The American scene

by Henry James

II

It was in conformity with some such induction as the foregoing that I had to feel myself, at Richmond, in the midst of abnormal wintry rigours, take in at every pore a Southern impression; just as it was also there, before a picture charmless at the best, I seemed to apprehend, and not redeemed now by mistimed snow and ice, that I was to recognize how much I had staked on my theory of the latent poetry of the South. This theory, during a couple of rather dark, vain days, constituted my one solace or support, and I was most of all occupied with my sense of the importance of carrying it off again unimpaired. I remember asking myself at the end of an hour or two what I had then expected—expected of the interesting Richmond; and thereupon, whether or no I mustered, on this first challenge, an adequate answer, trying to supply the original basis of expectation. By that effort, as happened, my dim perambulation was lighted, and I hasten to add that I felt the second branch of my question easy enough to meet. How was the sight of Richmond not to be a potent idea; how was the place not, presumably, to be interesting, to a restless analyst who had become conscious of the charge involved in that title as long ago as at the outbreak of the Civil War, if not even still more promptly; and to whose young imagination the Confederate capital had grown lurid, fuliginous, vividly tragic—especially under the process through which its fate was to close round it and overwhelm it, invest it with one of the great reverberating historic names? They hang together on the dreadful page, the cities of the supreme holocaust, the final massacres, the blood, the flames, the tears; they are chalked with the sinister red mark at sight of which the sensitive nerve of association forever winces. If the mere shadow had that penetrative power, what affecting virtue might accordingly not reside in the substances, the place itself, the haunted scene, as one might figure it, of the old, the vast intensity of drama? One thing at least was certain—that, however the sense of actual aspects was to disengage itself, I could not possibly have drawn near with an intelligence more respectfully and liberally prepared for hospitality to it. So, conformably with all this, how could it further not strike me, in presence of the presented appearances, that the needful perceptions were in fact at play?

I recall the shock of that question after a single interrogative stroll, a mere vague mile of which had thrown me back wondering and a trifle mystified. One had had brutally to put it to one’s self after a conscientious stare about: “This then the tragic ghost-haunted city, this the centre of the vast blood-drenched circle, one of the most blood-drenched, for miles and miles around, in the dire catalogue aforesaid?” One had counted on a sort of registered consciousness of the past, and the truth was that there appeared, for the moment, on the face of the scene, no discernible consciousness, registered or unregistered, of anything. Richmond, in a word, looked to me simply blank and void—whereby it was, precisely, however, that the great emotion was to come. One could never consent merely to taking it for that: intolerable the discredit so cast on one’s perceptive resources. The great modern hotel, superfluously vast, was excellent; but it enjoyed as a feature, as a “value,” an uncontested priority. It was a huge well-pitched tent, the latest thing in tents, proclaiming in the desert the name of a new industry. The desert, I have mentioned, was more or less muffled in snow—that furthered, I admit, the blankness; the wind was harsh, the sky sullen, the houses scarce emphasized at all as houses; the “Southern character,” in fine, was nowhere. I should doubtless have been embarrassed to say in what specific items I had imagined it would naturally reside—save in so far as I had attached some mystic virtue to the very name of Virginia: this instinctive imputation constituting by itself, for that matter, a symptom of a certain significance. I watched and waited, giving the virtue a chance to come out; I wandered far and wide—as far, that is, as weather and season permitted; they quite forbade, to my regret, the long drives involved in a visitation of the old battlefields. The shallow vistas, the loose perspectives, were as sadly simple as the faces of the blind. Was it practically but a question then, deplorable thought, of a poor Northern city?—with the bare difference that a Northern city of such extent would, however stricken, have succeeded, by some Northern art in pretending to resources. Where, otherwise, were the “old Southern mansions” on the wide verandahs and in the rank, sweet gardens of which Northern resources had once been held so cheap?

Well, I scarce remember at what point of my peregrination, at what quite vague, senseless street-corner it was that I felt my inquiry—up to that moment rather embarrassing—turn to clearness and the whole picture place itself in a light in which contemplation might for the time find a warrant and a clue. I at any rate almost like to live over the few minutes in question—for the sake of their relief and their felicity. So retracing them, I see that the spring had been pressed for them by the positive force of one’s first dismay; a sort of intellectual bankruptcy, this latter, that one felt one really couldn’t afford. There were no references—that had been the trouble; but the reaction came with the sense that the large, sad poorness was in itself a reference, and one by which a hundred grand historic connections were on the spot, and quite thrillingly, re-established. What was I tasting of, at that time of day, and with intensity, but the far consequences of things, made absolutely majestic by their weight and duration? I was tasting, mystically, of the very essence of the old Southern idea—the hugest fallacy, as it hovered there to one’s backward, one’s ranging vision, for which hundreds of thousands of men had ever laid down their lives. I was tasting of the very bitterness of the immense, grotesque, defeated project—the project, extravagant, fantastic, and to-day pathetic in its folly, of a vast Slave State (as the old term ran) artfully, savingly isolated in the world that was to contain it and trade with it. This was what everything round me meant—that that absurdity had once flourished there; and nothing, immediately, could have been more interesting than the lesson that such may remain, for long years, the tell-tale face of things where such absurdities have flourished. Thus, by a turn of my hand, or of my head, interest was evoked; so that from this moment I had never to let go of it. It was to serve again, it was to serve elsewhere, and in much the same manner; all aspects straightway were altered by it, and the pious pilgrim came round again into his own. He had wanted, his scheme had fairly required, this particular part of the country to be beautiful; he had really needed it to be, he couldn’t afford, in due deference to the intellectual economy imposed on him, its not being. When things were grandly sad, accordingly—sad on the great scale and with a certain nobleness of ruin—an element of beauty seemed always secured, even if one could scarce say why: which truth, clearly, would operate fortunately for the compromised South.

It came back again—it was always, after this fashion, coming back, as if to make me extravagantly repeat myself—to the quantity to be “read into” the American view, in general, before it gives out an interest. The observer, like a fond investor, must spend on it, boldly, ingeniously, to make it pay; and it may often thus remind one of the wonderful soil of California, which is nothing when left to itself and the fine weather, but becomes everything conceivable under the rainfall. What would many an American prospect be for him, the visitor bent on appreciation frequently wonders, without his preliminary discharge upon it of some brisk shower of general ideas? The arid sand has, in a remarkable degree, the fine property of absorbing these latter and then giving them back to the air in proportionate signs of life. There be blooming gardens, on the other hand, I take it, where the foliage of Time is positively too dense for the general idea to penetrate or to perch—as if too many ideas had already been concerned and involved and there were nothing to do but to accept the complete demonstration. It was not to this order, at any rate, that my decipherable South was to belong; but Richmond at least began to repay my outlay, from point to point, as soon as the outlay had been made. The place was weak—“adorably” weak: that was the word into which the whole impression flowered, that was the idea, evidently, that all the rest of the way as well, would be most brought home. That was the form, in short, that the interest would take; the charm—immense, almost august—being in the long, unbroken connections of the case. Here, obviously, would be the prime source of the beauty; since if to be sad was to be the reverse of blatant, what was the sadness, taken all round, but the incurable after-taste of the original vanity and fatuity, with the memories and penalties of which the very air seemed still charged? I had recently been studying, a little, the record, reading, with other things, the volume of his admirable History in which Mr. James Ford Rhoades recounts the long preliminaries of the War and shows us, all lucidly and humanely, the Southern mind of the mid-century in the very convulsions of its perversity—the conception that, almost comic in itself, was yet so tragically to fail to work, that of a world rearranged, a State solidly and comfortably seated and tucked in, in the interest of slave-produced Cotton.

The solidity and the comfort were to involve not only the wide extension, but the complete intellectual, moral and economic reconsecration of slavery, an enlarged and glorified, quite beatified, application of its principle. The light of experience, round about, and every finger-post of history, of political and spiritual science with which the scene of civilization seemed to bristle, had, when questioned, but one warning to give, and appeared to give it with an effect of huge derision: whereby was laid on the Southern genius the necessity of getting rid of these discords and substituting for the ironic face of the world an entirely new harmony, or in other words a different scheme of criticism. Since nothing in the Slave-scheme could be said to conform—conform, that is, to the reality of things—it was the plan of Christendom and the wisdom of the ages that would have to be altered. History, the history of everything, would be rewritten ad usum Delphini—the Dauphin being in this case the budding Southern mind. This meant a general and a permanent quarantine; meant the eternal bowdlerization of books and journals; meant in fine all literature and all art on an expurgatory index. It meant, still further, an active and ardent propaganda; the reorganization of the school, the college, the university, in the interest of the new criticism. The testimony to that thesis offered by the documents of the time, by State legislation, local eloquence, political speeches, the “tone of the press,” strikes us to-day as beyond measure queer and quaint and benighted—innocent above all; stamped with the inalienable Southern sign, the inimitable rococo note. We talk of the provincial, but the provinciality projected by the Confederate dream, and in which it proposed to steep the whole helpless social mass, looks to our present eyes as artlessly perverse, as untouched by any intellectual tradition of beauty or wit, as some exhibited array of the odd utensils or divinities of lone and primitive islanders. It came over one that they were there, in the air they had breathed, precisely, lone—even the very best of the old Southerners; and, looking at them over the threshold of approach that poor Richmond seemed to form, the real key to one’s sense of their native scene was in that very idea of their solitude and their isolation. Thus they affected one as such passive, such pathetic victims of fate, as so played upon and betrayed, so beaten and bruised, by the old burden of their condition, that I found myself conscious, on their behalf, of a sort of ingenuity of tenderness.

Their condition was to have waked up from far back to this thumping legacy of the intimate presence of the negro, and one saw them not much less imprisoned in it and overdarkened by it to-day than they had been in the time of their so fallacious presumption. The haunting consciousness thus produced is the prison of the Southern spirit; and how was one to say, as a pilgrim from afar, that with an equal exposure to the embarrassing fact one would have been more at one’s ease? I had found my own threatened, I remember—my ease of contemplation of the subject, which was all there could be question of—during some ten minutes spent, a few days before, in consideration of an African type or two encountered in Washington. I was waiting, in a cab, at the railway-station, for the delivery of my luggage after my arrival, while a group of tatterdemalion darkies lounged and sunned themselves within range. To take in with any attention two or three of these figures had surely been to feel one’s self introduced at a bound to the formidable question, which rose suddenly like some beast that had sprung from the jungle. These were its far outposts; they represented the Southern black as we knew him not, and had not within the memory of man known him, at the North; and to see him there, ragged and rudimentary, yet all portentous and “in possession of his rights as a man,” was to be not a little discomposed, was to be in fact very much admonished. One understood at a glance how he must loom, how he must count, in a community in which, in spite of the ground it might cover, there were comparatively so few other things. The admonition accordingly remained, and no further appeal was required, I felt, to disabuse a tactful mind of the urgency of preaching, southward, a sweet reasonableness about him. Nothing was less contestable, of course, than that such a sweet reasonableness might play, in the whole situation, a beautiful part; but nothing, also, was on reflection more obvious than that the counsel of perfection, in such a case, would never prove oil upon the waters. The lips of the non-resident were, at all events, not the lips to utter this wisdom; the non-resident might well feel themselves indeed, after a little, appointed to silence, and, with any delicacy, see their duty quite elsewhere.

It came to one, soon enough, by all the voices of the air, that the negro had always been, and could absolutely not fail to be, intensely “on the nerves” of the South, and that as, in the other time, the observer from without had always, as a tribute to this truth, to tread the scene on tiptoe, so even yet, in presence of the immitigable fact, a like discretion is imposed on him. He might depart from the discretion of old, if he were so moved, intrusively, fanatically, even heroically, and he would depart from it to-day, one quite recognized, with the same effect of importunity, but not with the same effect of gallantry. The moral of all of which fairly became, to my sense, a soft inward dirge over the eternal “false position” of the afflicted South—condemned as she was to institutions, condemned to a state of temper, of exasperation and depression, a horrid heritage she had never consciously invited, that bound up her life with a hundred mistakes and make-believes, suppressions and prevarications, things that really all named themselves in the noted provincialism. None of them would have lived in the air of the greater world—which was the world that the North, with whatever abatements, had comparatively been, and had conquered by being; so that if the actual visitor was conscious now, as I say, of the appeal to his tenderness, it was by this sight of a society still shut up in a world smaller than what one might suppose its true desire, to say nothing of its true desert. I can doubtless not sufficiently tell why, but there was something in my whole sense of the South that projected at moments a vivid and painful image—that of a figure somehow blighted or stricken, discomfortably, impossibly seated in an invalid-chair, and yet fixing one with strange eyes that were half a defiance and half a deprecation of one’s noticing, and much more of one’s referring to, any abnormal sign. The deprecation, in the Southern eyes, is much greater to-day, I think, than the old lurid challenge; but my haunting similitude was an image of the keeping-up of appearances, and above all of the maintenance of a tone, the historic “high” tone, in an excruciating posture. There was food for sympathy—and the restless analyst must repeat that when he had but tasted of it he could but make of it his full meal. Which brings him back, by a long way round, to the grim street-corner at Richmond where he last left himself.