II

It never failed that if in moving about I made, under stress, an

inquiry, I should prove to have made it of a flagrant foreigner. It

never happened that, addressing a fellow-citizen, in the street, on one

of those hazards of possible communion with the indigenous spirit, I

should not draw a blank. So, inevitably, at Salem, when, wandering

perhaps astray, I asked my way to the House of the Seven Gables, the

young man I had overtaken was true to his nature; he stared at me as a

remorseless Italian—as remorseless, at least, as six months of Salem

could leave him. On that spot, in that air, I confess, it was a

particular shock to me to be once more, with my so good general

intention, so “put off”; though, if my young man but glared frank

ignorance of the monument I named, he left me at least with the interest

of wondering how the native estimate of it as a romantic ruin might

strike a taste formed for such features by the landscape of Italy. I

will not profess that by the vibration of this note the edifice of my

fond fancy—I mean Hawthorne’s Salem, and the witches’, and that of other

eminent historic figures—was not rather essentially shaken; since what

had the intention of my pilgrimage been, in all good faith, in artless

sympathy and piety, but a search again, precisely, for the New England

homogeneous—for the renewal of that impression of it which had lingered

with me from a vision snatched too briefly, in a midsummer gloaming,

long years ago. I had been staying near, at that far-away time, and, the

railroad helping, had got myself dropped there for an hour at just the

right moment of the waning day. This memory had been, from far back, a

kept felicity altogether; a picture of goodly Colonial habitations,

quite the high-water mark of that type of state and ancientry, seen in

the clear dusk, and of almost nothing else but a pleasant harbour-side

vacancy, the sense of dead marine industries, that finally looked out at

me, for a climax, over a grass-grown interval, from the blank windows of

the old Customs House of the Introduction to _The Scarlet Letter_.

I could on that occasion have seen, with my eye on my return-train,

nothing else; but the image of these things I had not lost, wrapped up

as it even was, for the fancy, in some figment of the very patch of old

embroidered cloth that Hawthorne’s charming prefatory pages unfold for

us—pages in which the words are as finely “taken” as the silk and gold

stitches of poor Hester Prynne’s compunctious needle. It had hung, all

the years, closely together, and had served—oh, so conveniently!—as the

term of comparison, the rather rich frame, for any suggested vision of

New England life unalloyed. The case now was the more marked that,

already, on emerging from the station and not knowing quite where to

look again for my goodly Georgian and neo-Georgian houses, I had had to

permit myself to be directed to them by a civil Englishman, accosted by

the way, who, all kindness and sympathy, immediately mentioned that they

formed the Grosvenor Square, as might be said, of Salem. We conversed

for the moment, and settled, as he told me, in the town, he was most

sustaining; but when, a little later on, I stood there in admiration of

the noble quarter, I could only feel, even while doing it every justice,

that the place was not quite what my imagination had counted on. It was

possibly even better, for the famous houses, almost without exception

ample and charming, seemed to me to show a grace even beyond my

recollection; the only thing was that I had never bargained for looking

at them through a polyglot air. Look at them none the less, and at the

fine old liberal scale, and felt symmetry, and simple dignity, and solid

sincerity of them, I gratefully did, with due speculation as to their

actual chances and changes, as to what they represent to-day as social

“values,” and with a lively impression, above all, of their preserved

and unsophisticated state. That was a social value—which I found myself

comparing, for instance, with similar aspects, frequent and excellent,

in old English towns.

The Salem houses, the best, were all of the old English family, and,

from picture to picture, all the parts would have matched; but the

moral, the social, the political climate, even more than the breath of

nature, had had in each case a different action, had begotten on either

side a different consciousness. Or was it nearer even to say that these

things had on one side begotten a consciousness, and had on the other

begotten comparatively none? The approximation would have been the more

interesting as each arrayed group might pass for a supreme expression of

respectability. It would be the tone and weight, the quantity and

quality, of the respectability that make the difference; massive and

square-shouldered, yet rather battered and mottled, chipped and frayed,

at last rather sceptical and cynical, in fine, in the English

figure—thin and clear, consistently sharp, boldly unspotted, blankly

serene, in the American. It was more amusing at any rate to spin such

fancies, in reaction from the alien snub, than simply to see one’s

antitheses reduced to a mere question of the effect of climate. There

would be yet more to say for the Salem picture, many of the “bits” of

which remain, as Ruskin might have put it, entirely delightful; but

their desperate clean freshness was what was more to abide with me after

the polyglot air had cleared a little. The spacious, courteous doorways

of the houses, expansively columned, fluted, framed; their large honest

windows, in ample tiers, only here and there dishonoured by the modern

pane; their high bland foreheads, in short, with no musty secrets in the

eaves—yes, not one, in spite of the “speciality,” in this respect, of

the Seven Gables, to which I am coming—clarify too much perhaps the

expressive mask, the look of experience, depress the balance toward the

type of the expensive toy, shown on its shelf, but too good to be

humanly used. It’s as if the old witches had been suffered to live

again, penally, as public housemaids, using nocturnally, for purposes of

almost viciously-thorough purification, the famous broomsticks they used

wantonly to ride.

Was it a sacred terror, after this, that stayed me from crossing the

threshold of the Witch House?—in spite of the quite definite sturdy

stamp of this attraction. I think it was an almost sacred tenderness

rather, the instinct of not pressing too hard on my privilege and of not

draining the offered cup to the lees. It is always interesting, in

America, to see any object, some builded thing in particular, look as

old as it possibly can; for the sight of which effort we sometimes hold

our breath as if to watch, over the course of the backward years, the

straight “track” of the past, the course of some hero of the foot-race

on whom we have staked our hopes. How long will he hold out, how far

back will he run, and where, heroically blown, will he have to drop? Our

suspense is great in proportion to our hope, and if we are nervously

constituted we may very well, at the last, turn away for anxiety. It was

really in some such manner I was affected, I think, before the Salem

Witch House, in presence of the mystery of antiquity. It is a modest

wooden structure, consciously primitive, standing, if I remember

rightly, in some effective relation to a street-corner and putting no

little purpose into its archaism. The pity is, however, that unrelieved

wooden houses never very curiously testify—as I was presently to learn,

to my cost, from the dreadful anti-climax of the Seven Gables. They look

brief and provisional at the best—look, above all, incorrigibly and

witlessly innocent. The quite sufficiently sturdy little timbered mass

by the Salem street, none the less, with a sidelong crook or twist that

we may take as symbolizing ancient perversity, runs the backward race as

long-windedly as we may anywhere, over the land, see it run. Had I gone

in, as a frank placard invited me, I might have better measured the

exploit; yet, on the other hand, fearing frank placards, in general, in

these cases, fearing nothing so much as reconstituted antiquity, I might

have lost a part of my good little impression—which otherwise, as a

small pale flower plucked from a withered tree, I could fold away,

intact, between the leaves of my romantic herbarium.

I wanted, moreover, to be honest, not to fail, within the hour, of two

other urgent matters, my train away (my sense of Salem was too destined

to be train-haunted) and a due visitation of the Seven Gables and of the

birth-house of their chronicler. It was in the course of this errand

that I was made to feel myself, as I have mentioned, living, rather

witlessly, in a world unknown to the active Salemite of to-day—a world

embodied, I seemed to make out, in the large untidy industrial quarter

that had sprung up since my early visit. Did I quite escape from this

impression before alighting at last happily upon the small stale

structure that had sheltered the romancer’s entrance into life and that

now appears, according to the preference of fancy, either a strange

recipient of the romantic germ or the very spot to cause it, in protest

and desperation, to develop? I took the neighbourhood, at all events,

for the small original Hawthornesque world, keeping the other, the smoky

modernism, at a distance, keeping everything, in fact, at a distance—on

so spare and bare and lean and mean a face did the bright hard sky

strike me as looking down. The way to think of it evidently was in some

frank rural light of the past, that of all the ancient New England

simplicities, with the lap of wide waters and the stillness of rocky

pastures never far off (they seem still indeed close at hand), and with

any number of our present worryings and pamperings of the “literary

temperament” too little in question to be missed. It kept at a distance,

in fact, so far as my perception was concerned, everything but a little

boy, a dear little harsh, intelligent, sympathetic American boy, who

dropped straight from the hard sky for my benefit (I hadn’t seen him

emerge from elsewhere) and turned up at my side with absolute confidence

and with the most knowing tips. He might have been a Weimar tout or a

Stratford amateur—only he so beautifully wasn’t. That is what I mean by

my having alighted happily; the little boy was so completely master of

his subject, and we formed, on the spot, so close an alliance. He made

up to me for my crude Italian—the way they _become_ crude over here!—he

made up to me a little even for my civil Englishman; he was exactly what

I wanted—a presence (and he was the only thing far or near) old enough,

native and intimate enough, to reach back and to understand.

He showed me the window of the room in which Hawthorne had been born;

wild horses, as the phrase is, wouldn’t have dragged me into it, but

_he_ might have done so if he hadn’t, as I say, understood. But he

understood everything, and knew when to insist and when not to; knew,

for instance, exactly why I said “Dear, dear, are you very sure?” after

he had brought me to sight of an object at the end of a lane, by a vague

waterside, I think, and looking across to Marblehead, that he invited me

to take, if I could, for the Seven Gables. I couldn’t take it in the

least, as happens, and though he was perfectly sure, our reasons, on

either side, were equally clear to him—so that in short I think of him

as the very genius of the place, feeding his small shrillness on the

cold scraps of Hawthorne’s leaving and with the making of his

acquaintance alone worth the journey. Yet the fact that, the Seven

Gables being in question, the shapeless object by the waterside wouldn’t

do at all, not the least little bit, troubled us only till we had thrown

off together, with a quick, competent gesture and at the breaking of

light, the poor illusion of a _necessity_ of relation between the

accomplished thing, for poetry, for art, and those other quite equivocal

things that we inflate our ignorance with seeing it suggested by. The

weak, vague domiciliary presence at the end of the lane may have “been”

(in our poor parlance) the idea of the admirable book—though even here

we take a leap into dense darkness; but the idea that is the inner force

of the admirable book so vividly forgets, before our eyes, any such

origin or reference, “cutting” it dead as a low acquaintance and

outsoaring the shadow of its night, that the connection has turned a

somersault into space, repudiated like a ladder kicked back from the top

of a wall. Hawthorne’s ladder at Salem, in fine, has now quite gone, and

we but tread the air if we attempt to set our critical feet on its steps

and its rounds, learning thus as we do, and with infinite interest as I

think, how merely “subjective” in us are our discoveries about genius.

Endless are its ways of besetting and eluding, of meeting and mocking

us. When there are appearances that might have nourished it we see it as

swallowing them all; yet we see it as equally gorged when there are no

appearances at all—_then_ most of all, sometimes, quite insolently

bloated; and we recognize ruefully that we are forever condemned to know

it only after the fact.

IX

PHILADELPHIA

I

To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it,

analytically, minded—over and beyond an inherent love of the general

many-coloured picture of things—is to be subject to the superstition

that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and

addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper

to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at

once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the

matter. That perverse person is obliged to take it for a working theory

that the essence of almost any settled aspect of anything may be

extracted by the chemistry of criticism, and may give us its right name,

its formula, for convenient use. From the moment the critic finds

himself sighing, to save trouble in a difficult case, that the cluster

of appearances can _have_ no sense, from that moment he begins, and

quite consciously, to go to pieces; it being the prime business and the

high honour of the painter of life always to _make_ a sense—and to make

it most in proportion as the immediate aspects are loose or confused.

The last thing decently permitted him is to recognize incoherence—to

recognize it, that is, as baffling; though of course he may present and

portray it, in all richness, _for_ incoherence. That, I think, was what

I had been mainly occupied with in New York; and I quitted so qualified

a joy, under extreme stress of winter, with a certain confidence that I

should not have moved even a little of the way southward without

practical relief: relief which came in fact ever so promptly, at

Philadelphia, on my feeling, unmistakably, the change of half the

furniture of consciousness. This change put on, immediately, the

friendliest, the handsomest aspect—supplied my intelligence on the spot

with the clear, the salient note. I mean by this, not that the happy

definition or synthesis instantly came—came with the perception that

character and sense were there, only waiting to be disengaged; but that

the note, as I say, was already, within an hour, the germ of these

things, and that the whole flower, assuredly, wouldn’t fail to bloom. I

was in fact sniffing up its fragrance after I had looked out for three

minutes from one of the windows of a particularly wide-fronted house and

seen the large residential square that lay before me shine in its native

light. This light, remarkably tender, I thought, for that of a winter

afternoon, matched with none other I had ever seen, and announced

straight off fifty new circumstances—an enormous number, in America, for

any prospect to promise you in contradistinction from any other. It was

not simply that, beyond a doubt, the outlook was more _méridional_; a

still deeper impression had begun to work, and, as I felt it more and

more glimmer upon me, I caught myself about to jump, with a single leap,

to my synthesis. I of course stayed myself in the act, for there would

be too much, really, yet to come; but the perception left me, I even

then felt, in possession of half the ground on which later experience

would proceed. It was not too much to say, as I afterwards saw, that I

had in those few illumined moments put the gist of the matter into my

pocket.

Philadelphia, incontestably then, was the American city of the large

type, that didn’t _bristle_—just as I was afterwards to recognize in St.

Louis the nearest approach to companionship with her in this respect;

and to recognize in Chicago, I may parenthetically add, the most

complete divergence. It was not only, moreover, at the ample, tranquil

window there, that Philadelphia _didn’t_ “bristle” (by the record of my

moment) but that she essentially couldn’t and wouldn’t ever; that no

movement or process could be thought of, in fine, as more foreign to her

genius. I do not just now go into the question of what the business of

bristling, in an American city, may be estimated as consisting of; so

infallibly is one aware when the thousand possible quills _are_ erect,

and when, haply, they are not—such a test does the restored absentee

find, at least, in his pricked sensibility. A place may abound in its

own sense, as the phrase is, without bristling in the least—it is liable

indeed to bristle most, I think, when not too securely possessed of any

settled sense to abound in. An imperfect grasp of such a luxury is not

the weakness of Philadelphia—just as that admirable comprehensive

flatness in her which precludes the image of the porcupine figured to me

from the first, precisely, as her positive source of strength. The

absence of the note of the perpetual perpendicular, the New York, the

Chicago note—and I allude here to the material, the constructional

exhibition of it—seemed to symbolize exactly the principle of indefinite

level extension and to offer refreshingly, a challenge to horizontal, to

lateral, to more or less tangental, to rotary, or, better still, to

absolute centrifugal motion. If it was to befall me, during my brief but

various acquaintance with the place, not to find myself more than two or

three times hoisted or lowered by machinery, my prime illumination had

been an absolute forecast of that immunity—a virtue of general

premonition in it at which I have already glanced. I should in fact, I

repeat, most truly or most artfully repaint my little picture by mixing

my colours with the felt amenity of that small crisis, and by showing

how this, that and the other impression to come had had, while it

lasted, quite the definite prefigurement that the chapters of a book

find in its table of contents. The afternoon blandness, for a fugitive

from Madison Avenue in January snow, didn’t mean nothing; the little

marble steps and lintels and cornices and copings, all the so clear, so

placed accents in the good prose text of the mildly purple houses across

the Square, which seemed to wear them, as all the others did, up and

down the streets, in the manner of nice white stockings, neckties,

collars, cuffs, didn’t mean nothing; and this was somehow an assurance

that joined on to the vibration of the view produced, a few hours

before, by so merely convenient a circumstance as my taking my place, at

Jersey City, in the Pennsylvania train.

I had occasion, repeatedly, to find the Pennsylvania Railroad a

beguiling and predisposing influence—in relation to various objectives;

and indeed I quite lost myself in the singularity of this effect, which

existed for me, certainly, only in that connection, touching me with a

strange and most agreeable sense that the great line in question, an

institution with a style and _allure_ of its own, is not, even the world

over, as other railroads are. It absolutely, with a little

frequentation, affected me as better and higher than its office or

function, and almost as supplying one with a mode of life intrinsically

superior; as if it ought really to be on its way to much grander and

more charming places than any that happen to mark its course—as if

indeed, should one persistently keep one’s seat, not getting out

anywhere, it would in the end carry one to some such ideal city. One

might under this extravagant spell, which always began to work for me at

Twenty-third Street, and on the constantly-adorable Ferry, have fancied

the train, disvulgarized of passengers, steaming away, in disinterested

empty form, to some terminus too noble to be marked in _our_ poor

schedules. The consciousness of this devotion would have been thus like

that of living, all sublimely, up in a balloon. It was not, however—I

recover myself—that if I had been put off at Philadelphia I was not, for

the hour, contented; finding so immediately, as I have noted, more

interest to my hand than I knew at first what to do with. There was the

quick light of explanation, following on everything else I have

mentioned—the light in which I had only to turn round again and see

where I was, and how it was, in order to feel everything “come out”

under the large friendliness, the ordered charm and perfect peace of the

Club, housing me with that _whole_ protection the bestowal of which on

occasion is the finest grace of the hospitality of American clubs.

Philadelphia, manifestly, was beyond any other American city, a

_society_, and was going to show as such, as a thoroughly confirmed and

settled one—which fact became the key, precisely, to its extension on

one plane, and to its having no pretext for bristling. Human groups that

discriminate in their own favour do, one remembers, in general, bristle;

but that is only when they have not been really successful, when they

have not been able to discriminate enough, when they are not, like

Philadelphia, settled and confirmed and content. It would clearly be

impossible not to regard the place before me as possessed of this secret

of serenity to a degree elsewhere—at least among ourselves—unrivalled.

The basis of the advantage, the terms of the secret, would be still to

make out—which was precisely the high interest; and I was afterwards to

be justified of my conviction by the multiplication of my lights.

New York, in that sense, had appeared to me then not a society at all,

and it was rudimentary that Chicago would be one still less; neither of

them, as a human group, having been able to discriminate in its own

favour with anything like such success. The proof of that would be,

obviously, in one’s so easily imputing to them alteration, extension,

development; a change somehow unimaginable in the case of Philadelphia,

which was a fixed quantity and had filled to the brim, one felt—and

wasn’t that really to be part of the charm?—the measure of her

possibility. Boston even was thinkable as subject to mutation; had I not

in fact just seemed to myself to catch her in the almost uncanny

inconsequence of change? There had been for Boston the old epigram that

she wasn’t a place, but a state of mind; and that might remain, since we

know how frequently states of mind alter. Philadelphia then wasn’t a

place, but a state of consanguinity, which is an absolute final

condition. She had arrived at it, with nothing in the world left to

bristle for, or against; whereas New York, and above all Chicago, were

only, and most precariously, on the way to it, and indeed, having

started too late, would probably never arrive. There were, for them,

interferences and complications; they knew, and would yet know, other

conditions, perhaps other beatitudes; only the beatitude I speak of—that

of being, in the composed sense, a society—was lost to them forever.

Philadelphia, without complications or interferences, enjoyed it in

particular through having begun to invoke it in time. And now she had

nothing more to invoke; she had everything; her _cadres_ were all full;

her imagination was at peace. This, exactly again, would be the reason

of the bristling of the other places: the _cadres_ of New York, Chicago,

Boston, being as to a third of them empty and as to another third

objectionably filled—with much consequent straining, reaching, heaving,

both to attain and to eject. What makes a society was thus, more than

anything else, the number of organic social relations it represents; by

which logic Philadelphia would represent nothing _but_ organic social

relations. The degrees of consanguinity were the _cadres_; every one of

them was full; it was a society in which every individual was as many

times over cousin, uncle, aunt, niece, and so on through the list, as

poor human nature is susceptible of being. These degrees are, when one

reflects, the only really organic social relations, and when they are

all there for every one the scheme of security, in a community, has been

worked out. Philadelphia, in other words, would not only be a family,

she would be a “happy” one, and a probable proof that the happiness

comes as a matter of course if the family but be large enough.

Consanguinity provides the marks and features, the type and tone and

ease, the common knowledge and the common consciousness, but number

would be required to make these things social. Number, accordingly, for

her perfection, was what Philadelphia would have—it having been clear to

me still, in my charming Club and at my illuminating window, that she

couldn’t _not_ be perfect. She would be, of all goodly villages, the

very goodliest, probably, in the world; the very largest, and flattest,

and smoothest, the most rounded and complete.