LA DOUANE[1]
That vast gray building on Canal Street, which seemeth ancient as Karnac, and upon which princely sums have vainly been expended in the foolish hope of completing it, has long troubled us with a strange impression difficult to analyze. A sense of weight and antiquity oppresses the beholder when he gazes upon it. Kinglake's nightmare of "solid immensity" may be realized by a careful study of it; and its loftiest portion affords an artistic effect of ruin — not the picturesque ruin of feudal remains, but ruin as of Egypt, vast and shadowy and dusty. It has been to the United States Treasury what the sieve was to the daughters of Danaüs. Rivers of gold have been poured into it; yet it remaineth as before. Its marble hall seems like the Pharaonic burial-chamber in the heart of the granite monument of Cheops; and its doors exhale in the most arid and burning weather a breath of damp chilliness, such as smites a mourner in the face when he opens the iron gates of a family vault. So weirdly does it seem to hint of Death and the Past that one cannot help wondering why its corridors are not hypogea and its offices filled with mummies. Without, in sooth, its very shape is ominous. It is, despite its windows and entrances, its pilasters and niches, a huge sarcophagus of granite. Its form is funereal; and against the dismal immensity of its exterior, the openings in its awful walls seem but as carvings upon some ancient stone coffin.
It is in very truth a sarcophagus, wherein repose the mummified remains of that which was once mighty, but not magnanimous; of that which was once rich, yet not honest; of that which once believed itself eternal and invulnerable, yet which expired like Herod of self-engendered corruption. Its corridors are indeed hypogea, filled with the mummies of Radical Pharaohs; and its marble hall a burial-chamber, empty, indeed, like that in the stony heart of the Great Pyramid, yet haunted by the ghost of that régime for which none are left to mourn.
But those empty niches in the great waste surfaces of the quadruple façade! Ah, those niches! — those niches! Why are they accursed with emptiness; why made hideous with vacuity? The statues of stone created to fill them were chiseled out a quarter of a century ago; and yet never have beheld the light of day. Their stone eyes have never gazed upon the glory of Canal Street; their marble ears have never hearkened to the gossip of politicians; their rigid forms have never left the enclosure of the wooden coffins into which they were first packed for importation. They sleep in the awful silence and darkness of the most dismal chamber in the whole gray building. They sleep, and the dust thickens upon their faces; and sometimes in the dead waste and middle of the night they do converse dismally together. They represent Faiths not worshiped under the old régime, Hopes that had failed, and Charities that would have been scorned; Virtues that had fled, or had hidden themselves in lonesome places; Saintly Personages[2] who could not in those days have received respect; and Great Statesmen, perhaps, whose marble faces would have blushed into Egyptian granite, could they have seen that which was, but will never be again. And Radicalism, therefore, hid them away — not, indeed, out of consideration for their feelings, but out of consideration for its own. For it could not have endured the silent reproach of those eyes of marble, or dare to concoct plots within the reach of those ears of marble; and therefore the Faiths and the Virtues were cunningly hidden away where their presence could offend nobody. And now they ask, "When shall we be delivered from darkness and silence and oblivion? When shall the trumpet sound for our resurrection day? When shall we behold the great glory of the Southern sun and the splendor of Canal Street? Better even with broken noses to stand on our pedestals, better even to lose several of our Carrara limbs than this." But the silence and the darkness and the dampness remain; and echo answereth nothing.