by Henry James
The Salem houses, the best, were all of the old English family, and, from picture to picture, all the parts would have matched; but the moral, the social, the political climate, even more than the breath of nature, had had in each case a different action, had begotten on either side a different consciousness. Or was it nearer even to say that these things had on one side begotten a consciousness, and had on the other begotten comparatively none? The approximation would have been the more interesting as each arrayed group might pass for a supreme expression of respectability. It would be the tone and weight, the quantity and quality, of the respectability that make the difference; massive and square-shouldered, yet rather battered and mottled, chipped and frayed, at last rather sceptical and cynical, in fine, in the English figure—thin and clear, consistently sharp, boldly unspotted, blankly serene, in the American. It was more amusing at any rate to spin such fancies, in reaction from the alien snub, than simply to see one’s antitheses reduced to a mere question of the effect of climate. There would be yet more to say for the Salem picture, many of the “bits” of which remain, as Ruskin might have put it, entirely delightful; but their desperate clean freshness was what was more to abide with me after the polyglot air had cleared a little. The spacious, courteous doorways of the houses, expansively columned, fluted, framed; their large honest windows, in ample tiers, only here and there dishonoured by the modern pane; their high bland foreheads, in short, with no musty secrets in the eaves—yes, not one, in spite of the “speciality,” in this respect, of the Seven Gables, to which I am coming—clarify too much perhaps the expressive mask, the look of experience, depress the balance toward the type of the expensive toy, shown on its shelf, but too good to be humanly used. It’s as if the old witches had been suffered to live again, penally, as public housemaids, using nocturnally, for purposes of almost viciously-thorough purification, the famous broomsticks they used wantonly to ride.
Was it a sacred terror, after this, that stayed me from crossing the threshold of the Witch House?—in spite of the quite definite sturdy stamp of this attraction. I think it was an almost sacred tenderness rather, the instinct of not pressing too hard on my privilege and of not draining the offered cup to the lees. It is always interesting, in America, to see any object, some builded thing in particular, look as old as it possibly can; for the sight of which effort we sometimes hold our breath as if to watch, over the course of the backward years, the straight “track” of the past, the course of some hero of the foot-race on whom we have staked our hopes. How long will he hold out, how far back will he run, and where, heroically blown, will he have to drop? Our suspense is great in proportion to our hope, and if we are nervously constituted we may very well, at the last, turn away for anxiety. It was really in some such manner I was affected, I think, before the Salem Witch House, in presence of the mystery of antiquity. It is a modest wooden structure, consciously primitive, standing, if I remember rightly, in some effective relation to a street-corner and putting no little purpose into its archaism. The pity is, however, that unrelieved wooden houses never very curiously testify—as I was presently to learn, to my cost, from the dreadful anti-climax of the Seven Gables. They look brief and provisional at the best—look, above all, incorrigibly and witlessly innocent. The quite sufficiently sturdy little timbered mass by the Salem street, none the less, with a sidelong crook or twist that we may take as symbolizing ancient perversity, runs the backward race as long-windedly as we may anywhere, over the land, see it run. Had I gone in, as a frank placard invited me, I might have better measured the exploit; yet, on the other hand, fearing frank placards, in general, in these cases, fearing nothing so much as reconstituted antiquity, I might have lost a part of my good little impression—which otherwise, as a small pale flower plucked from a withered tree, I could fold away, intact, between the leaves of my romantic herbarium.
I wanted, moreover, to be honest, not to fail, within the hour, of two other urgent matters, my train away (my sense of Salem was too destined to be train-haunted) and a due visitation of the Seven Gables and of the birth-house of their chronicler. It was in the course of this errand that I was made to feel myself, as I have mentioned, living, rather witlessly, in a world unknown to the active Salemite of to-day—a world embodied, I seemed to make out, in the large untidy industrial quarter that had sprung up since my early visit. Did I quite escape from this impression before alighting at last happily upon the small stale structure that had sheltered the romancer’s entrance into life and that now appears, according to the preference of fancy, either a strange recipient of the romantic germ or the very spot to cause it, in protest and desperation, to develop? I took the neighbourhood, at all events, for the small original Hawthornesque world, keeping the other, the smoky modernism, at a distance, keeping everything, in fact, at a distance—on so spare and bare and lean and mean a face did the bright hard sky strike me as looking down. The way to think of it evidently was in some frank rural light of the past, that of all the ancient New England simplicities, with the lap of wide waters and the stillness of rocky pastures never far off (they seem still indeed close at hand), and with any number of our present worryings and pamperings of the “literary temperament” too little in question to be missed. It kept at a distance, in fact, so far as my perception was concerned, everything but a little boy, a dear little harsh, intelligent, sympathetic American boy, who dropped straight from the hard sky for my benefit (I hadn’t seen him emerge from elsewhere) and turned up at my side with absolute confidence and with the most knowing tips. He might have been a Weimar tout or a Stratford amateur—only he so beautifully wasn’t. That is what I mean by my having alighted happily; the little boy was so completely master of his subject, and we formed, on the spot, so close an alliance. He made up to me for my crude Italian—the way they become crude over here!—he made up to me a little even for my civil Englishman; he was exactly what I wanted—a presence (and he was the only thing far or near) old enough, native and intimate enough, to reach back and to understand.
He showed me the window of the room in which Hawthorne had been born; wild horses, as the phrase is, wouldn’t have dragged me into it, but he might have done so if he hadn’t, as I say, understood. But he understood everything, and knew when to insist and when not to; knew, for instance, exactly why I said “Dear, dear, are you very sure?” after he had brought me to sight of an object at the end of a lane, by a vague waterside, I think, and looking across to Marblehead, that he invited me to take, if I could, for the Seven Gables. I couldn’t take it in the least, as happens, and though he was perfectly sure, our reasons, on either side, were equally clear to him—so that in short I think of him as the very genius of the place, feeding his small shrillness on the cold scraps of Hawthorne’s leaving and with the making of his acquaintance alone worth the journey. Yet the fact that, the Seven Gables being in question, the shapeless object by the waterside wouldn’t do at all, not the least little bit, troubled us only till we had thrown off together, with a quick, competent gesture and at the breaking of light, the poor illusion of a necessity of relation between the accomplished thing, for poetry, for art, and those other quite equivocal things that we inflate our ignorance with seeing it suggested by. The weak, vague domiciliary presence at the end of the lane may have “been” (in our poor parlance) the idea of the admirable book—though even here we take a leap into dense darkness; but the idea that is the inner force of the admirable book so vividly forgets, before our eyes, any such origin or reference, “cutting” it dead as a low acquaintance and outsoaring the shadow of its night, that the connection has turned a somersault into space, repudiated like a ladder kicked back from the top of a wall. Hawthorne’s ladder at Salem, in fine, has now quite gone, and we but tread the air if we attempt to set our critical feet on its steps and its rounds, learning thus as we do, and with infinite interest as I think, how merely “subjective” in us are our discoveries about genius. Endless are its ways of besetting and eluding, of meeting and mocking us.
When there are appearances that might have nourished it we see it as swallowing them all; yet we see it as equally gorged when there are no appearances at all—then most of all, sometimes, quite insolently bloated; and we recognize ruefully that we are forever condemned to know it only after the fact.
IX
PHILADELPHIA
I
To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytically, minded—over and beyond an inherent love of the general many-coloured picture of things—is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter. That perverse person is obliged to take it for a working theory that the essence of almost any settled aspect of anything may be extracted by the chemistry of criticism, and may give us its right name, its formula, for convenient use. From the moment the critic finds himself sighing, to save trouble in a difficult case, that the cluster of appearances can have no sense, from that moment he begins, and quite consciously, to go to pieces; it being the prime business and the high honour of the painter of life always to make a sense—and to make it most in proportion as the immediate aspects are loose or confused. The last thing decently permitted him is to recognize incoherence—to recognize it, that is, as baffling; though of course he may present and portray it, in all richness, for incoherence. That, I think, was what I had been mainly occupied with in New York; and I quitted so qualified a joy, under extreme stress of winter, with a certain confidence that I should not have moved even a little of the way southward without practical relief: relief which came in fact ever so promptly, at Philadelphia, on my feeling, unmistakably, the change of half the furniture of consciousness. This change put on, immediately, the friendliest, the handsomest aspect—supplied my intelligence on the spot with the clear, the salient note. I mean by this, not that the happy definition or synthesis instantly came—came with the perception that character and sense were there, only waiting to be disengaged; but that the note, as I say, was already, within an hour, the germ of these things, and that the whole flower, assuredly, wouldn’t fail to bloom. I was in fact sniffing up its fragrance after I had looked out for three minutes from one of the windows of a particularly wide-fronted house and seen the large residential square that lay before me shine in its native light. This light, remarkably tender, I thought, for that of a winter afternoon, matched with none other I had ever seen, and announced straight off fifty new circumstances—an enormous number, in America, for any prospect to promise you in contradistinction from any other. It was not simply that, beyond a doubt, the outlook was more meridional; a still deeper impression had begun to work, and, as I felt it more and more glimmer upon me, I caught myself about to jump, with a single leap, to my synthesis. I of course stayed myself in the act, for there would be too much, really, yet to come; but the perception left me, I even then felt, in possession of half the ground on which later experience would proceed. It was not too much to say, as I afterwards saw, that I had in those few illumined moments put the gist of the matter into my pocket.
Philadelphia, incontestably then, was the American city of the large type, that didn’t bristle—just as I was afterwards to recognize in St. Louis the nearest approach to companionship with her in this respect; and to recognize in Chicago, I may parenthetically add, the most complete divergence. It was not only, moreover, at the ample, tranquil window there, that Philadelphia didn’t “bristle” (by the record of my moment) but that she essentially couldn’t and wouldn’t ever; that no movement or process could be thought of, in fine, as more foreign to her genius. I do not just now go into the question of what the business of bristling, in an American city, may be estimated as consisting of; so infallibly is one aware when the thousand possible quills are erect, and when, haply, they are not—such a test does the restored absentee find, at least, in his pricked sensibility. A place may abound in its own sense, as the phrase is, without bristling in the least—it is liable indeed to bristle most, I think, when not too securely possessed of any settled sense to abound in. An imperfect grasp of such a luxury is not the weakness of Philadelphia—just as that admirable comprehensive flatness in her which precludes the image of the porcupine figured to me from the first, precisely, as her positive source of strength. The absence of the note of the perpetual perpendicular, the New York, the Chicago note—and I allude here to the material, the constructional exhibition of it—seemed to symbolize exactly the principle of indefinite level extension and to offer refreshingly, a challenge to horizontal, to lateral, to more or less tangental, to rotary, or, better still, to absolute centrifugal motion. If it was to befall me, during my brief but various acquaintance with the place, not to find myself more than two or three times hoisted or lowered by machinery, my prime illumination had been an absolute forecast of that immunity—a virtue of general premonition in it at which I have already glanced. I should in fact, I repeat, most truly or most artfully repaint my little picture by mixing my colours with the felt amenity of that small crisis, and by showing how this, that and the other impression to come had had, while it lasted, quite the definite prefigurement that the chapters of a book find in its table of contents. The afternoon blandness, for a fugitive from Madison Avenue in January snow, didn’t mean nothing; the little marble steps and lintels and cornices and copings, all the so clear, so placed accents in the good prose text of the mildly purple houses across the Square, which seemed to wear them, as all the others did, up and down the streets, in the manner of nice white stockings, neckties, collars, cuffs, didn’t mean nothing; and this was somehow an assurance that joined on to the vibration of the view produced, a few hours before, by so merely convenient a circumstance as my taking my place, at Jersey City, in the Pennsylvania train.
I had occasion, repeatedly, to find the Pennsylvania Railroad a beguiling and predisposing influence—in relation to various objectives; and indeed I quite lost myself in the singularity of this effect, which existed for me, certainly, only in that connection, touching me with a strange and most agreeable sense that the great line in question, an institution with a style and allure of its own, is not, even the world over, as other railroads are. It absolutely, with a little frequentation, affected me as better and higher than its office or function, and almost as supplying one with a mode of life intrinsically superior; as if it ought really to be on its way to much grander and more charming places than any that happen to mark its course—as if indeed, should one persistently keep one’s seat, not getting out anywhere, it would in the end carry one to some such ideal city. One might under this extravagant spell, which always began to work for me at Twenty-third Street, and on the constantly-adorable Ferry, have fancied the train, disvulgarized of passengers, steaming away, in disinterested empty form, to some terminus too noble to be marked in our poor schedules. The consciousness of this devotion would have been thus like that of living, all sublimely, up in a balloon. It was not, however—I recover myself—that if I had been put off at Philadelphia I was not, for the hour, contented; finding so immediately, as I have noted, more interest to my hand than I knew at first what to do with. There was the quick light of explanation, following on everything else I have mentioned—the light in which I had only to turn round again and see where I was, and how it was, in order to feel everything “come out” under the large friendliness, the ordered charm and perfect peace of the Club, housing me with that whole protection the bestowal of which on occasion is the finest grace of the hospitality of American clubs. Philadelphia, manifestly, was beyond any other American city, a society, and was going to show as such, as a thoroughly confirmed and settled one—which fact became the key, precisely, to its extension on one plane, and to its having no pretext for bristling. Human groups that discriminate in their own favour do, one remembers, in general, bristle; but that is only when
they have not been really successful, when they have not been able to discriminate enough, when they are not, like Philadelphia, settled and confirmed and content. It would clearly be impossible not to regard the place before me as possessed of this secret of serenity to a degree elsewhere—at least among ourselves—unrivalled. The basis of the advantage, the terms of the secret, would be still to make out—which was precisely the high interest; and I was afterwards to be justified of my conviction by the multiplication of my lights.