III
ON RETURNING FROM EUROPE[59]
This page will be wafted possibly through a snow-storm to the reader's hand; but it is written while a few red leaves are still clinging to the maple bough, and the last steamer of the year from across the ocean has not yet discharged on our shores the final cargo of returning summer tourists. How glad they will be, like those who came over in previous ships, to sight that fantomish, white strip of Yankee land called Sandy Hook! It is thinking of them that I write.
Some one—that anonymous person who is always saying the wisest and most delightful things just as you are on the point of saying them yourself—has remarked that one of the greatest pleasures of foreign travel is to get home again. But no one—that irresponsible person forever to blame in railway accidents, but whom, on the whole, I vastly prefer to his garrulous relative quoted above—no one, I repeat, has pointed out the composite nature of this pleasure, or named the ingredient in it which gives the chief charm to this getting back. It is pleasant to feel the pressure of friendly hands once more; it is pleasant to pick up the threads of occupation which you dropt abruptly, or perhaps neatly knotted together and carefully laid away, just before you stept on board the steamer; it is very pleasant, when the summer experience has been softened and sublimated by time, to sit of a winter night by the cheery wood fire, or even at the register, since one must make one's self comfortable in so humiliating a fashion, and let your fancy wander back in the old footprints; to form your thoughts into happy summer pilgrims, and dispatch them to Arles or Nuremberg, or up the vine-clad heights of Monte Cassino, or embark them at Vienna for a cruise down the swift Danube to Budapest. But in none of these things lies the subtle charm I wish to indicate. It lies in the refreshing, short-lived pleasure of being able to look at your own land with the eyes of an alien; to see novelty blossoming on the most commonplace and familiar stems; to have the old manner and the threadbare old custom to present themselves to you as absolutely new—or if not new, at least strange.
After you have escaped from the claws of the custom-house officers—who are not nearly as affable birds as you once thought them—and are rattling in an oddly familiar hack through well-known but half-unrecognizable streets, you are struck by something comical in the names on the shop signs—are American names comical, as Englishmen seem to think?—by the strange fashion of the iron lamp-post at the corner, by peculiarities in the architecture, which you ought to have noticed, but never did notice until now. The candid incivility of the coachman, who does not touch his hat to you, but swears at you, has the vague charm of reminiscence. You regard him as the guests regarded the poor relation at table in Lamb's essay; you have an impression that you have seen him somewhere before. The truth is, for the first time in your existence, you have a full, unprejudiced look at the shell of the civilization from which you emerged when you went abroad. Is it a pretty shell? Is it a satisfactory shell? Not entirely. It has strange excrescences and blotches on it. But it is a shell worth examining; it is the best you can ever have; and it is expedient to study it very carefully the two or three weeks immediately following your return to it, for your privilege of doing so is of the briefest tenure. Some precious things you do not lose, but your newly acquired vision fails you shortly. Suddenly, while you are comparing, valuing, and criticizing, the old scales fall over your eyes, you insensibly slip back into the well-worn grooves, and behold all outward and most inward things in nearly the same light as your untraveled neighbor, who has never known
"The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome."
You will have to go abroad again to renew those magical spectacles which enabled you for a few weeks to see your native land.
FOOTNOTES:
[57] From Chapter I of "The Stillwater Tragedy." Copyright, 1880, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.
[58] From Chapter XIII of "The Story of a Bad Boy." Copyright, 1869, 1877, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.