by Henry James
But the question is positively of the impressiveness of the great terraced Capitol hill, with its stages and slopes, staircases and fountains, its general presentation of its charge. And if the whole mass and prospect “amuse,” as I say, from the moment they are embraced, the visitor curious of the democratic assimilation of the greater dignities and majesties will least miss the general logic. That is the light in which the whole thing is supremely interesting; the light of the fact, illustrated at every turn, that the populations maintaining it deal with it so directly and intimately, so sociably and humorously. We promptly take in that, if ever we are to commune in a concentrated way with the sovereign people, and see their exercised power raise a side-wind of irony for forms and arrangements other than theirs, the occasion here will amply serve. Indubitably, moreover, at a hundred points, the irony operates, and all the more markedly under such possible interference; the interference of the monumental spittoons, that of the immense amount of vulgar, of barbaric, decoration, that of the terrible artistic tributes from, and scarce less to, the different States—the unassorted marble mannikins in particular, each a portrayal by one of the commonwealths of her highest worthy, which make the great Rotunda, the intended Valhalla, resemble a stonecutter’s collection of priced sorts and sizes. Discretion exists, throughout, only as a flower of the very first or of these very latest years; the large middle time, corresponding, and even that unequally, with the English Victorian, of sinister memory, was unacquainted with the name, and waits there now, in its fruits, but for a huge sacrificial fire, some far-flaring act-of-faith of the future: a tribute to the aesthetic law which one already feels stirring the air, so that it may arrive, I think, with an unexampled stride. Nothing will have been more interesting, surely, than so public a wiping-over of the aesthetic slate, with all the involved collective compunctions and repudiations, the general exhibition of a colossal conscience, a conscience proportionate to the size and wealth of the country. To such grand gestures does the American scene lend itself!
The elements in question are meanwhile there, in any case, just as the sovereign people are there, “going over” their property; but we are aware none the less of impressions—that of the ponderous proud Senate, for instance, so sensibly massive; that of the Supreme Court, so simply, one almost says so chastely, yet, while it breathes supremacy, so elegantly, so all intellectually, in session—under which the view, taking one extravagance with another, recurs rather ruefully to glimpses elsewhere caught, glimpses of authority emblazoned, bewigged, bemantled, bemarshalled, in almost direct defeat of its intention of gravity. For the reinstated absentee, in these presences, the mere recovery of native privilege was at all events a balm—after too many challenged appeals and abused patiences, too many hushed circuitous creepings, among the downtrodden, in other and more bristling halls of state. The sense of a certain large, final benignity in the Capitol comes then, I think, from this impression that the national relation to it is that of a huge flourishing Family to the place of business, the estate-office, where, in a myriad open ledgers, which offer no obscurity to the hereditary head for figures, the account of their colossal revenue is kept. They meet there in safe sociability, as all equally initiated and interested—not as in a temple or a citadel, but by the warm domestic hearth of Columbia herself; a motherly, chatty, clear-spectacled Columbia, who reads all the newspapers, knows, to the last man, every one of her sons by name, and, to the last boy, even her grandsons, and is fenced off, at the worst, but by concentric circles of rocking-chairs. It is impossible, as I say, not to be fondly conscious of her welcome—unless again, and yet again, I read into the general air, confusedly, too much of the happy accident of the basis of my introduction. But if my sensibility responds with intensity to this, so much the better; for what were such felt personal aids and influences, after all, but cases and examples, embodied expressions of character, type, distinction, products of the working of the whole thing?—specimens, indeed, highly concentrated and refined, and made thereby, I admit, more charming and insidious.
It must also be admitted that to exchange the inner aspects of the vast monument for the outer is to be reminded with some sharpness of a Washington in which half the sides that have held our attention drop, as if rather abashed, out of sight. Not its pleasant brightness as of a winter watering-place, not its connections, however indirect, with the older, but those with the newer, the newest, civilization, seem matter of recognition for its various marble fronts; it rakes the prospect, it rakes the continent, to a much more sweeping purpose, and is visibly concerned but in immeasurable schemes of which it can consciously remain the centre. Here, in the vast spaces—mere empty light and air, though such pleasant air and such pretty light as yet—the great Federal future seems, under vague bright forms, to hover and to stalk, making the horizon recede to take it in, making the terraces too, below the long colonnades, the admirable standpoints, the sheltering porches, of political philosophy. The comparatively new wings of the building filled me, whenever I walked here, with thanksgiving for their large and perfect elegance: so, in Paris, might the wide mated fronts that are of such a noble effect on either side of the Rue Royale shine in multiplied majesty and recovered youth over an infinite Place de la Concorde. These parts of the Capitol, on their Acropolis height, are ideally constructed for “raking,” and for this suggestion of their dominating the American scene in playhouse gallery fashion. You are somehow possessed of it all while you tread them—their marble embrace appears so the complement of the vast democratic lap. Though I had them in general, for contemplation, quite to myself, I met one morning a trio of Indian braves, braves dispossessed of forest and prairie, but as free of the builded labyrinth as they had ever been of these; also arrayed in neat pot-hats, shoddy suits and light overcoats, with their pockets, I am sure, full of photographs and cigarettes: circumstances all that quickened their resemblance, on the much bigger scale, to Japanese celebrities, or to specimens, on show, of what the Government can do with people with whom it is supposed able to do nothing. They seemed just then and there, for a mind fed betimes on the Leatherstocking Tales, to project as in a flash an image in itself immense, but foreshortened and simplified—reducing to a single smooth stride the bloody footsteps of time. One rubbed one’s eyes, but there, at its highest polish, shining in the beautiful day, was the brazen face of history, and there, all about one, immaculate, the printless pavements of the State.
XII
RICHMOND
I
IT was, toward the end of the winter, fairly romantic to feel one’s self “going South”—in verification of the pleasant probability that, since one’s mild adventure had appeared beforehand, and as a whole, to promise that complexion, there would now he aspects and occasions more particularly and deeply dyed with it. The inevitability of his being romantically affected—being so more often than not—had been taken for granted by the restless analyst from the first; his feeling that he might count upon it having indeed, in respect to his visit, the force of a strong appeal. The case had come to strike him as perfectly clear—the case for the singular history, the odd evolution of this confidence, which might appear superficially to take some explaining. It was “Europe” that had, in very ancient days, held out to the yearning young American some likelihood of impressions more numerous and various and of a higher intensity than those he might gather on the native scene; and it was doubtless in conformity with some such desire more finely and more frequently to vibrate that he had originally begun to consult the European oracle. This had led, in the event, to his settling to live for long years in the very precincts, as it were, of the temple; so that the voice of the divinity was finally to become, in his ears, of all sounds the most familiar. It was quite to lose its primal note of mystery, to cease little by little to be strange, impressive and august—in the degree, at any rate, in which it had once enjoyed that character. The consultation of the oracle, in a word, the invocation of the possible thrill, was gradually to feel its r
omantic essence enfeebled, shrunken and spent. The European complexity, working clearer to one’s vision, had grown usual and calculable—presenting itself, to the discouragement of wasteful emotion and of “intensity” in general, as the very stuff, the common texture, of the real world. Romance and mystery—in other words the amusement of interest—would have therefore at last to provide for themselves elsewhere; and what curiously befell, in time, was that the native, the forsaken scene, now passing, as continual rumour had it, through a thousand stages and changes, and offering a perfect iridescence of fresh aspects, seemed more and more to appeal to the faculty of wonder. It was American civilization that had begun to spread itself thick and pile itself high, in short, in proportion as the other, the foreign exhibition had taken to writing itself plain; and to a world so amended and enriched, accordingly, the expatriated observer, with his relaxed curiosity reviving and his limp imagination once more on the stretch, couldn’t fail again to address himself. Nothing could be of a simpler and straighter logic: Europe had been romantic years before, because she was different from America; wherefore America would now be romantic because she was different from Europe. It was for this small syllogism then to meet, practically, the test of one’s repatriation; and as the palpitating pilgrim disembarked, in truth, he had felt it, like the rifle of a keen sportsman, carried across his shoulder and ready for instant use.
What employment it was thus to find, what game it was actually to bring down, this directed and aimed appetite for sharp impressions, is a question to which these pages may appear in a manner to testify—constituting to that extent the “proof” of my fond calculation. It was in respect to the South, meanwhile, at any rate, that the calculation had really been fondest—on such a stored, such a waiting provision of vivid images, mainly beautiful and sad, might one surely there depend. The sense of these things would represent for the restless analyst, more than that of any others, intensity of impression; so that his only prime discomfiture was in his having had helplessly to see his allowance of time cut short, reduced to the smallest compass in which the establishment of a relation to any group of aspects might be held conceivable. This last soreness, however—and the point is one to be made—was not slow, I noted, to find itself healingly breathed upon. More promptly in America than elsewhere does the relation to the group of aspects begin to work—whatever the group, and I think I may add whatever the relation, may be. Few elements of the picture are shy or lurking elements—tangled among others or hidden behind them, packed close by time and taking time to come out. They stand there in their row like the letters of an alphabet, and this is why, in spite of the vast surface exposed, any item, encountered or selected, contributes to the spelling of the word, becomes on the spot generally informing and characteristic. The word so recognized stands thus, immediately, for a multitude of others and constitutes, to expert observation, an all-sufficient specimen. “Here, evidently, more quickly than in Europe,” the visitor says to himself, “one knows what there is and what there isn’t: whence there is the less need, for one’s impression, of a multiplication of cases.” A single case speaks for many—since it is again and again, as he catches himself repeating, a question not of clustered meanings that fall like over-ripe fruit into his lap, but of the picking out of the few formed features, signs of character mature enough and firm enough to promise a savour or to suffer handling. These scant handfuls illustrate and typify, and, luckily, they are (as the evidence of manners and conditions, over the world, goes) quickly gathered; so that an impression founded on them is not an undue simplification. And I make out, I think, the reflection with which our anxious explorer tacitly concludes. “It’s a bad country to be stupid in—none on the whole so bad. If one doesn’t know how to look and to see, one should keep out of it altogether. But if one does, if one can see straight, one takes in the whole piece at a series of points that are after all comparatively few. One may neglect, by interspacing the points, a little of the accessory matter, but one neglects none of the essential. And if one has not at last learned to separate with due sharpness, pen in hand, the essential from the accessory, one has only, at best, to muffle one’s head for shame and await deserved extinction.”
II
It was in conformity with some such induction as the foregoing that I had to feel myself, at Richmond, in the midst of abnormal wintry rigours, take in at every pore a Southern impression; just as it was also there, before a picture charmless at the best, I seemed to apprehend, and not redeemed now by mistimed snow and ice, that I was to recognize how much I had staked on my theory of the latent poetry of the South. This theory, during a couple of rather dark, vain days, constituted my one solace or support, and I was most of all occupied with my sense of the importance of carrying it off again unimpaired. I remember asking myself at the end of an hour or two what I had then expected—expected of the interesting Richmond; and thereupon, whether or no I mustered, on this first challenge, an adequate answer, trying to supply the original basis of expectation. By that effort, as happened, my dim perambulation was lighted, and I hasten to add that I felt the second branch of my question easy enough to meet. How was the sight of Richmond not to be a potent idea; how was the place not, presumably, to be interesting, to a restless analyst who had become conscious of the charge involved in that title as long ago as at the outbreak of the Civil War, if not even still more promptly; and to whose young imagination the Confederate capital had grown lurid, fuliginous, vividly tragic—especially under the process through which its fate was to close round it and overwhelm it, invest it with one of the great reverberating historic names? They hang together on the dreadful page, the cities of the supreme holocaust, the final massacres, the blood, the flames, the tears; they are chalked with the sinister red mark at sight of which the sensitive nerve of association forever winces. If the mere shadow had that penetrative power, what affecting virtue might accordingly not reside in the substances, the place itself, the haunted scene, as one might figure it, of the old, the vast intensity of drama? One thing at least was certain—that, however the sense of actual aspects was to disengage itself, I could not possibly have drawn near with an intelligence more respectfully and liberally prepared for hospitality to it. So, conformably with all this, how could it further not strike me, in presence of the presented appearances, that the needful perceptions were in fact at play?
I recall the shock of that question after a single interrogative stroll, a mere vague mile of which had thrown me back wondering and a trifle mystified. One had had brutally to put it to one’s self after a conscientious stare about: “This then the tragic ghost-haunted city, this the centre of the vast blood-drenched circle, one of the most blood-drenched, for miles and miles around, in the dire catalogue aforesaid?” One had counted on a sort of registered consciousness of the past, and the truth was that there appeared, for the moment, on the face of the scene, no discernible consciousness, registered or unregistered, of anything. Richmond, in a word, looked to me simply blank and void—whereby it was, precisely, however, that the great emotion was to come. One could never consent merely to taking it for that: intolerable the discredit so cast on one’s perceptive resources. The great modern hotel, superfluously vast, was excellent; but it enjoyed as a feature, as a “value,” an uncontested priority. It was a huge well-pitched tent, the latest thing in tents, proclaiming in the desert the name of a new industry. The desert, I have mentioned, was more or less muffled in snow—that furthered, I admit, the blankness; the wind was harsh, the sky sullen, the houses scarce emphasized at all as houses; the “Southern character,” in fine, was nowhere. I should doubtless have been embarrassed to say in what specific items I had imagined it would naturally reside—save in so far as I had attached some mystic virtue to the very name of Virginia: this instinctive imputation constituting by itself, for that matter, a symptom of a certain significance. I watched and waited, giving the virtue a chance to come out; I wandered far and wide—as far, that is, as weather and season permitted; t
hey quite forbade, to my regret, the long drives involved in a visitation of the old battlefields. The shallow vistas, the loose perspectives, were as sadly simple as the faces of the blind. Was it practically but a question then, deplorable thought, of a poor Northern city?—with the bare difference that a Northern city of such extent would, however stricken, have succeeded, by some Northern art in pretending to resources. Where, otherwise, were the “old Southern mansions” on the wide verandahs and in the rank, sweet gardens of which Northern resources had once been held so cheap?
Well, I scarce remember at what point of my peregrination, at what quite vague, senseless street-corner it was that I felt my inquiry—up to that moment rather embarrassing—turn to clearness and the whole picture place itself in a light in which contemplation might for the time find a warrant and a clue. I at any rate almost like to live over the few minutes in question—for the sake of their relief and their felicity. So retracing them, I see that the spring had been pressed for them by the positive force of one’s first dismay; a sort of intellectual bankruptcy, this latter, that one felt one really couldn’t afford. There were no references—that had been the trouble; but the reaction came with the sense that the large, sad poorness was in itself a reference, and one by which a hundred grand historic connections were on the spot, and quite thrillingly, re-established. What was I tasting of, at that time of day, and with intensity, but the far consequences of things, made absolutely majestic by their weight and duration? I was tasting, mystically, of the very essence of the old Southern idea—the hugest fallacy, as it hovered there to one’s backward, one’s ranging vision, for which hundreds of thousands of men had ever laid down their lives. I was tasting of the very bitterness of the immense, grotesque, defeated project—the project, extravagant, fantastic, and to-day pathetic in its folly, of a vast Slave State (as the old term ran) artfully, savingly isolated in the world that was to contain it and trade with it. This was what everything round me meant—that that absurdity had once flourished there; and nothing, immediately, could have been more interesting than the lesson that such may remain, for long years, the tell-tale face of things where such absurdities have flourished. Thus, by a turn of my hand, or of my head, interest was evoked; so that from this moment I had never to let go of it. It was to serve again, it was to serve elsewhere, and in much the same manner; all aspects straightway were altered by it, and the pious pilgrim came round again into his own. He had wanted, his scheme had fairly required, this particular part of the country to be beautiful; he had really needed it to be, he couldn’t afford, in due deference to the intellectual economy imposed on him, its not being. When things were grandly sad, accordingly—sad on the great scale and with a certain nobleness of ruin—an element of beauty seemed always secured, even if one could scarce say why: which truth, clearly, would operate fortunately for the compromised South.