Conclusion

Summary

1. Crumbling is not an instant’s Act

2. A fundamental pause

3. Dilapidation’s processes

4. Are organized Decays.

5. ’Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul

6. A Cuticle of Dust

7. A Borer in the Axis

8. An Elemental Rust –

9. Ruin is formal – Devil’s work

10. Consecutive and slow –

11. Fail in an instant – no man did

12. Slipping – is Crash’s law.

13. – Emily Dickinson, c. 1865

For Henry James, returning to his native land after long exile, the New England scene was marked by poverty and ruin: “everywhere legible was the hard little historic record of agricultural failure and defeat. It had to pass for the historic background, that traceable truth that a stout human experiment had been tried, had broken down,” wrote James in The American Scene (1907). This failure signified nothing less than a refusal to consent to history, which was now being made “on the other side of the continent, at the expense of such sites.” The landscape represented not a narrative of decline and decay but rather a resistance to – even a defiance of – grand narrative itself. Like Thoreau stumbling through the ruins of Walden Woods, James confronted 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.” The human and social collapse of the “whole show” was less significant than a more profound absence of what James called “importance” in the rural picture. A sordid ugliness and shabbiness prevented ruin gaining simple aesthetic compensation. The “almost sophisticated dinginess of the present destitution” meant the “complete abolition of forms,” especially visible on Cape Cod:

I remember not less a longish walk, and a longer drive, into low extensions of woody, piney, pondy landscape, veined with blue inlets and trimmed, on opportunity, with blond beaches – through all of which I pursued in vain the shy spectre of a revelation. The only revelation seemed really to be that, quite as in New Hampshire, so many people had “left” that the remaining characters, on the sketchy page, were too few to form a word. With this, accordingly, of what, in the bright air, for the charmed visitor, were the softness and sweetness of impression made? I had again to take it for a mystery.