The American Scene | Page 6

be. "We are only instalments, symbols,
stopgaps," they practically admitted, and with no shade of
embarrassment; "expensive as we are, we have nothing to do with
continuity, responsibility, transmission, and don't in the least care what
becomes of us after we have served our present purpose." On the detail
of this impression, however, I needn't insist; the essence of it, which
was all that was worth catching, was one's recognition of the odd
treachery that may practically lie in wait for isolated opulence. The
highest luxury of all, the supremely expensive thing, is constituted
privacy--and yet it was the supremely expensive thing that the good
people had supposed themselves to be getting: all of which, I repeat,
enriched the case, for the restless analyst, with an illustrative
importance. For what did it offer but the sharp interest of the match
everywhere and everlastingly played between the short-cut and the long
road?--an interest never so sharp as since the short-cut has been able to
find itself so endlessly backed by money. Money in fact is the
short-cut--or the short-cut money; and the long road having, in the
instance before me, so little operated, operated for the effect, as we may
say, of the cumulative, the game remained all in the hands of its

adversary.
The example went straight to the point, and thus was the drama
presented: what turn, on the larger, the general stage, was the game
going to take? The whole spectacle, with the question, opened out,
diffusing positively a multitudinous murmur that was in my ears, for
some of the more subtly-romantic parts of the drive, as who should say
(the sweet American vaguenesses, hailed again, the dear old nameless,
promiscuous lengths of woodside and waterside), like the collective
afternoon hum of invisible insects. Yes; it was all actually going to be
drama, and that drama; than which nothing could be more to the occult
purpose of the confirmed, the systematic story-seeker, or to that even of
the mere ancient contemplative person curious of character. The very
donnee of the piece could be given, the subject formulated: the great
adventure of a society reaching out into the apparent void for the
amenities, the consummations, after having earnestly gathered in so
many of the preparations and necessities. "Into the apparent void"--I
had to insist on that, since without it there would be neither comedy nor
tragedy; besides which so little was wanting, in the way of vacancy, to
the completeness of the appearance. What would lurk beneath this--or
indeed what wouldn't, what mightn't--to thicken the plot from stage to
stage and to intensify the action? The story-seeker would be present,
quite intimately present, at the general effort--showing, doubtless, as
quite heroic in many a case--to gouge an interest out of the vacancy,
gouge it with tools of price, even as copper and gold and diamonds are
extracted, by elaborate processes, from earth-sections of small
superficial expression. What was such an effort, on its associated side,
for the attentive mind, but a more or less adventurous fight, carried on
from scene to scene, with fluctuations and variations, the shifting
quantity of success and failure? Never would be such a chance to see
how the short-cut works, and if there be really any substitute for
roundabout experience, for troublesome history, for the long, the
immitigable process of time. It was a promise, clearly, of the highest
entertainment.
II

It was presently to come back to me, however, that there were other
sorts, too--so many sorts, in fact, for the ancient contemplative person,
that selection and omission, in face of them, become almost a pain, and
the sacrifice of even the least of these immediate sequences of
impression in its freshness a lively regret. But without much
foreshortening is no representation, and I was promptly to become
conscious, at all events, of quite a different part of the picture, and of
personal perceptions, to match it, of a different order. I woke up, by a
quick transition, in the New Hampshire mountains, in the deep valleys
and the wide woodlands, on the forest-fringed slopes, the far-seeing
crests of the high places, and by the side of the liberal streams and the
lonely lakes; things full, at first, of the sweetness of belated recognition,
that of the sense of some bedimmed summer of the distant prime
flushing back into life and asking to give again as much as possible of
what it had given before--all in spite, too, of much unacquaintedness, of
the newness, to my eyes, through the mild September glow, of the
particular rich region. I call it rich without compunction, despite its
several poverties, caring little that half the charm, or half the response
to it, may have been shamelessly "subjective"; since that but slightly
shifts the ground of the beauty of