It is a convenience to be free to confess that the play of perception
during those first weeks was quickened, in the oddest way, by the
wonderment (which was partly also the amusement) of my finding how many
corners of the general, of the local, picture had anciently never been
unveiled for me at all, and how many unveiled too briefly and too
scantly, with quite insufficient bravery of gesture. That might make one
ask by what strange law one had lived in the other time, with gaps, to
that number, in one’s experience, in one’s consciousness, with so many
muffled spots in one’s general vibration—and the answer indeed to such a
question might carry with it an infinite penetration of retrospect, a
penetration productive of ghostly echoes as sharp sometimes as aches or
pangs. So many had been the easy things, the contiguous places, the
conspicuous objects, to right or to left of the path, that had been
either unaccountably or all too inevitably left undiscovered, and which
were to live on, to the inner vision, through the long years, as mere
blank faces, round, empty, metallic, senseless disks dangling from
familiar and reiterated names. Why, at the same time, one might ask, had
the consciousness of irritation from these vain forms not grown greater?
why had the inconvenience, or the disgrace, of early privation become an
accepted memory? All, doubtless, in the very interest, precisely, of
this eventual belated romance, and so that adventures, even of minor
type, so preposterously postponed should be able to deck themselves at
last with a kind of accumulation of freshness.
So the freshness, all the autumn, kept breaking through the
staleness—when the staleness, so agreeably flavoured with hospitality,
and indeed with new ingredients, was a felt element at all. There was
after all no moment perhaps at which one element stood out so very
sharply from the other—the hundred emendations and retouches of the old
picture, its greater depth of tone, greater show of detail, greater size
and scale, tending by themselves to confound and mislead, in a manner,
the lights and shades of remembrance. Very promptly, in the Boston
neighbourhoods, the work of time loomed large, and the difference made
by it, as one might say, for the general richness. The richness might
have its poverties still and the larger complexity its crudities; but,
all the same, to look back was to seem to have been present at an
extraordinary general process, that of the rapid, that of the ceaseless
relegation of the _previous_ (on the part of the whole visible order) to
one of the wan categories of misery. What was taking place was a
perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there had been a past to
repudiate, so far as the past was a positive rather than a negative
quantity. There had been plenty in it, assuredly, of the negative, and
that was but a shabbiness to disown or a deception to expose; yet there
had been an old conscious commemorated life too, and it was this that
had become the victim of supersession. The pathos, so to call it, of the
impression was somehow that it didn’t, the earlier, simpler condition,
still resist or protest, or at all expressively flush through; it was
consenting to become a past with all the fine candour with which it had
tried to affirm itself, in its day, as a present—and very much, for that
matter, as with a due ironic forecast of the fate in store for the
hungry, triumphant actual.
This savours perhaps of distorted reflection, but there was really a
light over it in which the whole spectacle was to shine. _The will to
grow_ was everywhere written large, and to grow at no matter what or
whose expense. I had naturally seen it before, I had seen it, on the
other side of the world, in a thousand places and forms, a thousand hits
and misses: these things are the very screeches of the pipe to which
humanity is actually dancing. But here, clearly, it was a question of
scale and space and chance, margin and elbow-room, the quantity of floor
and loudness of the dance-music; a question of the ambient air, above
all, the permitting medium, which had at once, for the visitor’s
personal inhalation, a dry taste in the mouth. Thin and clear and
colourless, what would it ever say “no” to? or what would it ever paint
thick, indeed, with sympathy and sanction? With so little, accordingly,
within the great frame of the picture, to prevent or to prescribe, it
was as if anything might be done there that any sufficient number of
subscribers to any sufficient number of sufficiently noisy newspapers
might want. That, moreover, was but another name for the largest and
straightest perception the restless analyst had yet risen to—the
perception that awaits the returning absentee from this great country,
on the wharf of disembarkation, with an embodied intensity that no
superficial confusion, no extremity of chaos any more than any brief
mercy of accident, avails to mitigate. The waiting observer need be
little enough of an analyst, in truth, to arrive at that consciousness,
for the phenomenon is vivid in direct proportion as the ship draws near.
The great presence that bristles for him on the sounding dock, and that
shakes the planks, the loose boards of its theatric stage to an
inordinate unprecedented rumble, is the monstrous form of Democracy,
which is thereafter to project its shifting angular shadow, at one time
and another, across every inch of the field of his vision. It is the
huge democratic broom that has made the clearance and that one seems to
see brandished in the empty sky.
That is of course on one side no great discovery, for what does even the
simplest soul ever sail westward for, at this time of day, if not to
profit, so far as possible, by “the working of democratic institutions”?
The political, the civic, the economic view of them is a study that may
be followed, more or less, at a distance; but the way in which they
determine and qualify manners, feelings, communications, modes of
contact and conceptions of life—this is a revelation that has its full
force and its lively interest only on the spot, where, when once caught,
it becomes the only clue worth mentioning in the labyrinth. The
condition, notoriously, represents an immense boon, but what does the
enjoyment of the boon represent? The clue is never out of your hands,
whatever other objects, extremely disconnected from it, may appear at
the moment to fill them. The democratic consistency, consummately and
immitigably complete, shines through with its hard light, whatever
equivocal gloss may happen momentarily to prevail. You may talk of other
things, and you do, as much as possible; but you are really thinking of
that one, which has everything else at its mercy. What indeed is this
circumstance that the condition is thus magnified but the commanding
value of the picture, its message and challenge to intelligent
curiosity? Curiosity is fairly fascinated by the sense of the immensity
of the chance, and by the sense that the whole of the chance has been
taken. It is rarely given to us to see a great game played as to the
very end—and that was where, with his impression of nothing to prevent,
of nothing, anywhere around him, to prevent anything, the ancient
contemplative person, floating serenely in his medium, had yet
occasionally to gasp before the assault of the quantity of illustration.
The illustration might be, enormously, of something deficient, absent—in
which case it was for the aching void to be (as an aching void) striking
and interesting. As an explication or an implication the democratic
intensity could always figure.