II

There was always, to begin with, the Old Town—we used, before we had

become Old ourselves, to speak of it that way, in the manner of an

allusion to Nuremberg or to Carcassonne, since it had been leading its

little historic life for centuries (as we implied) before “cottages” and

house-agents were dreamed of. It was not that we had great illusions

about it or great pretensions for it; we only thought it, without

interference, very “good of its kind,” and we had as to its _being_ of

that kind no doubt whatever. Would it still be of that kind, and what

had the kind itself been?—these questions made one’s heart beat faster

as one went forth in search of it. Distinctly, if it had been of a kind

it _would_ still be of it; for the kind wouldn’t at the worst or at the

best (one scarce knew how to put it) have been worth changing: so that

the question for the restored absentee, who so palpitated with the sense

of it, all hung, absolutely, on the validity of the past. One might well

hold one’s breath if the past, with the dear little blue distances in

it, were in danger now of being given away. One might well pause before

the possible indication that a cherished impression of youth had been

but a figment of the mind. Fortunately, however, at Newport, and

especially where the antiquities cluster, distances are short, and the

note of reassurance awaited me almost round the first corner. One had

been a hundred times right—for how _was_ one to think of it all, as one

went on, if one didn’t think of it as Old? There played before one’s

eyes again, in fine, in that unmistakable silvery shimmer, a particular

property of the local air, the exquisite law of the relative—the

application of which, on the spot, is required to make even such places

as Viterbo and Bagdad not seem new. One may sometimes be tired of the

word, but anything that has succeeded in living long enough to become

conscious of its _note_, is capable on occasion of making that note

effectively sound. It _will_ sound, we gather, if we listen for it, and

the small silver whistle of the past, with its charming quaver of weak

gaiety, quite played the tune I asked of it up and down the tiny, sunny,

empty Newport vistas, perspectives coming to a stop like the very short

walks of very old ladies. What indeed but little very old ladies did

they resemble, the little very old streets? with the same suggestion of

present timidity and frugality of life, the same implication in their

few folds of drab, of mourning, of muslin still mysteriously starched,

the implication of no adventure at any time, however far back, that

mightn’t have been suitable to a lady.

The whole low promontory, in its wider and remoter measurements, is a

region of jutting tide-troubled “points,” but we had admired the Old

Town too for the emphasis of its peculiar point, _the_ Point; a quarter

distinguished, we considered, by a really refined interest. Here would

have been my misadventure, if I was to have any—that of missing, on the

grey page of to-day, the suggestive passages I remembered; but I was to

find, to my satisfaction, that there was still no more mistaking their

pleasant sense than there had ever been: a quiet, mild waterside sense,

not that of the bold, bluff outer sea, but one in which shores and

strands and small coast things played the greater part; with overhanging

back verandahs, with little private wooden piers, with painted

boat-houses and boats laid up, with still-water bathing (the very words,

with their old slightly prim discrimination, as of ladies and children

jumping up and down, reach me across the years), with a wide-curving Bay

and dim landward distances that melted into a mysterious, rich,

superior, but quite disconnected and not at all permittedly patronizing

Providence. There were stories, anciently, for the Point—so prescribed a

feature of it that one made them up, freely and handsomely, when they

were not otherwise to be come by; though one was never quite sure if

they ought most to apply to the rather blankly and grimly Colonial

houses, fadedly drab at their richest and mainly, as the legend ran,

appurtenant to that Quaker race whom Massachusetts and Connecticut had

prehistorically cast forth and the great Roger Williams had handsomely

welcomed, or to the other habitations, the felicitous cottages, with

their galleries on the Bay and toward the sunset, their pleasure-boats

at their little wharves, and the supposition, that clung to them, of

their harbouring the less fashionable of the outer Great, but also the

more cultivated and the more artistic. Everything was there still, as I

say, and quite as much as anything the prolonged echo of that ingenuous

old-time distinction. It was a marvel, no doubt, that the handful of

light elements I have named should add up to any total deserving the

name of _picture_, and if I must produce an explanation I seek it with a

certain confidence in the sense of the secret enjoyed by that air for

bathing or, as one figures, for dipping, the objects it deals with. It

takes them uninteresting, but feels immediately what submersion can do

for them; tips them in, keeps them down, holds them under, just for the

proper length of time: after which they come up, as I say, irradiating

vague silver—the reflection of which I have perhaps here been trying to

catch even to extravagance.

I did nothing, at any rate, all an autumn morning, but discover again

how “good” everything had been—positively better than one had ventured

to suppose in one’s care to make the allowance for one’s young

simplicity. Some things indeed, clearly, had been better than one knew,

and now seemed to surpass any fair probability: else why, for instance,

should I have been quite awestruck by the ancient State House that

overlooks the ancient Parade?—an edifice ample, majestic, archaic, of

the finest proportions and full of a certain public Dutch dignity,

having brave, broad, high windows, in especial, the distinctness of

whose innumerable square white-framed panes is the recall of some street

view of Haarlem or Leyden. Here was the charming impression of a

treasure of antiquity to the vague image of which, through the years,

one hadn’t done justice—any more than one had done it, positively, to

three or four of the other old-time ornaments of the Parade (which, with

its wide, cobbly, sleepy space, of those years, in the shadow of the

State House, must have been much more of a Van der Heyden, or somebody

of that sort, than one could have dreamed). There was a treasure of

modernity to reckon with, in the form of one of the Commodores Perry

(they are somehow much multiplied at Newport, and quite monumentally

ubiquitous) engaged in his great naval act; but this was swept away in

the general flood of justice to be done. I continued to do it all over

the place, and I remember doing it next at a certain ample old-time

house which used to unite with the still prettier and archaic Vernon,

near it, to form an honourable pair. In this mild town-corner, where it

was so indicated that the grass should be growing between the primitive

paving-stones, and where indeed I honestly think it mainly is, amid

whatever remains of them, ancient peace had appeared formerly to

reign—though attended by the ghost of ancient war, inasmuch as these had

indubitably been the haunts of our auxiliary French officers during the

Revolution, and no self-respecting legend could fail to report that it

was in the Vernon house Washington would have visited Rochambeau. There

had hung about this structure, which is, architecturally speaking, all

“rusticated” and indefinable decency, the implication of an inward charm

that refined even on its outward, and this was the tantalizing message

its clean, serious windows, never yet debased, struck me as still

giving. But it was still (something told me) a question of not putting,

anywhere, too many presumptions to the touch; so that my hand quitted

the knocker when I was on the point of a tentative tap, and I fell back

on the neighbour and mate, as to which there was unforgotten

acquaintance to teach me certainty. Here, alas, cold change was

installed; the place had become a public office—none of the “artistic”

super-civilized, no _raffiné_ of them all, among the passing fanciers or

collectors, having, strangely enough, marked it for his own. This mental

appropriation it is, or it was a few months ago, really impossible not

to make, at sight of its delightful hall and almost “grand” staircase,

its charming recessed, cupboarded, window-seated parlours, its general

panelled amplitude and dignity: the due taster of such things putting

himself straight into possession on the spot, and, though wondering at

the indifference and neglect, breathing thanks for the absence of

positive ravage. For me there were special ghosts on the staircase,

known voices in the brown old rooms—presences that one would have liked,

however, to call a little to account. “People don’t do those things”;

people didn’t let so clear a case—clear for sound curiosity—go like

that; they didn’t, somehow, even if they were only ghosts. But I thought

too, as I turned away, of all the others of the foolish, or at least of

the responsible, those who for so long have swarmed in the modern

quarter and who make profession of the finer sense.

This impression had been disturbing, but it had served its purpose in

reconstituting, with a touch, a link—in laying down again every inch of

the train of association with the human, the social, personal Newport of

what I may call the middle years. To go further afield, to measure the

length of the little old Avenue and tread again the little old

cliff-walk, to hang over, from above, the little old white crescent of

the principal bathingsands, with the big pond, behind them, set in its

stonewalled featureless fields; to do these things and many others,

every one of them thus accompanied by the admission that all that _had_

been had been little, was to feel dead and buried generations push off

even the transparence of their shroud and get into motion for the

peopling of a scene that a present posterity has outgrown. The company

of the middle years, the so considerably prolonged formative, tentative,

imaginative Newport time, hadn’t outgrown it—this catastrophe was still

to come, as it constitutes, precisely, the striking dramatic

_dénouement_ I have already referred to. American society—so far as that

free mixture was to have arrived at cohesion—had for half a century

taken its whole relation with the place seriously (which was by

intention very gaily); it long remained, for its happiness, quite at one

with this most favoured resort of its comparative innocence. In the

attesting presence of all the constant elements, of natural conditions

that have, after all, persisted more than changed, a hundred far-away

passages of the extinct life and joy, and of the comparative innocence,

came back to me with an inevitable grace. A glamour as of the flushed

ends of beautiful old summers, making a quite rich medium, a red sunset

haze, as it were, for a processional throng of charioteers and riders,

fortunate folk, fortunate above all in their untouched good faith,

adjourning from the pleasures of the day to those of the evening—this

benignity in particular overspread the picture, hanging it there as the

Newport aspect that most lived again. Those good people all could make

discoveries within the frame itself—beginning of course to push it out,

in all directions, so as sufficiently to enlarge it, as they fondly

fancied, even for the experience of a sophisticated world. They danced

and they drove and they rode, they dined and wined and dressed and

flirted and yachted and polo’d and Casino’d, responding to the subtlest

inventions of their age; on the old lawns and verandahs I saw them

gather, on the old shining sands I saw them gallop, past the low

headlands I saw their white sails verily flash, and through the dusky

old shrubberies came the light and sound of their feasts.

It had all been in truth a history—for the imagination that could take

it so; and when once that kindly stage was offered them it was a wonder

how many figures and faces, how many names and voices, images and

embodiments of youth mainly, and often of Beauty, and of felicity and

fortune almost always, or of what then passed for such, pushed, under my

eyes, in blurred gaiety, to the front. Hadn’t it been above all, in its

good faith, the Age of Beauties—the blessed age when it was so easy to

_be_, “on the Avenue,” a Beauty, and when it was so easy, not less, not

to doubt of the unsurpassability of such as appeared there? It was

through the fact that the whole scheme and opportunity satisfied them,

the fact that the place was, as I say, good enough for them—it was

through this that, with ingenuities and audacities and refinements of

their own (some of the more primitive of which are still touching to

think of) they extended the boundaries of civilization, and fairly

taught themselves to believe they were doing it in the interest of

nature. Beautiful the time when the Ocean Drive had been hailed at once

as a triumph of civilization and as a proof of the possible appeal of

Scenery even to the dissipated. It was spoken of as of almost boundless

extent—as one of the wonders of the world; as indeed it does turn often,

in the gloaming, to purple and gold, and as the small sea-coves then

gleam on its edge like barbaric gems on a mantle. Yet if it was a

question of waving the wand and of breathing again, till it stirred, on

the quaintness of the old manners—I refer to those of the fifties,

sixties, seventies, and don’t exclude those of the eighties—it was most

touching of all to go back to dimmest days, days, such as now appear

antediluvian, when ocean-drives, engineered by landscape artists and

literally macadamized all the way, were still in the lap of time; when

there was only an afternoon for the Fort, and another for the Beach, and

another for the “Boat-house”—inconceivable innocence!—and even the

shortness of the Avenue seemed very long, and even its narrowness very

wide, and even its shabbiness very promising for the future, and when,

in fine, chariots and cavaliers took their course, across country, to

Bateman’s, by inelegant precarious tracts and returned, through the

darkling void, with a sense of adventure and fatigue. That, I can’t but

think, was the _pure_ Newport time, the most perfectly guarded by a

sense of margin and of mystery.

It was the time of settled possession, and yet furthest removed from

these blank days in which margin has been consumed and the palaces, on

the sites but the other day beyond price, stare silently seaward,

monuments to the _blasé_ state of their absent proprietors. Purer still,

however, I remind myself, was that stretch of years which I have reasons

for thinking sacred, when the custom of seeking hibernation on the spot

partly prevailed, when the local winter inherited something of the best

social grace (as it liked at least to think) of the splendid summer, and

when the strange sight might be seen of a considerable company of

Americans, not gathered at a mere rest-cure, who confessed brazenly to

not being in business. Do I grossly exaggerate in saying that this

company, candidly, quite excitedly self-conscious, as all companies not

commercial, in America, may be pleasantly noted as being, formed, for

the time of its persistence, an almost unprecedented small

body—unprecedented in American conditions; a collection of the detached,

the slightly disenchanted and casually disqualified, and yet of the

resigned and contented, of the socially orthodox: a handful of mild, oh

delightfully mild, cosmopolites, united by three common circumstances,

that of their having for the most part more or less lived in Europe,

that of their sacrificing openly to the ivory idol whose name is

leisure, and that, not least, of a formed critical habit. These things

had been felt as making them excrescences on the American surface, where

nobody ever criticized, especially after the grand tour, and where the

great black ebony god of business was the only one recognized. So I see

them, at all events, in fond memory, lasting as long as they could and

finding no successors; and they are most embalmed for me, I confess, in

that scented, somewhat tattered, but faintly spiced, wrapper of their

various “European” antecedents. I see them move about in the light of

these, and I understand how it was this that made them ask what would

have become of them, and where in the world, the hard American world,

they _could_ have hibernated, how they could even, in the Season, have

bowed their economic heads and lurked, if it hadn’t been for Newport. I

think of that question as, in their reduced establishments, over their

winter whist, under their private theatricals, and pending, constantly,

their loan and their return of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, their main

conversational note. I find myself in fact tenderly evoking them as

special instances of the great—or perhaps I have a right only to say of

the small—American complication; the state of one’s having been so

pierced, betimes, by the sharp outland dart as to be able ever

afterwards but to move about, vaguely and helplessly, with the shaft

still in one’s side.

Their nostalgia, however exquisite, was, I none the less gather,

sterile, for they appear to have left no seed. They must have died, some

of them, in order to “go back”—to go back, that is, to Paris. If I make,

at all events, too much of them, it is for their propriety as a delicate

subjective value matching with the intrinsic Newport delicacy. They must

have felt that they, obviously, notably, notoriously, did match—the

proof of which was in the fact that to them alone, of the customary

thousands, was the beauty of the good walk, over the lovely little land,

revealed. The customary thousands here, as throughout the United States,

never set foot to earth—yet this had happened so, of old, to be the

particular corner of _their_ earth that made that adventure most

possible. At Newport, as the phrase was, in autumnal, in vernal

hibernation, you _could_ walk—failing which, in fact, you failed of

impressions the most consolatory; and it is mainly to the far ends of

the low, densely shrubbed and perfectly finished little headlands that I

see our friends ramble as if to stretch fond arms across the sea. There

used to be distant places beyond Bateman’s, or better still on the

opposite isle of Conanicut, now blighted with ugly uses, where nursing a

nostalgia on the sun-warmed rocks was almost as good as having none at

all. So it was not only not our friends who had overloaded and

overcrowded, but it was they at last, I infer, who gave way before that

grossness. How should they have wished to leave seed only to be trampled

by the white elephants?

The white elephants, as one may best call them, all cry and no wool, all

house and no garden, make now, for three or four miles, a barely

interrupted chain, and I dare say I think of them best, and of the

distressful, inevitable waste they represent, as I recall the impression

of a divine little drive, roundabout them and pretty well everywhere,

taken, for renewal of acquaintance, while November was still mild. I

sought another renewal, as I have intimated, in the vacant splendour of

June, but the interesting evidence then only refined on that already

gathered. The place itself, as man—and often, no doubt, alas, as woman,

with her love of the immediate and contiguous—had taken it over, was

more than ever, to the fancy, like some dim, simplified ghost of a small

Greek island, where the clear walls of some pillared portico or

pavilion, perched afar, looked like those of temples of the gods, and

where Nature, deprived of that ease in merely massing herself on which

“American scenery,” as we lump it together, is too apt to depend for its

effect, might have shown a piping shepherd on any hillside or attached a

mythic image to any point of rocks. What an idea, originally, to have

seen this miniature spot of earth, where the sea-nymphs on the curved

sands, at the worst, might have chanted back to the shepherds, as a mere

breeding-ground for white elephants! They look queer and conscious and

lumpish—some of them, as with an air of the brandished proboscis, really

grotesque—while their averted owners, roused from a witless dream,

wonder what in the world is to be done with them. The answer to which, I

think, can only be that there is absolutely nothing to be done; nothing

but to let them stand there always, vast and blank, for reminder to

those concerned of the prohibited degrees of witlessness, and of the

peculiarly awkward vengeances of affronted proportion and discretion.

VII

BOSTON

It sometimes uncomfortably happens for a writer, consulting his

remembrance, that he remembers too much and finds himself knowing his

subject too well; which is but the case of the bottle too full for the

wine to start. There has to be room for the air to circulate between

one’s impressions, between the parts of one’s knowledge, since it is the

air, or call it the intervals on the sea of one’s ignorance, of one’s

indifference, that sets these floating fragments into motion. This is

more or less what I feel in presence of the invitation—even the

invitation written on the very face of the place itself, of its actual

aspects and appearances—to register my “impression” of Boston. Can one

_have_, in the conditions, an impression of Boston, any that has not

been for long years as inappreciable as a “sunk” picture?—that dead

state of surface which requires a fresh application of varnish. The

situation I speak of is the consciousness of “old” knowledge, knowledge

so compacted by the years as to be unable, like the bottled wine, to

flow. The answer to such questions as these, no doubt, however, is the

practical one of trying a shake of the bottle or a brushful of the

varnish. My “sunk” sense of Boston found itself vigorously varnished by

mere renewal of vision at the end of long years; though I confess that

under this favouring influence I ask myself why I should have had, after

all, the notion of overlaid deposits of experience. The experience had

anciently been small—so far as smallness may be imputed to any of our

prime initiations; yet it had left consequences out of proportion to its

limited seeming self. Early contacts had been brief and few, and the

slight bridge had long ago collapsed; wherefore the impressed condition

that acquired again, on the spot, an intensity, struck me as but half

explained by the inordinate power of assimilation of the imaginative

young. I should have had none the less to content myself with this

evidence of the magic of past sensibilities had not the question

suddenly been lighted for me as by a sudden flicker of the torch—and for

my special benefit—carried in the hand of history. This light, waving

for an instant over the scene, gave me the measure of my relation to it,

both as to immense little extent and to quite subjective character.

I

It was in strictness only a matter of noting the harshness of

change—since I scarce know what else to call it—on the part of the

approaches to a particular spot I had wished to revisit. I made out,

after a little, the entrance to Ashburton Place; but I missed on that

spacious summit of Beacon Hill more than I can say the pleasant little

complexity of the other time, marked with its share of the famous

old-world “crookedness” of Boston, that element of the mildly tortuous

which did duty, for the story-seeker, as an ancient and romantic note,

and was half envied, half derided by the merely rectangular criticism.

Didn’t one remember the day when New Yorkers, when Philadelphians, when

pilgrims from the West, sated with their eternal equidistances, with the

quadrilateral scheme of life, “raved” about Cornhill and appeared to

find in the rear of the State House a recall of one of the

topographical, the architectural jumbles of Europe or Asia? And did not

indeed the small happy accidents of the disappearing Boston exhale in a

comparatively sensible manner the warm breath of history, the history of

something as against the history of nothing?—so that, being gone, or

generally going, they enabled one at last to feel and almost to talk

about them as one had found one’s self feeling and talking about the

sacrificed relics of old Paris and old London. In this immediate

neighbourhood of the enlarged State House, where a great raw clearance

has been made, memory met that pang of loss, knew itself sufficiently

bereft to see the vanished objects, a scant but adequate cluster of

“nooks,” of such odds and ends as parochial schemes of improvement sweep

away, positively overgrown, within one’s own spirit, by a wealth of

legend. There was at least the gain, at any rate, that one was now going

to be free to picture them, to embroider them, at one’s ease—to tangle

them up in retrospect and make the real romantic claim for them. This

accordingly is what I am doing, but I am doing it in particular for the

sacrificed end of Ashburton Place, the Ashburton Place that I anciently

knew. This eminently respectable by-way, on my return to question it,

opened its short vista for me honestly enough, though looking rather

exposed and undermined, since the mouth of the passage to the west,

formerly measured and narrow, had begun to yawn into space, a space

peopled in fact, for the eye of appreciation, with the horrific glazed

perpendiculars of the future. But the pair of ancient houses I was in

quest of kept their tryst; a pleasant individual pair, mated with

nothing else in the street, yet looking at that hour as if their old

still faces had lengthened, their shuttered, lidded eyes had closed,

their brick complexions had paled, above the good granite basements, to

a fainter red—all as with the cold consciousness of a possible doom.

That possibility, on the spot, was not present to me, occupied as I was

with reading into one of them a short page of history that I had my own

reasons for finding of supreme interest, the history of two years of

far-away youth spent there at a period—the closing-time of the War—full

both of public and of intimate vibrations. The two years had been those

of a young man’s, a very young man’s earliest fond confidence in a

“literary career,” and the effort of actual attention was to recover on

the spot some echo of ghostly footsteps—the sound as of taps on the

window-pane heard in the dim dawn. The place itself was meanwhile, at

all events, a conscious memento, with old secrets to keep and old

stories to witness for, a saturation of life as closed together and

preserved in it as the scent lingering in a folded pocket-handkerchief.

But when, a month later, I returned again (a justly-rebuked mistake) to

see if another whiff of the fragrance were not to be caught, I found but

a gaping void, the brutal effacement, at a stroke, of every related

object, of the whole precious past. Both the houses had been levelled

and the space to the corner cleared; hammer and pickaxe had evidently

begun to swing on the very morrow of my previous visit—which had

moreover been precisely the imminent doom announced, without my

understanding it, in the poor scared faces. I had been present, by the

oddest hazard, at the very last moments of the victim in whom I was most

interested; the act of obliteration had been breathlessly swift, and if

I had often seen how fast history could be made I had doubtless never so

felt that it could be unmade still faster. It was as if the bottom had

fallen out of one’s own biography, and one plunged backward into space

without meeting anything. That, however, seemed just to give me, as I

have hinted, the whole figure of my connection with everything about, a

connection that had been sharp, in spite of brevity, and then had broken

short off. Thus it was the sense of the rupture, more than of anything

else, that I was, and for a still much briefer time, to carry with me.

It seemed to leave me with my early impression of the place on my hands,

inapt, as might be, for use; so that I could only try, rather vainly, to

fit it to present conditions, among which it tended to shrink and stray.

It was on two or three such loitering occasions, wondering and invoking

pauses that had, a little vaguely and helplessly perhaps, the changed

crest of Beacon Hill for their field—it was at certain of these moments

of charged, yet rather chilled, contemplation that I felt my small

cluster of early associations shrivel to a scarce discernible point. I

recall a Sunday afternoon in particular when I hung about on the now

vaster platform of the State House for a near view of the military

monuments erected there, the statues of Generals Hooker and Devens, and

for the charm at once and the pang of feeling the whole backward vista,

with all its features, fall from that eminence into grey perspective.

The top of Beacon Hill quite rakes, with a but slightly shifting range,

the old more definite Boston; for there seemed no item, nor any number,

of that remarkable sum that it would not anciently have helped one to

distinguish or divine. There all these things essentially were at the

moment I speak of, but only again as something ghostly and dim,

something overlaid and smothered by the mere modern thickness. I

lingered half-an-hour, much of the new disposition of the elements here

involved being duly impressive, and the old uplifted front of the State

House, surely, in its spare and austere, its ruled and pencilled kind, a

thing of beauty, more delightful and harmonious even than I had

remembered it; one of the inestimable values again, in the eye of the

town, for taste and temperance, as the perfectly felicitous “Park

Street” Church hard by, was another. The irresistible spell, however, I

think, was something sharper yet—the coercion, positively, of feeling

one’s case, the case of one’s deeper discomfiture, completely made out.

The day itself, toward the winter’s end, was all benignant, like the

immense majority of the days of the American year, and there went

forward across the top of the hill a continuous passage of men and

women, in couples and talkative companies, who struck me as labouring

wage-earners, of the simpler sort, arrayed, very comfortably, in their

Sunday best and decently enjoying their leisure. They came up as from

over the Common, they passed or they paused, exchanging remarks on the

beauty of the scene, but rapidly presenting themselves to me as of more

interest, for the moment, than anything it contained.

For no sound of English, in a single instance, escaped their lips; the

greater number spoke a rude form of Italian, the others some outland

dialect unknown to me—though I waited and waited to catch an echo of

antique refrains. No note of any shade of American speech struck my ear,

save in so far as the sounds in question represent to-day so much of the

substance of that idiom. The types and faces bore them out; the people

before me were gross aliens to a man, and they were in serene and

triumphant possession. Nothing, as I say, could have been more effective

for figuring the hitherward bars of a grating through which I might make

out, far off in space, “my” small homogeneous Boston of the more

interesting time. It was not of course that our gross little aliens were

immediate “social” figures in the narrower sense of the term, or that

any personal commerce of which there might be question could colour

itself, to its detriment, from their presence; but simply that they

expressed, as everywhere and always, the great cost at which every place

on my list had become braver and louder, and that they gave the measure

of the distance by which the general movement was _away_—away, always

and everywhere, from the old presumptions and conceivabilities. Boston,

the bigger, braver, louder Boston, was “away,” and it was quite, at that

hour, as if each figure in my procession were there on purpose to leave

me no doubt of it. Therefore had I the vision, as filling the sky, no

longer of the great Puritan “whip,” the whip for the conscience and the

nerves, of the local legend, but that of a huge applied sponge, a sponge

saturated with the foreign mixture and passed over almost everything I

remembered and might still have recovered. The detail of this

obliteration would take me too far, but I had even then (on a previous

day as well as only half-an-hour before) caught at something that might

stand for a vivid symbol of the general effect of it. To come up from

School Street into Beacon was to approach the Athenæum—exquisite

institution, to fond memory, joy of the aspiring prime; yet to approach

the Athenæum only to find all disposition to enter it drop as dead as if

from quick poison, what did _that_ denote but the dreadful chill of

change, and of the change in especial that was most completely dreadful?

For had not this honoured haunt of all the most civilized—library,

gallery, temple of culture, the place that was to Boston at large as

Boston at large was to the rest of New England—had it not with peculiar

intensity had a “value,” the most charming of its kind, no doubt, in all

the huge country, and had not this value now, evidently, been brought so

low that one shrank, in delicacy, from putting it to the test?

It was a case of the detestable “tall building” again, and of its

instant destruction of quality in everything it overtowers. Put

completely out of countenance by the mere masses of brute ugliness

beside it, the temple of culture looked only rueful and snubbed,

hopelessly down in the world; so that, far from being moved to hover or

to penetrate, one’s instinct was to pass by on the other side, averting

one’s head from an humiliation one could do nothing to make less. And

this indeed though one would have liked to do something; the brute

masses, above the comparatively small refined facade (one saw how happy

one had always thought it) having for the inner ear the voice of a pair

of school-bullies who hustle and pummel some studious little boy.

“‘Exquisite’ was what they called you, eh? We’ll teach you, then, little

sneak, to be exquisite! We allow none of that rot round here.” It was

heart-breaking, this presentation of a Boston practically void of an

Athenæum; though perhaps not without interest as showing how much one’s

own sense of the small city of the earlier time had been dependent on

that institution. I found it of no use, at any rate, to think, for a

compensatory sign of the new order, of the present Public Library; the

present Public Library, however remarkable in its pomp and circumstance,

and of which I had at that hour received my severe impression, being

neither exquisite nor on the way to become so—a difficult, an impassable

way, no doubt, for Public Libraries. Nor did I cast about, in fact, very

earnestly, for consolation—so much more was I held by the vision of the

closed order which shaped itself, continually, in the light of the

differing present; an order gaining an interest for this backward view

precisely as one felt that all the parts and tokens of it, while it

lasted, had hung intimately together. Missing those parts and tokens, or

as many of them as one could, became thus a constant slightly painful

joy: it made them fall so into their place as items of the old

character, or proofs, positively, as one might say, of the old

distinction. It was impossible not to see Park Street itself, for

instance—while I kept looking at the matter from my more “swagger”

hilltop as violently vulgarized; and it was incontestable that, whatever

might be said, there had anciently not been, on the whole continent,

taking everything together, an equal animated space more exempt from

vulgarity. There had probably been comparable spaces—impressions, in New

York, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, almost as good; but only almost, by

reason of their lacking (which was just the point) the indefinable

perfection of Park Street.

It seems odd to have to borrow from the French the right word in this

association—or would seem so, rather, had it been less often indicated

that that people have better names than ours even for the qualities we

are apt to suppose ourselves more in possession of than they. Park

Street, in any case, had been magnificently _honnête_—the very type and

model, for a pleasant street-view, of the character. The aspects that

might elsewhere have competed were _honnêtes_ and weak, whereas Park

Street was _honnête_ and strong—strong as founded on _all_ the moral,

material, social solidities, instead of on some of them only; which made

again all the difference. Personal names, as notes of that large

emanation, need scarcely be invoked—they might even have a weakening

effect; the force of the statement was in its collective, cumulative

look, as if each member of the row, from the church at the Tremont

Street angle to the amplest, squarest, most purple presence at the

Beacon Street corner (where it always had a little the air of a sturdy

proprietor with back to the fire, legs apart and thumbs in the armholes

of an expanse of high-coloured plush waistcoat), was but a syllable in

the word Respectable several times repeated. One had somehow never heard

it uttered with so convincing an emphasis. But the shops, up and down,

are making all this as if it had never been, pleasant “premises” as they

have themselves acquired; and it was to strike me from city to city, I

fear, that the American shop in general pleads but meagrely—whether on

its outer face or by any more intimate art—for indulgence to its

tendency to swarm, to bristle, to vociferate. The shop-front, observed

at random, produced on me from the first, and almost everywhere alike, a

singular, a sinister impression, which left me uneasy till I had found a

name for it: the sense of an economic law of which one had not for years

known the unholy rigour, the vision of “protected” production and of

commodities requiring certainly, in many cases, every advantage

Protection could give them. They looked to me always, these exhibitions,

consciously and defiantly protected—insolently safe, able to be with

impunity anything they would; and when once that lurid light had settled

on them I could see them, I confess, in none other; so that the objects

composing them fell, throughout, into a vicious and villainous

category—quite as if audibly saying: “Oh come; don’t look among us for

what you won’t, for what you shan’t find, the best quality attainable;

but only for that quite other matter, the best value we allow you. You

must take us or go without, and if you feel your nose thus held to the

grindstone by the hard fiscal hand, it’s no more than you deserve for

harbouring treasonable thoughts.”

So it was, therefore, that while the imagination and the memory

strayed—strayed away to other fiscal climates, where the fruits of

competition so engagingly ripen and flush—the streets affected one at

moments as a prolonged show-case for every arrayed vessel of

humiliation. The fact that several classes of the protected products

appeared to consist of articles that one might really anywhere have

preferred did little, oddly enough, to diminish the sense of severe

discipline awaiting the restored absentee on contact with these

occasions of traffic. The discipline indeed is general, proceeding as it

does from so many sources, but it earns its name, in particular, from

the predicament of the ingenuous inquirer who asks himself if he can

“really bear” the combination of such general manners and such general

prices, of such general prices and such general manners. He has a

helpless bewildered moment during which he wonders if he mightn’t bear

the prices a little better if he were a little better addressed, or bear

the usual form of address a little better if the prices were in

themselves, given the commodity offered, a little less humiliating to

the purchaser. Neither of these elements of his dilemma strikes him as

likely to abate—the general cost of the things to drop, or the general

grimness of the person he deals with over the counter to soften; so that

he reaches out again for balm to where he has had to seek it under other

wounds, falls back on the cultivation of patience and regret, on large

international comparison. He is confronted too often, to his sense, with

the question of what may be “borne”; but what does he see about him if

not a vast social order in which the parties to certain relations are

all the while marvellously, inscrutably, desperately “bearing” each

other? He may wonder, at his hours, how, under the strain, social

cohesion does not altogether give way; but that is another question,

which belongs to a different plane of speculation. For he asks himself

quite as much as anything else how the shopman or the shoplady can bear

to be barked at in the manner he constantly hears used to them by

customers—he recognizes that no agreeable form of intercourse _could_

survive a day in such air: so that what is the only relation finding

ground there but a necessary vicious circle of gross mutual endurance?

These reflections connect themselves moreover with that most general of

his restless hauntings in the United States—not only with the lapse of

all wonderment at the immense number of absentees unrestored and making

their lives as they may in other countries, but with the preliminary

American postulate or basis for any successful accommodation of life.

This basis is that of active pecuniary gain and of active pecuniary gain

only—that of one’s making the conditions so triumphantly pay that the

prices, the manners, the other inconveniences, take their place as a

friction it is comparatively easy to salve, wounds directly treatable

with the wash of gold. What prevails, what sets the tune, is the

American scale of gain, more magnificent than any other, and the fact

that the whole assumption, the whole theory of life, is that of the

individual’s participation in it, that of his being more or less

punctually and more or less effectually “squared.” To make so much money

that you won’t, that you don’t “mind,” don’t mind anything—that is

absolutely, I think, the main American formula. Thus your making no

money—or so little that it passes there for none—and being thereby

distinctly reduced to minding, amounts to your being reduced to the

knowledge that America is no place for you. To mind as one minds, for

instance, in Europe, under provocation or occasion offered, and yet to

have to live under the effect of American pressure, is speedily to

perceive that the knot can be untied but by a definite pull of one or

the other string. The immense majority of people pull, luckily for the

existing order, the string that consecrates their connection with it;

the minority (small, however, only in comparison) pull the string that

loosens that connection. The existing order is meanwhile safe, inasmuch

as the faculty of making money is in America the commonest of all and

fairly runs the streets: so simple a matter does it appear there, among

vast populations, to make betimes enough _not_ to mind. Yet the

withdrawal of the considerable group of the pecuniarily disqualified

seems no less, for the present, an assured movement; there will always

be scattered individuals condemned to mind on a scale beyond any scale

of making. The relation of this modest body to the country of their

birth, which asks so much, on the whole—so many surrenders and

compromises, and the possession above all of such a prodigious head for

figures—before it begins, in its wonderful way, to give or to “pay,”

would appear to us supremely touching, I think, as a case of communion

baffled and blighted, if we had time to work it out. It would bathe in

something of a tragic light the vivid truth that the “great countries”

are all, more and more, happy lands (so far as any can be called such)

for any, for every sort of person rather than the middle sort. The upper

sort—in the scale of wealth, the only scale now—can to their hearts’

content build their own castles and move by their own motors; the lower

sort, masters of gain in _their_ degree, can profit, also to their

hearts’ content, by the enormous extension of those material facilities

which may be gregariously enjoyed; they are able to rush about, as never

under the sun before, in promiscuous packs and hustled herds, while to

the act of so rushing about all felicity and prosperity appear for them

to have been comfortably reduced. The frustrated American, as I have

hinted at him, scraping for _his_ poor practical solution in the

depleted silver-mine of history, is the American who “makes” too little

for the castle and yet “minds” too much for the hustled herd, who can

neither achieve such detachment nor surrender to such society, and who

most of all accordingly, in the native order, fails of a working basis.

The salve, the pecuniary salve, in Europe, is sensibly less, but less on

the other hand also the excoriation that makes it necessary, whether

from above or below.