There are neither loose ends nor stray flutters, whether of the old
prose or the old poetry, to be encountered on the large lower level,
though there are performances of a different order, in the shadow of
which such matters tend to look merely, and perhaps rather meagrely,
subjective. It is all very rich and prosperous and monotonous, the large
lower level, but oh, so inexpressibly vacant! Where the “new land”
corresponds most to its name, rejoices most visibly and complacently in
its newness, its dumped and shovelled foundations, the home till
recently of a mere vague marine backwater, there the long, straight
residential avenues, vistas quite documentary, as one finds one’s self
pronouncing them, testify with a perfection all their own to a whole
vast side of American life. The winter winds and snows, and the eternal
dust, run races in them over the clearest course anywhere provided for
that grim competition; the league-long brick pavements mirror the
expansive void, for many months of the year, in their smooth, tight
ice-coats (and ice over brick can only be described as heels over head),
and the innumerable windows, up and down, watch each other, all
hopelessly, as for revelations, indiscretions, audible, resonant,
rebellious or explosive breakages of the pane from within, that never
disturb the peace. (No one will begin, and the buried hatchet, in spite
of whatever wistful looks to where it lies, is never dug up.) So it is
that these sustained affirmations of one of the smoothest and the most
settled social states “going” excite perversely, on the part of the
restless analyst, questions that would seem logically the very last
involved. We call such aspects “documentary” because they strike us,
more than any others, as speaking volumes for the possible _serenity_,
the common decency, the quiet cohesion, of a vast commercial and
professional bourgeoisie left to itself. Here was such an order caught
in the very fact, the fact of its living maximum. A bourgeoisie without
an aristocracy to worry it is of course a very different thing from a
bourgeoisie struggling _in_ that shade, and nothing could express more
than these interminable perspectives of security the condition of a
community leading its life in the social sun.
Why, accordingly, of December afternoons, did the restless analyst,
pausing at eastward-looking corners, find on his lips the vague refrain
of Tennyson’s “long, unlovely street”? Why, if Harley Street, if
Wimpole, is unlovely, should Marlborough Street, Boston, be so—beyond
the mere platitude of its motiveless name? Here is no monotony of black
leasehold brick, no patent disavowal, in the interest of stale and
strictly subordinate gentilities, of expression, animation, variety,
curiosity; here, on the contrary, is often the individual house-front in
all its independence and sometimes in all its felicity: this whole
region being, like so many such regions in the United States to-day, the
home of the free hand, a field for the liveliest architectural
experiment. There are interesting, admirable houses—though always too
much of the detestable vitreous “bow”—and there is above all what there
is everywhere in America for saving, or at least for propping up, the
situation, that particular look of the clear course and large
opportunity ahead, which, when taken in conjunction with all the will to
live, all the money to spend, all the knowledge to acquire and apply,
seems to marshal the material possibilities in glittering illimitable
ranks. Beacon Street, moreover, used to stretch back like a workable
telescope for the focussing, at its higher extremity, in an air of which
the positive defect is to be too seldom prejudicial, of the gilded dome
of the State House—fresh as a Christmas toy seen across the floor of a
large salubrious nursery. This made a civic vignette that furnished a
little the desert of cheerful family life. But Marlborough Street, for
imperturbable reasons of its own, used periodically to break my heart.
It was of no use to make a vow of hanging about till I should have
sounded my mystery—learned to say _why_ black, stale Harley Street, for
instance, in featureless row after row, had character and depth, while
what was before me fell upon my sense with the thinness of tone of a
precocious child—and still more why this latter effect should have been,
as it were, so insistently irritating. If there be strange ways of
producing an interest, to the critical mind, there are doubtless still
stranger ways of not producing one, and it was important to me, no
doubt, to make “my” defunct and compact and expressive little Boston
appear to don all the signs of that character that the New Land, and
what is built thereon, miss. How could one consider the place at all
unless in a light?—so that one had to decide definitely on one’s light.
This it was after all easy to do from the moment one had determined to
concede to the New Land the fact of possession of everything convenient
and handsome under heaven. Peace could always come with this recognition
of all the accessories and equipments, a hundred costly things, parks
and palaces and institutions, that the earlier community had lacked; and
there was an individual connection—only one, presently to be noted—in
which the actual city might seem for an hour to have no capacity for the
uplifting _idea_, no aptitude for the finer curiosity, to envy the past.
But meanwhile it was strange that even so fine a conception, finely
embodied, as the new Public Library, magnificently superseding all
others, was committed to speak to one’s inner perception still more of
the power of the purse and of the higher turn for business than of the
old intellectual, or even of the old moral, sensibility. Why else then
should one have thought of some single, some admirable hour of Emerson,
in one of the dusky, primitive lecture-halls that have ceased to be, or
of some large insuperable anti-slavery eloquence of Wendell Phillips’s,
during the same term and especially during the War, as breathing more of
the consciousness of literature and of history than all the promiscuous
bustle of the Florentine palace by Copley Square? Not that this latter
edifice, the fruit of immense considerations, has not its honourable
interest too; which it would have if only in the light of the constant
truth that almost any American application or practice of a general
thought puts on a new and original aspect. Public libraries are a
thoroughly general thought, and one has seen plenty of them, one is
seeing dreadfully many, in these very days, the world over; yet to be
confronted with an American example is to have sight straightway of more
difference than community, and to glean on the spot fresh evidence of
that democratic way of dealing which it has been the American office to
translate from an academic phrase into a bristling fact. The notes of
difference of the Florentine palace by Copley Square—more delicately
elegant, in truth, if less sublimely rugged, than most Florentine
palaces—resolve themselves, like so many such notes everywhere, into our
impression here, once more, that every one is “in” everything, whereas
in Europe so comparatively few persons are in anything (even as yet in
“society,” more and more the common refuge or retreat of the masses).
The Boston institution then is a great and complete institution, with
this reserve of its striking the restored absentee as practically
without _penetralia_. A library without _penetralia_ may affect him but
as a temple without altars; it will at any rate exemplify the
distinction between a benefit given and a benefit taken, a borrowed, a
lent, and an owned, an appropriated convenience. The British Museum, the
Louvre, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the treasures of South Kensington,
are assuredly, under forms, at the disposal of the people; but it is to
be observed, I think, that the people walk there more or less under the
shadow of the right waited for and conceded. It remains as difficult as
it is always interesting, however, to trace the detail (much of it
obvious enough, but much more indefinable) of the personal port of a
democracy that, unlike the English, is social as well as political. One
of these denotements is that social democracies are unfriendly to the
preservation of _penetralia_; so that when _penetralia_ are of the
essence, as in a place of study and meditation, they inevitably go to
the wall. The main staircase, in Boston, has, with its amplitude of wing
and its splendour of tawny marble, a high and luxurious beauty—bribing
the restored absentee to emotion, moreover, by expanding, monumentally,
at one of its rests, into admirable commemoration of the Civil War
service of the two great Massachusetts Volunteer regiments of _élite_.
Such visions, such felicities, such couchant lions and recorded names
and stirred memories as these, encountered in the early autumn twilight,
_colour_ an impression—even though to say so be the limit of breach of
the silence in which, for persons of the generation of the author of
these pages, appreciation of them can best take refuge: the refuge to
which I felt myself anon reduced, for instance, opposite the State
House, in presence of Saint-Gaudens’s noble and exquisite monument to
Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. There are works of
memorial art that may suddenly place themselves, by their operation in a
given case, outside articulate criticism—which was what happened, I
found, in respect to the main feature, the rich staircase of the
Library. Another way in which the bribe, as I have called it, of that
masterpiece worked on the spot was by prompting one to immediate charmed
perception of the character of the deep court and inner arcade of the
palace, where a wealth of science and taste has gone to producing a
sense, when the afternoon light sadly slants, of one of the myriad
gold-coloured courts of the Vatican.
These are the refinements of the present Boston—keeping company as they
can with the healthy animation, as it struck me, of the rest of the
building, the multitudinous bustle, the coming and going, as in a
railway-station, of persons with carpet-bags and other luggage, the
simplicity of plan, the open doors and immediate accesses, admirable
_for_ a railway-station, the ubiquitous children, _most_ irrepressible
little democrats of the democracy, the vain quest, above all, of the
deeper depths aforesaid, some part that should be sufficiently _within_
some other part, sufficiently withdrawn and consecrated, not to
constitute a thoroughfare. Perhaps I didn’t adequately explore; but
there was always the visible scale and scheme of the building. It was a
shock to find the so brave decorative designs of Puvis de Chavannes, of
Sargent and Abbey and John Elliott, hanging over mere chambers of
familiarity and resonance; and then, I must quickly add, it was a shock
still greater perhaps to find one had no good reason for defending them
against such freedoms. What was sauce for the goose was sauce for the
gander: had one not in other words, in the public places and under the
great loggias of Italy, acclaimed it as just the charm and dignity of
these resorts that, in their pictured and embroidered state, they still
serve for the graceful common life? It was true that one had not been
imprisoned in that consistency in the Laurentian, in the Ambrosian
Library—and at any rate one was here on the edge of abysses. Was it not
splendid, for example, to see, in Boston, such large provision made for
the amusement of children on rainy afternoons?—so many little heads bent
over their story-books that the edifice took on at moments the
appearance worn, one was to observe later on, by most other American
edifices of the same character, that of a lively distributing-house of
the new fiction for the young. The note was bewildering—yet would one,
snatching the bread-and-molasses from their lips, cruelly deprive the
young of rights in which they have been installed with a majesty nowhere
else approaching that of their American installation? I am not wrong,
probably, at all events, in qualifying such a question as that as
abysmal, and I remember how, more than once, I took refuge from it in
craven flight, straight across the Square, to the already so
interesting, the so rapidly-expanding Art Museum.
There, for some reason, questions exquisitely dropped; perhaps only for
the reason that things sifted and selected have, very visibly, the
effect of challenging the confidence even of the rash. It is of the
nature of objects doomed to show distinction that they virtually make a
desert round them, and peace reigned unbroken, I usually noted, in the
two or three Museum rooms that harbour a small but deeply-interesting
and steadily-growing collection of fragments of the antique. Here the
restless analyst found work to his hand—only too much; and indeed in
presence of the gem of the series, of the perhaps just too conscious
grace of a certain little wasted and dim-eyed head of Aphrodite, he felt
that his function should simply give way, in common decency, to that of
the sonneteer. For it is an impression by itself, and I think quite
worth the Atlantic voyage, to catch in the American light the very fact
of the genius of Greece. There are things we don’t know, feelings not to
be foretold, till we have had that experience—which I commend to the
_raffiné_ of almost any other clime. I should say to him that he has not
_seen_ a fine Greek thing till he has seen it in America. It is of
course on the face of it the most merciless case of transplanting—the
mere moral of which, none the less, for application, becomes by no means
flagrant. The little Aphrodite, with her connections, her antecedents
and references exhibiting the maximum of breakage, is no doubt as
_lonely_ a jewel as ever strayed out of its setting; yet what does one
quickly recognize but that the intrinsic lustre will have, so far as
that may be possible, doubled? She has lost her background, the divine
creature—has lost her company, and is keeping, in a manner, the
strangest; but so far from having lost an iota of her power, she has
gained unspeakably more, since what she essentially stands for she here
stands for alone, rising ineffably to the occasion. She has in short, by
her single presence, as yet, annexed an empire, and there are strange
glimmers of moments when, as I have spoken of her consciousness, the
very knowledge of this seems to lurk in the depth of her beauty. Where
was she ever more, where was she ever so much, a goddess—and who knows
but that, being thus divine, she foresees the time when, as she has
“moved over,” the place of her actual whereabouts will have become one
of her shrines? Objects doomed to distinction make round them a desert,
I have said; but that is only for any gross confidence in other matters.
For confidence in _them_ they make a garden, and that is why I felt this
quarter of the Boston Art Museum bloom, under the indescribable dim
eyes, with delicate flowers. The impression swallowed up every other;
the place, whatever it was, was supremely justified, and I was left cold
by learning that a much bigger and grander and richer place is presently
to overtop it.
The present establishment “dates back,” back almost to the good Boston
of the middle years, and is full of all sorts of accumulated and
concentrated pleasantness; which fact precisely gives the signal, by the
terrible American law, for its coming to an end and giving a chance to
the untried. It is a consistent application of the rotary system—the
untried always awaiting its turn, and quite perceptibly stamping and
snorting while it waits; all heedless as it is, poor innocent untried,
of the certain hour of the impatiences before which it too will have to
retreat. It is not indeed that the American laws, so operating, have not
almost always their own queer interest; founded as they are, all
together, on one of the strongest of the native impulses. We see this
characteristic again and again at play, see it in especial wherever we
see (which is more than frequently enough) a university or a college
“started” or amplified. This process almost always takes the form,
primarily, of more lands and houses and halls and rooms, more
swimming-baths and football-fields and gymnasia, a greater luxury of
brick and mortar, a greater ingenuity, the most artful conceivable, of
accommodation and installation. Such is the magic, such the presences,
that tend, more than any other, to figure _as_ the Institution, thereby
perverting not a little, as need scarce be remarked, the finer
collegiate idea: the theory being, doubtless, and again most
characteristically, that with all the wrought stone and oak and painted
glass, the immense provision, the multiplied marbles and tiles and
cloisters and acres, “people will come,” that is, individuals of value
will, and in some manner work some miracle. In the early American time,
doubtless, individuals of value had to wait too much for things; but
that is now made up by the way things are waiting for individuals of
value. To which I must immediately add, however—and it is the ground of
my allusion of a moment ago—that no impression of the “new” Boston can
feel itself hang together without remembrance of what it owes to that
rare exhibition of the living spirit lately achieved, in the interest of
the fine arts, and of all that is noblest in them, by the unaided and
quite heroic genius of a private citizen. To attempt to tell the story
of the wonderfully-gathered and splendidly-lodged Gardner Collection
would be to displace a little the line that separates private from
public property; and yet to find no discreet word for it is to appear to
fail of feeling for the complexity of conditions amid which so undaunted
a devotion to a great idea (undaunted by the battle to fight, losing,
alas, with State Protection of native art, and with other scarce less
uncanny things) has been able consummately to flower. It is in presence
of the results magnificently attained, the energy triumphant over
everything, that one feels the fine old disinterested tradition of
Boston least broken.
VIII
CONCORD AND SALEM
I
I felt myself, on the spot, cast about a little for the right expression
of it, and then lost any hesitation to say that, putting the three or
four biggest cities aside, Concord, Massachusetts, had an identity more
palpable to the mind, had nestled in other words more successfully
beneath her narrow fold of the mantle of history, than any other
American town. “Compare me with places of my size, you know,” one seemed
to hear her plead, with the modesty that, under the mild autumn sun, so
well became her russet beauty; and this exactly it was that prompted the
emphasis of one’s reply, or, as it may even be called, of one’s
declaration.
“Ah, my dear, it isn’t a question of places of your ‘size,’ since among
places of your size you’re too obviously and easily first: it’s a
question of places, so many of them, of fifty times your size, and which
yet don’t begin to have a fraction of your weight, or your character, or
your intensity of presence and sweetness of tone, or your moral charm,
or your pleasant appreciability, or, in short, of anything that is
yours. Your ‘size’? Why, you’re the biggest little place in America—with
only New York and Boston and Chicago, by what I make out, to surpass
you; and the country is lucky indeed to have you, in your sole and
single felicity, for if it hadn’t, where in the world should we go,
inane and unappeased, for the particular communication of which you have
the secret? The country is colossal, and you but a microscopic speck on
the hem of its garment; yet there’s nothing else like you, take you all
round, for we _see_ you complacently, with the naked eye, whereas-there
are vast sprawling, bristling areas, great grey ‘centres of population’
that spread, on the map, like irremediable grease-spots, which fail
utterly of any appeal to our vision or any control of it, leaving it to
pass them by as if they were not. If you are so thoroughly the opposite
of one of these I don’t say it’s all your superlative merit; it’s
rather, as I have put it, your felicity, your good fortune, the result
of the half-dozen happy turns of the wheel in your favour. Half-a-dozen
such turns, you see, are, for any mortal career, a handsome allowance;
and your merit is that, recognizing this, you have not fallen below your
estate. But it’s your fortune, above all, that’s your charm. One doesn’t
want to be patronizing, but you didn’t, thank goodness, make yours.
That’s what the other places, the big ones that are as nothing to you,
are trying to do, the country over—to make theirs; and, from the point
of view of these remarks, all in vain. Your luck is that you didn’t have
to; yours had been, just as it shows in you to-day, made _for_ you, and
you at the most but gratefully submitted to it. It must be said for you,
however, that you keep it; and it isn’t every place that would have been
capable——! You keep the look, you keep the feeling, you keep the air.
Your great trees arch over these possessions more protectingly, covering
them in as a cherished presence; and you have settled to your tone and
your type as to treasures that can now never be taken. Show me the other
places in America (of the few that have _had_ anything) from which the
best hasn’t mainly been taken, or isn’t in imminent danger of being.
There is old Salem, there is old Newport, which I am on my way to see
again, and which, if you will, are, by what I hear, still comparatively
intact; but their having was never a having like yours, and they adorn,
precisely, my little tale of your supremacy. No, I don’t want to be
patronizing, but your only fault is your tendency to improve—I mean just
by your duration as you _are_; which indeed is the only sort of
improvement that is not questionable.”
Such was the drift of the warm flood of appreciation, of reflection,
that Concord revisited could set rolling over the field of a prepared
sensibility; and I feel as if I had quite made my point, such as it is,
in asking what other American village could have done anything of the
sort. I should have been at fault perhaps only in speaking of the
interest in question as visible, on that large scale, to the “naked
eye”; the truth being perhaps that one wouldn’t have been so met
half-way by one’s impression unless one had rather particularly _known_,
and that knowledge, in such a case, amounts to a pair of magnifying
spectacles. I remember indeed putting it to myself on the November
Sunday morning, tepid and bright and perfect for its use, through which
I walked from the station under the constant archway of the elms, as yet
but indulgently thinned: would one know, for one’s self, what had
formerly been the matter here, if one hadn’t happened to be able to get
round behind, in the past, as it were, and more or less understand?
Would the operative elements of the past—little old Concord Fight,
essentially, and Emerson and Hawthorne and Thoreau, with the rest of the
historic animation and the rest of the figured and shifting
“transcendental” company, to its last and loosest ramifications—would
even these handsome quantities have so lingered to one’s intelligent
after-sense, if one had not brought with one some sign by which they too
would know; dim, shy spectralities as, for themselves, they must, at the
best, have become? Idle, however, such questions when, by the chance of
the admirable day, everything, in its own way and order, unmistakably
came _out_—every string sounded as if, for all the world, the loose New
England town (and I apply the expression but to the relations of objects
and places), were a lyre swept by the hand of Apollo. Apollo was the
spirit of antique piety, looking about, pausing, remembering, as he
moved to his music; and there were glimpses and reminders that of course
kept him much longer than others.
Seated there at its ease, as if placidly familiar with pilgrims and
quite taking their homage for granted, the place had the very aspect of
some grave, refined New England matron of the “old school,” the widow of
a high celebrity, living on and on in possession of all his relics and
properties, and, though not personally addicted to gossip or to
journalism, having become, where the great company kept by her in the
past is concerned, quite cheerful and modern and responsive. From her
position, her high-backed chair by the window that commands most of the
coming and going, she looks up intelligently, over her knitting, with no
vision of any limit on her part as yet, to this attitude, and with
nothing indeed to suggest the possibility of a limit save a hint of that
loss of temporal perspective in which we recognize the mental effect of
a great weight of years. I had formerly the acquaintance of a very
interesting lady, of extreme age, whose early friends, in “literary
circles,” are now regarded as classics, and who, toward the end of her
life, always said, “You know Charles Lamb has produced a play at Drury
Lane,” or “You know William Hazlitt has fallen in love with such a very
odd woman.” Her facts were perfectly correct; only death had beautifully
passed out of her world—since I don’t remember her mentioning to me the
demise, which she might have made so contemporary, either of Byron or of
Scott. When people were ill she admirably forbore to ask about them—she
disapproved wholly of such conditions; and there were interesting
invalids round about her, near to her, whose existence she for long
years consummately ignored. It is some such quiet backward stride as
those of my friend that I seem to hear the voice of old Concord take in
reference to her annals, and it is not too much to say that where her
soil is most sacred, I fairly caught, on the breeze, the mitigated
perfect tense. “You know there has been a fight between our men and the
King’s”—one wouldn’t have been surprised, that crystalline Sunday noon,
where so little had changed, where the stream and the bridge, and all
nature, and the _feeling_, above all, still so directly testify, at any
fresh-sounding form of such an announcement.
I had forgotten, in all the years, with what thrilling clearness that
supreme site speaks—though anciently, while so much of the course of the
century was still to run, the distinctness might have seemed even
greater. But to stand there again was to take home this foreshortened
view, the gained nearness, to one’s sensibility; to look straight over
the heads of the “American Weimar” company at the inestimable hour that
had so handsomely set up for them their background. The Fight had been
the hinge—so one saw it—on which the large revolving future was to turn;
or it had been better, perhaps, the large firm nail, ringingly driven
in, from which the beautiful portrait-group, as we see it to-day, was to
hang. Beautiful exceedingly the local Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne
and (in a fainter way) _tutti quanti_; but beautiful largely because the
fine old incident down in the valley had so seriously prepared their
effect. That seriousness gave once for all the pitch, and it was verily
as if, under such a value, even with the seed of a “literary circle” so
freely scattered by an intervening hand, the vulgar note would in that
air never be possible. As I had inevitably, in long absence, let the
value, for immediate perception, rather waste itself, so, on the spot,
it came back most instantly with the extraordinary sweetness of the
river, which, under the autumn sun, like all the American rivers one had
seen or was to see, straightway took the whole case straightway into its
hands. “Oh, you shall tell me of your impression when you have felt what
_I_ can do for it: so hang over me well!”—that’s what they all seem to
say.
I hung over Concord River then as long as I could, and recalled how
Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson himself, have expressed with due sympathy
the sense of this full, slow, sleepy, meadowy flood, which sets its pace
and takes its twists like some large obese benevolent person, scarce so
frankly unsociable as to pass you at all. It had watched the Fight, it
even now confesses, without a quickening of its current, and it draws
along the woods and the orchards and the fields with the purr of a mild
domesticated cat who rubs against the family and the furniture. Not to
be recorded, at best, however, I think, never to emerge from the state
of the inexpressible, in respect to the spot, by the bridge, where one
most lingers, is the sharpest suggestion of the whole scene—the power
diffused in it which makes it, after all these years, or perhaps indeed
by reason of their number, so irresistibly touching. All the
commemorative objects, the stone marking the burial-place of the three
English soldiers, the animated image of the young belted American yeoman
by Mr. Daniel French, the intimately associated element in the presence,
not far off, of the old manse, interesting theme of Hawthorne’s pen,
speak to the spirit, no doubt, in one of the subtlest tones of which
official history is capable, and yet somehow leave the exquisite
melancholy of everything unuttered. It lies too deep, as it always so
lies where the ground has borne the weight of the short, simple act,
intense and unconscious, that was to determine the event, determine the
future in the way we call immortally. For we read into the scene too
little of what we may, unless this muffled touch in it somehow reaches
us so that we feel the pity and the irony of the _precluded_ relation on
the part of the fallen defenders. The sense that was theirs and that
moved them we know, but we seem to know better still the sense that
wasn’t and that couldn’t, and that forms our luxurious heritage as our
eyes, across the gulf, seek to meet their eyes; so that we are almost
ashamed of taking so much, such colossal quantity and value, as the
equivalent of their dimly-seeing offer. The huge bargain they made for
us, in a word, made by the gift of the little all they had—to the
modesty of which amount the homely rural facts grouped there together
have appeared to go on testifying—this brilliant advantage strikes the
imagination that yearns over them as unfairly enjoyed at their cost. Was
it delicate, was it decent—that is _would_ it have been—to ask the
embattled farmers, simple-minded, unwitting folk, to make us so
inordinate a present with so little of the conscious credit of it? Which
all comes indeed, perhaps, simply to the most poignant of all those
effects of disinterested sacrifice that the toil and trouble of our
forefathers produce for us. The minute-men at the bridge were of course
interested intensely, as they believed—but such, too, was the artful
manner in which we see _our_ latent, lurking, waiting interest like, a
Jew in a dusky back-shop, providentially bait the trap.
Beyond even such broodings as these, and to another purpose, moreover,
the communicated spell falls, in its degree, into that pathetic oddity
of the small aspect, and the rude and the lowly, the reduced and
humiliated above all, that sits on so many nooks and corners, objects
and appurtenances, old contemporary things—contemporary with the doings
of our race; simplifying our antecedents, our annals, to within an inch
of their life, making us ask, in presence of the rude relics even of
greatness, mean retreats and receptacles, constructionally so poor, from
what barbarians or from what pigmies we have sprung. There are certain
rough black mementos of the early monarchy, in England and Scotland,
there are glimpses of the original humble homes of other greatness as
well, that strike in perfection this grim little note; which has the
interest of our being free to take it, for curiosity, for luxury of
thought, as that of the real or that of the romantic, and with which,
again, the deep Concord rusticity, momentary medium of our national
drama, essentially consorts. We remember the small hard facts of the
Shakespeare house at Stratford; we remember the rude closet, in
Edinburgh Castle, in which James VI of Scotland was born, or the other
little black hole, at Holyrood, in which Mary Stuart “sat” and in which
Rizzio was murdered. These, I confess, are odd memories at Concord;
although the manse, near the spot where we last paused, and against the
edge of whose acre or two the loitering river seeks friction in the
manner I have mentioned, would now seem to have shaken itself a trifle
disconcertingly free of the ornamental mosses scattered by Hawthorne’s
light hand; it stands there, beyond its gate, with every due similitude
to the shrunken historic site in general. To which I must hasten to add,
however, that I was much more struck with the way these particular
places of visitation resist their pressure of reference than with their
affecting us as below their fortune. Intrinsically they are as
naught—deeply depressing, in fact, to any impulse to reconstitute, the
house in which Hawthorne spent what remained to him of life after his
return from the Italy of his Donatello and his Miriam. Yet, in common
with everything else, this mild monument benefits by that something in
the air which makes us tender, keeps us respectful; meets, in the
general interest, waving it vaguely away, any closer assault of
criticism.
It is odd, and it is also exquisite, that these witnessing ways should
be the last ground on which we feel moved to ponderation of the “Concord
school”—to use, I admit, a futile expression; or rather, I should
doubtless say, it _would_ be odd if there were not inevitably something
absolute in the fact of Emerson’s all but lifelong connection with them.
We may smile a little as we “drag in” Weimar, but I confess myself, for
my part, much more satisfied than not by our happy equivalent, “in
American money,” for Goethe and Schiller. The money is a potful in the
second case as in the first, and if Goethe, in the one, represents the
gold and Schiller the silver, I find (and quite putting aside any
bimetallic prejudice) the same good relation in the other between
Emerson and Thoreau. I open Emerson for the same benefit for which I
open Goethe, the sense of moving in large intellectual space, and that
of the gush, here and there, out of the rock, of the crystalline cupful,
in wisdom and poetry, in Wahrheit and Dichtung; and whatever I open
Thoreau for (I needn’t take space here for the good reasons) I open him
oftener than I open Schiller. Which comes back to our feeling that the
rarity of Emerson’s genius, which has made him so, for the attentive
peoples, the first, and the one really rare, American spirit in letters,
couldn’t have spent his career in a charming woody, watery place, for so
long socially and typically and, above all, interestingly homogeneous,
without an effect as of the communication to it of something
ineffaceable. It was during his long span his immediate concrete,
sufficient world; it gave him his nearest vision of life, and he drew
half his images, we recognize, from the revolution of its seasons and
the play of its manners. I don’t speak of the other half, which he drew
from elsewhere. It is admirably, to-day, as if we were still seeing
these things _in_ those images, which stir the air like birds, dim in
the eventide, coming home to nest. If one had reached a “time of life”
one had thereby at least heard him lecture; and not a russet leaf fell
for me, while I was there, but fell with an Emersonian drop.