II

It was presently to come back to me, however, that there were other

sorts, too—so many sorts, in fact, for the ancient contemplative person,

that selection and omission, in face of them, become almost a pain, and

the sacrifice of even the least of these immediate sequences of

impression in its freshness a lively regret. But without much

foreshortening is no representation, and I was promptly to become

conscious, at all events, of quite a different part of the picture, and

of personal perceptions, to match it, of a different order. I woke up,

by a quick transition, in the New Hampshire mountains, in the deep

valleys and the wide woodlands, on the forest-fringed slopes, the

far-seeing crests of the high places, and by the side of the liberal

streams and the lonely lakes; things full, at first, of the sweetness of

belated recognition, that of the sense of some bedimmed summer of the

distant prime flushing back into life and asking to give again as much

as possible of what it had given before—all in spite, too, of much

unacquaintedness, of the newness, to my eyes, through the mild September

glow, of the particular rich region. I call it rich without compunction,

despite its several poverties, caring little that half the charm, or

half the response to it, may have been shamelessly “subjective”; since

that but slightly shifts the ground of the beauty of the impression.

When you wander about in Arcadia you ask as few questions as possible.

That _is_ Arcadia in fact, and questions drop, or at least get

themselves deferred and shiftlessly shirked; in conformity with which

truth the New England hills and woods—since they were not all, for the

weeks to come, of mere New Hampshire—the mild September glow and even

the clear October blaze were things to play on the chords of memory and

association, to say nothing of those of surprise, with an admirable art

of their own. The tune may have dropped at last, but it succeeded for a

month in being strangely sweet, and in producing, quite with intensity,

the fine illusion. Here, moreover, was “interest” of the sort that could

come easily, and therefore not of the sort—quite the contrary—that

involved a consideration of the millions spent; a fact none the fainter,

into the bargain, for having its curious, unexpected, inscrutable side.

Why was the whole connotation so _delicately_ Arcadian, like that of the

Arcadia of an old tapestry, an old legend, an old love-story in fifteen

volumes, one of those of Mademoiselle de Scudéri? Why, in default of

other elements of the higher finish, did all the woodwalks and nestled

nooks and shallow, carpeted dells, why did most of the larger views

themselves, the outlooks to purple crag and blue horizon, insist on

referring themselves to the idyllic _type_ in its purity?—as if the

higher finish, even at the hand of nature, were in some sort a

perversion, and hillsides and rocky eminences and wild orchards, in

short any common sequestered spot, could strike one as the more

exquisitely and ideally Sicilian, Theocritan, poetic, romantic,

academic, from their not bearing the burden of too much history. The

history was there in its degree, and one came upon it, on sunny

afternoons, in the form of the classic abandoned farm of the rude

forefather who had lost patience with his fate. These scenes of old,

hard New England effort, defeated by the soil and the climate and

reclaimed by nature and time—the crumbled, lonely chimney-stack, the

overgrown threshold, the dried-up well, the cart-track vague and

lost—these seemed the only notes to interfere, in their meagreness, with

the queer _other_, the larger, eloquence that one kept reading into the

picture. Even the wild legend, immediately local, of the Indian who,

having, a hundred years ago, murdered a husbandman, was pursued, by

roused avengers, to the topmost peak of Chocorua Mountain, and thence,

to escape, took his leap into the abyss—even so sharp an echo of a

definite far-off past, enriching the effect of an admirable silvered

summit (for Chocorua Mountain carries its grey head quite with the

grandest air), spent itself in the mere idleness of the undiscriminated,

tangled actual. There was one thinkable reason, of course, for

everything, which hung there as a possible answer to any question,

should any question insist. Did one by chance exaggerate, did one

rhapsodize amiss, and was the apparent superior charm of the whole thing

mainly but an accident of one’s own situation, the state of having

happened to be deprived to excess—that is for too long—of naturalism in

_quantity_? Here it was in such quantity as one hadn’t for years had to

deal with; and that might by itself be a luxury corrupting the judgment.

It was absurd, perhaps, to have one’s head so easily turned; but there

was perfect convenience, at least, in the way the parts of the

impression fell together and took a particular light. This light, from

whatever source proceeding, cast an irresistible spell, bathed the

picture in the confessed resignation of early autumn, the charming

sadness that resigned itself with a silent smile. I say “silent” because

the voice of the air had dropped as forever, dropped to a stillness

exquisite, day by day, for a pilgrim from a land of stertorous

breathing, one of the windiest corners of the world; the leaves of the

forest turned, one by one, to crimson and to gold, but never broke off:

all to the enhancement of this strange conscious hush of the landscape,

which kept one in presence as of a world created, a stage set, a sort of

ample capacity constituted, for—well, for things that wouldn’t, after

all, happen: more the pity for them, and for me and for you. This view

of so many of the high places of the hills and deep places of the woods,

the lost trails and wasted bowers, the vague, empty, rock-roughened

pastures, the lonely intervals where the afternoon lingered and the

hidden ponds over which the season itself seemed to bend as a young

bedizened, a slightly melodramatic mother, before taking some guilty

flight, hangs over the crib of her sleeping child—these things put you,

so far as you were preoccupied with the human history of places, into a

mood in which appreciation became a positive wantonness and the sense of

quality, plucking up unexpectedly a spirit, fairly threatened to take

the game into its hands. You discovered, when once it was stirred, an

elegance in the commonest objects, and a mystery even in accidents that

really represented, perhaps, mere plainness unashamed. Why otherwise,

for instance, the inveterate charm of the silver-grey rock cropping

through thinly-grassed acres with a placed and “composed” felicity that

suggested the furniture of a drawing-room? The great boulders in the

woods, the pulpit-stones, the couchant and rampant beasts, the isolated

cliffs and lichened cathedrals, had all, seen, as one passed, through

their drizzle of forest light, a special New Hampshire beauty; but I

never tired of finding myself of a sudden in some lonely confined place,

that was yet at the same time both wide and bright, where I could

recognize, after the fashion of the old New Hampshire sociability, every

facility for spending the day. There was the oddity—the place was

furnished by its own good taste; its bosky ring shut it in, the two or

three gaps of the old forgotten enclosure made symmetrical doors, the

sweet old stones had the surface of grey velvet, and the scattered wild

apples were like figures in the carpet.

It might be an ado about trifles—and half the poetry, roundabout, the

poetry in solution in the air, was doubtless but the alertness of the

touch of autumn, the imprisoned painter, the Bohemian with a rusty

jacket, who had already broken out with palette and brush; yet the way

the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there,

for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet,

recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a

fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before

she goes. One speaks, at the same time, of the orchards; but there are

properly no orchards where half the countryside shows, all September,

the easiest, most familiar sacrifice to Pomona. The apple-tree, in New

England, plays the part of the olive in Italy, charges itself with the

effect of detail, for the most part otherwise too scantly produced, and,

engaged in this charming care, becomes infinitely decorative and

delicate. What it must do for the too under-dressed land in May and June

is easily supposable; but its office in the early autumn is to scatter

coral and gold. The apples are everywhere and every interval, every old

clearing, an orchard; they have “run down” from neglect and shrunken

from cheapness—you pick them up from under your feet but to bite into

them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but as you catch their young

brightness in the blue air, where they suggest strings of

strange-coloured pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you note their

manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gaiety, they seem to ask to be

praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe. The question

of the encircled waters too, larger and smaller—that again was perhaps

an ado about trifles; but you can’t, in such conditions, and especially

at first, resist the appeal of their extraordinarily mild faces and

wooded brims, with the various choice spots where the great straight

pines, interspaced beside them, and yielding to small strands as finely

curved as the eyebrows of beauty, make the sacred grove and the American

classic temple, the temple for the worship of the evening sky, the cult

of the Indian canoe, of Fenimore Cooper, of W. C. Bryant, of the

immortalizable water-fowl. They look too much alike, the lakes and the

ponds, and this is, indeed, all over the world, too much a reproach to

lakes and ponds—to all save the pick of the family, say, like George and

Champlain; the American idea, moreover, is too inveterately that woods

shall grow thick to the water. Yet there is no feature of grace the

landscape could so ill spare—let alone one’s not knowing what other,

what baser, promiscuity mightn’t oppress the banks if that of the free

overgrowth didn’t. Each surface of this sort is a breathing-space in the

large monotony; the rich recurrence of water gives a polish to the

manner itself, so to speak, of nature; thanks to which, in any case, the

memory of a characteristic perfection attaches, I find, to certain hours

of declining day spent, in a shallow cove, on a fallen log, by the

scarce-heard plash of the largest liquid expanse under Chocorua; a

situation interfused with every properest item of sunset and evening

star, of darkening circle of forest, of boat that, across the water, put

noiselessly out—of analogy, in short, with every typical triumph of the

American landscape “school,” now as rococo as so many squares of

ingenious wool-work, but the remembered delight of our childhood. On

_terra firma_, in New England, too often dusty or scrubby, the guarantee

is small that some object at variance, cruelly at variance, with the

glamour of the landscape school may not “put out.” But that boat across

the water is safe, is sustaining as far as it goes; it puts out from the

cove of romance, from the inlet of poetry, and glides straight over,

with muffled oar, to the—well, to the right place.

The consciousness of quantity, rather, as opposed to quality, to which I

just alluded, quantity inordinate, quantity duly impressive and duly, if

need be, overwhelming, had been the form of vigilance posting itself at

the window—whence, incontestably, after a little, yielding to the so

marked agitation of its sister-sense, it stepped back into the shadow of

the room. If memory, at any rate, with its message so far to carry, had

played one a trick, imagination, or some finer faculty still, could play

another to match it. If it had settled to a convenience of the mind that

“New England scenery” was hard and dry and thin, scrubby and meagre and

“plain,” here was that comfort routed by every plea of fancy—though of a

fancy indeed perhaps open to the charge of the morbid—and by every

refinement of appeal. The oddest thing in the world would delightfully

have happened—and happened just there—in case one had really found the

right word for the anomaly of one’s surprise. What would the right word

be but that nature, in these lights, was no single one of the horrid

things I have named, but was, instead of them all, that quite other

happy and charming thing, _feminine_?—feminine from head to foot, in

expression, tone and touch, mistress throughout of the feminine attitude

and effect. That had by no means the figure recalled from far back, but

when once it had fully glimmered out it fitted to perfection, it became

the case like a crown of flowers and provided completely for one’s

relation to the subject.

“Oh Italy, thou woman-land!” breaks out Browning, more than once,

straight at _that_ mark, and with a force of example that, for this

other collocation, served much more as an incitement than as a warning.

Reminded vividly of the identities of latitude and living so much in the

same relation to the sun, you never really in New Hampshire—nor in

Massachusetts, I was soon able to observe—look out at certain hours for

the violet spur of an Apennine or venture to speak, in your admiration,

of Tuscan or Umbrian forms, without feeling that the ground has quite

gratefully borne you. The matter, however, the matter of the insidious

grace, is not at all only a question of amusing coincidence; something

intrinsically lovable everywhere lurks—which most comes out indeed, no

doubt, under the consummate art of autumn. How shall one lightly enough

express it, how describe it or to what compare it?—since, unmistakably,

after all, the numbered items, the few flagrant facts, fail perfectly to

account for it. It is like some diffused, some slightly confounding,

sweetness of voice, charm of tone and accent, on the part of some

enormous family of rugged, of almost ragged, rustics—a tribe of sons and

daughters too numerous to be counted and homogeneous perhaps to

monotony. There was a voice in the air, from week to week, a spiritual

voice: “Oh, the _land’s_ all right!”—it took on fairly a fondness of

emphasis, it rebounded from other aspects, at times, with such a

tenderness. Thus it sounded, the blessed note, under many promptings,

but always in the same form and to the effect that the poor dear land

itself—if that was all that was the matter—would beautifully “do.” It

seemed to plead, the pathetic presence, to be liked, to be loved, to be

stayed with, lived with, handled with some kindness, shown even some

courtesy of admiration. What was that but the feminine attitude?—not the

actual, current, impeachable, but the old ideal and classic; the air of

meeting you everywhere, standing in wait everywhere, yet always without

conscious defiance, only in mild submission to your doing what you would

with it. The mildness was of the very essence, the essence of all the

forms and lines, all the postures and surfaces, all the slimness and

thinness and elegance, all the consent, on the part of trees and rocks

and streams, even of vague happy valleys and fine undistinguished hills,

to be viewed, to their humiliation, in the mass, instead of being viewed

in the piece.

It is perhaps absurd to have to hasten to add that doing what you would

with it, in these irresponsible senses, simply left out of account, for

the country in general, the proved, the notorious fact that nothing

useful, nothing profitable, nothing directly economic, _could_ be done

at all. Written over the great New Hampshire region at least, and

stamped, in particular, in the shadow of the admirable high-perched cone

of Chocorua, which rears itself, all granite, over a huge interposing

shoulder, quite with the _allure_ of a minor Matterhorn—everywhere

legible was the hard little historic record of agricultural failure and

defeat. It had to pass for the historic background, that traceable truth

that a stout human experiment had been tried, had broken down. One was

in presence, everywhere, of the refusal to consent to history, and of

the consciousness, on the part of every site, that this precious

compound is in no small degree being insolently made, on the other side

of the continent, at the expense of such sites. The touching appeal of

nature, as I have called it therefore, the “Do something kind for me,”

is not so much a “Live upon me and thrive by me” as a “Live _with_ me,

somehow, and let us make out together what we may do for each

other—something that is not merely estimable in more or less greasy

greenbacks. See how ‘sympathetic’ I am,” the still voice seemed

everywhere to proceed, “and how I am therefore better than my fate; see

how I lend myself to poetry and sociability—positively to æsthetic use:

give me that consolation.” The appeal was thus not only from the rude

absence of the company that had gone, and the still ruder presence of

the company left, the scattered families, of poor spirit and loose

habits, who had feared the risk of change; it was to a listening ear,

directly—that of the “summer people,” to whom, in general, one soon

began to figure so much of the country, in New England, as looking for

its future; with the consequence in fact that, from place to place, the

summer people themselves almost promised to glow with a reflected light.

It was a clue, at any rate, in the maze of contemplation, for this

vision of the relation so established, the disinherited, the

impracticable land throwing itself, as for a finer argument, on the

non-rural, the intensely urban class, and the class in question throwing

itself upon the land for reasons of its own. What would come of such an

_entente_, on the great scale, for both parties?—that special wonderment

was to strike me everywhere as in order. How populations with money to

spare may extract a vulgar joy from “show” sections of the earth, like

Switzerland and Scotland, we have seen abundantly proved, so that this

particular lesson has little more to teach us; in America, however,

evidently, the difference in the conditions, and above all in the scale

of demonstration, is apt to make lessons new and larger.

Once the whole question had ranged itself under that head—what would the

“summer people,” as a highly comprehensive term, do with the aspects

(perhaps as a highly comprehensive term also), and what would the

aspects do with the summer people?—it became conveniently portable and

recurrently interesting. Perhaps one of the best reasons I can give for

this last side of it was that it kept again and again presenting the

idea of that responsibility for _appearances_ which, in such an

association as loomed thus large, was certain to have to fix itself

somewhere. What was one to say of appearances as they actually

prevailed—from the moment, I mean, they were not of the charming order

that nature herself could care for? The appearances of man, the

appearances of woman, and of their conjoined life, the general latent

spectacle of their arrangements, appurtenances, manners, devices, opened

up a different chapter, the leaves of which one could but musingly turn.

A better expression of the effect of most of this imagery on the mind

should really be sought, I think, in its seeming, through its sad

consistency, a mere complete negation of appearances—using the term in

the sense of any familiar and customary “care for looks.” Even the

recognition that, the scattered summer people apart, the thin population

was poor and bare had its bewilderment, on which I shall presently

touch; but the poverty and the bareness were, as we seemed to measure

them, a straight admonition of all we had, from far back, so easily and

comfortably taken for granted, in the rural picture, on the other side

of the world. There was a particular thing that, more than any other,

had been pulled out of the view and that left the whole show, humanly

and socially, a collapse. This particular thing was exactly the fact of

the _importance_, the significance, imputable, in a degree, to

appearances. In the region in which these observations first languished

into life that importance simply didn’t exist at all, and its absence

was everywhere forlornly, almost tragically, attested. There was the

little white wooden village, of course, with its houses in queer

alignment and its rudely-emphasized meeting-house, in particular, very

nearly as unconsecrated as the store or the town pump; but this

represented, throughout, the highest tribute to the amenities. A sordid

ugliness and shabbiness hung, inveterately, about the wayside “farms,”

and all their appurtenances and incidents—above all, about their

inmates; when the idea of appearance was anywhere expressed (and its

highest flights were but in the matter of fresh paint or a swept

dooryard), a summer person was usually the author of the boon. The

teams, the carts, the conveyances in their kinds, the sallow, saturnine

natives in charge of them, the enclosures, the fences, the gates, the

wayside “bits,” of whatever sort, so far as these were referable to

human attention or human neglect, kept telling the tale of the

difference made, in a land of long winters, by the suppression of the

two great factors of the familiar English landscape, the squire and the

parson.

What the squire and the parson do, between them, for appearances (which

is what I am talking of) in scenes, predominantly Anglo-Saxon, subject

to their sway, is brought home, as in an ineffable glow, when the

elements are reduced to “composing,” in the still larger Anglo-Saxon

light, without them. Here was no church, to begin with; and the shrill

effect of the New England meeting-house, in general, so merely

continuous and congruous, as to type and tone, with the common objects

about it, the single straight breath with which it seems to blow the

ground clear of the seated solidity of religion, is an impression that

responds to the renewed sight of one of these structures as promptly as

the sharp ring to the pressure of the electric button. One lives among

English ancientries, for instance, as in a world toward the furnishing

of which religion has done a large part. And here, immediately, was a

room vast and vacant, with a vacancy especially reducible, for most of

the senses, to the fact of that elimination. Perpetually, inevitably,

moreover, as the restless analyst wandered, the eliminated thing _par

excellence_ was the thing most absent to sight—and for which, oh! a

thousand times, the small substitutes, the mere multiplication of the

signs of theological enterprise, in the tradition and on the scale of

commercial and industrial enterprise, had no attenuation worth

mentioning. The case, in the New Hampshire hills at least, was quite the

same for the pervasive Patron, whose absence made such a hole. We went

on counting up all the blessings we had, too unthankfully, elsewhere

owed to him; we lost ourselves in the intensity of the truth that to

compare a simplified social order with a social order in which feudalism

had once struck deep was the right way to measure the penetration of

feudalism. If there was no point here at which they had perceptibly

begun, there was on the other side of the world no point at which they

had perceptibly ceased. One’s philosophy, one’s logic might perhaps be

muddled, but one clung to them for the convenience of their explanation

of so much of the ugliness. The ugliness—one pounced, indeed, on this as

on a talisman for the future—was the so complete abolition of _forms_;

if, with so little reference to their past, present or future

possibility, they could be said to have been even so much honoured as to

be abolished.

The pounce at any rate was, for a guiding light, effectual; the guiding

light worked to the degree of seeming at times positively to save the

restless analyst from madness. He could make the absence of forms

responsible, and he could thus react without bitterness—react absolutely

with pity; he could judge without cruelty and condemn without despair;

he could think of the case as perfectly definite and say to himself

that, could forms only _be_, as a recognized accessory to manners,

introduced and developed, the ugliness might begin scarcely to know

itself. He could play with the fancy that the people might at last grow

fairly to like them—far better, at any rate, than the class in question

may in its actual ignorance suppose: the necessity would be to give it,

on an adequate scale and in some lucid way, a taste of the revelation.

What “form,” meanwhile, _could_ there be in the almost sophisticated

dinginess of the present destitution? One thoughtfully asked that,

though at the cost of being occasionally pulled up by odd glimpses of

the underlying existence of a standard. There was the wage-standard, to

begin with; the well-nigh awestruck view of the high rate of

remuneration open to the most abysmally formless of “hired” men, indeed

to field or house labour, expert or inexpert, on the part of either sex,

in any connection: the ascertainment of which was one of the

“bewilderments” I just now spoke of, one of the failures of consistency

in the grey revelation. After this there was the standard, ah! the very

high standard, of sensibility and propriety, so far as tribute on this

ground was not owed by the parties themselves, but owed _to_ them, not

to be rendered, but to be received, and with a stiff, a warningly stiff,

account kept of it. Didn’t it appear at moments a theme for endless

study, this queer range of the finer irritability in the breasts of

those whose fastidiousness was compatible with the violation of almost

every grace in life _but_ that one? “Are you the woman of the house?” a

rustic cynically squalid, and who makes it a condition of _any_

intercourse that he be received at the front door of the house, not at

the back, asks of a _maîtresse de maison_, a summer person trained to

resignation, as preliminary to a message brought, as he then mentions,

from the “washerlady.” These are the phenomena, of course, that prompt

the woman of the house, and perhaps still more the man, to throw

herself, as I say, on the land, for what it may give her of balm and

beauty—a character to which, as I also say, the land may affect these

unfortunates as so consciously and tenderly playing up. The lesson had

perhaps to be taught; if the Patron is at every point so out of the

picture, the end is none the less not yet of the demonstration, on the

part of the figures peopling it, that they are not to be patronized.

Once to see this, however, was again to focus the possible evolution of

manners, the latent drama to come: the æsthetic enrichment of the summer

people, so far as they should be capable or worthy of it, by contact

with the consoling background, so full of charming secrets, and the

forces thus conjoined for the production and the imposition of forms.

Thrown back again almost altogether, as by the Jersey shore, on the

excitement of the speculative, one could extend unlimitedly—by which I

mean one could apply to a thousand phases of the waiting spectacle—the

idea of the possible drama. So everything worked round, afresh, to the

promise of the large interest.