The Public Libraries in the United States are, like the Universities,
a challenge to fond fancy; by which I mean that, if, taken together,
they bathe the scene with a strange hard light of their own, the
individual institution may often affect the strained pilgrim as a
blessedly restful perch. It constitutes, in its degree, wherever met,
a more explicit plea for the amenities, or at least a fuller
exhibition of them, than the place is otherwise likely to contain; and
I remember comparing them, inwardly, after periods of stress and
dearth, after long, vacant stretches, to the mast-heads on which spent
birds sometimes alight in the expanses of ocean. Their function for
the student of manners is by no means exhausted with that
attribute—they project, through the use made of them, twenty
interesting sidelights; but it was by that especial restorative, that
almost romantic character I have just glanced at, that I found myself
most solicited. It is to the inordinate value, in the picture, of the
non-commercial, non-industrial, non-financial note that they owe their
rich relief; being, with the Universities, as one never wearied of
noting, charged with the _whole_ expression of that part of the
national energy that is not calculable in terms of mere arithmetic.
They appeared to express it, at times, I admit, the strange national
energy, in terms of mere subjection to the spell of the last
“seller”—the new novel, epidemically swift, the ubiquity of which so
mirrors the great continental conditions of unity, equality and
prosperity; but this view itself was compatible with one’s sense of
their practical bid for the effect of distinction. There are a hundred
applications of the idea of civilization which, in a given place,
outside its Library, would be all wrong, if conceivably attempted, and
yet that immediately become right, incur in fact the highest sanction,
on passing that threshold. They often more or less fail of course,
they sometimes completely fail, to assert themselves even within the
precinct; but one at least feels that the precinct attends on them,
waits and confessedly yearns for them, consents indeed to be a
precinct only on the understanding that they shall not be forever
delayed. I wondered, everywhere, under stress of this perception, at
the general associations of the word that best describes them and that
remains so quaintly and admirably _their_ word even when their supreme
right in it is most vulgarly and loudly disputed. They are the _rich_
presences, even in the “rich” places, among the sky-scrapers, the
newspaper-offices, the highly-rented pews and the billionaires, and
they assert, with a blest imperturbable serenity, not only that
everything would be poor without them, but that even with them much is
as yet deplorably poor. They in fact so inexorably establish this
truth that when they are in question they leave little to choose, I
think, round about them, between the seats of wealth and the seats of
comparative penury: they are intrinsically so much more interesting
than either.
Was it then because Richmond at large, the “old” Richmond, seemed to lie
there in its icy shroud with the very dim smile of modesty, the invalid
gentleness, of a patient who has been freely bled—was it through profit
of this impression that the town Library struck me as flushing with
colour and resource, with confidence and temperament? The beauty of the
matter is that these _penetralia_, to carry it off as they do, call to
their aid, of necessity, no great store of possessions—play their trick,
if they must, with the mildest rarities. It sufficed, really, at
Richmond, that the solid structure—ample and detached indeed, and
keeping, where it stood, the best company the place could afford—should
make the affirmation furthest removed from the vain vaunt of the other
time, the pretence of a social order founded on delusions and
exclusions. Everything else was somehow, however indirectly, the bequest
of that sad age and partook more or less of its nature; this thing alone
either had nothing to do with it or had to do with it by an appealing, a
quite affecting lapse of logic—his half-hour’s appreciation of which had
for the restless analyst a positive melancholy sweetness. The place had
of course to be in its way a temple to the Confederate cause, but the
charm, in the spacious, “handsome,” convenient upper room, among books
of value and pictures of innocence, and glass cases of memorabilia more
refined than those of the collection I had previously visited, among
gentle readers, transported and oblivious, and the still gentler
specimens, if I rightly recollect, of the pale sisterhood of the
appointed and attendant fair who predominantly, throughout the States,
minister to intellectual appetite and perform the intellectual service,
directing and controlling them and, as would appear, triumphantly
minimizing their scope, feminizing their too possible male
grossnesses—the charm, I say, was now in the beautiful openness to the
world-relation, in the felt balm, really, of the disprovincializing
breath. Once such a summer air as that had begun softly to stir, even
the drearier little documents might flutter in it as confederately as
they liked. The terrible framed canvases, portraits of soldiers and
statesmen, strange images, on the whole, of the sectional great, might
seem to shake, faintly, on the wall, as in vague protest at a possible
doom. Disinherited of art one could indeed, in presence of such objects,
but feel that the old South had been; and might not this thin tremor, on
the part of several of those who had had so little care for it,
represent some sense of what the more liberal day—so announced there on
the spot—might mean for their meagre memories?
This was a question, however, that it naturally concerned me not to put
to the old mutilated Confederate soldier who, trafficking in photographs
in a corner of the room, rejoiced to proclaim the originals of the
portraits. Nothing could have been a happier link than the old
Confederate soldier—a link as from past to present and future, I mean,
even when individually addicted to “voicing” some of the more
questionable claims of the past. What will they be, at all events, the
Southern shrines of memory, on the day the last old Confederate soldier
shall have been gathered to his fate? Never, thanks to a low horizon,
had the human figure endowed with almost anything at all in the nature
of a presence or a silhouette such a chance to stand out; never had the
pictorial accident, on a vast grey canvas, such a chance to tell. But a
different matter from these, at Richmond, in fact the greatest matter of
all, is the statue of General Lee, which stands, high aloft and
extraordinarily by itself, at the far end of the main residential
street—a street with no imputable “character” but that of leading to it.
Faithful, experimentally, to a desperate practice, I yet had to renounce
here—in the main residential street—the subtle effort to “read” a sense
into the senseless appearances about me. This ranked, I scarce know why,
as a disappointment: I had presumed with a fond extravagance, I have
hinted, that they would give out here and there some unmistakable
backward reference, show, from the old overclambered but dispeopled
double galleries that I might liken to desecrated cloisters, some wan,
faded face of shrunken gentility. Frankly, however, with the best will
in the world—really too good a will, which found itself again and again
quite grimly snubbed—frankly I could do nothing: everything was there
but the material. The disposition had been a tribute to old Virginia,
but old Virginia quite unceremoniously washed her hands of me. I have
spoken of scratching, scratching for romance, and all tenderly, in the
deposit of history; but, plainly, no deposit would show, and I tried to
remember, for fairness, that Richmond had been after all but a modern
and upstart capital. Indistinct there, below the hill, was the James
River, and away in the mists of time “romantic” Jamestown, the creation
of a Stuart king. That would have to do, though it also, in its way, was
nothing; for meanwhile in truth, just here—here above all and in
presence of the monument completing the vista—were other things to
remember, provoked reflections that took on their own intensity.
The equestrian statue of the Southern hero, made to order in far-away
uninterested Paris, is the work of a master and has an artistic
interest—a refinement of style, in fact, under the impression of which
we seem to see it, in its situation, as some precious pearl of ocean
washed up on a rude bare strand. The very high florid pedestal is of the
last French elegance, and the great soldier, sitting his horse with a
kind of melancholy nobleness, raises his handsome head as he looks off
into desolate space. He does well, we feel, to sit as high as he may,
and to appear, in his lone survival, to see as far, and to overlook as
many things; for the irony of fate, crowning the picture, is surely
stamped in all sharpness on the scene about him. The place is the mere
vague centre of two or three crossways, without form and void, with a
circle half sketched by three or four groups of small, new, mean houses.
It is somehow empty in spite of being ugly, and yet expressive in spite
of being empty. “Desolate,” one has called the air; and the effect is,
strangely, of some smug “up-to-date” specimen or pattern of desolation.
So long as one stands there the high figure, which ends for all the
world by suggesting to the admirer a quite conscious, subjective, even a
quite sublime, effort to ignore, to sit, as it were, superior and
indifferent, enjoys the fact of company and thereby, in a manner, of
sympathy—so that the vast association of the futile for the moment drops
away from it. But to turn one’s back, one feels, is to leave it again
alone, communing, at its altitude, which represents thus some prodigious
exemplary perched position, some everlasting high stool of penitence,
with the very heaven of futility. So at least I felt brought round again
to meeting my first surprise, to solving the riddle of the historic
poverty of Richmond. It is the poverty that _is_, exactly, historic:
once take it for that and it puts on vividness. The condition attested
is the condition—or, as may be, one of the later, fainter, weaker
stages—of having worshipped false gods. As I looked back, before leaving
it, at Lee’s stranded, bereft image, which time and fortune have so
cheated of half the significance, and so, I think, of half the dignity,
of great memorials, I recognized something more than the melancholy of a
lost cause. The whole infelicity speaks of a cause that could never have
been gained.
XIII
CHARLESTON
I
To arrive at Charleston early in the chill morning was to appear to have
come quite adventurously far, and yet to be not quite clear about the
grounds of the appearance. Did it rest on impressions gathered by the
way, on the number of things one had been, since leaving Richmond, aware
of?—or was it rather explained by the long succession of hours, the
nights and days, consumed as mere tasteless time and without the
attending relish of excited interest? What, definitely, could I say I
had seen, that my journey should already presume to give itself airs, to
seat itself there as a chapter of experience? To consider of this
question was really, I think, after a little, to renew one’s
appreciation of the mystery and the marvel of experience. That accretion
may amount to an enormous sum, often, when the figures on the slate are
too few and too paltry to mention. It may count for enrichment without
one’s knowing why; and so again, on occasion, with a long column of
items, it may count for nothing at all. I reached Charleston ever so
much (as it seemed to me) the wiser—the wiser, that is, for the
impression of scarce distinguishable things. One made them out, with no
great brilliancy, as just Southern; but one would have missed the point,
I hasten to add, in failing to see what an application and what a value
they derived from that name. One was already beginning—that was the
truth—one’s convenient induction as to the nature of the South; and,
once that account was opened, how could everything, great or small,
positive or negative, not become straightway a contribution to it? The
large negatives, in America, have, as well as other matters, their
meaning and their truth: so what if my charged consciousness of the long
way from Richmond were that of a negative modified by small discomforts?
The discomforts indeed were as nothing, for importance—compared,
candidly, with the importance of the rest of the impression. The
process, certainly, however one qualified it, had been interrupted by
one of the most positive passages of one’s life—which may not figure
here, alas, unfortunately, as of the essence of my journey. Vast
brackets, applied, as it were, to the very face of nature, enclosed and
rounded this felicity; which was no more of the texture of the general
Southern stuff than a patch of old brocade would be of the woof of the
native homespun. I had, by a deviation, spent a week in a castle of
enchantment; but if this modern miracle, of which the mountains of North
Carolina happened to be the scene, would have been almost anywhere
miraculous, I could at least take it as testifying, all relevantly, all
directly, for the presence, as distinguished from the absence, of
feature. One felt how, in this light, the extent and the splendour of
such a place was but a detail; these things were accidents, without
which the great effect, the element that, in the beautiful empty air,
made all the difference, would still have prevailed. What was this
element but just the affirmation of resources?—made with great emphasis
indeed, but in a clear and exemplary way; so that if large wealth
represented some of them, an idea, a fine cluster of ideas, a will, a
purpose, a patience, an intelligence, a store of knowledge, immediately
workable things, represented the others. What it thus came to, on behalf
of this vast parenthetic Carolinian demonstration, was that somebody had
_cared_ enough—and that happily there had been somebody _to_ care; which
struck me at once as marking the difference for the rest of the text. My
view of the melancholy of it had been conveniently expressed, from hour
to hour, by the fond reflection, through the dreary land, that nobody
cared—cared really for _it_ or for anything. That fairly _made_ it
dreary, as the crazy timber viaducts, where the train crawled, and
sometimes nervously stopped, spanned the deep gorges and the admirable
nameless and more or less torrential streams; as the sense of landscape
in mere quantity became, once more, the vehicle of effect; and as we
pulled up at the small stations where the social scene might be
sufficiently penetrated, no doubt, from the car-window.
The social scene, shabby and sordid, and lost in the scale of space as
the quotable line is lost in a dull epic or the needed name in an ageing
memory, would have been as interesting, probably, as a “short story” in
one of the slangy dialects promoted by the illustrated monthly
magazines; but it affected me above all, and almost each time, I seem to
remember, as speaking of the number of things not cared for. There were
some presumably, though not at all discernibly, that _were_—enough to
beget the loose human cohesion, the scant consistency of parts and
pieces, to which the array by the railway platform testified; but
questions came up, plentifully, in respect to the whole picture, and if
the mass of interests that were absent was so remarkably large, this
would be certainly because such interests were ruled out. The grimness
with which, as by a hard inexorable fate, so many things were ruled out,
fixed itself most perhaps as the impression of the spectator enjoying
from his supreme seat of ease his extraordinary, his awful modern
privilege of this detached yet concentrated stare at the misery of
subject populations. (Subject, I mean, to this superiority of his bought
convenience—subject even as never, of old, to the sway of satraps or
proconsuls.) If the subject populations on the road to Charleston,
seemingly weak indeed in numbers and in energy, had to be viewed, at all
events, so vividly, as not “caring,” one made out quite with eagerness
that it was because they naturally couldn’t. The negroes were more
numerous than the whites, but still there _were_ whites—of aspect so
forlorn and depressed for the most part as to deprecate, though not
cynically, only quite tragically, any imputation of value. It was a
monstrous thing, doubtless, to sit there in a cushioned and kitchened
Pullman and deny to so many groups of one’s fellow-creatures any claim
to a “personality”; but this was in truth what one was perpetually
doing. The negroes, though superficially and doubtless not at all
intendingly sinister, were the lustier race; but how could they care (to
insist on my point) for such equivocal embodiments of the right
complexion? Yet these were, practically, within the picture the only
affirmations of life except themselves; and they obviously, they
notoriously, didn’t care for themselves. The moral of all of which was
that really, through the more and more southward hours, the wondering
stops and the blank renewals, it was only the restless analyst himself
who cared—and enough, after all, he finally felt, to make up for other
deficiencies.
He cared even when, in the watches of the night, he was roused, under
the bewilderment that was rarely to leave him, in America, at any stage
of any transaction to which the cars and their sparse stern
functionaries formed a party, for unpremeditated transfer to a dark and
friendless void where, with what grace he could, he awaited the February
dawn. The general American theory is that railway-travel within the
confines of the Republic is a matter of majestic simplicity and
facility—qualified at the worst by inordinate luxury; I should need
therefore an excursion here forbidden me to present another and perhaps
a too highly subjective view of it. There are lights in which the
majesty, if the question be of that, may strike the freshly repatriated,
or in other words the unwarned and inexpert, as quite grimly formidable;
lights, however, that must be left to shine for us in some other
connection. Let it none the less glimmer out of them for the moment that
this implication of the penalty of imperfect expertness is really a clue
to the essence of the matter; a core packed, in relation to the whole
subject of expertness, with fruitful suggestion. No single admonition,
in the States, I think, is more constant and vivid than the general mass
of intimation of what may happen to you, in transit, unless you have had
special and confirmed practice. You may have been without it in
“Europe,” for moving about, and yet not perish; but to be inexpert in
the American battle would be, it struck me, much more quickly to go
down. Your luggage, in America, is “looked after,” but you are not, save
so far as you receive on occasion a sharp order or a sharper shove: by
sufferance of which discipline, moreover, you by no means always
purchase a prompt delivery of your effects. This indeed is but a
translation of the general truth that it is the country in the world in
which you must do most things for yourself. It may be “better” for you
to have thus to do for yourself the secondary as well as the primary
things—but that is not here the question. It begins to strike you, at
all events, as soon as you begin to circulate, that your
fellow-travellers are for the most part, as to the complex act itself,
professional; whereas you may perform it all in “Europe” successfully
enough as an amateur. Whether to your glory or your shame you must of
course yourself decide; but impunity, nay more, success, may at least
attend your empiricism.
If it was not success, however, for the strayed amateur to have found
himself stranded in the small hours of morning by the vast vague
wayside, he still nevertheless remembers how quickly even this interlude
took on an interest. The gloom was scarce penetrable, but a light
glimmered here and there, and formless sheds and shanties, dim,
discomfortable things, straggled about and lost themselves.
Indistinguishable engines hooted, before and behind, where red fires
also flared and vanished; indistinguishable too, from each other, while
one sought a place of temporary deposit for the impedimenta that
attested one’s absurd want of rehearsal, were the cold steel of the
rails, the vague composition of the platform, and the kinder, the safer
breast of earth. The place was apparently a junction, and it was but a
question of waiting—of selecting as the wisest course, among the hoots
and the flares, to stand huddled just where one was. That almost
completely unservanted state which is so the mark, in general, of the
American station, was here the sole distinctness. I had succeeded in
artlessly becoming a perfectly isolated traveller, with nobody to warn
or comfort me, with nobody even to command. But it was precisely in this
situation that I felt again, as by the click of a spring, that my
adventure had, in spite of everything, or perhaps indeed just because of
everything, a charm all its own—and a charm, moreover, which I was to
have from that moment, for any connection, no difficulty whatever in
recognizing. It must have broken out more particularly, then and there,
in the breath of the night, which was verily now the bland air of the
South—mild, benignant, a benediction in itself as it hung about me, and
with that blest quality in it of its appearing a medium through which
almost any good might come. It was the air of the open gates—not, like
that of the North, of the closed; and one inhaled it, in short, on the
spot, as the very boon of one’s quest.
A couple of hours later, in the right train, which had at last arrived,
I had so settled to submission to this spell that it had wrought for me,
I think, all its magic—ministered absolutely to the maximum of
suggestion, which became thus, for my introduction to Charleston, the
presiding influence. What had happened may doubtless show for no great
matter in a bare verbal statement; yet it was to make all the
difference, I felt, for impressions (happy and harsh alike) still to
come. It couldn’t have happened without one’s beginning to wander; but
the lively interest was that the further one wandered the more the
suggestion spoke. The sense of the size of the Margin, that was the name
of it—the Margin by which the total of American life, huge as it already
appears, is still so surrounded as to represent, for the mind’s eye on a
general view, but a scant central flotilla huddled as for very fear of
the fathomless depth of water, the too formidable future, on the so much
vaster lake of the materially possible. Once that torch is at all
vividly lighted it flares, for any pair of open eyes, over every scene,
and with a presence that helps to explain their owner’s inevitable
failure to conclude. He feels it in all his uncertainties, and he never
just escapes concluding without the sense that this so fallacious
neatness would more or less absurdly have neglected or sacrificed it.
Not by any means that the Margin always affects him as standing for the
vision of a possible greater good than what he sees in the given
case—any more than as standing for a possible greater evil; these
differences are submerged in the immense fluidity; they lurk confused,
disengaged, in the mere looming mass of the _more_, the more and more to
come. And as yet nothing makes definite the probable preponderance of
particular forms of the more. The one all positive appearance is of the
perpetual increase of everything, the growth of the immeasurable
muchness that shall constitute the deep sea into which the seeker for
conclusions must cast his nets. The fact that, with so many things
present, so few of them are not on the way to become quite other, and
possibly altogether different, things, conduces to the peculiar interest
and, one often feels tempted to add, to the peculiar irritation of the
country.