II

Charleston early in the morning, on my driving from the station, was, it

had to be admitted, no very finished picture, but at least, already, it

was different—ever so different in aspect and “feeling,” and above all

for intimation and suggestion, from any passage of the American scene as

yet deciphered; and such became on the spot one’s appetite for local

colour that one was fairly grateful to a friend who, by having promised

to arrive from the interior of the State the night before, gave one a

pretext for seeking him up and down. My quest, for the moment, proved

vain; but the intimations and suggestions, while I proceeded from door

to door in the sweet blank freshness of the day, of the climate, of the

streets, began to swarm at such a rate that I had the sense of gathering

my harvest with almost too eager a thrift. It was like standing steeped

at the bookstall itself in the volume picked up and opened—though I may

add that when I had presently retreated upon the hotel, to which I

should in the first instance have addressed myself, it was quite, for a

turning of pages, as if I had gone on with the “set.” Thus, before

breakfast, I entered upon my brief residence with the right vibrations

already determined and unable really to say which of a couple of

contacts just enjoyed would have most ministered to them. I had roused,

guilelessly, through an easy misunderstanding, two more or less sleeping

households; but if I had still missed my clue to my friend I had yet put

myself into possession of much of whatever else I had wanted. What had I

most wanted, I could easily ask myself, but some small inkling (a mere

specimen-scrap would do) of the sense, as I have to keep forever calling

my wanton synthesis, of “the South before the War”?—an air-bubble only

to be blown, in any case, through some odd fragment of a pipe. My pair

of early Charleston impressions were thus a pair of thin prismatic

bubbles—which could have floated before me moreover but for a few

seconds, collapsing even while I stood there.

Prismatically, none the less, they had shown me the “old” South; in one

case by the mere magic of the manner in which a small, scared, starved

person of colour, of very light colour, an elderly mulattress in an

improvised wrapper, just barely held open for me a door through which I

felt I might have looked straight and far back into the past. The past,

that of the vanished order, was hanging on there behind her—as much of

it as the scant place would accommodate; and she knew this, and that I

had so quickly guessed it; which led her, in fine, before I could see

more, and that I might not sound the secret of shy misfortune, of faded

pretension, to shut the door in my face. So, it seemed to me, had I been

confronted, in Italy, under quite such a morning air and light, quite

the same touch of a tepid, odorous medium, with the ancient sallow

crones who guard the locked portals and the fallen pride of provincial

_palazzini_. That was all, in the one instance; there had been no more

of it than of the little flare of a struck match—which lasted long

enough, however, to light the sedative cigarette, smoked and thrown

away, that renews itself forever between the picture-seeker’s lips. The

small historic whiff I had momentarily inhaled required the correction,

I should add, of the sweeter breath of my commentary. Fresh altogether

was the air behind the garden wall that next gave way to my pursuit;

there being a thrill, for that matter, in the fact that here at last

again, if nowhere else over the land, rose the real walls that alone

make real gardens and that admit to the same by real doors. Close such a

door behind you, and you are at once _within_—a local relation, a

possibility of retreat, in favour of which the custom of the North has

so completely ceased to discriminate. One sacrificed the North, with its

mere hard conceit of virtuously meeting exhibition—much as if a house

were just a metallic machine, number so-and-so in a catalogue—one

sacrificed it on the spot to this finer feeling for the enclosure.

That had really sufficed, no doubt, for my second initiation; since I

remember withdrawing, after my fruitless question, as on the completion

of a mystic process. Initiation into _what_ I perhaps couldn’t have

said; only, at the most, into the knowledge that what such Southern

walls generally shut in proves exactly what one would have wished. I was

to see this loose quantity afterwards in greater profusion; but for the

moment the effect was as right as that of privacy for the habit of the

siesta. The details escape me, or rather I tenderly withhold them. For

the siesta there—what would it have been most like but some deep doze,

or call it frankly some final sleep, of the idea of “success”? And how

could one better have described the privacy, with the mild street shut

off and with the deep gallery, where resignation might sit in the shade

or swing without motion in a hammock, shut in, than as some dim dream

that things were still as they had been—still pleasant behind garden

walls—before the great folly? I was to find myself liking, in the South

and in the most monstrous fashion, it appeared, those aspects in which

the consequences of the great folly were, for extent and gravity, still

traceable; I was cold-bloodedly to prefer them, that is, to the aspects,

occasionally to be met, from which the traces had been removed. And

this, I need hardly say, from a point of view having so little in common

with the vindictive as to be quite directly opposed to it. For what in

the world was one candidly to do? It is the manner of the purged and

renovated, the disconnected element, anywhere, after great trials, to

express itself in forms comparatively vulgar; whereas those parts of the

organism that, having been through the fire, still have kept the

scorches and scars, resemble for tone, for colour and value, the

products of the potter’s oven; when the potter, I mean, or when, in

other words, history, has been the right great artist. They at least are

not cheerful rawnesses—they have been baked beautiful and hard.

I even tried, I fear, when once installed there, to look at my hotel in

that light; availing myself, to this end, of its appearance of “dating,”

with its fine old neo-classic front and of a certain romantic grandeur

of scale, the scale positively of “Latin” construction, in my vast

saloon-like apartment, which opened to a high colonnade. The great

canopied and curtained bed was really in the grand manner, and the ghost

of a rococo tradition, the tradition of the transatlantic South, memory

of other lands, glimmered generally in the decoration. When once I

had—though almost exclusively under the charm of these particular faded

graces, I admit—again privately protested that the place might have been

a “palace,” my peace was made with Charleston: I was ripe for the last

platitude of appreciation. Let me say indeed that this consciousness had

from the first to struggle with another—the immediate sense of the

degree in which the American scene is lighted, on occasion, to the

critical eye, by the testimony of the hotel. As had been the case for me

already at Richmond, so here again the note of that truth was sounded;

the visitor interested in manners was too clearly not to escape it, and

I scarce know under what slightly sinister warning he braced himself to

the fact. He had not, as yet, for repatriation, been thrown much upon

the hotel; but this was the high sense of looking further and seeing

more, this present promise of that adventure. One is thrown upon it, in

America, as straight upon the general painted scene over which the

footlights of publicity play with their large crudity, and against the

freely-brushed texture and grain of which you thus rub your nose more

directly, and with less of ceremony, than elsewhere. There are endless

things in “Europe,” to your vision, behind and beyond the hotel, a

multitudinous complicated life; in the States, on the other hand, you

see the hotel as itself that life, as constituting for vast numbers of

people the richest form of existence. You have to go no distance for

this to come over you—twenty appearances so vividly speak of it. It is

not so much, no doubt, that “every one” lives at hotels, according to

the witless belief of “Europe,” but that you so quickly seem to measure

the very limited extent to which those who people them, the populations

they appeal to in general, may be conceived as “living” out of them. I

remember how often, in moving about, the observation that most remained

with me appeared to be this note of the hotel, and of the hotel-like

chain of Pullman cars, as the supreme social expression. For the

Pullmans too, in their way, were eloquent; they affected me ever, by the

end of twenty-four hours, as carrying, if not Cæsar and his fortune, at

least almost _all_ the facts of American life. There were some of course

that didn’t fit into them, but so many others did, and these fitted

somehow so perfectly and with such a congruity.

What it comes back to is that in such conditions the elements of the

situation show with all possible, though quite unnoted, intensity; they

tell you all about it (about the situation) in a few remarkably plain

and distinct words; they make you feel in short how its significance is

written upon it. It is as if the figures before you and all round you,

less different from each other, less different too, I think, from the

objects about them, whatever these in any case may be, than any equal

mass of appearances under the sun—it is as if every one and everything

said to you straight: “Yes, this is how we are; this is what it is to

enjoy our advantages; this moreover is all there is of us; we give it

all out. Make what you can of it!” The restless analyst would have had

indeed an unusual fit of languor if he had not begun from the first to

make of it what he could, divided even though he was between his sense

of this largely-written significance and his wonderment, none the less,

as to its value and bearing: which constituted, after all, a shade of

perplexity as to its meaning. “Yes, I see how you are, God knows”—he was

ready with his reply; “for nothing in the world is easier to see, even

in all the particulars. But what does it mean to be as you are?—since I

suppose it means something; something more than your mere one universal

type, with its small deflections but never a departure; something more

than your way of sitting in silence together at table, than your

extraordinary, your enormous passivity, than your apparent absence of

criticism or judgment of anything that is put before you or that happens

to you (beyond occasionally remarking that it’s ‘fine!’) than, in a

word, the fact of what you eat and the fact of how you eat it. You are

not final, complacently as you appear so much of the time to assume

it—your mere inevitable shaking about in the Margin must more or less

take care of that; since you can’t be so inordinately passive

(everywhere, one infers, but in your particular wary niche of your

‘business-block’) without being in _some_ degree plastic. Distinct as

you are, you are not even definite, and it would be terrible not to be

able to suppose that you are as yet but an instalment, a current number,

like that of the morning paper, a specimen of a type in course of

serialization-like the hero of the magazine novel, by the

highly-successful author, the climax of which is still far off. Thus, as

you are perpetually provisional, the hotels and the Pullmans—the

Pullmans that are like rushing hotels and the hotels that are like

stationary Pullmans—represent the stages and forms of your evolution,

and are not a bit, in themselves, more final than you are. The

particulars still to be added either to you or to them form an insoluble

question; and meanwhile, clearly, your actual stage will not be short.”

So much as that, I recall, had hummed about my ears at Richmond, where

the strong vertical light of a fine domed and glazed cortile, the

spacious and agreeable dining-hall of the inn, had rested on the human

scene as with an effect of mechanical pressure. If the scene constituted

evidence, the evidence might have been in course of being pressed out,

in this shining form, by the application of a weight and the turn of a

screw. There it was, accordingly; there was the social, the readable

page, with its more or less complete report of the conditions. The

report was to be fuller as to some of these at Charleston; but I had at

least grasped its general value. And I shall come back to the Charleston

report.

It would have been a sorry business here, however, if this had been

mainly the source of my impressions—which was so far from the case that

I had but to go forth, after breakfast, to find insidious charm, the

appeal of the outer, the larger aspect, await me at every turn. The day

announced itself as warm and radiant, and, keeping its promise to the

end, squared itself there as the golden frame of an interesting

picture—interesting above all from the moment one desired with any

intensity to find it so. The vision persists, with its charming,

touching features; yet when I look back and ask myself what can have

made my impression, all round, so positive, I am at a loss for elements

to refer it to. Elements there were, certainly; in especial the fact

that during these first bland hours, charged with the splendour of

spring, I caught the wide-eyed smile of the South, that expression of a

temperamental felicity in which shades of character, questions of real

feature, other marks and meanings, tend always to lose themselves. But a

deficiency was clear, which was neither more nor less than the

deficiency of life; without life, all gracefully, the picture managed to

compose itself. Even while one felt it do so one missed the precious

presence; so that there at least was food for wonderment, for admiration

of the art at play. To what, all the while, as one went, could one

compare the mystification?—to what if not to the image of some handsome

pale person, a beauty (to call her so) of other days, who, besides

confessing to the inanimate state from closed eyes and motionless lips,

from the arrest of respiration and gesture, was to leave one, by the

day’s end, with the sense of a figure prepared for romantic interment,

stretched in a fair winding-sheet, covered with admirable flowers,

surrounded with shining tapers. _That_, one reasoned, would be something

to have seen; and yet one’s interest was not so limited. Ruins, to be

interesting, have to be massive; and poor bitter-sweet Charleston

suffered, for the observer, by the merciless law of the thinness, making

too much for transparency, for the effect of paucity, still inherent in

American groupings; a law under which the attempt to subject them to

portraiture, to see them as “composing,” resembles the attempt to play

whist with an imperfect pack of cards. If one had already, at the North,

divined the general complexion as probably thin, in this sense,

everywhere—thin, that is, for all note-taking but the statistical, under

which it might of course show as portentously thick—it wouldn’t turn

dense or rich of a sudden, even in an air that could so drench it with

benignity. Therefore if the scene, as one might say, was but the

historic Desert without the historic Mausoleum, how was one’s impression

to give out, as it clearly would, the after-taste of experience?

To let this small problem worry me no longer than it might, I sought an

answer, and quickly found one, in the fortunate fact of my not having

failed, after all, of the admirably suggestive society of my

distinguished and competent friend. He _had_ arrived over-night,

according to my hope, and had only happened to lodge himself momentarily

out of my ken; so that as soon as I had his company to profit by I felt

the “analytic” burden of my own blessedly lifted. I took over his

analysis, infinitely better adjusted to the case and which clearly would

suffice for everything—if only it should itself escape disintegration.

Let me say at once that it quite averted—whether consciously or

unconsciously, whether as too formidably bristling or as too perfectly

pacific—that menace; which success was to provide for us both, I think,

a rounded felicity. My companion, a Northerner of Southern descent (as

well as still more immediately, on another side, of English), knew his

South in general and his Carolina of that ilk in particular, with an

intimacy that was like a grab-bag into which, for illustration, he might

always dip his hand (a movement that, had the grab-bag been “European,”

I should describe rather as a plunge of his arm: so that it comes back

again to the shallowness of the American grab-bag, as yet, for

illustrations other than the statistical). He held up for me his bright

critical candle, which even in the intrinsic Charleston vividness made

its gay flicker, and it was under this aid that, to my extreme

convenience, I was able to “feel” the place. My fortune had indeed an

odd sequel—which I mention for its appreciatory value; the mishaps and

accidents of appreciation being ever, in their way, I think, as

contributive to judgment as the felicities. I was to challenge, too

recklessly, the chances of a second day; having by the end of the first,

and by the taking of example, quite learned to treat the scene as a

grab-bag for my own hand. I went over it again, in an evil

hour—whereupon I met afresh the admonition, already repeatedly received,

that where, in the States, the interest, where the pleasure of

contemplation is concerned, discretion is the better part of valour and

insistence too often a betrayal. It is not so much that the hostile fact

crops up as that the friendly fact breaks down. If you have luckily

_seen_, you have seen; carry off your prize, in this case, instantly and

at any risk. Try it again and you don’t, you won’t, see; for there is in

all contemplation, there is even in any clear appreciation, an element

of the cruel. These things demand that your exposed object shall, first

of all, exist; and to exist for exposure is to be at the best impaled on

the naturalist’s pin. It takes superpositions, at any rate, to defy

sufficiently this sort of attention; it takes either the stoutnesses of

history or the rarest rarities of nature to resist fatal penetration.

That was to come home to me presently in Florida—through the touched

sense of the truth that Florida, ever so amiably, is weak. You may live

there serenely, no doubt—as in a void furnished at the most with velvet

air; you may in fact live there with an idea, if you are content that

your idea shall consist of grapefruit and oranges. Oranges, grapefruit

and velvet air constitute, in a manner, I admit, a feast; but press upon

the board with any greater weight and it quite gives way—its three or

four props treacherously forsake it. That is what I mean by the

impression, in the great empty peninsula, of weakness; which I was to

feel still clearer about on being able to compare it afterwards with the

impression of California. California was to have—if I may decently be

premature about it—her own treachery; but she was to wind one up much

higher before she let one down. I was to find her, especially at the

first flush, unlike sweet frustrated Florida, ever so amiably strong:

which came from the art with which she makes the stoutnesses, as I have

called them, of natural beauty stand you in temporary stead of the

leannesses of everything else (everything that might be of an order

equally interesting). This she is on a short acquaintance quite

insolently able to do, thanks to her belonging so completely to the

“handsome” side of the continent, of which she is the finest expression.

The aspect of natural objects, up and down the Pacific coast, is as

“aristocratic” as the comprehensive American condition permits anything

to be: it indeed appears to the ingenious mind to represent an instinct

on the part of Nature, a sort of shuddering, bristling need, to brace

herself in advance against the assault of a society so much less marked

with distinction than herself. If I was to conceive therefore under

these later lights, that her spirit had put forth nowhere on the

sub-tropical Atlantic shore anything to approach this conscious pride,

so, doubtless, the Carolinian effect, even at its sweetest, was to

strike me as related to it very much as a tinkle is related to a boom.