications of the idea of civilization which, in a given place, outside its Library, would be all wrong, if conceivably attempted, and yet that immediately become right, incur in fact the highest sanction, on passing that threshold. They often more or less fail of course, they sometimes completely fail, to assert themselves even within the precinct; but one at least feels that the precinct attends on them, waits and confessedly yearns for them, consents indeed to be a precinct only on the understanding that they shall not be forever delayed. I wondered, everywhere, under stress of this perception, at the general associations of the word that best describes them and that remains so quaintly and admirably _their_ word even when their supreme right in it is most vulgarly and loudly disputed. They are the _rich_ presences, even in the “rich” places, among the sky-scrapers, the newspaper-offices, the highly-rented pews and the billionaires, and they assert, with a blest imperturbable serenity, not only that everything would be poor without them, but that even with them much is as yet deplorably poor. They in fact so inexorably establish this truth that when they are in question they leave little to choose, I think, round about them, between the seats of wealth and the seats of comparative penury: they are intrinsically so much more interesting than either.

Was it then because Richmond at large, the “old” Richmond, seemed to lie there in its icy shroud with the very dim smile of modesty, the invalid gentleness, of a patient who has been freely bled—was it through profit of this impression that the town Library struck me as flushing with colour and resource, with confidence and temperament? The beauty of the matter is that these _penetralia_, to carry it off as they do, call to their aid, of necessity, no great store of possessions—play their trick, if they must, with the mildest rarities. It sufficed, really, at Richmond, that the solid structure—ample and detached indeed, and keeping, where it stood, the best company the place could afford—should make the affirmation furthest removed from the vain vaunt of the other time, the pretence of a social order founded on delusions and exclusions. Everything else was somehow, however indirectly, the bequest of that sad age and partook more or less of its nature; this thing alone either had nothing to do with it or had to do with it by an appealing, a quite affecting lapse of logic—his half-hour’s appreciation of which had for the restless analyst a positive melancholy sweetness. The place had of course to be in its way a temple to the Confederate cause, but the charm, in the spacious, “handsome,” convenient upper room, among books of value and pictures of innocence, and glass cases of memorabilia more refined than those of the collection I had previously visited, among gentle readers, transported and oblivious, and the still gentler specimens, if I rightly recollect, of the pale sisterhood of the appointed and attendant fair who predominantly, throughout the States, minister to intellectual appetite and perform the intellectual service, directing and controlling them and, as would appear, triumphantly minimizing their scope, feminizing their too possible male grossnesses—the charm, I say, was now in the beautiful openness to the world-relation, in the felt balm, really, of the disprovincializing breath. Once such a summer air as that had begun softly to stir, even the drearier little documents might flutter in it as confederately as they liked. The terrible framed canvases, portraits of soldiers and statesmen, strange images, on the whole, of the sectional great, might seem to shake, faintly, on the wall, as in vague protest at a possible doom. Disinherited of art one could indeed, in presence of such objects, but feel that the old South had been; and might not this thin tremor, on the part of several of those who had had so little care for it, represent some sense of what the more liberal day—so announced there on the spot—might mean for their meagre memories?

This was a question, however, that it naturally concerned me not to put to the old mutilated Confederate soldier who, trafficking in photographs in a corner of the room, rejoiced to proclaim the originals of the portraits. Nothing could have been a happier link than the old Confederate soldier—a link as from past to present and future, I mean, even when individually addicted to “voicing” some of the more questionable claims of the past. What will they be, at all events, the Southern shrines of memory, on the day the last old Confederate soldier shall have been gathered to his fate? Never, thanks to a low horizon, had the human figure endowed with almost anything at all in the nature of a presence or a silhouette such a chance to stand out; never had the pictorial accident, on a vast grey canvas, such a chance to tell. But a different matter from these, at Richmond, in fact the greatest matter of all, is the statue of General Lee, which stands, high aloft and extraordinarily by itself, at the far end of the main residential street—a street with no imputable “character” but that of leading to it. Faithful, experimentally, to a desperate practice, I yet had to renounce here—in the main residential street—the subtle effort to “read” a sense into the senseless appearances about me. This ranked, I scarce know why, as a disappointment: I had presumed with a fond extravagance, I have hinted, that they would give out here and there some unmistakable backward reference, show, from the old overclambered but dispeopled double galleries that I might liken to desecrated cloisters, some wan, faded face of shrunken gentility. Frankly, however, with the best will in the world—really too good a will, which found itself again and again quite grimly snubbed—frankly I could do nothing: everything was there but the material. The disposition had been a tribute to old Virginia, but old Virginia quite unceremoniously washed her hands of me. I have spoken of scratching, scratching for romance, and all tenderly, in the deposit of history; but, plainly, no deposit would show, and I tried to remember, for fairness, that Richmond had been after all but a modern and upstart capital. Indistinct there, below the hill, was the James River, and away in the mists of time “romantic” Jamestown, the creation of a Stuart king. That would have to do, though it also, in its way, was nothing; for meanwhile in truth, just here—here above all and in presence of the monument completing the vista—were other things to remember, provoked reflections that took on their own intensity.

The equestrian statue of the Southern hero, made to order in far-away uninterested Paris, is the work of a master and has an artistic interest—a refinement of style, in fact, under the impression of which we seem to see it, in its situation, as some precious pearl of ocean washed up on a rude bare strand. The very high florid pedestal is of the last French elegance, and the great soldier, sitting his horse with a kind of melancholy nobleness, raises his handsome head as he looks off into desolate space. He does well, we feel, to sit as high as he may, and to appear, in his lone survival, to see as far, and to overlook as many things; for the irony of fate, crowning the picture, is surely stamped in all sharpness on the scene about him. The place is the mere vague centre of two or three crossways, without form and void, with a circle half sketched by three or four groups of small, new, mean houses. It is somehow empty in spite of being ugly, and yet expressive in spite of being empty. “Desolate,” one has called the air; and the effect is, strangely, of some smug “up-to-date” specimen or pattern of desolation. So long as one stands there the high figure, which ends for all the world by suggesting to the admirer a quite conscious, subjective, even a quite sublime, effort to ignore, to sit, as it were, superior and indifferent, enjoys the fact of company and thereby, in a manner, of sympathy—so that the vast association of the futile for the moment drops away from it. But to turn one’s back, one feels, is to leave it again alone, communing, at its altitude, which represents thus some prodigious exemplary perched position, some everlasting high stool of penitence, with the very heaven of futility. So at least I felt brought round again to meeting my first surprise, to solving the riddle of the historic poverty of Richmond. It is the poverty that _is_, exactly, historic: once take it for that and it puts on vividness. The condition attested is the condition—or, as may be, one of the later, fainter, weaker stages—of having worshipped false gods. As I looked back, before leaving it, at Lee’s stranded, bereft image, which time and fortune have so cheated of half the significance, and so, I think, of half the dignity, of great memorials, I recognized something more than the melancholy of a lost cause. The whole infelicity speaks of a cause that could never have been gained.

XIII
CHARLESTON

I

To arrive at Charleston early in the chill morning was to appear to have come quite adventurously far, and yet to be not quite clear about the grounds of the appearance. Did it rest on impressions gathered by the way, on the number of things one had been, since leaving Richmond, aware of?—or was it rather explained by the long succession of hours, the nights and days, consumed as mere tasteless time and without the attending relish of excited interest? What, definitely, could I say I had seen, that my journey should already presume to give itself airs, to seat itself there as a chapter of experience? To consider of this question was really, I think, after a little, to renew one’s appreciation of the mystery and the marvel of experience. That accretion may amount to an enormous sum, often, when the figures on the slate are too few and too paltry to mention. It may count for enrichment without one’s knowing why; and so again, on occasion, with a long column of items, it may count for nothing at all. I reached Charleston ever so much (as it seemed to me) the wiser—the wiser, that is, for the impression of scarce distinguishable things. One made them out, with no great brilliancy, as just Southern; but one would have missed the point, I hasten to add, in failing to see what an application and what a value they derived from that name. One was already beginning—that was the truth—one’s convenient induction as to the nature of the South; and, once that account was opened, how could everything, great or small, positive or negative, not become straightway a contribution to it? The large negatives, in America, have, as well as other matters, their meaning and their truth: so what if my charged consciousness of the long way from Richmond were that of a negative modified by small discomforts?

The discomforts indeed were as nothing, for importance—compared, candidly, with the importance of the rest of the impression. The process, certainly, however one qualified it, had been interrupted by one of the most positive passages of one’s life—which may not figure here, alas, unfortunately, as of the essence of my journey. Vast brackets, applied, as it were, to the very face of nature, enclosed and rounded this felicity; which was no more of the texture of the general Southern stuff than a patch of old brocade would be of the woof of the native homespun. I had, by a deviation, spent a week in a castle of enchantment; but if this modern miracle, of which the mountains of North Carolina happened to be the scene, would have been almost anywhere miraculous, I could at least take it as testifying, all relevantly, all directly, for the presence, as distinguished from the absence, of feature. One felt how, in this light, the extent and the splendour of such a place was but a detail; these things were accidents, without which the great effect, the element that, in the beautiful empty air, made all the difference, would still have prevailed. What was this element but just the affirmation of resources?—made with great emphasis indeed, but in a clear and exemplary way; so that if large wealth represented some of them, an idea, a fine cluster of ideas, a will, a purpose, a patience, an intelligence, a store of knowledge, immediately workable things, represented the others. What it thus came to, on behalf of this vast parenthetic Carolinian demonstration, was that somebody had _cared_ enough—and that happily there had been somebody _to_ care; which struck me at once as marking the difference for the rest of the text. My view of the melancholy of it had been conveniently expressed, from hour to hour, by the fond reflection, through the dreary land, that nobody cared—cared really for _it_ or for anything. That fairly _made_ it dreary, as the crazy timber viaducts, where the train crawled, and sometimes nervously stopped, spanned the deep gorges and the admirable nameless and more or less torrential streams; as the sense of landscape in mere quantity became, once more, the vehicle of effect; and as we pulled up at the small stations where the social scene might be sufficiently penetrated, no doubt, from the car-window.

The social scene, shabby and sordid, and lost in the scale of space as the quotable line is lost in a dull epic or the needed name in an ageing memory, would have been as interesting, probably, as a “short story” in one of the slangy dialects promoted by the illustrated monthly magazines; but it affected me above all, and almost each time, I seem to remember, as speaking of the number of things not cared for. There were some presumably, though not at all discernibly, that _were_—enough to beget the loose human cohesion, the scant consistency of parts and pieces, to which the array by the railway platform testified; but questions came up, plentifully, in respect to the whole picture, and if the mass of interests that were absent was so remarkably large, this would be certainly because such interests were ruled out. The grimness with which, as by a hard inexorable fate, so many things were ruled out, fixed itself most perhaps as the impression of the spectator enjoying from his supreme seat of ease his extraordinary, his awful modern privilege of this detached yet concentrated stare at the misery of subject populations. (Subject, I mean, to this superiority of his bought convenience—subject even as never, of old, to the sway of satraps or proconsuls.) If the subject populations on the road to Charleston, seemingly weak indeed in numbers and in energy, had to be viewed, at all events, so vividly, as not “caring,” one made out quite with eagerness that it was because they naturally couldn’t. The negroes were more numerous than the whites, but still there _were_ whites—of aspect so forlorn and depressed for the most part as to deprecate, though not cynically, only quite tragically, any imputation of value. It was a monstrous thing, doubtless, to sit there in a cushioned and kitchened Pullman and deny to so many groups of one’s fellow-creatures any claim to a “personality”; but this was in truth what one was perpetually doing. The negroes, though superficially and doubtless not at all intendingly sinister, were the lustier race; but how could they care (to insist on my point) for such equivocal embodiments of the right complexion? Yet these were, practically, within the picture the only affirmations of life except themselves; and they obviously, they notoriously, didn’t care for themselves. The moral of all of which was that really, through the more and more southward hours, the wondering stops and the blank renewals, it was only the restless analyst himself who cared—and enough, after all, he finally felt, to make up for other deficiencies.

He cared even when, in the watches of the night, he was roused, under the bewilderment that was rarely to leave him, in America, at any stage of any transaction to which the cars and their sparse stern functionaries formed a party, for unpremeditated transfer to a dark and friendless void where, with what grace he could, he awaited the February dawn. The general American theory is that railway-travel within the confines of the Republic is a matter of majestic simplicity and facility—qualified at the worst by inordinate luxury; I should need therefore an excursion here forbidden me to present another and perhaps a too highly subjective view of it. There are lights in which the majesty, if the question be of that, may strike the freshly repatriated, or in other words the unwarned and inexpert, as quite grimly formidable; lights, however, that must be left to shine for us in some other connection. Let it none the less glimmer out of them for the moment that this implication of the penalty of imperfect expertness is really a clue to the essence of the matter; a core packed, in relation to the whole subject of expertness, with fruitful suggestion. No single admonition, in the States, I think, is more constant and vivid than the general mass of intimation of what may happen to you, in transit, unless you have had special and confirmed practice. You may have been without it in “Europe,” for moving about, and yet not perish; but to be inexpert in the American battle would be, it struck me, much more quickly to go down. Your luggage, in America, is “looked after,” but you are not, save so far as you receive on occasion a sharp order or a sharper shove: by sufferance of which discipline, moreover, you by no means always purchase a prompt delivery of your effects. This indeed is but a translation of the general truth that it is the country in the world in which you must do most things for yourself. It may be “better” for you to have thus to do for yourself the secondary as well as the primary things—but that is not here the question. It begins to strike you, at all events, as soon as you begin to circulate, that your fellow-travellers are for the most part, as to the complex act itself, professional; whereas you may perform it all in “Europe” successfully enough as an amateur. Whether to your glory or your shame you must of course yourself decide; but impunity, nay more, success, may at least attend your empiricism.

If it was not success, however, for the strayed amateur to have found himself stranded in the small hours of morning by the vast vague wayside, he still nevertheless remembers how quickly even this interlude took on an interest. The gloom was scarce penetrable, but a light glimmered here and there, and formless sheds and shanties, dim, discomfortable things, straggled about and lost themselves. Indistinguishable engines hooted, before and behind, where red fires also flared and vanished; indistinguishable too, from each other, while one sought a place of temporary deposit for the impedimenta that attested one’s absurd want of rehearsal, were the cold steel of the rails, the vague composition of the platform, and the kinder, the safer breast of earth. The place was apparently a junction, and it was but a question of waiting—of selecting as the wisest course, among the hoots and the flares, to stand huddled just where one was. That almost completely unservanted state which is so the mark, in general, of the American station, was here the sole distinctness. I had succeeded in artlessly becoming a perfectly isolated traveller, with nobody to warn or comfort me, with nobody even to command. But it was precisely in this situation that I felt again, as by the click of a spring, that my adventure had, in spite of everything, or perhaps indeed just because of everything, a charm all its own—and a charm, moreover, which I was to have from that moment, for any connection, no difficulty whatever in recognizing. It must have broken out more particularly, then and there, in the breath of the night, which was verily now the bland air of the South—mild, benignant, a benediction in itself as it hung about me, and with that blest quality in it of its appearing a medium through which almost any good might come. It was the air of the open gates—not, like that of the North, of the closed; and one inhaled it, in short, on the spot, as the very boon of one’s quest.

A couple of hours later, in the right train, which had at last arrived, I had so settled to submission to this spell that it had wrought for me, I think, all its magic—ministered absolutely to the maximum of suggestion, which became thus, for my introduction to Charleston, the presiding influence. What had happened may doubtless show for no great matter in a bare verbal statement; yet it was to make all the difference, I felt, for impressions (happy and harsh alike) still to come. It couldn’t have happened without one’s beginning to wander; but the lively interest was that the further one wandered the more the suggestion spoke. The sense of the size of the Margin, that was the name of it—the Margin by which the total of American life, huge as it already appears, is still so surrounded as to represent, for the mind’s eye on a general view, but a scant central flotilla huddled as for very fear of the fathomless depth of water, the too formidable future, on the so much vaster lake of the materially possible. Once that torch is at all vividly lighted it flares, for any pair of open eyes, over every scene, and with a presence that helps to explain their owner’s inevitable failure to conclude. He feels it in all his uncertainties, and he never just escapes concluding without the sense that this so fallacious neatness would more or less absurdly have neglected or sacrificed it. Not by any means that the Margin always affects him as standing for the vision of a possible greater good than what he sees in the given case—any more than as standing for a possible greater evil; these differences are submerged in the immense fluidity; they lurk confused, disengaged, in the mere looming mass of the _more_, the more and more to come. And as yet nothing makes definite the probable preponderance of particular forms of the more. The one all positive appearance is of the perpetual increase of everything, the growth of the immeasurable muchness that shall constitute the deep sea into which the seeker for conclusions must cast his nets. The fact that, with so many things present, so few of them are not on the way to become quite other, and possibly altogether different, things, conduces to the peculiar interest and, one often feels tempted to add, to the peculiar irritation of the country.

II

Charleston early in the morning, on my driving from the station, was, it had to be admitted, no very finished picture, but at least, already, it was different—ever so different in aspect and “feeling,” and above all for intimation and suggestion, from any passage of the American scene as yet deciphered; and such became on the spot one’s appetite for local colour that one was fairly grateful to a friend who, by having promised to arrive from the interior of the State the night before, gave one a pretext for seeking him up and down. My quest, for the moment, proved vain; but the intimations and suggestions, while I proceeded from door to door in the sweet blank freshness of the day, of the climate, of the streets, began to swarm at such a rate that I had the sense of gathering my harvest with almost too eager a thrift. It was like standing steeped at the bookstall itself in the volume picked up and opened—though I may add that when I had presently retreated upon the hotel, to which I should in the first instance have addressed myself, it was quite, for a turning of pages, as if I had gone on with the “set.” Thus, before breakfast, I entered upon my brief residence with the right vibrations already determined and unable really to say which of a couple of contacts just enjoyed would have most ministered to them. I had roused, guilelessly, through an easy misunderstanding, two more or less sleeping households; but if I had still missed my clue to my friend I had yet put myself into possession of much of whatever else I had wanted. What had I most wanted, I could easily ask myself, but some small inkling (a mere specimen-scrap would do) of the sense, as I have to keep forever calling my wanton synthesis, of “the South before the War”?—an air-bubble only to be blown, in any case, through some odd fragment of a pipe. My pair of early Charleston impressions were thus a pair of thin prismatic bubbles—which could have floated before me moreover but for a few seconds, collapsing even while I stood there.

Prismatically, none the less, they had shown me the “old” South; in one case by the mere magic of the manner in which a small, scared, starved person of colour, of very light colour, an elderly mulattress in an improvised wrapper, just barely held open for me a door through which I felt I might have looked straight and far back into the past. The past, that of the vanished order, was hanging on there behind her—as much of it as the scant place would accommodate; and she knew this, and that I had so quickly guessed it; which led her, in fine, before I could see more, and that I might not sound the secret of shy misfortune, of faded pretension, to shut the door in my face. So, it seemed to me, had I been confronted, in Italy, under quite such a morning air and light, quite the same touch of a tepid, odorous medium, with the ancient sallow crones who guard the locked portals and the fallen pride of provincial _palazzini_. That was all, in the one instance; there had been no more of it than of the little flare of a struck match—which lasted long enough, however, to light the sedative cigarette, smoked and thrown away, that renews itself forever between the picture-seeker’s lips. The small historic whiff I had momentarily inhaled required the correction, I should add, of the sweeter breath of my commentary. Fresh altogether was the air behind the garden wall that next gave way to my pursuit; there being a thrill, for that matter, in the fact that here at last again, if nowhere else over the land, rose the real walls that alone make real gardens and that admit to the same by real doors. Close such a door behind you, and you are at once _within_—a local relation, a possibility of retreat, in favour of which the custom of the North has so completely ceased to discriminate. One sacrificed the North, with its mere hard conceit of virtuously meeting exhibition—much as if a house were just a metallic machine, number so-and-so in a catalogue—one sacrificed it on the spot to this finer feeling for the enclosure.

That had really sufficed, no doubt, for my second initiation; since I remember withdrawing, after my fruitless question, as on the completion of a mystic process. Initiation into _what_ I perhaps couldn’t have said; only, at the most, into the knowledge that what such Southern walls generally shut in proves exactly what one would have wished. I was to see this loose quantity afterwards in greater profusion; but for the moment the effect was as right as that of privacy for the habit of the siesta. The details escape me, or rather I tenderly withhold them. For the siesta there—what would it have been most like but some deep doze, or call it frankly some final sleep, of the idea of “success”? And how could one better have described the privacy, with the mild street shut off and with the deep gallery, where resignation might sit in the shade or swing without motion in a hammock, shut in, than as some dim dream that things were still as they had been—still pleasant behind garden walls—before the great folly? I was to find myself liking, in the South and in the most monstrous fashion, it appeared, those aspects in which the consequences of the great folly were, for extent and gravity, still traceable; I was cold-bloodedly to prefer them, that is, to the aspects, occasionally to be met, from which the traces had been removed. And this, I need hardly say, from a point of view having so little in common with the vindictive as to be quite directly opposed to it. For what in the world was one candidly to do? It is the manner of the purged and renovated, the disconnected element, anywhere, after great trials, to express itself in forms comparatively vulgar; whereas those parts of the organism that, having been through the fire, still have kept the scorches and scars, resemble for tone, for colour and value, the products of the potter’s oven; when the potter, I mean, or when, in other words, history, has been the right great artist. They at least are not cheerful rawnesses—they have been baked beautiful and hard.