Travels With Henry James

by Henry James

  FROM LAKE GEORGE TO BURLINGTON

  August 12, 1870

  Lake Champlain, New York.

  I HAVE SPENT TO-DAY AMID LAKES AND MOUNTAINS. I LEFT the further end of Lake George in a little steamer in the early morning. The three hours’ sail which you thus obtain is full of delightful beauty. The whole lake is framed in the noblest, purest mountain-masses. On the sides of the mountains, as we started, the clouds lay heavy and low, shutting us in, almost, to our little world of water; and during our transit they occasionally broke into rapid momentary rain; but on the whole I think they gave us quite as many effects as they concealed. At moments, when they thinned and lifted, the pale watery light yellowed the heavy darkness of the ranged forests into a languid counterfeit of autumn. The circling mountains faded and deepened in this passage like arriving and departing ghosts. The great hills group themselves about the upper portions of Lake George with a multitudinous majesty and variety which I shall not attempt to describe. They recede in dimly vaporous bays, where you barely feel their grim walls darkening through the cold gray sheets of cloud; they protrude in great headlands and break the mist with their cliffed and crested foreheads. The especial beauty of Lake George is believed to consist in its innumerable little islands. Many of these are extremely small—a growing-place for a dozen trees; several are large enough to contain a couple of houses. On one of them we saw some brave pleasure-seekers encamped, who came down to the water’s edge in the rain and cheered us with a beautiful, cheerful bravado. The scenery about the lake, as a whole, is such a vast simple undisturbed wilderness, that you are almost startled to behold these various little makeshifts of civilization; you half wonder at our capital little steamer and at the young ladies from the hotel on the deck, with copies of “Lothair” in their hands. Landing at the head of the lake, we mounted on stages and drove some four miles to Ticonderoga and the edge of Lake Champlain—passing on our way through a little village which seemed to me, save for its setting of hills, more drearily, dirtily, glaringly void of any poor, pitiful little incident of village prettiness than a village with as fine a name—it was called Ticonderoga—had a right to be. The last mile of the four brings you into a bit of country prettier to my eye, almost, than any other in all this beautiful region. Through a poor wooden gateway, erected as if with a sort of sense of its guarded treasure, you enter a great tract of grassy slopes and scattered trees, which seem to tell you that nature herself has determined for once to aim at pure privacy, and to bestow upon a great rough expanse of American woodland the distinction of aspect of a nobleman’s park. The short grass rolls downward in easy slopes, shaded by dense yet desultory groups of walnut and oak. You glance down the short vistas, as if to discover a browsing deer, or, perhaps, in the purer essence of romance and of baronial landscape, the sauntering daughter of an earl. But the pleasant avenue brings you only to the simple ruins of the grass-grown fort and to a sudden view of Champlain at your feet.

  Of the fort I shall not speak: I dined, perforce, in the half-hour during which I might fastingly have explored it. I saw it only from the top of the coach as we passed. It seemed to me in quite the perfection of decay—of stony decrepitude and verdurous overgrowth—and to exhale with sufficient force a meagre historic melancholy. I prefer to speak of the lake, though of this, indeed, there is but little to say, and I have little space to say it. My sail hitherward of four hours showed me the most and the best of it. There is something, to my sense, in the physiognomy of Lake Champlain delightfully free, noble, and open. It is narrow for a lake and broad for a river, yet it strikes you more as a river. The water is less blue and pure than that of Lake George—a concession of quality to quantity. But its great beauty is the really great style of the landscape: this grand unflowing river, as it seems, with the generous, prolonged simplicity of its shores—green and level, without being low, on the east (till you come abreast of the Green Mountains), on the west bordered by an immense panorama of magnificent hills, receding more dimly from line to line till they meet the steady azure of the great wall of the Adirondacks. At Burlington your seeming river broadens as if to the meeting of the sea, and the forward horizon becomes a long water-line. Hereabouts the Green Mountains rise up in the east to gaze across the broad interval at their marshalled peers in New York. The vast reach of the lake and this double mountain view go far to make Burlington a supremely beautiful town. I know of it only so much as I learned in an hour’s stroll, after my arrival. The lower portion by the lake-side is savagely raw and shabby, but as it ascends the long hill, which it partly covers, it gradually becomes the most truly charming, I fancy, of New England country towns. I followed a long street which leaves the hotel, crosses a rough, shallow ravine, which seems to divide it from the ugly poorness of the commercial quarter, and ascends a stately, shaded, residential avenue to no less a pinnacle of dignity than the University of Vermont. The university is a plain red building, with a cupola of beaten tin, shining like the dome of a Greek church, modestly embowered in scholastic shade—shade as modest as the number of its last batch of graduates, which I wouldn’t for the world repeat. It faces a small enclosed and planted common; the whole spot is full of civic greenness and stillness and sweetness. It pleased me deeply, considering what it was; it reminded me the least bit in the world of a sort of primitive development of an English cathedral close. On the summit of the hill, where it leaves the town, you embrace the whole circling presence of the distant mountains; you see Mount Mansfield looking over lake and land at Mount Marcy. Equally with the view, though—I had been having views all day—I enjoyed, as I passed again along the avenue, the pleasant, solid American homes, with their blooming breadth of garden, sacred with peace and summer and twilight. I say “solid” with intent; the most of them seemed to have been tested and ripened by time. One of them there was—but of it I shall say nothing. I reserve it for its proper immortality in the first chapter of the great American novel. It perhaps added a touch to my light impression of the old and the graceful that, as I wandered back to my hotel in the dusk, I heard repeatedly, as the homefaring laborers passed me in couples, the sound of a tongue of other than Yankee inflections. It was Canadian French.

  NEWPORT

  September 5, 1870

  The Point, Newport, Rhode Island, ca. 1878.

  THE SEASON AT NEWPORT HAS AN OBSTINATE LIFE. September has fairly begun, but as yet there is small visible diminution in the steady stream—the splendid, stupid stream—of carriages which rolls in the afternoon along the Avenue. There is, I think, a far more intimate fondness between Newport and its frequenters than that which in most American watering-places consecrates the somewhat mechanical relation between the visitors and the visited. This relation here is for the most part slightly sentimental. I am very far from professing a cynical contempt for the gaieties and vanities of Newport life: they are, as a spectacle, extremely amusing; they are full of a certain warmth of social color which charms alike the eye and the fancy; they are worth observing, if only to conclude against them; they possess at least the dignity of all extreme and emphatic expressions of a social tendency; but they are not so far from “was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine” that I do not seem to overhear at times the still, small voice of this tender sense of the sweet, superior beauty of the local influences that surround them, pleading gently in their favor to the fastidious critic. I feel almost warranted in saying that here this exquisite natural background has sunk less in relative value and suffered less from the encroachments of pleasure-seeking man than the scenic properties of any other great watering-place. For this, perhaps, we may thank rather the modest, incorruptible integrity of the Newport landscape than any very intelligent forbearance on the part of the summer colony. The beauty of this landscape is so subtle, so essential, so humble, so much a thing of character and impression, so little a thing of feature and pretension, that it cunningly eludes the grasp of the destroyer or the reformer, and triumphs in impalpable purity even when it seems to condescend. I have some
times wondered in sternly rational moods why it is that Newport is so loved of the votaries of idleness and pleasure. Its resources are few in number. It is emphatically circumscribed. It has few drives, few walks, little variety of scenery. Its charms and its interest are confined to a narrow circle. It has of course the unlimited ocean, but seafaring idlers are of necessity the fortunate few. Last evening, it seemed to me, as I drove along the Avenue, that my wonderment was quenched for ever. The atmospheric tone, the exquisite, rich simplicity of the landscape, gave mild, enchanting sense of positive climate—these are the real charm of Newport, and the secret of her supremacy. You are melted by the admirable art of the landscape, by seeing so much that is lovely and impressive achieved with such a masterly frugality of means—with so little parade of the vast, the various, or the rare, with so narrow a range of color and form. I could not help thinking, as I turned from the great harmony of elegance and the unfathomable mystery of purity which lay deepening on the breast of nature with the various shades of twilight, to the motley discord and lavish wholesale splendor of the flowing stream of gentility on the Avenue, that, quite in their own line of effect, these money-made social heroes and heroines might learn a few good lessons from the daily prospect of the great western expanse of rock and ocean in its relations with the declining sun. But this is a rather fantastic demand. Many persons of course come to Newport simply because others come, and in this way the present brilliant colony has grown up. Let me not be suspected, when I speak of Newport, of the untasteful heresy of meaning primarily rocks and waves rather than ladies and gentlemen.

  The ladies and gentlemen are in great force—the ladies, of course, especially. It is true everywhere, I suppose, that women are the central animating element of “society”; but you feel this to be especially true as you pass along the Newport Avenue. I doubt whether anywhere else women enjoy so largely what is called a “good time” with so small a sacrifice, that is, of the luxury of self-respect. I heard a lady yesterday tell another, with a quiet ecstasy of tone, that she had been having a “most perfect time.” This is the very poetry of pleasure. In England, if our impression is correct, women hold the second fiddle in the great social harmony. You will never, at the sight of a carriage-load of mild-browed English maidens, with a presiding matron, plump and passive, in the midst of them, suspect their countrywomen of enjoying in the conventional world anything more than a fictitious and deputed dignity. They neither speak nor act from themselves, but from their husbands and brothers and lovers. On the Continent, women are proclaimed supreme; but we fancy them, with more or less justice, as maintaining their empire by various clandestine and reprehensible arts. With us—we may say it without bravado—they are both free and unsophisticated. You feel it most gratefully as you receive a confident bow from a pretty young girl in her basket-phaeton. She is very young and very pretty, but she has a certain delicate breadth of movement which seems to you a pure gain, without imaginable taint of loss. She combines, you reflect with respectful tenderness, the utmost of modesty with the least possible shyness. Shyness is certainly very pretty—when it is not very ugly; but shyness may often darken the bloom of genuine modesty, and a certain feminine frankness and confidence may often incline it toward the light. Let us assume, then, that all the young ladies whom you may meet here are the correctest of all possible young ladies. In the course of time, they ripen into the delightful women who divide your admiration. It is easy to see that Newport must be a most agreeable sojourn for the male sex. The gentlemen, indeed, look wonderfully prosperous and well-conditioned. They gallop on shining horses or recline in a sort of coaxing Herculean submission beside the lovely mistress of a phaeton. Young men—and young old men—I have occasion to observe, are far more numerous than at Saratoga, and of vastly superior quality. There is, indeed, in all things a striking difference in tone and aspect between these two great cities of pleasure. After Saratoga, Newport seems really substantial and civilized. Aesthetically speaking, you may remain at Newport with a fairly good conscience; at Saratoga, you linger on under passionate protest. At Newport, life is public, if you will; at Saratoga, it is absolutely common. The difference, in a word, is the difference between a group of three or four hotels and a series of cottages and villas. Saratoga perhaps deserves our greater homage, as being characteristically democratic and American; let us, then, make Saratoga the heaven of our aspiration, but let us yet a while content ourselves with Newport as the lordly earth of our residence.

  The villas and cottages, the beautiful idle women, the beautiful idle men, the brilliant pleasure-fraught days and evenings, impart, perhaps, to Newport life a faintly European expression, in so far as they suggest the somewhat alien presence of leisure—“fine old Leisure,” as George Eliot calls it. Nothing, it seems to me, however, can take place in America without straightway seeming very American; and, after a week at Newport, you begin to fancy that, to live for amusement simply, beyond the noise of commerce or of care, is a distinctively national trait. Nowhere else in this country—nowhere, of course, within the range of our better civilization—does business seem so remote, so vague and unreal. Here a positive organic system of idleness or of active pleasure-taking has grown up and matured. If there is any poetry in the ignorance of trade and turmoil and the hard processes of fortune, Newport may claim her share of it. She knows—or at least appears to know—for the most part, nothing but results. Individuals here, of course, have private cares and burdens, to preserve the balance and the dignity of life; but these collective society conspires to forget. It is a singular fact that a society that does nothing is decidedly more picturesque, more interesting to the eye of sentiment, than a society which is hard at work. Newport, in this way, is infinitely more picturesque than Saratoga. There you feel that idleness is occasional, empirical. Most of the people you see are asking themselves, you imagine, whether the game is worth the candle, and work is not better than such toilsome play. But here, obviously, the habit of pleasure is formed, and (within the limits of a generous morality) many of the secrets of pleasure are known. Do what we will, on certain lines Europe is ahead of us yet. Newport falls altogether short of Baden-Baden in her presentment of the improprieties. They are altogether absent from the picture, which is therefore signally destitute of those shades of color produced by the mysteries and fascinations of vice. But idleness per se is vicious, and of course you may imagine what you please. For my own part, I prefer to imagine nothing but the graceful and the pure; and, with the help of such imaginings, you may construct a very pretty sentimental counterpart to the superficial movement of society. This I lately found very difficult to do at Saratoga. Sentiment there is pitifully shy and elusive. Here, the multiplied relations of men and women, under the permanent pressure of luxury and idleness, give it a very fair chance. Sentiment, indeed, of masterly force and interest, springs up in every soil, with a sovereign disregard of occasion. People love and hate and aspire with the greatest intensity when they have to make their time and privilege. I should hardly come to Newport for the materials of a tragedy. Even in their own kind, the social elements are as yet too light and thin. But I can fancy finding here the plot of many a pleasant sentimental comedy. I can almost imagine, indeed, a transient observer of the Newport spectacle dreaming momentarily of a great American novel, in which the heroine shall be infinitely realistic, and yet neither a schoolmistress nor an outcast. I say intentionally the “transient” observer, because I fancy that here the suspicion only is friendly to dramatic peace; the knowledge is hostile. The observer would discover, on a nearer view, I rather fear, that his possible heroines have too unexceptionally a perpetual “good time.”

  This will remind the reader of what he must already have heard affirmed, that to speak of a place with abundance you must know it, but not too well. I feel as if I knew the natural elements of Newport too well to attempt to describe them. I have known them so long that I hardly know what I think of them. I have little more than a simple consciousness of vastly enjo
ying them. Even this consciousness at times lies dumb and inert. I wonder at such times whether, to appeal fairly to the general human sense, the prospect here has not something too much of the extra-terrestrial element. Life seems too short, space too narrow, to warrant you in giving in an unqualified adhesion to a paysage which is two-thirds ocean. For the most part, however, I am willing to take the landscape as it stands, and to think that, without its native complement of sea, the land would lose much of its beauty. It is, in fact, a land exquisitely modified by marine influences. Indeed, in spite of all the evil it has done me, I could find it in my soul to love the sea when I consider how it co-operates with the Newport promontories to the delight of the eye. Give it up altogether, and you can thus enjoy it still, reflected and immobilized—like the Prussian army a month hence.