If the interest then was large, this particular interest of the “social”
side of the general scene, more and more likely to emerge, what better
proof could I want again than the differences of angle at which it
continued to present itself? The differences of angle—as obvious most
immediately, for instance, “north of the mountains,” and first of all in
the valley of the Saco—gathered into their train a hundred happy
variations. I kept tight hold of my temporary clue, the plea of the
country’s amiability, as I have called it, its insinuating appeal from
too rigorous a doom; but there was a certain strain in this, from day to
day, and relief was apparent as soon as the conditions changed. They
changed, notably, by the rapid and complete drop of the sordid element
from the picture; it was, for all the world, of a sudden, as if
Appearance, precious principle, had again asserted its rights. That
confidence, clearly, at North Conway, had come to it in the course of
the long years, too many to reckon over, that separated my late from my
early vision—though I recognized as disconcerting, toward the close of
the autumn day, to have to owe this perception, in part, to the great
straddling, bellowing railway, the high, heavy, dominant American train
that so reverses the relation of the parties concerned, suggesting
somehow that the country exists for the “cars,” which overhang it like a
conquering army, and not the cars for the country. This presence had
learned to penetrate the high valleys and had altered, unmistakably, the
old felicity of proportion. The old informal earthy coach-road was a
firm highway, wide and white—and ground to dust, for all its firmness,
by the whirling motor; without which I might have followed it, back and
back a little, into the near, into the far, country of youth—left lying,
however, as the case stood, beyond the crest of a hill. Only the high
rock-walls of the Ledges, the striking sign of the spot, were there;
grey and perpendicular, with their lodged patches of shrub-like forest
growth, and the immense floor, below them, where the Saco spreads and
turns and the elms of the great general meadow stand about like
candelabra (with their arms reversed) interspaced on a green table.
There hung over these things the insistent hush of a September Sunday
morning; nowhere greater than in the tended woods enclosing the
admirable country home that I was able to enjoy as a centre for
contemplation; woods with their dignity maintained by a large and artful
clearance of undergrowth, and repaying this attention, as always, by
something of the semblance of a sacred grove, a place prepared for high
uses, even if for none rarer than high talk. There was a latent
poetry—old echoes, ever so faint, that _would_ come back; it made a
general meaning, lighted the way to the great modern farm, all so
contemporary and exemplary, so replete with beauty of beasts and
convenience of man, with a positive dilettantism of care, but making one
perhaps regret a little the big, dusky, heterogeneous barns, the more
Bohemian bucolics, of the earlier time. I went down into the valley—that
was an impression to woo by stages; I walked beside one of those great
fields of standing Indian corn which make, to the eye, so perfect a note
for the rest of the American rural picture, throwing the conditions back
as far as our past permits, rather than forward, as so many other things
do, into the age to come. The maker of these reflections betook himself
at last, in any case, to an expanse of rock by a large bend of the Saco,
and lingered there under the infinite charm of the place. The rich, full
lapse of the river, the perfect brownness, clear and deep, as of liquid
agate, in its wide swirl, the large indifferent ease in its pace and
motion, as of some great benevolent institution smoothly working; all
this, with the sense of the deepening autumn about, gave I scarce know
what pastoral nobleness to the scene, something raising it out of the
reach of even the most restless of analysts. The analyst in fact could
scarce be restless here; the impression, so strong and so final,
persuaded him perfectly to peace. This, on September Sunday mornings,
was what American beauty _should_ be; it filled to the brim its idea and
its measure—albeit Mount Washington, hazily overhung, happened not to
contribute to the effect. It was the great, gay river, singing as it
went, like some reckless adventurer, goodhumoured for the hour and with
his hands in his pockets, that argued the whole case and carried
everything assentingly before it.
Who, for that matter, shall speak, who shall begin to speak, of the
alacrity with which, in the New England scene (to confine ourselves for
the moment only to that), the eye and the fancy take to the water?—take
to it often for relief and security, the corrective it supplies to the
danger of the common. The case is rare when it is not better than the
other elements of the picture, even if these be at their best; and its
strength is in the fact that the common has, for the most part, to stop
short at its brink; no water being intrinsically less distinguished—save
when it is dirty—than any other. By a fortunate circumstance, moreover,
are not the objects usually afloat on American lakes and rivers, to say
nothing of bays and sounds, almost always white and wonderful,
high-piled, characteristic, fantastic things, begotten of the native
conditions and shining in the native light? Let my question, however,
not embroider too extravagantly my mere sense of driving presently,
though after nightfall, and in the public conveyance, into a village
that gave out, through the dusk, something of the sense of a flourishing
Swiss village of the tourist season, as one recalls old Alpine
associations: the swing of the coach, the cold, high air, the scattered
hotels and their lighted windows, the loitering people who might be
celebrated climbers or celebrated guides, the resonance of the bridge as
one crossed, the gleam of the swift river under the lamps. My village
had no happy name; it was, crudely speaking, but Jackson, N. H., just as
the swift river that, later on, in the morning light, to the immediate
vision, easily surpassed everything else, was only the river of the
Wildcat—a superiority strictly comparative. The note of this superiority
was in any case already there, for the first, for the nocturnal
impression; scarce seen, only heard as yet, it could still give the
gloom a larger lift than any derived from a tour of the piazzas of the
hotels. This tour, undertaken while supper was preparing, in the
interest of a study of manners, left room, all the same, for much
support to the conviction I just expressed, the conviction that, name
for name, the stream had got off better than the village, that streams
_couldn’t_, at the worst, have such cruel names as villages, and that
this too, after all, was an intimation of their relative value. That
inference was, for the actual case, to be highly confirmed; the Wildcat
River, on the autumn morning, in its deep valley and its precipitous
bed, was as headlong and romantic as one could desire; though, indeed, I
am not, in frankness, prepared to say better things of it than of the
great picture, the feature of the place, to a view of which I mounted an
hour or two after breakfast.
Here, at least, where a small and charming country-house had seated
itself very much as the best box, on the most expensive tier, rakes the
prospect for grand opera—here might manners too be happily studied, save
perhaps for their being enjoyed at too short range. Here, verily, were
verandahs of contemplation, but admitting to such images of furnished
peace, within, as could but illustrate a rare personal history. This was
a felicity apart; whereas down in the valley, the night before, the
story told at the lighted windows of the inns was precisely, was above
all, of advantages impartially diffused and shared. That, at any rate,
would seem in each instance the most direct message of the life
displayed to the observer, on the fresher evenings, in the halls and
parlours, the large, clean, bare spaces (almost penally clean and bare),
where plain, respectable families seemed to sit and study in silence,
with a kind of awe indeed, as from a sense of inevitable doom, their
reflected resemblances, from group to group, their baffling identities
of type and tone, their inability to escape from participations and
communities. My figure of the opera-box, for the other, the removed,
case, is justified meanwhile by the memory of the happy vision that was
to make up to me for having missed Mount Washington at Intervale; the
something splendidly scenic in the composition of the “Presidential
range,” hung in the air, across the valley, with its most eminent object
holding exactly the middle of the stage and the grand effect stretching
without a break to either wing. Mount Washington, seen from such a point
of vantage, a kind of noble equality of intercourse, looks admirably,
solidly _seated_, as with the other Presidential peaks standing at his
chair; and the picture is especially sublime far off to the right, with
the grand style of Carter’s Dome, a masterly piece of drawing against
the sky, and the romantic dip of Carter’s Notch, the very ideal of the
pass (other than Alpine) that announces itself to the winding wayfarer,
for beauty and interest, from a distance. The names, “Presidential” and
other, minister little to the poetry of association; but that,
throughout the American scene, is a source of irritation with which the
restless analyst has had, from far back, to count. Charming places,
charming objects, languish, all round him, under designations that seem
to leave on them the smudge of a great vulgar thumb—which is precisely a
part of what the pleading land appears to hint to you when it murmurs,
in autumn, its intelligent refrain. If it feels itself better than so
many of the phases of its fate, so there are spots where you see it turn
up at you, under some familiar tasteless infliction of this order, the
plaintive eye of a creature wounded with a poisoned arrow.
You learn, after a little, not to insist on names—that is not to inquire
of them; and are happiest perchance when the answer is made you as it
was made me by a neighbour, in a railway train, on the occasion of my
greatly admiring, right and left of us, a tortuous brawling river. I had
supposed it for a moment, in my innocence, the Connecticut—which it
decidedly was not; it was only, as appeared, a stream _quelconque_, a
stream without an identity. That was better, somehow, than the adventure
of a little later—my learning, too definitely, that another stream,
ample, admirable, in every way distinguished, a stream worthy of
Ruysdael or Salvator Rosa, was known but as the Farmington River. This I
could in no manner put up with—this taking by the greater of the
comparatively common little names of the less. Farmington, as I was
presently to learn, is a delightful, a model village; but villages,
fords, bridges are not the godparents of the element that makes them
possible, they are much rather the godchildren. So far as such
reflections might be idle, however, in an order so differently
determined, they easily lost themselves, on the morrow of Jackson, N.
H., in an impression of sharper intensity; that of a drive away, on the
top of the coach, in the wondrous, lustrous early morning and in company
that positively gave what it had to give quite as if it had had my
curiosity on its conscience. That curiosity held its breath, in truth,
for fear of breaking the spell—the spell of the large liberty with which
a pair of summer girls and a summer youth, from the hotel, took all
nature and all society (so far as society was present on the top of the
coach) into the confidence of their personal relation. Their personal
relation—that of the young man was with the two summer girls, whose own
was all with _him_; any other, with their mother, for instance, who sat
speechless and serene beside me, with the other passengers, with the
coachman, the guard, the quick-eared four-in-hand, being for the time
completely suspended. The freedoms of the young three—who were, by the
way, not in their earliest bloom either—were thus bandied in the void of
the gorgeous valley without even a consciousness of its shriller, its
recording echoes. The whole phenomenon was documentary; it started, for
the restless analyst, innumerable questions, amid which he felt himself
sink beyond his depth. The immodesty was too colossal to be anything but
innocence—yet the innocence, on the other hand, was too colossal to be
anything but inane. And they were alive, the slightly stale three: they
talked, they laughed, they sang, they shrieked, they romped, they scaled
the pinnacle of publicity and perched on it flapping their wings;
whereby they were shown in possession of many of the movements of life.
Life, however, involved in some degree experience—if only the
experience, for instance, of the summer apparently just spent, at a
great cost, in the gorgeous valley. How was _that_, how was the
perception of any concurrent presence, how was the human or social
function at all, compatible with the _degree_ of the inanity? There was,
as against this, the possibility that the inanity was feigned, if not
the immodesty; and the fact that there would have been more immodesty in
feigning it than in letting it flow clear. These were maddening
mystifications, and the puzzle fortunately dropped with the arrival of
the coach at the station.