It was of course the fact that the “values” here were all such, and such
alone, as might be reflected from the social conditions and the state of
manners, even if reflected, for the hour, almost into empty space—it was
this that gave weight to each perceived appearance and permitted none to
show as trivial enough to project me, in reaction or in inanition, upon
the comparative obviousness of the “burnt district.” There is almost
always a burnt district to eke out the interest of an American city—it
is the pride of the citizen and the resource of the visitor when all
else fails; and I can scarce, I think, praise Baltimore so liberally as
to note that this was the last of her beauties I was conscious of. She
had lost by fire, a few months before, the greater part of her business
quarter, which she was now rapidly and artfully calling back to
existence; but the entertainment she offered me was guiltless, ever so
gracefully and gallantly guiltless, as it struck me, of reference, even
indirect, to the majesty either of ruin or of remedy. One was, on
further acquaintance, thoroughly beguiled, but the burnt district had so
little to do with it that the days came and went without my so much as
discovering its whereabouts. Wonderful little Baltimore, in which,
whether when perched on a noble eminence or passing from one seat of the
humanities, one seat of hospitality, to another—a process mainly
consisting indeed, as it seemed to me, of prompt drives through romantic
parks and woodlands that were all suburban yet all Arcadian—I caught no
glimpse of traffic, however mild, nor spied anything “tall” at the end
of any vista. This was in itself really a benediction, since I had
nowhere, from the first, been infatuated with tallness; I was infatuated
only with the question of manners, in their largest sense—to the finer
essence of which tallness had already defined itself to me as positively
abhorrent. What occurred betimes, and ever so happily, was simply that
the delicate blank of those first hours flushed into animation, and that
with this indeed the embroidery of the fine canvas turned thick and
rich. It came back again, no doubt, in the inveterate way, to the
University presence, and to the eagerness with which, on the American
scene, as I tire not, you see, of repeating, the visiting spirit, on
such occasions, throws itself straight into sanctuary. It breaks in at
any cost, this distracted appetite, and, recomposing the elements to
their greater distinction, if need be, and with a high imaginative hand,
makes of the combination obtained the only firm standpoint for the rest
of the view. It has even in this connection an occasional sharp chill;
air-borne rumours reach it of perversities and treacheries, conspiracies
possibly hatching in the very bosom of the temple and against its very
faith. One hears of the University idea threatened in more than one of
the great institutions—reduced to some pettifogging conception of a
short brisk term and a simplified culture; a lively thrifty training for
“business-competition.” This is a blow to the collective fond fancies
set humming, at once, in almost any scholastic shade—under the effect of
which one can but give one’s own scant scholar’s hood, while one winces,
a further protesting pull over abashed brows. It would have been a
question, very much, of what I call breaking-in (into the Johns Hopkins)
at this moment, had I not here been indulged, in all liberality, with an
impression the more charming, in a manner, for the fact of halls and
courts brooding in vacation stillness. Perversely adorable always—and I
scarce know why—the late afternoon light in deserted haunts of study;
with the secret of supreme dignity lurking, above all, in high, dusky,
wainscoted chambers where the sound of one’s footfall lingers, to one’s
pleasure, like a caress, and where portraits of the appurtenant
worthies, the heroes and patrons, grow vague in the twilight. It is a
tribute to the forces of idealism lurking again and again, over the
country, in the amenity of the general Collegiate appearance, that the
last thing these conditions overtly suggest, or seem to accept as their
imputed virtue, is this precipitation of the young intelligence into the
mere vociferous market.
I scarcely know why, however, I should have appeared, even by waving it
away, to make room at our banquet for the possible skeleton of the
false, the barbarizing, note; since the natural pitch of Baltimore, the
pictorial, so to speak, as well as the social, struck me, once a certain
contact established, as that of disinterested sensibility, the passion
of which her University is the highest and clearest example. There was
on the splendid Sunday in particular a warm, soft fusion of aspects—a
_con_fusion, in fact, while I now gather it in—which seems to defy,
though all unconsciously, the sharper edge of discrimination and to
offer itself, insistently, as a general wash of brave Southern shade,
the play of a liquid brush of which the North knows nothing. The
episodes melt together, yet they also, under a little pressure, come
happily apart, and over the large sun-chequered picture the generous
boughs hang heavy. Admirable I found them, the Maryland boughs, and so
immediately disposed about the fortunate town, by parkside and lonely
lane, by trackless hillside and tangled copse, that the depth of rural
effect becomes at once bewildering. You wonder at the absent
transitions, you look in vain for the shabby fringes—or at least, under
my spell, I did; you have never seen, on the lap of nature, so large a
burden so neatly accommodated. Baltimore sits there as some quite robust
but almost unnaturally good child might sit on the green apron of its
nurse, with no concomitant crease or crumple, no uncontrollable “mess,”
by the nursery term, to betray its temper. It was with something like
that figure before me that I kept communing, as I say, with the bland
presence. Even a morning hour or two at the great University
Hospital—for one’s experience of the higher tone, one’s irrepressible
pursuit of charm, in America, has, to its great enrichment, these odd
sequences—even that beginning of the day did nothing to obtrude the ugly
or to overemphasize the real; it simply contributed, under some
perversion that I can neither explain nor defend, to the general grace
of the picture. Why should the great Hospital, with its endless chambers
of woe, its whole air as of _most_ directly and advisedly facing, as the
hospitals of the world go, the question of the immensities of pain—why
should such an impression actually have turned, under the spell, to fine
poetry, to a mere shining vision of the conditions, the high beauty of
applied science? The conditions, positively, as I think of them after
the interval, make the poetry—the large art, above all, by which, in a
place bristling with its terrible tale, everything was made to seem
fair, and fairest even while it most intimately concurred in the work.
In short if the Hospital was fundamentally Universitarian—as of the
domain of the great Medical Faculty—so it partook for me, in its own
way, of the University glamour, and so the tempered morning, and the
shaded splendour, and the passive rows, the grim human alignments that
became, in their cool vistas, delicate “symphonies in white,” and, more
even than anything else, the pair of gallant young Doctors who ruled,
for me, so gently, the whole still concert, abide with me, collectively,
as agents of the higher tone.
No example could speak more of that enlargement of function, for
constituting some picture of life, which many an American element or
object, many an institution, has to be felt as practising—usually with
high success. It comes back, one notes for the thousandth time, to that
redistribution and reconsecration of values, of representative weight,
which it is _the_ interesting thing, over the land, to see take
effect—to see in special take all the effect of which it is capable.
There are a thousand “European” values that are absent, and, whether as
a consequence or not of that, there are innumerable felt solutions of
the social continuity. The instinct of missing—by which I mean not at
all either the consciousness or the confession of lacking—keeps up,
however, its own activity; for the theory at least of the native spirit
is to consent wittingly to no privation. It has a genius, the native
spirit, for desiring things of the existence, and even of the
possibility of which it is actually unaware, and it views the totality
of nature and the general life of man, I think, as more than anything
else commissioned and privileged to wait on these awakenings. Thus new
values arise as expansion proceeds; the marked character of which, for
comparative sociology, is that they are not at all as other values. What
they “count” for is the particular required American quantity; and we
see again and again how large a quantity symbol and figure have to
represent. The interesting thing is that, on the spot, the
representation does practically cover the ground: it covers elements
that in communities employing a different scale require for their
expression (and perhaps sometimes to an effect of waste) a much greater
number of terms. Hence the constant impression of elasticity, and that
of those pressures of necessity under which value and virtue, character
and quantity, greatness and glory even, to a considerable extent, are
imputed and projected. There has to be a facility for the working of any
social form—facility of comparison and selection in some communities,
facility of rapid conversion in others That is where the American
material is elastic, where it affects one, as a whole, in the manner of
some huge india-rubber cloth fashioned for “field” use and warranted to
bear inordinate stretching.
One becomes aware thus wherever one turns, both of the tension and of
the resistance; everything and every one, all objects and elements, all
systems, arrangements, institutions, functions, persons, reputations,
give the sense of their pulling hard at the india-rubber: almost always,
wonderfully, without breaking it off, yet never quite with the effect of
causing it to lie thick. The matter of interest, however, is just this
fact that its thinness should so generally—in some cases, to all intents
and purposes, so richly—suffice; suffice, that is, for producing
unaided, impressions of a sort that make their way to us in “Europe”
through superimposed densities, a thousand thicknesses of tradition.
Which is what one means, again, by the differing “values”; the thinness
doing perforce, on the one side, much of the work done by the thickness
on the other: the work, in particular, of the appeal to the fond
observer. He is by his very nature committed everywhere to his
impression—which means essentially, I think, that he is foredoomed, in
one place as in another, to “put in” a certain quantity of emotion and
reflection. The turn his sensibility takes depends of course on what is
before him; but when is it ever not in some manner exposed and alert? If
it be anything really of a touchstone it is more disposed, I hold, to
easy bargains than to hard ones; it only wants to be _somehow_
interested, and is not without the knowledge that an emotion is after
all, at the best or the worst, but an emotion. All of which is a
voluminous commentary, I admit, on the modest text that I perhaps made
the University Hospital stand for too many things. That establishes at
all events my contention—that the living fact, in the United States,
_will_ stand, other facts not preventing, for almost anything you may
ask of it. Other facts, at Baltimore, didn’t prevent—there being none,
outside the University circle, of any perceptibly public, any majestic
or impressive or competitive order. So it was as if this particular
experience had been (as the visitation of cities goes) that of _all_
present art and organization, that of all antiquity, history, piety,
sociability, that of the rich real and the rich romantic, in fine, at a
stroke. Had there been more to see and to feel I should possibly have
seen and felt more; yet what was absent, with this sense of feeling and
seeing so much?