Travels With Henry James

by Henry James

  An important feature in many watering-places is the facility for leaving it a little behind you and tasting of the unmitigated country. You may wander to some shady hillside and sentimentalize upon the vanity of high civilization. But at Saratoga civilization holds you fast. The most important feature of the place, perhaps, is the impossibility of realizing any such pastoral dream. The surrounding country is a charming wilderness, but the roads are so abominably bad that walking and driving are alike unprofitable. Of course, however, if you are bent upon a walk, you will take it. There is a striking contrast between the concentrated prodigality of life in the immediate precinct of the hotels and the generous wooded wildness and roughness into which half an hour’s stroll may lead you. Only a mile behind you are thousands of loungers and idlers, fashioned from head to foot by the experience of cities and keenly knowing in their secrets; while here, about you and before you, blooms untamed the hardy innocence of field and forest. The heavy roads are little more than sandy wheel-tracks; by the tangled wayside the blackberries wither unpicked. The country undulates with a beautiful unsoftened freedom. There are no white villages gleaming in the distance, no spires of churches, no salient details. It is all green, lonely, and vacant. If you wish to seize an “effect,” you must stop beneath a cluster of pines and listen to the murmur of the softly-troubled air, or follow upward the gradual bending of their trunks to where the afternoon light touches and enchants them. Here and there on a slope by the roadside stands a rough unpainted farm-house, looking as if its dreary blackness were the result of its standing dark and lonely amid so many months, and such a wide expanse, of winter snow. The principal feature of the grassy unfurnished yard is the great wood-pile, telling grimly of the long reversion of the summer. For the time, however, it looks down contentedly enough over a goodly appanage of grain-fields and orchards, and I can fancy that it may be good to be a boy there. But to be a man, it must be quite what the lean, brown, serious farmers physiognomically hint it to be. You have, however, at the present season, for your additional beguilement, on the eastern horizon, the vision of the long bold chain of the Green Mountains, clad in that single coat of simple candid blue which is the favorite garment of our American hills. As a visitor, too, you have for an afternoon’s excursion your choice between a couple of lakes. Saratoga Lake, the larger and more distant of the two, is the goal of the regular afternoon drive. Above the shore is a well-appointed tavern—“Moon’s” it is called by the voice of fame—where you may sit upon a broad piazza and partake of fried potatoes and “drinks”; the latter, if you happen to have come from poor dislicensed Boston, a peculiarly gratifying privilege. You enjoy the felicity sighed for by that wanton Italian princess of the anecdote, when, one summer evening, to the sound of music, she wished that to eat an ice were a sin. The other lake is small, and its shores are unadorned by any edifice but a boat-house, where you may hire a skiff and pull yourself out into the minnow-tickled, wood-circled oval. Here, floating in its darkened half, while you watch on the opposite shore the tree-stems, white and sharp in the declining sunlight, and their foliage whitening and whispering in the breeze, and you feel that this little solitude is part of a greater and more portentous solitude, you may resolve certain passages of Ruskin, in which he dwells upon the needfulness of some human association, however remote, to make natural scenery fully impressive. You may recall that magnificent passage in which he relates having tried with such fatal effect, in a battle-haunted valley of the Jura, to fancy himself in a nameless solitude of our own continent. You feel around you, with irresistible force, the serene inexperience of undedicated nature—the absence of serious associations, the nearness, indeed, of the vulgar and trivial associations of the least picturesque of great watering-places—you feel this, and you wonder what it is you so deeply and calmly enjoy. You conclude, possibly, that it is a great advantage to be able at once to enjoy Ruskin and to enjoy what Ruskin dispraises. And hereupon you return to your hotel and read the New York papers on the plan of the French campaign and the Twenty-third Street murder.

  LAKE GEORGE

  August 10, 1870

  Lake George, ca. 1873.

  I FIND SO GREAT A PLEASURE IN TRAVELLING, AND MAINTAIN so friendly and expectant an attitude toward possible “sensations,” that they haven’t the heart to leave me altogether unvisited, though I confess that they are frequently such as may seem to lack flavor to fastidious people or to those sated with many wanderings. I found it a sensation, for instance, to come from Saratoga (for the first time) in a “drawing-room car.” I found it a luxury of an almost romantic intensity to sit in one of those revolving fauteuils and gaze through that generous, oblong plate of glass at the midsummer wilderness which bordered my route, while through a nether screen of delicate wire the summer breeze rushed in, winnowed of the grossness of cinders, and an artfully frescoed ceiling invited my gaze to rest at moments from the excessive abandon of nature. I observed that my companions on top of the coach which I subsequently mounted, were unanimous in voting Glenn’s Falls a remarkably pretty town: I therefore observed it with the view at once of enjoying its prettiness and of appraising my neighbor’s judgment. Pretty it is for a town of elements so meagre. Like Saratoga, the village is blissfully bedimmed and over-shadowed with a noble abundance of wayside verdure—by serried lines of elms and maples, and their goodly domestic umbrage in gardens and yards. It has not, however, that rounded and harmonious charm which would perhaps have made it appear a little less incongruous to me than it did to behold a public work of art at our egress from the village. Like so many other little American towns, it has its own little aesthetic fact—shining with newness—in the shape of a soldier’s monument: an obelisk, if I recollect, of a pleasant cream-colored stone, surmounted on its apex by a species of napkin, which an eagle is in the act of rending in his claws, and decorated toward the bases with four niches, enclosing four of the usual warriors contemplating the graves of their comrades. It is not very wisely conceived, perhaps, nor very cunningly executed; but there it stands, neighbored by a grosser ugliness, which, in its fair monumental breadth and permanence, it may connect with some lurking germs of future beauty. The drive to Lake George is full of a grand rough prettiness—leading you straight into the midst of the thickening hills and along the bases of half-grown mountains. When you emerge upon the lake, you find yourself fairly launched into the romance of mountain scenery.

  I find here, at this little village of Caldwell, an immense hotel of a good deal of external architectural pretension—French-roofed, with a sort of high-piled and gabled complexity which, as country hotels go, makes it look vaguely picturesque. It stands directly on the lake, and boasts a really magnificent piazza—a terrace of contemplation—worthy of the beautiful view it commands. This, I believe, is not the choice quarter of the lake. Yet such as it is, it is thoroughly lovely. Great simple masses of wooded hills rise with a plain green nearness, to right and left; further, as the lake recedes, they increase in size and in magic of colors, and in the uttermost background they figure nobly in outline and hue, with the magnitude and mystery of a mountain chain. A friend at Saratoga informed me that Lake George is considered strongly to resemble the Lake of Como. A year ago, almost at the present moment, I spent a week on the shores of that divinest of lakes, and I think that, even unreminded by my friends, I should occasionally be prompted to an attempt at comparison and contrast. It is in a certain way unwise and even unkind to play this sort of game with the things of America and of Italy, but it seems to me that comparisons are odious only when they are sterile, and intruders only when they are forced. Lake George is quite enough like the Lake of Como to impel you, if the image of the latter is fresh in your mind, to pursue the likeness to its inevitable phase of unlikeness. The mountains which melt into those blue Italian waters are clad with olives and vines, with groves of mulberry and chestnut and ilex, with a verdure productive of a wholly different range of effects from that of the sombre forests of the North. And yet, such is th
e in-finite mercy of the sun, its inscrutable cunning and power, that, to-day, as the morning light spent itself through the long hours over the sullen darkness of these American hills, it tempered and tinted and softened them, and wrought upon them such a sweet confusion of exquisite tones, such a dimness of distant blue, such a brilliant tissue of noonday vapors, such a fine-drawn purity of outline, that they seemed to borrow their beauty from a Southern air and to shine with that mild, iridescent, opaline glow which you enjoy from the little headland above Bellagio. It is the complete absence of detail which betrays the identity of American scenery. On those Italian slopes the fancy travels with the eye from one bright sign of human presence to another, from a gleaming mountain hamlet to the lonely twinkle of a mountain shrine. In our own landscape, if the background in its greatest beauty is in a sense common, undetermined, and general, the foreground is even more so, inasmuch as in the foreground there is usually an attempt at detail. Here, on the left shore of the lake, is a saw-mill with a high black chimney, a dozen little white wooden houses, and a little promontory of planks on posts, in the nature of a steamboat-pier. This brave little attempt at civilization looks as transient and accidental as the furniture of a dream. Above it mounts the long-drawn roundness of the wooded hills. Their woods of course supply the saw-mill, and the saw-mill supplies the excellent plank-road. I followed this road yesterday through the village to a point where, having entered the relapsing woods, it throws out two tributary arms. The plank-road pursues its way to other little settlements, expectant of the coach. One of the other roads keeps along the lake—“a little piece away,” as a young girl of the country told me. The third observes a middling course, along the lower slope of the hills, above the lake road. I wandered along the last, to excellent purpose as regards the pursuit of the picturesque: through the coolness of thinly divided woods, past little bald grey farm-houses, lonely and sunny in their midsummer plenitude, past an occasional cottage of gentility—a built and dedicated point of view. I shall long remember a certain little farm-house before which I stayed my steps to stare and enjoy. If the pure picturesque means simply the presentation of a picture, self-informed and complete, I have seen nothing in Italy or England which better deserves the praise. Here, for once, the picture swarmed with detail—less, however, with the scattered accessories of the usual warm-toned farmstead of tradition than with the rich invasive presence of spontaneous nature and the tangled overgrowth of rank vegetation. No Tuscan podere could have been more densely and gracefully luxuriant. The little unpainted dwelling stood on a grassy slope—leaden-grey in the shade, silver-grey in the sun. Against the darkness of the open doorway, from where I stood, I saw a white butterfly soar and sink—I almost heard in the noonday stillness the soundless whirr of his wings. The milk-pans glittered in the sun; beside the house-wall a magnificent clump of pink hollyhocks lifted its blooming stalks, touching almost the roof, and adding the hint of another color to the abounding green and yellow and blue. The deeper grass, toward the fence and roadside, was a great expansive blaze of golden-rod. It seemed to glitter upward toward the milder yellow of the crowded apples in the crowded trees of the orchard. This orchard—its trees all high and noble in spite of their bended breadth—lost itself in a tangled confusion of verdurous background, so that it was hard to say whether it was an orchard run wild with excessive productiveness, or a piece of the mountain wilderness come down to be tame and prolific. At any rate, I have seldom seen a more potent emanation of reflected composite light and color, of leafed and bladed and fruited green.

  I made my way down a sloping lane to the road which adheres to the lake and thence by a path across a wooded field to the verge of the water. Here I wandered along the narrow strip of beach to a little sandy cove, and lay down with my head in the shade of a thicket of bushes. The pebbles lay unstirred at my feet; the water was sheeted with the noonday light; the opposite mountains were clothed with wonderful tones of atmospheric blue. I tried to study them, to distinguish them, to remember them; but I felt only that they were wonderful, and that they don’t belong to the province of words. The mountains at all hours have a way of trying to put off the observer with a certain faux air of simplicity: a single great curve for an outline, a dozen alternate planes of deeper or fainter blue for its contents. The persistent observer very soon learns, however, what to make of this brave simplicity—or rather, he very soon learns how hard it is to make anything positive of it, to resolve it into its thousand magical parts. It is an old story that the mountains are for ever changing, that they live and move in a series of shifting and melting and amazing “effects”; but I never so deeply felt its meaning as while I lay on that couch of unrolled pebbles and gazed at them across that shining-level which assures the freedom of the interval of air. The clouds were stationed in a windless volume just above the line of their summits. Above the empty lake was an empty field of sky. The result, of course, on the slopes of the hills was a series of exquisite operations in light—doubly fine and delicate from the stillness of the air. The general tone was immensely soft and luminous—so that, as I say, I might very well have been on the Lake of Como or on Lago Maggiore. A green island lay blooming in the middle of the lake—which was not the Isola Bella, but apparently a plain small thicket of firs. The oars of a little boat twinkled in the sun and wrinkled the waveless deep. I chased the great slow shadows on the mountains into little shadows, and the little shadows into shadows which still were great. I followed the even blue into violet and pink and amber. I disintegrated with a steady gaze the long pure sky-lines into linked miles of innumerable lonely spires. And then at last I rose to my feet feeling that I had learned chiefly to misreport these mountain wonders.

  In the late afternoon, I went upon the lake lazily, with a red-necked, brawn-eyed young rustic as an oarsman. It was, of course, delicious. The closing day had drained the water of its early glare and dyed it with cool blue shadows. The hotel, from the lake, looked decidedly vulgar. The mountains, in the gross richness of their deepening blue, made at last an approach to a large massive simplicity. It is not till the sun departs, I think, that you see them in their essential masses. The aerial charm is gone, but they gain in formal grandeur. In the evening, at the hotel, there was the usual array of placid, sauntering tourists—the usual spectacle of high-heeled young ladies in those charming puffed and panniered overdresses of white muslin which are now so picturesquely worn. I confess, however, that to myself the most interesting feature of the evening was the band of musicians on the piazza. The New York papers had just come in, and I had been reading of the great deeds of Prussia and the confusion of France. I was filled with a sense of Prussian greatness. Strolling toward the place where the band was stationed, I beheld behind every trumpet a sturdy German face and heard in every note an uplifted German voice. My sense of German greatness was hugely magnified. Here, while their strong fellow-citizens were winning battles and making history in Alsace and Lorraine, they were making music in a distant land for a crowd of unmelodious strangers. What a splendid range of prowess and powers! What an omen for the Prussian future! The air seemed a brazen paean of triumph and joy. Their simple Teutonic presence seemed a portent.