But why do I talk of the new generations, or at any rate of the abyss in
them that may seem here and there beyond one’s shallow sounding, when,
all the while, at the back of my head, hovers the image in the guise of
which antiquity in Philadelphia looks most seated and most interesting?
Nowhere throughout the country, I think, unless it be perchance at Mount
Vernon, does our historic past so enjoy the felicity of an “important”
concrete illustration. It survives there in visible form as it nowhere
else survives, and one can doubtless scarce think too largely of what
its mere felicity of presence, in these conditions, has done, and
continues, and will continue, to do for the place at large. It may seem
witless enough, at this time of day, to arrive from Pennsylvania with
“news” of the old State House, and my news, I can only recognize, began
but with being news for myself—in which character it quite shamelessly
pretended both to freshness and to brilliancy. Why _shouldn’t_ it have
been charming, the high roof under which the Declaration of Independence
had been signed?—that was of course a question that might from the first
have been asked of me, and with no better answer in wait for it than
that, after all, it might just have happened, in the particular
conditions, not to be; or else that, in general, one is allowed a
margin, on the spot, for the direct sense of consecrated air, for that
communication of its spirit which, in proportion as the spirit has been
great, withholds itself, shyly and nobly, from any mere forecast. This
it is exactly that, by good fortune, keeps up the sanctity of shrines
and the lessons of history, to say nothing of the freshness of
individual sensibility and the general continuity of things. There is
positively nothing of Independence Hall, of its fine old Georgian
amplitude and decency, its large serenity and symmetry of pink and drab,
and its actual emphasis of detachment from the vulgar brush of things,
that is _not_ charming; and there is nothing, the city through, that
doesn’t receive a mild sidelight, that of a reflected interest, from its
neighbourhood.
This element of the reflected interest, and more particularly of the
reflected distinction, is for the most part, on the American scene, the
missed interest—despite the ingenuities of wealth and industry and
“energy” that strain so touchingly often, and even to grimace and
contortion, somehow to supply it. One finds one’s self, when it _has_
happened to intervene, weighing its action to the last grain of gold.
One even puts to one’s self fantastic cases, such as the question, for
instance, of what might, what might _not_ have happened if poor dear
reckless New York had been so distinguished or so blest—with the bad
conscience she is too intelligent not to have, her power to be now and
then ashamed of her “form,” lodged, after all, somewhere in her
interminable boots. One has of course to suppress there the prompt
conviction that the blessing—that of the possession of an historical
monument of the first order—would long since have been replaced by the
higher advantage of a row of sky-scrapers yielding rents; yet the
imagination none the less dallies with the fond vision of some respect
somehow instilled, some deference somehow suggested, some revelation of
the possibilities of a public _tenue_ somehow effected. Fascinating in
fact to speculate a little as to what a New York held in respect by
something or other, some power not of the purse, might have become. It
is bad, ever, for lusty youth, especially with a command of means, to
grow up without knowing at least one “nice family”—if the family be not
priggish; and this is the danger that the young Philadelphia, with its
eyes on the superior connection I am speaking of, was enabled to escape.
The charming old pink and drab heritage of the great time was to be the
superior connection, playing, for the education of the place, the part
of the nice family. Socially, morally, even æsthetically, the place was
to be thus more or less inevitably built round it; but for which good
fortune who knows if even Philadelphia too might have not been vulgar?
One meets throughout the land enough instances of the opposite luck—the
situation of immense and “successful” communities that have lacked,
originally, anything “first-rate,” as they might themselves put it, to
be built round; anything better, that is, than some profitable hole in
the earth, some confluence of rivers or command of lakes or railroads:
and one sees how, though this deficiency may not have made itself felt
at first, it has inexorably loomed larger and larger, the drawback of it
growing all the while with the growth of the place. Our sense of such
predicaments, for the gatherings of men, comes back, I think, and with
an intensity of interest, to our sense of the way the human imagination
absolutely declines everywhere to go to sleep without some apology at
least for a supper. The collective consciousness, in however empty an
air, gasps for a relation, as intimate as possible, to something
superior, something as central as possible, from which it may more or
less have proceeded and round which its life may revolve—and its dim
desire is always, I think, to do it justice, that this object or
presence shall have had as much as possible an heroic or romantic
association. But the difficulty is that in these later times, among such
aggregations, the heroic and romantic elements, even under the earliest
rude stress, have been all too tragically obscure, belonged to
smothered, unwritten, almost unconscious private history: so that the
central something, the social _point de repère_, has had to be
extemporized rather pitifully after the fact, and made to consist of the
biggest hotel or the biggest common school, the biggest factory, the
biggest newspaper office, or, for climax of desperation, the house of
the biggest billionaire. These are the values resorted to in default of
higher, for with _some_ coloured rag or other the general imagination,
snatching its chance, must dress its doll.
As a real, a moral value, to the general mind, at all events, and not as
a trumped-up one, I saw the lucky legacy of the past, at Philadelphia,
operate; though I admit that these are, at best, for the mooning
observer, matters of appreciation, mysteries of his own sensibility.
Such an observer has early to perceive, and to conclude on it once for
all, that there will be little for him in the American scene unless he
be ready, anywhere, everywhere, to read “into” it as much as he reads
out. It is at its best for him when most open to that friendly
penetration, and not at its best, I judge, when practically most closed
to it. And yet how can I pretend to be able to say, under this
discrimination, what was better and what was worse in Independence
Hall?—to say how far the charming facts struck me as going of
themselves, or where the imagination (perhaps on this sole patch of
ground, by exception, a meddler “not wanted anyhow”) took them up to
carry them further. I am reduced doubtless to the comparative sophism of
making my better sense here consist but of my sense of the fine interior
of the building. One sees them immediately as “good,” delightfully good,
on architectural and scenic lines, these large, high, wainscoted
chambers, as good as any could thinkably have been at the time;
embracing what was to be done in them with such a noble congruity (which
in all the conditions they might readily have failed of, though they
were no mere tent pitched for the purpose) that the historic
imagination, reascending the centuries, almost catches them in the act
of directly suggesting the celebrated _coup_. One fancies, under the
high spring of the ceiling and before the great embrasured window-sashes
of the principal room, some clever man of the period, after a long look
round, taking the hint. “_What_ an admirable place for a Declaration of
something! What could one here—what _couldn’t_ one really declare?” And
then after a moment: “I say, why not our Independence?—capital thing
always to declare, and before any one gets in with anything tactless.
You’ll see that the fortune of the place will be made.” It really takes
some such frivolous fancy as that to represent with proper extravagance
the reflection irresistibly rising there and that it yet would seem
pedantic to express with solemnity: the sense, namely, of our beautiful
escape in not having had to “declare” in any way meanly, of our good
fortune in having found half the occasion made to our hand.
High occasions consist of many things, and it was extraordinary luck for
our great date that not one of these, even as to surface and appearance,
should have been wanting. There might easily have been traps laid for us
by some of the inferior places, but I am convinced (and more completely
than of anything else in the whole connection) that the genius of
historic decency would have kept us enslaved rather than have seen us
committed to one of those. In that light, for the intelligent pilgrim,
the Philadelphia monument becomes, under his tread, under the touch of
his hand and the echo of his voice, the very prize, the sacred thing
itself, contended for and gained; so that its quality, in fine, is
irresistible and its dignity not to be uttered. I was so conscious, for
myself, I confess, of the intensity of this perception, that I dip deep
into the whole remembrance without touching bottom; by which I mean that
I grope, reminiscentially, in the full basin of the general experience
of the spot without bringing up a detail. Distinct to me only the way
its character, so clear yet so ample, everywhere hangs together and
keeps itself up; distinct to me only the large sense, in halls and
spreading staircase and long-drawn upper gallery, of one of those rare
precincts of the past against which the present has kept beating in
vain. The present comes in and stamps about and very stertorously
breathes, but its sounds are as naught the next moment; it is as if one
felt there that the grandparent, reserved, irresponsive now, and having
spoken his word, in his finest manner, once for all, must have long ago
had enough of the exuberance of the young grandson’s modernity. But of
course the great impression is that of the persistent actuality of the
so auspicious room in which the Signers saw their tossing ship into
port. The lapse of time here, extraordinarily, has sprung no leak in the
effect; it remains so robust that everything lives again, the interval
drops out and we mingle in the business: the old ghosts, to our inward
sensibility, still make the benches creak as they free their full
coat-skirts for sitting down; still make the temperature rise, the pens
scratch, the papers flutter, the dust float in the large sun-shafts; we
place them as they sit, watch them as they move, hear them as they
speak, pity them as they ponder, know them, in fine, from the arch of
their eyebrows to the shuffle of their shoes.
I am not sure indeed that, for mere archaic insolence, the little old
Hall of the Guild of Carpenters, my vision of which jostles my memory of
the State House, does not carry it even with a higher hand—in spite of a
bedizenment of restoration, within, which leads us to rejoice that the
retouchings of the greater monument expose themselves comparatively so
little. The situation of this elegant structure—of dimensions and form
that scarce differ, as I recall them, from those of delicate little
Holden Chapel, of the so floridly-overlaid gable, most articulate single
word, in College Yard, of the small builded sense of old Harvard—comes
nearer to representing an odd town-nook than any other corner of
American life that I remember; American life having been organized, _ab
ovo_, with an hostility to the town-nook which has left no scrap of
provision for eyes needing on occasion a refuge from the general glare.
The general glare seemed to me, at the end of something like a passage,
in the shade of something like a court, and in the presence of something
like a relic, to have mercifully intermitted, on that fine Philadelphia
morning; I won’t answer for the exact correspondence of the conditions
with my figure of them, since the shade I speak of may have been but the
shade of “tall” buildings, the vulgarest of new accidents. Yet I let my
impression stand, if only as a note of the relief certain always to
lurk, at any turn of the American scene, in the appearance of any
individual thing within, or behind, or at the end, or in the depth, of
any other individual thing. It makes for the sense of complexity,
relieves the eternal impression of things all in a row and of a single
thickness, an impression which the usual unprecedented length of the
American alignment (always its source of pride) does by itself little to
mitigate. Nothing in the array is “behind” anything else—an odd result,
I admit, of the fact that so many things affirm themselves as
preponderantly before. Little Carpenters’ Hall _was_, delightfully,
somewhere behind; so much behind, as I perhaps thus fantastically see
it, that I dare say I should not be able to find my way to it again if I
were to try. Nothing, for that matter, would induce me to revisit in
fact, I feel, the object I so fondly evoke. It might have been, for this
beautiful posteriority, somewhere in the City of London.