The following pages duly explain themselves, I judge, as to the Author’s
point of view and his relation to his subject; but I prefix this word on
the chance of any suspected or perceived failure of such references. My
visit to America had been the first possible to me for nearly a quarter
of a century, and I had before my last previous one, brief and distant
to memory, spent other years in continuous absence; so that I was to
return with much of the freshness of eye, outward and inward, which,
with the further contribution of a state of desire, is commonly held a
precious agent of perception. I felt no doubt, I confess, of my great
advantage on that score; since if I had had time to become almost as
“fresh” as an inquiring stranger, I had not on the other hand had enough
to cease to be, or at least to feel, as acute as an initiated native. I
made no scruple of my conviction that I should understand and should
care better and more than the most earnest of visitors, and yet that I
should vibrate with more curiosity—on the extent of ground, that is, on
which I might aspire to intimate intelligence at all—than the pilgrim
with the longest list of questions, the sharpest appetite for
explanations and the largest exposure to mistakes.
I felt myself then, all serenely, not exposed to grave mistakes—though
there were also doubtless explanations which would find me, and quite as
contentedly, impenetrable. I would take my stand on my gathered
impressions, since it was all for them, for them only, that I returned;
I would in fact go to the stake for them—which is a sign of the value
that I both in particular and in general attach to them and that I have
endeavoured to preserve for them in this transcription. My cultivated
sense of aspects and prospects affected me absolutely as an enrichment
of my subject, and I was prepared to abide by the law of that sense—the
appearance that it would react promptly in some presences only to remain
imperturbably inert in others. There would be a thousand matters—matters
already the theme of prodigious reports and statistics—as to which I
should have no sense whatever, and as to information about which my
record would accordingly stand naked and unashamed. It should
unfailingly be proved against me that my opportunity had found me
incapable of information, incapable alike of receiving and of imparting
it; for then, and then only, would it be clearly enough attested that I
_had_ cared and understood.
There are features of the human scene, there are properties of the
social air, that the newspapers, reports, surveys and blue-books would
seem to confess themselves powerless to “handle,” and that yet
represented to me a greater array of items, a heavier expression of
character, than my own pair of scales would ever weigh, keep them as
clear for it as I might. I became aware soon enough, on the spot, that
these elements of the human subject, the results of these attempted
appreciations of life itself, would prove much too numerous even for a
capacity all given to them for some ten months; but at least therefore,
artistically concerned as I had been all my days with the human subject,
with the appreciation of life itself, and with the consequent question
of literary representation, I should not find such matters scant or
simple. I was not in fact to do so, and they but led me on and on. How
far this might have been my several chapters show; and yet even here I
fall short. I shall have to take a few others for the rest of my story.