II

It was in conformity with some such induction as the foregoing that I

had to feel myself, at Richmond, in the midst of abnormal wintry

rigours, take in at every pore a Southern impression; just as it was

also there, before a picture charmless at the best, I seemed to

apprehend, and not redeemed now by mistimed snow and ice, that I was to

recognize how much I had staked on my theory of the latent poetry of the

South. This theory, during a couple of rather dark, vain days,

constituted my one solace or support, and I was most of all occupied

with my sense of the importance of carrying it off again unimpaired. I

remember asking myself at the end of an hour or two what I had then

expected—expected of the interesting Richmond; and thereupon, whether or

no I mustered, on this first challenge, an adequate answer, trying to

supply the original basis of expectation. By that effort, as happened,

my dim perambulation was lighted, and I hasten to add that I felt the

second branch of my question easy enough to meet. How was the sight of

Richmond not to be a potent idea; how was the place not, presumably, to

be interesting, to a restless analyst who had become conscious of the

charge involved in that title as long ago as at the outbreak of the

Civil War, if not even still more promptly; and to whose young

imagination the Confederate capital had grown lurid, fuliginous, vividly

tragic—especially under the process through which its fate was to close

round it and overwhelm it, invest it with one of the great reverberating

historic names? They hang together on the dreadful page, the cities of

the supreme holocaust, the final massacres, the blood, the flames, the

tears; they are chalked with the sinister red mark at sight of which the

sensitive nerve of association forever winces. If the mere shadow had

that penetrative power, what affecting virtue might accordingly not

reside in the substances, the place itself, the haunted scene, as one

might figure it, of the old, the vast intensity of drama? One thing at

least was certain—that, however the sense of actual aspects was to

disengage itself, I could not possibly have drawn near with an

intelligence more respectfully and liberally prepared for hospitality to

it. So, conformably with all this, how could it further not strike me,

in presence of the presented appearances, that the needful perceptions

were in fact at play?

I recall the shock of that question after a single interrogative stroll,

a mere vague mile of which had thrown me back wondering and a trifle

mystified. One had had brutally to put it to one’s self after a

conscientious stare about: “This then the tragic ghost-haunted city,

this the centre of the vast blood-drenched circle, one of the _most_

blood-drenched, for miles and miles around, in the dire catalogue

aforesaid?” One had counted on a sort of registered consciousness of the

past, and the truth was that there appeared, for the moment, on the face

of the scene, no discernible consciousness, registered or unregistered,

of anything. Richmond, in a word, looked to me simply blank and

void—whereby it was, precisely, however, that the great emotion was to

come. One could never consent merely to _taking_ it for that:

intolerable the discredit so cast on one’s perceptive resources. The

great modern hotel, superfluously vast, was excellent; but it enjoyed as

a feature, as a “value,” an uncontested priority. It was a huge

well-pitched tent, the latest thing in tents, proclaiming in the desert

the name of a new industry. The desert, I have mentioned, was more or

less muffled in snow—that furthered, I admit, the blankness; the wind

was harsh, the sky sullen, the houses scarce emphasized at all as

houses; the “Southern character,” in fine, was nowhere. I should

doubtless have been embarrassed to say in what specific items I had

imagined it would naturally reside—save in so far as I had attached some

mystic virtue to the very name of Virginia: this instinctive imputation

constituting by itself, for that matter, a symptom of a certain

significance. I watched and waited, giving the virtue a chance to come

out; I wandered far and wide—as far, that is, as weather and season

permitted; they quite forbade, to my regret, the long drives involved in

a visitation of the old battlefields. The shallow vistas, the loose

perspectives, were as sadly simple as the faces of the blind. Was it

practically but a question then, deplorable thought, of a poor Northern

city?—with the bare difference that a Northern city of such extent

would, however stricken, have succeeded, by some Northern art in

pretending to resources. Where, otherwise, were the “old Southern

mansions” on the wide verandahs and in the rank, sweet gardens of which

Northern resources had once been held so cheap?

Well, I scarce remember at what point of my peregrination, at what quite

vague, senseless street-corner it was that I felt my inquiry—up to that

moment rather embarrassing—turn to clearness and the whole picture place

itself in a light in which contemplation might for the time find a

warrant and a clue. I at any rate almost like to live over the few

minutes in question—for the sake of their relief and their felicity. So

retracing them, I see that the spring had been pressed for them by the

positive force of one’s first dismay; a sort of intellectual bankruptcy,

this latter, that one felt one really couldn’t afford. There were no

_references_—that had been the trouble; but the reaction came with the

sense that the large, sad poorness was in itself a reference, and one by

which a hundred grand historic connections were on the spot, and quite

thrillingly, re-established. What was I tasting of, at that time of day,

and with intensity, but the far consequences of things, made absolutely

majestic by their weight and duration? I was tasting, mystically, of the

very essence of the old Southern idea—the hugest fallacy, as it hovered

there to one’s backward, one’s ranging vision, for which hundreds of

thousands of men had ever laid down their lives. I was tasting of the

very bitterness of the immense, grotesque, defeated project—the project,

extravagant, fantastic, and to-day pathetic in its folly, of a vast

Slave State (as the old term ran) artfully, savingly isolated in the

world that was to contain it and trade with it. This was what everything

round me meant—that that absurdity had once flourished there; and

nothing, immediately, could have been more interesting than the lesson

that such may remain, for long years, the tell-tale face of things where

such absurdities _have_ flourished. Thus, by a turn of my hand, or of my

head, interest was evoked; so that from this moment I had never to let

go of it. It was to serve again, it was to serve elsewhere, and in much

the same manner; all aspects straightway were altered by it, and the

pious pilgrim came round again into his own. He had wanted, his scheme

had fairly required, this particular part of the country to be

beautiful; he had really needed it to be, he couldn’t afford, in due

deference to the intellectual economy imposed on him, its not being.

When things were grandly sad, accordingly—sad on the great scale and

with a certain nobleness of ruin—an element of beauty seemed always

secured, even if one could scarce say why: which truth, clearly, would

operate fortunately for the compromised South.

It came back again—it was always, after this fashion, coming back, as if

to make me extravagantly repeat myself—to the quantity to be “read into”

the American view, in general, before it gives out an interest. The

observer, like a fond investor, must spend on it, boldly, ingeniously,

to make it pay; and it may often thus remind one of the wonderful soil

of California, which is nothing when left to itself and the fine

weather, but becomes everything conceivable under the rainfall. What

would many an American prospect be for him, the visitor bent on

appreciation frequently wonders, without his preliminary discharge upon

it of some brisk shower of general ideas? The arid sand has, in a

remarkable degree, the fine property of absorbing these latter and then

giving them back to the air in proportionate signs of life. There be

blooming gardens, on the other hand, I take it, where the foliage of

Time is positively too dense for the general idea to penetrate or to

perch—as if too many ideas had already been concerned and involved and

there were nothing to do but to accept the complete demonstration. It

was not to this order, at any rate, that my decipherable South was to

belong; but Richmond at least began to repay my outlay, from point to

point, as soon as the outlay had been made. The place was

_weak_—“adorably” weak: that was the word into which the whole

impression flowered, that was the idea, evidently, that all the rest of

the way as well, would be most brought home. That was the form, in

short, that the interest would take; the charm—immense, almost

august—being in the long, unbroken connections of the case. Here,

obviously, would be the prime source of the beauty; since if to be sad

was to be the reverse of blatant, what was the sadness, taken all round,

but the incurable after-taste of the original vanity and fatuity, with

the memories and penalties of which the very air seemed still charged? I

had recently been studying, a little, the record, reading, with other

things, the volume of his admirable History in which Mr. James Ford

Rhoades recounts the long preliminaries of the War and shows us, all

lucidly and humanely, the Southern mind of the mid-century in the very

convulsions of its perversity—the conception that, almost comic in

itself, was yet so tragically to fail to work, that of a world

rearranged, a State solidly and comfortably seated and tucked in, in the

interest of slave-produced Cotton.

The solidity and the comfort were to involve not only the wide

extension, but the complete intellectual, moral and economic

reconsecration of slavery, an enlarged and glorified, quite beatified,

application of its principle. The light of experience, round about, and

every finger-post of history, of political and spiritual science with

which the scene of civilization seemed to bristle, had, when questioned,

but one warning to give, and appeared to give it with an effect of huge

derision: whereby was laid on the Southern genius the necessity of

getting rid of these discords and substituting for the ironic face of

the world an entirely new harmony, or in other words a different scheme

of criticism. Since nothing in the Slave-scheme could be said to

conform—conform, that is, to the reality of things—it was the plan of

Christendom and the wisdom of the ages that would have to be altered.

History, the history of everything, would be rewritten _ad usum

Delphini_—the Dauphin being in this case the budding Southern mind. This

meant a general and a permanent quarantine; meant the eternal

bowdlerization of books and journals; meant in fine all literature and

all art on an expurgatory index. It meant, still further, an active and

ardent propaganda; the reorganization of the school, the college, the

university, in the interest of the new criticism. The testimony to that

thesis offered by the documents of the time, by State legislation, local

eloquence, political speeches, the “tone of the press,” strikes us

to-day as beyond measure queer and quaint and benighted—innocent above

all; stamped with the inalienable Southern sign, the inimitable _rococo_

note. We talk of the provincial, but the provinciality projected by the

Confederate dream, and in which it proposed to steep the whole helpless

social mass, looks to our present eyes as artlessly perverse, as

untouched by any intellectual tradition of beauty or wit, as some

exhibited array of the odd utensils or divinities of lone and primitive

islanders. It came over one that they _were_ there, in the air they had

breathed, precisely, lone—even the very best of the old Southerners;

and, looking at them over the threshold of approach that poor Richmond

seemed to form, the real key to one’s sense of their native scene was in

that very idea of their solitude and their isolation. Thus they affected

one as such passive, such pathetic victims of fate, as so played upon

and betrayed, so beaten and bruised, by the old burden of their

condition, that I found myself conscious, on their behalf, of a sort of

ingenuity of tenderness.

Their condition was to have waked up from far back to this thumping

legacy of the intimate presence of the negro, and one saw them not much

less imprisoned in it and overdarkened by it to-day than they had been

in the time of their so fallacious presumption. The haunting

consciousness thus produced is the prison of the Southern spirit; and

how was one to say, as a pilgrim from afar, that with an equal exposure

to the embarrassing fact one would have been more at one’s ease? I had

found my own threatened, I remember—my ease of contemplation of the

subject, which was all there could be question of—during some ten

minutes spent, a few days before, in consideration of an African type or

two encountered in Washington. I was waiting, in a cab, at the

railway-station, for the delivery of my luggage after my arrival, while

a group of tatterdemalion darkies lounged and sunned themselves within

range. To take in with any attention two or three of these figures had

surely been to feel one’s self introduced at a bound to the formidable

question, which rose suddenly like some beast that had sprung from the

jungle. These were its far outposts; they represented the Southern black

as we knew him not, and had not within the memory of man known him, at

the North; and to see him there, ragged and rudimentary, yet all

portentous and “in possession of his rights as a man,” was to be not a

little discomposed, was to be in fact very much admonished. One

understood at a glance how he must loom, how he must count, in a

community in which, in spite of the ground it might cover, there were

comparatively so few other things. The admonition accordingly remained,

and no further appeal was required, I felt, to disabuse a tactful mind

of the urgency of preaching, southward, a sweet reasonableness about

him. Nothing was less contestable, of course, than that such a sweet

reasonableness might play, in the whole situation, a beautiful part; but

nothing, also, was on reflection more obvious than that the counsel of

perfection, in such a case, would never prove oil upon the waters. The

lips of the non-resident were, at all events, not the lips to utter this

wisdom; the non-resident might well feel themselves indeed, after a

little, appointed to silence, and, with any delicacy, see their duty

quite elsewhere.

It came to one, soon enough, by all the voices of the air, that the

negro had always been, and could absolutely not fail to be, intensely

“on the nerves” of the South, and that as, in the other time, the

observer from without had always, as a tribute to this truth, to tread

the scene on tiptoe, so even yet, in presence of the immitigable fact, a

like discretion is imposed on him. He might depart from the discretion

of old, if he were so moved, intrusively, fanatically, even heroically,

and he would depart from it to-day, one quite recognized, with the same

effect of importunity, but not with the same effect of gallantry. The

moral of all of which fairly became, to my sense, a soft inward dirge

over the eternal “false position” of the afflicted South—condemned as

she was to institutions, condemned to a state of temper, of exasperation

and depression, a horrid heritage she had never consciously invited,

that bound up her life with a hundred mistakes and make-believes,

suppressions and prevarications, things that really all named themselves

in the noted provincialism. None of them would have lived in the air of

the greater world—which was the world that the North, with whatever

abatements, had comparatively been, and had conquered by being; so that

if the actual visitor was conscious now, as I say, of the appeal to his

tenderness, it was by this sight of a society still shut up in a world

smaller than what one might suppose its true desire, to say nothing of

its true desert. I can doubtless not sufficiently tell why, but there

was something in my whole sense of the South that projected at moments a

vivid and painful image—that of a figure somehow blighted or stricken,

discomfortably, impossibly seated in an invalid-chair, and yet fixing

one with strange eyes that were half a defiance and half a deprecation

of one’s noticing, and much more of one’s referring to, any abnormal

sign. The deprecation, in the Southern eyes, is much greater to-day, I

think, than the old lurid challenge; but my haunting similitude was an

image of the keeping-up of appearances, and above all of the maintenance

of a tone, the historic “high” tone, in an excruciating posture. There

was food for sympathy—and the restless analyst must repeat that when he

had but tasted of it he could but make of it his full meal. Which brings

him back, by a long way round, to the grim street-corner at Richmond

where he last left himself.