This last impression had indeed everything to gain from the sad rigour
of steps retraced, an inevitable return to the North (in the interest of
a directly subsequent, and thereby gracelessly roundabout, move
Westward); and I confess to having felt on that occasion, before the
dire backwardness of the Northern spring, as if I had, while travelling
in the other sense, but blasphemed against the want of forwardness of
the Southern. Every breath that one might still have drawn in the
South—might if twenty other matters had been different—haunted me as the
thought of a lost treasure, and I settled, at the eternal car-window, to
the mere sightless contemplation, the forlorn view, of an ugly—ah, such
an ugly, wintering, waiting world. My eye had perhaps been jaundiced by
the breach of a happy spell—inasmuch as on thus leaving the sad
fragments there where they had fallen I tasted again the quite
saccharine sweetness of my last experience of Palm Beach, and knew how I
should wish to note for remembrance the passage, supremely charged with
that quality, in which it had culminated. I asked myself what other
expression I should find for the incident, the afternoon before I left
the place, of one of those mild progresses to the head of Lake Worth
which distil, for the good children of the Pair, the purest poetry of
their cup. The poetic effect had braved the compromising aid of the
highly-developed electric launch in which the pilgrim embarks, and
braved as well the immitigable fact that his shrine, at the end of a
couple of hours, is, in the vast and exquisite void, but an institution
of yesterday, a wondrous floating tea-house or restaurant, inflated
again with the hotel-spirit and exhaling modernity at every pore.
These associations are—so far as association goes—the only ones; but the
whole impression, for simply sitting there in the softest lap the whole
South had to offer, seemed to me to dispense with any aid but that of
its own absolute felicity. It was, for the late return at least, the
return in the divine dusk, with the flushed West at one’s right, a
concert of but two or three notes—the alignment, against the golden sky,
of the individual black palms, a frieze of chiselled ebony, and the
texture, for faintly-brushed cheek and brow, of an air of such silkiness
of velvet, the very throne-robe of the star-crowned night, as one can
scarce commemorate but in the language of the loom. The shore of the
sunset and the palms, what was that, meanwhile, like, and yet with what
did it, at the moment one asked the question, refuse to have anything to
do? It was like a myriad pictures of the Nile; with much of the modern
life of which it suggested more than one analogy. These indeed all
dropped, I found, before I had done—it would have been a Nile so
simplified out of the various fine senses attachable. One had to put the
case, I mean, to _make_ a fine sense, that here surely then was the
greater antiquity of the two, the antiquity of the infinite _previous_,
of the time, before Pharaohs and Pyramids, when everything was still to
come. It was a Nile, in short, without the least little implication of a
Sphinx or, still more if possible, of a Cleopatra. I had the foretaste
of what I was presently to feel in California—when the general aspect of
that wondrous realm kept suggesting to me a sort of prepared but
unconscious and inexperienced Italy, the primitive _plate_, in perfect
condition, but with the impression of History all yet to be made.
Of how grimly, meanwhile, under the annual rigour, the world, for the
most part, waits to be less ugly again, less despoiled of interest, less
abandoned to monotony, less forsaken of the presence that forms its only
resource, of the one friend to whom it owes all it ever gets, of the
pitying season that shall save it from its huge insignificance—of so
much as this, no doubt, I sufficiently renewed my vision, and with
plenty of the reviving ache of a question already familiar. To what
extent was hugeness, to what extent _could_ it be, a ground for
complacency of view, in any country not visited for the very love of
wildness, for positive joy in barbarism? Where was the charm of
boundless immensity as overlooked from a car-window?—with the general
pretension to charm, the general conquest of nature and space, affirmed,
immediately round about you, by the general pretension of the Pullman,
the great monotonous rumble of which seems forever to say to you: “See
what I’m making of all this—see what I’m making, what I’m making!” I was
to become later on still more intimately aware of the spirit of one’s
possible reply to that, but even then my consciousness served, and the
eloquence of my exasperation seems, in its rude accents, to come back to
me.
“I see what you are _not_ making, oh, what you are ever so vividly not;
and how can I help it if I am subject to that lucidity?—which appears
never so welcome to you, for its measure of truth, as it ought to be!
How can I not be so subject, from the moment I don’t just irreflectively
gape? If I were one of the painted savages you have dispossessed, or
even some tough reactionary trying to emulate him, what you are making
would doubtless impress me more than what you are leaving unmade; for in
that case it wouldn’t be to _you_ I should be looking in any degree for
beauty or for charm. Beauty and charm would be for me in the solitude
you have ravaged, and I should owe you my grudge for every disfigurement
and every violence, for every wound with which you have caused the face
of the land to bleed. No, since I accept your ravage, what strikes me is
the long list of the arrears of your undone; and so constantly, right
and left, that your pretended message of civilization is but a colossal
recipe for the _creation_ of arrears, and of such as can but remain
forever out of hand. You touch the great lonely land—as one feels it
still to be—only to plant upon it some ugliness about which, never
dreaming of the grace of apology or contrition, you then proceed to brag
with a cynicism all your own. You convert the large and noble sanities
that I see around me, you convert them one after the other to crudities,
to invalidities, hideous and unashamed; and you so leave them to add to
the number of the myriad aspects you simply spoil, of the myriad
unanswerable questions that you scatter about as some monstrous
unnatural mother might leave a family of unfathered infants on doorsteps
or in waiting-rooms. This is the meaning surely of the inveterate rule
that you shall multiply the perpetrations you call ‘places’—by the sign
of some name as senseless, mostly, as themselves—to the sole end of
multiplying to the eye, as one approaches, every possible source of
displeasure. When nobody cares or notices or suffers, by all one makes
out, when no displeasure, by what one can see, is ever felt or ever
registered, why shouldn’t you, you may indeed ask, be as much in your
right as you need? But in that fact itself, that fact of the vast
general unconsciousness and indifference, looms, for any restless
analyst who may come along, the accumulation, on your hands, of the
unretrieved and the irretrievable!”
I remember how it was to come to me elsewhere, in such hours as those,
that south of Pennsylvania, for instance, or beyond the radius of
Washington, I had caught no glimpse of anything that was to be called,
for more than a few miles and by a stretch of courtesy, the honour, the
decency or dignity of a road—that most exemplary of all civil creations,
and greater even as a note of morality, one often thinks, than as a note
of facility; and yet had nowhere heard these particular arrears spoken
of as matters ever conceivably to be made up. I was doubtless aware that
if I had been a beautiful red man with a tomahawk I should of course
have rejoiced in the occasional sandy track, or in the occasional
mud-channel, just in proportion as they fell so short of the type. Only
in that case I shouldn’t have been seated by the great square of
plate-glass through which the missionary Pullman appeared to invite me
to admire the achievements it proclaimed. It was in this respect the
great symbolic agent; it seemed to stand for all the irresponsibility
behind it; and I am not sure that I didn’t continue, so long as I was in
it, to “slang” it for relief of the o’erfraught heart. “You deal your
wounds—that is the ‘trouble,’ as you say—in numbers so out of proportion
to any hint of responsibility for them that you seem ever moved to take;
which is the devil’s dance, precisely, that your vast expanse of level
floor leads you to caper through with more kinds of outward
clumsiness—even if also with more kinds of inward impatience and
avidity, more leaps and bounds of the spirit at any cost to grace—than
have ever before been collectively displayed. The expanse of the floor,
the material opportunity itself, has elsewhere failed; so that what is
the positive effect of their inordinate presence but to make the lone
observer, here and there, but measure with dismay the trap laid by the
scale, if he be not tempted even to say by the superstition, of
continuity? Is the germ of anything finely human, of anything agreeably
or successfully social, supposably planted in conditions of such endless
stretching and such boundless spreading as shall appear finally to
minister but to the triumph of the superficial and the apotheosis of the
raw? Oh for a split or a chasm, one groans beside your plate-glass, oh
for an unbridgeable abyss or an insuperable mountain!”—and I could so
indulge myself though still ignorant of how one was to groan later on,
in particular, after taking yet further home the portentous truth that
this same criminal continuity, scorning its grandest chance to break
down, makes but a mouthful of the mighty Mississippi. That was to be in
fact my very next “big” impression.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.