One might have been sure in advance that the character of a democracy
would nowhere more sharply mark itself than in the democratic substitute
for a court city, and Washington is cast in the mould that expresses
most the absence of salient social landmarks and constituted features.
Here it is that conversation, as the only invoked presence, betrays a
little its inadequacy to the furnishing forth, all by itself, of an
outward view. It tells us it must be there, since in all the wide empty
vistas nothing else is, and the general elimination _can_ but have left
it. A pleading, touching effect, indeed, lurks in this sense of it as
seated, at receipt of custom, by any decent door of any decent domicile
and watching the vacancy for reminder and appeal. It is left to
conversation alone to people the scene with accents; putting aside two
or three objects to be specified, there is _never_ an accent in it, up
and down, far and wide, save such as fall rather on the ear of the mind:
those projected by the social spirit starved for the sense of an
occasional emphasis. The White House is an accent—one of the lightest,
sharpest possible; and the Capitol, of course, immensely, another;
though the latter falls on the exclusively political page, as to which I
have been waiting to say a word. It should meanwhile be mentioned that
we are promised these enhancements, these illustrations, of the great
general text, on the most magnificent scale; a splendid projected and
announced Washington of the future, with approaches even now grandly
outlined and massively marked; in face of which one should perhaps
confess to the futility of any current estimate. If I speak thus of the
Capitol, however, let me not merely brush past the White House to get to
it—any more than feel free to pass into it without some preliminary
stare at that wondrous Library of Congress which glitters in fresh and
almost unmannerly emulation, almost frivolous irrelevance of form, in
the neighbourhood of the greater building. About the ingenuities and
splendours of this last costly structure, a riot of rare material and
rich ornament, there would doubtless be much to say—did not one
everywhere, on all such ground, meet the open eye of criticism simply to
establish with it a private intelligence, simply to respond to it by a
deprecating wink. The guardian of that altar, I think, is but too
willing, on such a hint, to let one pass without the sacrifice.
It is a case again here, as on fifty other occasions, of the tribute
instantly paid by the revisiting spirit; but paid, all without question,
to the general _kind_ of presence for which the noisy air, over the
land, feels so sensibly an inward ache—the presence that corresponds
there, no matter how loosely, to that of the housing and harbouring
European Church in the ages of great disorder. The Universities and the
greater Libraries (the smaller, for a hundred good democratic reasons,
are another question), repeat, in their manner, to the imagination, East
and West, the note of the old thick-walled convents and quiet cloisters:
they are large and charitable, they are sturdy, often proud and often
rich, and they have the incalculable value that they represent the only
intermission to inordinate rapacious traffic that the scene offers to
view. With this suggestion of sacred ground they play even upon the most
restless of analysts as they will, making him face about, with ecstasy,
any way they seem to point; so that he feels it his business much less
to count over their shortcomings than to proclaim them places of
enchantment. They are better at their worst than anything else at its
best, and the comparatively sweet sounds that stir their theoretic
stillness are for him as echoes of the lyre of Apollo. The Congressional
Library is magnificent, and would become thus a supreme sanctuary even
were it ten times more so: there would seem to be nothing then but to
pronounce it a delight and have done with it—or let the appalled
imagination, in other words, slink into it and stay there. But here is
pressed precisely, with particular force, the spring of the question
that takes but a touch to sound: is the case of this remarkable
creation, by exception, a case in which the violent waving of the
pecuniary wand _has_ incontinently produced interest? The answer can
only be, I feel, a shy assent—though shy indeed only till the logic of
the matter is apparent. This logic is that, though money alone can
gather in on such a scale the treasures of knowledge, these treasures,
in the form of books and documents, themselves organize and furnish
their world. They appoint and settle the proportions, they thicken the
air, they people the space, they create and consecrate all their
relations, and no one shall say that, where they scatter life, which
they themselves in fact _are_, history does not promptly attend.
Emphatically yes, therefore, the great domed and tiered, galleried and
statued central hall of the Congressional, the last word of current
constructional science and artistic resource, already crowns itself with
that grace.
The graceful thing in Washington beyond any other, none the less, is the
so happily placed and featured White House, the late excellent
extensions and embellishments of which have of course represented
expenditure—but only of the refined sort imposed by some mature
portionless gentlewoman on relatives who have accepted the principle of
making her, at a time of life, more honourably comfortable. The whole
ample precinct and margin formed by the virtual continuity of its
grounds with those expanses in which the effect of the fine Washington
Obelisk rather spends or wastes itself (not a little as if some loud
monosyllable had been uttered, in a preoccupied company, without a due
production of sympathy or sense)—the fortunate isolation of the White
House, I say, intensifies its power to appeal to that musing and mooning
visitor whose perceptions alone, in all the conditions, I hold worthy of
account. Hereabouts, beyond doubt, history had from of old seemed to me
insistently seated, and I remember a short spring-time of years ago when
Lafayette Square itself, contiguous to the Executive Mansion, could
create a rich sense of the past by the use of scarce other witchcraft
than its command of that pleasant perspective and its possession of the
most prodigious of all Presidential effigies, Andrew Jackson, as archaic
as a Ninevite king, prancing and rocking through the ages. If that
atmosphere, moreover, in the fragrance of the Washington April, was even
a quarter of a century since as a liquor of bitter-sweet taste,
overflowing its cup, what was the ineffable mixture now, with all the
elements further distilled, all the life further sacrificed, to make it
potent? One circled about the place as for meeting the ghosts, and one
paused, under the same impulse, before the high palings of the White
House drive, as if wondering at haunted ground. There the ghosts stood
in their public array, spectral enough and clarified; yet scarce making
it easier to “place” the strange, incongruous blood-drops, as one looked
through the rails, on that revised and freshened page. But one
fortunately has one’s choice, in all these connections, as one turns
away; the mixture, as I have called it, is really here so fine. General
Jackson, in the centre of the Square, still rocks his hobby and the
earth; but the fruit of the interval, to my actual eyes, hangs nowhere
brighter than in the brilliant memorials lately erected to Lafayette and
to Rochambeau. Artful, genial, expressive, the tribute of French talent,
these happy images supply, on the spot, the note without which even the
most fantasticating sense of our national past would feel itself rub
forever against mere brown homespun. Everything else gives way, for me,
I confess, as I again stand before them; everything, whether as historic
fact, or present _agrément_, or future possibility, yields to this one
high luxury of our old friendship with France.
The “artistic” Federal city already announced spreads itself then before
us, in plans elaborated even to the finer details, a city of palaces and
monuments and gardens, symmetries and circles and far radiations, with
the big Potomac for water-power and water-effect and the recurrent
Maryland spring, so prompt and so full-handed, for a perpetual
benediction. This imagery has, above all, the value, for the considering
mind, that it presents itself as under the wide-spread wings of the
general Government, which fairly make it figure to the rapt vision as
the object caught up in eagle claws and lifted into fields of air that
even the high brows of the municipal boss fail to sweep. The wide-spread
wings affect us, in the prospect, as great fans that, by their mere
tremor, will blow the work, at all steps and stages, clean and clear,
disinfect it quite ideally of any germ of the job, and prepare thereby
for the American voter, on the spot and in the pride of possession,
quite a new kind of civic consciousness. The scheme looms largest,
surely, as a demonstration of the possibilities of that service to him,
and nothing about it will be more interesting than to measure—though
this may take time—the nature and degree of his alleviation. Will the
new pride I speak of sufficiently inflame him? Will the taste of the new
consciousness, finding him so fresh to it, prove the right medicine? One
can only regret that we must still rather indefinitely wait to see—and
regret it all the more that there is always, in America, yet another
lively source of interest involved in the execution of such designs, and
closely involved just in proportion as the high intention, the formal
majesty, of the thing seems assured. It comes back to what we constantly
feel, throughout the country, to what the American scene everywhere
depends on for half its appeal or its effect; to the fact that the
social conditions, the material, pressing and pervasive, make the
particular experiment or demonstration, whatever it may pretend to,
practically a new and incalculable thing. This general Americanism is
often the one tag of character attaching to the case after every other
appears to have abandoned it. The thing is happening, or will have to
happen, in the American way—that American way which is more different
from all other native ways, taking country with country, than any of
these latter are different from each other; and the question is of how,
each time, the American way will see it through.
The element of suspense—beguilement, ever, of the sincere observer—is
provided for by the fact that, though this American way never fails to
come up, he has to recognize as by no means equally true that it never
fails to succeed. It is inveterately applied, but with consequences
bewilderingly various; which means, however, for our present moral, but
that the certainty of the _determined_ American effect is an element to
attend quite especially such a case as the employment of the arts of
design, on an unprecedented scale, for public uses, the adoption on this
scale of the whole æsthetic law. Encountered in America, phenomena of
this order strike us mostly as occurring in the historic void, as having
to present themselves in the hard light of that desert, and as needing
to extort from it, so far as they can, something of the shading of their
interest. Encountered in older countries, they show, on the contrary, as
taking up the references, as consenting perforce to the relations, of
which the air is already full, and as having thereby much rather to get
themselves expressive by charm than to get themselves expressive by
weight. The danger “in Europe” is of their having too many things to
say, and too many others to distinguish these from; the danger in the
States is of their not having things enough—with enough tone and
resonance furthermore to give them. What therefore will the
multitudinous and elaborate forms of the Washington to come have to
“say,” and what, above all, besides gold and silver, stone and marble
and trees and flowers, will they be able to say it _with_? That is one
of the questions in the mere phrasing of which the restless analyst
finds a thrill. There is a thing called interest that has to be produced
for him—positively as if he were a rabid usurer with a clutch of his
imperilled bond. He has seen again and again how the most expensive
effort often fails to lead up to interest, and he has seen how it may
bloom in soil of no more worth than so many layers of dust and ashes. He
has learnt in fact—he learns greatly in America—to mistrust any plea for
it _directly_ made by money, which operates too often as the great
puffing motor-car framed for whirling him, in his dismay, quite away
from it. And he has inevitably noted, at the same time, from how
comparatively few other sources this rewarding dividend on his invested
attention may be drawn. He thinks of these sources as few, that is,
because he sees the same ones, which are the references by which
interest is fed, used again and again, with a desperate economy; sees
the same ones, even as the human heroes, celebrities, extemporized lions
or scapegoats, required social and educational figure-heads and
“values,” having to serve in _all_ the connections and adorn all the
tales. That is one of the liveliest of his American impressions. He has
at moments his sense that, in presence of such vast populations and
instilled, emulous demands, there is not, outside the mere economic,
enough native history, recorded or current, to go round.
V
It seemed to me on the spot, moreover, that such reflections were rather
more than less pertinent in face of the fact that I was again to find
the Capitol, whenever I approached, and above all whenever I entered it,
a vast and many-voiced creation. The thing depends of course somewhat on
the visitor, who will be the more responsive, I think, the further back
into the “origins” of the whole American spectacle his personal vision
shall carry him; but this hugest, as I suppose it, of all the homes of
debate only asks to put forth, on opportunity, an incongruous, a
various, an inexhaustible charm. I may as well say at once that I had
found myself from the first adoring the Capitol, though I may not
pretend here to dot all the i’s of all my reasons—since some of these
might appear below the dignity of the subject and others alien to its
simplicity. The ark of the American covenant may strike one thus, at any
rate, as a compendium of all the national ideals, a museum, crammed
full, even to overflowing, of all the national terms and standards,
weights and measures and emblems of greatness and glory, and indeed as a
builded record of half the collective vibrations of a people; their
conscious spirit, their public faith, their bewildered taste, their
ceaseless curiosity, their arduous and interrupted education. Such were
to my vision at least some of its aspects, but the place had a hundred
sides, and if I had had time to look for others still I felt I should
have found them. What it comes to—whereby the “pull,” in America, is of
the greatest—is that association really reigns there, and in the
richest, and even again and again in the drollest, forms; it is thick
and vivid and almost gross, it assaults the wondering mind. The
labyrinthine pile becomes thus inordinately _amusing_—taking the term in
its finer modern sense. The analogy may seem forced, but it affected me
as playing in Washington life very much the part that St. Peter’s, of
old, had seemed to me to play in Roman: it offered afternoon
entertainment, at the end of a longish walk, to any spirit in the humour
for the uplifted and flattered vision—and this without suggesting that
the sublimities in the two cases, even as measured by the profanest
mind, tend at all to be equal. The Washington dome is indeed capable, in
the Washington air, of admirable, of sublime, effects; and there are
cases in which, seen at a distance above its yellow Potomac, it varies
but by a shade from the sense—yes, absolutely the divine
campagna-sense—of St. Peter’s and the like-coloured Tiber.
But the question is positively of the impressiveness of the great
terraced Capitol hill, with its stages and slopes, staircases and
fountains, its general presentation of its charge. And if the whole mass
and prospect “amuse,” as I say, from the moment they are embraced, the
visitor curious of the _democratic assimilation_ of the greater
dignities and majesties will least miss the general logic. That is the
light in which the whole thing is supremely interesting; the light of
the fact, illustrated at every turn, that the populations maintaining it
deal with it so directly and intimately, so sociably and humorously. We
promptly take in that, if ever we are to commune in a concentrated way
with the sovereign people, and see their exercised power raise a
side-wind of irony for forms and arrangements other than theirs, the
occasion here will amply serve. Indubitably, moreover, at a hundred
points, the irony operates, and all the more markedly under such
possible interference; the interference of the monumental spittoons,
that of the immense amount of vulgar, of barbaric, decoration, that of
the terrible artistic tributes from, and scarce less to, the different
States—the unassorted marble mannikins in particular, each a portrayal
by one of the commonwealths of her highest worthy, which make the great
Rotunda, the intended Valhalla, resemble a stonecutter’s collection of
priced sorts and sizes. Discretion exists, throughout, only as a flower
of the very first or of these very latest years; the large middle time,
corresponding, and even that unequally, with the English Victorian, of
sinister memory, was unacquainted with the name, and waits there now, in
its fruits, but for a huge sacrificial fire, some far-flaring
act-of-faith of the future: a tribute to the æsthetic law which one
already feels stirring the air, so that it may arrive, I think, with an
unexampled stride. Nothing will have been more interesting, surely, than
so public a wiping-over of the æsthetic slate, with all the involved
collective compunctions and repudiations, the general exhibition of a
colossal conscience, a conscience proportionate to the size and wealth
of the country. To such grand gestures does the American scene lend
itself!
The elements in question are meanwhile there, in any case, just as the
sovereign people are there, “going over” their property; but we are
aware none the less of impressions—that of the ponderous proud Senate,
for instance, so sensibly massive; that of the Supreme Court, so simply,
one almost says so chastely, yet, while it breathes supremacy, so
elegantly, so all intellectually, in session—under which the view,
taking one extravagance with another, recurs rather ruefully to glimpses
elsewhere caught, glimpses of authority emblazoned, bewigged, bemantled,
bemarshalled, in almost direct defeat of its intention of gravity. For
the reinstated absentee, in these presences, the mere recovery of native
privilege was at all events a balm—after too many challenged appeals and
abused patiences, too many hushed circuitous creepings, among the
downtrodden, in other and more bristling halls of state. The sense of a
certain large, final benignity in the Capitol comes then, I think, from
this impression that the national relation to it is that of a huge
flourishing Family to the place of business, the estate-office, where,
in a myriad open ledgers, which offer no obscurity to the hereditary
head for figures, the account of their colossal revenue is kept. They
meet there in safe sociability, as all equally initiated and
interested—not as in a temple or a citadel, but by the warm domestic
hearth of Columbia herself; a motherly, chatty, clear-spectacled
Columbia, who reads all the newspapers, knows, to the last man, every
one of her sons by name, and, to the last boy, even her grandsons, and
is fenced off, at the worst, but by concentric circles of
rocking-chairs. It is impossible, as I say, not to be fondly conscious
of her welcome—unless again, and yet again, I read into the general air,
confusedly, too much of the happy accident of the basis of my
introduction. But if my sensibility responds with intensity to this, so
much the better; for what were such felt personal aids and influences,
after all, but cases and examples, embodied expressions of character,
type, distinction, products of the _working_ of the whole
thing?—specimens, indeed, highly concentrated and refined, and made
thereby, I admit, more charming and insidious.
It must also be admitted that to exchange the inner aspects of the vast
monument for the outer is to be reminded with some sharpness of a
Washington in which half the sides that have held our attention drop, as
if rather abashed, out of sight. Not its pleasant brightness as of a
winter watering-place, not its connections, however indirect, with the
older, but those with the newer, the newest, civilization, seem matter
of recognition for its various marble fronts; it rakes the prospect, it
rakes the continent, to a much more sweeping purpose, and is visibly
concerned but in immeasurable schemes of which it can consciously remain
the centre. Here, in the vast spaces—mere empty light and air, though
such pleasant air and such pretty light as yet—the great Federal future
seems, under vague bright forms, to hover and to stalk, making the
horizon recede to take it in, making the terraces too, below the long
colonnades, the admirable standpoints, the sheltering porches, of
political philosophy. The comparatively new wings of the building filled
me, whenever I walked here, with thanksgiving for their large and
perfect elegance: so, in Paris, might the wide mated fronts that are of
such a noble effect on either side of the Rue Royale shine in multiplied
majesty and recovered youth over an infinite Place de la Concorde. These
parts of the Capitol, on their Acropolis height, are ideally constructed
for “raking,” and for this suggestion of their dominating the American
scene in playhouse gallery fashion. You are somehow possessed of it
_all_ while you tread them—their marble embrace appears so the
complement of the vast democratic lap. Though I had them in general, for
contemplation, quite to myself, I met one morning a trio of Indian
braves, braves dispossessed of forest and prairie, but as free of the
builded labyrinth as they had ever been of these; also arrayed in neat
pot-hats, shoddy suits and light overcoats, with their pockets, I am
sure, full of photographs and cigarettes: circumstances all that
quickened their resemblance, on the much bigger scale, to Japanese
celebrities, or to specimens, on show, of what the Government can do
with people with whom it is supposed able to do nothing. They seemed
just then and there, for a mind fed betimes on the Leatherstocking
Tales, to project as in a flash an image in itself immense, but
foreshortened and simplified—reducing to a single smooth stride the
bloody footsteps of time. One rubbed one’s eyes, but there, at its
highest polish, shining in the beautiful day, was the brazen face of
history, and there, all about one, immaculate, the printless pavements
of the State.
XII
RICHMOND
I
It was, toward the end of the winter, fairly romantic to feel one’s self
“going South”—in verification of the pleasant probability that, since
one’s mild adventure had appeared beforehand, and as a whole, to promise
that complexion, there would now be aspects and occasions more
particularly and deeply dyed with it. The inevitability of his being
romantically affected—being so more often than not—had been taken for
granted by the restless analyst from the first; his feeling that he
might count upon it having indeed, in respect to his visit, the force of
a strong appeal. The case had come to strike him as perfectly clear—the
case for the singular history, the odd evolution of this confidence,
which might appear superficially to take some explaining. It was
“Europe” that had, in very ancient days, held out to the yearning young
American some likelihood of impressions more numerous and various and of
a higher intensity than those he might gather on the native scene; and
it was doubtless in conformity with some such desire more finely and
more frequently to vibrate that he had originally begun to consult the
European oracle. This had led, in the event, to his settling to live for
long years in the very precincts, as it were, of the temple; so that the
voice of the divinity was finally to become, in his ears, of all sounds
the most familiar. It was quite to lose its primal note of mystery, to
cease little by little to be strange, impressive and august—in the
degree, at any rate, in which it had once enjoyed that character. The
consultation of the oracle, in a word, the invocation of the possible
thrill, was gradually to feel its romantic essence enfeebled, shrunken
and spent. The European complexity, working clearer to one’s vision, had
grown usual and calculable—presenting itself, to the discouragement of
wasteful emotion and of “intensity” in general, as the very stuff, the
common texture, of the real world. Romance and mystery—in other words
the _amusement_ of interest—would have therefore at last to provide for
themselves elsewhere; and what curiously befell, in time, was that the
native, the forsaken scene, now passing, as continual rumour had it,
through a thousand stages and changes, and offering a perfect
iridescence of fresh aspects, seemed more and more to appeal to the
faculty of wonder. It was American civilization that had begun to spread
itself thick and pile itself high, in short, in proportion as the other,
the foreign exhibition had taken to writing itself plain; and to a world
so amended and enriched, accordingly, the expatriated observer, with his
relaxed curiosity reviving and his limp imagination once more on the
stretch, couldn’t fail again to address himself. Nothing could be of a
simpler and straighter logic: Europe had been romantic years before,
because she was different from America; wherefore America would now be
romantic because she was different from Europe. It was for this small
syllogism then to meet, practically, the test of one’s repatriation; and
as the palpitating pilgrim disembarked, in truth, he had felt it, like
the rifle of a keen sportsman, carried across his shoulder and ready for
instant use.
What employment it was thus to find, what game it was actually to bring
down, this directed and aimed appetite for sharp impressions, is a
question to which these pages may appear in a manner to
testify—constituting to that extent the “proof” of my fond calculation.
It was in respect to the South, meanwhile, at any rate, that the
calculation had really been fondest—on such a stored, such a waiting
provision of vivid images, mainly beautiful and sad, might one surely
there depend. The sense of these things would represent for the restless
analyst, more than that of any others, intensity of impression; so that
his only prime discomfiture was in his having had helplessly to see his
allowance of time cut short, reduced to the smallest compass in which
the establishment of a relation to any group of aspects might be held
conceivable. This last soreness, however—and the point is one to be
made—was not slow, I noted, to find itself healingly breathed upon. More
promptly in America than elsewhere does the relation to the group of
aspects begin to work—whatever the group, and I think I may add whatever
the relation, may be. Few elements of the picture are shy or lurking
elements—tangled among others or hidden behind them, packed close by
time and taking time to come out. They stand there in their row like the
letters of an alphabet, and this is why, in spite of the vast surface
exposed, any item, encountered or selected, contributes to the spelling
of the word, becomes on the spot generally informing and characteristic.
The word so recognized stands thus, immediately, for a multitude of
others and constitutes, to expert observation, an all-sufficient
specimen. “Here, evidently, more quickly than in Europe,” the visitor
says to himself, “one knows what there is and what there isn’t: whence
there is the less need, for one’s impression, of a multiplication of
cases.” A single case speaks for many—since it is again and again, as he
catches himself repeating, a question not of clustered meanings that
fall like over-ripe fruit into his lap, but of the picking out of the
few formed features, signs of character mature enough and firm enough to
promise a savour or to suffer handling. These scant handfuls illustrate
and typify, and, luckily, they are (as the evidence of manners and
conditions, over the world, goes) quickly gathered; so that an
impression founded on them is not an undue simplification. And I make
out, I think, the reflection with which our anxious explorer tacitly
concludes. “It’s a bad country to be stupid in—none on the whole so bad.
If one doesn’t know _how_ to look and to see, one should keep out of it
altogether. But if one does, if one _can_ see straight, one takes in the
whole piece at a series of points that are after all comparatively few.
One may neglect, by interspacing the points, a little of the accessory
matter, but one neglects none of the essential. And if one has not at
last learned to separate with due sharpness, pen in hand, the essential
_from_ the accessory, one has only, at best, to muffle one’s head for
shame and await deserved extinction.”