by Henry James
As you wouldn’t, however, go back in winter on any account whatever, and least of all for any such dire discovery, the picture hangs undisturbed in your gallery, and you even, with extended study of it, class it among your best mementos of the great autumnal harmony. The truth is that, for six or seven weeks after the mid-September, among the mountains of Massachusetts and Connecticut, the mere fusion of earth and air and water, of light and shade and colour, the almost shameless tolerance of nature for the poor human experiment, are so happily effective that you lose all reckoning of the items of the sum, that you in short find in your draught, contentedly, a single strong savour. By all of which I don’t mean to say that this sweetness of the waning year has not more taste in the presence of certain objects than in the presence of certain others. Objects remarkable enough, objects rich and rare perhaps, objects at any rate curious and interesting, emerge, for genial reference, from the gorgeous blur, and would commit me, should I give them their way, to excesses of specification. So I throw myself back upon the fusion, as I have called it—with the rich light hanging on but half-a-dozen spots. This renews the vision of the Massachusetts Berkshire—land beyond any other, in America, to-day, as one was much reminded, of leisure on the way to legitimation, of the social idyll, of the workable, the expensively workable, American form of country life; and, in especial, of a perfect consistency of surrender to the argument of the verdurous vista. This is practically the last word of such communities as Stockbridge, Pittsfield, Lenox, or of such villages as Salisbury and Farmington, over the Connecticut border. I speak of consistency in spite of the fact that it has doubtless here and there, under the planted elms, suffered some injury at the hands of the summer people; for really, beneath the wide mantle of parti-coloured Nature, nothing matters but the accidental liability of the mantle here and there to fall thickest. Thus it is then that you do, after a little, differentiate, from place to place, and compare and even prefer; thus it is that you recognize a scale and a range of amplitude—nay, more, wonderful to say, on occasion an emergence of detail; thus it is, in fine, that, while accepting the just eminence of Stockbridge and Pittsfield, for instance, you treat yourself on behalf of Farmington to something like a luxury of discrimination.
I may perhaps not go the length of asserting that Farmington might brave undismayed the absolute removal of the mantle of charity; since the great elm-gallery there struck me as not less than elsewhere essentially mistress of the scene. Only there were particular felicities there within the general—and anything very particular, in the land at large, always gave the case an appearance of rarity. When the great elm-gallery happens to be garnished with old houses, and the old houses happen to show style and form and proportion, and the hand of time, further, has been so good as to rest on them with all the pressure of protection and none of that of interference, then it is that the New England village may placidly await any comer. Farmington sits with this confidence on the top of a ridge that presents itself in its fringed length—a straight avenue seen in profile—to the visitor taking his way from the station across a couple of miles of level bottom that speak, for New England, of a luxury of culture; and nothing could be more fastidious and exceptional, and thereby more impressive in advance, than such upliftedness of posture. What is it but the note of the aristocratic in an air that so often affects us as drained precisely, and well-nigh to our gasping, of any exception to the common? The indication I here glance at secures for the place in advance, as you measure its detachment across the valley, a positively thrilled attention. Then comes, under the canopy of autumn, your vision of the grounds of this mild haughtiness, every one of which you gratefully allow. Stay as many hours as you will—and my stay was but of hours—they don’t break down; you trace them into fifty minor titles and dignities, all charming aspects and high refinements of the older New England domestic architecture. Not only, moreover, are the best houses so “good”—the good ones are so surprisingly numerous. That is all they seem together to say. “We are good, yes—we are excellent; though, if we know it very well, we make no vulgar noise about it: we only just stand here, in our long double line, in the manner of mature and just slightly-reduced gentlewomen seated against the wall at an evening party (some party where mature gentlewomen unusually abound), and neither too boldly affront the light nor shrink from the favouring shade.” That again, on the spot, is the discreet voice of the air—which quavered away, for me, into still other admissions.
It takes but the barest semitone to start the story-seeker curious of manners—the story-seeker impenitent and uncorrected, as happened in this case, by a lesson unmistakably received, or at least intended, a short time before. He had put a question, on that occasion, with an expectancy doubtless too crude; he had asked a resident of a large city of the middle West what might be, credibly, the conditions of the life “socially” led there. He had not, at Farmington, forgotten the ominous pause that had preceded the reply: “The conditions of the life? Why, the same conditions as everywhere else.” He had not forgotten, either, the thrill of his sense of this collapse of his interlocutor: the case being, obviously, that it is of the very nature of conditions, as reported on by the expert—and it was to the expert he had appealed—to vary from place to place, so that they fall into as many groups, and constitute as many stamps, as there are different congregations of men. His interlocutor was not of the expert—that had really been the lesson; and it was with a far different poetry, the sweet shyness of veracity, that Farmington confessed to idiosyncrasies. I have too little space, however, as I had then too little time, to pretend to have lifted more than the smallest corner of this particular veil; besides which, if it is of the essence of the land, in these regions, to throw you back, after a little, upon the possible humanities, so it often results from the social study, too baffling in many a case, that you are thrown back upon the land. That agreeable, if sometimes bewildering, seesaw is perhaps the best figure, in such conditions, for the restless analyst’s tenor of life. It was an effect of the fusion he has endeavoured to suggest; it is certainly true, at least, that, among the craggy hills, among little mountains that turned so easily, at any opening, to clearness of violet and blue, among the wood-circled dells that seemed to wait as for afternoon dances, among the horizons that recalled at their will the Umbrian note and the finer drawing, every ugliness melted and dropped, any wonderment at the other face of the medal seemed more trouble than it was worth. It was enough that the white village or the painted farm could gleam from afar, on the faintly purple slope, like a thing of mystery or of history; it was enough that the charming hill-mass, happily presented and foreshortened, should lie there like some beast, almost heraldic, resting his nose on his paws.
Those images, for retrospect, insistently supplant the others; though I have notes enough, I find, about the others too—about the inscrutability of the village street in general, for instance, in any relation but its relation to its elms. What they seemed to say is what I have mentioned; but what secrets, meanwhile, did the rest of the scene keep? Were there any secrets at all, or had the outward blankness, the quantity of absence, as it were, in the air, its inward equivalent as well? There was the high, thin church, made higher, made highest, and sometimes, as at Farmington, made as pretty as a monstrous Dutch toy, by its steeple of quaint and classic carpentry; but this monument appeared to testify scarce more than some large white card, embellished with a stencilled border, on which a message or a sentence, an invitation or a revelation, might be still to be inscribed. The present, the positive, was mainly represented, ever, by the level railway-crossing, gaining expression from its localization of possible death and destruction, where the great stilted, strident, yet so almost comically impersonal train, which, with its so often undesignated and so always unservanted stations, and its general air of “bossing” the neighbourhoods it warns, for climax of its characteristic curtness, to “look out” for its rush, is everywhere a large contribution to one’s impression of a kind of monoton
y of acquiescence. This look as of universal acquiescence plays somehow through the visible vacancy—seems a part of the thinness, the passivity, of that absence of the settled standard which contains, as I more and more felt, from day to day, the germ of the most final of all my generalizations. I needn’t be too prompt with it—so much higher may it hold its head, I foresee, when it flowers, perfectly, as a conclusion, than when it merely struggles through the side of the subject as a tuft for provisional clutching. It sprouts in that soil, none the less, betimes, this apprehension that the “common man” and the common woman have here their appointed paradise and sphere, and that the sign of it is the abeyance, on many a scene, of any wants, any tastes, any habits, any traditions but theirs. The bullying railway orders them off their own decent avenue without a fear that they will “stand up” to it; the tone of the picture is the pitch of their lives, and when you listen to what the village street seems to say, marking it, at the end, with your “Is that all?” it is as if you had had your account of a scheme fashioned preponderantly in their image.
I mean in theirs exactly, with as little provision for what is too foul for them as for what is too fair: the very middle, the golden mean, of the note of the common, to which the two extremes of condition are equally wanting; though with the mark strongest, if anywhere, against dusky misfortune and precarious dependence. The romance of costume, for better or worse, the implication of vices, accomplishments, manners, accents, attitudes, is as absent for evil as for good, for a low connection as for a high: which is why the simplification covers so much ground, that of public houses, that of kinds of people, that of suggestions, however faint, of discernible opportunity, of any deviation, in other words, into the uncommon. There are no “kinds” of people; there are simply people, very, very few, and all of one kind, the kind who thus simply invest themselves for you in the grey truth that they don’t go to the public house. It’s a negative garment, but it must serve you; which it makes shift to do while you keep on asking, from the force of acquired habit, what may be behind, what beneath, what within, what may represent, in such conditions, the appeal of the senses or the tribute to them; what, in such a show of life, may take the place (to put it as simply as possible) of amusement, of social and sensual margin, overflow and by-play. Of course there is by-play here and there; here and there, of course, extremes are touched: otherwise, the whole concretion, in its thinness, would crack, and the fact is that two or three of these strong patches of surface-embroidery remain with me as curious and interesting. Never was such by-play as in a great new house on a hilltop that overlooked the most composed of communities; a house apparently conceived—and with great felicity—on the lines of a magnified Mount Vernon, and in which an array of modern “impressionistic” pictures, mainly French, wondrous examples of Manet, of Degas, of Claude Monet, of Whistler, of other rare recent hands, treated us to the momentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning, between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanition. One hadn’t quite known one was starved, but the morsel went down by the mere authority of the thing consummately prepared. Nothing else had been, in all the circle, prepared to anything like the same extent; and though the consequent taste, as a mixture with the other tastes, was of the queerest, no proof of the sovereign power of art could have been, for the moment, sharper. It happened to be that particular art—it might as well, no doubt, have been another; it made everything else shrivel and fade: it was like the sudden trill of a nightingale, lord of the hushed evening.
These appeared to be, over the land, always possible adventures; obviously I should have others of the same kind; I could let them, in all confidence, accumulate and wait. But, if that was one kind of extreme, what meanwhile was the other kind, the kind portentously alluded to by those of the sagacious who had occasionally put it before me that the village street, the arched umbrageous vista, half so candid and half so cool, is too frequently, in respect to “morals,” but a whited sepulchre? They had so put it before me, these advisers, but they had as well, absolutely and all tormentingly, so left it: partly as if the facts were too abysmal for a permitted distinctness, and partly, no doubt, as from the general American habit of indirectness, of positive primness, of allusion to those matters that are sometimes collectively spoken of as “the great facts of life.” It had been intimated to me that the great facts of life are in high fermentation on the other side of the ground glass that never for a moment flushes, to the casual eye, with the hint of a lurid light: so much, at least, one had no alternative, under pressure, but to infer. The inference, however, still left the question a prey to vagueness—it being obvious that vice requires forms not less than virtue, or perhaps even more, and that forms, up and down the prospect, were exactly what one waited in vain for. The theory that no community can live wholly without by-play, and the confirmatory word, for the particular case, of more initiated reporters, these things were all very well; but before a scene peeled as bare of palpable pretext as the American sky is often peeled of clouds (in the interest of the slightly acid juice of its light), where and how was the application to be made? It came at last, the application—that, I mean, of the portentous hint; and under it, after a fashion, the elements fell together. Why the picture shouldn’t bristle with the truth—that was all conceivable; that the truth could only strike inward, horribly inward, not playing up to the surface—this too needed no insistence; what was sharpest for reflection being, meanwhile, a couple of minor appearances, which one gathered as one went. That our little arts of pathetic, of humorous, portrayal may, for all their claim to an edifying ”realism,” have on occasion small veracity and courage—that again was a remark pertinent to the matter. But the strangest link in the chain, and quite the horridest, was this other, of high value to the restless analyst—that, as the “interesting” puts in its note but where it can and where it will, so the village street and the lonely farm and the hillside cabin became positively richer objects under the smutch of imputation; twitched with a grim effect the thinness of their mantle, shook out of its folds such crudity and levity as they might, and borrowed, for dignity, a shade of the darkness of Cenci-drama, of monstrous legend, of old Greek tragedy, and thus helped themselves out for the story-seeker more patient almost of anything than of flatness.
There was not flatness, accordingly, though there might be dire dreariness, in some of those impressions gathered, for a climax, in the Berkshire country of Massachusetts, which forced it upon the fancy that here at last, in far, deep mountain valleys, where the winter is fierce and the summer irresponsible, was that heart of New England which makes so pretty a phrase for print and so stern a fact, as yet, for feeling. During the great loops thrown out by the lasso of observation from the wonder-working motor-car that defied the shrinkage of autumn days, this remained constantly the best formula of the impression and even of the emotion; it sat in the vehicle with us, but spreading its wings to the magnificence of movement, and gathering under them indeed most of the meanings of the picture. The heart of New England, at this rate, was an ample, a generous, heart, the largest demands on which, as to extent and variety, seemed not to overstrain its capacity. But it was where the mountain-walls rose straight and made the valleys happiest or saddest—one couldn’t tell which, as to the felicity of the image, and it didn’t much matter—that penetration was, for the poetry of it, deepest; just as generalization, for an opposite sort of beauty, was grandest on those several occasions when we perched for a moment on the summit of a “pass,” a real little pass, slowly climbed to and keeping its other side, with an art all but Alpine, for a complete revelation, and hung there over the full vertiginous effect of the long and steep descent, the clinging road, the precipitous fall, the spreading, shimmering land bounded by blue horizons. We liked the very vocabulary, reduced to whatever minimum, of these romanticisms of aspect; again and again the land would do beautifully, if that were all that was wanted, and it deserved, the dear thing, thoroughly, any verbal caress, any tend
erness of term, any share in a claim to the grand manner, to which we could responsively treat it. The grand manner was in the winding ascent, the rocky defile, the sudden rest for wonder, and all the splendid reverse of the medal, the world belted afresh as with purple sewn with pearls—melting, in other words, into violet hills with vague white towns on their breasts.
That was, at the worst, for October afternoons, the motor helping, our frequent fare; the habit of confidence in which was, perhaps, on no occasion so rewarded as on that of a particular plunge, from one of the highest places, through an ebbing golden light, into the great Lebanon “bowl,” the vast, scooped hollow in one of the hither depths of which (given the quarter of our approach) we found the Shaker settlement once more or less, I believe, known to fame, ever so grimly planted. The grimness, even, was all right, when once we had admiringly dropped down and down and down; it would have done for that of a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas—though more savagely clean and more economically impersonal, we seemed to make out, than the communities of older faiths are apt to show themselves. I remember the mere chill of contiguity, like the breath of the sepulchre, as we skirted, on the wide, hard floor of the valley, the rows of gaunt windows polished for no whitest, stillest, meanest face, even, to look out; so that they resembled the parallelograms of black paint criss-crossed with white lines that represent transparency in Nuremberg dolls’-houses. It wore, the whole settlement, as seen from without, the strangest air of active, operative death; as if the state of extinction were somehow, obscurely, administered and applied—the final hush of passions, desires, dangers, converted into a sort of huge stiff brush for sweeping away rubbish, or still more, perhaps, into a monstrous comb for raking in profit. The whole thing had the oddest appearance of mortification made to “pay.” This was really, however, sounding the heart of New England beyond its depth, for I am not sure that the New York boundary had not been, just there, over-passed; there flowered out of that impression, at any rate, another adventure, the very bravest possible for a shortened day, of which the motive, whether formulated or not, had doubtless virtually been to feel, with a far-stretched arm, for the heart of New York. Had New York, the miscellaneous monster, a heart at all?—this inquiry, amid so much encouraged and rewarded curiosity, might have been well on the way to become sincere, and we kept groping, between a prompt start and an extremely retarded return, for any stray sign of an answer.