To stray but for an instant into such an out-of-the-way corner of one’s
notes, however, is to give the lie to the tenderness that asserted
itself so promptly as the very medium of one’s perception. There was
literally no single object that, from morn to nightfall, it was not more
possible to consider with tenderness, a rich consistency of tenderness,
than to consider without it: _such_ was the subtle trick that Charleston
could still play. There echoed for me as I looked out from the Battery
the recent speech of a friend which had had at the time a depressing
weight; the Battery of the long, curved sea-front, of the waterside
public garden furnished with sad old historic guns, with live-oaks
draped in trailing moss, with palmettos that, as if still mindful of
their State symbolism, seem to try everywhere, though with a melancholy
sceptical droop, to repeat the old escutcheon; with its large, thrilling
view in particular—thrilling to a Northerner who stands there for the
first time. “Filled as I am, in general, while there,” my friend had
said, “with the sadness and sorrow of the South, I never, at Charleston,
look out to the old betrayed Forts without feeling my heart harden again
to steel.” One remembered that, on the spot, and one waited a little—to
see what was happening to one’s heart. I found this to take time indeed;
everything differed, somehow, from one’s old conceived image—or if I had
anciently grasped the remoteness of Fort Sumter, near the mouth of the
Bay, and of its companion, at the point of the shore forming the other
side of the passage, this lucidity had so left me, in the course of the
years, that the far-away dimness of the consecrated objects was almost a
shock. It was a blow even to one’s faded vision of Charleston viciously
firing on the Flag; the Flag would have been, from the Battery, such a
mere speck in space that the vice of the act lost somehow, with the
distance, to say nothing of the forty years, a part of its grossness.
The smitten face, however flushed and scarred, was out of sight, though
the intention of smiting and the force of the insult were of course
still the same. This reflection one made, but the old fancied
perspective and proportions were altered; and then the whole picture, at
that hour, exhaled an innocence. It was as blank as the face of a child
under mention of his naughtiness and his punishment of week before last.
The Forts, faintly blue on the twinkling sea, looked like vague marine
flowers; innocence, pleasantness ruled the prospect: it was as if the
compromised slate, sponged clean of all the wicked words and hung up on
the wall for better use, dangled there so vacantly as almost to look
foolish. Ah, there again was the word: the air still just tasted of the
antique folly; so that in presence of a lesson so sharp and so
prolonged, of the general _sterilized_ state, of the brightly-lighted,
delicate dreariness recording the folly, harshness was conjured away.
There was that in the impression which affected me after a little as one
of those refinements of irony that wait on deep expiations: one could
scarce conceive at this time of day that such a place had ever been
dangerously moved. It was the _bled_ condition, and mostly the depleted
cerebral condition, that was thus attested—as I had recognized it at
Richmond; and I asked myself, on the Battery, what more one’s sternest
justice could have desired. If my heart wasn’t to harden to steel, in
short, access to it by the right influence had found perhaps too many
other forms of sensibility in ambush.
To justify hardness, moreover, one would have had to meet something
hard; and if my peregrination, after this, had been a search for such an
element, I should have to describe it as made all in vain. Up and down
and in and out, with my companion, I strolled from hour to hour; but
more and more under the impression of the consistency of softness. One
could have expressed the softness in a word, and the picture so offered
would be infinitely touching. It was a city of gardens and absolutely of
no men—or of so few that, save for the general sweetness, the War might
still have been raging and all the manhood at the front. The gardens
were matter for the women; though even of the women there were few, and
that small company—rare, discreet, flitting figures that brushed the
garden walls with noiseless skirts in the little melancholy streets of
interspaced, overtangled abodes—were clad in a rigour of mourning that
was like the garb of a conspiracy. The effect was superficially prim,
but so far as it savoured of malice prepense, of the Southern, the
sentimental _parti-pris_, it was delightful. What was it all most like,
the incoherent jumble of suggestions?—the suggestion of a social
shrinkage and an economic blight unrepaired, irreparable; the suggestion
of by-ways of some odd far East infected with triumphant women’s rights,
some perspective of builded, plastered lanes over the enclosures of
which the flowering almond drops its petals into sharp deep bands of
shade or of sun. It is not the muffled ladies who walk about
predominantly in the East; but that is a detail. The likeness was
perhaps greater to some little old-world quarter of quiet convents where
only priests and nuns steal forth—the priests mistakable at a distance,
say, for the nuns. It was indeed thoroughly mystifying, the whole
picture—since I was to get, in the freshness of that morning, from the
very background of the scene, my quite triumphant little impression of
the “old South.” I remember feeling with intensity at two or three
points in particular that I should never get a better one, that even
this was precarious—might melt at any moment, by a wrong touch or a
false note, in my grasp—and that I must therefore make the most of it.
The rest of my time, I may profess, was spent in so doing. I made the
most of it in several successive spots: under the south wall of St.
Michael’s Church, the sweetest corner of Charleston, and of which there
is more to say; out in the old Cemetery on the edge of the lagoon, where
the distillation of the past was perhaps clearest and the bribe to
tenderness most effective; and even not a little on ground thereunto
almost adjacent, that of a kindly Country Club installed in a fine old
semi-sinister mansion, and holding an afternoon revel at which I was
privileged briefly to assist. The wrong touch and the false note were
doubtless just sensible in this last connection, where the question,
probed a little, would apparently have been of some new South that has
not yet quite found the effective way romantically, or at least
insidiously, to appeal. The South that is cultivating country-clubs is a
South presumably, in many connections, quite in the right; whereas the
one we were invidiously “after” was the one that had been so utterly in
the wrong. Even there, none the less, in presence of more than a single
marked sign of the rude Northern contagion, I disengaged, socially
speaking, a faint residuum which I mention for proof of the intensity of
my quest and of my appreciation.
There were two other places, I may add, where one could but work the
impression for all it was, in the modern phrase, “worth,” and where I
had, I may venture to say, the sense of making as much of it as was
likely ever to be made again. Meanings without end were to be read,
under tuition, into one of these, which was neither more nor less than
a slightly shy, yet after all quite serene place of refection, a
luncheon-room or tea-house, denominated for quaint reasons an
“Exchange”—_the_ very Exchange in fact lately commemorated in a
penetrating study, already much known to fame, of the little that is
left of the local society. My tuition, at the hands of my ingenious
comrade, was the very best it was possible to have. Nothing, usually,
is more wonderful than the quantity of significant character that,
with such an example set, the imagination may recognize in the
scantest group of features, objects, persons. I fantastically feasted
here, at my luncheon-table, not only, as the genius of the place
demanded, on hot chocolate, sandwiches and “Lady Baltimore” cake (this
last a most delectable compound), but on the exact _nuance_ of oddity,
of bravery, of reduced gentility, of irreducible superiority, to which
the opening of such an establishment, without derogation, by the proud
daughters of war-wasted families, could exquisitely testify. They
hovered, the proud impoverished daughters, singly or in couples,
behind the counter—a counter, again, delectably charged; they waited,
inscrutably, irreproachably, yet with all that peculiarly chaste
_bonhomie_ of the Southern tone, on the customers’ wants, even coming
to ascertain these at the little thrifty tables; and if the drama and
its adjusted theatre really contained all the elements of history,
tragedy, comedy, irony, that a pair of expert romancers, closely
associated for the hour, were eager to evoke, the scene would have
been, I can only say, supreme of its kind. That desire of the artist
to linger where the breath of a “subject,” faintly stirring the air,
reaches his vigilant sense, would here stay my steps—as this very
influence was in fact, to his great good fortune, to stay those of my
companion. The charm I speak of, the charm to cherish, however, was
most exhaled for me in other conditions—conditions that scarce permit
of any direct reference to their full suggestiveness. If I alluded
above to the vivid Charleston background, where its “mystification”
most scenically persists, the image is all rounded and complete, for
memory, in this connection at which—as the case is of an admirably
mature and preserved interior—I can only glance as I pass. The
puzzlement elsewhere is in the sense that though the elements of earth
and air, the colour, the tone, the light, the sweetness in fine,
linger on, the “old South” could have had no such unmitigated
mildness, could never have seen itself as subject to such strange
feminization. The feminization is there just to promote for us some
eloquent antithesis; just to make us say that whereas the ancient
order was masculine, fierce and moustachioed, the present is at the
most a sort of sick lioness who has so visibly parted with her teeth
and claws that we may patronizingly walk all round her.
This image really gives us the best word for the general effect of
Charleston—that of the practically vacant cage which used in the other
time to emit sounds, even to those of the portentous shaking of bars,
audible as far away as in the listening North. It is the vacancy that is
a thing by itself, a thing that makes us endlessly wonder. How, in an at
all complex, a “great political,” society, can _everything_ so have
gone?—assuming indeed that, under this aegis, very much ever had come.
How can everything so have gone that the only “Southern” book of any
distinction published for many a year is _The Souls of Black Folk_, by
that most accomplished of members of the negro race, Mr. W. E. B. Du
Bois? Had the _only_ focus of life then been Slavery?—from the point
onward that Slavery had reached a quarter of a century before the War,
so that with the extinction of that interest none other of any sort was
left. To say “yes” seems the only way to account for the degree of the
vacancy, and yet even as I form that word I meet as a reproach the face
of the beautiful old house I just mentioned, whose ample spaces had so
unmistakably echoed to the higher amenities that one seemed to feel the
accumulated traces and tokens gradually come out of their corners like
blest objects taken one by one from a reliquary worn with much handling.
The note of such haunted chambers as these—haunted structurally, above
all, quite as by the ghost of the grand style—was not, certainly, a
thinness of reverberation; so that I had to take refuge here in the fact
that everything appeared thoroughly to _antedate_, to refer itself to
the larger, the less vitiated past that had closed a quarter of a
century or so before the War, before the fatal time when the South,
mono-maniacal at the parting of the ways, “elected” for extension and
conquest. The admirable old house of the stately hall and staircase, of
the charming coved and vaulted drawing-room, of the precious mahogany
doors, the tall unsophisticated portraits, the delicate dignity of
welcome, owed nothing of its noble identity, nothing at all appreciable,
to the monomania. However that might be, moreover, I kept finding the
mere melancholy charm reassert itself where it could—the charm, I mean,
of the flower-crowned waste that was, by my measure, what the monomania
had most prepared itself to bequeathe. In the old Cemetery by the
lagoon, to which I have already alluded, this influence distils an
irresistible poetry—as one has courage to say even in remembering how
disproportionately, almost anywhere on the American scene, the general
place of interment is apt to be invited to testify for the presence of
charm. The golden afternoon, the low, silvery, seaward horizon, as of
wide, sleepy, game-haunted inlets and reed-smothered banks, possible
site of some Venice that had never mustered, the luxury, in the mild
air, of shrub and plant and blossom that the pale North can but
distantly envy; something that I scarce know how to express but as the
proud humility of the whole idle, easy loveliness, made even the
restless analyst, for the hour, among the pious inscriptions that scarce
ever belie the magniloquent clime or the inimitable tradition, feel
himself really capable of the highest Carolinian pitch.
To what height did he rise, on the other hand, on being introduced
another day, at no great distance from this point, and where the silvery
seaward outlook still prevails, to the lapsed and readministered
residence, also already named, that was to give him his one glimpse of
any local modernism? This was the nearest approach for him to any
reanimation of the flower-crowned waste, and he has still in memory, for
symbol of the modernism, a vision of the great living, blazing fire of
logs round which, as the afternoon had turned wet and chill, this
contribution to his view of a possible new society, a possible youthful
tone, a possible Southern future in short, had disposed itself. There
were men here, in the picture—a few, and young ones: that odd other
sense as of a becraped, feminized world was accordingly for the moment
in abeyance. For the moment, I say advisedly—for the moment only; since
what aspect of the social scene anywhere in the States strikes any
second glance as exempt from that condition? It is overwhelmingly
feminized or it _is_ not—that is the formula with which its claim to
existence pierces the ear. Lest, however, the recognition again of this
truth should lead me too far, I content myself with noting a matter
perhaps more relevant just here—one’s inevitable consciousness, in
presence of the “new” manifestations, that the South is in the
predicament of having to be tragic, as it were, in order to beguile. It
was very hard, I said to myself, and very cruel and very perverse, and
above all very strange; but what “use” had the restless analyst here for
a lively and oblivious type? Was there not something in the lively and
oblivious that, given the materials employed for it and the effect
produced by it, threw one back with renewed relish on the unforgetting
and the devoted, on the resentful and even, if need might be, the
vindictive? These things would represent certainly a bad _état
d’âme_—and was one thus cold-bloodedly, critically, to wish such a
condition perpetuated? The answer to that seemed to be, monstrously
enough, “Well, yes—for these people; since it appears the only way by
which they can be interesting. See when they try other ways! Their
sadness and sorrow, as my friend called it, has at least for it that it
has been expensively produced. Everything else, on the other hand,
anything that may pretend to be better—oh, so cheaply!”
One had already, in moving about, winced often enough at sight of where
one was, intellectually, to “land,” under these last consistencies of
observation and reflection; so I may put it here that I _didn’t_, after
all, land, but recoiled rather and forbore, making my skiff fast to no
conclusion whatever, only pushing out again and letting it, for a
supreme impression and to prepare in the aftertime the best remembrance,
drift where it would. So, accordingly, the aftertime having a little
arrived, it touches now once more of its own motion, carries me back and
puts me ashore on the one spot where the impression had been perfectly
felicitous. I have already named the place—under the mild, the bright
south wall of St. Michael’s Church, where the whole precinct offered the
full-blown Southern spring, that morning, the finest of all canvases to
embroider. The canvas here, yes, was of the best; not only did
Charleston show me none other so good, but I was doubtless to have met,
South or North, none of an equal happy grain and form. The high,
complicated, inflated spire of the church has the sincerity, approved of
time, that is so rare, over the land, in the work of man’s hands, laden
though these be with the millions he offers as a vain bribe to it; and
in the sweet old churchyard ancient authority seemed to me, on the
occasion of my visit, to sit, among the sun-warmed tombs and the
interrelated slabs and the extravagant flowers, as on the sole cushion
the general American bareness in such connections had left it. There was
more still of association and impression; I found, under this charm, I
confess, character in every feature. Even in the much-maintained
interior revolutions and renovations have respected its sturdy, rather
sombre essence: the place feels itself, in the fine old dusky archaic
way, the constituted temple of a faith—achieves, in a word, the air of
reality that one had seen in every other such case, from town to town
and from village to village, missed with an unconsciousness that had to
do duty for success.
XIV
FLORIDA
I
It is the penalty of the state of receiving too many impressions of too
many things that when the question arises of giving some account of
these a small sharp anguish attends the act of selection and the
necessity of omission. They have so hung together, have so almost
equally contributed, for the fond critic, to the total image, the
chapter of experience, whatever such may have been, that to detach and
reject is like mutilation or falsification; the history of any given
impression residing often largely in others that have led to it or
accompanied it. This I find the case, again and again, with my American
memories; there was something of a hundred of those I may not note in
each of those I may, and I feel myself, amid the swarm, pluck but a
fruit or two from any branch. When I think of Florida, for instance, I
think of twenty matters involved in the start and the approach; I think
of the moist, the slightly harsh, Sunday morning under the portico of
the Charleston Hotel; I think of the inauspicious drizzle about the
yellow omnibus, archaic and “provincial,” that awaited the departing
guests—remembering how these antique vehicles, repudiated, rickety
“stages” of the age ignorant of trolleys, affected me here and there as
the quaintest, most immemorial of American things, the persistent use of
which surely represented the very superstition of the past. I think of
the gentleman, in the watchful knot, who, while our luggage emerged, was
moved to say to me, for some reason, “I guess we manage our travelling
here better than in _your_ country!”—whereby he so easily triumphed,
blank as I had to remain as to the country he imputed to me. I think of
the inimitable detachment with which, at the very moment he spoke, the
negro porter engaged at the door of the conveyance put straight down
into the mud of the road the dressing-bag I was obliged, a few minutes
later, in our close-pressed company, to nurse on my knees; and I go so
far, even, as almost to lose myself in the sense of other occasions
evoked by that reminiscence; this marked anomaly, the apparently
deep-seated inaptitude of the negro race at large for any alertness of
personal service, having been throughout a lively surprise.
One had counted, with some eagerness, in moving southward, on the
virtual opposite—on finding this deficiency, encountered right and left
at the North, beautifully corrected; one had remembered the old Southern
tradition, the house alive with the scramble of young darkies for the
honour of fetching and carrying; and one was to recognize, no doubt, at
the worst, its melancholy ghost. Its very ghost, however, by my
impression, had ceased to walk; or, if this be not the case, the old
planters, the cotton gentry, were the people in the world the worst
ministered to. I could have shed tears for them at moments, reflecting
that it was for _this_ they had fought and fallen. The negro waiter at
the hotel is in general, by an oddity of his disposition, so zealous to
break for you two or three eggs into a tumbler, or to drop for you three
or four lumps of sugar into a coffee-cup, that he scarce waits, in
either case, for your leave; but these struck me everywhere as the limit
of his accomplishment. He lends himself sufficiently to the rough,
gregarious bustle of crowded feeding-places, but seemed to fall below
the occasion on any appeal to his individual promptitude. Which
reflections, doubtless, exactly illustrate my profession of a moment ago
as to the insidious continuity, the close inter-relation, of observed
phenomena. I might with a little audacity insist still further on
that—which was in fact what I had originally quite promised myself to
do. I certainly should have been half heart-broken at the hour itself,
for example, had I _then_ had to estimate as pure waste my state of
sensibility to the style and stamp of my companions; aspects and sounds
burned into my memory, as I find, but none the less overstraining, I am
obliged to feel, the frame of these remarks. So vivid on the spot was
the sense of these particular human and “sectional” appearances, and of
certain others of the same cluster, that they remained for me afterwards
beautifully _placed_—placed in this connection of the pilgrimage to Palm
Beach, and not the less relevant for being incidental. I was to find the
obvious “bagman,” the lusty “drummer” of the Southern trains and inns
(if there be not, as yet unrevealed to me, some later fond diminutive of
designation for the ubiquitous commercial traveller)—I was to find, I
say, this personage promptly insist on a category of his own, a category
which, at the moments I here recall, loomed so large as to threaten to
block out of view almost every other object.
Was I the victim of grave mischance? was my infelicity exceptional?—or
was the type with which the scene so abounded, were the specimens I was
thus to treasure, all of the common class and the usual frequency? I was
to treasure them as specimens of something I had surely never yet so
_undisputedly_ encountered. They went, all by themselves, as it were, so
far—were, as to facial character, vocal tone, primal rawness of speech,
general accent and attitude, extraordinarily base and vulgar; and it was
interesting to make out why this fact took on, for my edification, so
unwonted an intensity. The fact of the influence, on the whole man, of a
sordid and ravenous habit, was naturally no new thing; one had met him
enough about the world, the brawny peddler more or less gorged with the
fruits of misrepresentation and blatant and brazen in the key of his
“special line of goods” and the measure of his need. But if the figure
was immemorial, why did it now usurp a value out of proportion to other
values? What, for instance, were its remorseless reasons for treating
the restless analyst, at the breakfast-hour perhaps above all, to so
lurid a vision of its triumph? He had positively come to associate the
breakfast-hour, from hotel to dining-car and from dining-car to hotel,
with the perfect security of this exhibition, the sight of the type in
completely unchallenged possession. I scarce know why my sensibility, at
the juncture in question, so utterly gave way to it; why I appealed in
vain from one of these so solemnly-feeding presences to another. They
refused to the wondering mind any form of relief; they insisted, as I
say, with the strange crudity of their air of commercial truculence, on
being exactly as “low” as they liked. And the affirmation was made, in
the setting of the great greasy inelegant room, as quietly as possible,
and without the least intention of offence: there were ladies and
children all about—though indeed there may have been sometimes _but_ the
lone breakfasting child to reckon with; the little pale, carnivorous,
coffee-drinking ogre or ogress who prowls down in advance of its elders,
engages a table—dread vision!—and has the “run” of the bill of fare.
The great blank decency, at all events, was no more broken than, on the
general American scene, it ever is; yet the apprehension of marks and
signs, the trick of speculation, declined none the less to drop. Whom
were they constructed, such specimens, to talk with, to talk over, or to
talk under, and what form of address or of intercourse, what uttered,
what intelligible terms of introduction, of persuasion, of menace, what
developed, what specific human process of any sort, was it possible to
impute to them? What reciprocities did they imply, what presumptions did
they, could they, create? What happened, inconceivably, when such Greeks
met such Greeks, such faces looked into such faces, and such sounds, in
especial, were exchanged with such sounds? What women did they live
with, what women, living with them, could yet leave them as they were?
What wives, daughters, sisters, did they in fine make credible; and
what, in especial, was the speech, what the manners, what the general
dietary, what most the monstrous morning meal, of ladies receiving at
such hands the law or the licence of life? Questions, these latter, some
of which, all the while, were not imperceptibly answered—save that the
vainest, no doubt, was that baffled inquiry as to the thinkable ground,
amid such relations, of preliminary confidence. What _was_ preliminary
confidence, where it had to reckon so with the minimum of any finished
appearance? How, when people were like that, did any one trust any one
enough to begin, or understand any one enough to go on, or keep the
peace with any one enough to survive? Wasn’t it, however, at last, none
the less, the sign of a fallacy somewhere in my impression that the
peace _was_ kept, precisely, while I so luxuriously wondered?—the
consciousness of which presently led me round to something that was at
the least a temporary, a working answer. My friends the drummers bore me
company thus, in the smoking-car, through the deepening, sweetening
South (where the rain soon gave way to a refinement of mildness) all the
way to Savannah; at the end of which time, under the enchantment of the
spreading scene, I had more or less issued from my maze.
It was not, probably, that, inflated though they might be, after early
refreshment, with the inward conflict of a greater number of strange
sacrifices to appetite than I had ever before seen perpetrated at once,
they were really more gruesome examples of a class at best disquieting
than might elsewhere have been discovered; it was only that, by so sad a
law of their situation, they were at once more exposed and less
susceptible of bearing exposure. They so became, to my imagination, and
by a mere turn of the hand of that precious faculty, something like
victims and martyrs, creatures touchingly, tragically doomed. For they
hadn’t _asked_, when one reflected, to be almost the only figures in the
social landscape—hadn’t wanted the fierce light to beat _all_ on
themselves. They hadn’t actively usurped the appearance of carrying on
life without aid of any sort from other _kinds_ of persons, other types,
presences, classes. If these others were absent it wasn’t _their_ fault;
and though they devoured, at a matutinal sitting, thirty little saucers
of insane, of delirious food, this was yet a law which, over much of the
land, appeared to recognize no difference of application for age, sex,
condition or constitution, and it had not in short been their pretension
to take over the whole social case. It would have been so different,
this case, and the general effect, for the human scene, would have been
so different, with a due proportion of other presences, other figures
and characters, members of other professions, representatives of other
interests, exemplars of other possibilities in man than the mere
possibility of getting the better of his fellow-man over a “trade.”
Wondrous always to note is this sterility of aspect and this blight of
vulgarity, humanly speaking, where a single type has had the game, as
one may say, all in its hands. Character is developed to visible
fineness only by friction and discipline on a large scale, only by its
having to reckon with a complexity of forces—a process which results, at
the worst, in a certain amount of social training.
No kind of person—that was the admonition—is a very good kind, and still
less a very pleasing kind, when its education has not been made to some
extent by contact with other kinds, by a sense of the existence of other
kinds, and, to that degree, by a certain relation with them. This
education may easily, at a hundred points, transcend the teaching of the
big brick school-house, for all the latter’s claim to universality. The
last dose ever administered by the great wooden spoon so actively plied
_there_ is the precious bitter-sweet of a sense of proportion; yet to
miss that taste, ever, at the table of civilization is to feel ourselves
seated surely too much below the salt. We miss it when the social effect
of it fails—when, all so dismally or so monstrously, every one strikes
us as “after” but one thing, and as thus not only unaware of the absent
importances and values, but condemned and restricted, as a direct
consequence of it, to the mere raw stage of their own particular
connection. I so worked out, in a word, that what was the matter with my
friends was not at all that they were viciously full-blown, as one might
say, were the ultimate sort of monstrosity they had at first appeared;
but that they were, on the contrary, just unformed, undeveloped,
unrelated above all—unrelated to any merciful modifying terms of the
great social proposition. They were not in their place—not relegated,
shaded, embowered, protected; and, dreadful though this might be to a
stray observer of the fact, it was much more dreadful for themselves.
They had the helpless weakness and, I think even, somewhere in dim
depths, deeper down still than the awful breakfast-habit, the vaguely
troubled sense of it. They would fall into their place at a touch, were
the social proposition, as I have called it, completed; they would then
help, quite subordinately assist, the long sentence to read—relieved of
their ridiculous charge of supplying all its clauses. I positively at
last thought of them as appealing from this embarrassment; in which
sublime patience I was floated, as I say, to Savannah.