There was little need, for that matter, to drag it into the foreground
on the evening of my renewed introduction to the particular Boston
neighbourhood—the only one of them all—with which I had been formerly
somewhat acquainted. I had alighted in New York but three days before,
and my senses were all so full of it that as I look back I can again
feel it, under the immediate Cambridge impression, assert itself by
turning quite to insidious softness, to confused and surprised
recognition. I had driven out from Boston through the warm September
night and through a town-picture as of extraordinary virtuous vacancy
(without so much as the figure of a policeman in sight from the South
Station to the region of Harvard Square), and I remember how the odorous
hour—charged with the old distinctively American earth-smell, which in
the darkness fairly poetized the suburbs, and with the queer, far, wild
throb of shrilling insects—prescribed to me the exact form of the
response to the question as to one’s sense of a “great change” already
so often sounded. “A great change? No change at all. Where then would
the ‘intensity’ be? But _changes_—ever so many and so amusing and so
agreeable. The intensity is compatible with _them_—nothing, clearly, is
going to be so interesting as to make out, with plenty of good-will, how
compatible!” There was unmistakably everywhere a more embroidered
surface—the new free figures played over the canvas; so that at this
rate, in the time to come, how far might the embroidery not go, what
silk and gold mightn’t it weave into the pattern? It wasn’t of course a
question of rhapsodizing—Cambridge was Cambridge still, and all faithful
to its type; but the rustle of the trees in the summer night had a
larger tone, the more frequent lamplight slept on ampler walls, the body
of impression was greater and the University, above all, seemed in more
confident possession. It massed there in multiplied forms, with new and
strange architectures looming through the dark; it appeared to have
wandered wide and to be stretching forth, in many directions, long,
acquisitive arms.
This vision, for the moment, of a great dim, clustered but restlessly
expansive Harvard, hushed to vacation stillness as to a deep ambitious
dream, was, for the impressible story-seeker, practically the germ of
the most engaging of the generalized images of reassurance, the
furniture, so to speak, of the _other_ scale, that the extension of his
view was to cause him to cultivate. Reassurance is required, before the
spectacle of American manners at large, whenever one most acutely
perceives how little honour they tend to heap on the art of
discrimination, and it is at such hours that, turning in his frequent
stupefaction, the restless analyst reaches out for support to the
nearest faint ghost of a constituted Faculty. It takes no exceptional
exposure to the promiscuous life to show almost any institution
pretending to university form as stamped here with the character and
function of the life-saving monasteries of the dark ages. They glow, the
humblest of them, to the imagination—the imagination that fixes the
surrounding scene as a huge Rappacini-garden, rank with each variety of
the poison-plant of the money-passion—they glow with all the vividness
of the defined alternative, the possible antidote, and seem to call on
us to blow upon the flame till it is made inextinguishable. So little
time had it taken, at any rate, to suggest to me that a new and higher
price, in American conditions, is attaching to the cloister,
literally—the place inaccessible (to put it most pertinently) to the
shout of the newspaper, the place to perambulate, the place to think,
apart from the crowd. Doubtless indeed I was not all aware of it at the
time, but the image I touch upon in connection with those first moments
was to remain with me, the figure of the rich old Harvard organism
brooding, exactly, through the long vacation, brooding through the
summer night, on discriminations, on insistences, on sublime and
exquisite heresies to come.
After that arrived daylight recognitions, but they were really for the
most part offered me, as in a full cup, by the accident of a couple of
hours that were to leave me the pure essence, the finer sense of them.
These were a matter of a fortnight later, as I had had immediately to
make an absence, and the waning September afternoon of the second
occasion took on a particular quality for this deferred surrender of a
dozen stored secrets. “Secrets” I call them because the total impression
was of the production of some handful of odds and ends that had lurked,
for long, in a locked drawer, and which, being brought out, might
promote, by their blinking consciousness, either derision or respect.
They excited, as befell, an extraordinary tenderness—on which conclusion
it was fortunate to be able afterwards to rest. I wandered, for the
day’s end, with a young modern for whom the past had not been and who
was admirably unconscious of the haunting moral of the whole
mutation—the tune to which the pampered present made the other time look
comparatively grim. Each item of the pampered state contributed to this
effect—the finer _mise en scène_, the multiplied resources, halls,
faculties, museums, undergraduate and postgraduate habitations (these
last of so large a luxury); the pompous little club-houses, visited, all
vacant, in the serious tell-tale twilight that seemed to give them,
intellectually, “away”; the beautiful new Union, with its great grave
noble hall, of which there would be so much more to be said; and above
all, doubtless, the later majesties of the Law School, in the near
presence of which the tiny old disinherited seat of that subject,
outfaced and bedimmed, seemed unable to make even a futile plea for
quaintness. I went into the new Law Library, immense and supreme—in the
shadow of which I caught myself sniffing the very dust, prehistoric but
still pungent, of the old. I saw in the distance a distinguished friend,
all alone, belatedly working there, but to go to him I should have had
to cross the bridge that spans the gulf of time, and, with a suspicion
of weak places, I was nervous about its bearing me.
What such delicacies came to, then and afterwards, for the whole
impression, was the instinct not to press, not to push on, till forced,
through any half-open door of the real. The real was there, certainly
enough, outside and all round, but there was standing-ground, more
immediately, for a brief idyll, and one would walk in the idyll, if only
from hour to hour, while one could. This could but mean that one would
cultivate the idyllic, for the social, for the pictorial illusion, by
every invoking and caressing art; and in fact, as a consequence, the
reflection of our observer’s experience for the next few weeks—that is
so long as the spell of the autumn lasted—would be but the history of
his more or less ingenious arts. With the breaking of the autumn, later
on, everything broke, everything went—everything was transposed at least
into another key. But for the time so much had been gained—the happy
trick had been played.