IV

I can but continue to lose myself, for these connections, in my _whole_

sense of the intermission, as I have called it, of the glare. The

mellower light prevailed, somehow, _all_ that fine Philadelphia morning,

as well as on two or three other occasions—and I cannot, after all,

pretend I don’t now see why. It was because one’s experience of the

place had become immediately an intimate thing—intimate with that

intimacy that I had tasted, from the first, in the local air; so that,

inevitably, thus, there was no keeping of distinct accounts for public

and private items. An ancient church or two, of aspect as Anglican still

as you please, and taking, for another case, from the indifferent bustle

round it, quite the look of Wren’s mere steepled survivals in the

backwaters of London churchyards; Franklin’s grave itself, in its own

backwater of muffled undulations, close to the indifferent bustle;

Franklin’s admirable portrait by Duplessis in the council-room of an

ancient, opulent Trust, a conservative Company, vague and awful to my

shy sense, that was housed after the fashion of some exclusive,

madeira-drinking old gentleman with obsequious heirs: these and other

matters, wholly thrilling at the time, float back to me as on the

current of talk and as in the flood, so to speak, of hospitality. If

Philadelphia had, in opposition to so many other matters, struck me as

coherent, there would be surely no point of one’s contact at which this

might so have come home as in those mysterious chambers and before the

most interesting of the many far-scattered portraits of Franklin—the

portrait working as some sudden glimpse of the fine old incised seal,

kept in its glass cabinet, that had originally stamped all over, for

identification, the comparatively soft local wax. One thinks of

Franklin’s reputation, of his authority—and however much they may have

been locally contested at the time—as marking the material about him

much as his name might have marked his underclothing or his

pocket-books. Small surprise one had the impression of a Society, with

such a figure as that to start conversation. He seemed to preside over

it all while one lingered there, as if he had been seated, at the

mahogany, relentingly enough, near his glass of madeira; seemed to be

“in” it even more freely than by the so interesting fact of his still

having, in Philadelphia, in New York, in Boston, through his daughter,

so numerous a posterity. The sense of life, life the most positive, most

human and most miscellaneous, expressed in his aged, crumpled, canny

face, where the smile wittily profits, for fineness, by the comparative

collapse of the mouth, represents a suggestion which succeeding

generations may well have found it all they could do to work out. It is

impossible, in the place, after seeing that portrait, not to feel him

still with them, with the genial generations—even though to-day, in the

larger, more mixed cup, the force of his example may have suffered some

dilution.

It was a savour of which, at any rate, for one’s own draught, one could

but make the most; and I went so far, on this occasion, as fairly to

taste it there in the very quality of my company—in that of the

distinguished guidance and protection I was enjoying, which could only

make me ask myself in what finer modern form one would have wished to

see Franklin’s humanity and sagacity, his variety and ingenuity, his

wealth of ideas and his tireless application of them, embodied. There

was verily nothing to do, after this, but to play over the general

picture that light of his assumption of the general ease of things—of

things at any rate thereabouts; so that I now see each reminiscence,

whatever the time or the place, happily governed and coloured by it.

Times and places, in such an experience, ranged themselves, after a

space, like valued objects in one of the assorted rooms of a

“collection.” Keep them a little, tenderly handled, wrapped up, stowed

away, and they then come forth, into the room swept and garnished,

susceptible of almost any pleasing arrangement. The only thing is that

you shall scarce know, at a given moment, amid your abundance, which of

them to take up first; there being always in them, moreover, at best,

the drawback of value from mere association, that keepsake element of

objects in a reliquary. Is not this, however, the drawback for

exhibition of almost any item of American experience that may not

pretend to deal with the mere monstrosities?—the immensities of size and

space, of trade and traffic, of organisation, political, educational,

economic. From the moment one’s record is not, in fine, a loud

statistical shout, it falls into the order of those shy things that

speak, at the most (when one is one’s self incapable even of the merest

statistical whisper), but of the personal adventure—in other words but

of one’s luck and of one’s sensibility. There are incidents, there are

passages, that flush, in this fashion, to the backward eye, under the

torch. But what solemn statement is one to make of the “importance,” for

example, of such a matter as the Academy soirée (as they say in London)

of the Philadelphia winter, the festive commemoration of some long span

of life achieved by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts? We may have

been thrilled, positively, by the occasion, by the interesting

encounters and discoveries, artistic and personal, to which it

ministered; we may have moved from one charmed recognition to another,

noting Sargents and Whistlers by the dozen, and old forgotten French

friends, foreign friends in general, older and younger; noting young

native upstarts, creatures of yesterday and to-morrow, who invite, with

all success, a stand and a stare; but no after-sense of such vibrations,

however lively, presumes to take itself as communicable.

One would regret, on the other hand, failing to sound some echo of a

message everywhere in the United States so audible; that of the

clamorous signs of a hungry social growth, the very pulses, making all

their noise, of the engine that works night and day for a theory of

civilization. There are moments at which it may well seem that, putting

the sense of the spectacle even at its lowest, there is no such

amusement as this anywhere supplied; the air through which everything

shows is so transparent, with steps and stages and processes as distinct

in it as the appearance, from a street-corner, of a crowd rushing on an

alarm to a fire. The gregarious crowd “tells,” in the street, and the

indications I speak of tell, like chalk-marks, on the demonstrative

American black-board—an impression perhaps never so much brought home to

me as by a wondrous Sunday morning at the edge of a vast vacant

Philadelphia street, a street not of Penn’s creation and vacant of

everything but an immeasurable bourgeois blankness. I had turned from

that scene into a friendly house that was given over, from top to toe,

to a dazzling collection of pictures, amid which I felt myself catch in

the very act one of the great ingurgitations of the hungry machine, and

recognize as well how perfect were all the conditions for making it a

case. What could have testified less, on the face of it, than the

candour of the street’s insignificance?—a pair of huge parted lips

protesting almost to pathos their innocence of anything to say: which

was exactly, none the less, where appetite had broken out and was

feeding itself to satiety. Large and liberal the hospitality, remarkably

rich the store of acquisition, in the light of which the whole energy of

the keen collector showed: the knowledge, the acuteness, the audacity,

the incessant watch for opportunity. These abrupt and multiplied

encounters, intensities, ever so various, of individual curiosity, sound

the æsthetic note sometimes with unprecedented shrillness and then again

with the most muffled discretion. Was the note muffled or shrill,

meanwhile, as I listened to it—under a fascination I fully

recognized—during an hour spent in the clustered palæstra of the

University of Pennsylvania? Here the winter afternoon seemed to throw

itself artfully back, across the centuries, the climates, the seasons,

the very faiths and codes, into the air of old Greece and the age of

gymnastic glory: artfully, I rather insist, because I scarce know what

fine emphasis of modernism hung about it too. I put that question,

however, only to deny myself the present luxury of answering it; so

thickly do the visitor’s University impressions, over the land, tend to

gather, and so markedly they suggest their being reported of together. I

note my palæstral hour, therefore, but because it fell through what it

seemed to show me, straight into what I had conceived of the

Philadelphia scheme, the happy family given up, though quite on “family”

lines, to all the immediate beguilements and activities; the art in

particular of cultivating, with such gaiety as might be, a brave civic

blindness.

I became conscious of but one excrescence on this large smooth surface;

it is true indeed that the excrescence was huge and affected me as

demanding in some way to be dealt with. The Pennsylvania Penitentiary

rears its ancient grimness, its grey towers and defensive moats (masses

at least that uncertain memory so figures for me) in an outlying quarter

which struck me as borrowing from them a vague likeness to some more or

less blighted minor city of Italy or France, black Angers or dead

Ferrara—yet seated on its basis of renown and wrapped in its legend of

having, as the first flourishing example of the strictly cellular

system, the complete sequestration of the individual prisoner, thought

wonderful in its day, moved Charles Dickens to the passionate protest

recorded in his _American Notes_. Of such substance was the story of

these battlements; yet it was unmistakable that when one had crossed the

drawbridge and passed under the portcullis the air seemed thick enough

with the breath of the generations. A prison has, at the worst, the

massive majesty, the sinister peace of a prison; but this huge house of

sorrow affected me as, uncannily, of the City itself, the City of all

the cynicisms and impunities against which my friends had, from far

back, kept plating, as with the old silver of their sideboards, the

armour of their social consciousness. It made the whole place, with some

of its oddly antique aspects and its oddly modern freedoms, look doubly

cut off from the world of light and ease. The suggestions here were

vast, however; too many of them swarm, and my imagination must defend

itself as it can. What I was most concerned to note was the complete

turn of the wheel of fortune in respect to the measure of mere

incarceration suffered, from which the worst of the rigour had visibly

been drawn. Parts of the place suggested a sunny Club at a languid hour,

with members vaguely lounging and chatting, with open doors and

comparatively cheerful vistas, and plenty of rocking-chairs and

magazines. The only thing was that, under this analogy, one found one’s

self speculating much on the implied requisites for membership. It was

impossible not to wonder, from face to face, what these would have been,

and not to ask what one would have taken them to be if the appearance of

a Club had been a little more complete. I almost blush, I fear, for the

crude comfort of my prompt conclusion. One would have taken them to

consist, without exception, of full-blown basenesses; one couldn’t, from

member to member, from type to type, from one pair of eyes to another,

take them for anything less. Where was the victim of circumstances,

where the creature merely misled or betrayed? He fitted no type, he

suffered in no face, he yearned in no history, and one felt, the more

one took in his absence, that the numerous substitutes for him were good

enough for each other.

The great interest was in this sight of the number and variety of ways

of looking morally mean; and perhaps also in the question of how much

the effect came from its being proved upon them, of how little it might

have come if they had still been out in the world. Considered as

criminals the moral meanness here was their explication. Considered as

morally mean, therefore, would possible criminality, out in the world,

have been in the same degree their sole sense? Was the fact of prison

_all_ the mere fact of opportunity, and the fact of freedom all the mere

fact of the absence of it? One inclined to believe that—the

simplification was at any rate so great for one’s feeling: the cases

presented became thus, consistently, cases of the vocation, and from the

moment this was clear the place took on, in its way, almost the harmony

of a convent. I talked for a long time with a charming reprieved

murderer whom I half expected, at any moment, to see ring for coffee and

cigars: he explained with all urbanity, and with perfect lucidity, the

real sense of the appearance against him, but I none the less felt sure

that his merit was largely in the refinement wrought in him by so many

years of easy club life. He was as natural a subject for commutation as

for conviction, and had had to have the latter in order to have the

former—in the enjoyment, and indeed in the subtle criticism, of which,

_as_ simple commutation he was at his best. They were there, all those

of his companions, I was able to note, unmistakably at their best. One

could, as I say, sufficiently rest in it, and to do that kept, in a

manner, the excrescence, as I have called it, on the general scene,

within bounds. I was moreover luckily to see the general scene

definitely cleared again, cleared of everything save its own social

character and its practical philosophy—and at no moment with these

features so brightly presented as during a few days’ rage of winter

round an old country-house. The house was virtually distant from town,

and the conditions could but strike any visitor who stood whenever he

might with his back to the fire, where the logs were piled high, as made

to press on all the reserves and traditions of the general temperament;

those of gallantry, hilarity, social disposability, crowned with the

grace of the sporting instinct. What was it confusedly, almost

romantically, like, what “old order” commemorated in fiction and

anecdote? I had groped for this, as I have shown, before, but I found

myself at it again. Wasn’t it, for freedom of movement, for jingle of

sleigh-bells, for breasting of the elements, for cross-country drives in

the small hours, for _crânerie_ of fine young men and high wintry colour

of muffled nymphs, wasn’t it, brogue and all, like some audible echo of

close-packing, chancing Irish society of the classic time, seen and

heard through a roaring blizzard? That at least, with his back to the

fire, was where the restless analyst was landed.

X

BALTIMORE

I

It had doubtless not been merely absurd, as the wild winter proceeded,

to find one’s self so enamoured of the very name of the South that one

was ready to take it in any small atmospheric instalment and to feel the

echo of its voice in the yell of any engine that happened not to drag

one either directly North or directly West. One tended at least, on

these terms, in some degree, toward the land where the citron blooms,

and that was something to go on with, a handful of small change accepted

for the time as a pledge of great gold pieces to come. It is

astonishing, along the Atlantic coast, how, from the moment the North

ceases to insist, the South may begin to presume; ever so little, no

doubt, at first, yet with protrusive feelers that tell how she only

wants the right sensibility, the true waiting victim, to play upon. It

is a question certainly of where, on the so frequently torpid stretch of

shore I speak of, the North does cease to insist; or perhaps I should

more correctly say a question of when it does. It appeared incapable of

this fine tact almost anywhere, I confess, at the season, the first

supposedly relenting weeks, of my facing in earnest to Florida; and the

interest indeed of that slightly grim adventure was to be in the way it

ministered to the coincidence, for me, of two quite opposed strains of

reflection. On the one hand nothing could “say” more to the subject long

expatriated, condemned by the terms of his exile to a chronic

consciousness of grey northern seas, than to feel how, from New York, or

even from Boston, he had but to sit still in his portentous car, had but

to exercise a due concentrated patience, in order to become aware,

without personal effort or suffered transfer, of that most charming of

all watchable processes, the gradual soft, the distinctively

demoralized, conversion of the soul of Nature. This conversion, if I may

so put it without profanity, has always struck me, on any southward

course, as a return, on the part of that soul, from a comparatively grim

Theistic faith to the ineradicable principle of Paganism; a conscious

casting-off of the dread theological abstraction—an abstraction still,

even with all Puritan stiffening—in the interest of multiplied, lurking,

familiar powers; divinities, graces, presences as unseen but as inherent

as the scents clinging to the folds of Nature’s robe. It would be on

such occasions the fault of the divine familiars themselves if their

haunts and shrines were empty, for earth and air and day and night, as

we go, still affect us as moods of their sympathy, still vibrate to the

breath of their passage; so that our progress, under the expanding sun,

resembles a little less a journey through space than a retracing of the

course of the ages.

These are fine fancies, however, and what is more to my point is that

the theory (so agreeable to entertain at Jersey City) of a direct

connection between the snow-banks and the orange-groves is a thing of

sweetness only so long as practically unshaken. There is continuity,

goodness knows, always in America—it is the last thing that is ever

broken: the question for the particular case is but continuity of what?

The basis of my individual hope had been that of the reign of the

orange-grove; but what it proved, at the crisis I name, was positively

that of the usurpation of the snow-bank. It was possible, indubitably,

in such conditions, to go to Charleston on sledges—which made in fact,

after all, for directness of connection. It made moreover, by the same

token, for a certain sinister light on the general truth of our grand

territorial unity. It was as if the winter, at the end of February,

abroad for a walk, had marched as promptly and inevitably from the

Arctic Circle to the Gulf as it might have proceeded, with pride in its

huge clear course, from the top of Broadway to the Battery. This brought

home again, as I myself went, I remember, one of those three or four

main ideas, suggested by the recurrent conditions, which become as

obsessions for the traveller in the States—if he have a mind, that is,

so indecently exposed to ideas: the sense, constantly fed, and from a

hundred sources, that, as Nature abhors a vacuum, so it is of the genius

of the American land and the American people to abhor, whenever may be,

a discrimination. They are reduced, together, under stress, to making

discriminations, but they make them, I think, as lightly and scantily as

possible. With the lively insistence of that impression, even though it

quite undermined my fond view of a loose and overreaching citronic belt,

I found my actually monotonous way beguiled. Practically, till I reached

Charleston, this way, disclaiming every invidious intent, refused to be

dissociated from anything else in the world: it was only another case of

the painting with a big brush, a brush steeped in crude universal white,

and of the colossal size this implement was capable of assuming.

Gradations, transitions, differences of any sort, temporal, material,

social, whether in man or in his environment, shrank somehow, under its

sweep, to negligible items; and one had perhaps never yet seemed so to

move through a vast simplified scheme. The illustration was once more,

in fine, of the small inherent, the small accumulated resistance, in

American air, to any force that does simplify. One found the signs of

such resistance as little in the prospect enjoyed from the car-window as

one distinguished them in the vain images of the interior; those human

documents, deciphered from one’s seat in the Pullman, which yet do

always, in _their_ way, for the traveller, constitute precious evidence.

The spread of this single great wash of winter from latitude to latitude

struck me in fact as having its analogy in the vast vogue of some

infinitely-selling novel, one of those happy volumes of which the

circulation roars, periodically, from Atlantic to Pacific and from great

windy State to State, in the manner, as I have heard it vividly put, of

a blazing prairie fire; with as little possibility of arrest from

“criticism” in the one case as from the bleating of lost sheep in the

other. Everything, so to speak, was monotonized, and the whole social

order might have had its nose, for the time, buried, by one levelling

doom, in the pages that, after the break of the spell, it would never

know itself to mention again. Of course, one remembered meanwhile, there

were spells and spells, and the free field—the particular freedom of

which is the point of my remark—would on occasion be just as open to the

far-exhaled breath of the South. That in fact is what I was to find

it—though I thought all delightfully—later in the season, when the

freedom of the field struck me as pure benefit. I was not, at the end of

February, really to meet it (as I had looked for it) before crossing the

Florida line; but toward the middle of June I was to meet it,

enchantingly, at Baltimore, and this, then, as I had not stopped there

in my previous course, was, even beyond the wondrous February Florida,

to reveal to me, grateful for any such favour, the South in her

freshness. The freshness was in part, no doubt—and even perhaps to

extravagance—mine; I testify at all events first for Baltimore.

It would probably be again the freshness, of this confessedly subjective

sort, it would probably be again the state of alert response to any

favour of the class just hinted at; but the immediate effect of the

Maryland capital was to place it, to my troubled vision, and quite at

the head of its group, in a category of images and memories small at the

best and the charm of which casts a shadow, none the less, even as the

rose wears a thorn. I refer indeed in this slightly portentous figure to

the mere familiar truth that if representative values and the traceable

or the imaginable connections of things happen to have, on occasion, for

your eyes and your intelligence, an existence of any intensity, your

case, as a traveller, an observer, a reporter, is “bound” from the

first, under the stirred impression, to loom for you in some distressful

shape. These representative values and constructive connections, the

whole of the latent vividness of things, not only remain, under

expression, subject to no definite chemical test, no mathematical proof

whatever, but almost turn their charming backs and toss their wilful

heads at one’s poor little array of terms and equivalents. There thus

immediately rises for the lone visionary, betrayed and arrested in the

very act of vision, that spectre of impotence which dogs the footsteps

of perception and whose presence is like some poison-drop in the silver

cup. Baltimore put on for me, from the first glance, the form of the

silver cup filled with the mildest, sweetest decoction; but I had no

sooner begun to taste of it than I began to taste also of the infused

bitter. It had, in its way, during that first early hour or two of the

summer evening, a perfect felicity: which meant, for the touched

intelligence, that it was full of pleasantly-playing reference and

reflection, that it exhaled on the spot, as the word goes, an

atmosphere; that it wore, to contemplation, in fine, a character as

marked with mild accents as some faded old uniform is marked with

tarnished buttons and braid—albeit these sources of interest were too

closely of the texture to be snipped off, in the guise of patterns or

relics, by any mere sharp shears of journalism.

I arrived late in the day, and the day had been lovely; I alighted at a

large fresh peaceful hostelry, imposingly modern yet quietly affable,

and, having recognized the deep, soft general note, even from my

windows, as that of a kind of mollified vivacity, I sought the streets

with as many tacit questions as I judged they would tolerate, or as the

waning day would allow me to put. It took but that hour, as I strolled

in the early eventide, to give me the sense of the predicament I have

glanced at; that of finding myself committed to the view of Baltimore as

quite insidiously “sympathetic,” quite inordinately amiable—which

amounted, in other words, to the momentous proposition that she was

interesting—and still of wondering, by the same stroke, how I was to

make any such statement plausible. Character is founded on elements and

features, so many particular parts which conduce to an expression. So I

walked about the dear little city looking for the particular parts—all

with the singular effect of rather failing to find them and with my

impression of felicity at the same time persistently growing. The

felicity was certainly not that of a mere blank; there must accordingly

have been items and objects, signs and tokens, there must have been

causes of so charming a consequence; there must have been the little

numbers (not necessarily big, if only a tall enough column) for the

careful sum on my slate. What happened then, remarkably, was that while

I mechanically so argued my impression was fixing itself by a wild logic

of its own, and that I was presently to see how it would, when once

settled to a certain intensity, snap its fingers at warrants and

documents. If it was a question of a slate the slate was used, at

school, I remembered, for more than one purpose; so that mine, by my

walk’s end, instead of a show of neat ciphering, exhibited simply a bold

drawn image—which had the merit moreover of not being in the least a

caricature. The moral of this was precious—that of the fine impunity

with which, if one but had sensibility, the ciphering could be neglected

and in fact almost contemned: always, that is (and only) _with_ one’s

finer wits about one. Without them one was at best, really, nowhere—even

with “items” by the thousand; so that the place became, quite adorably,

a lesson in the use of that resource. It would be “no good” to a

journalist—for _he_ is nowhere, ever, without his items; but it would be

everything, always, to the mere restless analyst. He might by its aid

stand against all comers; and this alike in pleasure and in pain, in the

bruised or in the soothed condition. That was the real way to work

things out, and to feel it so brought home would by itself sufficiently

crown this particular small pilgrimage.