The American Scene | Page 9

typical
triumph of the American landscape "school," now as rococo as so many
squares of ingenious wool-work, but the remembered delight of our
childhood. On terra firma, in New England, too often dusty or scrubby,
the guarantee is small that some object at variance, cruelly at variance,
with the glamour of the landscape school may not "put out." But that
boat across the water is safe, is sustaining as far as it goes; it puts out
from the cove of romance, from the inlet of poetry, and glides straight
over, with muffled oar, to the--well, to the right place.
The consciousness of quantity, rather, as opposed to quality, to which I
just alluded, quantity inordinate, quantity duly impressive and duly, if
need be, overwhelming, had been the form of vigilance posting itself at
the window--whence, incontestably, after a little, yielding to the so
marked agitation of its sister-sense, it stepped back into the shadow of
the room. If memory, at any rate, with its message so far to carry, had
played one a trick, imagination, or some finer faculty still, could play
another to match it. If it had settled to a convenience of the mind that
"New England scenery" was hard and dry and thin, scrubby and meagre
and "plain," here was that comfort routed by every plea of
fancy--though of a fancy indeed perhaps open to the charge of the
morbid--and by every refinement of appeal. The oddest thing in the
world would delightfully have happened--and happened just there--in
case one had really found the right word for the anomaly of one's
surprise. What would the right word be but that nature, in these lights,
was no single one of the horrid things I have named, but was, instead of
them all, that quite other happy and charming thing,

feminine?--feminine from head to foot, in expression, tone and touch,
mistress throughout of the feminine attitude and effect. That had by no
means the figure recalled from far back, but when once it had fully
glimmered out it fitted to perfection, it became the case like a crown of
flowers and provided completely for one's relation to the subject.
"Oh Italy, thou woman-land!" breaks out Browning, more than once,
straight at that mark, and with a force of example that, for this other
collocation, served much more as an incitement than as a warning.
Reminded vividly of the identities of latitude and living so much in the
same relation to the sun, you never really in New Hampshire--nor in
Massachusetts, I was soon able to observe--look out at certain hours for
the violet spur of an Apennine or venture to speak, in your admiration,
of Tuscan or Umbrian forms, without feeling that the ground has quite
gratefully borne you. The matter, however, the matter of the insidious
grace, is not at all only a question of amusing coincidence; something
intrinsically lovable everywhere lurks--which most comes out indeed,
no doubt, under the consummate art of autumn. How shall one lightly
enough express it, how describe it or to what compare it?--since,
unmistakably, after all, the numbered items, the few flagrant facts, fail
perfectly to account for it. It is like some diffused, some slightly
confounding, sweetness of voice, charm of tone and accent, on the part
of some enormous family of rugged, of almost ragged, rustics--a tribe
of sons and daughters too numerous to be counted and homogeneous
perhaps to monotony. There was a voice in the air, from week to week,
a spiritual voice: "Oh, the land's all right!"--it took on fairly a fondness
of emphasis, it rebounded from other aspects, at times, with such a
tenderness. Thus it sounded, the blessed note, under many promptings,
but always in the same form and to the effect that the poor dear land
itself--if that was all that was the matter--would beautifully "do." It
seemed to plead, the pathetic presence, to be liked, to be loved, to be
stayed with, lived with, handled with some kindness, shown even some
courtesy of admiration. What was that but the feminine attitude?--not
the actual, current, impeachable, but the old ideal and classic; the air of
meeting you everywhere, standing in wait everywhere, yet always
without conscious defiance, only in mild submission to your doing
what you would with it. The mildness was of the very essence, the

essence of all the forms and lines, all the postures and surfaces, all the
slimness and thinness and elegance, all the consent, on the part of trees
and rocks and streams, even of vague happy valleys and fine
undistinguished hills, to be viewed, to their humiliation, in the mass,
instead of being viewed in the piece.
It is perhaps absurd to have to hasten to add that doing what you would
with it, in these irresponsible senses, simply left