The American scene

by Henry James

II

If my sensibility yielded so completely to Baltimore, however, I should add, this was no doubt partly because the air seemed from the first to breathe upon it a pledge of no bruises. I mounted, in the golden June light, the neatest, amplest, emptiest street-vista, the builded side of a steepish hill, and, having come in due course to a spacious summit, laid out with monumental elegance and completely void, for the time, of the human footstep, I saw that to suffer in any fibre I should have positively, somewhere, to hurl myself upon the spears. Not a point protruded then or afterwards; and the cunning of the restless analyst is essentially such that, with friction long enough in abeyance to leave him a start, he is already astride of his happier thesis, seated firm, having “elected” to be undismountable, and riding it as hard as it will go. The absence of friction, on my monumental hilltop and in the prospects it overhung, constituted, I was to find, an absolute circus-ring for this exercise; and it is much to be able to say, while performing in the circus (even if but mainly to the public of one’s own conscience), that one has never had the sense of a safer hour. The safety of Baltimore, I should indeed mention, consisted perhaps a little overmuch, during that first flush, in its apparently vacant condition: it affected me as a sort of perversely cheerful little city of the dead; and from the dead, naturally, comes no friction. Was it cheerful, that is, or was it only resigned and discreet?—with the manner of the good breeding that doesn’t publicly prate of family troubles. I found myself handling, in imagination, these large quantities only because, as I suppose, it was impossible not to remember on that spot of what native generation one had come. It took no greater intensity of the South than Baltimore could easily give to figure again, however fadedly, and all as a ghostly presence, the huge shadow of the War, and to reproduce that particular bloodstained patch of it which, in the very first days, the now so irresponsible and absent community about me had flung across the path of the North. This one echo of old Time made the connections, for the instant, all vibrate, and the scene before me, somehow, as it stood, had to account for the great revolution. It was as if that, for the restless analyst, had to be disposed of before anything else: whereby, precisely, didn’t the amenity of his impression partly spring from the descent there, on the spot, in a quick white flash, of the most august of the Muses? It was History in person that hovered, just long enough for me to recognize her and to read, in her strange deep eyes, her intelligence at least of everything. It might have been there fairly as reassurance. “Yes, they have lived with me, and it has done them good, and we have buried together all their past—about which, wise creature as I am, I allow them, of course, all piety. But this—what you make out around us—is their real collective self, which I am delighted to commend to you. I’ve found Baltimore a charming patient.” That was, in ten minutes, what it had come to; as if the brush of the sublime garment had by itself cleared the air. If there was a fine warm hush everywhere it was indeed partly that of this historic peace.

But for the rest it only meant that the world was at such a season out of town. Houses were everywhere closed, and the neat perspectives, all domiciliary and all, as I have hinted, tending mildly to a vague elegance, were the more neat and more elegant, though doubtless also the more mild and the more vague, for their being so inanimate. A certain vividness of high decency seemed in spite of it to possess them, and this suggestion of the real southern glow, yet with no southern looseness, was clearly something by itself—all special and local and all, or almost all, expressed in repeated vistas of little brick-faced and protrusively door-stepped houses, which, overhung by tall, regular umbrage, suggested rows of quiet old ladies seated, with their toes tucked-up on uniform footstools, under the shaded candlesticks of old-fashioned tea-parties. The little ladylike squares, though below any tide-mark of fashion, were particularly frequent; in which case it was as if the virtuous dames had drawn together round a large green table, albeit to no more riotous end than that each should sit before her individual game of patience. One sounds inevitably the note of the “virtue”—so little, in general, can any picture of American town-appearance hang together without it. It amounts, everywhere, to something intenser than the implied absence of “vice”; it amounts to a sort of registered absence of the conception or the imagination of it, and still more of the provision for it; though, all the while, as one goes and comes, one feels that no community can really be as purged of peccant humours as the typical American has for the most part found itself foredoomed to look. It has been caught in the mechanism of that consistency—to an effect of convenience, doubtless, much more than to any other; and has thus, in the whole vast connection, a relation to appearances that is all its own. The “European” scene, at a thousand points, looks all its sophistications straight out at us—or looks, in other words, at least as perverse as it practically is. The American, on the other hand, expressing physiognomically no sophistications at all—though plenty of quite common candours, crudities and vulgarities—makes one ask if the cash-register, the ice-cream freezer, the lightning-elevator, the “boys’ paper,” and other such overflows, do truly represent the sum of its passions. Incontestably, at all events, this immensely ingenuous aspect counts, for any country and any scheme of life, as a great force, just as the appearance of the stale and the congested residing in the comparatively battered mask of experience counts as a weakness: to conceive which the mind’s eye has only to fix a little the colossal American face grimacing with anything of a subtler consciousness. That image, if actually presented, would become, as we feel, appalling. The inexorable fate of the countenance in question may be so to learn to grimace in time, but though few processes are slow, in the United States, and few exhibitions not contagious, any such transition, assuredly, will not be rapid, any more than any such tendency will easily predominate.

All of which would have carried me far from the simple sweetness of Baltimore, were it not that, for the restless analyst, there is no such thing as an unrelated fact, no such thing as a break in the chain of relations. Many a perceived American aspect, for that matter, would by itself have little to give; the student of manners, in other words, to make it presentable—by which I understand to make it sufficiently interesting—must first discover connections for it and then borrow from these, if possible, the elements of a wardrobe. And though it should sound a little monstrous, moreover, one had somehow not been prepared for so delicate an effect of propriety; since there are cases too, indubitably, in which propriety can show for almost as coarse as anything else. It couldn’t have been, either, that one had expected any positive air of licence; but the fact was, I suppose, that, for a constitutional story-seeker, a certain still, small shock, a prompt need of readjustment of view, was involved in one’s finding the element of the bourgeois crop up, so inveterately, in latitudes generally associated, so far as one knew them elsewhere, with some perceptible sacrifice to the sway of the senses. I had already, at this date, as I have noted, dipped deep into our own uttermost South, and had there had to reckon with that first slight disconcertment awaiting the observer whose southern categories happen to have been wholly European. His simplest expression for the anomaly he meets is that he sees the citronic belt all incongruously Protestantized: that big word (for so small a bewilderment perhaps) sticks to him and worries him—almost as absurdly, I grant, as if he had expected Charleston and Savannah to betray the moral accent of Naples or Seville. He had not, assuredly, done this; but he had as little allowed, in imagination, for the hyperborean note. A South without church-fronts and church-interiors had been superficially as strange, in its way, as a Methodism of the sub-tropic night, a Methodism of the orange and the palm. Such were the treacheries of association; though what indeed would observation be, for interest, if it were not, just by these armed surprises, constantly touched with adventure? The beauty of Baltimore was, all this time, that one could feel it as potentially harmonizing; the citronic belt would not embrace here more Methodism than might consort with it, nor the Methodism pretend to cultivate with any success the hibiscus and the pomegranate.

That I could entertain so many incoherent ideas in half-an-hour was in any case a proof that I felt, for the occasion, left in possession; quite as the visitor as yet unintroduced may feel during some long preliminary wait in a drawing-room. He looks at the furniture, pictures, books; he studies in these objects the character of the house and of his hosts, and if there be some domestic treasure visibly more important and conspicuous than the others, it engages his attention as either with a fatal or an engaging force. The top of the central eminence, with its air of an ample plan and of sweeping the rest of the circle, figured the documentary parlour and my enjoyed leave to touch and examine; so that when it was a question, in particular, of the monument to Washington, the high column, in the middle, with its surmounting figure and its spreading architectural base, this presence was, for all the world, like that of some vast and stately old-fashioned clock, a decorative “piece,” an heirloom from generations now respectably remote, occupying an inordinate space in proportion to the other conveniences. The ornamental, the “important” clock is apt to be in especial, at such a crisis, a tell-tale object; its range of testimony, of possible treachery, is immense, and cases are not unknown, I gather, in which it has put the doubting visitor to flight. The greater the felicity, thereby, for the overtopping Baltimore timepiece, which hung about in mild reassurance, promptly aware that it wasn’t a bit vulgar, but, on the contrary, of a pleasant jejune academic pomp that suggested to the fancy some melancholy, some spectral, man-at-arms mounting guard at the angles, in due military form, over suspected treasures of Style. One could imagine, somehow, under the summer stars, the mystic vigil of these mild heroes; and one could above all catch again the interesting hint of the terms on which, in the United States, the consecration of time may be found operating. It has a trick there all of its own, thanks to which the effect of duration is produced very much as, before the footlights, the prestidigitator produces the effect of extracting a live fowl from a hat. This is a law under which, the material permitting, the decades count as centuries and the centuries as æons. The misfortune is that too often the material, futile and treacherous, doesn’t permit. Yet the law is in the happiest cases none the less strikingly vindicated. There, for instance—to pursue undiscouraged my figure of the guest in the empty parlour—were the best houses, the older, the ampler, the more blandly quadrilateral; which in spite of their still faces met one’s arrest, at their commodious corners and other places of vantage, with an unmistakable manner. The quiet assurance of a position in the world—the world, the only one, with which they were concerned—testified again, in an interesting way, to the simple source of their impressiveness, showing how almost any modern interval could have been long enough to make them nobly antique if such interval might only have been vulgar enough. The age of “brown stone” was to have found no difficulty in that; the prolongation of its rage for a quarter of a century amply sufficed to dignify every antecedent thing it had spared (as the survivors of reigns of Terror grow by mere survival distinguished); while, steeped in dishonour up to the eyebrows, that is up to its false cornices of painted and sanded wood and iron, it was never to enjoy, for itself, the advantage it elsewhere conferred. Nothing has ever been vulgar enough to rehabilitate the odd ugliness, so distinct, yet after all so undemonstrable, of this luckless material; the way one shuddered, in particular, at the touch, on balustrade and elsewhere, of the sanded iron! It has been followed by other rages and other errors, but even the grace of the American time-measure can do nothing for it.