VII

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 Iconfess 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, afrieze 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, tomakea fine sense, that here surely then was the greater antiquity of the two, the antiquity of the infiniteprevious, 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 primitiveplate, 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 extentcouldit 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 arenotmaking, 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 toyouI 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 thecreationof 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 thelarge 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 throughwhich 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.

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