The American Scene | Page 7

the impression. When you wander
about in Arcadia you ask as few questions as possible. That is Arcadia
in fact, and questions drop, or at least get themselves deferred and
shiftlessly shirked; in conformity with which truth the New England
hills and woods--since they were not all, for the weeks to come, of
mere New Hampshire--the mild September glow and even the clear
October blaze were things to play on the chords of memory and
association, to say nothing of those of surprise, with an admirable art of
their own. The tune may have dropped at last, but it succeeded for a
month in being strangely sweet, and in producing, quite with intensity,
the fine illusion. Here, moreover, was "interest" of the sort that could
come easily, and therefore not of the sort--quite the contrary--that
involved a consideration of the millions spent; a fact none the fainter,
into the bargain, for having its curious, unexpected, inscrutable side.
Why was the whole connotation so delicately Arcadian, like that of the
Arcadia of an old tapestry, an old legend, an old love-story in fifteen
volumes, one of those of Mademoiselle de ScudŽri? Why, in default of

other elements of the higher finish, did all the woodwalks and nestled
nooks and shallow, carpeted dells, why did most of the larger views
themselves, the outlooks to purple crag and blue horizon, insist on
referring themselves to the idyllic type in its purity?--as if the higher
finish, even at the hand of nature, were in some sort a perversion, and
hillsides and rocky eminences and wild orchards, in short any common
sequestered spot, could strike one as the more exquisitely and ideally
Sicilian, Theocritan, poetic, romantic, academic, from their not bearing
the burden of too much history. The history was there in its degree, and
one came upon it, on sunny afternoons, in the form of the classic
abandoned farm of the rude forefather who had lost patience with his
fate. These scenes of old, hard New England effort, defeated by the soil
and the climate and reclaimed by nature and time--the crumbled, lonely
chimney-stack, the overgrown threshold, the dried-up well, the
cart-track vague and lost--these seemed the only notes to interfere, in
their meagreness, with the queer other, the larger, eloquence that one
kept reading into the picture. Even the wild legend, immediately local,
of the Indian who, having, a hundred years ago, murdered a
husbandman, was pursued, by roused avengers, to the topmost peak of
Chocorua Mountain, and thence, to escape, took his leap into the
abyss--even so sharp an echo of a definite far-off past, enriching the
effect of an admirable silvered summit (for Chocorua Mountain carries
its grey head quite with the grandest air), spent itself in the mere
idleness of the undiscriminated, tangled actual. There was one
thinkable reason, of course, for everything, which hung there as a
possible answer to any question, should any question insist. Did one by
chance exaggerate, did one rhapsodize amiss, and was the apparent
superior charm of the whole thing mainly but an accident of one's own
situation, the state of having happened to be deprived to excess--that is
for too long--of naturalism in quantity? Here it was in such quantity as
one hadn't for years had to deal with; and that might by itself be a
luxury corrupting the judgment.
It was absurd, perhaps, to have one's head so easily turned; but there
was perfect convenience, at least, in the way the parts of the impression
fell together and took a particular light. This light, from whatever
source proceeding, cast an irresistible spell, bathed the picture in the

confessed resignation of early autumn, the charming sadness that
resigned itself with a silent smile. I say "silent" because the voice of the
air had dropped as forever, dropped to a stillness exquisite, day by day,
for a pilgrim from a land of stertorous breathing, one of the windiest
corners of the world; the leaves of the forest turned, one by one, to
crimson and to gold, but never broke off: all to the enhancement of this
strange conscious hush of the landscape, which kept one in presence as
of a world created, a stage set, a sort of ample capacity constituted,
for--well, for things that wouldn't, after all, happen: more the pity for
them, and for me and for you. This view of so many of the high places
of the hills and deep places of the woods, the lost trails and wasted
bowers, the vague, empty, rock-roughened pastures, the lonely intervals
where the afternoon lingered and the hidden ponds over which the
season itself seemed to bend as a young bedizened, a slightly
melodramatic mother, before taking some guilty flight, hangs over the
crib of her sleeping child--these things put you, so far as you