Title: The American scene
Author: James, Henry
Language: English
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                           THE AMERICAN SCENE


                                   BY

                              HENRY JAMES


                                 LONDON

                         CHAPMAN AND HALL, LTD

                                  1907



                     RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
                      BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
                            BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.



                                PREFACE


The following pages duly explain themselves, I judge, as to the Author’s
point of view and his relation to his subject; but I prefix this word on
the chance of any suspected or perceived failure of such references. My
visit to America had been the first possible to me for nearly a quarter
of a century, and I had before my last previous one, brief and distant
to memory, spent other years in continuous absence; so that I was to
return with much of the freshness of eye, outward and inward, which,
with the further contribution of a state of desire, is commonly held a
precious agent of perception. I felt no doubt, I confess, of my great
advantage on that score; since if I had had time to become almost as
“fresh” as an inquiring stranger, I had not on the other hand had enough
to cease to be, or at least to feel, as acute as an initiated native. I
made no scruple of my conviction that I should understand and should
care better and more than the most earnest of visitors, and yet that I
should vibrate with more curiosity—on the extent of ground, that is, on
which I might aspire to intimate intelligence at all—than the pilgrim
with the longest list of questions, the sharpest appetite for
explanations and the largest exposure to mistakes.

I felt myself then, all serenely, not exposed to grave mistakes—though
there were also doubtless explanations which would find me, and quite as
contentedly, impenetrable. I would take my stand on my gathered
impressions, since it was all for them, for them only, that I returned;
I would in fact go to the stake for them—which is a sign of the value
that I both in particular and in general attach to them and that I have
endeavoured to preserve for them in this transcription. My cultivated
sense of aspects and prospects affected me absolutely as an enrichment
of my subject, and I was prepared to abide by the law of that sense—the
appearance that it would react promptly in some presences only to remain
imperturbably inert in others. There would be a thousand matters—matters
already the theme of prodigious reports and statistics—as to which I
should have no sense whatever, and as to information about which my
record would accordingly stand naked and unashamed. It should
unfailingly be proved against me that my opportunity had found me
incapable of information, incapable alike of receiving and of imparting
it; for then, and then only, would it be clearly enough attested that I
_had_ cared and understood.

There are features of the human scene, there are properties of the
social air, that the newspapers, reports, surveys and blue-books would
seem to confess themselves powerless to “handle,” and that yet
represented to me a greater array of items, a heavier expression of
character, than my own pair of scales would ever weigh, keep them as
clear for it as I might. I became aware soon enough, on the spot, that
these elements of the human subject, the results of these attempted
appreciations of life itself, would prove much too numerous even for a
capacity all given to them for some ten months; but at least therefore,
artistically concerned as I had been all my days with the human subject,
with the appreciation of life itself, and with the consequent question
of literary representation, I should not find such matters scant or
simple. I was not in fact to do so, and they but led me on and on. How
far this might have been my several chapters show; and yet even here I
fall short. I shall have to take a few others for the rest of my story.

                                                                   H. J.



                                CONTENTS


                                                           PAGE
           I. NEW ENGLAND: AN AUTUMN IMPRESSION               1

          II. NEW YORK REVISITED                             72

         III. NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON: A SPRING IMPRESSION  116

          IV. NEW YORK: SOCIAL NOTES                        158

           V. THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS                    194

          VI. THE SENSE OF NEWPORT                          209

         VII. BOSTON                                        226

        VIII. CONCORD AND SALEM                             256

          IX. PHILADELPHIA                                  273

           X. BALTIMORE                                     303

          XI. WASHINGTON                                    332

         XII. RICHMOND                                      365

        XIII. CHARLESTON                                    395

         XIV. FLORIDA                                       422



                           THE AMERICAN SCENE



                                   I
                              NEW ENGLAND
                          AN AUTUMN IMPRESSION


                                   I

Conscious that the impressions of the very first hours have always the
value of their intensity, I shrink from wasting those that attended my
arrival, my return after long years, even though they be out of order
with the others that were promptly to follow and that I here gather in,
as best I may, under a single head. They referred partly, these instant
vibrations, to a past recalled from very far back; fell into a train of
association that receded, for its beginning, to the dimness of extreme
youth. One’s extremest youth had been full of New York, and one was
absurdly finding it again, meeting it at every turn, in sights, sounds,
smells, even in the chaos of confusion and change; a process under
which, verily, recognition became more interesting and more amusing in
proportion as it became more difficult, like the spelling-out of foreign
sentences of which one knows but half the words. It was not, indeed, at
Hoboken, on emerging from the comparatively assured order of the great
berth of the ship, that recognition _was_ difficult: there, only too
confoundingly familiar and too serenely exempt from change, the
waterside squalor of the great city put forth again its most inimitable
notes, showed so true to the barbarisms it had not outlived that one
could only fall to wondering what obscure inward virtue had preserved
it. There was virtue evident enough in the crossing of the water, that
brave sense of the big, bright, breezy bay; of light and space and
multitudinous movement; of the serried, bristling city, held in the easy
embrace of its great good-natured rivers very much as a battered and
accommodating beauty may sometimes be “distinguished” by a gallant less
fastidious, with his open arms, than his type would seem to imply. But
what was it that was still holding together, for observation, on the
hither shore, the same old sordid facts, all the ugly items that had
seemed destined so long ago to fall apart from their very cynicism?—the
rude cavities, the loose cobbles, the dislodged supports, the
unreclaimed pools, of the roadway; the unregulated traffic, as of
innumerable desperate drays charging upon each other with tragic
long-necked, sharp-ribbed horses (a length and a sharpness all
emphasized by the anguish of effort); the corpulent constables, with
helmets askew, swinging their legs, in high detachment, from coigns of
contemplation; the huddled houses of the other time, red-faced, off
their balance, almost prone, as from too conscious an affinity with
“saloon” civilization.

It was, doubtless, open to the repentant absentee to feel these things
sweetened by some shy principle of picturesqueness; and I admit that I
asked myself, while I considered and bumped, why what was “sauce for the
goose” should _not_ be in this case sauce for the gander; and why
antique shabbiness shouldn’t plead on this particular waterside the
cause it more or less successfully pleads on so many others. The light
of the September day was lovely, and the sun of New York rests mostly,
with a laziness all its own, on that dull glaze of crimson paint, as
thick as on the cheek of the cruder coquetry, which is, in general,
beneath its range, the sign of the old-fashioned. Yes; I could remind
myself, as I went, that Naples, that Tangiers or Constantinople has
probably nothing braver to flaunt, and mingle with excited recognition
the still finer throb of seeing in advance, seeing even to alarm, many
of the responsibilities lying in wait for the habit of headlong critical
or fanciful reaction, many of the inconsistencies in which it would
probably have, at the best, more or less defiantly to drape itself. Such
meditations, at all events, bridged over alike the weak places of
criticism and some of the rougher ones of my material passage. Nothing
was left, for the rest of the episode, but a kind of fluidity of
appreciation—a mild, warm wave that broke over the succession of aspects
and objects according to some odd inward rhythm, and often, no doubt,
with a violence that there was little in the phenomena themselves
flagrantly to justify. It floated me, my wave, all that day and the
next; so that I still think tenderly—for the short backward view is
already a distance with “tone”—of the service it rendered me and of the
various perceptive penetrations, charming coves of still blue water,
that carried me up into the subject, so to speak, and enabled me to step
ashore. The subject was everywhere—that was the beauty, that the
advantage: it was thrilling, really, to find one’s self in presence of a
theme to which everything directly contributed, leaving no touch of
experience irrelevant. That, at any rate, so far as feeling it went;
treating it, evidently, was going to be a matter of prodigious
difficulty and selection—in consequence of which, indeed, there might
even be a certain recklessness in the largest surrender to impressions.
Clearly, however, these were not for the present—and such as they
were—to be kept at bay; the hour of reckoning, obviously, would come,
with more of them heaped up than would prove usable, a greater quantity
of vision, possibly, than might fit into decent form: whereby,
assuredly, the part of wisdom was to put in as much as possible of one’s
recklessness while it was fresh.

It was fairly droll, for instance, the quantity of vision that began to
press during a wayside rest in a house of genial but discriminating
hospitality that opened its doors just where the fiddle-string of
association could most intensely vibrate, just where the sense of “old
New York,” of the earlier stages of the picture now so violently
overpainted, found most of its occasions—found them, to extravagance,
within and without. The good easy Square, known in childhood, and as if
the light were yellower there from that small accident, bristled with
reminders as vague as they were sweet; within, especially, the place was
a cool backwater, for time as well as for space; out of the slightly dim
depths of which, at the turn of staircases and from the walls of
communicating rooms, portraits and relics and records, faintly, quaintly
æsthetic, in intention at least, and discreetly—yet bravely, too, and
all so archaically and pathetically—Bohemian, laid traps, of a
pleasantly primitive order, for memory, for sentiment, for relenting
irony; gross little devices, on the part of the circumscribed past,
which appealed with scarce more emphasis than so many tail-pieces of
closed chapters. The whole impression had fairly a rococo tone; and it
was in this perceptibly golden air, the air of old empty New York
afternoons of the waning summer-time, when the long, the perpendicular
rattle, as of buckets, forever thirsty, in the bottomless well of
fortune, almost dies out in the merciful cross-streets, that the ample
rearward loggia of the Club seemed serenely to hang; the glazed,
disglazed, gallery dedicated to the array of small spread tables for
which blank “backs,” right and left and opposite, made a privacy; backs
blank with the bold crimson of the New York house-painter, and playing
upon the chord of remembrance, all so absurdly, with the scarcely less
simplified green of their great cascades of Virginia creeper, as yet
unturned: an admonition, this, for piety, as well as a reminder—since
one had somehow failed to treasure it up—that the rather pettifogging
plan of the city, the fruit, on the spot, of an artless age, happened to
leave even so much margin as that for consoling chances. There were
plenty of these—which I perhaps seem unduly to patronize in speaking of
them as only “consoling”—for many hours to come and while the easy wave
that I have mentioned continued to float me: so abysmal are the
resources of the foredoomed student of manners, or so helpless, at
least, his case when once adrift in that tide.

If in Gramercy Park already, three hours after his arrival, he had felt
himself, this victim, up to his neck in what I have called his
“subject,” the matter was quite beyond calculation by the time he had
tumbled, in such a glorified “four-wheeler,” and with such an odd
consciousness of roughness superimposed upon smoothness, far down-town
again, and, on the deck of a shining steamer bound for the Jersey shore,
was taking all the breeze of the Bay. The note of manners, the note that
begins to sound, everywhere, for the spirit newly disembarked, with the
first word exchanged, seemed, on the great clean deck, fairly to
vociferate in the breeze—and not at all, so far, as was pleasant to
remark, to the harshening of that element. Nothing could have been more
to the spectators purpose, moreover, than the fact he was ready to hail
as the most characteristic in the world, the fact that what surrounded
him was a rare collection of young men of business returning, as the
phrase is, and in the pride of their youth and their might, to their
“homes,” and that, if treasures of “type” were not here to be
disengaged, the fault would be all his own. It was perhaps this simple
sense of treasure to be gathered in, it was doubtless this very
confidence in the objective reality of impressions, so that they could
deliciously be left to ripen, like golden apples, on the tree—it was all
this that gave a charm to one’s sitting in the orchard, gave a strange
and inordinate charm both to the prospect of the Jersey shore and to
every inch of the entertainment, so divinely inexpensive, by the way.
The immense liberality of the Bay, the noble amplitude of the boat, the
great unlocked and tumbled-out city on one hand, and the low, accessible
mystery of the opposite State on the other, watching any approach, to
all appearance, with so gentle and patient an eye; the gaiety of the
light, the gladness of the air, and, above all (for it most came back to
that), the unconscious affluence, the variety in identity, of the young
men of business: these things somehow left speculation, left curiosity
exciting, yet kept it beguilingly safe. And what shall I say more of all
that presently followed than that it sharpened to the last
pleasantness—quite draining it of fears of fatuity—that consciousness of
strolling in the orchard that was all one’s own to pluck, and counting,
overhead, the apples of gold? I figure, I repeat, under this name those
thick-growing items of the characteristic that were surely going to drop
into one’s hand, for vivid illustration, as soon as one could begin to
hold it out.

Heavy with fruit, in particular, was the whole spreading bough that
rustled above me during an afternoon, a very wonderful afternoon, that I
spent in being ever so wisely driven, driven further and further, into
the large lucidity of—well, of what else shall I call it but a New
Jersey condition? That, no doubt, is a loose label for the picture; but
impressions had to range themselves, for the hour, as they could. I had
come forth for a view of such parts of the condition as might peep out
at the hour and on the spot, and it was clearly not going to be the
restless analyst’s own fault if conditions in general, everywhere,
should strike him as peculiarly, as almost affectingly, at the mercy of
observation. They came out to meet us, in their actuality, in the soft
afternoon; they stood, artless, unconscious, unshamed, at the very gates
of Appearance; they might, verily, have been there, in their plenitude,
at the call of some procession of drums and banners—the principal facts
of the case being collected along our passage, to my fancy, quite as if
they had been principal citizens. And then there was the further fact of
the case, one’s own ridiculous property and sign—the romantic, if not
the pathetic, circumstance of one’s having had to wait till now to read
even such meagre meanings as this into a page at which one’s geography
might so easily have opened. It might have threatened, for twenty
minutes, to be almost complicating, but the truth was recorded: it was
an adventure, unmistakably, to have a revelation made so convenient—to
be learning at last, in the maturity of one’s powers, what New Jersey
might “connote.” This was nearer than I had ever come to any such
experience; and it was now as if, all my life, my curiosity had been
greater than I knew. Such, for an excited sensibility, are the
refinements of personal contact. These influences then were present, as
a source of glamour, at every turn of our drive, and especially present,
I imagined, during that longest perspective when the road took no turn,
but showed us, with a large, calm consistency, the straight blue band of
summer sea, between the sandy shore and the reclaimed margin of which
the chain of big villas was stretched tight, or at least kept straight,
almost as for the close stringing of more or less monstrous pearls. The
association of the monstrous thrusts itself somehow into my retrospect,
for all the decent humility of the low, quiet coast, where the shadows
of the waning afternoon could lengthen at their will and the chariots of
Israel, on the wide and admirable road, could advance, in the glittering
eye of each array of extraordinarily exposed windows, as through an
harmonious golden haze.

There was gold-dust in the air, no doubt—which would have been again an
element of glamour if it had not rather lighted the scene with too crude
a confidence. It was one of the phases, full of its own marks and signs,
of New York, the immense, in _villeggiatura_—and, presently, with little
room left for doubt of what particular phase it might be. The huge new
houses, up and down, looked over their smart, short lawns as with a
certain familiar prominence in their profiles, which was borne out by
the accent, loud, assertive, yet benevolent withal, with which they
confessed to their extreme expensiveness. “Oh, yes; we were awfully
dear, for what we are and for what we do”—it was proud, but it was
rather rueful; with the odd appearance everywhere as of florid creations
waiting, a little bewilderingly, for their justification, waiting for
the next clause in the sequence, waiting in short for life, for time,
for interest, for character, for identity itself to come to them, quite
as large spread tables or superfluous shops may wait for guests and
customers. The scene overflowed with curious suggestion; it comes back
to me with the afternoon air and the amiable flatness, the note of the
sea in a drowsy mood; and I thus somehow think of the great white boxes
as standing there with the silvered ghostliness (for all the silver
involved) of a series of candid new moons. It could only be the
occupants, moreover, who were driving on the vast, featureless highway,
to and fro in front of their ingenuous palaces and as if pretending not
to recognize them when they passed; German Jewry—wasn’t it
conceivable?—tending to the stout, the simple, the kind, quite visibly
to the patriarchal, and with the old superseded shabbiness of Long
Branch partly for the goal of their course; the big brown wooden
barracks of the hotels, the bold rotunda of the gaming-room—monuments
already these, in truth, of a more artless age, and yet with too little
history about them for dignity of ruin. Dignity, if not of ruin at least
of reverence, was what, at other points, doubtless, we failed
considerably less to read into the cottage where Grant lived and the
cottage where Garfield died; though they had, for all the world, those
modest structures, exactly the effect of objects diminished by recession
into space—as if to symbolize the rapidity of their recession into time.
They have been left so far behind by the expensive, as the expensive is
now practised; in spite of having apparently been originally a
sufficient expression of it.

This could pass, it seemed, for the greatest vividness of the
picture—that the expensive, for New York in _villeggiatura_, even on
such subordinate showing, is like a train covering ground at maximum
speed and pushing on, at present, into regions unmeasurable. It
included, however, other lights, some of which glimmered, to my eyes, as
with the promise of great future intensity—hanging themselves as
directly over the question of manners as if they had been a row of
lustres reflected in the polished floor of a ball-room. Here was the
expensive as a power by itself, a power unguided, undirected,
practically unapplied, really exerting itself in a void that could make
it no response, that had nothing—poor gentle, patient, rueful, but
altogether helpless, void!—to offer in return. The game was that of its
doing, each party to the whole combination, what it could, but with the
result of the common effort’s falling so short. Nothing could be of a
livelier interest—with the question of manners always in view—than to
note that the most as yet accomplished at such a cost was the air of
unmitigated publicity, publicity as a condition, as a doom, from which
there could be no appeal; just as in all the topsy-turvy order, the
defeated scheme, the misplaced confidence, or whatever one may call it,
there was no achieved protection, no constituted mystery of retreat, no
saving complexity, not so much as might be represented by a foot of
garden wall or a preliminary sketch of interposing shade. The homely
principle under which the picture held at all together was that of the
famous freedom of the cat to look at the king; that seemed, so clearly,
throughout, the only motto that would work. The ample villas, in their
full dress, planted each on its little square of brightly-green carpet,
and as with their stiff skirts pulled well down, eyed each other, at
short range, from head to foot; while the open road, the chariots, the
buggies, the motors, the pedestrians—which last number, indeed, was
remarkably small—regarded at their ease both this reciprocity and the
parties to it. It was in fact all _one_ participation, with an effect
deterrent to those ingenuities, or perhaps indeed rather to those
commonplaces, of conjecture produced in general by the outward show of
the fortunate life. That, precisely, appeared the answer to the question
of manners: the fact that in such conditions there couldn’t _be_ any
manners to speak of; that the basis of privacy was somehow wanting for
them; and that nothing, accordingly, no image, no presumption of
constituted relations, possibilities, amenities, in the social, the
domestic order, was inwardly projected. It was as if the projection had
been so completely outward that one could but find one’s self almost
uneasy about the mere perspective required for the common acts of the
personal life, that minimum of vagueness as to what takes place in it
for which the complete “home” aspires to provide.

What had it been their idea to _do_, the good people—do, exactly, _for_
their manners, their habits, their intercourse, their relations, their
pleasures, their general advantage and justification? Do, that is, in
affirming their wealth with such innocent emphasis and yet not at the
same time affirming anything else. It would have rested on the
cold-blooded critic, doubtless, to explain why the crudity of wealth did
strike him with so direct a force; accompanied after all with no
paraphernalia, no visible redundancies of possession, not so much as a
lodge at any gate, nothing but the scale of many of the houses and their
candid look of having cost as much as they knew how. Unmistakably they
all proclaimed it—they would have cost still more had the way but been
shown them; and, meanwhile, they added as with one voice, they would
take a fresh start as soon as ever it should be. “We are only
instalments, symbols, stop-gaps,” 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
_donnée_ 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 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 Scudéri? 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 were preoccupied with the human history of places, into a
mood in which appreciation became a positive wantonness and the sense of
quality, plucking up unexpectedly a spirit, fairly threatened to take
the game into its hands. You discovered, when once it was stirred, an
elegance in the commonest objects, and a mystery even in accidents that
really represented, perhaps, mere plainness unashamed. Why otherwise,
for instance, the inveterate charm of the silver-grey rock cropping
through thinly-grassed acres with a placed and “composed” felicity that
suggested the furniture of a drawing-room? The great boulders in the
woods, the pulpit-stones, the couchant and rampant beasts, the isolated
cliffs and lichened cathedrals, had all, seen, as one passed, through
their drizzle of forest light, a special New Hampshire beauty; but I
never tired of finding myself of a sudden in some lonely confined place,
that was yet at the same time both wide and bright, where I could
recognize, after the fashion of the old New Hampshire sociability, every
facility for spending the day. There was the oddity—the place was
furnished by its own good taste; its bosky ring shut it in, the two or
three gaps of the old forgotten enclosure made symmetrical doors, the
sweet old stones had the surface of grey velvet, and the scattered wild
apples were like figures in the carpet.

It might be an ado about trifles—and half the poetry, roundabout, the
poetry in solution in the air, was doubtless but the alertness of the
touch of autumn, the imprisoned painter, the Bohemian with a rusty
jacket, who had already broken out with palette and brush; yet the way
the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there,
for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet,
recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a
fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before
she goes. One speaks, at the same time, of the orchards; but there are
properly no orchards where half the countryside shows, all September,
the easiest, most familiar sacrifice to Pomona. The apple-tree, in New
England, plays the part of the olive in Italy, charges itself with the
effect of detail, for the most part otherwise too scantly produced, and,
engaged in this charming care, becomes infinitely decorative and
delicate. What it must do for the too under-dressed land in May and June
is easily supposable; but its office in the early autumn is to scatter
coral and gold. The apples are everywhere and every interval, every old
clearing, an orchard; they have “run down” from neglect and shrunken
from cheapness—you pick them up from under your feet but to bite into
them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but as you catch their young
brightness in the blue air, where they suggest strings of
strange-coloured pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you note their
manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gaiety, they seem to ask to be
praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe. The question
of the encircled waters too, larger and smaller—that again was perhaps
an ado about trifles; but you can’t, in such conditions, and especially
at first, resist the appeal of their extraordinarily mild faces and
wooded brims, with the various choice spots where the great straight
pines, interspaced beside them, and yielding to small strands as finely
curved as the eyebrows of beauty, make the sacred grove and the American
classic temple, the temple for the worship of the evening sky, the cult
of the Indian canoe, of Fenimore Cooper, of W. C. Bryant, of the
immortalizable water-fowl. They look too much alike, the lakes and the
ponds, and this is, indeed, all over the world, too much a reproach to
lakes and ponds—to all save the pick of the family, say, like George and
Champlain; the American idea, moreover, is too inveterately that woods
shall grow thick to the water. Yet there is no feature of grace the
landscape could so ill spare—let alone one’s not knowing what other,
what baser, promiscuity mightn’t oppress the banks if that of the free
overgrowth didn’t. Each surface of this sort is a breathing-space in the
large monotony; the rich recurrence of water gives a polish to the
manner itself, so to speak, of nature; thanks to which, in any case, the
memory of a characteristic perfection attaches, I find, to certain hours
of declining day spent, in a shallow cove, on a fallen log, by the
scarce-heard plash of the largest liquid expanse under Chocorua; a
situation interfused with every properest item of sunset and evening
star, of darkening circle of forest, of boat that, across the water, put
noiselessly out—of analogy, in short, with every 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 out of account, for
the country in general, the proved, the notorious fact that nothing
useful, nothing profitable, nothing directly economic, _could_ be done
at all. Written over the great New Hampshire region at least, and
stamped, in particular, in the shadow of the admirable high-perched cone
of Chocorua, which rears itself, all granite, over a huge interposing
shoulder, quite with the _allure_ of a minor Matterhorn—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. One was
in presence, everywhere, of the refusal to consent to history, and of
the consciousness, on the part of every site, that this precious
compound is in no small degree being insolently made, on the other side
of the continent, at the expense of such sites. The touching appeal of
nature, as I have called it therefore, the “Do something kind for me,”
is not so much a “Live upon me and thrive by me” as a “Live _with_ me,
somehow, and let us make out together what we may do for each
other—something that is not merely estimable in more or less greasy
greenbacks. See how ‘sympathetic’ I am,” the still voice seemed
everywhere to proceed, “and how I am therefore better than my fate; see
how I lend myself to poetry and sociability—positively to æsthetic use:
give me that consolation.” The appeal was thus not only from the rude
absence of the company that had gone, and the still ruder presence of
the company left, the scattered families, of poor spirit and loose
habits, who had feared the risk of change; it was to a listening ear,
directly—that of the “summer people,” to whom, in general, one soon
began to figure so much of the country, in New England, as looking for
its future; with the consequence in fact that, from place to place, the
summer people themselves almost promised to glow with a reflected light.
It was a clue, at any rate, in the maze of contemplation, for this
vision of the relation so established, the disinherited, the
impracticable land throwing itself, as for a finer argument, on the
non-rural, the intensely urban class, and the class in question throwing
itself upon the land for reasons of its own. What would come of such an
_entente_, on the great scale, for both parties?—that special wonderment
was to strike me everywhere as in order. How populations with money to
spare may extract a vulgar joy from “show” sections of the earth, like
Switzerland and Scotland, we have seen abundantly proved, so that this
particular lesson has little more to teach us; in America, however,
evidently, the difference in the conditions, and above all in the scale
of demonstration, is apt to make lessons new and larger.

Once the whole question had ranged itself under that head—what would the
“summer people,” as a highly comprehensive term, do with the aspects
(perhaps as a highly comprehensive term also), and what would the
aspects do with the summer people?—it became conveniently portable and
recurrently interesting. Perhaps one of the best reasons I can give for
this last side of it was that it kept again and again presenting the
idea of that responsibility for _appearances_ which, in such an
association as loomed thus large, was certain to have to fix itself
somewhere. What was one to say of appearances as they actually
prevailed—from the moment, I mean, they were not of the charming order
that nature herself could care for? The appearances of man, the
appearances of woman, and of their conjoined life, the general latent
spectacle of their arrangements, appurtenances, manners, devices, opened
up a different chapter, the leaves of which one could but musingly turn.
A better expression of the effect of most of this imagery on the mind
should really be sought, I think, in its seeming, through its sad
consistency, a mere complete negation of appearances—using the term in
the sense of any familiar and customary “care for looks.” Even the
recognition that, the scattered summer people apart, the thin population
was poor and bare had its bewilderment, on which I shall presently
touch; but the poverty and the bareness were, as we seemed to measure
them, a straight admonition of all we had, from far back, so easily and
comfortably taken for granted, in the rural picture, on the other side
of the world. There was a particular thing that, more than any other,
had been pulled out of the view and that left the whole show, humanly
and socially, a collapse. This particular thing was exactly the fact of
the _importance_, the significance, imputable, in a degree, to
appearances. In the region in which these observations first languished
into life that importance simply didn’t exist at all, and its absence
was everywhere forlornly, almost tragically, attested. There was the
little white wooden village, of course, with its houses in queer
alignment and its rudely-emphasized meeting-house, in particular, very
nearly as unconsecrated as the store or the town pump; but this
represented, throughout, the highest tribute to the amenities. A sordid
ugliness and shabbiness hung, inveterately, about the wayside “farms,”
and all their appurtenances and incidents—above all, about their
inmates; when the idea of appearance was anywhere expressed (and its
highest flights were but in the matter of fresh paint or a swept
dooryard), a summer person was usually the author of the boon. The
teams, the carts, the conveyances in their kinds, the sallow, saturnine
natives in charge of them, the enclosures, the fences, the gates, the
wayside “bits,” of whatever sort, so far as these were referable to
human attention or human neglect, kept telling the tale of the
difference made, in a land of long winters, by the suppression of the
two great factors of the familiar English landscape, the squire and the
parson.

What the squire and the parson do, between them, for appearances (which
is what I am talking of) in scenes, predominantly Anglo-Saxon, subject
to their sway, is brought home, as in an ineffable glow, when the
elements are reduced to “composing,” in the still larger Anglo-Saxon
light, without them. Here was no church, to begin with; and the shrill
effect of the New England meeting-house, in general, so merely
continuous and congruous, as to type and tone, with the common objects
about it, the single straight breath with which it seems to blow the
ground clear of the seated solidity of religion, is an impression that
responds to the renewed sight of one of these structures as promptly as
the sharp ring to the pressure of the electric button. One lives among
English ancientries, for instance, as in a world toward the furnishing
of which religion has done a large part. And here, immediately, was a
room vast and vacant, with a vacancy especially reducible, for most of
the senses, to the fact of that elimination. Perpetually, inevitably,
moreover, as the restless analyst wandered, the eliminated thing _par
excellence_ was the thing most absent to sight—and for which, oh! a
thousand times, the small substitutes, the mere multiplication of the
signs of theological enterprise, in the tradition and on the scale of
commercial and industrial enterprise, had no attenuation worth
mentioning. The case, in the New Hampshire hills at least, was quite the
same for the pervasive Patron, whose absence made such a hole. We went
on counting up all the blessings we had, too unthankfully, elsewhere
owed to him; we lost ourselves in the intensity of the truth that to
compare a simplified social order with a social order in which feudalism
had once struck deep was the right way to measure the penetration of
feudalism. If there was no point here at which they had perceptibly
begun, there was on the other side of the world no point at which they
had perceptibly ceased. One’s philosophy, one’s logic might perhaps be
muddled, but one clung to them for the convenience of their explanation
of so much of the ugliness. The ugliness—one pounced, indeed, on this as
on a talisman for the future—was the so complete abolition of _forms_;
if, with so little reference to their past, present or future
possibility, they could be said to have been even so much honoured as to
be abolished.

The pounce at any rate was, for a guiding light, effectual; the guiding
light worked to the degree of seeming at times positively to save the
restless analyst from madness. He could make the absence of forms
responsible, and he could thus react without bitterness—react absolutely
with pity; he could judge without cruelty and condemn without despair;
he could think of the case as perfectly definite and say to himself
that, could forms only _be_, as a recognized accessory to manners,
introduced and developed, the ugliness might begin scarcely to know
itself. He could play with the fancy that the people might at last grow
fairly to like them—far better, at any rate, than the class in question
may in its actual ignorance suppose: the necessity would be to give it,
on an adequate scale and in some lucid way, a taste of the revelation.
What “form,” meanwhile, _could_ there be in the almost sophisticated
dinginess of the present destitution? One thoughtfully asked that,
though at the cost of being occasionally pulled up by odd glimpses of
the underlying existence of a standard. There was the wage-standard, to
begin with; the well-nigh awestruck view of the high rate of
remuneration open to the most abysmally formless of “hired” men, indeed
to field or house labour, expert or inexpert, on the part of either sex,
in any connection: the ascertainment of which was one of the
“bewilderments” I just now spoke of, one of the failures of consistency
in the grey revelation. After this there was the standard, ah! the very
high standard, of sensibility and propriety, so far as tribute on this
ground was not owed by the parties themselves, but owed _to_ them, not
to be rendered, but to be received, and with a stiff, a warningly stiff,
account kept of it. Didn’t it appear at moments a theme for endless
study, this queer range of the finer irritability in the breasts of
those whose fastidiousness was compatible with the violation of almost
every grace in life _but_ that one? “Are you the woman of the house?” a
rustic cynically squalid, and who makes it a condition of _any_
intercourse that he be received at the front door of the house, not at
the back, asks of a _maîtresse de maison_, a summer person trained to
resignation, as preliminary to a message brought, as he then mentions,
from the “washerlady.” These are the phenomena, of course, that prompt
the woman of the house, and perhaps still more the man, to throw
herself, as I say, on the land, for what it may give her of balm and
beauty—a character to which, as I also say, the land may affect these
unfortunates as so consciously and tenderly playing up. The lesson had
perhaps to be taught; if the Patron is at every point so out of the
picture, the end is none the less not yet of the demonstration, on the
part of the figures peopling it, that they are not to be patronized.
Once to see this, however, was again to focus the possible evolution of
manners, the latent drama to come: the æsthetic enrichment of the summer
people, so far as they should be capable or worthy of it, by contact
with the consoling background, so full of charming secrets, and the
forces thus conjoined for the production and the imposition of forms.
Thrown back again almost altogether, as by the Jersey shore, on the
excitement of the speculative, one could extend unlimitedly—by which I
mean one could apply to a thousand phases of the waiting spectacle—the
idea of the possible drama. So everything worked round, afresh, to the
promise of the large interest.


                                  III

If the interest then was large, this particular interest of the “social”
side of the general scene, more and more likely to emerge, what better
proof could I want again than the differences of angle at which it
continued to present itself? The differences of angle—as obvious most
immediately, for instance, “north of the mountains,” and first of all in
the valley of the Saco—gathered into their train a hundred happy
variations. I kept tight hold of my temporary clue, the plea of the
country’s amiability, as I have called it, its insinuating appeal from
too rigorous a doom; but there was a certain strain in this, from day to
day, and relief was apparent as soon as the conditions changed. They
changed, notably, by the rapid and complete drop of the sordid element
from the picture; it was, for all the world, of a sudden, as if
Appearance, precious principle, had again asserted its rights. That
confidence, clearly, at North Conway, had come to it in the course of
the long years, too many to reckon over, that separated my late from my
early vision—though I recognized as disconcerting, toward the close of
the autumn day, to have to owe this perception, in part, to the great
straddling, bellowing railway, the high, heavy, dominant American train
that so reverses the relation of the parties concerned, suggesting
somehow that the country exists for the “cars,” which overhang it like a
conquering army, and not the cars for the country. This presence had
learned to penetrate the high valleys and had altered, unmistakably, the
old felicity of proportion. The old informal earthy coach-road was a
firm highway, wide and white—and ground to dust, for all its firmness,
by the whirling motor; without which I might have followed it, back and
back a little, into the near, into the far, country of youth—left lying,
however, as the case stood, beyond the crest of a hill. Only the high
rock-walls of the Ledges, the striking sign of the spot, were there;
grey and perpendicular, with their lodged patches of shrub-like forest
growth, and the immense floor, below them, where the Saco spreads and
turns and the elms of the great general meadow stand about like
candelabra (with their arms reversed) interspaced on a green table.
There hung over these things the insistent hush of a September Sunday
morning; nowhere greater than in the tended woods enclosing the
admirable country home that I was able to enjoy as a centre for
contemplation; woods with their dignity maintained by a large and artful
clearance of undergrowth, and repaying this attention, as always, by
something of the semblance of a sacred grove, a place prepared for high
uses, even if for none rarer than high talk. There was a latent
poetry—old echoes, ever so faint, that _would_ come back; it made a
general meaning, lighted the way to the great modern farm, all so
contemporary and exemplary, so replete with beauty of beasts and
convenience of man, with a positive dilettantism of care, but making one
perhaps regret a little the big, dusky, heterogeneous barns, the more
Bohemian bucolics, of the earlier time. I went down into the valley—that
was an impression to woo by stages; I walked beside one of those great
fields of standing Indian corn which make, to the eye, so perfect a note
for the rest of the American rural picture, throwing the conditions back
as far as our past permits, rather than forward, as so many other things
do, into the age to come. The maker of these reflections betook himself
at last, in any case, to an expanse of rock by a large bend of the Saco,
and lingered there under the infinite charm of the place. The rich, full
lapse of the river, the perfect brownness, clear and deep, as of liquid
agate, in its wide swirl, the large indifferent ease in its pace and
motion, as of some great benevolent institution smoothly working; all
this, with the sense of the deepening autumn about, gave I scarce know
what pastoral nobleness to the scene, something raising it out of the
reach of even the most restless of analysts. The analyst in fact could
scarce be restless here; the impression, so strong and so final,
persuaded him perfectly to peace. This, on September Sunday mornings,
was what American beauty _should_ be; it filled to the brim its idea and
its measure—albeit Mount Washington, hazily overhung, happened not to
contribute to the effect. It was the great, gay river, singing as it
went, like some reckless adventurer, goodhumoured for the hour and with
his hands in his pockets, that argued the whole case and carried
everything assentingly before it.

Who, for that matter, shall speak, who shall begin to speak, of the
alacrity with which, in the New England scene (to confine ourselves for
the moment only to that), the eye and the fancy take to the water?—take
to it often for relief and security, the corrective it supplies to the
danger of the common. The case is rare when it is not better than the
other elements of the picture, even if these be at their best; and its
strength is in the fact that the common has, for the most part, to stop
short at its brink; no water being intrinsically less distinguished—save
when it is dirty—than any other. By a fortunate circumstance, moreover,
are not the objects usually afloat on American lakes and rivers, to say
nothing of bays and sounds, almost always white and wonderful,
high-piled, characteristic, fantastic things, begotten of the native
conditions and shining in the native light? Let my question, however,
not embroider too extravagantly my mere sense of driving presently,
though after nightfall, and in the public conveyance, into a village
that gave out, through the dusk, something of the sense of a flourishing
Swiss village of the tourist season, as one recalls old Alpine
associations: the swing of the coach, the cold, high air, the scattered
hotels and their lighted windows, the loitering people who might be
celebrated climbers or celebrated guides, the resonance of the bridge as
one crossed, the gleam of the swift river under the lamps. My village
had no happy name; it was, crudely speaking, but Jackson, N. H., just as
the swift river that, later on, in the morning light, to the immediate
vision, easily surpassed everything else, was only the river of the
Wildcat—a superiority strictly comparative. The note of this superiority
was in any case already there, for the first, for the nocturnal
impression; scarce seen, only heard as yet, it could still give the
gloom a larger lift than any derived from a tour of the piazzas of the
hotels. This tour, undertaken while supper was preparing, in the
interest of a study of manners, left room, all the same, for much
support to the conviction I just expressed, the conviction that, name
for name, the stream had got off better than the village, that streams
_couldn’t_, at the worst, have such cruel names as villages, and that
this too, after all, was an intimation of their relative value. That
inference was, for the actual case, to be highly confirmed; the Wildcat
River, on the autumn morning, in its deep valley and its precipitous
bed, was as headlong and romantic as one could desire; though, indeed, I
am not, in frankness, prepared to say better things of it than of the
great picture, the feature of the place, to a view of which I mounted an
hour or two after breakfast.

Here, at least, where a small and charming country-house had seated
itself very much as the best box, on the most expensive tier, rakes the
prospect for grand opera—here might manners too be happily studied, save
perhaps for their being enjoyed at too short range. Here, verily, were
verandahs of contemplation, but admitting to such images of furnished
peace, within, as could but illustrate a rare personal history. This was
a felicity apart; whereas down in the valley, the night before, the
story told at the lighted windows of the inns was precisely, was above
all, of advantages impartially diffused and shared. That, at any rate,
would seem in each instance the most direct message of the life
displayed to the observer, on the fresher evenings, in the halls and
parlours, the large, clean, bare spaces (almost penally clean and bare),
where plain, respectable families seemed to sit and study in silence,
with a kind of awe indeed, as from a sense of inevitable doom, their
reflected resemblances, from group to group, their baffling identities
of type and tone, their inability to escape from participations and
communities. My figure of the opera-box, for the other, the removed,
case, is justified meanwhile by the memory of the happy vision that was
to make up to me for having missed Mount Washington at Intervale; the
something splendidly scenic in the composition of the “Presidential
range,” hung in the air, across the valley, with its most eminent object
holding exactly the middle of the stage and the grand effect stretching
without a break to either wing. Mount Washington, seen from such a point
of vantage, a kind of noble equality of intercourse, looks admirably,
solidly _seated_, as with the other Presidential peaks standing at his
chair; and the picture is especially sublime far off to the right, with
the grand style of Carter’s Dome, a masterly piece of drawing against
the sky, and the romantic dip of Carter’s Notch, the very ideal of the
pass (other than Alpine) that announces itself to the winding wayfarer,
for beauty and interest, from a distance. The names, “Presidential” and
other, minister little to the poetry of association; but that,
throughout the American scene, is a source of irritation with which the
restless analyst has had, from far back, to count. Charming places,
charming objects, languish, all round him, under designations that seem
to leave on them the smudge of a great vulgar thumb—which is precisely a
part of what the pleading land appears to hint to you when it murmurs,
in autumn, its intelligent refrain. If it feels itself better than so
many of the phases of its fate, so there are spots where you see it turn
up at you, under some familiar tasteless infliction of this order, the
plaintive eye of a creature wounded with a poisoned arrow.

You learn, after a little, not to insist on names—that is not to inquire
of them; and are happiest perchance when the answer is made you as it
was made me by a neighbour, in a railway train, on the occasion of my
greatly admiring, right and left of us, a tortuous brawling river. I had
supposed it for a moment, in my innocence, the Connecticut—which it
decidedly was not; it was only, as appeared, a stream _quelconque_, a
stream without an identity. That was better, somehow, than the adventure
of a little later—my learning, too definitely, that another stream,
ample, admirable, in every way distinguished, a stream worthy of
Ruysdael or Salvator Rosa, was known but as the Farmington River. This I
could in no manner put up with—this taking by the greater of the
comparatively common little names of the less. Farmington, as I was
presently to learn, is a delightful, a model village; but villages,
fords, bridges are not the godparents of the element that makes them
possible, they are much rather the godchildren. So far as such
reflections might be idle, however, in an order so differently
determined, they easily lost themselves, on the morrow of Jackson, N.
H., in an impression of sharper intensity; that of a drive away, on the
top of the coach, in the wondrous, lustrous early morning and in company
that positively gave what it had to give quite as if it had had my
curiosity on its conscience. That curiosity held its breath, in truth,
for fear of breaking the spell—the spell of the large liberty with which
a pair of summer girls and a summer youth, from the hotel, took all
nature and all society (so far as society was present on the top of the
coach) into the confidence of their personal relation. Their personal
relation—that of the young man was with the two summer girls, whose own
was all with _him_; any other, with their mother, for instance, who sat
speechless and serene beside me, with the other passengers, with the
coachman, the guard, the quick-eared four-in-hand, being for the time
completely suspended. The freedoms of the young three—who were, by the
way, not in their earliest bloom either—were thus bandied in the void of
the gorgeous valley without even a consciousness of its shriller, its
recording echoes. The whole phenomenon was documentary; it started, for
the restless analyst, innumerable questions, amid which he felt himself
sink beyond his depth. The immodesty was too colossal to be anything but
innocence—yet the innocence, on the other hand, was too colossal to be
anything but inane. And they were alive, the slightly stale three: they
talked, they laughed, they sang, they shrieked, they romped, they scaled
the pinnacle of publicity and perched on it flapping their wings;
whereby they were shown in possession of many of the movements of life.
Life, however, involved in some degree experience—if only the
experience, for instance, of the summer apparently just spent, at a
great cost, in the gorgeous valley. How was _that_, how was the
perception of any concurrent presence, how was the human or social
function at all, compatible with the _degree_ of the inanity? There was,
as against this, the possibility that the inanity was feigned, if not
the immodesty; and the fact that there would have been more immodesty in
feigning it than in letting it flow clear. These were maddening
mystifications, and the puzzle fortunately dropped with the arrival of
the coach at the station.


                                   IV

Clearly, none the less, there were puzzles and puzzles, and I had almost
immediately the amusement of waking up to another—this one of a
different order altogether. The point was that if the bewilderments I
have just mentioned had dropped, most other things had dropped too: the
challenge to curiosity here was in the extreme simplification of the
picture, a simplification on original lines. Not that there was not
still much to think of—if only because one had to stare at the very
wonder of a picture so simplified. The thing now was to catch this note,
to keep it in the ear and see, really, how far and how long it would
sound. The simplification, for that immediate vision, was to a broad
band of deep and clear blue sea, a blue of the deepest and clearest
conceivable, limited in one quarter by its far and sharp horizon of sky,
and in the other by its near and sharp horizon of yellow sand
over-fringed with a low woody shore; the whole seen through the
contorted cross-pieces of stunted, wind-twisted, far-spreading, quite
fantastic old pines and cedars, whose bunched bristles, at the ends of
long limbs, produced, against the light, the most vivid of all
reminders. Cape Cod, on this showing, was exactly a pendent, pictured
Japanese screen or banner; a delightful little triumph of
“impressionism,” which, during my short visit at least, never departed,
under any provocation, from its type. Its type, so easily formulated, so
completely filled, was there the last thing at night and the first thing
in the morning; there was rest for the mind—for that, certainly, of the
restless analyst—in having it so exactly under one’s hand. After that
one could read into it other meanings without straining or disturbing
it. There was a couchant promontory in particular, half bosky with the
evergreen boskage of the elegant kakemono, half bare with the bareness
of refined, the _most_ refined, New England decoration—a low, hospitable
headland projected, as by some water-colourist master of the trick, into
a mere brave wash of cobalt. It interfered, the sweet promontory, with
its generous Boston bungalow, its verandahs still haunted with old
summer-times, and so wide that the present could elbow and yet not
jostle the past—it interfered no whit, for all its purity of style, with
the human, the social question always dogging the steps of the ancient
contemplative person and making him, before each scene, wish really to
get _into_ the picture, to cross, as it were, the threshold of the
frame. It never lifts, verily, this obsession of the story-seeker,
however often it may flutter its wings, it may bruise its breast,
against surfaces either too hard or too blank. “The _manners_, the
manners: where and what are they, and what have they to tell?”—that
haunting curiosity, essential to the honour of his office, yet making it
much of a burden, fairly buzzes about his head the more pressingly in
proportion as the social mystery, the lurking human secret, seems more
shy.

Then it is that, as he says to himself, the secret must be most
queer—and it might therefore well have had, so insidiously sounded, a
supreme queerness on Cape Cod. For not the faintest echo of it trembled
out of the blankness; there were always the little white houses of the
village, there were always the elegant elms, feebler and more feathery
here than further inland; but the life of the little community was
practically locked up as tight as if it had _all_ been a question of
painted Japanese silk. And that was doubtless, for the story-seeker,
absolutely the little story: the constituted blankness was the whole
business, and one’s opportunity was all, thereby, for a study of
exquisite emptiness. This was stuff, in its own way, of a beautiful
quality; that impression came to me with a special sweetness that I have
not forgotten. The help in the matter was that I had not forgotten,
either, a small pilgrimage or two of far-away earlier years—the sense as
of absent things in other summer-times, golden afternoons that referred
themselves for their character simply to sandy roads and primitive
“farms,” crooked inlets of mild sea and, at the richest, large
possibilities of worked cranberry-swamp. I remembered, in fine,
Mattapoisett, I remembered Marion, as admirable examples of that
frequent New England phenomenon, the case the consummate example of
which I was soon again to recognize in Newport—the presence of an
_unreasoned_ appeal, in nature, to the sense of beauty, the appeal on a
basis of items that failed somehow, count and recount them as one would,
to justify the effect and make up the precious sum. The sum, at Newport
above all, as I was soon again to see, is the exquisite, the
irresistible; but you falter before beginning to name the parts of the
explanation, conscious how short the list may appear. Thus everything,
in the whole range of imagery, affirms itself and interposes; you will,
you inwardly determine, arrive at some notation of manners even if you
perish in the attempt. Thus, as I jogged southward, from Boston, in a
train that stopped and stopped again, for my fuller enlightenment, and
that insisted, the good old promiscuous American car itself, on having
as much of its native character as possible for my benefit, I already
knew I must fall back on old props of association, some revival of the
process of seeing the land grow mild and vague and interchangeably
familiar with the sea, all under the spell of the reported
“gulf-stream,” those mystic words that breathe a softness wherever they
sound.

It was imperative here that they should do what they could for me, and
they must have been in full operation when, on my arrival at the small
station from which I was to drive across to Cotuit—“across the Cape,” as
who should say, romantic thought, though I strain a point geographically
for the romance—I found initiation awaiting me in the form of minimized
horse-and-buggy and minimized man. The man was a little boy in tight
knickerbockers, the horse barely an animal at all, a mere ambling spirit
in shafts on the scale of a hairpin, the buggy disembodied save for its
wheels, the whole thing the barest infraction of the road, of the void:
circumstances, altogether, that struck the note, the right, the
persistent one—that of my baffled endeavour, while in the neighbourhood,
to catch life in the fact, and of my then having to recognize it as
present _without_ facts, or with only the few (the little white houses,
the feathery elms, the band of ocean blue, the stripe of sandy yellow,
the tufted pines in angular silhouette, the cranberry-swamps stringed
across, for the picking, like the ruled pages of ledgers), that fell,
incorruptibly silent, into the picture. We were still far from our goal,
that first hour, when I had recognized the full pictorial and other
“value” of my little boy and his little accessories; had seen, in the
amiable waste that we continued to plough till we struck, almost with a
shock, the inconsistency of a long stretch of new “stone” road, that,
socially, economically, every contributive scrap of this detail was
required. I drained my small companion, by gentle pressure, of such
sidelights as he could project, consisting almost wholly, as they did,
of a prompt and shrill, an oddly-emphasized “Yes, _sir_!” to each
interrogative attempt to break ground. The summer people had already
departed—with, as it seemed to me, undue precipitation; the very hotel
offered, in its many-windowed bulk, the semblance of a mere huge brittle
sea-shell that children tired of playing with it have cast again upon
the beach; the alignments of white cottages were, once more, as if the
children had taken, for a change, to building houses of cards and then
had deserted _them_. I remember the sense that something _must_ be done
for penetration, for discovery; I remember an earnest stroll, undertaken
for a view of waterside life, which resulted in the perception of a
young man, in a spacious but otherwise unpeopled nook, a clear,
straightforward young man to converse with, for a grand opportunity,
across the water, waist-high in the quiet tide and prodding the
sea-bottom for oysters; also in the discovery of an animated centre of
industry of which oysters again were the motive: a mute citizen or two
packing them in boxes, on the beach, for the Boston market, the hammer
of some vague carpentry hard by, and, filling the air more than anything
else, the unabashed discourse of three or four school-children at
leisure, visibly “prominent” and apparently in charge of the life of the
place. 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.


                                   V

This was really, for that matter, but the first phase of a resumed, or
rather of a greatly-enlarged, acquaintance with the New England village
in its most exemplary state: the state of being both sunned and shaded;
of exhibiting more fresh white paint than can be found elsewhere in
equal areas, and yet of correcting that conscious, that doubtless often
somewhat embarrassed, hardness of countenance with an art of its own.
The descriptive term is of the simplest, the term that suffices for the
whole family when at its best: having spoken of them as “elm-shaded,”
you have said so much about them that little else remains. It is but a
question, throughout, of the quantity, the density, of their shade;
often so thick and ample, from May to November, that their function, in
the social, in the economic, order would seem on occasion to consist
solely of their being passive to that effect. To note the latter,
accordingly, to praise it, to respond to its appeal for admiration,
practically represents, as you pass beneath the great feathery arches,
the only comment that may be addressed to the scene. The charming
thing—if that be the best way to take it—is that the scene is everywhere
the same; whereby tribute is always ready and easy, and you are spared
all shocks of surprise and saved any extravagance of discrimination.
These communities stray so little from the type, that you often ask
yourself by what sign or difference you know one from the other. The
goodly elms, on either side of the large straight “street,” rise from
their grassy margin in double, ever and anon in triple, file; the white
paint, on wooden walls, amid open dooryards, reaffirms itself eternally
behind them—though hanging back, during the best of the season, with a
sun-checkered, “amusing” vagueness; while the great verdurous vista, the
high canopy of meeting branches, has the air of consciously playing the
trick and carrying off the picture. “See with how little we do it; count
over the elements and judge how few they are: in other words come back
in winter, in the months of the naked glare, when the white paint looks
dead and dingy against the snow, the poor dear old white
paint—immemorial, ubiquitous, save as venturing into brown or
yellow—which is really all we have to build on!” Some such sense as that
you may catch from the murmur of the amiable elms—if you are a very
restless analyst indeed, that is a very indiscreet listener.

As you wouldn’t, however, go back in winter on any account whatever, and
least of all for any such dire discovery, the picture hangs undisturbed
in your gallery, and you even, with extended study of it, class it among
your best mementos of the great autumnal harmony. The truth is that, for
six or seven weeks after the mid-September, among the mountains of
Massachusetts and Connecticut, the mere _fusion_ of earth and air and
water, of light and shade and colour, the almost shameless tolerance of
nature for the poor human experiment, are so happily effective that you
lose all reckoning of the items of the sum, that you in short find in
your draught, contentedly, a single strong savour. By all of which I
don’t mean to say that this sweetness of the waning year has not more
taste in the presence of certain objects than in the presence of certain
others. Objects remarkable enough, objects rich and rare perhaps,
objects at any rate curious and interesting, emerge, for genial
reference, from the gorgeous blur, and would commit me, should I give
them their way, to excesses of specification. So I throw myself back
upon the fusion, as I have called it—with the rich light hanging on but
half-a-dozen spots. This renews the vision of the Massachusetts
Berkshire—land beyond any other, in America, to-day, as one was much
reminded, of leisure on the way to legitimation, of the social idyll, of
the workable, the expensively workable, American form of country life;
and, in especial, of a perfect consistency of surrender to the argument
of the verdurous vista. This is practically the last word of such
communities as Stockbridge, Pittsfield, Lenox, or of such villages as
Salisbury and Farmington, over the Connecticut border. I speak of
consistency in spite of the fact that it has doubtless here and there,
under the planted elms, suffered some injury at the hands of the summer
people; for really, beneath the wide mantle of parti-coloured Nature,
nothing matters but the accidental liability of the mantle here and
there to fall thickest. Thus it is then that you do, after a little,
differentiate, from place to place, and compare and even prefer; thus it
is that you recognize a scale and a range of amplitude—nay, more,
wonderful to say, on occasion an emergence of detail; thus it is, in
fine, that, while accepting the just eminence of Stockbridge and
Pittsfield, for instance, you treat yourself on behalf of Farmington to
something like a luxury of discrimination.

I may perhaps not go the length of asserting that Farmington might brave
undismayed the absolute removal of the mantle of charity; since the
great elm-gallery there struck me as not less than elsewhere essentially
mistress of the scene. Only there were particular felicities there
within the general—and anything very particular, in the land at large,
always gave the case an appearance of rarity. When the great elm-gallery
happens to be garnished with old houses, and the old houses happen to
show style and form and proportion, and the hand of time, further, has
been so good as to rest on them with all the pressure of protection and
none of that of interference, then it is that the New England village
may placidly await any comer. Farmington sits with this confidence on
the top of a ridge that presents itself in its fringed length—a straight
avenue seen in profile—to the visitor taking his way from the station
across a couple of miles of level bottom that speak, for New England, of
a luxury of culture; and nothing could be more fastidious and
exceptional, and thereby more impressive in advance, than such
upliftedness of posture. What is it but the note of the aristocratic in
an air that so often affects us as drained precisely, and well-nigh to
our gasping, of any exception to the common? The indication I here
glance at secures for the place in advance, as you measure its
detachment across the valley, a positively thrilled attention. Then
comes, under the canopy of autumn, your vision of the grounds of this
mild haughtiness, every one of which you gratefully allow. Stay as many
hours as you will—and my stay was but of hours—they don’t break down;
you trace them into fifty minor titles and dignities, all charming
aspects and high refinements of the older New England domestic
architecture. Not only, moreover, are the best houses so “good”—the good
ones are so surprisingly numerous. That is all they seem together to
say. “We are good, yes—we are excellent; though, if we know it very
well, we make no vulgar noise about it: we only just stand here, in our
long double line, in the manner of mature and just slightly-reduced
gentlewomen seated against the wall at an evening party (some party
where mature gentlewomen unusually abound), and neither too boldly
affront the light nor shrink from the favouring shade.” That again, on
the spot, is the discreet voice of the air—which quavered away, for me,
into still other admissions.

It takes but the barest semitone to start the story-seeker curious of
manners—the story-seeker impenitent and uncorrected, as happened in this
case, by a lesson unmistakably received, or at least intended, a short
time before. He had put a question, on that occasion, with an expectancy
doubtless too crude; he had asked a resident of a large city of the
middle West what might be, credibly, the conditions of the life
“socially” led there. He had not, at Farmington, forgotten the ominous
pause that had preceded the reply: “The conditions of the life? Why, the
same conditions as everywhere else.” He had not forgotten, either, the
thrill of his sense of this collapse of his interlocutor: the case
being, obviously, that it is of the very nature of conditions, as
reported on by the expert—and it was to the expert he had appealed—to
vary from place to place, so that they fall into as many groups, and
constitute as many stamps, as there are different congregations of men.
His interlocutor was not of the expert—_that_ had really been the
lesson; and it was with a far different poetry, the sweet shyness of
veracity, that Farmington confessed to idiosyncrasies. I have too little
space, however, as I had then too little time, to pretend to have lifted
more than the smallest corner of this particular veil; besides which, if
it is of the essence of the land, in these regions, to throw you back,
after a little, upon the possible humanities, so it often results from
the social study, too baffling in many a case, that you are thrown back
upon the land. That agreeable, if sometimes bewildering, seesaw is
perhaps the best figure, in such conditions, for the restless analyst’s
tenor of life. It was an effect of the fusion he has endeavoured to
suggest; it is certainly true, at least, that, among the craggy hills,
among little mountains that turned so easily, at any opening, to
clearness of violet and blue, among the wood-circled dells that seemed
to wait as for afternoon dances, among the horizons that recalled at
their will the Umbrian note and the finer drawing, every ugliness melted
and dropped, any wonderment at the other face of the medal seemed more
trouble than it was worth. It was enough that the white village or the
painted farm could gleam from afar, on the faintly purple slope, like a
thing of mystery or of history; it was enough that the charming
hill-mass, happily presented and foreshortened, should lie there like
some beast, almost heraldic, resting his nose on his paws.

Those images, for retrospect, insistently supplant the others; though I
have notes enough, I find, about the others too—about the inscrutability
of the village street in general, for instance, in any relation but its
relation to its elms. What _they_ seemed to say is what I have
mentioned; but what secrets, meanwhile, did the rest of the scene keep?
_Were_ there any secrets at all, or had the outward blankness, the
quantity of absence, as it were, in the air, its inward equivalent as
well? There was the high, thin church, made higher, made highest, and
sometimes, as at Farmington, made as pretty as a monstrous Dutch toy, by
its steeple of quaint and classic carpentry; but this monument appeared
to _testify_ scarce more than some large white card, embellished with a
stencilled border, on which a message or a sentence, an invitation or a
revelation, might be still to be inscribed. The present, the positive,
was mainly represented, ever, by the level railway-crossing, gaining
expression from its localization of possible death and destruction,
where the great stilted, strident, yet so almost comically impersonal
train, which, with its so often undesignated and so always unservanted
stations, and its general air of “bossing” the neighbourhoods it warns,
for climax of its characteristic curtness, to “look out” for its rush,
is everywhere a large contribution to one’s impression of a kind of
monotony of acquiescence. This look as of universal acquiescence plays
somehow through the visible vacancy—seems a part of the thinness, the
passivity, of that absence of the settled standard which contains, as I
more and more felt, from day to day, the germ of the most final of all
my generalizations. I needn’t be too prompt with it—so much higher may
it hold its head, I foresee, when it flowers, perfectly, as a
conclusion, than when it merely struggles through the side of the
subject as a tuft for provisional clutching. It sprouts in that soil,
none the less, betimes, this apprehension that the “common man” and the
common woman have here their appointed paradise and sphere, and that the
sign of it is the abeyance, on many a scene, of any wants, any tastes,
any habits, any traditions but theirs. The bullying railway orders them
off their own decent avenue without a fear that they will “stand up” to
it; the tone of the picture is the pitch of their lives, and when you
listen to what the village street seems to say, marking it, at the end,
with your “Is that _all_?” it is as if you had had your account of a
scheme fashioned preponderantly in their image.

I mean in _theirs_ exactly, with as little provision for what is too
foul for them as for what is too fair: the very middle, the golden mean,
of the note of the common, to which the two extremes of condition are
equally wanting; though with the mark strongest, if anywhere, against
dusky misfortune and precarious dependence. The romance of costume, for
better or worse, the implication of vices, accomplishments, manners,
accents, attitudes, is as absent for evil as for good, for a low
connection as for a high: which is why the simplification covers so much
ground, that of public houses, that of kinds of people, that of
suggestions, however faint, of discernible opportunity, of any
deviation, in other words, into the _un_common. There are no “kinds” of
people; there are simply people, very, very few, and all of one kind,
the kind who thus simply invest themselves for you in the grey truth
that they don’t go to the public house. It’s a negative garment, but it
must serve you; which it makes shift to do while you keep on asking,
from the force of acquired habit, what may be behind, what beneath, what
within, what may represent, in such conditions, the appeal of the senses
or the tribute to them; what, in such a show of life, may take the place
(to put it as simply as possible) of amusement, of social and sensual
margin, overflow and by-play. Of course there is by-play here and there;
here and there, of course, extremes _are_ touched: otherwise, the whole
concretion, in its thinness, would crack, and the fact is that two or
three of these strong patches of surface-embroidery remain with me as
curious and interesting. Never was such by-play as in a great new house
on a hilltop that overlooked the most composed of communities; a house
apparently conceived—and with great felicity—on the lines of a magnified
Mount Vernon, and in which an array of modern “impressionistic”
pictures, mainly French, wondrous examples of Manet, of Degas, of Claude
Monet, of Whistler, of other rare recent hands, treated us to the
momentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning,
between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanition. One hadn’t
quite known one was starved, but the morsel went down by the mere
authority of the thing consummately _prepared_. Nothing else had been,
in all the circle, prepared to anything like the same extent; and though
the consequent taste, as a mixture with the other tastes, was of the
queerest, no proof of the sovereign power of art could have been, for
the moment, sharper. It happened to be that particular art—it might as
well, no doubt, have been another; it made everything else shrivel and
fade: it was like the sudden trill of a nightingale, lord of the hushed
evening.

These appeared to be, over the land, always possible adventures;
obviously I should have others of the same kind; I could let them, in
all confidence, accumulate and wait. But, if that was one kind of
extreme, what meanwhile was the other kind, the kind portentously
alluded to by those of the sagacious who had occasionally put it before
me that the village street, the arched umbrageous vista, half so candid
and half so cool, is too frequently, in respect to “morals,” but a
whited sepulchre? They had so put it before me, these advisers, but they
had as well, absolutely and all tormentingly, so left it: partly as if
the facts were too abysmal for a permitted distinctness, and partly, no
doubt, as from the general American habit of indirectness, of positive
primness, of allusion to those matters that are sometimes collectively
spoken of as “the great facts of life.” It had been intimated to me that
the great facts of life are in high fermentation on the other side of
the ground glass that never for a moment flushes, to the casual eye,
with the hint of a lurid light: so much, at least, one had no
alternative, under pressure, but to infer. The inference, however, still
left the question a prey to vagueness—it being obvious that vice
requires forms not less than virtue, or perhaps even more, and that
forms, up and down the prospect, were exactly what one waited in vain
for. The theory that no community _can_ live wholly without by-play, and
the confirmatory word, for the particular case, of more initiated
reporters, these things were all very well; but before a scene peeled as
bare of palpable pretext as the American sky is often peeled of clouds
(in the interest of the slightly acid juice of its light), where and how
was the application to be made? It came at last, the application—that, I
mean, of the portentous hint; and under it, after a fashion, the
elements fell together. Why the picture _shouldn’t_ bristle with the
truth—that was all conceivable; that the truth could only strike inward,
horribly inward, not playing up to the surface—this too needed no
insistence; what was sharpest for reflection being, meanwhile, a couple
of minor appearances, which one gathered as one went. That our little
arts of pathetic, of humorous, portrayal may, for all their claim to an
edifying “realism,” have on occasion small veracity and courage—that
again was a remark pertinent to the matter. But the strangest link in
the chain, and quite the horridest, was this other, of high value to the
restless analyst—that, as the “interesting” puts in its note but where
it can and where it will, so the village street and the lonely farm and
the hillside cabin became positively richer objects under the smutch of
imputation; twitched with a grim effect the thinness of their mantle,
shook out of its folds such crudity and levity as they might, and
borrowed, for dignity, a shade of the darkness of Cencidrama, of
monstrous legend, of old Greek tragedy, and thus helped themselves out
for the story-seeker more patient almost of anything than of flatness.

There was not flatness, accordingly, though there might be dire
dreariness, in some of those impressions gathered, for a climax, in the
Berkshire country of Massachusetts, which forced it upon the fancy that
here at last, in far, deep mountain valleys, where the winter is fierce
and the summer irresponsible, was that heart of New England which makes
so pretty a phrase for print and so stern a fact, as yet, for feeling.
During the great loops thrown out by the lasso of observation from the
wonder-working motor-car that defied the shrinkage of autumn days, this
remained constantly the best formula of the impression and even of the
emotion; it sat in the vehicle with us, but spreading its wings to the
magnificence of movement, and gathering under them indeed most of the
meanings of the picture. The heart of New England, at this rate, was an
ample, a generous, heart, the largest demands on which, as to extent and
variety, seemed not to overstrain its capacity. But it was where the
mountain-walls rose straight and made the valleys happiest or
saddest—one couldn’t tell which, as to the felicity of the image, and it
didn’t much matter—that penetration was, for the poetry of it, deepest;
just as generalization, for an opposite sort of beauty, was grandest on
those several occasions when we perched for a moment on the summit of a
“pass,” a real little pass, slowly climbed to and keeping its other
side, with an art all but Alpine, for a complete revelation, and hung
there over the full vertiginous effect of the long and steep descent,
the clinging road, the precipitous fall, the spreading, shimmering land
bounded by blue horizons. We liked the very vocabulary, reduced to
whatever minimum, of these romanticisms of aspect; again and again the
land would do beautifully, if that were all that was wanted, and it
deserved, the dear thing, thoroughly, any verbal caress, any tenderness
of term, any share in a claim to the grand manner, to which we could
responsively treat it. The grand manner was in the winding ascent, the
rocky defile, the sudden rest for wonder, and all the splendid reverse
of the medal, the world belted afresh as with purple sewn with
pearls—melting, in other words, into violet hills with vague white towns
on their breasts.

That was, at the worst, for October afternoons, the motor helping, our
frequent fare; the habit of confidence in which was, perhaps, on no
occasion so rewarded as on that of a particular plunge, from one of the
highest places, through an ebbing golden light, into the great Lebanon
“bowl,” the vast, scooped hollow in one of the hither depths of which
(given the quarter of our approach) we found the Shaker settlement once
more or less, I believe, known to fame, ever so grimly planted. The
grimness, even, was all right, when once we had admiringly dropped down
and down and down; it would have done for that of a Buddhist monastery
in the Himalayas—though more savagely clean and more economically
impersonal, we seemed to make out, than the communities of older faiths
are apt to show themselves. I remember the mere chill of contiguity,
like the breath of the sepulchre, as we skirted, on the wide, hard floor
of the valley, the rows of gaunt windows polished for no whitest,
stillest, meanest face, even, to look out; so that they resembled the
parallelograms of black paint criss-crossed with white lines that
represent transparency in Nuremberg dolls’-houses. It wore, the whole
settlement, as seen from without, the strangest air of active, operative
death; as if the state of extinction were somehow, obscurely,
administered and applied—the final hush of passions, desires, dangers,
converted into a sort of huge stiff brush for sweeping away rubbish, or
still more, perhaps, into a monstrous comb for raking in profit. The
whole thing had the oddest appearance of mortification made to “pay.”
This was really, however, sounding the heart of New England beyond its
depth, for I am not sure that the New York boundary had not been, just
there, overpassed; there flowered out of that impression, at any rate,
another adventure, the very bravest possible for a shortened day, of
which the motive, whether formulated or not, had doubtless virtually
been to feel, with a far-stretched arm, for the heart of New York. _Had_
New York, the miscellaneous monster, a heart at all?—this inquiry, amid
so much encouraged and rewarded curiosity, might have been well on the
way to become sincere, and we kept groping, between a prompt start and
an extremely retarded return, for any stray sign of an answer.

The answer, perhaps, in the event, still eluded us, but the pursuit
itself, away across State lines, through zones of other manners, through
images of other ideals, through densities of other values, into a
separate sovereign civilization in short—this, with “a view of the
autumnal Hudson” for an added incentive, became, in all the conditions,
one of the finer flowers of experience. To be on the lookout for
differences was, not unnaturally, to begin to meet them just over the
border and see them increase and multiply; was, indeed, with a mild
consistency, to feel it steal over us that we were, as we advanced, in a
looser, shabbier, perhaps even rowdier world, where the roads were of an
easier virtue and the “farms” of a scantier pride, where the absence of
the ubiquitous sign-post of New England, joy of lonely corners, left the
great spaces with an accent the less; where, in fine, the wayside
bravery of the commonwealth of Massachusetts settled itself, for memory,
all serenely, to suffer by no comparison whatever. And yet it wasn’t,
either, that this other was not also a big, bold country, with ridge
upon ridge and horizon by horizon to deal with, insistently, pantingly,
puffingly, pausingly, before the great river showed signs of taking up
the tale with its higher hand; it wasn’t, above all, that the most
striking signs by which the nearness of the river was first announced,
three or four fine old houses overlooking the long road, reputedly Dutch
manors, seats of patriarchs and patroons, and unmistakably rich “values”
in the vast, vague scene, had not a nobler archaic note than even the
best of the New England colonial; it wasn’t that, finally, the Hudson,
when we reached the town that repeats in so minor a key the name of the
stream, was not autumnal indeed, with majestic impenetrable mists that
veiled the waters almost from sight, showing only the dim Catskills, off
in space, as perfunctory graces, cheaply thrown in, and leaving us to
roam the length of a large straight street which was, yes, decidedly,
for comparison, for curiosity, not as the streets of Massachusetts.

The best here, to speak of, was that the motor underwent repair and that
its occupants foraged for dinner—finding it indeed excellently at a
quiet cook-shop, about the middle of the long-drawn way, after we had
encountered coldness at the door of the main hotel by reason of our
French poodle. This personage had made our group, admirably composed to
our own sense as it was, only the more illustrious; but minds
indifferent to an opportunity of intercourse, if but the intercourse of
mere vision, with fine French poodles, may be taken always as suffering
where they have sinned. The hospitality of the cook-shop was meanwhile
touchingly, winningly unconditioned, yet full of character, of local, of
national truth, as we liked to think: documentary, in a high degree—we
talked it over—for American life. Wasn’t it interesting that with
American life so personally, so freely affirmed, the superstition of
cookery should yet be so little denied? It was the queer old complexion
of the long straight street, however, that most came home to me: Hudson,
in the afternoon quiet, seemed to stretch back, with fumbling friendly
hand, to the earliest outlook of my consciousness. Many matters had come
and gone, innumerable impressions had supervened; yet here, in the stir
of the senses, a whole range of small forgotten things revived, things
intensely Hudsonian, more than Hudsonian; small echoes and tones and
sleeping lights, small sights and sounds and smells that made one, for
an hour, _as_ small—carried one up the rest of the river, the very river
of life indeed, as a thrilled, roundabouted pilgrim, by primitive
steamboat, to a mellow, mediæval Albany.


                                   VI

It is a convenience to be free to confess that the play of perception
during those first weeks was quickened, in the oddest way, by the
wonderment (which was partly also the amusement) of my finding how many
corners of the general, of the local, picture had anciently never been
unveiled for me at all, and how many unveiled too briefly and too
scantly, with quite insufficient bravery of gesture. That might make one
ask by what strange law one had lived in the other time, with gaps, to
that number, in one’s experience, in one’s consciousness, with so many
muffled spots in one’s general vibration—and the answer indeed to such a
question might carry with it an infinite penetration of retrospect, a
penetration productive of ghostly echoes as sharp sometimes as aches or
pangs. So many had been the easy things, the contiguous places, the
conspicuous objects, to right or to left of the path, that had been
either unaccountably or all too inevitably left undiscovered, and which
were to live on, to the inner vision, through the long years, as mere
blank faces, round, empty, metallic, senseless disks dangling from
familiar and reiterated names. Why, at the same time, one might ask, had
the consciousness of irritation from these vain forms not grown greater?
why had the inconvenience, or the disgrace, of early privation become an
accepted memory? All, doubtless, in the very interest, precisely, of
this eventual belated romance, and so that adventures, even of minor
type, so preposterously postponed should be able to deck themselves at
last with a kind of accumulation of freshness.

So the freshness, all the autumn, kept breaking through the
staleness—when the staleness, so agreeably flavoured with hospitality,
and indeed with new ingredients, was a felt element at all. There was
after all no moment perhaps at which one element stood out so very
sharply from the other—the hundred emendations and retouches of the old
picture, its greater depth of tone, greater show of detail, greater size
and scale, tending by themselves to confound and mislead, in a manner,
the lights and shades of remembrance. Very promptly, in the Boston
neighbourhoods, the work of time loomed large, and the difference made
by it, as one might say, for the general richness. The richness might
have its poverties still and the larger complexity its crudities; but,
all the same, to look back was to seem to have been present at an
extraordinary general process, that of the rapid, that of the ceaseless
relegation of the _previous_ (on the part of the whole visible order) to
one of the wan categories of misery. What was taking place was a
perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there had been a past to
repudiate, so far as the past was a positive rather than a negative
quantity. There had been plenty in it, assuredly, of the negative, and
that was but a shabbiness to disown or a deception to expose; yet there
had been an old conscious commemorated life too, and it was this that
had become the victim of supersession. The pathos, so to call it, of the
impression was somehow that it didn’t, the earlier, simpler condition,
still resist or protest, or at all expressively flush through; it was
consenting to become a past with all the fine candour with which it had
tried to affirm itself, in its day, as a present—and very much, for that
matter, as with a due ironic forecast of the fate in store for the
hungry, triumphant actual.

This savours perhaps of distorted reflection, but there was really a
light over it in which the whole spectacle was to shine. _The will to
grow_ was everywhere written large, and to grow at no matter what or
whose expense. I had naturally seen it before, I had seen it, on the
other side of the world, in a thousand places and forms, a thousand hits
and misses: these things are the very screeches of the pipe to which
humanity is actually dancing. But here, clearly, it was a question of
scale and space and chance, margin and elbow-room, the quantity of floor
and loudness of the dance-music; a question of the ambient air, above
all, the permitting medium, which had at once, for the visitor’s
personal inhalation, a dry taste in the mouth. Thin and clear and
colourless, what would it ever say “no” to? or what would it ever paint
thick, indeed, with sympathy and sanction? With so little, accordingly,
within the great frame of the picture, to prevent or to prescribe, it
was as if anything might be done there that any sufficient number of
subscribers to any sufficient number of sufficiently noisy newspapers
might want. That, moreover, was but another name for the largest and
straightest perception the restless analyst had yet risen to—the
perception that awaits the returning absentee from this great country,
on the wharf of disembarkation, with an embodied intensity that no
superficial confusion, no extremity of chaos any more than any brief
mercy of accident, avails to mitigate. The waiting observer need be
little enough of an analyst, in truth, to arrive at that consciousness,
for the phenomenon is vivid in direct proportion as the ship draws near.
The great presence that bristles for him on the sounding dock, and that
shakes the planks, the loose boards of its theatric stage to an
inordinate unprecedented rumble, is the monstrous form of Democracy,
which is thereafter to project its shifting angular shadow, at one time
and another, across every inch of the field of his vision. It is the
huge democratic broom that has made the clearance and that one seems to
see brandished in the empty sky.

That is of course on one side no great discovery, for what does even the
simplest soul ever sail westward for, at this time of day, if not to
profit, so far as possible, by “the working of democratic institutions”?
The political, the civic, the economic view of them is a study that may
be followed, more or less, at a distance; but the way in which they
determine and qualify manners, feelings, communications, modes of
contact and conceptions of life—this is a revelation that has its full
force and its lively interest only on the spot, where, when once caught,
it becomes the only clue worth mentioning in the labyrinth. The
condition, notoriously, represents an immense boon, but what does the
enjoyment of the boon represent? The clue is never out of your hands,
whatever other objects, extremely disconnected from it, may appear at
the moment to fill them. The democratic consistency, consummately and
immitigably complete, shines through with its hard light, whatever
equivocal gloss may happen momentarily to prevail. You may talk of other
things, and you do, as much as possible; but you are really thinking of
that one, which has everything else at its mercy. What indeed is this
circumstance that the condition is thus magnified but the commanding
value of the picture, its message and challenge to intelligent
curiosity? Curiosity is fairly fascinated by the sense of the immensity
of the chance, and by the sense that the whole of the chance has been
taken. It is rarely given to us to see a great game played as to the
very end—and that was where, with his impression of nothing to prevent,
of nothing, anywhere around him, to prevent anything, the ancient
contemplative person, floating serenely in his medium, had yet
occasionally to gasp before the assault of the quantity of illustration.
The illustration might be, enormously, of something deficient, absent—in
which case it was for the aching void to be (as an aching void) striking
and interesting. As an explication or an implication the democratic
intensity could always figure.


                                  VII

There was little need, for that matter, to drag it into the foreground
on the evening of my renewed introduction to the particular Boston
neighbourhood—the only one of them all—with which I had been formerly
somewhat acquainted. I had alighted in New York but three days before,
and my senses were all so full of it that as I look back I can again
feel it, under the immediate Cambridge impression, assert itself by
turning quite to insidious softness, to confused and surprised
recognition. I had driven out from Boston through the warm September
night and through a town-picture as of extraordinary virtuous vacancy
(without so much as the figure of a policeman in sight from the South
Station to the region of Harvard Square), and I remember how the odorous
hour—charged with the old distinctively American earth-smell, which in
the darkness fairly poetized the suburbs, and with the queer, far, wild
throb of shrilling insects—prescribed to me the exact form of the
response to the question as to one’s sense of a “great change” already
so often sounded. “A great change? No change at all. Where then would
the ‘intensity’ be? But _changes_—ever so many and so amusing and so
agreeable. The intensity is compatible with _them_—nothing, clearly, is
going to be so interesting as to make out, with plenty of good-will, how
compatible!” There was unmistakably everywhere a more embroidered
surface—the new free figures played over the canvas; so that at this
rate, in the time to come, how far might the embroidery not go, what
silk and gold mightn’t it weave into the pattern? It wasn’t of course a
question of rhapsodizing—Cambridge was Cambridge still, and all faithful
to its type; but the rustle of the trees in the summer night had a
larger tone, the more frequent lamplight slept on ampler walls, the body
of impression was greater and the University, above all, seemed in more
confident possession. It massed there in multiplied forms, with new and
strange architectures looming through the dark; it appeared to have
wandered wide and to be stretching forth, in many directions, long,
acquisitive arms.

This vision, for the moment, of a great dim, clustered but restlessly
expansive Harvard, hushed to vacation stillness as to a deep ambitious
dream, was, for the impressible story-seeker, practically the germ of
the most engaging of the generalized images of reassurance, the
furniture, so to speak, of the _other_ scale, that the extension of his
view was to cause him to cultivate. Reassurance is required, before the
spectacle of American manners at large, whenever one most acutely
perceives how little honour they tend to heap on the art of
discrimination, and it is at such hours that, turning in his frequent
stupefaction, the restless analyst reaches out for support to the
nearest faint ghost of a constituted Faculty. It takes no exceptional
exposure to the promiscuous life to show almost any institution
pretending to university form as stamped here with the character and
function of the life-saving monasteries of the dark ages. They glow, the
humblest of them, to the imagination—the imagination that fixes the
surrounding scene as a huge Rappacini-garden, rank with each variety of
the poison-plant of the money-passion—they glow with all the vividness
of the defined alternative, the possible antidote, and seem to call on
us to blow upon the flame till it is made inextinguishable. So little
time had it taken, at any rate, to suggest to me that a new and higher
price, in American conditions, is attaching to the cloister,
literally—the place inaccessible (to put it most pertinently) to the
shout of the newspaper, the place to perambulate, the place to think,
apart from the crowd. Doubtless indeed I was not all aware of it at the
time, but the image I touch upon in connection with those first moments
was to remain with me, the figure of the rich old Harvard organism
brooding, exactly, through the long vacation, brooding through the
summer night, on discriminations, on insistences, on sublime and
exquisite heresies to come.

After that arrived daylight recognitions, but they were really for the
most part offered me, as in a full cup, by the accident of a couple of
hours that were to leave me the pure essence, the finer sense of them.
These were a matter of a fortnight later, as I had had immediately to
make an absence, and the waning September afternoon of the second
occasion took on a particular quality for this deferred surrender of a
dozen stored secrets. “Secrets” I call them because the total impression
was of the production of some handful of odds and ends that had lurked,
for long, in a locked drawer, and which, being brought out, might
promote, by their blinking consciousness, either derision or respect.
They excited, as befell, an extraordinary tenderness—on which conclusion
it was fortunate to be able afterwards to rest. I wandered, for the
day’s end, with a young modern for whom the past had not been and who
was admirably unconscious of the haunting moral of the whole
mutation—the tune to which the pampered present made the other time look
comparatively grim. Each item of the pampered state contributed to this
effect—the finer _mise en scène_, the multiplied resources, halls,
faculties, museums, undergraduate and postgraduate habitations (these
last of so large a luxury); the pompous little club-houses, visited, all
vacant, in the serious tell-tale twilight that seemed to give them,
intellectually, “away”; the beautiful new Union, with its great grave
noble hall, of which there would be so much more to be said; and above
all, doubtless, the later majesties of the Law School, in the near
presence of which the tiny old disinherited seat of that subject,
outfaced and bedimmed, seemed unable to make even a futile plea for
quaintness. I went into the new Law Library, immense and supreme—in the
shadow of which I caught myself sniffing the very dust, prehistoric but
still pungent, of the old. I saw in the distance a distinguished friend,
all alone, belatedly working there, but to go to him I should have had
to cross the bridge that spans the gulf of time, and, with a suspicion
of weak places, I was nervous about its bearing me.

What such delicacies came to, then and afterwards, for the whole
impression, was the instinct not to press, not to push on, till forced,
through any half-open door of the real. The real was there, certainly
enough, outside and all round, but there was standing-ground, more
immediately, for a brief idyll, and one would walk in the idyll, if only
from hour to hour, while one could. This could but mean that one would
cultivate the idyllic, for the social, for the pictorial illusion, by
every invoking and caressing art; and in fact, as a consequence, the
reflection of our observer’s experience for the next few weeks—that is
so long as the spell of the autumn lasted—would be but the history of
his more or less ingenious arts. With the breaking of the autumn, later
on, everything broke, everything went—everything was transposed at least
into another key. But for the time so much had been gained—the happy
trick had been played.


                                  VIII

It was after all in the great hall of the Union perhaps (to come back to
that delicate day’s end) that the actual vibration of response seemed
most to turn to audible music—repeated, with all its suggestiveness, on
another occasion or two. For the case was unmistakably that just there,
more than anywhere, by a magnificent stroke, an inspiration working
perhaps even beyond its consciousness, the right provision had been made
for the remembering mind. The place was addressed in truth so largely to
an enjoying and producing future that it might seem to frown on mere
commemoration, on the backward vision; and yet, at the moment I speak
of, its very finest meaning might have been that of a liberal monument
to those who had come and gone, to the company of the lurking ghosts.
The air there was full of them, and this was its service, that it cared
for them all, and so eased off the intensity of their appeal. And yet it
appeared to play that part for a reason more interesting than reducible
to words—a reason that mainly came out for me while, in the admirable
hall aforesaid, I stood before Sargent’s high portrait of Major Henry
Lee Higginson, _donatorio_ of the house (as well as author, all round
about, of innumerable other civil gifts); a representation of life and
character, a projection of genius, which even that great painter has
never outdone. Innumerable, ever, are the functions performed and the
blessings wrought by the supreme work of art, but I know of no case in
which it has been so given to such a work to make the human statement
with a great effect, to interfuse a group of public acts with the
personality, with the characteristics, of the actor. The acts would
still have had all their value if the portrait had had less, but they
would not assuredly have been able to become so interesting, would not
have grown to affect each beneficiary, however obscure, as proceeding,
for him, from a possible relation, a possible intimacy. It is to the
question of intimacy with somebody or other that all great practical
public recognition is finally carried back—but carried only by the magic
carpet, when the magic carpet happens to be there. Mr. Sargent’s
portrait of Henry Higginson is exactly the magic carpet.

That was the “pull” (one kept on feeling) that this happy commemorative
creation of the Union had over the great official, the great bristling
brick Valhalla of the early “seventies,” that house of honour and of
hospitality which, under the name of the Alumni Hall, dispenses (apart
from its containing a noble auditorium) laurels to the dead and dinners
to the living. The recording tablets of the members of the University
sacrificed, on the Northern side, in the Civil War, are too impressive
not to retain here always their collective beauty; but the monumental
office and character suffer throughout from the too scant presence of
the massive and the mature. The great structure speads and soars with
the best will in the world, but succeeds in resembling rather some
high-masted ship at sea, in slightly prosaic equilibrium, than a thing
of builded foundations and embrasured walls. To which it is impossible
not immediately to add that these distinctions are relative and these
comparisons almost odious, in face of the recent generations, gathered
in from beneath emptier skies, who must have found in the big building
as it stands an admonition and an ideal. So much the better for the big
building, assuredly, and none so calculably the worse for the
generations themselves. The reflection follows close moreover that,
tactfully speaking, criticism has no close concern with Alumni Hall; it
is as if that grim visitor found the approaches closed to him—had to
enter, to the loss of all his identity, some relaxing air of mere
sentimental, mere shameless association. He turns his back, a trifle
ruefully whistling, and wanders wide; so at least I seemed to see him
do, all September, all October, and hereabouts in particular: I felt him
resignedly reduced, for the time, to looking over, to looking through,
the fence—all the more that at Cambridge there was at last something in
the nature of a fence so to be dealt with.

The smaller aspects, the sight of mere material arrears made up, may
seem unduly to have held me when I say that few fresh circumstances
struck me as falling more happily into the picture than this especial
decency of the definite, the palpable affirmation and belated
delimitation of College Yard. The high, decorated, recurrent gates and
the still insufficiently high iron palings—representing a vast ring and
even now incomplete—may appear, in spots, extemporized and thin; but
that signifies little in presence of the precious idea on the side of
which, in the land of the “open door,” the all-abstract outline, the
timid term and the general concession, they bravely range themselves.
The open door—as it figures here in respect to everything but trade—may
make a magnificent place, but it makes poor places; and in places,
despite our large mistrust of privacy, and until the national ingenuity
shall have invented a substitute for them, we must content ourselves
with living. This especial drawing of the belt at Harvard is an
admirably interesting example of the way in which the formal enclosure
of objects at all interesting immediately refines upon their interest,
immediately establishes values. The enclosure may be impressive from
without, but from within it is sovereign; nothing is more curious than
to trace in the aspects so controlled the effect of their established
relation to it. This resembles, in the human or social order, the
improved situation of the foundling who has discovered his family or of
the actor who has mastered his part.

The older buildings, in the Yard, profit indeed, on the spot, to the
story-seeking mind, by the fact of their comparative exhibition of the
tone of time—so prompt an ecstasy and so deep a relief reward, in
America, everywhere, any suggested source of interest that is not the
interest of importunate newness. That source overflows, all others run
thin; but the wonder and the satisfaction are that in College Yard more
than one of these should have finally been set to running thick. The
best pieces of the earlier cluster, from Massachusetts to Stoughton,
emerge from their elongation of history with a paler archaic pink in
their brickwork; their scant primitive details, small “quaintnesses” of
form, have turned, each, to the expressive accent that no short-cut of
“style” can ever successfully imitate, and from their many-paned
windows, where, on the ensconced benches, so many generations have
looked out, they fall, in their minor key, into the great main current
of ghostly gossip. “See, see, we are getting on, we are getting almost
ripe, ripe enough to justify the question of taste about us. We are
growing a complexion—which takes almost as long, and is in fact pretty
well the same thing, as growing a philosophy; but we are putting it on
and entering into the dignity of time, the beauty of life. We are in a
word beginning to begin, and we have that best sign of it, haven’t we?
that we make the vulgar, the very vulgar, think we are beginning to
end.”

That moreover was not the only relation thus richly promoted; there
could be no unrest of analysis worthy of the name that failed to
perceive how, after term had opened, the type of the young men coming
and going in the Yard gained, for vivacity of appeal, through this more
marked constitution of a _milieu_ for it. Here, verily, questions could
swarm; for there was scarce an impression of the local life at large
that didn’t play into them. One thing I had not yet done—I had not been,
under the best guidance, out to Ellis Island, the seat of the
Commissioner of Immigration, in the bay of New York, to catch in the
fact, as I was to catch later on, a couple of hours of the ceaseless
process of the recruiting of our race, of the plenishing of our huge
national _pot au feu_, of the introduction of fresh—of perpetually fresh
so far it isn’t perpetually stale—foreign matter into our heterogeneous
system. But even without that a haunting wonder as to what might be
becoming of us all, “typically,” ethnically, and thereby
physiognomically, linguistically, _personally_, was always in order. The
young men in their degree, as they flocked candidly up to college,
struck me as having much to say about it, and there was always the sense
of light on the subject, for comparison and reference, that a long
experience of other types and other manners could supply. Swarming
ingenuous youths, _whom did they look like the sons of_?—that inquiry,
as to any group, any couple, any case, represented a game that it was
positively thrilling to play out. There was plenty to make it so, for
there was, to begin with, both the forecast of the thing that might
easily settle the issue and the forecast of the thing that might easily
complicate it.

No impression so promptly assaults the arriving visitor of the United
States as that of the overwhelming preponderance, wherever he turns and
twists, of the unmitigated “business-man” face, ranging through its
various possibilities, its extraordinary actualities, of intensity. And
I speak here of facial cast and expression alone, leaving out of account
the questions of voice, tone, utterance and attitude, the chorus of
which would vastly swell the testimony and in which I seem to discern,
for these remarks at large, a treasure of illustration to come. Nothing,
meanwhile, is more concomitantly striking than the fact that the women,
over the land—allowing for every element of exception—appear to be of a
markedly finer texture than the men, and that one of the liveliest signs
of this difference is precisely in their less narrowly specialized,
their less commercialized, distinctly more generalized, physiognomic
character. The superiority thus noted, and which is quite another matter
from the universal fact of the mere usual female femininity, is far from
constituting absolute distinction, but it constitutes relative, and it
is a circumstance at which interested observation snatches, from the
first, with an immense sense of its _portée_. There are, with all the
qualifications it is yet open to, fifty reflections to be made upon the
truth it seems to represent, the appearance of a queer deep split or
chasm between the two stages of personal polish, the two levels of the
conversable state, at which the sexes have arrived. It is at all events
no exaggeration to say that the imagination at once embraces it as _the_
feature of the social scene, recognizing it as a subject fruitful beyond
the common, and wondering even if for pure drama, the drama of manners,
anything anywhere else touches it. If it be a “subject,” verily—with the
big vision of the intersexual relation as, at such an increasing rate, a
prey to it—the right measure for it would seem to be offered in the art
of the painter of life by the concrete example, the art of the dramatist
or the novelist, rather than in that of the talker, the reporter at
large. The only thing is that, from the moment the painter begins to
look at American life brush in hand, he is in danger of seeing, in
comparison, almost nothing else in it—nothing, that is, so
characteristic as this apparent privation, for the man, of his right
kind of woman, and this apparent privation, for the woman, of her right
kind of man.

The right kind of woman for the American man may really be, of course,
as things are turning out with him, the woman as to whom his most
workable relation is to support her and bear with her—just as the right
kind of man for the American woman may really be the man who intervenes
in her life only by occult, by barely divinable, by practically
disavowed courses. But the ascertainment and illustration of these
truths would be, exactly, very conceivably high sport for the ironic
poet—who has surely hitherto neglected one of his greatest current
opportunities. It in any case remains vivid that American life may, as
regards much of its manifestation, fall upon the earnest view as a
society of women “located” in a world of men, which is so different a
matter from a collection of men of the world; the men supplying, as it
were, all the canvas, and the women all the embroidery. Just this
vividness it was that held up the torch, through the Cambridge autumn,
to that question of the affiliation of the encountered Harvard
undergraduate which I may not abandon. In what proportion of instances
would it stick out that the canvas, rather than the embroidery, was what
he had to show? In what proportion would he wear the stamp of the
unredeemed commercialism that should betray his paternity? In what
proportion, in his appearance, would the different social “value”
imputable to his mother have succeeded in interposing? The discerned
answer to these inquiries is really, after all, too precious (in its
character of contribution to one’s total gathered wisdom) to be given
away prematurely; but there was at least always the sense, to which the
imagination reverted, that in the collegiate cloisters and academic
shades of other countries this absence of a possible _range_ of origin
and breeding in a young type had not been so felt. The question of
origin, the question of breeding, had been large—never settled in
advance; there had been fifty _sorts_ of persons, fifty representatives
of careers, to whom the English, the French, the German universitarian
of tender years might refer you for a preliminary account of him.

I speak of my keeping back, for the present, many of my ultimate
perceptions, but I may none the less recall my having had, all the
season, from early, the ring in my ears of a reply I had heard made, on
the spot, to a generous lady offering entertainment to a guest, a
stranger to the scene, whose good impression she had had at heart. “What
kind of people should I like to meet? Why, my dear madam, have you more
than _one_ kind?” At the same time that I could remember this, however,
I could also remember that the consistently _bourgeois_ fathers must
themselves in many cases have had mothers whose invitation to their male
offspring to clutch at their relatively finer type had not succeeded in
getting itself accepted. That constituted a fatal precedent, and it
would have to be in the female offspring, probably, that one should look
for evidences of the clutching—an extension of the inquiry for which
there was plenty of time. What did escape from submersion, meanwhile, as
is worth mentioning, was the golden state of being reminded at moments
that there are no such pleasure-giving accidents, for the mind, as
violations of the usual in conditions that make them really precarious
and rare. As the usual, in our vast crude democracy of trade, is the
new, the simple, the cheap, the common, the commercial, the immediate,
and, all too often, the ugly, so any human product that those elements
fail conspicuously to involve or to explain, any creature, or even any
feature, not turned out to pattern, any form of suggested rarity,
subtlety, ancientry, or other pleasant perversity, prepares for us a
recognition akin to rapture. These lonely ecstasies of the truly open
sense make up often, in the hustling, bustling desert, for such
“sinkings” of the starved stomach as have led one too often to have to
tighten one’s æsthetic waistband.


                                   IX

All of which is sufficiently to imply, again, that for adventurous
contemplation, at any of the beguiled hours of which I pretend here but
to give the general happier drift, there was scarce such a thing as a
variation of insistence. As every fact was convertible into a fancy,
there was only an encouraged fusion of possible felicities and possible
mistakes, stop-gaps before the awful advent of a “serious sense of
critical responsibility.” Or say perhaps rather, to alter the image,
that there was only a builded breakwater against the assault of matters
demanding a _literal_ notation. I walked, at the best, but on the
breakwater—looking down, if one would, over the flood of the real, but
much more occupied with the sight of the old Cambridge ghosts, who
seemed to advance one by one, even at that precarious eminence, to meet
me. My small story would gain infinitely in richness if I were able to
name them, but they swarmed all the while too thick, and of but two or
three of them alone is it true that they push their way, of themselves,
through any silence. It was thus at any rate a question—as I have indeed
already sufficiently shown—of what one read _into_ anything, not of what
one read out of it; and the occasions that operated for that mild magic
resolve themselves now into three or four of an intrinsic colour so dim
as to be otherwise well-nigh indistinguishable. Why, if one could tell
it, would it be so wonderful, for instance, to have stood on the low
cliff that hangs over the Charles, by the nearer side of Mount Auburn,
and felt the whole place bristle with merciless memories? It was late in
the autumn and in the day—almost evening; with a wintry pink light in
the west, the special shade, fading into a heartless prettiness of grey,
that shows with a polar chill through the grim tracery of November. Just
opposite, at a distance, beyond the river and its meadows, the white
face of the great empty Stadium stared at me, as blank as a rising
moon—with Soldiers’ Field squaring itself like some flat memorial slab
that waits to be inscribed. I had seen it inscribed a week or two before
in the fantastic lettering of a great intercollegiate game of football,
and that impression had been so documentary, as to the capacity of the
American public for momentary gregarious emphasis, that I regret having
to omit here all the reflections it prompted.

They were not, however, what was now relevant, save in so far as the
many-mouthed uproar they recalled was a voice in the more multitudinous
modern hum through which one listened almost in vain for the sound of
the old names. One of these in particular rose to my lips—it was
impossible to stand there and not reach out a hand to J. R. L. as to a
responsive personal presence, the very genius of the spot, who had given
it from so early the direct literary consecration without which even the
most charming seats of civilization go through life awkwardly and
ruefully, after the manner of unchristened children. They lack thus, for
the great occasions, the great formal necessities, their “papers.” It
was thanks to Lowell even more immediately than to Longfellow that
Cambridge _had_ its papers—though if I find myself putting that word
into the past tense it is perhaps because of the irresistible
admonition, too (proceeding so from a thousand local symptoms), that
titles embodied in literary form are less and less likely, in the
Harvard air, to be asked for. That is clearly not the way the wind sets:
we see the great University sit and look very hard, at blue horizons of
possibility, across the high table-land of her future; but the light of
literary desire is not perceptibly in her eye (nothing is more striking
than the recent drop in her of any outward sign of literary curiosity);
precisely for which reason it was, doubtless, in part, that the changed
world seemed reflected with a certain tragic intensity even in faces
ever so turned to cheerful lights as those of my two constructive
companions.

I had passed high, square, sad old Elmwood on the way to my cliff over
the Charles, and had wonderingly lingered a little about it. I had
passed Mr. Longfellow’s immemorial, historical, admired residence, still
ample and symmetrical and visibly tourist-haunted (the only detected
ruffle of its noble calm); elements of the picture that had rekindled
for an hour the finer sensibility, the finer continuity and piety. It
was because of these things, again, that I felt the invoked pair beside
me presently turn away, as under a chill, from that too spectral (in its
own turn) stare of the Stadium—perceived as a portent of the more
_roaring_, more reported and excursionized scene; and in particular
seemed to see J. R. L.’s robust humour yield to the recognition of the
irony of fate, dear to every poet, in one of its most pointed forms.
That humour had played of old, charmingly, over the thesis that
Cambridge, Mass., was, taken altogether, the most inwardly civilized,
most intimately humane, among the haunts of men; whereby it had
committed itself, this honest adventurer, to a patient joy in the
development of the _genius loci_, and was therefore without provision,
either of poetry or of prose, against the picture of proportions and
relations overwhelmingly readjusted. If the little old place, with its
accessible ear, had been so brave, what was the matter with the big new
one, going in, as it would itself say, for greater braveries still?
Nothing, no doubt, but that the possession of an ear would be ceasing to
count as an advantage. In what produced form, for instance, if he had
been right, was now represented the love of letters of which he had been
so distinguished an example? If he had on the other hand _not_ been
right—well, it would all be rather dreadful. Such, at all events, may be
the disconcertments of a revisiting spirit—when he has happened to
revisit too ingenious an old friend.

The old friend moreover had meanwhile had, and in relation to this
large loose fringe of the town, there so freely disposed, one of his
very own disconcertments; he had turned his steps, for the pleasure of
memory, to Fresh Pond, dear to the muses of youth, the Sunday
afternoons of spring, and had to accept there his clearest vision
perhaps of the new differences and indifferences. The little nestling
lake of other days had ceased to nestle; there was practically no
Fresh Pond any more, and I seemed somehow to see why the muses had
fled even as from the place at large. The light flutter of their robes
had surrounded far-away walks and talks: one could at this day, on
printed, on almost faded pages, give chapter and verse for the effect,
audible on the Sunday afternoons, of their habit of murmurous hinted
approval. Other things had come by makeweight; the charming Country
Club on toward Watertown, all verandahs and golf-links and
tennis-lawns, all tea and ices and self-consciousness; and there had
come, thereabouts too, the large extension of the “Park System,” the
admirable commissioners’ roads that reach across the ruder countryside
like the arms of carnivorous giants stretching over a tea-table of
blackberries and buns. But these things were in the eternal American
note, the note of the gregarious, the concentric, and pervaded
moreover by the rustle of petticoats too distinguishable from any
garmenthem of the sacred nine. The desecrated, the destroyed resort
had favoured, save on rare feast-days, the single stroll, or at the
worst the double, dedicated to shared literary secrets; which was why
I almost angrily missed, among the ruins, what I had mainly gone back
to recover—some echo of the dreams of youth, the titles of tales, the
communities of friendship, the sympathies and patiences, in fine, of
dear W. D. H.



                                   II
                           NEW YORK REVISITED


                                   I

The single impression or particular vision most answering to the
greatness of the subject would have been, I think, a certain hour of
large circumnavigation that I found prescribed, in the fulness of the
spring, as the almost immediate crown of a return from the Far West. I
had arrived at one of the transpontine stations of the Pennsylvania
Railroad; the question was of proceeding to Boston, for the occasion,
without pushing through the terrible town—why “terrible,” to my sense,
in many ways, I shall presently explain—and the easy and agreeable
attainment of this great advantage was to embark on one of the mightiest
(as appeared to me) of train-bearing barges and, descending the western
waters, pass round the bottom of the city and remount the other current
to Harlem; all without “losing touch” of the Pullman that had brought me
from Washington. This absence of the need of losing touch, this breadth
of effect, as to the whole process, involved in the prompt floating of
the huge concatenated cars not only without arrest or confusion, but as
for positive prodigal beguilement of the artless traveller, had
doubtless much to say to the ensuing state of mind, the happily-excited
and amused view of the great face of New York. The extent, the ease, the
energy, the quantity and number, all notes scattered about as if, in the
whole business and in the splendid light, nature and science were
joyously romping together, might have been taking on again, for their
symbol, some collective presence of great circling and plunging,
hovering and perching seabirds, white-winged images of the spirit, of
the restless freedom of the Bay. The Bay had always, on other
opportunities, seemed to blow its immense character straight into one’s
face—coming “at” you, so to speak, bearing down on you, with the full
force of a thousand prows of steamers seen exactly on the line of their
longitudinal axis; but I had never before been so conscious of its
boundless cool assurance or seemed to see its genius so grandly at play.
This was presumably indeed because I had never before enjoyed the
remarkable adventure of taking in so much of the vast bristling
promontory from the water, of ascending the East River, in especial, to
its upper diminishing expanses.

Something of the air of the occasion and of the mood of the moment
caused the whole picture to speak with its largest suggestion; which
suggestion is irresistible when once it is sounded clear. It is all,
absolutely, an expression of things lately and currently _done_, done on
a large impersonal stage and on the basis of inordinate gain—it is not
an expression of any other matters whatever; and yet the sense of the
scene (which had at several previous junctures, as well, put forth to my
imagination its power) was commanding and thrilling, was in certain
lights almost charming. So it befell, exactly, that an element of
mystery and wonder entered into the impression—the interest of trying to
make out, in the absence of features of the sort usually supposed
indispensable, the reason of the beauty and the joy. It is indubitably a
“great” bay, a great harbour, but no one item of the romantic, or even
of the picturesque, as commonly understood, contributes to its effect.
The shores are low and for the most part depressingly furnished and
prosaically peopled; the islands, though numerous, have not a grace to
exhibit, and one thinks of the other, the real flowers of geography in
this order, of Naples, of Capetown, of Sydney, of Seattle, of San
Francisco, of Rio, asking how if _they_ justify a reputation, New York
should seem to justify one. Then, after all, we remember that there are
reputations and reputations; we remember above all that the imaginative
response to the conditions here presented may just happen to proceed
from the intellectual extravagance of the given observer. When this
personage is open to corruption by almost any large view of an intensity
of life, his vibrations tend to become a matter difficult even for _him_
to explain. He may have to confess that the group of evident facts fails
to account by itself for the complacency of his appreciation. Therefore
it is that I find myself rather backward with a perceived sanction, of
an at all proportionate kind, for the fine exhilaration with which, in
this free wayfaring relation to them, the wide waters of New York
inspire me. There is the beauty of light and air, the great scale of
space, and, seen far away to the west, the open gates of the Hudson,
majestic in their degree, even at a distance, and announcing still
nobler things. But the real appeal, unmistakably, is in that note of
vehemence in the local life of which I have spoken, for it is the appeal
of a particular type of dauntless power.

The aspect the power wears then is indescribable; it is the power of
the most extravagant of cities, rejoicing, as with the voice of the
morning, in its might, its fortune, its unsurpassable conditions, and
imparting to every object and element, to the motion and expression of
every floating, hurrying, panting thing, to the throb of ferries and
tugs, to the plash of waves and the play of winds and the glint of
lights and the shrill of whistles and the quality and authority of
breeze-borne cries—all, practically, a diffused, wasted clamour of
_detonations_—something of its sharp free accent and, above all, of
its sovereign sense of being “backed” and able to back. The universal
_applied_ passion struck me as shining unprecedentedly out of the
composition; in the bigness and bravery and insolence, especially, of
everything that rushed and shrieked; in the air as of a great
intricate frenzied dance, half merry, half desperate, or at least half
defiant, performed on the huge watery floor. This appearance of the
bold lacing-together, across the waters, of the scattered members of
the monstrous organism—lacing as by the ceaseless play of an enormous
system of steam-shuttles or electric bobbins (I scarce know what to
call them), commensurate in form with their infinite work—does perhaps
more than anything else to give the pitch of the vision of energy. One
has the sense that the monster grows and grows, flinging abroad its
loose limbs even as some unmannered young giant at his “larks,” and
that the binding stitches must for ever fly further and faster and
draw harder; the future complexity of the web, all under the sky and
over the sea, becoming thus that of some colossal set of clockworks,
some steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and hammering fists
and opening and closing jaws. The immeasurable bridges are but as the
horizontal sheaths of pistons working at high pressure, day and night,
and subject, one apprehends with perhaps inconsistent gloom, to
certain, to fantastic, to merciless multiplication. In the light of
this apprehension indeed the breezy brightness of the Bay puts on the
semblance of the vast white page that awaits beyond any other perhaps
the black overscoring of science.

Let me hasten to add that its present whiteness is precisely its
charming note, the frankest of the signs you recognize and remember it
by. That is the distinction I was just feeling my way to name as the
main ground of its doing so well, for effect, without technical scenery.
There are great imposing ports—Glasgow and Liverpool and London—that
have already their page blackened almost beyond redemption from any such
light of the picturesque as can hope to irradiate fog and grime, and
there are others, Marseilles and Constantinople say, or, for all I know
to the contrary, New Orleans, that contrive to abound before everything
else in colour, and so to make a rich and instant and obvious show. But
memory and the actual impression keep investing New York with the tone,
predominantly, of summer dawns and winter frosts, of sea-foam, of
bleached sails and stretched awnings, of blanched hulls, of scoured
decks, of new ropes, of polished brasses, of streamers clear in the blue
air; and it is by this harmony, doubtless, that the projection of the
individual character of the place, of the candour of its avidity and the
freshness of its audacity, is most conveyed. The “tall buildings,” which
have so promptly usurped a glory that affects you as rather surprised,
as yet, at itself, the multitudinous sky-scrapers standing up to the
view, from the water, like extravagant pins in a cushion already
overplanted, and stuck in as in the dark, anywhere and anyhow, have at
least the felicity of carrying out the fairness of tone, of taking the
sun and the shade in the manner of towers of marble. They are not all of
marble, I believe, by any means, even if some may be, but they are
impudently new and still more impudently “novel”—this in common with so
many other terrible things in America—and they are triumphant payers of
dividends; all of which uncontested and unabashed pride, with flash of
innumerable windows and flicker of subordinate gilt attributions, is
like the flare, up and down their long, narrow faces, of the lamps of
some general permanent “celebration.”

You see the pin-cushion in profile, so to speak, on passing between
Jersey City and Twenty-third Street, but you get it broadside on, this
loose nosegay of architectural flowers, if you skirt the Battery, well
out, and embrace the whole plantation. Then the “American beauty,” the
rose of interminable stem, becomes the token of the cluster at large—to
that degree that, positively, this is all that is wanted for emphasis of
your final impression. Such growths, you feel, have confessedly arisen
but to be “picked,” in time, with a shears; nipped short off, by waiting
fate, as soon as “science,” applied to gain, has put upon the table,
from far up its sleeve, some more winning card. Crowned not only with no
history, but with no credible possibility of time for history, and
consecrated by no uses save the commercial at any cost, they are simply
the most piercing notes in that concert of the expensively provisional
into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself. They never
begin to speak to you, in the manner of the builded majesties of the
world as we have heretofore known such—towers or temples or fortresses
or palaces—with the authority of things of permanence or even of things
of long duration. One story is good only till another is told, and
sky-scrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another
word be written. This shall be possibly a word of still uglier meaning,
but the vocabulary of thrift at any price shows boundless resources, and
the consciousness of that truth, the consciousness of the finite, the
menaced, the essentially _invented_ state, twinkles ever, to my
perception, in the thousand glassy eyes of these giants of the mere
market. Such a structure as the comparatively windowless bell-tower of
Giotto, in Florence, looks supremely serene in its beauty. You don’t
feel it to have risen by the breath of an interested passion that,
restless beyond all passions, is for ever seeking more pliable forms.
Beauty has been the object of its creator’s idea, and, having found
beauty, it has found the form in which it splendidly rests.

Beauty indeed was the aim of the creator of the spire of Trinity Church,
so cruelly overtopped and so barely distinguishable, from your
train-bearing barge, as you stand off, in its abject helpless humility;
and it may of course be asked how much of this superstition finds voice
in the actual shrunken presence of that laudable effort. Where, for the
eye, is the felicity of simplified Gothic, of noble pre-eminence, that
once made of this highly-pleasing edifice the pride of the town and the
feature of Broadway? The answer is, as obviously, that these charming
elements are still there, just where they ever were, but that they have
been mercilessly deprived of their visibility. It aches and throbs, this
smothered visibility, we easily feel, in its caged and dishonoured
condition, supported only by the consciousness that the dishonour is no
fault of its own. We commune with it, in tenderness and pity, through
the encumbered air; our eyes, made, however unwillingly, at home in
strange vertiginous upper atmospheres, look down on it as on a poor
ineffectual thing, an architectural object addressed, even in its prime
aspiration, to the patient pedestrian sense and permitting thereby a
relation of intimacy. It was to speak to me audibly enough on two or
three other occasions—even through the thick of that frenzy of Broadway
just where Broadway receives from Wall Street the fiercest application
of the maddening lash; it was to put its tragic case there with
irresistible lucidity. “Yes, the wretched figure I am making is as
little as you see my fault—it is the fault of the buildings whose very
first care is to deprive churches of their visibility. There are but two
or three—two or three outward and visible churches—left in New York
‘anyway,’ as you must have noticed, and even they are hideously
threatened: a fact at which no one, indeed, appears to be shocked, from
which no one draws the least of the inferences that stick straight out
of it, which every one seems in short to take for granted either with
remarkable stupidity or with remarkable cynicism.” So, at any rate, they
may still effectively communicate, ruddy-brown (where not browny-black)
old Trinity and any pausing, any attending survivor of the clearer
age—and there is yet more of the bitterness of history to be tasted in
such a tacit passage, as I shall presently show.

Was it not the bitterness of history, meanwhile, that on that day of
circumnavigation, that day of highest intensity of impression, of which
I began by speaking, the ancient rotunda of Castle Garden, viewed from
just opposite, should have lurked there as a vague nonentity? One had
known it from far, far back and with the indelibility of the childish
vision—from the time when it was the commodious concert-hall of New
York, the firmament of long-extinguished stars; in spite of which
extinction there outlives for me the image of the infant phenomenon
Adelina Patti, whom (another large-eyed infant) I had been benevolently
taken to hear: Adelina Patti, in a fan-like little white frock and
“pantalettes” and a hussar-like red jacket, mounted on an armchair, its
back supporting her, wheeled to the front of the stage and warbling like
a tiny thrush even in the nest. Shabby, shrunken, barely discernible
to-day, the ancient rotunda, adjusted to other uses, had afterwards, for
many decades, carried on a conspicuous life—and it was the present
remoteness, the repudiated barbarism of all this, foreshortened by one’s
own experience, that dropped the acid into the cup. The sky-scrapers and
the league-long bridges, present and to come, marked the point where the
age—the age for which Castle Garden could have been, in its day, a
“value”—had come out. That in itself was nothing—ages do come out, as a
matter of course, so far from where they have gone in. But it had done
so, the latter half of the nineteenth century, in one’s own more or less
immediate presence; the difference, from pole to pole, was so vivid and
concrete that no single shade of any one of its aspects was lost. This
impact of the whole condensed past at once produced a horrible, hateful
sense of personal antiquity.

Yet was it after all that those monsters of the mere market, as I have
called them, had more to say, on the question of “effect,” than I had at
first allowed?—since they are the element that looms largest for me
through a particular impression, with remembered parts and pieces
melting together rather richly now, of “down-town” seen and felt from
the inside. “Felt”—I use that word, I dare say, all presumptuously, for
a relation to matters of magnitude and mystery that I could begin
neither to measure nor to penetrate, hovering about them only in
magnanimous wonder, staring at them as at a world of immovably-closed
doors behind which immense “material” lurked, material for the artist,
the painter of life, as we say, who shouldn’t have begun so early and so
fatally to fall away from possible initiations. This sense of a baffled
curiosity, an intellectual adventure forever renounced, was surely
enough a state of feeling, and indeed in presence of the different
half-hours, as memory presents them, at which I gave myself up both to
the thrill of Wall Street (by which I mean that of the whole wide edge
of the whirlpool), and the too accepted, too irredeemable ignorance, I
am at a loss to see what intensity of response was wanting. The
imagination might have responded more if there had been a slightly less
settled inability to understand what every one, what any one, was really
doing; but the picture, as it comes back to me, is, for all this foolish
subjective poverty, so crowded with its features that I rejoice, I
confess, in not having more of them to handle. No open apprehension,
even if it be as open as a public vehicle plying for hire, can carry
more than a certain amount of life, of a kind; and there was nothing at
play in the outer air, at least, of the scene, during these glimpses,
that didn’t scramble for admission into mine very much as I had seen the
mob seeking entrance to an up-town or a down-town electric car fight for
life at one of the apertures. If it had been the final function of the
Bay to make one feel one’s age, so, assuredly, the mouth of Wall Street
proclaimed it, for one’s private ear, distinctly enough; the breath of
existence being taken, wherever one turned, as that of youth on the run
and with the prize of the race in sight, and the new landmarks crushing
the old quite as violent children stamp on snails and caterpillars.

The hour I first recall was a morning of winter drizzle and mist, of
dense fog in the Bay, one of the strangest sights of which I was on my
way to enjoy; and I had stopped in the heart of the business quarter to
pick up a friend who was to be my companion. The weather, such as it
was, worked wonders for the upper reaches of the buildings, round which
it drifted and hung very much as about the flanks and summits of
emergent mountainmasses—for, to be just all round, there _was_ some
evidence of their having a message for the eyes. Let me parenthesize,
once for all, that there are other glimpses of this message, up and down
the city, frequently to be caught; lights and shades of winter and
summer air, of the literally “finishing” afternoon in particular, when
refinement of modelling descends from the skies and lends the white
towers, all new and crude and commercial and over-windowed as they are,
a fleeting distinction. The morning I speak of offered me my first
chance of seeing one of them from the inside—which was an opportunity I
sought again, repeatedly, in respect to others; and I became conscious
of the force with which this vision of their prodigious working, and of
the multitudinous life, as if each were a swarming city in itself, that
they are capable of housing, may beget, on the part of the free
observer, in other words of the restless analyst, the impulse to
describe and present the facts and express the sense of them. Each of
these huge constructed and compressed communities, throbbing, through
its myriad arteries and pores, with a single passion, even as a
complicated watch throbs with the one purpose of telling you the hour
and the minute, testified overwhelmingly to the _character_ of New
York—and the passion of the restless analyst, on his side, is for the
extraction of character. But there would be too much to say, just here,
were this incurable eccentric to let himself go; the impression in
question, fed by however brief an experience, kept overflowing the cup
and spreading in a wide waste of speculation. I must dip into these
depths, if it prove possible, later on; let me content myself for the
moment with remembering how from the first, on all such ground, my
thought went straight to poor great wonder-working Émile Zola and _his_
love of the human aggregation, the artificial microcosm, which had to
spend itself on great shops, great businesses, great “apartment-houses,”
of inferior, of mere Parisian scale. His image, it seemed to me, really
asked for compassion—in the presence of this material that his energy of
evocation, his alone, would have been of a stature to meddle with. What
if _Le Ventre de Paris_, what if _Au Bonheur des Dames_, what if
_Pot-Bouille_ and _L’Argent_, could but have come into being under the
New York inspiration?

The answer to that, however, for the hour, was that, in all probability,
New York was not going (as it turns such remarks) to produce both the
maximum of “business” spectacle and the maximum of ironic reflection of
it. Zola’s huge reflector got itself formed, after all, in a far other
air; it had hung there, in essence, awaiting the scene that was to play
over it, long before the scene really approached it in scale. The
reflecting surfaces, of the ironic, of the epic order, suspended in the
New York atmosphere, have yet to show symptoms of shining out, and the
monstrous phenomena themselves, meanwhile, strike me as having, with
their immense momentum, got the start, got ahead of, in proper parlance,
any possibility of poetic, of dramatic capture. That conviction came to
me most perhaps while I gazed across at the special sky-scraper that
overhangs poor old Trinity to the north—a south face as high and wide as
the mountain-wall that drops the Alpine avalanche, from time to time,
upon the village, and the village spire, at its foot; the interest of
this case being above all, as I learned, to my stupefaction, in the fact
that the very creators of the extinguisher are the churchwardens
themselves, or at least the trustees of the church property. What was
the case but magnificent for pitiless ferocity?—that inexorable law of
the growing invisibility of churches, their everywhere reduced or
abolished _presence_, which is nine-tenths of their virtue, receiving
thus, at such hands, its supreme consecration. This consecration was
positively the greater that just then, as I have said, the vast
money-making structure quite horribly, quite romantically justified
itself, looming through the weather with an insolent cliff-like
sublimity. The weather, for all that experience, mixes intimately with
the fulness of my impression; speaking not least, for instance, of the
way “the state of the streets” and the assault of the turbid air seemed
all one with the look, the tramp, the whole quality and _allure_, the
consummate monotonous commonness, of the pushing male crowd, moving in
its dense mass—with the confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence,
any perception; a welter of objects and sounds in which relief,
detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights. It
appeared, the muddy medium, all one with every other element and note as
well, all the signs of the heaped industrial battle-field, all the
sounds and silences, grim, pushing, trudging silences too, of the
universal will to move—to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an
appetite at any price.

In the Bay, the rest of the morning, the dense raw fog that delayed the
big boat, allowing sight but of the immediate ice-masses through which
it thumped its way, was not less of the essence. Anything blander, as a
medium, would have seemed a mockery of the facts of the terrible little
Ellis Island, the first harbour of refuge and stage of patience for the
million or so of immigrants annually knocking at our official door.
Before this door, which opens to them there only with a hundred forms
and ceremonies, grindings and grumblings of the key, they stand
appealing and waiting, marshalled, herded, divided, subdivided, sorted,
sifted, searched, fumigated, for longer or shorter periods—the effect of
all which prodigious process, an intendedly “scientific” feeding of the
mill, is again to give the earnest observer a thousand more things to
think of than he can pretend to retail. The impression of Ellis Island,
in fine, would be—as I was to find throughout that so many of my
impressions would be—a chapter by itself; and with a particular page for
recognition of the degree in which the liberal hospitality of the
eminent Commissioner of this wonderful service, to whom I had been
introduced, helped to make the interest of the whole watched drama
poignant and unforgettable. It is a drama that goes on, without a pause,
day by day and year by year, this visible act of ingurgitation on the
part of our body politic and social, and constituting really an appeal
to amazement beyond that of any sword-swallowing or fire-swallowing of
the circus. The wonder that one couldn’t keep down was the thought that
these two or three hours of one’s own chance vision of the business were
but as a tick or two of the mighty clock, the clock that never, never
stops—least of all when it strikes, for a sign of so much winding-up,
some louder hour of our national fate than usual. I think indeed that
the simplest account of the action of Ellis Island on the spirit of any
sensitive citizen who may have happened to “look in” is that he comes
back from his visit not at all the same person that he went. He has
eaten of the tree of knowledge, and the taste will be for ever in his
mouth. He had thought he knew before, thought he had the sense of the
degree in which it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his
American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with
the inconceivable alien; but the truth had never come home to him with
any such force. In the lurid light projected upon it by those courts of
dismay it shakes him—or I like at least to imagine it shakes him—to the
depths of his being; I like to think of him, I positively _have_ to
think of him, as going about ever afterwards with a new look, for those
who can see it, in his face, the outward sign of the new chill in his
heart. So is stamped, for detection, the questionably privileged person
who has had an apparition, seen a ghost in his supposedly safe old
house. Let not the unwary, therefore, visit Ellis Island.

The after-sense of that acute experience, however, I myself found, was
by no means to be brushed away; I felt it grow and grow, on the
contrary, wherever I turned: other impressions might come and go, but
this affirmed claim of the alien, however immeasurably alien, to share
in one’s supreme relation was everywhere the fixed element, the reminder
not to be dodged. One’s supreme relation, as one had always put it, was
one’s relation to one’s country—a conception made up so largely of one’s
countrymen and one’s countrywomen. Thus it was as if, all the while,
with such a fond tradition of what these products predominantly were,
the idea of the country itself underwent something of that profane
overhauling through which it appears to suffer the indignity of change.
Is not our instinct in this matter, in general, essentially the safe
one—that of keeping the idea simple and strong and continuous, so that
it shall be perfectly sound? To touch it overmuch, to pull it about, is
to put it in peril of weakening; yet on this free assault upon it, this
readjustment of it in _their_ monstrous, presumptuous interest, the
aliens, in New York, seemed perpetually to insist. The combination there
of their quantity and their quality—that loud primary stage of alienism
which New York most offers to sight—operates, for the native, as their
note of settled possession, something they have nobody to thank for; so
that _un_settled possession is what we, on our side, seem reduced to—the
implication of which, in its turn, is that, to recover confidence and
regain lost ground, we, not they, must make the surrender and accept the
orientation. We must go, in other words, _more_ than half-way to meet
them; which is all the difference, for us, between possession and
dispossession. This sense of dispossession, to be brief about it,
haunted me so, I was to feel, in the New York streets and in the packed
trajectiles to which one clingingly appeals from the streets, just as
one tumbles back into the streets in appalled reaction from _them_, that
the art of beguiling or duping it became an art to be cultivated—though
the fond alternative vision was never long to be obscured, the
imagination, exasperated to envy, of the ideal, in the order in
question; of the luxury of some such close and sweet and _whole_
national consciousness as that of the Switzer and the Scot.


                                   II

My recovery of impressions, after a short interval, yet with their flush
a little faded, may have been judged to involve itself with excursions
of memory—memory directed to the antecedent time—reckless almost to
extravagance. But I recall them to-day, none the less, for that value in
them which ministered, at happy moments, to an artful evasion of the
actual. There was no escape from the ubiquitous alien into the future,
or even into the present; there was an escape but into the past. I count
as quite a triumph in this interest an unbroken ease of frequentation of
that ancient end of Fifth Avenue to the whole neighbourhood of which
one’s earlier vibrations, a very far-away matter now, were attuned. The
precious stretch of space between Washington Square and Fourteenth
Street had a value, had even a charm, for the revisiting spirit—a mild
and melancholy glamour which I am conscious of the difficulty of
“rendering” for new and heedless generations. Here again the assault of
suggestion is too great; too large, I mean, the number of hares started,
before the pursuing imagination, the quickened memory, by this fact of
the felt moral and social value of this comparatively unimpaired morsel
of the Fifth Avenue heritage. Its reference to a pleasanter, easier,
hazier past is absolutely comparative, just as the past in question
itself enjoys as such the merest courtesy-title. It is all recent
history enough, by the measure of the whole, and there are flaws and
defacements enough, surely, even in its appearance of decency of
duration. The tall building, grossly tall and grossly ugly, has failed
of an admirable chance of distinguished consideration for it, and the
dignity of many of its peaceful fronts has succumbed to the presence of
those industries whose foremost need is to make “a good thing” of them.
The good thing is doubtless being made, and yet this lower end of the
once agreeable street still just escapes being a wholly bad thing. What
held the fancy in thrall, however, as I say, was the admonition,
proceeding from all the facts, that values of this romantic order are at
best, anywhere, strangely relative. It was an extraordinary statement on
the subject of New York that the space between Fourteenth Street and
Washington Square _should_ count for “tone,” figure as the old ivory of
an overscored tablet.

True wisdom, I found, was to let it, to make it, so count and figure as
much as it would, and charming assistance came for this, I also found,
from the young good-nature of May and June. There had been neither
assistance nor good-nature during the grim weeks of mid-winter; there
had been but the meagre fact of a discomfort and an ugliness less
formidable here than elsewhere. When, toward the top of the town,
circulation, alimentation, recreation, every art of existence, gave way
before the full onset of winter, when the upper avenues had become as so
many congested bottle-necks, through which the wine of life simply
refused to be decanted, getting back to these latitudes resembled really
a return from the North Pole to the Temperate Zone: it was as if the
wine of life had been poured for you, in advance, into some pleasant old
punch-bowl that would support you through the temporary stress. Your
condition was not reduced to the endless vista of a clogged tube, of a
thoroughfare occupied as to the narrow central ridge with trolley-cars
stuffed to suffocation, and as to the mere margin, on either side, with
snow-banks resulting from the cleared rails and offering themselves as a
field for all remaining action. Free existence and good manners, in New
York, are too much brought down to a bare rigour of marginal relation to
the endless electric coil, the monstrous chain that winds round the
general neck and body, the general middle and legs, very much as the
boa-constrictor winds round the group of the Laocoon. It struck me that
when these folds are tightened in the terrible stricture of the
snow-smothered months of the year, the New York predicament leaves far
behind the anguish represented in the Vatican figures. To come and go
where East Eleventh Street, where West Tenth, opened their kind short
arms was at least to keep clear of the awful hug of the serpent. And
this was a grace that grew large, as I have hinted, with the approach of
summer, and that made in the afternoons of May and of the first half of
June, above all, an insidious appeal. There, I repeat, was the delicacy,
there the mystery, there the wonder, in especial, of the unquenchable
intensity of the impressions received in childhood. They are made then
once for all, be their intrinsic beauty, interest, importance, small or
great; the stamp is indelible and never wholly fades. This in fact gives
it an importance when a lifetime has intervened. I found myself
intimately recognizing every house my officious tenth year had, in the
way of imagined adventure, introduced to me—incomparable master of
ceremonies after all; the privilege had been offered since to millions
of other objects that had made nothing of it, that had gone as they
came; so that here were Fifth Avenue corners with which one’s connection
was fairly exquisite. The lowered light of the days’ ends of early
summer became them, moreover, exceedingly, and they fell, for the quiet
northward perspective, into a dozen delicacies of composition and tone.

One could talk of “quietness” now, for the shrinkage of life so marked,
in the higher latitudes of the town, after Easter, the visible early
flight of that “society” which, by the old custom, used never to budge
before June or July, had almost the effect of clearing some of the
streets, and indeed of suggesting that a truly clear New York might have
an unsuspected charm or two to put forth. An approach to peace and
harmony might have been, in a manner, promised, and the sense of other
days took advantage of it to steal abroad with a ghostly tread. It kept
meeting, half the time, to its discomfiture, the lamentable little Arch
of Triumph which bestrides these beginnings of Washington
Square—lamentable because of its poor and lonely and unsupported and
unaffiliated state. With this melancholy monument it could make no terms
at all, but turned its back to the strange sight as often as possible,
helping itself thereby, moreover, to do a little of the pretending
required, no doubt, by the fond theory that nothing hereabouts was
changed. Nothing _was_, it could occasionally appear to me—there was no
new note in the picture, not one, for instance, when I paused before a
low house in a small row on the south side of Waverley Place and lived
again into the queer mediæval costume (preserved by the
daguerreotypist’s art) of the very little boy for whom the scene had
once embodied the pangs and pleasures of a dame’s small school. The dame
must have been Irish, by her name, and the Irish tradition, only
intensified and coarsened, seemed still to possess the place, the fact
of the survival, the sturdy sameness, of which arrested me, again and
again, to fascination. The shabby red house, with its mere two storeys,
its lowly “stoop,” its dislocated ironwork of the forties, the early
fifties, the record, in its face, of blistering summers and of the long
stages of the loss of self-respect, made it as consummate a morsel of
the old liquor-scented, heated-looking city, the city of no pavements,
but of such a plenty of politics, as I could have desired. And
neighbouring Sixth Avenue, overstraddled though it might be with feats
of engineering unknown to the primitive age that otherwise so persisted,
wanted only, to carry off the illusion, the warm smell of the bakery on
the corner of Eighth Street, a blessed repository of doughnuts, cookies,
cream-cakes and pies, the slow passing by which, on returns from school,
must have had much in common with the experience of the shipmen of old
who came, in long voyages, while they tacked and hung back, upon those
belts of ocean that are haunted with the balm and spice of tropic
islands.

These were the felicities of the backward reach, which, however, had
also its melancholy checks and snubs; nowhere quite so sharp as in
presence, so to speak, of the rudely, the ruthlessly suppressed
birth-house on the other side of the Square. That was where the pretence
that nearly nothing was changed had most to come in; for a high, square,
impersonal structure, proclaiming its lack of interest with a crudity
all its own, so blocks, at the right moment for its own success, the
view of the past, that the effect for me, in Washington Place, was of
having been amputated of half my history. The grey and more or less
“hallowed” University building—wasn’t it somehow, with a desperate
bravery, both castellated and gabled?—has vanished from the earth, and
vanished with it the two or three adjacent houses, of which the
birthplace was one. This was the snub, for the complacency of
retrospect, that, whereas the inner sense had positively erected there
for its private contemplation a commemorative mural tablet, the very
wall that should have borne this inscription had been smashed as for
demonstration that tablets, in New York, are unthinkable. And I have had
indeed to permit myself this free fantasy of the hypothetic rescued
identity of a given house—taking the vanished number in Washington Place
as most pertinent—in order to invite the reader to gasp properly with me
before the fact that we not only fail to remember, in the whole length
of the city, one of these frontal records of birth, sojourn, or death,
under a celebrated name, but that we have only to reflect an instant to
see any such form of civic piety inevitably and for ever absent. The
form is cultivated, to the greatly quickened interest of street-scenery,
in many of the cities of Europe; and is it not verily bitter, for those
who feel a poetry in the noted passage, longer or shorter, here and
there, of great lost spirits, that the institution, the profit, the
glory of any such association is denied in advance to communities
tending, as the phrase is, to “run” preponderantly to the sky-scraper?
Where, in fact, is the point of inserting a mural tablet, at any legible
height, in a building certain to be destroyed to make room for a
sky-scraper? And from where, on the other hand, in a façade of fifty
floors, does one “see” the pious plate recording the honour attached to
one of the apartments look down on a responsive people? We have but to
ask the question to recognize our necessary failure to answer it as a
supremely characteristic local note—a note in the light of which the
great city is projected into its future as, practically, a huge,
continuous fifty-floored conspiracy against the very idea of the ancient
graces, those that strike us as having flourished just in proportion as
the parts of life and the signs of character have _not_ been lumped
together, not been indistinguishably sunk in the common fund of mere
economic convenience. So interesting, as object-lessons, may the
developments of the American gregarious ideal become; so traceable, at
every turn, to the restless analyst at least, are the heavy footprints,
in the finer texture of life, of a great commercial democracy seeking to
abound supremely in its own sense and having none to gainsay it.

Let me not, however, forget, amid such contemplations, what may serve
here as a much more relevant instance of the operation of values, the
price of the as yet undiminished dignity of the two most southward of
the Fifth Avenue churches. Half the charm of the prospect, at that
extremity, is in their still being there, and being as they are; this
charm, this serenity of escape and survival positively works as a blind
on the side of the question of their architectural importance. The last
shade of pedantry or priggishness drops from your view of that element;
they illustrate again supremely your grasped truth of the _comparative_
character, in such conditions, of beauty and of interest. The special
standard they may or may not square with signifies, you feel, not a jot:
all you know, and want to know, is that they are probably menaced—some
horrible voice of the air has murmured it—and that with them will go, if
fate overtakes them, the last cases worth mentioning (with a single
exception), of the modest felicity that sometimes used to be. Remarkable
certainly the state of things in which mere exemption from the
“squashed” condition can shed such a glamour; but we may accept the
state of things if only we can keep the glamour undispelled. It reached
its maximum for me, I hasten to add, on my penetrating into the
Ascension, at chosen noon, and standing for the first time in presence
of that noble work of John La Farge, the representation, on the west
wall, in the grand manner, of the theological event from which the
church takes its title. Wonderful enough, in New York, to find one’s
self, in a charming and considerably dim “old” church, hushed to
admiration before a great religious picture; the sensation, for the
moment, upset so all the facts. The hot light, outside, might have been
that of an Italian _piazzetta_; the cool shade, within, with the
important work of art shining through it, seemed part of some
other-world pilgrimage—all the more that the important work of art
itself, a thing of the highest distinction, spoke, as soon as one had
taken it in, with that authority which makes the difference, ever
afterwards, between the remembered and the forgotten quest. A rich note
of interference came, I admit, through the splendid window-glass, the
finest of which, unsurpassably fine, to my sense, is the work of the
same artist; so that the church, as it stands, is very nearly as
commemorative a monument as a great reputation need wish. The deeply
pictorial windows, in which clearness of picture and fulness of
expression consort so successfully with a tone as of magnified gems, did
not strike one as looking into a yellow little square of the south—they
put forth a different implication; but the flaw in the harmony was, more
than anything else, that sinister voice of the air of which I have
spoken, the fact that one _could_ stand there, vibrating to such
impressions, only to remember the suspended danger, the possibility of
the doom. Here was the loveliest cluster of images, begotten on the
spot, that the preoccupied city had ever taken thought to offer itself;
and here, to match them, like some black shadow they had been condemned
to cast, was this particular prepared honour of “removal” that appeared
to hover about them.

One’s fear, I repeat, was perhaps misplaced—but what an air to live in,
the shuddering pilgrim mused, the air in which such fears are not
misplaced only when we are conscious of very special reassurances! The
vision of the doom that does descend, that had descended all round, was
at all events, for the half-hour, all that was wanted to charge with the
last tenderness one’s memory of the transfigured interior. Afterwards,
outside, again and again, the powers of removal struck me as looming,
awfully, in the newest mass of multiplied floors and windows visible at
this point. _They_, ranged in this terrible recent erection, were going
to bring in money—and was not money the only thing a self-respecting
structure could be thought of as bringing in? Hadn’t one heard, just
before, in Boston, that the security, that the sweet serenity of the
Park Street Church, charmingest, there, of aboriginal notes, the very
light, with its perfect position and its dear old delightful Wren-like
spire, of the starved city’s eyes, had been artfully practised against,
and that the question of saving it might become, in the near future,
acute? Nothing, fortunately, I think, is so much the “making” of New
York, at its central point, for the visual, almost for the romantic,
sense, as the Park Street Church is the making, by its happy coming-in,
of Boston; and, therefore, if it were thinkable that the peculiar
rectitude of Boston might be laid in the dust, what mightn’t easily come
about for the reputedly less austere conscience of New York? Once such
questions had obtained lodgment, to take one’s walks was verily to look
at almost everything in their light; and to commune with the sky-scraper
under this influence was really to feel worsted, more and more, in any
magnanimous attempt to adopt the æsthetic view of it. I may appear to
make too much of these invidious presences, but it must be remembered
that they represent, for our time, the only claim to any consideration
other than merely statistical established by the resounding growth of
New York. The attempt to take the æsthetic view is invariably blighted
sooner or later by their most salient characteristic, _the_ feature that
speaks loudest for the economic idea. Window upon window, at any cost,
is a condition never to be reconciled with any grace of building, and
the logic of the matter here happens to put on a particularly fatal
front. If quiet interspaces, always half the architectural battle, exist
no more in such a structural scheme than quiet tones, blest
breathing-spaces, occur, for the most part, in New York conversation, so
the reason is, demonstrably, that the building can’t afford them. (It is
by very much the same law, one supposes, that New York conversation
cannot afford stops.) The building can only afford lights, each light
having a superlative value as an aid to the transaction of business and
the conclusion of sharp bargains. Doesn’t it take in fact acres of
window-glass to help even an expert New Yorker to get the better of
another expert one, or to see that the other expert one doesn’t get the
better of _him_? It is easy to conceive that, after all, with this
origin and nature stamped upon their foreheads, the last word of the
mercenary monsters should not be their address to our sense of formal
beauty.

Still, as I have already hinted, there was always the case of the one
other rescued identity and preserved felicity, the happy accident of the
elder day still ungrudged and finally legitimated. When I say ungrudged,
indeed, I seem to remember how I had heard that the divine little City
Hall had _been_ grudged, at a critical moment, to within an inch of its
life; had but just escaped, in the event, the extremity of grudging. It
lives on securely, by the mercy of fate—lives on in the delicacy of its
beauty, speaking volumes again (more volumes, distinctly, than are
anywhere else spoken) for the exquisite truth of the _conferred_ value
of interesting objects, the value derived from the social, the
civilizing function for which they have happened to find their
opportunity. It is the opportunity that gives them their price, and the
luck of there being, round about them, nothing greater than themselves
to steal it away from them. They strike thus, virtually, the supreme
note, and—such is the mysterious play of our finer sensibility!—one
takes this note, one is glad to work it, as the phrase goes, for all it
is worth. I so work the note of the City Hall, no doubt, in speaking of
the spectacle there constituted as “divine”; but I do it precisely by
reason of the spectacle taken _with_ the delightful small facts of the
building: largely by reason, in other words, of the elegant, the gallant
little structure’s situation and history, the way it has played,
artistically, ornamentally, its part, has held out for the good cause,
through the long years, alone and unprotected. The fact is it has been
the very centre of that assault of vulgarity of which the innumerable
mementos rise within view of it and tower, at a certain distance, over
it; and yet it has never parted with a square inch of its character, it
has forced them, in a manner, to stand off. I hasten to add that in
expressing thus its uncompromised state I speak of its outward, its
æsthetic character only. So, at all events, it has discharged the
civilizing function I just named as inherent in such cases—that of
representing, to the community possessed of it, all the Style the
community is likely to get, and of making itself responsible for the
same.

The consistency of this effort, under difficulties, has been the story
that brings tears to the eyes of the hovering kindly critic, and it is
through his tears, no doubt, that such a personage reads the best
passages of the tale and makes out the proportions of the object. Mine,
I recognize, didn’t prevent my seeing that the pale yellow marble (or
whatever it may be) of the City Hall has lost, by some late excoriation,
the remembered charm of its old surface, the pleasant promiscuous patina
of time; but the perfect taste and finish, the reduced yet ample scale,
the harmony of parts, the just proportions, the modest classic grace,
the living look of the type aimed at, these things, with gaiety of
detail undiminished and “quaintness” of effect augmented, are all there;
and I see them, as I write, in that glow of appreciation which made it
necessary, of a fine June morning, that I should somehow pay the whole
place my respects. The simplest, in fact the only way, was, obviously,
to pass under the charming portico and brave the consequences: this
impunity of such audacities being, in America, one of the last of the
lessons the repatriated absentee finds himself learning. The crushed
spirit he brings back from European discipline never quite rises to the
height of the native argument, the brave sense that the public, the
civic building is his very own, for any honest use, so that he may tread
even its most expensive pavements and staircases (and very expensive,
for the American citizen, these have lately become,) without a question
asked. This further and further unchallenged penetration begets in the
perverted person I speak of a really romantic thrill: it is like some
assault of the dim seraglio, with the guards bribed, the eunuchs drugged
and one’s life carried in one’s hand. The only drawback to such freedom
is that penetralia it is so easy to penetrate fail a little of a due
impressiveness, and that if stationed sentinels are bad for the temper
of the freeman they are good for the “prestige” of the building.

Never, in any case, it seemed to me, had any freeman made so free with
the majesty of things as I was to make on this occasion with the
mysteries of the City Hall—even to the point of coming out into the
presence of the Representative of the highest office with which City
Halls are associated, and whose thoroughly gracious condonation of my
act set the seal of success upon the whole adventure. Its dizziest
intensity in fact sprang precisely from the unexpected view opened into
the old official, the old so thick-peopled local, municipal world: upper
chambers of council and state, delightfully of their nineteenth-century
time, as to design and ornament, in spite of rank restoration; but
replete, above all, with portraits of past worthies, past celebrities
and city fathers, Mayors, Bosses, Presidents, Governors, Statesmen at
large, Generals and Commodores at large, florid ghosts, looking so
unsophisticated now, of years not remarkable, municipally, for the
absence of sophistication. Here were types, running mainly to ugliness
and all bristling with the taste of their day and the quite touching
provincialism of their conditions, as to many of which nothing would be
more interesting than a study of New York annals in the light of their
personal look, their very noses and mouths and complexions and heads of
hair—to say nothing of their waistcoats and neckties; with such colour,
such sound and movement would the thick stream of local history then be
interfused. Wouldn’t its thickness fairly become transparent? since to
walk through the collection was not only to see and feel so much that
had happened, but to understand, with the truth again and again
inimitably pointed, why nothing could have happened otherwise; the whole
array thus presenting itself as an unsurpassed demonstration of the real
reasons of things. The florid ghosts look out from their exceedingly
gilded frames—all that _that_ can do is bravely done for them—with the
frankest responsibility for everything; their collective presence
becomes a kind of copious tell-tale document signed with a hundred
names. There are few of these that at this hour, I think, we
particularly desire to repeat; but the place where they may be read is,
all the way from river to river and from the Battery to Harlem, the
place in which there is most of the terrible town.


                                  III

If the Bay had seemed to me, as I have noted, most to help the fond
observer of New York aspects to a sense, through the eyes, of embracing
possession, so the part played there for the outward view found its
match for the inward in the portentous impression of one of the great
caravansaries administered to me of a winter afternoon. I say with
intention “administered”: on so assiduous a guide, through the endless
labyrinth of the Waldorf-Astoria was I happily to chance after turning
out of the early dusk and the January sleet and slosh into permitted,
into enlightened contemplation of a pandemonium not less admirably
ordered, to all appearance, than rarely intermitted. The seer of great
cities is liable to easy error, I know, when he finds this, that or the
other caught glimpse the supremely significant one—and I am willing to
preface with that remark my confession that New York told me more of her
story at once, then and there, than she was again and elsewhere to tell.
With this apprehension that she was in fact fairly shrieking it into
one’s ears came a curiosity, corresponding, as to its kind and its
degree of interest; so that there was nought to do, as we picked our
tortuous way, but to stare with all our eyes and miss as little as
possible of the revelation. That harshness of the essential conditions,
the outward, which almost any large attempt at the amenities, in New
York, has to take account of and make the best of, has at least the
effect of projecting the visitor with force upon the spectacle prepared
for him at this particular point and of marking the more its sudden high
pitch, the character of violence which all its warmth, its colour and
glitter so completely muffle. There is violence outside, mitigating
sadly the frontal majesty of the monument, leaving it exposed to the
vulgar assault of the street by the operation of those dire facts of
absence of margin, of meagreness of site, of the brevity of the block,
of the inveteracy of the near thoroughfare, which leave “style,” in
construction, at the mercy of the impertinent cross-streets, make
detachment and independence, save in the rarest cases, an insoluble
problem, preclude without pity any element of court or garden, and open
to the builder in quest of distinction the one alternative, and the
great adventure, of seeking his reward in the sky.

Of their licence to pursue it there to any extent whatever New Yorkers
are, I think, a trifle too assertively proud; no court of approach, no
interspace worth mention, ever forming meanwhile part of the ground-plan
or helping to receive the force of the breaking public wave. New York
pays at this rate the penalty of her primal topographic curse, her old
inconceivably bourgeois scheme of composition and distribution, the
uncorrected labour of minds with no imagination of the future and blind
before the opportunity given them by their two magnificent water-fronts.
This original sin of the longitudinal avenues perpetually, yet meanly
intersected, and of the organized sacrifice of the indicated
alternative, the great perspectives from East to West, might still have
earned forgiveness by some occasional departure from its pettifogging
consistency. But, thanks to this consistency, the city is, of all great
cities, the least endowed with any blest item of stately square or
goodly garden, with any happy accident or surprise, any fortunate nook
or casual corner, any deviation, in fine, into the liberal or the
charming. That way, however, for the regenerate filial mind, madness may
be said to lie—the way of imagining what might have been and putting it
all together in the light of what so helplessly is. One of the things
that helplessly are, for instance, is just this assault of the street,
as I have called it, upon any direct dealing with our caravansary. The
electric cars, with their double track, are everywhere almost as tight a
fit in the narrow channel of the roadway as the projectile in the bore
of a gun; so that the Waldorf-Astoria, sitting by this absent margin for
life with her open lap and arms, is reduced to confessing, with a
strained smile, across the traffic and the danger, how little, outside
her mere swing-door, she can do for you. She seems to admit that the
attempt to get at her may cost you your safety, but reminds you at the
same time that any good American, and even any good inquiring stranger,
is supposed willing to risk that boon for her. “_Un bon mouvement_,
therefore: you must make a dash for it, but you’ll see I’m worth it.” If
such a claim as this last be ever justified, it would indubitably be
justified here; the survivor scrambling out of the current and up the
bank finds in the amplitude of the entertainment awaiting him an instant
sense as of applied restoratives. The amazing hotel-world quickly closes
round him; with the process of transition reduced to its minimum he is
transported to conditions of extraordinary complexity and brilliancy,
operating—and with proportionate perfection—by laws of their own and
expressing after their fashion a complete scheme of life. The air
swarms, to intensity, with the _characteristic_, the characteristic
condensed and accumulated as he rarely elsewhere has had the luck to
find it. It jumps out to meet his every glance, and this unanimity of
its spring, of all its aspects and voices, is what I just now referred
to as the essence of the loud New York story. That effect of violence in
the whole communication, at which I thus hint, results from the
inordinate mass, the quantity of presence, as it were, of the testimony
heaped together for emphasis of the wondrous moral.

The moral in question, the high interest of the tale, is that you are in
presence of a revelation of the possibilities of the hotel—for which the
American spirit has found so unprecedented a use and a value; leading it
on to express so a social, indeed positively an æsthetic ideal, and
making it so, at this supreme pitch, a synonym for civilization, for the
capture of conceived manners themselves, that one is verily tempted to
ask if the hotel-spirit may not just _be_ the American spirit most
seeking and most finding itself. That truth—the truth that the present
is more and more the day of the hotel—had not waited to burst on the
mind at the view of this particular establishment; we have all more or
less been educated to it, the world over, by the fruit-bearing action of
the American example: in consequence of which it has been opened to us
to see still other societies moved by the same irresistible spring and
trying, with whatever grace and ease they may bring to the business, to
unlearn as many as possible of their old social canons, and in especial
their old discrimination in favour of the private life. The business for
them—for communities to which the American ease in such matters is not
native—goes much less of itself and produces as yet a scantier show; the
great difference with the American show being that in the United States
every one is, for the lubrication of the general machinery, practically
in everything, whereas in Europe, mostly, it is only certain people who
are in anything; so that the machinery, so much less generalized, works
in a smaller, stiffer way. This one caravansary makes the American case
vivid, gives it, you feel, that quantity of illustration which renders
the place a new thing under the sun. It is an expression of the
gregarious state breaking down every barrier but two—one of which, the
barrier consisting of the high pecuniary tax, is the immediately
obvious. The other, the rather more subtle, is the condition, for any
member of the flock, that he or she—in other words especially she—be
presumably “respectable,” be, that is, not discoverably anything else.
The rigour with which any appearance of pursued or desired adventure is
kept down—adventure in the florid sense of the word, the sense in which
it remains an euphemism—is not the least interesting note of the whole
immense promiscuity. Protected at those two points the promiscuity
carries, through the rest of the range, everything before it.

It sat there, it walked and talked, and ate and drank, and listened and
danced to music, and otherwise revelled and roamed, and bought and sold,
and came and went there, all on its own splendid terms and with an
encompassing material splendour, a wealth and variety of constituted
picture and background, that might well feed it with the finest
illusions about itself. It paraded through halls and saloons in which
art and history, in masquerading dress, muffled almost to suffocation as
in the gold brocade of their pretended majesties and their conciliatory
graces, stood smirking on its passage with the last cynicism of
hypocrisy. The exhibition is wonderful for that, for the suggested sense
of a promiscuity which manages to be at the same time an inordinate
untempered monotony; manages to be so, on such ground as this, by an
extraordinary trick of its own, wherever one finds it. The combination
forms, I think, largely, the very interest, such as it is, of these
phases of the human scene in the United States—if only for the pleasant
puzzle of our wondering how, when types, aspects, conditions, have so
much in common, they should seem at all to make up a conscious
miscellany. That question, however, the question of the play and range,
the practical elasticity, of the social sameness, in America, will meet
us elsewhere on our path, and I confess that all questions gave way, in
my mind, to a single irresistible obsession. This was just the ache of
envy of the spirit of a society which had found there, in its prodigious
public setting, so exactly what it wanted. One was in presence, as never
before, of a realized ideal and of that childlike rush of surrender to
it and clutch at it which one was so repeatedly to recognize, in
America, as the note of the supremely gregarious state. It made the
whole vision unforgettable, and I am now carried back to it, I confess,
in musing hours, as to one of my few glimpses of perfect human felicity.
It had the admirable sign that it was, precisely, so comprehensively
collective—that it made so vividly, in the old phrase, for the greatest
happiness of the greatest number. Its rare beauty, one felt with instant
clarity of perception, was that it was, for a “mixed” social
manifestation, blissfully exempt from any principle or possibility of
disaccord with itself. It was absolutely a fit to its conditions, those
conditions which were both its earth and its heaven, and every part of
the picture, every item of the immense sum, every wheel of the wondrous
complexity, was on the best terms with all the rest.

The sense of these things became for the hour as the golden glow in
which one’s envy burned, and through which, while the sleet and the
slosh, and the clangorous charge of cars, and the hustling, hustled
crowds held the outer world, one carried one’s charmed attention from
one chamber of the temple to another. For that is how the place speaks,
as great constructed and achieved harmonies mostly speak—as a temple
builded, with clustering chapels and shrines, to an idea. The hundreds
and hundreds of people in circulation, the innumerable huge-hatted
ladies in especial, with their air of finding in the gilded and storied
labyrinth the very firesides and pathways of home, became thus the
serene faithful, whose rites one would no more have sceptically brushed
than one would doff one’s disguise in a Mohammedan mosque. The question
of who they all might be, seated under palms and by fountains, or
communing, to some inimitable New York tune, with the shade of Marie
Antoinette in the queer recaptured actuality of an easy Versailles or an
intimate Trianon—such questions as that, interesting in other societies
and at other times, insisted on yielding here to the mere eloquence of
the general truth. Here was a social order in positively stable
equilibrium. Here was a world whose relation to its form and medium was
practically imperturbable; here was a conception of publicity _as_ the
vital medium organized with the authority with which the American genius
for organization, put on its mettle, alone could organize it. The whole
thing remains for me, however, I repeat, a gorgeous golden blur, a
paradise peopled with unmistakable American shapes, yet in which, the
general and the particular, the organized and the extemporized, the
element of ingenuous joy below and of consummate management above,
melted together and left one uncertain which of them one was, at a given
turn of the maze, most admiring. When I reflect indeed that without my
clue I should not have even known the maze—should not have known, at the
given turn, whether I was engulfed, for instance, in the _vente de
charité_ of the theatrical profession and the onset of persuasive
peddling actresses, or in the annual tea-party of German
lady-patronesses (of I know not what) filling with their Oriental
opulence and their strange idiom a playhouse of the richest rococo,
where some other expensive anniversary, the ball of a guild or the
carouse of a club, was to tread on their heels and instantly mobilize
away their paraphernalia—when I so reflect I see the sharpest dazzle of
the eyes as precisely the play of the genius for organization.

There are a thousand forms of this ubiquitous American force, the most
ubiquitous of all, that I was in no position to measure; but there was
often no resisting a vivid view of the form it may take, on occasion,
under pressure of the native conception of the hotel. Encountered
embodiments of the gift, in this connection, master-spirits of
management whose influence was as the very air, the very expensive air,
one breathed, abide with me as the intensest examples of American
character; indeed as the very interesting supreme examples of a type
which has even on the American ground, doubtless, not said its last
word, but which has at least treated itself there to a luxury of
development. It gives the impression, when at all directly met, of
having at its service something of that fine flame that makes up
personal greatness; so that, again and again, as I found, one would have
liked to see it more intimately at work. Such failures of opportunity
and of penetration, however, are but the daily bread of the visionary
tourist. Whenever I dip back, in fond memory, none the less, into the
vision I have here attempted once more to call up, I see the whole thing
overswept as by the colossal extended arms, waving the magical baton, of
some high-stationed orchestral leader, the absolute presiding power,
conscious of every note of every instrument, controlling and commanding
the whole volume of sound, keeping the whole effect together and making
it what it is. What may one say of such a spirit if not that he
understands, so to speak, the forces he sways, understands his boundless
American material and plays with it like a master indeed? One sees it
thus, in its crude plasticity, almost in the likeness of an army of
puppets whose strings the wealth of his technical imagination teaches
him innumerable ways of pulling, and yet whose innocent, whose always
ingenuous agitation of their members he has found means to make them
think of themselves as delightfully free and easy. Such was my
impression of the perfection of the concert that, for fear of its being
spoiled by some chance false note, I never went into the place again.

It might meanwhile seem no great adventure merely to walk the streets;
but (beside the fact that there is, in general, never a better way of
taking in life), this pursuit irresistibly solicited, on the least
pretext, the observer whose impressions I note—accustomed as he had ever
been conscientiously to yield to it: more particularly with the
relenting year, when the breath of spring, mildness being really
installed, appeared the one vague and disinterested presence in the
place, the one presence not vociferous and clamorous. Any definite
presence that doesn’t bellow and bang takes on in New York by that
simple fact a distinction practically exquisite; so that one goes forth
to meet it as a guest of honour, and that, for my own experience, I
remember certain aimless strolls as snatches of intimate communion with
the spirit of May and June—as abounding, almost to enchantment, in the
comparatively _still_ condition. Two secrets, at this time, seemed to
profit by that influence to tremble out; one of these to the effect that
New York would really have been “meant” to be charming, and the other to
the effect that the restless analyst, willing at the lightest persuasion
to let so much of its ugliness edge away unscathed from his analysis,
must have had for it, from far back, one of those loyalties that are
beyond any reason.

“It’s all very well,” the voice of the air seemed to say, if I may so
take it up; “it’s all very well to ‘criticize,’ but you distinctly take
an interest and are the victim of your interest, be the grounds of your
perversity what they will. You can’t escape from it, and don’t you see
that this, precisely, is what _makes_ an adventure for you (an
adventure, I admit, as with some strident, battered, questionable
beauty, truly some ‘bold bad’ charmer), of almost any odd stroll, or
waste half-hour, or other promiscuous passage, that results for you in
an impression? There is always your bad habit of receiving through
almost any accident of vision more impressions than you know what to do
with; but that, for common convenience, is your eternal handicap and may
not be allowed to plead here against your special responsibility. You
_care_ for the terrible town, yea even for the ‘horrible,’ as I have
overheard you call it, or at least think it, when you supposed no one
would know; and you see now how, if you fly such fancies as that it was
conceivably meant to be charming, you are tangled by that weakness in
some underhand imagination of its possibly, one of these days, as a
riper fruit of time, becoming so. To do that, you indeed sneakingly
provide, it must get away from itself; but you are ready to follow its
hypothetic dance even to the mainland and to the very end of its tether.
What makes the general relation of your adventure with it is that, at
bottom, you are all the while wondering, in presence of the aspects of
its genius and its shame, what elements or parts, if any, would be worth
its saving, worth carrying off for the fresh embodiment and the better
life, and which of them would have, on the other hand, to face the
notoriety of going _first_ by the board. I have literally heard you
qualify the monster as ‘shameless’—though that was wrung from you, I
admit, by the worst of the winter conditions, when circulation, in any
fashion consistent with personal decency or dignity, was merely mocked
at, when the stony-hearted ‘trolleys,’ cars of Juggernaut in their power
to squash, triumphed all along the line, when the February blasts became
as cyclones in the darkened gorges of masonry (which down-town, in
particular, put on, at their mouths, the semblance of black rat-holes,
holes of gigantic rats, inhabited by whirlwinds;) when all the pretences
and impunities and infirmities, in fine, had massed themselves to be
hurled at you in the fury of the elements, in the character of the
traffic, in the unadapted state of the place to almost _any_ dense
movement, and, beyond everything, in that pitch of all the noises which
acted on your nerves as so much wanton provocation, so much conscious
cynicism. The fury of sound took the form of derision of the rest of
your woe, and thus it _might_, I admit, have struck you as brazen that
the horrible place should, in such confessed collapse, still be
swaggering and shouting. It might have struck you that great cities,
with the eyes of the world on them, as the phrase is, should be capable
either of a proper form or (failing this) of a proper compunction; which
tributes to propriety were, on the part of New York, equally wanting.
This made you remark, precisely, that nothing was wanting, on the other
hand, to that analogy with the character of the bad bold beauty, the
creature the most blatant of whose pretensions is that she is one of
those to whom everything is always forgiven. On what ground ‘forgiven’?
of course you ask; but note that you ask it while you’re in the very act
of forgiving. Oh yes, you are; you’ve as much as said so yourself. So
there it all is; arrange it as you can. Poor dear bad bold beauty; there
must indeed be something about her——!”

Let me grant then, to get on, that there _was_ doubtless, in the better
time, something about her; there was enough about her, at all events, to
conduce to that distinct cultivation of her company for which the
contemplative stroll, when there was time for it, was but another name.
The analogy was in truth complete; since the repetition of such walks,
and the admission of the beguiled state contained in them, resembled
nothing so much as the visits so often still incorrigibly made to
compromised charmers. I defy even a master of morbid observation to
perambulate New York unless he be interested; so that in a case of
memories so gathered the interest must be taken as a final fact. Let me
figure it, to this end, as lively in every connection—and so indeed no
more lively at one mild crisis than at another. The crisis—even of
observation at the morbid pitch—is inevitably mild in cities intensely
new; and it was with the quite peculiarly insistent newness of the upper
reaches of the town that the spirit of romantic inquiry had always, at
the best, to reckon. There are new cities enough about the world,
goodness knows, and there are new parts enough of old cities—for
examples of which we need go no farther than London, Paris and Rome, all
of late so mercilessly renovated. But the newness of New York—unlike
even that of Boston, I seemed to discern—had this mark of its very own,
that it affects one, in every case, as having treated itself as still
more provisional, if possible, than any poor dear little interest of
antiquity it may have annihilated. The very sign of its energy is that
it doesn’t believe in itself; it fails to succeed, even at a cost of
millions, in persuading you that it does. Its mission would appear to
be, exactly, to gild the temporary, with its gold, as many inches thick
as may be, and then, with a fresh shrug, a shrug of its splendid
cynicism for its freshly detected inability to convince, give up its
actual work, however exorbitant, as the merest of stop-gaps. The
difficulty with the compromised charmer is just this constant inability
to convince; to convince ever, I mean, that she is serious, serious
about any form whatever, or about anything but that perpetual passionate
pecuniary purpose which plays with all forms, which derides and devours
them, though it may pile up the cost of them in order to rest a while,
spent and haggard, in the illusion of their finality.

The perception of this truth grows for you by your simply walking
up Fifth Avenue and pausing a little in presence of certain forms,
certain exorbitant structures, in other words, the elegant
domiciliary, as to which the illusion of finality was within one’s
memory magnificent and complete, but as to which one feels to-day
that their life wouldn’t be, as against any whisper of a higher
interest, worth an hour’s purchase. They sit there in the florid
majesty of the taste of their time—a light now, alas, generally
clouded; and I pretend of course to speak, in alluding to them, of
no individual case of danger or doom. It is only a question of
that unintending and unconvincing expression of New York
everywhere, as yet, on the matter of the _maintenance_ of a given
effect—which comes back to the general insincerity of effects, and
truly even (as I have already noted) to the insincerity of the
effect of the sky-scrapers themselves. There results from all
this—and as much where the place most smells of its millions as
elsewhere—that unmistakable New York admission of unattempted,
impossible maturity. The new Paris and the new Rome do at least
propose, I think, to be old—one of these days; the new London
even, erect as she is on leaseholds destitute of dignity, yet
does, for the period, appear to believe in herself. The vice I
glance at is, however, when showing, in our flagrant example, on
the forehead of its victims, much more a cause for pitying than
for decrying them. Again and again, in the upper reaches, you
pause with that pity; you learn, on the occasion of a kindly
glance up and down a quiet cross-street (there being objects and
aspects in many of them appealing to kindness), that such and such
a house, or a row, is “coming down”; and you gasp, in presence of
the elements involved, at the strangeness of the moral so pointed.
It rings out like the crack of that lash in the sky, the play of
some mighty teamster’s whip, which ends by affecting you as the
poor New Yorker’s one association with the idea of “powers above.”
“No”—this is the tune to which the whip seems flourished—“there’s
no step at which you shall rest, no form, as I’m constantly
showing you, to which, consistently with my interests, you _can_.
I build you up but to tear you down, for if I were to let
sentiment and sincerity once take root, were to let any tenderness
of association once accumulate, or any ‘love of the old’ once pass
unsnubbed, what would become of _us_, who have our hands on the
whipstock, please? Fortunately we’ve learned the secret for
keeping association at bay. We’ve learned that the great thing is
not to suffer it to so much as begin. Wherever it does begin we
find we’re lost; but as that takes some time we get in ahead. It’s
the reason, if you must know, why you shall ‘run,’ all, without
exception, to the fifty floors. We defy you even to aspire to
venerate shapes so grossly constructed as the arrangement in fifty
floors. You may have a feeling for keeping on with an old
staircase, consecrated by the tread of generations—especially when
it’s ‘good,’ and old staircases are often so lovely; but how can
you have a feeling for keeping on with an old elevator, how can
you have it any more than for keeping on with an old omnibus?
You’d be ashamed to venerate the arrangement in fifty floors,
accordingly, even if you could; whereby, saving you any moral
trouble or struggle, they are conceived and constructed—and you
must do us the justice of this care for your sensibility—in a
manner to put the thing out of the question. In such a manner,
moreover, as that there shall be immeasurably more of them, in
quantity, to tear down than of the actual past that we are now
sweeping away. Wherefore we shall be kept in precious practice.
The word will perhaps be then—who knows?—for building from the
earth-surface downwards; in which case it will be a question of
tearing, so to speak, ‘up.’ It little matters, so long as we
blight the superstition of rest.”

Yet even in the midst of this vision of eternal waste, of conscious,
sentient-looking houses and rows, full sections of streets, to which the
rich taste of history is forbidden even while their fresh young lips are
just touching the cup, something charmingly done, here and there, some
bid for the ampler permanence, seems to say to you that the particular
place only asks, as a human home, to lead the life it has begun, only
asks to enfold generations and gather in traditions, to show itself
capable of growing up to character and authority. Houses of the best
taste are like clothes of the best tailors—it takes their age to show us
how good they are; and I frequently recognized, in the region of the
upper reaches, this direct appeal of the individual case of happy
construction. Construction at large abounds in the upper reaches,
construction indescribably precipitate and elaborate—the latter fact
about it always so oddly hand in hand with the former; and we should
exceed in saying that felicity is always its mark. But some highly
liberal, some extravagant intention almost always is, and we meet here
even that happy accident, already encountered and acclaimed, in its few
examples, down-town, of the object shining almost absurdly in the light
of its merely comparative distinction. All but lost in the welter of
instances of sham refinement, the shy little case of real refinement
detaches itself ridiculously, as being (like the saved City Hall, or
like the pleasant old garden-walled house on the north-west corner of
Washington Square and Fifth Avenue) of so beneficent an admonition as to
show, relatively speaking, for priceless. These things, which I may not
take time to pick out, are the salt that saves, and it is enough to say
for their delicacy that they are the direct counterpart of those other
dreadful presences, looming round them, which embody the imagination of
new kinds and new clustered, emphasized quantities of vulgarity. To
recall these fine notes and these loud ones, the whole play of wealth
and energy and untutored liberty, of the movement of a breathless
civilization reflected, as brick and stone and marble may reflect,
through all the contrasts of prodigious flight and portentous stumble,
is to acknowledge, positively, that one’s rambles were delightful, and
that the district abutting on the east side of the Park, in particular,
never engaged my attention without, by the same stroke, making the
social question dance before it in a hundred interesting forms.

The social question quite fills the air, in New York, for any spectator
whose impressions at all follow themselves up; it wears, at any rate, in
what I have called the upper reaches, the perpetual strange appearance
as of Property perched high aloft and yet itself looking about, all
ruefully, in the wonder of what it is exactly doing there. We see it
perched, assuredly, in other and older cities, other and older social
orders; but it strikes us in those situations as knowing a little more
where it is. It strikes us as knowing how it has got up and why it must,
infallibly, stay up; it has not the frightened look, measuring the
spaces around, of a small child set on a mantelshelf and about to cry
out. If old societies are interesting, however, I am far from thinking
that young ones may not be more so—with their collective countenance so
much more presented, precisely, to observation, as by their artless need
to get themselves explained. The American world produces almost
everywhere the impression of appealing to any attested interest for the
word, the _fin mot_, of what it may mean; but I somehow see those parts
of it most at a loss that are already explained not a little by the
ample possession of money. This is the amiable side there of the large
developments of private ease in general—the amiable side of those
numerous groups that are rich enough and, in the happy vulgar phrase,
bloated enough, to be candidates for the classic imputation of
haughtiness. The amiability proceeds from an essential vagueness;
whereas real haughtiness is never vague about itself—it is only vague
about others. That is the human note in the huge American rattle of
gold—so far as the “social” field is the scene of the rattle. The
“business” field is a different matter—as to which the determination of
the audibility in it of the human note (so interesting to try for if one
had but the warrant) is a line of research closed to me, alas, by my
fatally uninitiated state. My point is, at all events, that you cannot
be “hard,” really, with any society that affects you as ready to learn
from you, and from this resource for it of your detachment combining
with your proximity, what in the name of all its possessions and all its
destitutions it would honestly be “at.”



                                  III
                        NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON
                          A SPRING IMPRESSION


                                   I

It was a concomitant, always, of the down-town hour that it could be
felt as _most_ playing into the surrendered consciousness and making the
sharpest impression; yet, since the up-town hour was apt, in its turn,
to claim the same distinction, I could only let each of them take its
way with me as it would. The oddity was that they seemed not at all to
speak of different things—by so quick a process does any one aspect, in
the United States, in general, I was to note, connect itself with the
rest; so little does any link in the huge looseness of New York, in
especial, appear to come as a whole, or as final, out of the fusion. The
fusion, as of elements in solution in a vast hot pot, is always going
on, and one stage of the process is as typical or as vivid as another.
Whatever I might be looking at, or be struck with, the object or the
phase was an item in the pressing conditions of the place, and as such
had more in common with its sister items than it had in difference from
them. It mattered little, moreover, whether this might be a proof that
New York, among cities, most deeply languishes and palpitates, or
vibrates and flourishes (whichever way one may put it) under the breath
of her conditions, or whether, simply, this habit of finding a little of
_all_ my impressions reflected in any one of them testified to the
enjoyment of a real relation with the subject. I like indeed to think of
my relation to New York as, in that manner, almost inexpressibly
intimate, and as hence making, for daily sensation, a keyboard as
continuous, and as free from hard transitions, as if swept by the
fingers of a master-pianist. You cannot, surely, say more for your sense
of the underlying unity of an occasion than that the taste of each dish
in the banquet recalls the taste of most of the others; which is what I
mean by the “continuity,” not to say the affinity, on the island of
Manhattan, between the fish and the sweets, between the soup and the
game. The whole feast affects one as eaten—that is the point—with the
general queer sauce of New York; a preparation as freely diffused,
somehow, on the East side as on the West, in the quarter of Grand Street
as in the quarter of Murray Hill. No fact, I hasten to add, would appear
to make the place more amenable to delineations of the order that may be
spoken of as hanging together.

I must confess, notwithstanding, to not being quite ready to point
directly to the common element in the dense Italian neighbourhoods of
the lower East side, and in the upper reaches of Fifth and of Madison
Avenues; though indeed I wonder at this inability in recollecting two or
three of those charming afternoons of early summer, in Central Park,
which showed the fruit of the foreign tree as shaken down there with a
force that smothered everything else. The long residential vistas I have
named were within a quarter of an hour’s walk, but the alien was as
truly in possession, under the high “aristocratic” nose, as if he had
had but three steps to come. If it be asked why, the alien still
striking you so as an alien, the singleness of impression, throughout
the place, should still be so marked, the answer, close at hand, would
seem to be that the alien himself fairly _makes_ the singleness of
impression. Is not the universal sauce essentially _his_ sauce, and do
we not feel ourselves feeding, half the time, from the ladle, as greasy
as he chooses to leave it for us, that he holds out? Such questions were
in my ears, at all events, with the cheerful hum of that babel of
tongues established in the vernal Park, and they supplied, beyond doubt,
the livelier interest of any hour of contemplation there. I hate to
drift into dealing with them at the expense of a proper tribute, kept
distinct and vivid, to the charming bosky precinct itself, the great
field of recreation with which they swarmed; but it could not be the
fault of the brooding visitor, and still less that of the restored
absentee, if he was conscious of the need of mental adjustment to
phenomena absolutely fresh. He could remember still how, months before,
a day or two after his restoration, a noted element of one of his first
impressions had been this particular revealed anomaly. He had been, on
the Jersey shore, walking with a couple of friends through the grounds
of a large new rural residence, where groups of diggers and ditchers
were working, on those lines of breathless haste which seem always, in
the United States, of the essence of any question, toward an expensive
effect of landscape gardening. To pause before them, for interest in
their labour, was, and would have been everywhere, instinctive; but what
came home to me on the spot was that whatever _more_ would have been
anywhere else involved had here inevitably to lapse.

What lapsed, on the spot, was the element of communication with the
workers, as I may call it for want of a better name; that element which,
in a European country, would have operated, from side to side, as the
play of mutual recognition, founded on old familiarities and heredities,
and involving, for the moment, some impalpable exchange. The men, in the
case I speak of, were Italians, of superlatively southern type, and any
impalpable exchange struck me as absent from the air to positive
intensity, to mere unthinkability. It was as if contact were out of the
question and the sterility of the passage between us recorded, with due
dryness, in our staring silence. This impression was for one of the
party a shock—a member of the party for whom, on the other side of the
world, the imagination of the main furniture, as it might be called, of
any rural excursion, of _the_ rural in particular, had been, during
years, the easy sense, for the excursionist, of a social relation with
any encountered type, from whichever end of the scale proceeding. Had
that not ever been, exactly, a part of the vague warmth, the intrinsic
colour, of any honest man’s rural walk in his England or his Italy, his
Germany or his France, and was not the effect of its so suddenly
dropping out, in the land of universal brotherhood—for I was to find it
drop out again and again—rather a chill, straightway, for the heart, and
rather a puzzle, not less, for the head? Shortly after the spring of
this question was first touched for me I found it ring out again with a
sharper stroke. Happening to have lost my way, during a long ramble
among the New Hampshire hills, I appealed, for information, at a parting
of the roads, to a young man whom, at the moment of my need, I happily
saw emerge from a neighbouring wood. But his stare was blank, in answer
to my inquiry, and, seeing that he failed to understand me and that he
had a dark-eyed “Latin” look, I jumped to the inference of his being a
French Canadian. My repetition of my query in French, however, forwarded
the case as little, and my trying him with Italian had no better effect.
“What _are_ you then?” I wonderingly asked—on which my accent loosened
in him the faculty of speech. “I’m an Armenian,” he replied, as if it
were the most natural thing in the world for a wage-earning youth in the
heart of New England to be—so that all I could do was to try and make my
profit of the lesson. I could have made it better, for the occasion, if,
even on the Armenian basis, he had appeared to expect brotherhood; but
this had been as little his seeming as it had been that of the diggers
by the Jersey shore.

To inquire of these things on the spot, to betray, that is, one’s sense
of the “chill” of which I have spoken, is of course to hear it admitted,
promptly enough, that there is no claim to brotherhood with aliens in
the first grossness of their alienism. The material of which they
consist is being dressed and prepared, at this stage, for brotherhood,
and the consummation, in respect to many of them, will not be, can not
from the nature of the case be, in any lifetime of their own. Their
children are another matter—as in fact the children throughout the
United States, are an immense matter, are almost the greatest matter of
all; it is the younger generation who will fully profit, rise to the
occasion and enter into the privilege. The machinery is colossal—nothing
is more characteristic of the country than the development of this
machinery, in the form of the political and social habit, the common
school and the newspaper; so that there are always millions of little
transformed strangers growing up in regard to whom the idea of intimacy
of relation may be as freely cherished as you like. _They_ are the stuff
of whom brothers and sisters are made, and the making proceeds on a
scale that really need leave nothing to desire. All this you take in,
with a wondering mind, and in the light of it the great “ethnic”
question rises before you on a corresponding scale and with a
corresponding majesty. Once it has set your observation, to say nothing
of your imagination, working, it becomes for you, as you go and come,
the wonderment to which everything ministers and that is quickened
well-nigh to madness, in some places and on some occasions, by every
face and every accent that meet your eyes and ears. The sense of the
elements in the cauldron—the cauldron of the “American”
character—becomes thus about as vivid a thing as you can at all quietly
manage, and the question settles into a form which makes the
intelligible answer further and further recede. “What meaning, in the
presence of such impressions, can continue to attach to such a term as
the ‘American’ character?—what type, as the result of such a prodigious
amalgam, such a hotch-potch of racial ingredients, is to be conceived as
shaping itself?” The challenge to speculation, fed thus by a thousand
sources, is so intense as to be, as I say, irritating; but practically,
beyond doubt, I should also say, you take refuge from it—since your case
would otherwise be hard; and you find your relief not in the least in
any direct satisfaction or solution, but absolutely in that blest
general drop of the immediate need of conclusions, or rather in that
blest general feeling for the impossibility of them, to which the
philosophy of any really fine observation of the American spectacle must
reduce itself, and the large intellectual, quite even the large
æsthetic, margin supplied by which accompanies the spectator as his one
positively complete comfort.

It is more than a comfort to him, truly, in all the conditions, this
accepted vision of the too-defiant scale of numerosity and quantity—the
effect of which is so to multiply the possibilities, so to open, by the
million, contingent doors and windows: he rests in it at last as an
absolute luxury, converting it even into a substitute, into _the_
constant substitute, for many luxuries that are absent. He doesn’t
_know_, he can’t _say_, before the facts, and he doesn’t even want to
know or to say; the facts themselves loom, before the understanding, in
too large a mass for a mere mouthful: it is as if the syllables were too
numerous to make a legible word. The _il_legible word, accordingly, the
great inscrutable answer to questions, hangs in the vast American sky,
to his imagination, as something fantastic and _abracadabrant_,
belonging to no known language, and it is under this convenient ensign
that he travels and considers and contemplates, and, to the best of his
ability, enjoys. The interesting point, in the connection, is moreover
that this particular effect of the scale of things is the only effect
that, throughout the land, is not directly adverse to joy. Extent and
reduplication, the multiplication of cognate items and the continuity of
motion, are elements that count, there, in general, for fatigue and
satiety, prompting the earnest observer, overburdened perhaps already a
little by his earnestness, to the reflection that the country is too
large for any human convenience, that it can scarce, in the scheme of
Providence, have been meant to be dealt with as we are trying, perhaps
all in vain, to deal with it, and that its very possibilities of
population themselves cause one to wince in the light of the question of
intercourse and contact. That relation to its superficies and
content—the relation of flat fatigue—is, with the traveller, a constant
quantity; so that he feels himself justified of the inward, the
philosophic, escape into the immensity. And as it is the restored
absentee, with his acquired habit of nearer limits and shorter journeys
and more muffled concussions, who is doubtless most subject to flat
fatigue, so it is this same personage who most avails himself of the
liberty of waiting to see. It is an advantage—acting often in the way of
a compensation, or of an appeal from the immediate—that he becomes,
early in his period of inquiry, conscious of intimately invoking, in
whatever apparent inconsistency it may lodge him. There is too much of
the whole thing, he sighs, for the personal relation with it; and yet he
would desire no inch less for the relation that he describes to himself
best perhaps either as the provisionally-imaginative or as the
distantly-respectful. Diminution of quantity, even by that inch, might
mark the difference of his having to begin to recognize from afar, as
through a rift in the obscurity, the gleam of some propriety of opinion.
What would a man make, many things still being as they are, he finds
himself asking, of a _small_ America?—and what may a big one, on the
other hand, still not make of itself? Goodness be thanked, accordingly,
for the bigness. The state of flat fatigue, obviously, is not an
opinion, save in the sense attributed to the slumber of the gentleman of
the anecdote who had lost consciousness during the reading of the
play—it belongs to the order of mere sensation and impression; and as to
these the case is quite different: he may have as many of each as he can
carry.


                                   II

The process of the mitigation and, still more, of the conversion of the
alien goes on, meanwhile, obviously, not by leaps and bounds or any form
of easy magic, but under its own mystic laws and with an outward air of
quite declining to be unduly precipitated. How little it may be thought
of in New York as a quick business we readily perceive as the effect of
merely remembering the vast numbers of their kind that the arriving
reinforcements, from whatever ends of the earth, find already in
possession of the field. There awaits the disembarked Armenian, for
instance, so warm and furnished an Armenian corner that the need of
hurrying to get rid of the sense of it must become less and less a
pressing preliminary. The corner growing warmer and warmer, it is to be
supposed, by rich accretions, he may take his time, more and more, for
becoming absorbed in the surrounding element, and he may in fact feel
more and more that he can do so on his own conditions. I seem to find
indeed in this latter truth a hint for the best expression of a whole
side of New York—the best expression of much of the medium in which one
consciously moves. It is formed by this fact that the alien is taking
his time, and that you go about with him meanwhile, sharing, all
respectfully, in his deliberation, waiting on his convenience, watching
him at his interesting work. The vast foreign quarters of the city
present him as thus engaged in it, and they are curious and portentous
and “picturesque” just by reason of their doing so. You recognize in
them, freely, those elements that are not elements of swift
convertibility, and you lose yourself in the wonder of what becomes, as
it were, of the obstinate, the unconverted residuum. The country at
large, as you cross it in different senses, keeps up its character for
you as the hugest thinkable organism for successful “assimilation”; but
the assimilative force itself has the residuum still to count with. The
operation of the immense machine, identical after all with the total of
American life, trembles away into mysteries that are beyond our present
notation and that reduce us in many a mood to renouncing analysis.

Who and what is an alien, when it comes to that, in a country peopled
from the first under the jealous eye of history?—peopled, that is, by
migrations at once extremely recent, perfectly traceable and urgently
required. They are still, it would appear, urgently required—if we look
about far enough for the urgency; though of that truth such a scene as
New York may well make one doubt. Which is the American, by these scant
measures?—which is _not_ the alien, over a large part of the country at
least, and where does one put a finger on the dividing line, or, for
that matter, “spot” and identify any particular phase of the conversion,
any one of its successive moments? The sense of the interest of so doing
is doubtless half the interest of the general question—the possibility
of our seeing lucidly presented some such phenomenon, in a given group
of persons, or even in a felicitous individual, as the dawn of the
American spirit while the declining rays of the Croatian, say, or of the
Calabrian, or of the Lusitanian, still linger more or less pensively in
the sky. Fifty doubts and queries come up, in regard to any such
possibility, as one circulates in New York, with the so ambiguous
element in the _launched_ foreign personality always in one’s eyes; the
wonder, above all, of whether there be, comparatively, in the vastly
greater number of the representatives of the fresh contingent, any
spirit that the American does not find an easy prey. Repeatedly, in the
electric cars, one seemed invited to take that for granted—there being
occasions, days and weeks together, when the electric cars offer you
nothing else to think of. The carful, again and again, is a foreign
carful; a row of faces, up and down, testifying, without exception, to
alienism unmistakable, alienism undisguised and unashamed. You do here,
in a manner perhaps, discriminate; the launched condition, as I have
called it, is more developed in some types than in others; but I
remember observing how, in the Broadway and the Bowery conveyances in
especial, they tended, almost alike, to make the observer gasp with the
sense of isolation. It was not for this that the observer on whose
behalf I more particularly write had sought to take up again the sweet
sense of the natal air.

The great fact about his companions was that, foreign as they might be,
newly inducted as they might be, they were _at home_, really more at
home, at the end of their few weeks or months or their year or two, than
they had ever in their lives been before; and that _he_ was at home too,
quite with the same intensity: and yet that it was this very equality of
condition that, from side to side, made the whole medium so strange.
Here again, however, relief may be sought and found—and I say this at
the risk of perhaps picturing the restored absentee as too constantly
requiring it; for there is fascination in the study of the innumerable
ways in which this sense of being at home, on the part of all the types,
may show forth. New York offers to such a study a well-nigh unlimited
field, but I seem to recall winter days, harsh, dusky, sloshy winter
afternoons, in the densely-packed East-side street-cars, as an
especially intimate surrender to it. It took its place thus, I think,
under the general American law of _all_ relief from the great equalizing
pressure: it took on that last disinterestedness which consists of one’s
getting away from one’s subject by plunging into it, for sweet truth’s
sake, still deeper. If I speak, moreover, of this general first
grossness of alienism as presented in “types,” I use that word for easy
convenience and not in respect to its indicating marked variety. There
are many different ways, certainly, in which obscure fighters of the
battle of life may look, under new high lights, queer and crude and
unwrought; but the striking thing, precisely, in the crepuscular,
tunnel-like avenues that the “Elevated” overarches—yet without
quenching, either, that constant power of any American exhibition rather
luridly to light itself—the striking thing, and the beguiling, was
always the manner in which figure after figure and face after face
already betrayed the common consequence and action of their whereabouts.
Face after face, unmistakably, was “low”—particularly in the men,
squared all solidly in their new security and portability, their vague
but growing sense of many unprecedented things; and as signs of the
reinforcing of a large local conception of manners and relations it was
difficult to say if they most affected one as promising or as
portentous.

The great thing, at any rate, was that they were all together so visibly
on the new, the lifted level—that of consciously not being what they
_had_ been, and that this immediately glazed them over as with some
mixture, of indescribable hue and consistency, the wholesale varnish of
consecration, that might have been applied, out of a bottomless
receptacle, by a huge white-washing brush. Here, perhaps, was the
nearest approach to a seizable step in the evolution of the oncoming
citizen, the stage of his no longer being for you—for any complacency of
the romantic, or even verily of the fraternizing, sense in you—the
foreigner of the quality, of the kind, that he might have been _chez
lui_. Whatever he might see himself becoming, he was never to see
himself that again, any more than you were ever to see him. He became
then, to my vision (which I have called fascinated for want of a better
description of it), a creature promptly despoiled of those “manners”
which were the grace (as I am again reduced to calling it) by which one
had best known and, on opportunity, best liked him. He presents himself
thus, most of all, to be plain—and not only in New York, but throughout
the country—as wonderingly conscious that his manners of the other
world, that everything you have there known and praised him for, have
been a huge mistake: to that degree that the sense of this luminous
discovery is what we mainly imagine his weighted communications to those
he has left behind charged with; those rich letters home as to the
number and content of which the Post Office gives us so remarkable a
statistic. If there are several lights in which the great assimilative
organism itself may be looked at, does it not still perhaps loom largest
as an agent for revealing to the citizen-to-be the error in question? He
hears it, under this aegis, proclaimed in a thousand voices, and it is
as listening to these and as, according to the individual, more or less
swiftly, but always infallibly, penetrated and convinced by them, that I
felt myself see him go about his business, see him above all, for some
odd reason, sit there in the street-car, and with a slow, brooding
gravity, a dim calculation of bearings, which yet never takes a backward
step, expand to the full measure of it.

So, in New York, largely, the “American” value of the immigrant who
arrives at all mature is restricted to the enjoyment (all prepared to
increase) of that important preliminary truth; which makes him for us,
we must own, till more comes of it, a tolerably neutral and colourless
image. He resembles for the time the dog who sniffs round the
freshly-acquired bone, giving it a push and a lick, betraying a sense of
its possibilities, but not—and quite as from a positive deep tremor of
consciousness—directly attacking it. There are categories of foreigners,
truly, meanwhile, of whom we are moved to say that only a mechanism
working with scientific force could have performed this feat of making
them colourless. The Italians, who, over the whole land, strike us, I am
afraid, as, after the Negro and the Chinaman, the human value most
easily produced, the Italians meet us, at every turn, only to make us
ask what has become of that element of the agreeable address in _them_
which has, from far back, so enhanced for the stranger the interest and
pleasure of a visit to their beautiful country. They shed it utterly, I
couldn’t but observe, on their advent, after a deep inhalation or two of
the clear native air; shed it with a conscientious completeness which
leaves one looking for any faint trace of it. “Colour,” of that pleasant
sort, was what they had appeared, among the races of the European
family, most to have; so that the effect I speak of, the rapid action of
the ambient air, is like that of the tub of hot water that reduces a
piece of bright-hued stuff, on immersion, to the proved state of not
“washing”: the only fault of my image indeed being that if the stuff
loses its brightness the water of the tub at least is more or less
agreeably dyed with it. That is doubtless not the case for the ambient
air operating after the fashion I here note—since we surely fail to
observe that the property washed out of the new subject begins to tint
with its pink or its azure his fellow-soakers in the terrible tank. If
this property that has quitted him—the general amenity of attitude in
the absence of provocation to its opposite—could be accounted for by its
having rubbed off on any number of surrounding persons, the whole
process would be easier and perhaps more comforting to follow. It will
not have been his first occasion of taking leave of short-sighted
comfort in the United States, however, if the patient inquirer postpones
that ideal to the real solicitation of the question I here touch on.

What _does_ become of the various positive properties, on the part of
certain of the installed tribes, the good manners, say, among them, as
to which the process of shedding and the fact of eclipse come so
promptly into play? It has taken long ages of history, in the other
world, to produce them, and you ask yourself, with independent
curiosity, if they may really be thus extinguished in an hour. And if
they are not extinguished, into what pathless tracts of the native
atmosphere do they virtually, do they provisionally, and so all
undiscoverably, melt? Do they burrow underground, to await their day
again?—or in what strange secret places are they held in deposit and in
trust? The “American” identity that has profited by their sacrifice has
meanwhile acquired (in the happiest cases) all apparent confidence and
consistency; but may not the doubt remain of whether the extinction of
qualities ingrained in generations is to be taken for quite complete?
Isn’t it conceivable that, for something like a final efflorescence, the
business of slow comminglings and makings-over at last ended, they may
rise again to the surface, affirming their vitality and value and
playing their part? It would be for them, of course, in this event, to
attest that they had been worth waiting so long for; but the
speculation, at any rate, irresistibly forced upon us, is a sign of the
interest, in the American world, of what I have called the “ethnic”
outlook. The cauldron, for the great stew, has such circumference and
such depth that we can only deal here with ultimate syntheses, ultimate
combinations and possibilities. Yet I am well aware that if these vague
evocations of them, in their nebulous remoteness, may charm the
ingenuity of the student of the scene, there are matters of the
foreground that they have no call to supplant. Any temptation to let
them do so is meanwhile, no doubt, but a proof of that impulse
irresponsibly to escape from the formidable foreground which so often,
in the American world, lies in wait for the spirit of intellectual
dalliance.


                                  III

New York really, I think, is all formidable foreground; or, if it be
not, there is more than enough of this pressure of the present and the
immediate to cut out the close sketcher’s work for him. These things are
a thick growth all round him, and when I recall the intensity of the
material picture in the dense Yiddish quarter, for instance, I wonder at
its not having forestalled, on my page, mere musings and, as they will
doubtless be called, moonings. There abides with me, ineffaceably, the
memory of a summer evening spent there by invitation of a high public
functionary domiciled on the spot—to the extreme enhancement of the
romantic interest his visitor found him foredoomed to inspire—who was to
prove one of the most liberal of hosts and most luminous of guides. I
can scarce help it if this brilliant personality, on that occasion the
very medium itself through which the whole spectacle showed, so colours
my impressions that if I speak, by intention, of the facts that played
into them I may really but reflect the rich talk and the general
privilege of the hour. That accident moreover must take its place simply
as the highest value and the strongest note in the total show—so much
did it testify to the quality of appealing, surrounding life. The sense
of this quality was already strong in my drive, with a companion,
through the long, warm June twilight, from a comparatively conventional
neighbourhood; it was the sense, after all, of a great swarming, a
swarming that had begun to thicken, infinitely, as soon as we had
crossed to the East side and long before we had got to Rutgers Street.
There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got a
start, and the scene here bristled, at every step, with the signs and
sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds.
That it has burst all bounds in New York, almost any combination of
figures or of objects taken at hazard sufficiently proclaims; but I
remember how the rising waters, on this summer night, rose, to the
imagination, even above the housetops and seemed to sound their murmur
to the pale distant stars. It was as if we had been thus, in the
crowded, hustled roadway, where multiplication, multiplication of
everything, was the dominant note, at the bottom of some vast sallow
aquarium in which innumerable fish, of over-developed proboscis, were to
bump together, for ever, amid heaped spoils of the sea.

The children swarmed above all—here was multiplication with a vengeance;
and the number of very old persons, of either sex, was almost equally
remarkable; the very old persons being in equal vague occupation of the
doorstep, pavement, curbstone, gutter, roadway, and every one alike
using the street for overflow. As overflow, in the whole quarter, is the
main fact of life—I was to learn later on that, with the exception of
some shy corner of Asia, no district in the world known to the
statistician has so many inhabitants to the yard—the scene hummed with
the human presence beyond any I had ever faced in quest even of
refreshment; producing part of the impression, moreover, no doubt, as a
direct consequence of the intensity of the Jewish aspect. This, I think,
makes the individual Jew more of a concentrated person, savingly
possessed of everything that is in him, than any other human, noted at
random—or is it simply, rather, that the unsurpassed strength of the
race permits of the chopping into myriads of fine fragments without loss
of race-quality? There are small strange animals, known to natural
history, snakes or worms, I believe, who, when cut into pieces, wriggle
away contentedly and live in the snippet as completely as in the whole.
So the denizens of the New York Ghetto, heaped as thick as the splinters
on the table of a glass-blower, had each, like the fine glass particle,
his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter of Israel. This
diffused intensity, as I have called it, causes any array of Jews to
resemble (if I may be allowed another image) some long nocturnal street
where every window in every house shows a maintained light. The advanced
age of so many of the figures, the ubiquity of the children, carried out
in fact this analogy; they were all there for race, and not, as it were,
for reason: that excess of lurid meaning, in some of the old men’s and
old women’s faces in particular, would have been absurd, in the
conditions, as a really directed attention—it could only be the gathered
past of Israel mechanically pushing through. The way, at the same time,
this chapter of history did, all that evening, seem to push, was a
matter that made the “ethnic” apparition again sit like a skeleton at
the feast. It was fairly as if I could see the spectre grin while the
talk of the hour gave me, across the board, facts and figures, chapter
and verse, for the extent of the Hebrew conquest of New York. With a
reverence for intellect, one should doubtless have drunk in tribute to
an intellectual people; but I remember being at no time more conscious
of that merely portentous element, in the aspects of American growth,
which reduces to inanity any marked dismay quite as much as any high
elation. The portent is one of too many—you always come back, as I have
hinted, with your easier gasp, to _that_: it will be time enough to sigh
or to shout when the relation of the particular appearance to all the
other relations shall have cleared itself up. Phantasmagoric for me,
accordingly, in a high degree, are the interesting hours I here glance
at content to remain—setting in this respect, I recognize, an excellent
example to all the rest of the New York phantasmagoria. Let me speak of
the remainder only as phantasmagoric too, so that I may both the more
kindly recall it and the sooner have done with it.

I have not done, however, with the impression of that large evening in
the Ghetto; there was too much in the vision, and it has left too much
the sense of a rare experience. For what did it all really come to but
that one had seen with one’s eyes the New Jerusalem on earth? What less
than that could it all have been, in its far-spreading light and its
celestial serenity of multiplication? There it was, there it is, and
when I think of the dark, foul, stifling Ghettos of other remembered
cities, I shall think by the same stroke of the city of redemption, and
evoke in particular the rich Rutgers Street perspective—rich, so
peculiarly, for the eye, in that complexity of fire-escapes with which
each house-front bristles and which gives the whole vista so modernized
and appointed a look. Omnipresent in the “poor” regions, this neat
applied machinery has, for the stranger, a common side with the electric
light and the telephone, suggests the distance achieved from the old
Jerusalem. (These frontal iron ladders and platforms, by the way, so
numerous throughout New York, strike more New York notes than can be
parenthetically named—and among them perhaps most sharply the note of
the ease with which, in the terrible town, on opportunity,
“architecture” goes by the board; but the appearance to which they often
most conduce is that of the spaciously organized cage for the nimbler
class of animals in some great zoological garden. This general analogy
is irresistible—it seems to offer, in each district, a little world of
bars and perches and swings for human squirrels and monkeys. The very
name of architecture perishes, for the fire-escapes look like abashed
afterthoughts, staircases and communications forgotten in the
construction; but the inhabitants lead, like the squirrels and monkeys,
all the merrier life.) It was while I hung over the prospect from the
windows of my friend, however, the presiding genius of the district, and
it was while, at a later hour, I proceeded in his company, and in that
of a trio of contributive fellow-pilgrims, from one “characteristic”
place of public entertainment to another: it was during this rich
climax, I say, that the city of redemption was least to be taken for
anything less than it was. The windows, while we sat at meat, looked out
on a swarming little square in which an ant-like population darted to
and fro; the square consisted in part of a “district” public garden, or
public lounge rather, one of those small backwaters or refuges, artfully
economized for rest, here and there, in the very heart of the New York
whirlpool, and which spoke louder than anything else of a Jerusalem
disinfected. What spoke loudest, no doubt, was the great overtowering
School which formed a main boundary and in the shadow of which we all
comparatively crouched.

But the School must not lead me on just yet—so colossally has its
presence still to loom for us; that presence which profits so, for
predominance, in America, by the failure of concurrent and competitive
presences, the failure of any others looming at all on the same scale
save that of Business, those in particular of a visible Church, a
visible State, a visible Society, a visible Past; those of the many
visibilities, in short, that warmly cumber the ground in older
countries. Yet it also spoke loud that my friend was quartered, for the
interest of the thing (from his so interesting point of view), in a
“tenement-house”; the New Jerusalem would so have triumphed, had it
triumphed nowhere else, in the fact that this charming little structure
_could_ be ranged, on the wonderful little square, under that invidious
head. On my asking to what latent vice it owed its stigma, I was asked
in return if it didn’t sufficiently pay for its name by harbouring some
five-and-twenty families. But this, exactly, was the way it
testified—this circumstance of the simultaneous enjoyment by
five-and-twenty families, on “tenement” lines, of conditions so little
sordid, so highly “evolved.” I remember the evolved fire-proof
staircase, a thing of scientific surfaces, impenetrable to the microbe,
and above all plated, against side friction, with white marble of a
goodly grain. The white marble was surely the New Jerusalem note, and we
followed that note, up and down the district, the rest of the evening,
through more happy changes than I may take time to count. What struck me
in the flaring streets (over and beyond the everywhere insistent,
defiant, unhumorous, exotic face) was the blaze of the shops addressed
to the New Jerusalem wants and the splendour with which these were taken
for granted; the only thing indeed a little ambiguous was just this look
of the trap too brilliantly, too candidly baited for the wary side of
Israel itself. It is not _for_ Israel, in general, that Israel so
artfully shines—yet its being moved to do so, at last, in that luxurious
style, might be precisely the grand side of the city of redemption. Who
can ever tell, moreover, in any conditions and in presence of any
apparent anomaly, what the genius of Israel may, or may not, really be
“up to”?

The grateful way to take it all, at any rate, was with the sense of its
coming back again to the inveterate rise, in the American air, of every
value, and especially of the lower ones, those most subject to
multiplication; such a wealth of meaning did this keep appearing to pour
into the value and function of the country at large. Importances are all
strikingly shifted and reconstituted, in the United States, for the
visitor attuned, from far back, to “European” importances; but I think
of no other moment of my total impression as so sharply working over my
own benighted vision of them. The scale, in this light of the New
Jerusalem, seemed completely rearranged; or, to put it more simply, the
wants, the gratifications, the aspirations of the “poor,” as expressed
in the shops (which were the shops of the “poor”), denoted a new style
of poverty; and this new style of poverty, from street to street, stuck
out of the possible purchasers, one’s jostling fellow-pedestrians, and
made them, to every man and woman, individual throbs in the larger
harmony. One can speak only of what one has seen, and there were grosser
elements of the sordid and the squalid that I doubtless never saw. That,
with a good deal of observation and of curiosity, I should have failed
of this, the country over, affected me as by itself something of an
indication. To miss that part of the spectacle, or to know it only by
its having so unfamiliar a pitch, was an indication that made up for a
great many others. It is when this one in particular is forced home to
you—this immense, vivid _general_ lift of poverty and general
appreciation of the living unit’s paying property in himself—that the
picture seems most to clear and the way to jubilation most to open. For
it meets you there, at every turn, as the result most definitely
attested. You are as constantly reminded, no doubt, that these rises in
enjoyed value shrink and dwindle under the icy breath of Trusts and the
weight of the new remorseless monopolies that operate as no madnesses of
ancient personal power thrilling us on the historic page ever operated;
the living unit’s property in himself becoming more and more merely such
a property as may consist with a relation to properties overwhelmingly
greater and that allow the asking of no questions and the making, for
co-existence with them, of no conditions. But that, in the fortunate
phrase, is another story, and will be altogether, evidently, a new and
different drama. There is such a thing, in the United States, it is
hence to be inferred, as freedom to grow up to be blighted, and it may
be the only freedom in store for the smaller fry of future generations.
If it is accordingly of the smaller fry I speak, and of how large they
massed on that evening of endless admonitions, this will be because I
caught them thus in their comparative humility and at an early stage of
their American growth. The life-thread has, I suppose, to be of a
certain thickness for the great shears of Fate to feel for it. Put it,
at the worst, that the Ogres were to devour them, they were but the more
certainly to fatten into food for the Ogres.

Their dream, at all events, as I noted it, was meanwhile sweet and
undisguised—nowhere sweeter than in the half-dozen picked beer-houses
and cafés in which our ingenuous _enquête_, that of my fellow-pilgrims
and I, wound up. These establishments had each been selected for its
playing off some facet of the jewel, and they wondrously testified, by
their range and their individual colour, to the spread of that lustre.
It was a pious rosary of which I should like to tell each bead, but I
must let the general sense of the adventure serve. Our successive
stations were in no case of the “seamy” order, an inquiry into seaminess
having been unanimously pronounced futile, but each had its separate
social connotation, and it was for the number and variety of these
connotations, and their individual plenitude and prosperity, to set one
thinking. Truly the Yiddish world was a vast world, with its own deeps
and complexities, and what struck one above all was that it sat there at
its cups (and in no instance vulgarly the worse for them) with a
sublimity of good conscience that took away the breath, a protrusion of
elbow never aggressive, but absolutely proof against jostling. It was
the incurable man of letters under the skin of one of the party who
gasped, I confess; for it was in the light of letters, that is in the
light of our language as literature has hitherto known it, that one
stared at this all-unconscious impudence of the agency of future ravage.
The man of letters, in the United States, has his own difficulties to
face and his own current to stem—for dealing with which his liveliest
inspiration may be, I think, that they are still very much his own, even
in an Americanized world, and that more than elsewhere they press him to
intimate communion with his honour. For that honour, the honour that
sits astride of the consecrated English tradition, to his mind, quite as
old knighthood astride of its caparisoned charger, the dragon most
rousing, over the land, the proper spirit of St. George, is just this
immensity of the alien presence climbing higher and higher, climbing
itself into the very light of publicity.

I scarce know why, but I saw it that evening as in some dim dawn of that
promise to its own consciousness, and perhaps this was precisely what
made it a little exasperating. Under the impression of the mere mob the
question doesn’t come up, but in these haunts of comparative civility we
saw the mob sifted and strained, and the exasperation was the sharper,
no doubt, because what the process had left most visible was just the
various possibilities of the waiting spring of intelligence. Such
elements constituted the germ of a “public,” and it was impossible
(possessed of a sensibility worth speaking of) to be exposed to them
without feeling how new a thing under the sun the resulting public would
be. That was where one’s “lettered” anguish came in—in the turn of one’s
eye from face to face for some betrayal of a prehensile hook for the
linguistic tradition as one had known it. Each warm lighted and supplied
circle, each group of served tables and smoked pipes and fostered
decencies and unprecedented accents, beneath the extravagant lamps, took
on thus, for the brooding critic, a likeness to that terrible modernized
and civilized room in the Tower of London, haunted by the shade of Guy
Fawkes, which had more than once formed part of the scene of the
critic’s taking tea there. In this chamber of the present urbanities the
wretched man had been stretched on the rack, and the critic’s ear (how
else should it have been a critic’s?) could still always catch, in
pauses of talk, the faint groan of his ghost. Just so the East side
cafés—and increasingly as their place in the scale was higher—showed to
my inner sense, beneath their bedizenment, as torture-rooms of the
living idiom; the piteous gasp of which at the portent of lacerations to
come could reach me in any drop of the surrounding Accent of the Future.
The accent of the very ultimate future, in the States, may be destined
to become the most beautiful on the globe and the very music of humanity
(here the “ethnic” synthesis shrouds itself thicker than ever); but
whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for
English—in any sense for which there is an existing literary measure.


                                   IV

The huge jagged city, it must be nevertheless said, has always at the
worst, for propitiation, the resource of its easy reference to its
almost incomparable river. New York may indeed be jagged, in her long
leanness, where she lies looking at the sky in the manner of some
colossal hair-comb turned upward and so deprived of half its teeth that
the others, at their uneven intervals, count doubly as sharp spikes;
but, unmistakably, you can bear with some of her aspects and her airs
better when you have really taken in that reference—which I speak of as
easy because she has in this latter time begun to make it with an
appearance of some intention. She has come at last, far up on the West
side, into possession of her birthright, into the roused consciousness
that some possibility of a river-front may still remain to her; though,
obviously, a justified pride in this property has yet to await the birth
of a more responsible sense of style in her dealings with it, the dawn
of some adequate plan or controlling idea. Splendid the elements of
position, on the part of the new Riverside Drive (over the small
suburbanizing name of which, as at the effect of a second-rate shop-worn
article, we sigh as we pass); yet not less irresistible the pang of our
seeing it settle itself on meagre, bourgeois, happy-go-lucky lines. The
pity of this is sharp in proportion as the “chance” has been
magnificent, and the soreness of perception of what merely might have
been is as constant as the flippancy of the little vulgar “private
houses” or the big vulgar “apartment hotels” that are having their own
way, so unchallenged, with the whole question of composition and
picture. The fatal “tall” pecuniary enterprise rises where it will, in
the candid glee of new worlds to conquer; the intervals between take
whatever foolish little form they like; the sky-line, eternal victim of
the artless jumble, submits again to the type of the broken hair-comb
turned up; the streets that abut from the East condescend at their
corners to any crudity or poverty that may suit their convenience. And
all this in presence of an occasion for noble congruity such as one
scarce knows where to seek in the case of another great city.

A sense of the waste of criticism, however, a sense that is almost in
itself consoling, descends upon the fond critic after his vision has
fixed the scene awhile in this light of its lost accessibility to some
informed and benevolent despot, some power working in one great way and
so that the interest of beauty should have been better saved. Is not
criticism wasted, in other words, just by the reason of the constant
remembrance, on New York soil, that one is almost impudently cheated by
any part of the show that pretends to prolong its actuality or to rest
on its present basis? Since every part, however blazingly new, fails to
affect us as doing more than hold the ground for something else, some
conceit of the bigger dividend, that is still to come, so we may bind up
the æsthetic wound, I think, quite as promptly as we feel it open. The
particular ugliness, or combination of uglinesses, is no more final than
the particular felicity (since there are several even of these up and
down the town to be noted), and whatever crudely-extemporized look the
Riverside heights may wear to-day, the spectator of fifty years hence
will find his sorrow, if not his joy, in a different extemporization.
The whole thing is the vividest of lectures on the subject of
individualism, and on the strange truth, no doubt, that this principle
may in the field of art—at least if the art be architecture—often
conjure away just that mystery of distinction which it sometimes so
markedly promotes in the field of life. It is also quite as suggestive
perhaps on the ever-interesting question, for the artist, of the
entirely relative nature and value of “treatment.” A manner so right in
one relation may be so wrong in another, and a house-front so “amusing”
for its personal note, or its perversity, in a short perspective, may
amid larger elements merely dishonour the harmony. And yet why _should_
the charm ever fall out of the “personal,” which is so often the very
condition of the exquisite? Why should conformity and subordination,
that acceptance of control and assent to collectivism in the name of
which our age has seen such dreary things done, become on a given
occasion the one _not_ vulgar way of meeting a problem?

Inquiries these, evidently, that are answerable only in presence of the
particular cases provoking them; when indeed they may hold us as under a
spell. Endless for instance the æsthetic nobleness of such a question as
that of the authority with which the spreading Hudson, at the opening of
its gates, would have imposed on the constructive powers, if listened
to, some proportionate order—would, in other words, have admirably given
us collectivism at its highest. One has only to stand there and _see_—of
such value are lessons in “authority.” But the great vista of the stream
alone speaks of it—save in so far at least as the voice is shared, and
to so different, to so dreadful a tune, by the grossly-defacing railway
that clings to the bank. The authority of railways, in the United
States, sits enthroned as none other, and has always, of course, in any
vision of aspects, to be taken into account. Here, at any rate, it is
the rule that has prevailed; the other, the high interest of the
possible picture, is one that lapses; so that the cliffs overhang the
water, and at various points descend to it in green slopes and hollows
(where the landscape-gardener does what he can), only to find a wealth
of visible baseness installed there before them. That so familiar
circumstance, in America, of the completion of the good thing ironically
and, as would often seem for the time, insuperably baffled, meets here
one of its liveliest illustrations. It at all events helps to give
meanwhile the mingled pitch of the whole concert that Columbia College
(to sound the old and easier name) should have “moved up”—moved up
twice, if I am not mistaken—to adorn with an ampler presence this very
neighbourhood. It has taken New York to invent, for the thickening of
classic shades, the “moving” University; and does not that quite mark
the tune of the dance, of the local unwritten law that forbids almost
_any_ planted object to gather in a history where it stands, forbids in
fact any accumulation that may not be recorded in the mere bank-book?
This last became long ago _the_ historic page.

It is, however, just because the beauty of the Hudson seems to speak of
other matters, and because the sordid city has the honour, after all, of
sitting there at the Beautiful Gate, that I alluded above to her
profiting in a manner, even from the point of view of “taste,” by this
close and fortunate connection. The place puts on thus, not a little,
the likeness of a large loose family which has had queer adventures and
fallen into vulgar ways, but for which a glorious cousinship never quite
repudiated by the indifferent princely cousin—_bon prince_ in this as in
other matters—may still be pleaded. At the rate New York is growing, in
fine, she will more and more “command,” in familiar intercourse, the
great perspective of the River; so that here, a certain point reached,
her whole case must change and her general opportunity, swallowing up
the mainland, become a new question altogether. Let me hasten to add
that in the light of this opportunity even the most restless analyst can
but take the hopeful view of her. I fear I am finding too many personal
comparisons for her—than which indeed there can be no greater sign of a
confessed preoccupation; but she figures, once again, as an heir whose
expectations are so vast and so certain that no temporary sowing of wild
oats need be felt to endanger them. As soon as the place begins to
spread at ease real responsibility of all sorts will begin, and the
good-natured feeling must surely be that the civic conscience in her, at
such a stage, will fall into step. Of the spreading woods and waters
amid which the future in question appears still half to lurk, that
mainland region of the Bronx, vast above all in possibilities of Park,
out of which it already appears half to emerge, I unluckily failed of
occasion to take the adequate measure. But my confused impression was of
a kind of waiting abundance, an extraordinary quantity of “nature,” for
the reformed rake, that is the sobered heir, to play with. It is the
fashion in the East to speak of New York as poor of environment,
unpossessed of the agreeable, accessible countryside that crowns the
convenience not only of London and of Paris, but even, with more
humiliating promptitude, that of Boston, of Philadelphia, of Baltimore.
In spite, however, of the memory, from far back, of a hundred marginal
Mahattanese miseries, an immediate belt of the most sordid character, I
cannot but think of this invidious legend as attempting to prove too
much.

The countryside is there, on the most liberal of scales—it is the
townside, only, that, having the great waters and the greater distances
generally to deal with, has worn so rude and demoralized a face as to
frighten the country away. And if the townside is now making after the
countryside fast, as I say, and with a little less of the mere roughness
of the satyr pursuing the nymph, what finer warrant could be desired
than such felicities of position as those enjoyed, on the Riverside
heights, by the monument erected to the soldiers and sailors of the
Civil War and, even in a greater degree, by the tomb of General Grant?
These are verily monumental sites of the first order, and I confess
that, though introduced to them on a bleak winter morning, with no
ingratiation in any element, I felt the critical question, as to the
structures themselves, as to taste or intention, as to the amount of
involved or achieved consecration or profanation, carried off in the
general greatness of the effect. I shall in fact always remember that
icy hour, with the temple-crowned headlands, the wide Hudson vista white
with the cold, all nature armour-plated and grim, as an extraordinarily
strong and simple composition; made stern and kept simple as for some
visit of the God of Battles to his chosen. He might have been riding
there, on the north wind, to look down at them, and one caught for the
moment, the true hard light in which military greatness should be seen.
It shone over the miles of ice with its lustre of steel, and if what,
thus attested, it makes one think of was its incomparable,
indestructible “prestige,” so that association affected me both then and
on a later occasion as with a strange indefinable consequence—an
influence in which the æsthetic consideration, the artistic value of
either memorial, melted away and became irrelevant. For here, if ever,
was a great democratic demonstration caught in the fact, the nakedest
possible effort to strike the note of the august. The tomb of the single
hero in particular presents itself in a manner so opposed to our common
ideas of the impressive, to any past vision of sepulchral state, that we
can only wonder if a new kind and degree of solemnity may not have been
arrived at in this complete rupture with old consecrating forms.

The tabernacle of Grant’s ashes stands there by the pleasure-drive,
unguarded and unenclosed, the feature of the prospect and the property
of the people, as open as an hotel or a railway-station to any coming
and going, and as dedicated to the public use as builded things in
America (when not mere closed churches) only can be. Unmistakable its
air of having had, all consciously, from the first, to raise its head
and play its part without pomp and circumstance to “back” it, without
mystery or ceremony to protect it, without Church or State to intervene
on its behalf, with only its immediacy, its familiarity of interest to
circle it about, and only its proud outlook to preserve, so far as
possible, its character. The tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides is a
great national property, and the play of democratic manners sufficiently
surrounds it; but as compared to the small pavilion on the Riverside
bluff it is a holy of holies, a great temple jealously guarded and
formally approached. And yet one doesn’t conclude, strange to say, that
the Riverside pavilion fails of its expression a whit more than the
Paris dome; one perhaps even feels it triumph by its use of its want of
reserve as a very last word. The admonition of all of which possibly
is—I confess I but grope for it—that when there has been in such cases a
certain other happy combination, an original sincerity of intention, an
original propriety of site, and above all an original high value of name
and fame, something in this line really supreme, publicity, familiarity,
immediacy, as I have called them, _carried far enough_, may stalk in and
out of the shrine with their hands in their pockets and their hats on
their heads, and yet not dispel the Presence. The question at any rate
puts itself—as new questions in America are always putting themselves:
Do certain impressions there represent the absolute extinction of old
sensibilities, or do they represent only new forms of them? The inquiry
would be doubtless easier to answer if so many of these feelings were
not mainly known to us just _by_ their attendant forms. At this rate, or
on such a showing, in the United States, attendant forms being, in every
quarter, remarkably scarce, it would indeed seem that the sentiments
implied _are_ extinct; for it would be an abuse of ingenuity, I fear, to
try to read mere freshness of form into some of the more rank failures
of observance. There are failures of observance that stand, at the best,
for failures of sense—whereby, however, the question grows too great.
One must leave the tomb of Grant to its conditions and its future with
the simple note for it that if it be not in fact one of the most
effective of commemorations it is one of the most missed. On the whole I
distinctly “liked” it.


                                   V

It is still vivid to me that, returning in the spring-time from a few
weeks in the Far West, I re-entered New York State with the absurdest
sense of meeting again a ripe old civilization and travelling through a
country that showed the mark of established manners. It will seem, I
fear, one’s perpetual refrain, but the moral was yet once more that
values of a certain order are, in such conditions, all relative, and
that, as some wants of the spirit _must_ somehow be met, one knocks
together any substitute that will fairly stay the appetite. We had
passed great smoky Buffalo in the raw vernal dawn—with a vision, for me,
of curiosity, character, charm, whatever it might be, too needfully
sacrificed, opportunity perhaps forever missed, yet at the same time a
vision in which the lost object failed to mock at me with the last
concentration of shape; and history, as we moved Eastward, appeared to
meet us, in the look of the land, in its more overwrought surface and
thicker detail, quite as if she had ever consciously declined to cross
the border and were aware, precisely, of the queer feast we should find
in her. The recognition, I profess, was a preposterous ecstasy: one
couldn’t have felt more if one had passed into the presence of some
seated, placid, rich-voiced gentlewoman after leaving that of an honest
but boisterous hoyden. It was doubtless a matter only of degrees and
shades, but never was such a pointing of the lesson that a sign of any
sort may count double if it be but artfully placed. I spent that day,
literally, in the company of the rich-voiced gentlewoman, making my
profit of it even in spite of a second privation, the doom I was under
of having only, all wistfully, all ruefully, to avert my lips from the
quaint silver bowl, as I here quite definitely figured it, in which she
offered me the entertainment of antique Albany. At antique Albany, to a
certainty, the mature matron involved in my metaphor would have put on a
particular grace, and as our train crossed the river for further
progress I almost seemed to see her stand at some gable-window of Dutch
association, one of the two or three impressed there on my infantile
imagination, to ask me why then I had come so far at all.

I could have replied but in troubled tones, and I looked at the rest of
the scene for some time, no doubt, as through the glaze of all but
filial tears. Thus it was, possibly, that I saw the River shine, from
that moment on, as a great romantic stream, such as could throw not a
little of its glamour, for the mood of that particular hour, over the
city at its mouth. I had not even known, in my untravelled state, that
we were to “strike” it on our way from Chicago, so that it represented,
all that afternoon, so much beauty thrown in, so much benefit beyond the
bargain—the so hard bargain, for the traveller, of the American
railway-journey at its best. That ordeal was in any case at its best
here, and the perpetually interesting river kept its course, by my right
elbow, with such splendid consistency that, as I recall the impression,
I repent a little of having just now reflected with acrimony on the cost
of the obtrusion of track and stations to the Riverside view. One must
of course choose between dispensing with the ugly presence and enjoying
the scenery by the aid of the same—which but means, really, that to use
the train at all had been to put one’s self, for any proper justice to
the scenery, in a false position. That, however, takes us too far back,
and one can only save one’s dignity by laying all such blames on our
detestable age. A decent respect for the Hudson would confine us to the
use of the boat—all the more that American river-steamers have had, from
the earliest time, for the true _raffiné_, their peculiar note of
romance. A possible commerce, on the other hand, with one’s time—which
is always also the time of so many other busy people—has long since made
mincemeat of the rights of contemplation; rights as reduced, in the
United States, to-day, and by quite the same argument, as those of the
noble savage whom we have banished to his narrowing reservation. Letting
that pass, at all events, I still remember that I was able to put, from
the car-window, as many questions to the scene as it could have answered
in the time even had its face been clearer to read.

Its face was veiled, for the most part, in a mist of premature spring
heat, an atmosphere draping it indeed in luminous mystery, hanging it
about with sun-shot silver and minimizing any happy detail, any element
of the definite, from which the romantic effect might here and there
have gained an accent. There was not an accent in the picture from the
beginning of the run to Albany to the end—for which thank goodness! one
is tempted to say on remembering how often, over the land in general,
the accents are wrong. Yet if the romantic effect as we know it
elsewhere mostly depends on them, why _should_ that glamour have so
shimmered before me in their absence?—how should the picture have
managed to be a constant combination of felicities? Was it just
_because_ the felicities were all vaguenesses, and the “beauties,” even
the most celebrated, all blurs?—was it perchance on that very account
that I could meet my wonder so promptly with the inference that what I
had in my eyes on so magnificent a scale was simply, was famously,
“style”? I was landed by that conclusion in the odd further proposition
that style could then exist without accents—a quandary soon after to be
quenched, however, in the mere blinding radiance of a visit to West
Point. I was to make that memorable pilgrimage a fortnight later—and I
was to find my question, when it in fact took place, shivered by it to
mere silver atoms. The very powers of the air seemed to have taken the
case in hand and positively to have been interested in making it
transcend all argument. Our Sunday of mid-May, wet and windy, let loose,
over the vast stage, the whole procession of storm-effects; the raw
green of wooded heights and hollows was only everywhere rain-brightened,
the weather playing over it all day as with some great grey water-colour
brush. The essential character of West Point and its native nobleness of
position can have been but intensified, I think, by this artful process;
yet what was mainly unmistakable was the fact again of the suppression
of detail as in the positive interest of the grand style. One had
therefore only to take detail as another name for accent, the accent
that might prove compromising, in order to see it made good that style
_could_ do without them, and that the grand style in fact almost always
must. How on this occasion the trick was played is more than I shall
attempt to say; it is enough to have been conscious of our being, from
hour to hour, literally bathed in that high element, with the very face
of nature washed, so to speak, the more clearly to express and utter it.

Such accordingly is the strong silver light, all simplifying and
ennobling, in which I see West Point; see it as a cluster of high
promontories, of the last classic elegance, overhanging vast receding
reaches of river, mountain-guarded and dim, which took their place in
the geography of the ideal, in the long perspective of the poetry of
association, rather than in those of the State of New York. It was as if
the genius of the scene had said: “No, you _shan’t_ have accent, because
accent is, at the best, local and special, and might here by some
perversity—how do I know after all?—interfere. I want you to have
something unforgettable, and therefore you shall have _type_—yes,
absolutely have type, and even tone, without accent; an impossibility,
you may hitherto have supposed, but which you have only to look about
you now really to see expressed. And type and tone of the very finest
and rarest; type and tone good enough for Claude or Turner, if they
could have walked by these rivers instead of by their thin rivers of
France and Italy; type and tone, in short, that gather in shy detail
under wings as wide as those with which a motherly hen covers her
endangered brood. So there you are—deprived of all ‘accent’ as a peg for
criticism, and reduced thereby, you see, to asking me no more
questions.” I was able so to take home, I may add, this formula of the
matter, that even the interesting facts of the School of the Soldier
which have carried the name of the place about the world almost put on
the shyness, the air of conscious evasion and escape, noted in the above
allocution: they struck me as forsaking the foreground of the picture.
It was part of the play again, no doubt, of the grey water-colour brush:
there was to be no consent of the elements, that day, to anything but a
generalized elegance—in which effect certainly the clustered, the
scattered Academy played, on its high green stage, its part. But, of all
things in the world, it massed, to my vision, more mildly than I had
somehow expected; and I take that for a feature, precisely, of the pure
poetry of the impression. It lurked there with grace, it insisted
without swagger—and I could have hailed it just for this reason indeed
as a presence of the last distinction. It is doubtless too much to say,
in fine, that the Institution, at West Point, “suffers” comparatively,
for vulgar individual emphasis, from the overwhelming liberality of its
setting—and I perhaps chanced to see it in the very conditions that most
invest it with poetry. The fact remains that, both as to essence and as
to quantity, its prose seemed washed away, and I shall recall it in the
future much less as the sternest, the world over, of all the seats of
Discipline, than as some great Corot-composition of young, vague,
wandering figures in splendidly-classic shades.


                                   VI

I make that point, for what it is worth, only to remind myself of
another occasion on which the romantic note sounded for me with the last
intensity, and yet on which the picture swarmed with accents—as, absent
or present, I must again call them—that contributed alike to its
interest and to its dignity. The proof was complete, on this second
Sunday, with the glow of early summer already in possession, that
affirmed detail was not always affirmed infelicity—since the scene here
bristled with detail (and detail of the importance that frankly
_constitutes_ accent) only to the enhancement of its charm. It was a
matter once more of hanging over the Hudson on the side opposite West
Point, but further down; the situation was founded, as at West Point, on
the presence of the great feature and on the consequent general lift of
foreground and distance alike, and yet infinitely sweet was it to gather
that style, in such conditions and for the success of such effects, had
not really to depend on mere kind vaguenesses, on any anxious
deprecation of distinctness. There was no vagueness now; a wealth of
distinctness, in the splendid light, met the eyes—but with the very
result of showing them how happily it could play. What it came back to
was that the accents, in the delightful old pillared and porticoed house
that crowned the cliff and commanded the stream, were as right as they
were numerous; so that there immediately followed again on this
observation a lively recognition of the ground of the rightness. To
wonder what this was could be but to see, straightway, that, though many
reasons had worked together for them, mere time had done more than all;
that beneficence of time enjoying in general, in the United States, so
little even of the chance that so admirably justifies itself, for the
most part, when interference happens to have spared it. Cases of this
rare mercy yet exist, as I had had occasion to note, and their
consequent appeal to the touched sense within us comes, as I have also
hinted, with a force out of all proportion, comes with a kind of
accepted insolence of authority. The things that have lasted, in short,
whatever they may be, “succeed” as no newness, try as it will, succeeds,
inasmuch as their success is a created interest.

There we catch the golden truth which so much of the American world
strikes us as positively organized to gainsay, the truth that production
takes time, and that the production of interest, in particular, takes
_most_ time. Desperate again and again the ingenuity of the offered, the
obtruded substitute, and pathetic in many an instance its confessed
failure; this remark being meanwhile relevant to the fact that my
charming old historic house of the golden Sunday put me off, among its
great trees, its goodly gardens, its acquired signs and gathered
memories, with no substitute whatever, even the most specious, but just
paid cash down, so to speak, ripe ringing gold, over the counter, for
all the attention it invited. It had character, as one might say, and
character is scarce less precious on the part of the homes of men in a
raw medium than on the part of responsible persons at a difficult
crisis. This virtue was there within and without and on every face; but
perhaps nowhere so present, I thought, as in the ideal refuge for summer
days formed by the wide north porch, if porch that disposition may be
called—happiest disposition of the old American country-house—which sets
tall columns in a row, under a pediment suitably severe, to present them
as the “making” of a high, deep gallery. I know not what dignity of old
afternoons suffused with what languor seems to me always, under the
murmur of American trees and by the lap of American streams, to abide in
these mild shades; there are combinations with depths of congruity
beyond the plummet, it would seem, even of the most restless of
analysts, and rather than try to say why my whole impression here melted
into the general iridescence of a past of Indian summers hanging about
mild ghosts half asleep, in hammocks, over still milder novels, I would
renounce altogether the art of refining. For the iridescence consists,
in this connection, of a shimmer of association that still more refuses
to be reduced to terms; some sense of legend, of aboriginal mystery,
with a still earlier past for its dim background and the insistent idea
of the River as above all romantic for its warrant. Helplessly analyzed,
perhaps, this amounts to no more than the very childish experience of a
galleried house or two round about which the views and the trees and the
peaches and the pony seemed prodigious, and to the remembrance of which
the wonder of Rip Van Winkle and that of the “Hudson River School” of
landscape art were, a little later on, to contribute their glamour.

If Rip Van Winkle had been really at the bottom of it all, nothing could
have furthered the whole case more, on the occasion I speak of, than the
happy nearness of the home of Washington Irving, the impression of which
I was thus able, in the course of an hour, to work in—with the effect of
intensifying more than I can say the old-time charm and the general
legendary fusion. These are beautiful, delicate, modest matters, and how
can one touch them with a light enough hand? How can I give the
comparatively coarse reasons for my finding at Sunnyside, which
contrives, by some grace of its own, to be at once all ensconced and
embowered in relation to the world, and all frank and uplifted in
relation to the river, a perfect treasure of mild moralities? The
highway, the old State road to Albany, bristling now with the
cloud-compelling motor, passes at the head of a deep, long lane,
winding, embanked, overarched, such an old-world lane as one scarce ever
meets in America; but if you embrace this chance to plunge away to the
left you come out for your reward into the quite indefinable air of the
little American literary past. The place is inevitably, to-day, but a
qualified Sleepy Hollow—the Sleepy Hollow of the author’s charming
imagination was, as I take it, off somewhere in the hills, or in some
dreamland of old autumns, happily unprofanable now; for “modernity,”
with its terrible power of working its will, of abounding in its sense,
of gilding its toy—modernity, with its pockets full of money and its
conscience full of virtue, its heart really full of tenderness, has
seated itself there under pretext of guarding the shrine. What has
happened, in a word, is very much what has happened in the case of other
shy retreats of anchorites doomed to celebrity—the primitive cell has
seen itself encompassed, in time, by a temple of many chambers, all
dedicated to the history of the hermit. The cell is still there at
Sunnyside, and there is even yet so much charm that one doesn’t attempt
to say where the parts of it, all kept together in a rich conciliatory
way, begin or end—though indeed, I hasten to add, the identity of the
original modest house, the shrine within the gilded shell, has been
religiously preserved.

One has, in fact, I think, no quarrel whatever with the amplified state
of the place, for it is the manner and the effect of this amplification
that enable us to read into the scene its very most interesting message.
The “little” American literary past, I just now said—using that
word—(whatever the real size of the subject) because the caressing
diminutive, at Sunnyside, is what rises of itself to the lips; the small
uncommodious study, the limited library, the “dear” old portrait-prints
of the first half of the century—very dear to-day when properly signed
and properly sallow—these things, with the beauty of the site, with the
sense that the man of letters of the unimproved age, the age of
processes still comparatively slow, could have wanted no deeper, softer
dell for mulling material over, represent the conditions that encounter
now on the spot the sharp reflection of our own increase of arrangement
and loss of leisure. This is the admirable interest of the exhibition of
which Wolfert’s Roost had been, a hundred years before the date of
Irving’s purchase, the rudimentary principle—that it throws the facts of
our earlier “intellectual activity” into a vague golden perspective, a
haze as of some unbroken spell of the same Indian summer I a moment ago
had occasion to help myself out with; a fond appearance than which
nothing could minister more to envy. If we envy the spinners of prose
and tellers of tales to whom our American air anciently either
administered or refused sustenance, this is all, and quite the best
thing, it would seem, that we need do for them: it exhausts, or rather
it forestalls, the futilities of discrimination. Strictly critical,
mooning about Wolfert’s Roost of a summer Sunday, I defy even the
hungriest of analysts to be: his predecessors, the whole connected
company, profit so there, to his rueful vision, by the splendour of
their possession of better conditions than his. It has taken _our_ ugly
era to thrust in the railroad at the foot of the slope, among the
masking trees; the railroad that is part, exactly, of the pomp and
circumstance, the quickened pace, the heightened fever, the narrowed
margin expressed within the very frame of the present picture, as I say,
and all in the perfect good faith of collateral piety. I had hoped not
to have to name the railroad—it seems so to give away my case. There was
no railroad, however, till long after Irving’s settlement—he survived
the railroad but by a few years, and my case is simply that, disengaging
_his_ Sunnyside from its beautiful extensions and arriving thus at the
sense of his easy elements, easy for everything but rushing about and
being rushed at, the sense of his “command” of the admirable river and
the admirable country, his command of all the mildness of his life, of
his pleasant powers and his ample hours, of his friends and his
contemporaries and his fame and his honour and his temper and, above
all, of his delightful fund of reminiscence and material, I seemed to
hear, in the summer sounds and in the very urbanity of my entertainers,
the last faint echo of a felicity forever gone. That is the true voice
of such places, and not the imputed challenge to the chronicler or the
critic.



                                   IV
                                NEW YORK
                              SOCIAL NOTES


                                   I

Were I not afraid of appearing to strike to excess the so-called
pessimistic note, I should really make much of the interesting,
appealing, touching vision of waste—I know not how else to name it—that
flung its odd melancholy mantle even over one’s walks through the parts
of the town supposedly noblest and fairest. For it proceeded, the
vision, I think, from a source or two still deeper than the most
obvious, the constant shocked sense of houses and rows, of recent
expensive construction (that had cost thought as well as money, that had
taken birth presumably as a _serious_ demonstration, and that were
thereby just beginning to live into history) marked for removal, for
extinction, in their prime, and awaiting it with their handsome faces so
fresh and yet so wan and so anxious. The most tragic element in the
French Revolution, and thence surely the most tragic in human annals,
was the so frequent case of the very young sent to the scaffold—the
youths and maidens, all bewildered and stainless, lately born into a
world decked for them socially with flowers, and for whom, none the less
suddenly, the horror of horrors uprose. They were literally the victims
I thought of, absurd as it may seem, under the shock in question; in
spite of which, however, even this is not what I mean by my impression
of the squandered effort. I have had occasion to speak—and one can only
speak with sympathy—of the really human, the communicative, side of that
vivid show of a society trying to build itself, with every elaboration,
into some coherent sense _of_ itself, and literally putting forth
interrogative feelers, as it goes, into the ambient air; literally
reaching out (to the charmed beholder, say) for some measure and some
test of its success. This effect of certain of the manifestations of
wealth in New York is, so far as I know, unique; nowhere else does
pecuniary power so beat its wings in the void, and so look round it for
the charity of some hint as to the possible awkwardness or possible
grace of its motion, some sign of whether it be flying, for good taste,
too high or too low. In the other American cities, on the one hand, the
flights are as yet less numerous—though already promising no small
diversion; and amid the older congregations of men, in the
proportionately rich cities of Europe, on the other hand, good taste is
present, for reference and comparison, in a hundred embodied and
consecrated forms. Which is why, to repeat, I found myself recognizing
in the New York predicament a particular character and a particular
pathos. The whole costly up-town demonstration was a record, in the last
analysis, of individual loneliness; whence came, precisely, its
insistent testimony to waste—waste of the still wider sort than the mere
game of rebuilding.

That quite different admonition of the general European spectacle, the
effect, in the picture of things, as of a large, consummate economy,
traditionally practised, springs from the fact that old societies, old,
and even new, aristocracies, are arranged exactly to supply functions,
forms, the whole element of custom and perpetuity, to any massiveness of
private ease, however great. Massive private ease attended with no force
of assertion beyond the hour is an anomaly rarely encountered,
therefore, in countries where the social arrangements strike one as
undertaking, by their very nature and pretension, to make the future as
interesting as the past. These conditions, the romantic ones for the
picture-seeker, are generally menaced, one is reminded; they tend to
alter everywhere, partly by the very force of the American example, and
it may be said that in France, for instance, they have done nothing but
alter for a hundred years. It none the less remains true that for once
that we ask ourselves in “Europe” what is going to become of a given
piece of property, whether family “situation,” or else palace, castle,
picture, _parure_, other attribute of wealth, we indulge in the question
twenty times in the United States—so scant an engagement does the
visible order strike us as taking to provide for it. _There_ comes in
the note of loneliness on the part of these loose values—deep as the
look in the eyes of dogs who plead against a change of masters. The
visible order among ourselves undertakes at the most that they shall
change hands, and the meagreness and indignity of this doom affect them
as a betrayal just in proportion as they have grown great. Uppermost
Fifth Avenue, for example, is lined with dwellings the very intention
both of the spread and of the finish of which would seem to be to imply
that they are “entailed” as majestically as red tape can entail them.
But we know how little they enjoy any such courtesy or security; and,
but for our tender heart and our charming imagination, we would blight
them in their bloom with our restless analysis. “It’s all very well for
you to look as if, since you’ve had no past, you’re going in, as the
next best thing, for a magnificent compensatory future. What are you
going to make your future _of_, for all your airs, we want to know?—what
elements of a future, as futures have gone in the great world, are at
all assured to you? Do what you will, you sit here only in the lurid
light of ‘business,’ and you know, without our reminding you, what
guarantees, what majestic continuity and heredity, that represents.
Where are not only your eldest son and _his_ eldest son, those prime
indispensables for any real projection of your estate, unable as they
would be to get rid of you even if they should wish; but where even is
the old family stocking, properly stuffed and hanging so heavy as not to
stir, some dreadful day, in the cold breath of Wall Street? No, what you
are reduced to for ‘importance’ is the present, pure and simple,
squaring itself between an absent future and an absent past as solidly
as it can. You overdo it for what you are—you overdo it still more for
what you may be; and don’t pretend, above all, with the object-lesson
supplied you, close at hand, by the queer case of Newport, don’t
pretend, we say, not to know what we mean.”

“We say,” I put it, but the point is that we say nothing, and it is that
very small matter of Newport exactly that keeps us compassionately
silent. The present state of Newport shall be a chapter by itself, which
I long to take in hand, but which must wait its turn; so that I may
mention it here only for the supreme support it gives to this reading of
the conditions of New York opulence. The show of the case to-day—oh, so
vividly and pathetically!—is that New York and other opulence, creating
the place, for a series of years, as part of the effort of “American
society” to find out, by experiment, what it would be at, now has no
further use for it—has only learned from it, at an immense expenditure,
how to get rid of an illusion. “We’ve found out, after all (since it’s a
question of what we would be ‘at’), that we wouldn’t be at Newport—if we
can possibly be anywhere else; which, with our means, we indubitably
_can_ be: so that we leave poor dear Newport just ruefully to show it.”
That remark is written now over the face of the scene, and I can think
nowhere of a mistake confessed to so promptly, yet in terms so
exquisite, so charmingly cynical; the terms of beautiful houses and
delicate grounds closed, condemned and forsaken, yet so “kept up,” at
the same time, as to cover the retreat of their projectors. The very air
and light, soft and discreet, seem to speak, in tactful fashion, for
people who would be embarrassed to be there—as if it might shame them to
see it proved against them that they could once have been so artless and
so bourgeois. The point is that they have learned not to be by the
rather terrible process of exhausting the list of mistakes. Newport, for
them—of for us others—is only one of these mistakes; and we feel no
confidence that the pompous New York houses, most of them so flagrantly
tentative, and tentative only, bristling with friezes and pinnacles, but
discernibly deficient in reasons, shall not collectively form another.
It is the hard fate of new aristocracies that the element of error, with
them, has to be contemporary—not relegated to the dimness of the past,
but receiving the full modern glare, a light fatal to the fond theory
that the best society, everywhere, has grown, in all sorts of ways, in
spite of itself. We see it in New York trying, trying its very hardest,
to grow, not yet knowing (by so many indications) what to grow _on_.

There comes back to me again and again, for many reasons, a particular
impression of this interesting struggle in the void—a constituted image
of the upper social organism floundering there all helplessly, more or
less floated by its immense good-will and the splendour of its immediate
environment, but betrayed by its paucity of real resource. The occasion
I allude to was simply a dinner-party, of the most genial intention, but
at which the note of high ornament, of the general uplifted situation,
was so consistently struck that it presented itself, on the page of New
York life, as a purple patch without a possible context—as consciously,
almost painfully, unaccompanied by passages in anything like the same
key. The scene of our feast was a palace and the perfection of setting
and service absolute; the ladies, beautiful, gracious and glittering
with gems, were in tiaras and a semblance of court-trains, a sort of
prescribed official magnificence; but it was impossible not to ask one’s
self with what, in the wide American frame, such great matters might be
supposed to consort or to rhyme. The material pitch was so high that it
carried with it really no social sequence, no application, and that, as
a tribute to the ideal, to the exquisite, it wanted company, support,
some sort of consecration. The difficulty, the irony, of the hour was
that so many of the implications of completeness, that is, of a
sustaining social order, were absent. There was nothing for us to do at
eleven o’clock—or for the ladies at least—but to scatter and go to bed.
There was nothing, as in London or in Paris, to go “on” to; the going
“on” is, for the New York aspiration, always the stumbling-block. A
great court-function would alone have met the strain, met the terms of
the case—would alone properly have crowned the hour. When I speak of the
terms of the case I must remind myself indeed that they were not all of
one complexion; which is but another sign, however, of the inevitable
jaggedness of the purple patch in great commercial democracies. The high
colour required could be drawn in abundance from the ladies, but in a
very minor degree, one easily perceived, from the men. The impression
was singular, but it was there: had there been a court-function the
ladies must have gone on to it alone, trusting to have the proper
partners and mates supplied them on the premises—supplied, say, with the
checks for recovery of their cloaks. The high pitch, all the exalted
reference, was of the palatial house, the would-be harmonious women, the
tiaras and the trains; it was not of the amiable gentlemen, delightful
in their way, in whose so often quaint presence, yet without whose
immediate aid, the effort of American society to arrive at the “best”
consciousness still goes forward.

This failure of the sexes to keep step socially is to be noted, in the
United States, at every turn, and is perhaps more suggestive of
interesting “drama,” as I have already hinted, than anything else in the
country. But it illustrates further that foredoomed _grope_ of wealth,
in the conquest of the amenities—the strange necessity under which the
social interest labours of finding out for itself, as a preliminary,
what civilization really _is_. If the men are not to be taken as
contributing to it, but only the women, what new case is _that_, under
the sun, and under what strange aggravations of difficulty therefore is
the problem not presented? We should call any such treatment of a
different order of question the empirical treatment—the limitations and
aberrations of which crop up, for the restless analyst, in the most
illustrative way. Its presence is felt unmistakably, for instance, in
the general extravagant insistence on the Opera, which plays its part as
the great vessel of social salvation, the comprehensive substitute for
all other conceivable vessels; the _whole_ social consciousness thus
clambering into it, under stress, as the whole community crams into the
other public receptacles, the desperate cars of the Subway or the vast
elevators of the tall buildings. The Opera, indeed, as New York enjoys
it, one promptly perceives, is worthy, musically and picturesquely, of
its immense function; the effect of it is splendid, but one has none the
less the oddest sense of hearing it, as an institution, groan and creak,
positively almost split and crack, with the extra weight thrown upon
it—the weight that in worlds otherwise arranged is artfully scattered,
distributed over all the ground. In default of a court-function our
ladies of the tiaras and court-trains might have gone on to the
opera-function, these occasions offering the only approach to the
implication of the tiara known, so to speak, to the American law. Yet
even here there would have been no one for them, in congruity and
consistency, to curtsey to—their only possible course becoming thus, it
would seem, to make obeisance, clingingly, to each other. This truth
points again the effect of a picture poor in the male presence; for to
what male presence of native growth is it thinkable that the wearer of
an American tiara _should_ curtsey? Such a vision gives the measure of
the degree in which we see the social empiricism in question putting,
perforce, the cart before the horse. In worlds otherwise arranged,
besides there being always plenty of subjects for genuflection, the
occasion itself, with its character fully turned on, produces the tiara.
In New York this symbol has, by an arduous extension of its virtue, to
produce the occasion.


                                   II

I found it interesting to note, furthermore, that the very Clubs, on
whose behalf, if anywhere, expert tradition might have operated,
betrayed with a _bonhomie_ touching in the midst of their magnificence
the empirical character. Was not their admirable, their unique,
hospitality, for that matter, an empirical note—a departure from the
consecrated collective egoism governing such institutions in worlds, as
I have said, otherwise arranged? Let the hospitality in this case at
least stand for the prospective discovery of a new and better law, under
which the consecrated egoism itself will have become the “provincial”
sign. Endless, at all events, the power of one or two of these splendid
structures to testify to the state of manners—of manners
undiscourageably seeking the superior stable equilibrium. There had
remained with me as illuminating, from years before, the confidential
word of a friend on whom, after a long absence from New York, the
privilege of one of the largest clubs had been conferred. “The place is
a palace, for scale and decoration, but there is only one kind of
letter-paper.” There would be more kinds of letter-paper now, I take
it—though the American club struck me everywhere, oddly, considering the
busy people who employ it, as much less an institution for attending to
one’s correspondence than others I had had knowledge of; generally
destitute, in fact, of copious and various appliances for that purpose.
There is such a thing as the imagination of the writing-table, and I
nowhere, save in a few private houses, came upon its fruits; to which I
must add that this is the one connection in which the provision for ease
has not an extraordinary amplitude, an amplitude unequalled anywhere
else. One emphatic reservation, throughout the country, the restored
absentee finds himself continually making, but the universal custom of
the house with almost no one of its indoor parts distinguishable from
any other is an affliction against which he has to learn betimes to
brace himself. This diffused vagueness of separation between apartments,
between hall and room, between one room and another, between the one you
are in and the one you are not in, between place of passage and place of
privacy, is a provocation to despair which the public institution shares
impartially with the luxurious “home.” To the spirit attuned to a
different practice these dispositions can only appear a strange
perversity, an extravagant aberration of taste; but I may here touch on
them scarce further than to mark their value for the characterization of
manners.

They testify at every turn, then, to those of the American people, to
the prevailing “conception of life”; they correspond, within doors, to
the as inveterate suppression of almost every outward exclusory
arrangement. The instinct is throughout, as we catch it at play, that of
minimizing, for any “interior,” the guilt or odium or responsibility,
whatever these may appear, of its _being_ an interior. The custom rages
like a conspiracy for nipping the interior in the bud, for denying its
right to exist, for ignoring and defeating it in every possible way, for
wiping out successively each sign by which it may be known from an
exterior. The effacement of the difference has been marvellously,
triumphantly brought about; and, with all the ingenuity of young, fresh,
frolicsome architecture aiding and abetting, has been made to flourish,
alike in the small structure and the great, as the very law of the
structural fact. Thus we have the law fulfilled that every part of every
house shall be, as nearly as may be, visible, visitable, penetrable, not
only from every other part, but from as many parts of as many other
houses as possible, if they only be near enough. Thus we see
systematized the indefinite extension of all spaces and the definite
merging of all functions; the enlargement of every opening, the
exaggeration of every passage, the substitution of gaping arches and far
perspectives and resounding voids for enclosing walls, for practicable
doors, for controllable windows, for all the rest of the essence of the
room-character, that room-suggestion which is so indispensable not only
to occupation and concentration, but to conversation itself, to the play
of the social relation at any other pitch than the pitch of a shriek or
a shout. This comprehensive canon has so succeeded in imposing itself
that it strikes you as reflecting inordinately, as positively serving
you up for convenient inspection, under a clear glass cover, the social
tone that has dictated it. But I must confine myself to recording, for
the moment, that it takes a whole new discipline to put the visitor at
his ease in so merciless a medium; he finds himself looking round for a
background or a limit, some localizing fact or two, in the interest of
talk, of that “good” talk which always falters before the complete
proscription of privacy. He sees only doorless apertures, vainly
festooned, which decline to tell him where he is, which make him still a
homeless wanderer, which show him other apertures, corridors,
staircases, yawning, expanding, ascending, descending, and all as for
the purpose of giving his presence “away,” of reminding him that what he
says must be said for the house. He is beguiled in a measure by reading
into these phenomena, ever so sharply, the reason of many another
impression; he is beguiled by remembering how many of the things said in
America _are_ said for the house; so that if all that he wants is to
keep catching the finer harmony of effect and cause, of explanation and
implication, the cup of his perception is full to overflowing.

That satisfaction does represent, certainly, much of his quest; all the
more that what he misses, in the place—the comfort and support, for
instance, of windows, porches, verandahs, lawns, gardens, “grounds,”
that, by not taking the whole world into their confidence, have not the
whole world’s confidence to take in return—ranges itself for him in that
large mass of American idiosyncrasy which contains, unmistakably, a
precious principle of future reaction. The desire to rake and be raked
has doubtless, he makes out, a long day before it still; but there are
too many reasons why it should not be the last word of _any_ social
evolution. The social idea has too inevitably secrets in store, quite
other constructive principles, quite other refinements on the idea of
intercourse, with which it must eventually reckon. It will be certain at
a given moment, I think, to head in a different direction altogether;
though obviously many other remarkable things, changes of ideal, of
habit, of key, will have to take place first. The conception of the
home, and _a fortiori_ of the club, as a combination of the hall of
echoes and the toy “transparency” held against the light, will meanwhile
sufficiently prevail to have made my reference to it not quite futile.
Yet I must after all remember that the reservation on the ground of
comfort to which I just alluded applies with its smallest force to the
interchangeability of club compartments, to the omnipresence of the
majestic open arch in club conditions. Such conditions more or less
prescribe that feature, and criticism begins only when private houses
emulate the form of clubs. What I had mainly in mind was another of
these so inexhaustible values of my subject; with which the question of
rigour of comfort has nothing to do. I cherish certain remembered
aspects for their general vivid eloquence—for the sake of my impression
of the type of great generous club-establishments in which the
“empiricism” of that already-observed idea of the conquest of splendour
could richly and irresponsibly flower. It is of extreme interest to be
reminded, at many a turn of such an exhibition, that it takes an endless
amount of history to make even a little tradition, and an endless amount
of tradition to make even a little taste, and an endless amount of
taste, by the same token, to make even a little tranquillity.
Tranquillity results largely from taste tactfully applied, taste lighted
above all by experience and possessed of a clue for its labyrinth. There
is no such clue, for club-felicity, as some view of congruities and
harmonies, completeness of correspondence between aspects and uses. A
sense for that completeness is a thing of slow growth, one of the
flowers of tradition precisely; of the good conservative tradition that
walks apart from the extravagant use of money and the unregulated appeal
to “style”—passes in fact, at its best, quite on the other side of the
way. This discrimination occurs when the ground has the good fortune to
be already held by some definite, some transmitted conception of the
adornments and enhancements that consort, and that do not consort, with
the presence, the habits, the tone, of lounging, gossiping, smoking,
newspaper-reading, bridge-playing, cocktail-imbibing men. The
club-developments of New York read here and there the lesson of the
strange deserts in which the appeal to style may lose itself, may wildly
and wantonly stray, without a certain light of the fine old gentlemanly
prejudice to guide it.


                                  III

But I should omit half my small story were I not meanwhile to make due
record of the numerous hours at which one ceased consciously to
discriminate, just suffering one’s sense to be flooded with the large
clean light and with that suggestion of a crowded “party” of young
persons which lurked in the general aspect of the handsomer regions—a
great circle of brilliant and dowered _débutantes_ and impatient youths,
expert in the cotillon, waiting together for the first bars of some
wonderful imminent dance-music, something “wilder” than any ever yet. It
is such a wait for something more, these innocents scarce know what, it
is this, distinctly, that the upper New York picture seems to cause to
play before us; but the wait is just that collective alertness of
bright-eyed, light-limbed, clear-voiced youth, without a doubt in the
world and without a conviction; which last, however, always, may
perfectly be absent without prejudice to confidence. The confidence and
the innocence are those of children whose world has ever been
practically a safe one, and the party so imaged is thus really even a
child’s party, enormously attended, but in which the united ages of the
company make up no formidable sum. In the light of that analogy the New
York social movement of the day, I think, always shines—as the whole
show of the so-called social life of the country does, for that matter;
since it comes home to the restless analyst everywhere that this
“childish” explanation is the one that meets the greatest number of the
social appearances. To arrive—and with tolerable promptitude—at that
generalization is to find it, right and left, immensely convenient, and
thereby quite to cling to it: the newspapers alone, for instance, doing
so much to feed it, from day to day, as with their huge playfully
brandished wooden spoon. We seem at moments to see the incoherence and
volatility of childhood, its living but in the sense of its hour and in
the immediacy of its want, its instinctive refusal to be brought to
book, its boundless liability to contagion and boundless incapacity for
attention, its ingenuous blankness to-day over the appetites and
clamours of yesterday, its chronic state of besprinklement with the
sawdust of its ripped-up dolls, which it scarce goes even through the
form of shaking out of its hair—we seem at moments to see these things,
I say, twinkle in the very air, as by reflection of the movement of a
great, sunny playroom floor. The immensity of the native accommodation,
socially speaking, for the childish life, is not that exactly the key of
much of the spectacle?—the safety of the vast flat expanse where every
margin abounds and nothing too untoward need happen. The question is
interesting, but I remember quickly that I am concerned with it only so
far as it is part of the light of New York.

It appeared at all events, on the late days of spring, just a response
to the facility of things, and to much of their juvenile pleasantry, to
find one’s self “liking,” without more ado, and very much even at the
risk of one’s life, the heterogeneous, miscellaneous apology for a
Square marking the spot at which the main entrance, as I suppose it may
be called, to the Park opens toward Fifth Avenue; opens toward the
glittering monument to Sherman, toward the most death-dealing, perhaps,
of all the climaxes of electric car cross-currents, toward the loosest
of all the loose distributions of the overtopping “apartment” and other
hotel, toward the most jovial of all the sacrifices of preconsidered
composition, toward the finest of all the reckless revelations, in
short, of the brave New York humour. The best thing in the picture,
obviously, is Saint-Gaudens’s great group, splendid in its golden
elegance and doing more for the scene (by thus giving the beholder a
point of such dignity for his orientation) than all its other elements
together. Strange and seductive for any lover of the reasons of things
this inordinate value, on the spot, of the dauntless refinement of the
Sherman image; the comparative vulgarity of the environment drinking it
up, on one side, like an insatiable sponge, and yet failing at the same
time sensibly to impair its virtue. The refinement prevails and, as it
were, succeeds; holds its own in the medley of accidents, where nothing
else is refined unless it be the amplitude of the “quiet” note in the
front of the Metropolitan Club; amuses itself in short with being as
extravagantly “intellectual” as it likes. Why, therefore, given the
surrounding medium, does it so triumphantly impose itself, and impose
itself not insidiously and gradually, but immediately and with force?
Why does it not pay the penalty of expressing an idea and being founded
on one?—such scant impunity seeming usually to be enjoyed among us, at
this hour, by any artistic intention of the finer strain? But I put
these questions only to give them up—for what I feel beyond anything
else is that Mr. Saint-Gaudens somehow takes care of himself.

To what measureless extent he does this on occasion one was to learn, in
due course, from his magnificent Lincoln at Chicago—the lesson there
being simply that of a mystery exquisite, the absolute inscrutable; one
of the happiest cases known to our time, known doubtless to any time, of
the combination of intensity of effect with dissimulation, with deep
disavowal, of process. After seeing the Lincoln one consents, for its
author, to the drop of questions—that is the lame truth; a truth in the
absence of which I should have risked another word or two, have
addressed perhaps even a brief challenge to a certain ambiguity in the
Sherman. Its idea, to which I have alluded, strikes me as equivocal, or
more exactly as double; the image being, on the one side, and splendidly
rendered, that of an overwhelming military advance, an irresistible
march into an enemy’s country—the strain forward, the very inflation of
drapery with the rush, symbolizing the very breath of the Destroyer. But
the idea is at the same time—which part of it is also admirably
expressed—that the Destroyer is a messenger of peace, with the olive
branch too waved in the blast and with embodied grace, in the form of a
beautiful American girl, attending his business. And I confess to a
lapse of satisfaction in the presence of this interweaving—the result
doubtless of a sharp suspicion of all attempts, however glittering and
golden, to confound destroyers with benefactors. The military monument
in the City Square responds evidently, wherever a pretext can be found
for it, to a desire of men’s hearts; but I would have it always as
military as possible, and I would have the Destroyer, in intention at
least, not docked of one of his bristles. I would have him deadly and
terrible, and, if he be wanted beautiful, beautiful only as a war-god
and crested not with peace, but with snakes. Peace is a long way round
from him, and blood and ashes in between. So, with a less intimate
perversity, I think, than that of Mr. Saint-Gaudens’s brilliant scheme,
I would have had a Sherman of the terrible march (the “immortal” march,
in all abundance, if that be the needed note), not irradiating
benevolence, but signifying, by every ingenious device, the misery, the
ruin and the vengeance of his track. It is not one’s affair to attempt
to teach an artist how such horrors may be monumentally signified; it is
enough that their having been perpetrated is the very ground of the
monument. And monuments should always have a clean, clear meaning.


                                   IV

I must positively get into the gate of the Park, however—even at the
risk of appearing to have marched round through Georgia to do so. I
found myself, in May and June, getting into it whenever I could, and if
I spoke just now of the loud and inexpensive charm (inexpensive in the
æsthetic sense) of the precinct of approach to it, that must positively
have been because the Park diffuses its grace. One grasped at every
pretext for finding it inordinately amiable, and nothing was more
noteworthy than that one felt, in doing so, how this was the only way to
play the game in fairness. The perception comes quickly, in New York, of
the singular and beautiful but almost crushing mission that has been
laid, as an effect of time, upon this limited territory, which has risen
to the occasion, from the first, so consistently and bravely. It is a
case, distinctly, in which appreciation and gratitude for a public
function admirably performed are twice the duty, on the visitor’s part,
that they may be in other such cases. We may even say, putting it simply
and strongly, that if he doesn’t here, in his thought, keep patting the
Park on the back, he is guilty not alone of a failure of natural
tenderness, but of a real deviation from social morality. For this mere
narrow oblong, much _too_ narrow and very much too short, had directly
prescribed to it, from its origin, to “do,” officially, on behalf of the
City, the publicly amiable, and _all_ the publicly amiable—all there
could be any question of in the conditions: incurring thus a heavier
charge, I respectfully submit, than one has ever before seen so
gallantly carried. Such places, the municipally-instituted
pleasure-grounds of the greater and the smaller cities, abound about the
world and everywhere, no doubt, agreeably enough play their part; but is
the part anywhere else as heroically played in proportion to the
difficulty? The difficulty in New York, _that_ is the point for the
restless analyst; conscious as he is that other cities even in spite of
themselves lighten the strain and beguile the task—a burden which here
on the contrary makes every inch of its weight felt. This means a good
deal, for the space comprised in the original New York scheme represents
in truth a wonderful economy and intensity of effort. It would go hard
with us not to satisfy ourselves, in other quarters (and it is of the
political and commercial capitals we speak), of some such amount of
“general” outside amenity, of charm in the town at large, as may here
and there, even at widely-scattered points, relieve the o’erfraught
heart. The sense of the picturesque often finds its account in strange
and unlikely matters, but has none the less a way of finding it, and so,
in the coming and going, takes the chance. But the New York problem has
always resided in the absence of any chance to take, however one might
come and go—come and go, that is, before reaching the Park.

To the Park, accordingly, and to the Park only, hitherto, the æsthetic
appetite has had to address itself, and the place has therefore borne
the brunt of many a peremptory call, acting out year after year the
character of the cheerful, capable, bustling, even if overworked,
hostess of the one inn, somewhere, who has to take all the travel, who
is often at her wits’ end to know how to deal with it, but who, none the
less, has, for the honour of the house, never once failed of
hospitality. That is how we see Central Park, utterly overdone by the
“run” on its resources, yet also never having had to make an excuse.
When once we have taken in thus its remarkable little history, there is
no endearment of appreciation that we are not ready to lay, as a
tribute, on its breast; with the interesting effect, besides, of our
recognizing in this light how the place has had to be, in detail and
feature, exactly what it is. It has had to have something for everybody,
since everybody arrives famished; it has had to multiply itself to
extravagance, to pathetic little efforts of exaggeration and deception,
to be, breathlessly, everywhere and everything at once, and produce on
the spot the particular romantic object demanded, lake or river or
cataract, wild woodland or teeming garden, boundless vista or bosky
nook, noble eminence or smiling valley. It has had to have feature at
any price, the clamour of its customers being inevitably _for_ feature;
which accounts, as we forgivingly see, for the general rather eruptive
and agitated effect, the effect of those old quaint prints which give in
a single view the classic, gothic and other architectural wonders of the
world. That is its sole defect—its being inevitably too self-conscious,
being afraid to be just vague and frank and quiet. I should compare her
again—and the propriety is proved by this instinctively feminine
pronoun—to an actress in a company destitute, through an epidemic or
some other stress, of all other feminine talent; so that she assumes on
successive nights the most dissimilar parts and ranges in the course of
a week from the tragedy queen to the singing chambermaid. That valour by
itself wins the public and brings down the house—it being really a
marvel that she should in no part fail of a hit. Which is what I mean,
in short, by the sweet _ingratiation_ of the Park. You are perfectly
aware, as you hang about her in May and June, that you _have_, as a
travelled person, beheld more remarkable scenery and communed with
nature in ampler or fairer forms; but it is quite equally definite to
you that none of those adventures have counted more to you for
experience, for stirred sensibility—inasmuch as you can be, at the best,
and in the showiest countries, only thrilled by the pastoral or the
awful, and as to pass, in New York, from the discipline of the streets
to this so different many-smiling presence is to be thrilled at every
turn.

The strange thing, moreover, is that the crowd, in the happiest seasons,
at favouring hours, the polyglot Hebraic crowd of pedestrians in
particular, has, for what it is, none but the mildest action on the
nerves. The nerves are too grateful, the intention of beauty everywhere
too insistent; it “places” the superfluous figures with an art of its
own, even when placing them in heavy masses, and they become for you
practically as your fellow-spectators of the theatre, whose proximity
you take for granted, while the little overworked _cabotine_ we have
hypothesized, the darling of the public, is vocalizing or capering. I
recall as singularly contributive in all this sense the impression of a
splendid Sunday afternoon of early summer, when, during a couple of
hours spent in the mingled medium, the variety of accents with which the
air swarmed seemed to make it a question whether the Park itself or its
visitors were most polyglot. The condensed geographical range, the
number of kinds of scenery in a given space, competed with the number of
languages heard, and the whole impression was of one’s having had but to
turn in from the Plaza to make, in the most agreeable manner possible,
the tour of the little globe. And that, frankly, I think, was the best
of all impressions—was seeing New York at its best; for if ever one
could feel at one’s ease about the “social question,” it would be
surely, somehow, on such an occasion. The number of persons in
circulation was enormous—so great that the question of how they had got
there, from their distances, and would get away again, in the so
formidable public conveyances, loomed, in the background, rather like a
skeleton at the feast; but the general note was thereby, intensely, the
“popular,” and the brilliancy of the show proportionately striking. That
is the great and only brilliancy worth speaking of, to my sense, in the
general American scene—the air of hard prosperity, the ruthlessly
pushed-up and promoted look worn by men, women and children alike. I
remember taking that appearance, of the hour or two, for a climax to the
sense that had most remained with me after a considerable previous
moving about over the land, the sense of the small quantity of mere
human sordidness of state to be observed.

One is liable to observe it in _any_ best of all possible worlds, and I
had not, in truth, gone out of my way either to avoid it or to look for
it; only I had met it enough, in other climes, without doing so, and
had, to be veracious, not absolutely and utterly missed it in the
American. Images of confirmed (though, strangely, of active, occupied
and above all “sensitive”) squalor had I encountered in New Hampshire
hills; also, below the Southern line, certain special, certain awful
examples, in Black and White alike, of the last crudity of condition.
These spots on the picture had, however, lost themselves in the general
attestation of the truth most forced home, the vision of the country as,
supremely, a field for the unhampered revel, the unchecked _essor_,
material and moral, of the “common man” and the common woman. How
splendidly they were making it all answer, for the most part, or to the
extent of the so rare public collapse of the individual, had been an
observation confirmed for me by a rapid journey to the Pacific coast and
back; yet I had doubtless not before seen it so answer as in this very
concrete case of the swarming New York afternoon. It was little to say,
in that particular light, that such grossnesses as want or tatters or
gin, as the unwashed face or the ill-shod, and still less the unshod,
foot, or the mendicant hand, became strange, unhappy, far-off things—it
would even have been an insult to allude to them or to be explicitly
complacent about their absence. The case was, unmistakably, universally,
of the common, the very common man, the very common woman and the very
common child; but all enjoying what I have called their promotion, their
rise in the social scale, with that absence of acknowledging flutter,
that serenity of assurance, which marks, for the impressed class, the
school-boy or the school-girl who is accustomed, and who always quite
expects, to “move up.” The children at play, more particularly the
little girls, formed the characters, as it were, in which the story was
written largest; frisking about over the greenswards, grouping together
in the vistas, with an effect of the exquisite in attire, of delicacies
of dress and personal “keep-up,” as through the shimmer of silk, the
gloss of beribboned hair, the gleam of cared-for teeth, the pride of
varnished shoe, that might well have created a doubt as to their
“popular” affiliation. This affiliation was yet established by
sufficiencies of context, and might well have been, for that matter, by
every accompanying vocal or linguistic note, the swarm of queer sounds,
mostly not to be interpreted, that circled round their pretty heads as
if they had been tamers of odd, outlandish, perching little birds. They
fell moreover into the vast category of those ubiquitous children of the
public schools who occupy everywhere, in the United States, so much of
the forefront of the stage, and at the sight of whose so remarkably clad
and shod condition the brooding analyst, with the social question never,
after all, too much in abeyance, could clap, in private, the most
reactionary hands.

The brooding analyst had in fact, from the first of his return,
recognized in the mere detail of the testimony everywhere offered to the
high pitch of the American shoe-industry, a lively incentive to cheerful
views; the population showing so promptly, in this connection, as the
best equipped in the world. The impression at first had been
irresistible: two industries, at the most, seemed to rule the American
scene. The dentist and the shoedealer divided it between them; to that
degree, positively, that in public places, in the perpetual electric
cars which seem to one’s desperation at times (so condemned is one to
live in them) all there measurably _is_ of the American scene, almost
any other typical, any other personal fact might be neglected, for
consideration, in the interest of the presentable foot and the
far-shining dental gold. It was a world in which every one, without
exception, no matter how “low” in the social scale, wore the best and
the newest, the neatest and the smartest, boots; to be added to which
(always for the brooding analyst) was the fascination, so to speak, of
noting how much more than any other single thing this may do for a
possibly compromised appearance. And if my claim for the interest of
this exhibition seems excessive, I refer the objector without hesitation
to a course of equivalent observation in other countries, taking an
equally miscellaneous show for his basis. Nothing was more curious than
to trace, on a great ferry-boat, for instance, the effect of letting
one’s eyes work up, as in speculation, from the lower to the higher
extremities of some seated row of one’s fellow passengers. The testimony
of the lower might preponderantly have been, always, to their
comparative conquest of affluence and ease; but this presumption gave
way, at successive points, with the mounting vision, and was apt to
break down entirely under the evidence of face and head. When I say
“head,” I mean more particularly, where the men were, concerned, hat;
this feature of the equipment being almost always at pains, and with the
oddest, most inveterate perversity, to defeat and discredit whatever
might be best in the others. Such are the problems in which a restless
analysis may land us.

Why should the general “feeling” for the boot, in the United States, be
so mature, so evolved, and the feeling for the hat lag at such a
distance behind it? The standard as to that article of dress struck me
as, everywhere, of the lowest; governed by no consensus of view, custom
or instinct, no sense of its “vital importance” in the manly aspect. And
yet the wearer of any loose improvisation in the way of a head-cover
will testify as frankly, in his degree, to the extreme consideration
given by the community at large, as I have intimated, to the dental
question. The terms in which this evidence is presented are often, among
the people, strikingly artless, but they are a marked advance on the
omnipresent opposite signs, those of a systematic detachment from the
chair of anguish, with which any promiscuous “European” exhibition is
apt to bristle. I remember to have heard it remarked by a French friend,
of a young woman who had returned to her native land after some years of
domestic service in America, that she had acquired there, with other
advantages, _le sourire Californien_, and the “Californian” smile,
indeed, expressed, more or less copiously, in undissimulated cubes of
the precious metal, plays between lips that render scant other tribute
to civilization. The greater interest, in this connection, however, is
that impression of the state and appearance of the teeth viewed among
the “refined” as supremely important, which the restored absentee, long
surrounded elsewhere with the strangest cynicisms of indifference on
this article, makes the subject of one of his very first notes. Every
one, in “society,” has good, handsome, pretty, has above all cherished
and tended, teeth; so that the offered spectacle, frequent in other
societies, of strange irregularities, protrusions, deficiencies, fangs
and tusks and cavities, is quite refreshingly and consolingly absent.
The consequences of care and forethought, from an early age, thus write
themselves on the facial page distinctly and happily, and it is not too
much to say that the total show is, among American aspects, cumulatively
charming. One sees it sometimes balance, for charm, against a greater
number of less fortunate items, in that totality, than one would quite
know how to begin estimating.

But I have strayed again far from my starting-point and have again, I
fear, succumbed to the danger of embroidering my small original
proposition with too many, and scarce larger, derivatives. I left the
Plaza, I left the Park steeped in the rose-colour of such a brightness
of Sunday and of summer as had given me, on a couple of occasions,
exactly what I desired—a simplified attention, namely, and the power to
rest for the time in the appearance that the awful aliens were
flourishing there in perfections of costume and contentment. One had
only to take them in as more completely, conveniently and expensively
_endimanchés_ than one had ever, on the whole, seen any other people, in
order to feel that one was calling down upon all the elements involved
the benediction of the future—and calling it down most of all on one’s
embraced permission not to worry any more. It was by way of not
worrying, accordingly, that I found in another presentment of the
general scene, chanced upon at a subsequent hour, all sorts of
interesting and harmonious suggestions. These adventures of the critical
spirit were such mere mild walks and talks as I almost blush to offer,
on this reduced scale, as matter of history; but I draw courage from the
remembrance that history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate
crudity of what “happens,” but the much finer complexity of what we read
into it and think of in connection with it. If a walk across the Park,
with a responsive friend, late on the golden afternoon of a warm
week-day, and if a consequent desultory stroll, for speculation’s sake,
through certain northward and eastward streets and avenues, of an
identity a little vague to me now, save as a blur of builded evidence as
to proprietary incomes—if such an incident ministered, on the spot, to a
boundless evocation, it then became history of a splendid order: though
I perhaps must add that it became so for the two participants alone, and
with an effect after all not easy to communicate. The season was over,
the recipients of income had retired for the summer, and the large clear
vistas were peopled mainly with that conscious hush and that spectral
animation characteristic of places kept, as with all command of time and
space, for the indifferent, the all but insolent, absentee. It was a
vast, costly, empty newness, redeemed by the rare quiet and coloured by
the pretty light, and I scare know, I confess, why it should have had
anything murmurous or solicitous to say at all, why its eloquence was
not over when it had thus defined itself as intensely rich and intensely
modern.

If I have spoken, with some emphasis, of what it “evoked,” I might
easily be left, it would appear, with that emphasis on my hands—did I
not catch, indeed, for my explanation, the very key to the anomaly.
Ransacking my brain for the sources of the impressiveness, I see them,
of a sudden, locked up in that word “modern”; the mystery clears in the
light of the fact that one was perhaps, for that half-hour, more
intimately than ever before in touch with the sense of the term. It was
exactly because I seemed, with the ear of the spirit, to hear the whole
quarter bid, as with one penetrating voice, for the boon of the future,
for some guarantee, or even mere hinted promise, of history and
opportunity, that the attitude affected me as the last revelation of
modernity. What made the revelation was the collective sharpness, so to
speak, of this vocal note, offering any price, offering everything,
wanting only to outbid and prevail, at the great auction of life. “See
how ready we are”—one caught the tone: “ready to buy, to pay, to
promise; ready to place, to honour, our purchase. We have everything,
don’t you see? every capacity and appetite, every advantage of education
and every susceptibility of sense; no ‘tip’ in the world, none that our
time is capable of giving, has been lost on us: so that all we now
desire is what you, Mr. Auctioneer, have to dispose of, the great
‘going’ chance of a time to come.” That was the sound unprecedentedly
evoked for me, and in a form that made sound somehow overflow into
sight. It was as if, in their high gallery, the bidders, New Yorkers
every one, were before one’s eyes; pressing to the front, hanging over
the balustrade, holding out clamorous importunate hands. It was not,
certainly, for general style, pride and colour, a Paul Veronese company;
even the women, in spite of pearls and brocade and golden hair, failed
of that type, and still more inevitably the men, without doublet,
mantle, ruff or sword; the nearest approach might have been in the great
hounds and the little blackamoors. But my vision had a kind of analogy;
for what were the Venetians, after all, but the children of a Republic
and of trade? It was, however, mainly, no doubt, an affair of the
supporting marble terrace, the platform of my crowd, with as many
columns of onyx and curtains of velvet as any great picture could need.
About these there would be no difficulty whatever; though this luxury of
vision of the matter had meanwhile no excuse but the fact that the hour
was charming, the waning light still lucid, the air admirable, the
neighbourhood a great empty stage, expensively, extravagantly set, and
the detail in frontage and cornice and architrave, in every feature of
every edifice, as sharp as the uttered words of the plea I have just
imagined.


                                   V

The American air, I take advantage of this connection to remember, lends
a felicity to all the exactitudes of architecture and sculpture, favours
sharp effects, disengages differences, preserves lights, defines
projected shadows. Sculpture, in it, never either loses a value or
conceals a loss, and it is everywhere full of help to discriminated
masses. This remark was to be emphatically made, I found myself
observing, in presence of so distinct an appeal to high clearness as the
great Palladian pile just erected by Messrs. Tiffany on one of the upper
corners of Fifth Avenue, where it presents itself to the friendly sky
with a great nobleness of white marble. One is so thankful to it, I
recognize, for not having twenty-five stories, which it might easily
have had, I suppose, in the wantonness of wealth or of greed, that one
gives it a double greeting, rejoicing to excess perhaps at its merely
remaining, with the three fine arched and columned stages above its high
basement, within the conditions of sociable symmetry. One may break
one’s heart, certainly, over its only being, for “interest,” a great
miscellaneous shop—if one has any heart left in New York for such
adventures. One may also reflect, if any similar spring of reflection
will still serve, on its being, to the very great limitation of its
dignity, but a more or less pious _pastiche_ or reproduction, the copy
of a model that sits where Venetian water-steps keep—or used to
keep!—vulgar invasion at bay. But I hasten to add that one will do these
things only at the cost of not “putting in” wherever one can the patch
of optimism, the sigh of relief, the glow of satisfaction, or whatever
else the pardonably factitious emotion may be called—which in New York
is very bad economy. Look for interest where you may, cultivate a
working felicity, press the spring hard, and you will see that, to
whatever air Palladian piles may have been native, they can nowhere tell
their great cold calculated story, in measured chapter and verse, better
than to the strong sea-light of New York. This medium has the abundance
of some ample childless mother who consoles herself for her sterility by
an unbridled course of adoption—as I seemed again to make out in
presence of the tiers of white marble that are now on their way to
replace the granitic mass of the old Reservoir, _ultima Thule_ of the
northward walk of one’s early time.

The reservoir of learning here taking form above great terraces—which my
mind’s eye makes as great as it would like—lifts, once more, from the
heart the weight of the “tall” building it apparently doesn’t propose to
become. I could admire, in the unfinished state of the work, but the
lower courses of this inestimable structure, the Public Library that is
to gather into rich alliance and splendid ease the great minor Libraries
of the town; it was enough for my delight, however, that the conditions
engage for a covering of the earth rather than an invasion of the air—of
so supreme an effect, at the pitch things have reached, is this single
element of a generous area. It offers the best of reasons for speaking
of the project as inestimable. Any building that, being beautiful,
presents itself as seated rather than as standing, can do with your
imagination what it will; you ask it no question, you give it a free
field, content only if it will sit and sit and sit. And if you
interrogate your joy, in the connection, you will find it largely
founded, I think, on all the implications thus conveyed of a
proportionately smaller quantity of the great religion of the Elevator.
The lateral development of great buildings is as yet, in the United
States, but an opportunity for the legs, is in fact almost their sole
opportunity—a circumstance that, taken alone, should eloquently plead;
but it has another blest value, for the imagination, for the nerves, as
a check on the constant obsession of one’s living, of every one’s
living, by the packed and hoisted basket. The sempiternal lift, for
one’s comings and goings, affects one at last as an almost intolerable
symbol of the herded and driven state and of that malady of preference
for gregarious ways, of insistence on gregarious ways only, by which the
people about one seem ridden. To wait, perpetually, in a human bunch, in
order to be hustled, under military drill, the imperative order to “step
lively,” into some tight mechanic receptacle, fearfully and wonderfully
working, is conceivable, no doubt, as a sad liability of our nature, but
represents surely, when cherished and sacrificed to, a strange
perversion of sympathies and ideals. Anything that breaks the gregarious
spell, that relieves one of one’s share, however insignificant, of the
abject collective consciousness of being pushed and pressed in, with
something that one’s shoulders and one’s heels must dodge at their
peril, something that slides or slams or bangs, operating, in your rear,
as ruthlessly as the guillotine—anything that performs this office puts
a price on the lonely sweetness of a step or two taken by one’s self, of
deviating into some sense of independent motive power, of climbing even
some grass-grown staircase, with a dream perhaps of the thrill of
fellow-feeling _then_ taking, then finding, place—something like
Robinson Crusoe’s famous thrill before Friday’s footprint in the sand.

However these things might be, I recall further, as an incident of that
hour of “evocation,” the goodly glow, under this same illumination, of
an immense red building, off in the clear north-east quarter, which had
hung back, with all success, from the perpendicular form, and which
actually covered ground with its extensions of base, its wide
terrestrial wings. It had, I remember, in the early evening light, a
homely kindness of diffused red brick, and to make out then that it was
a great exemplary Hospital, one of the many marvels of New York in this
general order, was to admire the exquisite art with which, in such a
medium, it had so managed to invest itself with stillness. It was as
quiet there, on its ample interspace, as if the clamorous city,
roundabout, as if the passion of the Elevated and of the Elevator in
especial, were forever at rest and no one were stepping lively for miles
and miles away; so that visibly, it had a spell to cast and a character
to declare—things I was won over, on the spot, to desire a nearer view
of. Fortune presently favoured this purpose, and almost my last
impression of New York was gathered, on a very hot June morning, in the
long, cool corridors of the Presbyterian Hospital, and in those “halls
of pain,” the high, quiet, active wards, silvery-dim with their
whiteness and their shade, where the genius of the terrible city seemed
to filter in with its energy sifted and softened, with its huge
good-nature refined. There were reasons beyond the scope of these
remarks for the interest of that hour, but it is at least within the
scope that I recall noting there, all responsively, as not before, that
if the _direct_ pressure of New York is too often to ends that strike us
as vulgar, the indirect is capable, and perhaps to an unlimited degree,
of these lurking effects of delicacy. The immediate expression is the
expression of violence, but you may find there is something left,
something kept back for you, if that has not from the first fatally
deafened you. It carries with it an after-sense which put on for me,
under several happy intimations, the image of some garden of the finest
flowers—or of such as might be on the way to become the finest—masked by
an enormous bristling hedge of defensive and aggressive vegetation,
lacerating, defiant, not to be touched without blood. One saw the garden
itself, behind its hedge and approachable only by those in the
secret—one divined it to contain treasures of delicacy, many of them
perhaps still to be developed, but attesting the possibilities of the
soil. My Presbyterian Hospital was somehow in the garden, just where the
soil, the very human soil itself, was richest, and—though this may
appear an odd tribute to an institution founded on the principle of
instant decision and action—it affected me, amid its summer airs and its
boundless, soundless business, as surpassingly delicate. _There_, if
nowhere else, was adjustment of tone; there was the note of mildness and
the sense of manners; under the impression of which I am not sure of not
having made up my mind that, were I merely alone and disconcerted,
merely unprepared and unwarned, in the vast, dreadful place, as must
happen to so many a helpless mortal, I should positively desire or
“elect,” as they say, to become the victim of some such mischance as
would put me into relation again, the ambulance or the police aiding,
with these precious saving presences. They might re-establish for me,
before the final extinction or dismissal, some belief in manners and in
tone.

Was it in the garden also, as I say, that the Metropolitan Museum had
meanwhile struck me as standing?—the impression of a quite other hazard
of _flânerie_ this, and one of those memories, once more, that I find
myself standing off from, as under the shadow of their too numerous
suggestion. That institution _is_, decidedly, to-day, part of the inner
New York harmony that I have described as a touched after-sense; so that
if there were, scattered about the place, elements prompting rich, if
vague, evocations, this was recognizably one of the spots over which
such elements would have most freedom to play. The original Museum was a
thing of the far past; hadn’t I the vision of it, from ancient days,
installed, stately though scrappy, in a large eccentric house in West
Fourteenth Street, a house the prior period, even the early, impressive
construction of which one recalled from days still more ancient, days so
far away that to be able to travel back to them was almost as good, or
as bad, as being a centenarian? This superfluous consciousness of the
original seat of the Museum, of where and what it had been, was one of
those terrible traps to memory, about the town, which baited themselves
with the cheese of association, so to speak, in order to exhibit one
afterwards as “caught,” or, otherwise expressed, as old; such being the
convicted state of the unfortunate who knows the _whole_ of so many of
his stories. The case is never really disguisable; we get off perhaps
when we only know the ends of things, but beyond that our historic sense
betrays us. We have known the beginnings, we have been present, in the
various connections, at the birth, the life and the death, and it is
wonderful how traceably, in such a place as New York, careers of
importance may run their course and great institutions, while you are
just watching, rise, prosper and fall. I had had my shudder, in that
same Fourteenth Street, for the complete disappearance of a large
church, as massive as brown stone could make it, at the engaging
construction of which one’s tender years had “assisted” (it exactly
faced the parental home, and nefarious, perilous play was found possible
in the works), but which, after passing from youth to middle age and
from middle age to antiquity, has vanished as utterly as the Assyrian
Empire.

So, it was to be noted, had the parental home, and so the first home of
the Museum, by what I made out, beyond Sixth Avenue—after which, for the
last-named, had there not been a second seat, long since superseded too,
a more prolonged _étape_ on the glorious road? This also gave out a
shimmer from the middle time, but with the present favouring stage of
the journey the glorious road seems to stretch away. It is a palace of
art, truly, that sits there on the edge of the Park, rearing itself with
a radiance, yet offering you expanses to tread; but I found it invite me
to a matter of much more interest than any mere judging of its
dispositions. It spoke with a hundred voices of that huge process of
historic waste that the place in general keeps putting before you; but
showing it in a light that drew out the harshness or the sadness, the
pang, whatever it had seemed elsewhere, of the reiterated sacrifice to
pecuniary profit. For the question here was to be of the advantage to
the spirit, not to the pocket; to be of the æsthetic advantage involved
in the wonderful clearance to come. From the moment the visitor takes in
two or three things—first, perhaps, the scale on which, in the past,
bewildering tribute has flowed in; second, the scale on which it must
absolutely now flow out; and, third, the presumption created by the
vivacity of these two movements for a really fertilizing stir of the
ground—he sees the whole place as the field of a drama the nearer view
of the future course of which he shall be sorry to lose. One never
winces after the first little shock, when Education is expensive—one
winces only at the expense which, like so much of the expense of New
York, doesn’t educate; and Education, clearly, was going to seat herself
in these marble halls—admirably prepared for her, to all appearance—and
issue her instructions without regard to cost. The obvious, the
beautiful, the thrilling thing was that, without regard to cost either,
they were going to be obeyed: that inference was somehow irresistible,
the disembodied voices I have spoken of quite forcing it home and the
palace roof arching to protect it as the dome of the theatre protects
the performance. I know not if all past purchase, in these annals
(putting the Cesnola Collection aside), has been without reproach, but
it struck me as safe to gather that (putting aside again Mr. Marquand’s
rare munificence) almost no past acceptance of gifts and bequests “in
kind” had been without weakness. In the light of Sargent’s splendid
portrait, simply, there would have been little enough weakness to
associate with Mr. Marquand’s collection; but the gifts and bequests in
general, even when speciously pleasing or interesting, constitute an
object-lesson in the large presence of which the New York mind will
perform its evolution—an evolution traceable, and with sharpness, in
advance. I shall nevertheless not attempt to foretell it; for sufficient
to the situation, surely, is the appearance, represented by its
announcing shadow, that Acquisition—acquisition if need be on the
highest terms—may, during the years to come, bask here as in a climate
it has never before enjoyed. There was money in the air, ever so much
money—that was, grossly expressed, the sense of the whole intimation.
And the money was to be all for the most exquisite things—for _all_ the
most exquisite except creation, which was to be off the scene
altogether; for art, selection, criticism, for knowledge, piety, taste.
The intimation—which was somehow, after all, so pointed—would have been
detestable if interests other, and smaller, than these had been in
question. The Education, however, was to be exclusively that of the
sense of beauty; this defined, romantically, for my evoked drama, the
central situation. What left me wondering a little, all the same, was
the contradiction involved in one’s not thinking of some of its
prospective passages as harsh. Here it is, no doubt, that one catches
the charm of rigours that take place all in the æsthetic and the
critical world. They would be invidious, would be cruel, if applied to
personal interests, but they take on a high benignity as soon as the
values concerned become values mainly for the mind. (If they happen to
have also a trade-value this is pure superfluity and excess.) The
thought of the acres of canvas and the tons of marble to be turned out
into the cold world as the penalty of old error and the warrant for a
clean slate ought to have drawn tears from the eyes. But these impending
incidents affected me, in fact, on the spot, as quite radiant
demonstrations. The Museum, in short, was going to be great, and in the
geniality of the life to come such sacrifices, though resembling those
of the funeral-pile of Sardanapalus, dwindled to nothing.



                                   V
                       THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS


                                   I

I scarce know, once more, if such a matter be a sign of the city itself,
or only another perversity on the part of a visitor apt to press a
little too hard, everywhere, on the spring of the show; but wherever I
turned, I confess, wherever any aspect seemed to put forth a freshness,
there I found myself saying that this aspect was one’s strongest
impression. It is impossible, as I now recollect, not to be amused at
the great immediate differences of scene and occasion that could produce
such a judgment, and this remark directly applies, no doubt, to the
accident of a visit, one afternoon of the dire mid-winter, to a theatre
in the Bowery at which a young actor in whom I was interested had found
for the moment a fine melodramatic opportunity. This small adventure—if
the adventures of rash observation be ever small—was to remain embalmed
for me in all its odd, sharp notes, and perhaps in none more than in its
element of contrast with an image antediluvian, the memory of the
conditions of a Bowery theatre, _the_ Bowery Theatre in fact,
contemporary with my more or less gaping youth. Was that vast dingy
edifice, with its illustrious past, still standing?—a point on which I
was to remain vague while I electrically travelled through a strange, a
sinister over-roofed clangorous darkness, a wide thoroughfare beset, for
all its width, with sound and fury, and bristling, amid the traffic,
with posts and piles that were as the supporting columns of a vast cold,
yet also uncannily-animated, sepulchre. It was like moving the length of
an interminable cage, beyond the remoter of whose bars lighted shops,
struggling dimly under other pent-house effects, offered their Hebrew
faces and Hebrew names to a human movement that affected one even then
as a breaking of waves that had rolled, for their welter on this very
strand, from the other side of the globe. I was on my way to enjoy, no
doubt, some peculiarly “American” form of the theatric mystery, but my
way led me, apparently, through depths of the Orient, and I should
clearly take my place with an Oriental public.

I took it in fact in such a curtained corner of a private box as might
have appeared to commit me to the most intimate interest possible—might
have done so, that is, if all old signs had not seemed visibly to fail
and new questions, mockingly insoluble, to rise. The old signs would
have been those of some “historic” community, so to speak, between the
play and the public, between those opposed reciprocal quantities: such a
consciousness of the same general terms of intercourse for instance, as
I seemed to have seen prevail, long years ago, under the great dim,
bleak, sonorous dome of the old Bowery. Nothing so much imposed itself
at first as this suggestive contrast—the vision of the other big bare
ranting stupid stage, the grey void, smelling of dust and tobacco-juice,
of a scene on which realism was yet to dawn, but which addressed itself,
on the other hand, to an audience at one with it. Audience and
“production” had been then of the same stripe and the same “tradition”;
the pitch, that is, had been of our own domestic and romantic tradition
(to apply large words to a loose matter, a matter rich in our very own
æsthetic idiosyncrasy). I should say, in short, if it didn’t savour of
pedantry, that if this ancient “poetic” had been purely a home-grown
thing, nursed in the English intellectual cradle, and in the American of
a time when the American resembled the English closely enough, so the
instincts from which it sprang were instincts familiar to the whole body
of spectators, whose dim sense of art (to use again the big word) was
only not thoroughly English because it must have been always so
abundantly Irish. The foreign note, in that thinner air, was, at the
most, the Irish, and I think of the elements of the “Jack Sheppard” and
“Claude Duval” Bowery, including the peanuts and the orange-peel, as
quite harmoniously Irish. From the corner of the box of my so improved
playhouse further down, the very name of which moreover had the
cosmopolite lack of point, I made out, in the audience, the usual mere
monotony of the richer exoticism. No single face, beginning with those
close beside me (for my box was a shared luxury), but referred itself,
by my interpretation, to some such strange outland form as we had not
dreamed of in my day. There they all sat, the representatives of the
races we have nothing “in common” with, as naturally, as comfortably, as
munchingly, as if the theatre were their constant practice—and, as
regards the munching, I may add, I was struck with the appearance of
quality and cost in the various confections pressed from moment to
moment upon our notice by the little playhouse peddlers.

It comes over me under this branch of my reminiscence, that these almost
“high-class” luxuries, circulating in such a company, were a sort of
supreme symbol of the _promoted_ state of the aspirant to American
conditions. He, or more particularly she, had been promoted, and, more
or less at a bound, to the habitual use of chocolate-creams, and indeed
of other dainties, refined and ingenious, compared with which these are
quite _vieux jeu_. This last remark might in fact open up for us, had I
space, a view, interesting to hold a moment, or to follow as far as it
might take us, of the wondrous consumption by the “people,” over the
land, of the most elaborate solid and liquid sweets, such products as
form in other countries an expensive and select dietary. The whole
phenomenon of this omnipresent and essentially “popular” appeal of the
confectioner and pastry-cook, I can take time but to note, is more
significant of the economic, and even of the social situation of the
masses than many a circumstance honoured with more attention. I found
myself again and again—in presence, for example, of the great glittering
temples, the bristling pagodas, erected to the worship in question
wherever men and women, perhaps particularly women, most congregate, and
above all under the high domes of the great modern railway stations—I
found myself wondering, I say, what such facts represented, what light
they might throw upon manners and wages. Wages, in the country at large,
are largely manners—the only manners, I think it fair to say, one mostly
encounters; the market and the home therefore look alike dazzling, at
first, in this reflected, many-coloured lustre. It speaks somehow,
beyond anything else, of the diffused sense of material ease—since the
solicitation of sugar couldn’t be so hugely and artfully organized if
the response were not clearly proportionate. But how is the response
itself organized, and what are the other items of that general budget of
labour, what in especial are the attenuations of that general state of
fatigue, in which so much purchasing-power can flow to the supposedly
superfluous? The wage-earners, the toilers of old, notably in other
climes, were known by the wealth of their songs; and has it, on these
lines, been given to the American people to be known by the number of
their “candies”?

I must not let the question, however, carry me too far—quite away from
the point I was about to make of my sense of the queer chasm over which,
on the Saturday afternoon at the Windsor Theatre, I seemed to see the so
domestic drama reach out to the so exotic audience and the so exotic
audience reach out to the so domestic drama. The play (a masterpiece of
its type, if I may so far strain a point, in such a case, and in the
interest of my young friend’s excellent performance, as to predicate
“type”) was American, to intensity, in its blank conformity to
convention, the particular implanted convention of the place. This
convention, simply expressed, was that there should never be anything
different in a play (the most conservative of human institutions) from
what there had always been before; that _that place_, in a word, should
always know the very same theatric thing, any deviation from which might
be phrenology, or freemasonry, or ironmongery, or anything else in the
world, but would never be drama, especially drama addressed to the heart
of the people. The tricks and the traps, the _trucs_, the whole
stage-carpentry, might freely renew themselves, to create for artless
minds the illusion of a difference; but the sense of the business would
still have to reside in our ineradicable Anglo-Saxon policy, or our
seemingly deep-seated necessity, of keeping, where “representation” is
concerned, so far away from the truth and the facts of life as really to
betray a fear in us of possibly doing something like them should we be
caught nearer. “Foreigners,” in general, unmistakably, in any attempt to
render life, obey the instinct of keeping closer, positively recognize
the presence and the solicitation of the deep waters; yet here was my
houseful of foreigners, physiognomically branded as such, confronted
with our pale poetic—fairly caught for schooling in our art of making
the best of it. Nothing (in the texture of the occasion) could have had
a sharper interest than this demonstration that, since what we most
pretend to do with them is thoroughly to school them, the schooling, by
our system, cannot begin too soon nor pervade their experience too much.
Were they going to rise to it, or rather to fall to it—to _our_
instinct, as distinguished from their own, for picturing life? Were they
to take our lesson, submissively, in order to get with it our smarter
traps and tricks, our superior Yankee machinery (illustrated in the case
before them, for instance, by a wonderful folding bed in which the
villain of the piece, pursuing the virtuous heroine round and round the
room and trying to leap over it after her, is, at the young lady’s touch
of a hidden spring, engulfed as in the jaws of a crocodile?) Or would it
be their dim intellectual resistance, a vague stir in them of some
unwitting heritage—of the finer irony, that I should make out, on the
contrary, as withstanding the effort to corrupt them, and thus perhaps
really promising to react, over the head of our offered mechanic bribes,
on our ingrained intellectual platitude?

One had only to formulate that question to seem to see the issue hang
there, for the excitement of the matter, quite as if the determination
were to be taken on the spot. For the opposition over the chasm of the
footlights, as I have called it, grew intense truly, as I took in on one
side the hue of the Galician cheek, the light of the Moldavian eye, the
whole pervasive facial mystery, swaying, at the best, for the moment,
over the gulf, on the vertiginous bridge of American confectionery—and
took in on the other the perfect “Yankee” quality of the challenge which
stared back at them as in the white light of its hereditary thinness. I
needn’t say that when I departed—perhaps from excess of suspense—it was
without seeing the balance drop to either quarter, and I am afraid I
think of the odd scene as still enacted in many places and many ways,
the inevitable rough union in discord of the two groups of instincts,
the fusion of the two camps by a queer, clumsy, wasteful social
chemistry. Such at all events are the roundabout processes of peaceful
history, the very history that succeeds, for our edification, in _not_
consisting of battles and blood and tears.


                                   II

I was happily to find, at all events, that I had not, on that occasion,
done with the Bowery, or with its neighbourhood—as how could one not
rejoice to return to an air in which such infinite suggestion might
flower? The season had advanced, though the summer night was no more
than genial, and the question, for this second visit, was of a “look
in,” with two or three friends, at three or four of the most
“characteristic” evening resorts (for reflection and conversation) of
the dwellers on the East side. It was definitely not, the question, of
any gaping view of the policed underworld—unanimously pronounced an
imposture, in general, at the best, and essentially less interesting
than the exhibition of public manners. I found on the spot, in harmony
with this preference, that nothing better could have been desired, in
the way of pure presentable picture, subject always to the swinging
lantern-light of the individual imagination, than the first (as I think
it was, for the roaming hour) of our penetrated “haunts”—a large
semi-subterranean establishment, a beer-cellar rich in the sporting
note, adorned with images of strong men and lovely women, prize-fighters
and _ballerine_, and finding space in its deep bosom for a billiard-room
and a bowling-alley, all sociably squeezed together; finding space,
above all, for a collection of extraordinarily equivocal types of
consumers: an intensity of equivocation indeed planted, just as if to
await direct and convenient study, in the most typical face of the
collection, a face which happened, by good fortune, to be that of the
most officious presence. When the element of the equivocal in personal
character and history takes on, in New York, an addition from all the
rest of the swarming ambiguity and fugacity of race and tongue, the
result becomes, for the picture-seeker, indescribably, luridly strong.
There always comes up, at view of the “low” physiognomy shown in
conditions that denote a measure of impunity and ease, the question—than
which few, I think, are more interesting to the psychologist—of the
forms of ability _consistent_ with lowness; the question of the quality
of intellect, the subtlety of character, the mastery of the art of life,
with which the extremity of baseness may yet be associated. That
question held me, I confess, so under its spell during those almost
first steps of our ingenuous _enquête_, that I would gladly have
prolonged, just there, my opportunity to sound it.

The fascination was of course in the perfection of the baseness, and the
puzzle in the fact that it could be subject, without fatally muddling,
without tearing and rending them, to those arts of life, those
quantities of conformity, the numerous involved accommodations and
patiences, that are _not_ in the repertory of the wolf and the snake.
Extraordinary, we say to ourselves on such occasions, the amount of
formal tribute that civilization is after all able to gouge out of
apparently hopeless stuff; extraordinary that it can make a presentable
sheath for such fangs and such claws. The mystery is in the _how_ of the
process, in the wonderful little wavering borderland between nature and
art, the place of the crooked seam where, if psychology had the adequate
lens, the white stitches would show. All this played through one’s
thought, to the infinite extension of the sufficiently close and
thoroughly _banal_ beer-cellar. There happened to be reasons, not to be
shaded over, why one of my companions should cause a particular chord of
recognition to vibrate, and the very convergence of hushed looks, in the
so “loud” general medium, seemed to lay bare, from table to table, the
secret of the common countenance (common to that place) put off its
guard by curiosity, almost by amiability. The secret was doubtless in
many cases but the poor familiar human secret of the vulgar mind, of the
soul unfurnished, so to speak, in respect to delicacy, probity, pity,
with a social decoration of the mere bleak walls of instinct; but it was
the unforgettable little personality that I have referred to as the
presiding spirit, it was the spokesman of our welcome, the master of the
scene himself, who struck me as presenting my question in its finest
terms. To conduct a successful establishment, to _be_ a spokesman, an
administrator, an employer of labour and converser on subjects, let
alone a citizen and a tax-payer, was to have an existence abounding in
relations and to be subject to the law that a relation, however
imperfectly human or social, is at the worst a matter that can only be
described as delicate. Well, in presence of the abysmal obliquity of
such a face, of the abysmal absence of traceability or coherency in such
antecedents, where did the different delicacies involved come in at
all?—how did intercourse emerge at all, and, much more, emerge so
brilliantly, as it were, from its dangers? The answer had to be, for the
moment, no doubt, that if there be such a state as that of
misrepresenting your value and use, there is also the rarer condition of
being so sunk beneath the level of appearance as not to be able to
represent them at all. Appearance, in you, has thus not only no notes,
no language, no authority, but is literally condemned to operate _as_
the treacherous sum of your poverties.

The jump was straight, after this, to a medium so different that I seem
to see, as the one drawback to evoking it again, however briefly, the
circumstance that it started the speculative hare for even a longer and
straighter run. This irrepressible animal covered here, however, a much
goodlier country, covered it in the interest of a happy
generalization—the bold truth that even when apparently done to death by
that property of the American air which reduces so many aspects to a
common denominator, certain finer shades of saliency and consistency do
often, by means known to themselves, recover their rights. They are like
swimmers who have had to plunge, to come round and under water, but who
pop out a panting head and shine for a moment in the sun. My image is
perhaps extravagant, for the question is only of the kept recollection
of a café pure and simple, particularly pure and particularly simple in
fact, inasmuch as it dispensed none but “soft” drinks and presented
itself thus in the light, the quiet, tempered, intensely individual
light, of a beerhouse innocent of beer. I have indeed no other excuse
for calling it a beerhouse than the fact that it offered to every sense
such a deep Germanic peace as abides, for the most part (though not
always even then), where the deep-lidded tankard balances with the
scarce shallower bowl of the meditative pipe. This modest asylum had its
tone, which I found myself, after a few minutes, ready to take for
exquisite, if on no other ground than its almost touching suggestion of
discriminations made and preserved in the face of no small difficulty.
That is what I meant just now by my tribute to the occasional patience
of unquenched individualism—the practical subtlety of the spirit
unashamed of its preference for the minor key, clinging, through thick
and thin, to its conception of decency and dignity, and finding means to
make it good even to the exact true shade. These are the real triumphs
of art—the discriminations in favour of taste produced not by the gilded
and guarded “private room,” but by making publicity itself delicate,
making your barrier against vulgarity consist but in a few tables and
chairs, a few coffee-cups and boxes of dominoes. Money in quantities
enough can always create tone, but it had been created here by mere
unbuyable instinct. The charm of the place in short was that its note of
the exclusive had been arrived at with such a beautifully fine economy.
I try, in memory, and for the value of the lesson, to analyze, as it
were, the elements, and seem to recall as the most obvious the
contemplative stillness in which the faint click of the moved domino
could be heard, and into which the placid attention of the quiet, honest
men who were thus testifying for the exquisite could be read. The
exquisite, yes, _was_ the triumph of their tiny temple, with all the
loud surrounding triumphs, those of the coarse and the common, making it
but stick the faster, like a well-inserted wedge. And fully to catch
this was to catch by the same stroke the main ground of the effect, to
see that it came most of all from felicity of suppression and omission.
There was so visibly too much everywhere else of everything vulgar, that
there reigned here, for the difference, the learnt lesson that there
could scarce be in such an air of infection little enough, in quantity
and mass, of anything. The felicity had its climax in the type, or
rather in the individual character, of our host, who, officiating alone,
had apparently suppressed all aids to service and succeeded, as by an
inspiration of genius, in omitting, for all his years, to learn the
current American. He spoke but a dozen words of it, and that was
doubtless how he best kept the key of the old Germanic peace—of the
friendly stillness in which, while the East side roared, a new
metaphysic might have been thought out or the scheme of a new war
intellectualized.


                                  III

After this there were other places, mostly higher in the scale, and but
a couple of which my memory recovers. There was also, as I recall, a
snatched interlude—an associated dash into a small crammed convivial
theatre, an oblong hall, bristling with pipe and glass, at the end of
which glowed for a moment, a little dingily, some broad passage of a
Yiddish comedy of manners. It hovered there, briefly, as if seen through
a spy-glass reaching, across the world, to some far-off dowdy Jewry;
then our sense of it became too mixed a matter—it was a scent,
literally, not further to be followed. There remained with me none the
less the patch of alien comedy, with all it implied of esoteric vision
on the part of the public. Something of that admonition had indeed,
earlier in the season, been sharp—so much had one heard of a brilliant
Yiddish actress who was drawing the town to the East side by the promise
of a new note. This lady, however, had disconcerted my own purpose by
suddenly appearing, in the orthodox quarter, in a language only
definable as not in _intention_ Yiddish—not otherwise definable; and I
also missed, through a like alarm, the opportunity of hearing an admired
actor of the same school. He was Yiddish on the East side, but he
cropped up, with a wild growth, in Broadway as well, and his auditors
seemed to know as little as care to what idiom they supposed themselves
to be listening. Marked in New York, by many indications, this vagueness
of ear as to differences, as to identities, of idiom.

I must not, however, under that interference, lose the echo of a couple
of other of the impressions of my crowded summer night—and all the less
that they kept working it, as I seem to remember, up to a higher and
higher pitch. It had been intimated to me that one of these scenes of
our climax had entered the sophisticated phase, that of sacrificing to a
self-consciousness that was to be regretted—that of making eyes, so to
speak, at the larger, the up-town public; that pestilent favour of
“society” which is fatal to everything it touches and which so quickly
leaves the places of its passage unfit for its own use and uninteresting
for any other. This establishment had learned to lay on local colour
with malice prepense—the local colour of its “Slav” origin—and was the
haunt, on certain evenings of the week, of yearning groups from Fifth
Avenue sated with familiar horizons. Yet there were no yearning
groups—none, that is, save our own—at the time of our visit; there was
only, very amply and pleasantly presented, another aspect of the
perpetual process of the New York intermarriage. As the Venetian
Republic, in the person of the Doge, used to go forth, on occasion, to
espouse the Adriatic, so it is quite as if the American, incarnate in
its greatest port, were for ever throwing the nuptial ring to the still
more richly-dowered Atlantic. I speak again less of the nuptial rites
themselves than of those immediate fruits that struck me everywhere as
so characteristic—so equally characteristic, I mean, of each party to
the union. The flourishing establishment of my present reference offered
distinctly its outland picture, but showed it in an American frame, and
the features of frame and picture arranged themselves shrewdly together.
Quiet couples, elderly bourgeois husbands and wives, sat there over
belated sausage and cheese, potato-salad and Hungarian wine, the wife
with her knitting produced while the husband finished his cigar; and the
indication, for the moment, might have been of some evening note of
Dantzig or of Buda-Pesth. But the conditioning foreign, and the
visibility of their quite so happily conjugal give-and-take, in New
York, is my reason for this image of the repeated espousals. Why were
the quiet easy couples, with their homely café habit (kept in the best
relation to the growth, under the clicking needles, of the marital
stocking), such remote and indirect results of our local anecdotic past,
our famous escape, at our psychological moment, from King George and his
works, with all sorts of inevitable lapses and hitches in any grateful
consciousness they might ever have of that prime cause of their new
birth? Yet why, on the other hand, could they affect one, even with the
Fatherland planked under them in the manner of the praying-carpet spread
beneath the good Mahometan, as still more disconnected from the historic
consciousness implied in their own type, and with the mere moral
identity of German or Slav, or whatever it might be, too extinct in them
for any possibility of renewal? The exotic boss here did speak, I
remember, fluent East-side New Yorkese, and it was in this wonderful
tongue that he expressed to us his superior policy, his refined
philosophy, announced his plans for the future and presented himself, to
my vision, as a possibly far-reaching master-spirit. What remains with
me is this expression, and the colour and the quality of it, and the
free familiarity and the “damned foreign impudence,” with so much taken
for granted, and all the hitches and lapses, all the solutions of
continuity, in _his_ inward assimilation of our heritage and point of
view, matched as these were, on our own side, by such signs of large and
comparatively witless concession. What, oh, what again, were he and his
going to make of us?

Well, there was the impression, and that was a question on which, for a
certain intensity in it, our adventure might have closed; but it was so
far from closing that, late though the hour, it presently opened out
into a vast and complicated picture which I find myself thinking of,
after an interval, as the splendid crown of the evening. Here were we
still on the East side, but we had moved up, by stages artfully
inspired, into the higher walks, into a pavilion of light and sound and
savoury science that struck one as vaguely vast, as possibly gardened
about, and that, blazing into the stillness of the small hours, dazzled
one with the show of its copious and various activity. The whole vision
was less intimate than elsewhere, but it was a world of custom quite
away from any mere Delmonico tradition of one’s earlier time, and rich,
as one might reckon it, in its own queer marks, marks probably never yet
reduced—inspiring thought!—to literary notation; with which it would
seem better to form a point of departure for fresh exploration than
serve as tail-piece to the end of a chapter. Who were all the people,
and whence and whither and why, in the good New York small hours? Where
_was_ the place after all, and what might it, or might it not, truly,
represent to slightly-fatigued feasters who, in a recess like a
privileged opera-box at a _bal masqué_, and still communing with
polyglot waiters, looked down from their gallery at a multitudinous
supper, a booming orchestra, an elegance of disposed plants and flowers,
a perfect organization and an abyss of mystery? Was it “on” Third
Avenue, on Second, on fabulous unattempted First? Nothing would induce
me to cut down the romance of it, in remembrance, to a mere address,
least of all to an awful New York one; New York addresses falling so
below the grace of a city where the very restaurants may on occasion,
under restless analysis, flash back the likeness of Venetian palaces
flaring with the old carnival. The ambiguity is the element in which the
whole thing swims for me—so nocturnal, so bacchanal, so hugely hatted
and feathered and flounced, yet apparently so innocent, almost so
patriarchal again, and matching, in its mixture, with nothing one had
elsewhere known. It breathed its simple “New York! New York!” at every
impulse of inquiry; so that I can only echo contentedly, with analysis
for once quite agreeably baffled, “Remarkable, unspeakable New York!”



                                   VI
                          THE SENSE OF NEWPORT


                                   I

Newport, on my finding myself back there, threatened me sharply, quite
at first, with that predicament at which I have glanced in another
connection or two—the felt condition of having known it too well and
loved it too much for description or definition. What was one to say
about it except that one _had_ been so affected, so distraught, and that
discriminations and reasons were buried under the dust of use? There was
a chance indeed that the breath of the long years (of the interval of
absence, I mean) would have blown away this dust—and that, precisely,
was what one was eager to see. To go out, to look about, to recover the
sense, was accordingly to put the question, without delay, to the
proof—and with the happy consequence, I think, of an escape from a grave
discomfiture. The charm was there again, unmistakably, the little old
strange, very simple charm—to be expressed, as a fine proposition, or to
be given up; but the answer came in the fact that to have walked about
for half-an-hour was to have felt the question clear away. It cleared
away so conveniently, so blissfully, in the light of the benign little
truth that nothing had been less possible, even in the early, ingenuous,
infatuated days, than to describe or define Newport. It had clearly had
nothing about it _to_ describe or define, so that one’s fondness had
fairly rested on this sweet oddity in it. One had only to look back to
recognize that it had never condescended to give a scrap of reasoned
account of itself (as a favourite of fortune and the haunt of the
_raffiné_); it had simply lain there like a little bare, white, open
hand, with slightly-parted fingers, for the observer with a presumed
sense for hands to take or to leave. The observer with a real sense
never failed to pay this image the tribute of quite tenderly grasping
the hand, and even of raising it, delicately, to his lips; having no
less, at the same time, the instinct of not shaking it too hard, and
that above all of never putting it to any rough work.

Such had been from the first, under a chastened light and in a purple
sea, the dainty isle of Aquidneck; which might have avoided the weak
mistake of giving up its pretty native name and of becoming thereby as
good as nameless—with an existence as Rhode Island practically
monopolized by the State and a Newport identity borrowed at the best and
applicable but to a corner. Does not this vagueness of condition,
however, fitly symbolize the small virtual promontory, of which,
superficially, nothing could be predicated but its sky and its sea and
its sunsets? One views it as placed there, by some refinement in the
scheme of nature, just as a touchstone of taste—with a beautiful little
sense to be read into it by a few persons, and nothing at all to be made
of it, as to its essence, by most others. I come back, for its essence,
to that figure of the little white hand, with the gracefully-spread
fingers and the fine grain of skin, even the dimples at the joints and
the shell-like delicacy of the pink nails—all the charms in short that a
little white hand may have. I see all the applications of the image—I
see a special truth in each. It is the back of the hand, rising to the
swell of the wrist, that is exposed—which is the way, I think, the true
lover takes and admires it. He makes out in it, bending over it—or he
used to in the old days—innumerable shy and subtle beauties, almost
requiring, for justice, a magnifying-glass; and he winces at the sight
of certain other obtruded ways of dealing with it. The touchstone of
taste was indeed to operate, for the critical, the tender spirit, from
the moment the pink palm was turned up on the chance of what might be
“in” it. For nine persons out of ten, among its visitors, its purchasers
of sites and builders of (in the old parlance) cottages, there had never
been anything in it at all—except of course an opportunity: an
opportunity for escaping the summer heat of other places, for bathing,
for boating, for riding and driving, and for many sorts of more or less
expensive riot. The pink palm being empty, in other words, to their
vision, they had begun, from far back, to put things into it, things of
their own, and of all sorts, and of many ugly, and of more and more
expensive, sorts; to fill it substantially, that is, with gold, the gold
that they have ended by heaping up there to an amount so oddly out of
proportion to the scale of nature and of space.

This process, one was immediately to perceive with that renewal of
impression, this process of injection and elaboration, of creating the
palpable pile, had been going on for years to such a tune that the face
of nature was now as much obliterated as possible, and the original shy
sweetness as much as possible bedizened and bedevilled: all of which,
moreover, might also at present be taken as having led, in turn, to the
most unexpected climax, a matter of which I shall presently speak. The
original shy sweetness, however, that range of effect which I have
referred to as practically too latent and too modest for notation, had
meanwhile had its votaries, the fond pedestrian minority, for whom the
little white hand (to return for an instant to my figure, with which, as
you see, I am charmed) had always been so full of treasures of its own
as to discredit, from the point of view of taste, any attempt, from
without, to stuff it fuller. Such attempts had, in the nature of the
case, and from far back, been condemned to show for violations;
violations of taste and discretion, to begin with—violations, more
intimately, as the whole business became brisker, of a thousand delicate
secret places, dear to the disinterested rambler, small, mild “points”
and promontories, far away little lonely, sandy coves, rock-set,
lily-sheeted ponds, almost hidden, and shallow Arcadian summer-haunted
valleys, with the sea just over some stony shoulder: a whole world that
called out to the long afternoons of youth, a world with its scale so
measured and intended and happy, its detail so finished and pencilled
and stippled (certainly for American detail!) that there comes back to
me, across the many years, no better analogy for it than that of some
fine foreground in an old “line” engraving. There remained always a
sense, of course, in which the superimpositions, the multiplied
excrescences, were a tribute to the value of the place; where no such
liberty was ever taken save exactly _because_ (as even the most
blundering builder would have claimed) it was all so beautiful, so
solitary and so “sympathetic.” And that indeed has been, thanks to the
“pilers-on” of gold, the fortune, the history of its beauty: that it now
bristles with the villas and palaces into which the cottages have all
turned, and that these monuments of pecuniary power rise thick and
close, precisely, in order that their occupants may constantly remark to
each other, from the windows to the “grounds,” and from house to house,
that it _is_ beautiful, it _is_ solitary and sympathetic. The thing has
been done, it is impossible not to perceive, with the best faith in the
world—though not altogether with the best light, which is always so
different a matter; and it is with the general consequence only, at the
end of the story, that I find myself to-day concerned.

So much concerned I found myself, I profess, after I had taken in this
fact of a very distinct general consequence, that the whole interest of
the vision was quickened by it; and that when, in particular, on one of
the last days of June, among the densely-arrayed villas, I had followed
the beautiful “ocean drive” to its uttermost reach and back without
meeting either another vehicle or a single rider, let alone a single
pedestrian, I recognized matter for the intellectual thrill that attests
a social revolution foreseen and completed. The term I use may appear
extravagant, but it was a fact, none the less, that I seemed to take
full in my face, on this occasion, the cold stir of air produced when
the whirligig of time has made one of its liveliest turns. It is always
going, the whirligig, but its effect is so to blow up the dust that we
must wait for it to stop a moment, as it now and then does with a pant
of triumph, in order to see what it has been at. I saw, beyond all
doubt, on the spot—and _there_ came in, exactly, the thrill; I could
remember far back enough to have seen it begin to blow all the artless
buyers and builders and blunderers into their places, leaving them there
for half a century or so of fond security, and then to see it, of a
sudden, blow them quite out again, as with the happy consciousness of
some new amusing use for them, some other game still to play with them.
This acquaintance, as it practically had been, with the whole rounding
of the circle (even though much of it from a distance), was tantamount
to the sense of having sat out the drama, the social, the local, that of
a real American period, from the rise to the fall of the curtain—always
assuming that truth of the reached catastrophe or _dénouement_. _How_
this climax or solution had been arrived at—that, clearly, for the
spectator, would have been worth taking note of; but what he made of it
I shall not glance at till I have shown him as first of all, on the
spot, quite modestly giving in to mere primary beguilement. It had been
certain in advance that he would find the whole picture overpainted, and
the question could only be, at the best, of how much of the ancient
surface would here and there glimmer through. The ancient surface had
been the concern, as I have hinted, of the small fond minority, the
comparatively few people for whom the lurking shy charm, all there, but
all to be felt rather than published, did in fact constitute a surface.
The question, as soon as one arrived, was of whether some ghost of that
were recoverable.


                                   II

There was always, to begin with, the Old Town—we used, before we had
become Old ourselves, to speak of it that way, in the manner of an
allusion to Nuremberg or to Carcassonne, since it had been leading its
little historic life for centuries (as we implied) before “cottages” and
house-agents were dreamed of. It was not that we had great illusions
about it or great pretensions for it; we only thought it, without
interference, very “good of its kind,” and we had as to its _being_ of
that kind no doubt whatever. Would it still be of that kind, and what
had the kind itself been?—these questions made one’s heart beat faster
as one went forth in search of it. Distinctly, if it had been of a kind
it _would_ still be of it; for the kind wouldn’t at the worst or at the
best (one scarce knew how to put it) have been worth changing: so that
the question for the restored absentee, who so palpitated with the sense
of it, all hung, absolutely, on the validity of the past. One might well
hold one’s breath if the past, with the dear little blue distances in
it, were in danger now of being given away. One might well pause before
the possible indication that a cherished impression of youth had been
but a figment of the mind. Fortunately, however, at Newport, and
especially where the antiquities cluster, distances are short, and the
note of reassurance awaited me almost round the first corner. One had
been a hundred times right—for how _was_ one to think of it all, as one
went on, if one didn’t think of it as Old? There played before one’s
eyes again, in fine, in that unmistakable silvery shimmer, a particular
property of the local air, the exquisite law of the relative—the
application of which, on the spot, is required to make even such places
as Viterbo and Bagdad not seem new. One may sometimes be tired of the
word, but anything that has succeeded in living long enough to become
conscious of its _note_, is capable on occasion of making that note
effectively sound. It _will_ sound, we gather, if we listen for it, and
the small silver whistle of the past, with its charming quaver of weak
gaiety, quite played the tune I asked of it up and down the tiny, sunny,
empty Newport vistas, perspectives coming to a stop like the very short
walks of very old ladies. What indeed but little very old ladies did
they resemble, the little very old streets? with the same suggestion of
present timidity and frugality of life, the same implication in their
few folds of drab, of mourning, of muslin still mysteriously starched,
the implication of no adventure at any time, however far back, that
mightn’t have been suitable to a lady.

The whole low promontory, in its wider and remoter measurements, is a
region of jutting tide-troubled “points,” but we had admired the Old
Town too for the emphasis of its peculiar point, _the_ Point; a quarter
distinguished, we considered, by a really refined interest. Here would
have been my misadventure, if I was to have any—that of missing, on the
grey page of to-day, the suggestive passages I remembered; but I was to
find, to my satisfaction, that there was still no more mistaking their
pleasant sense than there had ever been: a quiet, mild waterside sense,
not that of the bold, bluff outer sea, but one in which shores and
strands and small coast things played the greater part; with overhanging
back verandahs, with little private wooden piers, with painted
boat-houses and boats laid up, with still-water bathing (the very words,
with their old slightly prim discrimination, as of ladies and children
jumping up and down, reach me across the years), with a wide-curving Bay
and dim landward distances that melted into a mysterious, rich,
superior, but quite disconnected and not at all permittedly patronizing
Providence. There were stories, anciently, for the Point—so prescribed a
feature of it that one made them up, freely and handsomely, when they
were not otherwise to be come by; though one was never quite sure if
they ought most to apply to the rather blankly and grimly Colonial
houses, fadedly drab at their richest and mainly, as the legend ran,
appurtenant to that Quaker race whom Massachusetts and Connecticut had
prehistorically cast forth and the great Roger Williams had handsomely
welcomed, or to the other habitations, the felicitous cottages, with
their galleries on the Bay and toward the sunset, their pleasure-boats
at their little wharves, and the supposition, that clung to them, of
their harbouring the less fashionable of the outer Great, but also the
more cultivated and the more artistic. Everything was there still, as I
say, and quite as much as anything the prolonged echo of that ingenuous
old-time distinction. It was a marvel, no doubt, that the handful of
light elements I have named should add up to any total deserving the
name of _picture_, and if I must produce an explanation I seek it with a
certain confidence in the sense of the secret enjoyed by that air for
bathing or, as one figures, for dipping, the objects it deals with. It
takes them uninteresting, but feels immediately what submersion can do
for them; tips them in, keeps them down, holds them under, just for the
proper length of time: after which they come up, as I say, irradiating
vague silver—the reflection of which I have perhaps here been trying to
catch even to extravagance.

I did nothing, at any rate, all an autumn morning, but discover again
how “good” everything had been—positively better than one had ventured
to suppose in one’s care to make the allowance for one’s young
simplicity. Some things indeed, clearly, had been better than one knew,
and now seemed to surpass any fair probability: else why, for instance,
should I have been quite awestruck by the ancient State House that
overlooks the ancient Parade?—an edifice ample, majestic, archaic, of
the finest proportions and full of a certain public Dutch dignity,
having brave, broad, high windows, in especial, the distinctness of
whose innumerable square white-framed panes is the recall of some street
view of Haarlem or Leyden. Here was the charming impression of a
treasure of antiquity to the vague image of which, through the years,
one hadn’t done justice—any more than one had done it, positively, to
three or four of the other old-time ornaments of the Parade (which, with
its wide, cobbly, sleepy space, of those years, in the shadow of the
State House, must have been much more of a Van der Heyden, or somebody
of that sort, than one could have dreamed). There was a treasure of
modernity to reckon with, in the form of one of the Commodores Perry
(they are somehow much multiplied at Newport, and quite monumentally
ubiquitous) engaged in his great naval act; but this was swept away in
the general flood of justice to be done. I continued to do it all over
the place, and I remember doing it next at a certain ample old-time
house which used to unite with the still prettier and archaic Vernon,
near it, to form an honourable pair. In this mild town-corner, where it
was so indicated that the grass should be growing between the primitive
paving-stones, and where indeed I honestly think it mainly is, amid
whatever remains of them, ancient peace had appeared formerly to
reign—though attended by the ghost of ancient war, inasmuch as these had
indubitably been the haunts of our auxiliary French officers during the
Revolution, and no self-respecting legend could fail to report that it
was in the Vernon house Washington would have visited Rochambeau. There
had hung about this structure, which is, architecturally speaking, all
“rusticated” and indefinable decency, the implication of an inward charm
that refined even on its outward, and this was the tantalizing message
its clean, serious windows, never yet debased, struck me as still
giving. But it was still (something told me) a question of not putting,
anywhere, too many presumptions to the touch; so that my hand quitted
the knocker when I was on the point of a tentative tap, and I fell back
on the neighbour and mate, as to which there was unforgotten
acquaintance to teach me certainty. Here, alas, cold change was
installed; the place had become a public office—none of the “artistic”
super-civilized, no _raffiné_ of them all, among the passing fanciers or
collectors, having, strangely enough, marked it for his own. This mental
appropriation it is, or it was a few months ago, really impossible not
to make, at sight of its delightful hall and almost “grand” staircase,
its charming recessed, cupboarded, window-seated parlours, its general
panelled amplitude and dignity: the due taster of such things putting
himself straight into possession on the spot, and, though wondering at
the indifference and neglect, breathing thanks for the absence of
positive ravage. For me there were special ghosts on the staircase,
known voices in the brown old rooms—presences that one would have liked,
however, to call a little to account. “People don’t do those things”;
people didn’t let so clear a case—clear for sound curiosity—go like
that; they didn’t, somehow, even if they were only ghosts. But I thought
too, as I turned away, of all the others of the foolish, or at least of
the responsible, those who for so long have swarmed in the modern
quarter and who make profession of the finer sense.

This impression had been disturbing, but it had served its purpose in
reconstituting, with a touch, a link—in laying down again every inch of
the train of association with the human, the social, personal Newport of
what I may call the middle years. To go further afield, to measure the
length of the little old Avenue and tread again the little old
cliff-walk, to hang over, from above, the little old white crescent of
the principal bathingsands, with the big pond, behind them, set in its
stonewalled featureless fields; to do these things and many others,
every one of them thus accompanied by the admission that all that _had_
been had been little, was to feel dead and buried generations push off
even the transparence of their shroud and get into motion for the
peopling of a scene that a present posterity has outgrown. The company
of the middle years, the so considerably prolonged formative, tentative,
imaginative Newport time, hadn’t outgrown it—this catastrophe was still
to come, as it constitutes, precisely, the striking dramatic
_dénouement_ I have already referred to. American society—so far as that
free mixture was to have arrived at cohesion—had for half a century
taken its whole relation with the place seriously (which was by
intention very gaily); it long remained, for its happiness, quite at one
with this most favoured resort of its comparative innocence. In the
attesting presence of all the constant elements, of natural conditions
that have, after all, persisted more than changed, a hundred far-away
passages of the extinct life and joy, and of the comparative innocence,
came back to me with an inevitable grace. A glamour as of the flushed
ends of beautiful old summers, making a quite rich medium, a red sunset
haze, as it were, for a processional throng of charioteers and riders,
fortunate folk, fortunate above all in their untouched good faith,
adjourning from the pleasures of the day to those of the evening—this
benignity in particular overspread the picture, hanging it there as the
Newport aspect that most lived again. Those good people all could make
discoveries within the frame itself—beginning of course to push it out,
in all directions, so as sufficiently to enlarge it, as they fondly
fancied, even for the experience of a sophisticated world. They danced
and they drove and they rode, they dined and wined and dressed and
flirted and yachted and polo’d and Casino’d, responding to the subtlest
inventions of their age; on the old lawns and verandahs I saw them
gather, on the old shining sands I saw them gallop, past the low
headlands I saw their white sails verily flash, and through the dusky
old shrubberies came the light and sound of their feasts.

It had all been in truth a history—for the imagination that could take
it so; and when once that kindly stage was offered them it was a wonder
how many figures and faces, how many names and voices, images and
embodiments of youth mainly, and often of Beauty, and of felicity and
fortune almost always, or of what then passed for such, pushed, under my
eyes, in blurred gaiety, to the front. Hadn’t it been above all, in its
good faith, the Age of Beauties—the blessed age when it was so easy to
_be_, “on the Avenue,” a Beauty, and when it was so easy, not less, not
to doubt of the unsurpassability of such as appeared there? It was
through the fact that the whole scheme and opportunity satisfied them,
the fact that the place was, as I say, good enough for them—it was
through this that, with ingenuities and audacities and refinements of
their own (some of the more primitive of which are still touching to
think of) they extended the boundaries of civilization, and fairly
taught themselves to believe they were doing it in the interest of
nature. Beautiful the time when the Ocean Drive had been hailed at once
as a triumph of civilization and as a proof of the possible appeal of
Scenery even to the dissipated. It was spoken of as of almost boundless
extent—as one of the wonders of the world; as indeed it does turn often,
in the gloaming, to purple and gold, and as the small sea-coves then
gleam on its edge like barbaric gems on a mantle. Yet if it was a
question of waving the wand and of breathing again, till it stirred, on
the quaintness of the old manners—I refer to those of the fifties,
sixties, seventies, and don’t exclude those of the eighties—it was most
touching of all to go back to dimmest days, days, such as now appear
antediluvian, when ocean-drives, engineered by landscape artists and
literally macadamized all the way, were still in the lap of time; when
there was only an afternoon for the Fort, and another for the Beach, and
another for the “Boat-house”—inconceivable innocence!—and even the
shortness of the Avenue seemed very long, and even its narrowness very
wide, and even its shabbiness very promising for the future, and when,
in fine, chariots and cavaliers took their course, across country, to
Bateman’s, by inelegant precarious tracts and returned, through the
darkling void, with a sense of adventure and fatigue. That, I can’t but
think, was the _pure_ Newport time, the most perfectly guarded by a
sense of margin and of mystery.

It was the time of settled possession, and yet furthest removed from
these blank days in which margin has been consumed and the palaces, on
the sites but the other day beyond price, stare silently seaward,
monuments to the _blasé_ state of their absent proprietors. Purer still,
however, I remind myself, was that stretch of years which I have reasons
for thinking sacred, when the custom of seeking hibernation on the spot
partly prevailed, when the local winter inherited something of the best
social grace (as it liked at least to think) of the splendid summer, and
when the strange sight might be seen of a considerable company of
Americans, not gathered at a mere rest-cure, who confessed brazenly to
not being in business. Do I grossly exaggerate in saying that this
company, candidly, quite excitedly self-conscious, as all companies not
commercial, in America, may be pleasantly noted as being, formed, for
the time of its persistence, an almost unprecedented small
body—unprecedented in American conditions; a collection of the detached,
the slightly disenchanted and casually disqualified, and yet of the
resigned and contented, of the socially orthodox: a handful of mild, oh
delightfully mild, cosmopolites, united by three common circumstances,
that of their having for the most part more or less lived in Europe,
that of their sacrificing openly to the ivory idol whose name is
leisure, and that, not least, of a formed critical habit. These things
had been felt as making them excrescences on the American surface, where
nobody ever criticized, especially after the grand tour, and where the
great black ebony god of business was the only one recognized. So I see
them, at all events, in fond memory, lasting as long as they could and
finding no successors; and they are most embalmed for me, I confess, in
that scented, somewhat tattered, but faintly spiced, wrapper of their
various “European” antecedents. I see them move about in the light of
these, and I understand how it was this that made them ask what would
have become of them, and where in the world, the hard American world,
they _could_ have hibernated, how they could even, in the Season, have
bowed their economic heads and lurked, if it hadn’t been for Newport. I
think of that question as, in their reduced establishments, over their
winter whist, under their private theatricals, and pending, constantly,
their loan and their return of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, their main
conversational note. I find myself in fact tenderly evoking them as
special instances of the great—or perhaps I have a right only to say of
the small—American complication; the state of one’s having been so
pierced, betimes, by the sharp outland dart as to be able ever
afterwards but to move about, vaguely and helplessly, with the shaft
still in one’s side.

Their nostalgia, however exquisite, was, I none the less gather,
sterile, for they appear to have left no seed. They must have died, some
of them, in order to “go back”—to go back, that is, to Paris. If I make,
at all events, too much of them, it is for their propriety as a delicate
subjective value matching with the intrinsic Newport delicacy. They must
have felt that they, obviously, notably, notoriously, did match—the
proof of which was in the fact that to them alone, of the customary
thousands, was the beauty of the good walk, over the lovely little land,
revealed. The customary thousands here, as throughout the United States,
never set foot to earth—yet this had happened so, of old, to be the
particular corner of _their_ earth that made that adventure most
possible. At Newport, as the phrase was, in autumnal, in vernal
hibernation, you _could_ walk—failing which, in fact, you failed of
impressions the most consolatory; and it is mainly to the far ends of
the low, densely shrubbed and perfectly finished little headlands that I
see our friends ramble as if to stretch fond arms across the sea. There
used to be distant places beyond Bateman’s, or better still on the
opposite isle of Conanicut, now blighted with ugly uses, where nursing a
nostalgia on the sun-warmed rocks was almost as good as having none at
all. So it was not only not our friends who had overloaded and
overcrowded, but it was they at last, I infer, who gave way before that
grossness. How should they have wished to leave seed only to be trampled
by the white elephants?

The white elephants, as one may best call them, all cry and no wool, all
house and no garden, make now, for three or four miles, a barely
interrupted chain, and I dare say I think of them best, and of the
distressful, inevitable waste they represent, as I recall the impression
of a divine little drive, roundabout them and pretty well everywhere,
taken, for renewal of acquaintance, while November was still mild. I
sought another renewal, as I have intimated, in the vacant splendour of
June, but the interesting evidence then only refined on that already
gathered. The place itself, as man—and often, no doubt, alas, as woman,
with her love of the immediate and contiguous—had taken it over, was
more than ever, to the fancy, like some dim, simplified ghost of a small
Greek island, where the clear walls of some pillared portico or
pavilion, perched afar, looked like those of temples of the gods, and
where Nature, deprived of that ease in merely massing herself on which
“American scenery,” as we lump it together, is too apt to depend for its
effect, might have shown a piping shepherd on any hillside or attached a
mythic image to any point of rocks. What an idea, originally, to have
seen this miniature spot of earth, where the sea-nymphs on the curved
sands, at the worst, might have chanted back to the shepherds, as a mere
breeding-ground for white elephants! They look queer and conscious and
lumpish—some of them, as with an air of the brandished proboscis, really
grotesque—while their averted owners, roused from a witless dream,
wonder what in the world is to be done with them. The answer to which, I
think, can only be that there is absolutely nothing to be done; nothing
but to let them stand there always, vast and blank, for reminder to
those concerned of the prohibited degrees of witlessness, and of the
peculiarly awkward vengeances of affronted proportion and discretion.



                                  VII
                                 BOSTON


It sometimes uncomfortably happens for a writer, consulting his
remembrance, that he remembers too much and finds himself knowing his
subject too well; which is but the case of the bottle too full for the
wine to start. There has to be room for the air to circulate between
one’s impressions, between the parts of one’s knowledge, since it is the
air, or call it the intervals on the sea of one’s ignorance, of one’s
indifference, that sets these floating fragments into motion. This is
more or less what I feel in presence of the invitation—even the
invitation written on the very face of the place itself, of its actual
aspects and appearances—to register my “impression” of Boston. Can one
_have_, in the conditions, an impression of Boston, any that has not
been for long years as inappreciable as a “sunk” picture?—that dead
state of surface which requires a fresh application of varnish. The
situation I speak of is the consciousness of “old” knowledge, knowledge
so compacted by the years as to be unable, like the bottled wine, to
flow. The answer to such questions as these, no doubt, however, is the
practical one of trying a shake of the bottle or a brushful of the
varnish. My “sunk” sense of Boston found itself vigorously varnished by
mere renewal of vision at the end of long years; though I confess that
under this favouring influence I ask myself why I should have had, after
all, the notion of overlaid deposits of experience. The experience had
anciently been small—so far as smallness may be imputed to any of our
prime initiations; yet it had left consequences out of proportion to its
limited seeming self. Early contacts had been brief and few, and the
slight bridge had long ago collapsed; wherefore the impressed condition
that acquired again, on the spot, an intensity, struck me as but half
explained by the inordinate power of assimilation of the imaginative
young. I should have had none the less to content myself with this
evidence of the magic of past sensibilities had not the question
suddenly been lighted for me as by a sudden flicker of the torch—and for
my special benefit—carried in the hand of history. This light, waving
for an instant over the scene, gave me the measure of my relation to it,
both as to immense little extent and to quite subjective character.


                                   I

It was in strictness only a matter of noting the harshness of
change—since I scarce know what else to call it—on the part of the
approaches to a particular spot I had wished to revisit. I made out,
after a little, the entrance to Ashburton Place; but I missed on that
spacious summit of Beacon Hill more than I can say the pleasant little
complexity of the other time, marked with its share of the famous
old-world “crookedness” of Boston, that element of the mildly tortuous
which did duty, for the story-seeker, as an ancient and romantic note,
and was half envied, half derided by the merely rectangular criticism.
Didn’t one remember the day when New Yorkers, when Philadelphians, when
pilgrims from the West, sated with their eternal equidistances, with the
quadrilateral scheme of life, “raved” about Cornhill and appeared to
find in the rear of the State House a recall of one of the
topographical, the architectural jumbles of Europe or Asia? And did not
indeed the small happy accidents of the disappearing Boston exhale in a
comparatively sensible manner the warm breath of history, the history of
something as against the history of nothing?—so that, being gone, or
generally going, they enabled one at last to feel and almost to talk
about them as one had found one’s self feeling and talking about the
sacrificed relics of old Paris and old London. In this immediate
neighbourhood of the enlarged State House, where a great raw clearance
has been made, memory met that pang of loss, knew itself sufficiently
bereft to see the vanished objects, a scant but adequate cluster of
“nooks,” of such odds and ends as parochial schemes of improvement sweep
away, positively overgrown, within one’s own spirit, by a wealth of
legend. There was at least the gain, at any rate, that one was now going
to be free to picture them, to embroider them, at one’s ease—to tangle
them up in retrospect and make the real romantic claim for them. This
accordingly is what I am doing, but I am doing it in particular for the
sacrificed end of Ashburton Place, the Ashburton Place that I anciently
knew. This eminently respectable by-way, on my return to question it,
opened its short vista for me honestly enough, though looking rather
exposed and undermined, since the mouth of the passage to the west,
formerly measured and narrow, had begun to yawn into space, a space
peopled in fact, for the eye of appreciation, with the horrific glazed
perpendiculars of the future. But the pair of ancient houses I was in
quest of kept their tryst; a pleasant individual pair, mated with
nothing else in the street, yet looking at that hour as if their old
still faces had lengthened, their shuttered, lidded eyes had closed,
their brick complexions had paled, above the good granite basements, to
a fainter red—all as with the cold consciousness of a possible doom.

That possibility, on the spot, was not present to me, occupied as I was
with reading into one of them a short page of history that I had my own
reasons for finding of supreme interest, the history of two years of
far-away youth spent there at a period—the closing-time of the War—full
both of public and of intimate vibrations. The two years had been those
of a young man’s, a very young man’s earliest fond confidence in a
“literary career,” and the effort of actual attention was to recover on
the spot some echo of ghostly footsteps—the sound as of taps on the
window-pane heard in the dim dawn. The place itself was meanwhile, at
all events, a conscious memento, with old secrets to keep and old
stories to witness for, a saturation of life as closed together and
preserved in it as the scent lingering in a folded pocket-handkerchief.
But when, a month later, I returned again (a justly-rebuked mistake) to
see if another whiff of the fragrance were not to be caught, I found but
a gaping void, the brutal effacement, at a stroke, of every related
object, of the whole precious past. Both the houses had been levelled
and the space to the corner cleared; hammer and pickaxe had evidently
begun to swing on the very morrow of my previous visit—which had
moreover been precisely the imminent doom announced, without my
understanding it, in the poor scared faces. I had been present, by the
oddest hazard, at the very last moments of the victim in whom I was most
interested; the act of obliteration had been breathlessly swift, and if
I had often seen how fast history could be made I had doubtless never so
felt that it could be unmade still faster. It was as if the bottom had
fallen out of one’s own biography, and one plunged backward into space
without meeting anything. That, however, seemed just to give me, as I
have hinted, the whole figure of my connection with everything about, a
connection that had been sharp, in spite of brevity, and then had broken
short off. Thus it was the sense of the rupture, more than of anything
else, that I was, and for a still much briefer time, to carry with me.
It seemed to leave me with my early impression of the place on my hands,
inapt, as might be, for use; so that I could only try, rather vainly, to
fit it to present conditions, among which it tended to shrink and stray.

It was on two or three such loitering occasions, wondering and invoking
pauses that had, a little vaguely and helplessly perhaps, the changed
crest of Beacon Hill for their field—it was at certain of these moments
of charged, yet rather chilled, contemplation that I felt my small
cluster of early associations shrivel to a scarce discernible point. I
recall a Sunday afternoon in particular when I hung about on the now
vaster platform of the State House for a near view of the military
monuments erected there, the statues of Generals Hooker and Devens, and
for the charm at once and the pang of feeling the whole backward vista,
with all its features, fall from that eminence into grey perspective.
The top of Beacon Hill quite rakes, with a but slightly shifting range,
the old more definite Boston; for there seemed no item, nor any number,
of that remarkable sum that it would not anciently have helped one to
distinguish or divine. There all these things essentially were at the
moment I speak of, but only again as something ghostly and dim,
something overlaid and smothered by the mere modern thickness. I
lingered half-an-hour, much of the new disposition of the elements here
involved being duly impressive, and the old uplifted front of the State
House, surely, in its spare and austere, its ruled and pencilled kind, a
thing of beauty, more delightful and harmonious even than I had
remembered it; one of the inestimable values again, in the eye of the
town, for taste and temperance, as the perfectly felicitous “Park
Street” Church hard by, was another. The irresistible spell, however, I
think, was something sharper yet—the coercion, positively, of feeling
one’s case, the case of one’s deeper discomfiture, completely made out.
The day itself, toward the winter’s end, was all benignant, like the
immense majority of the days of the American year, and there went
forward across the top of the hill a continuous passage of men and
women, in couples and talkative companies, who struck me as labouring
wage-earners, of the simpler sort, arrayed, very comfortably, in their
Sunday best and decently enjoying their leisure. They came up as from
over the Common, they passed or they paused, exchanging remarks on the
beauty of the scene, but rapidly presenting themselves to me as of more
interest, for the moment, than anything it contained.

For no sound of English, in a single instance, escaped their lips; the
greater number spoke a rude form of Italian, the others some outland
dialect unknown to me—though I waited and waited to catch an echo of
antique refrains. No note of any shade of American speech struck my ear,
save in so far as the sounds in question represent to-day so much of the
substance of that idiom. The types and faces bore them out; the people
before me were gross aliens to a man, and they were in serene and
triumphant possession. Nothing, as I say, could have been more effective
for figuring the hitherward bars of a grating through which I might make
out, far off in space, “my” small homogeneous Boston of the more
interesting time. It was not of course that our gross little aliens were
immediate “social” figures in the narrower sense of the term, or that
any personal commerce of which there might be question could colour
itself, to its detriment, from their presence; but simply that they
expressed, as everywhere and always, the great cost at which every place
on my list had become braver and louder, and that they gave the measure
of the distance by which the general movement was _away_—away, always
and everywhere, from the old presumptions and conceivabilities. Boston,
the bigger, braver, louder Boston, was “away,” and it was quite, at that
hour, as if each figure in my procession were there on purpose to leave
me no doubt of it. Therefore had I the vision, as filling the sky, no
longer of the great Puritan “whip,” the whip for the conscience and the
nerves, of the local legend, but that of a huge applied sponge, a sponge
saturated with the foreign mixture and passed over almost everything I
remembered and might still have recovered. The detail of this
obliteration would take me too far, but I had even then (on a previous
day as well as only half-an-hour before) caught at something that might
stand for a vivid symbol of the general effect of it. To come up from
School Street into Beacon was to approach the Athenæum—exquisite
institution, to fond memory, joy of the aspiring prime; yet to approach
the Athenæum only to find all disposition to enter it drop as dead as if
from quick poison, what did _that_ denote but the dreadful chill of
change, and of the change in especial that was most completely dreadful?
For had not this honoured haunt of all the most civilized—library,
gallery, temple of culture, the place that was to Boston at large as
Boston at large was to the rest of New England—had it not with peculiar
intensity had a “value,” the most charming of its kind, no doubt, in all
the huge country, and had not this value now, evidently, been brought so
low that one shrank, in delicacy, from putting it to the test?

It was a case of the detestable “tall building” again, and of its
instant destruction of quality in everything it overtowers. Put
completely out of countenance by the mere masses of brute ugliness
beside it, the temple of culture looked only rueful and snubbed,
hopelessly down in the world; so that, far from being moved to hover or
to penetrate, one’s instinct was to pass by on the other side, averting
one’s head from an humiliation one could do nothing to make less. And
this indeed though one would have liked to do something; the brute
masses, above the comparatively small refined facade (one saw how happy
one had always thought it) having for the inner ear the voice of a pair
of school-bullies who hustle and pummel some studious little boy.
“‘Exquisite’ was what they called you, eh? We’ll teach you, then, little
sneak, to be exquisite! We allow none of that rot round here.” It was
heart-breaking, this presentation of a Boston practically void of an
Athenæum; though perhaps not without interest as showing how much one’s
own sense of the small city of the earlier time had been dependent on
that institution. I found it of no use, at any rate, to think, for a
compensatory sign of the new order, of the present Public Library; the
present Public Library, however remarkable in its pomp and circumstance,
and of which I had at that hour received my severe impression, being
neither exquisite nor on the way to become so—a difficult, an impassable
way, no doubt, for Public Libraries. Nor did I cast about, in fact, very
earnestly, for consolation—so much more was I held by the vision of the
closed order which shaped itself, continually, in the light of the
differing present; an order gaining an interest for this backward view
precisely as one felt that all the parts and tokens of it, while it
lasted, had hung intimately together. Missing those parts and tokens, or
as many of them as one could, became thus a constant slightly painful
joy: it made them fall so into their place as items of the old
character, or proofs, positively, as one might say, of the old
distinction. It was impossible not to see Park Street itself, for
instance—while I kept looking at the matter from my more “swagger”
hilltop as violently vulgarized; and it was incontestable that, whatever
might be said, there had anciently not been, on the whole continent,
taking everything together, an equal animated space more exempt from
vulgarity. There had probably been comparable spaces—impressions, in New
York, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, almost as good; but only almost, by
reason of their lacking (which was just the point) the indefinable
perfection of Park Street.

It seems odd to have to borrow from the French the right word in this
association—or would seem so, rather, had it been less often indicated
that that people have better names than ours even for the qualities we
are apt to suppose ourselves more in possession of than they. Park
Street, in any case, had been magnificently _honnête_—the very type and
model, for a pleasant street-view, of the character. The aspects that
might elsewhere have competed were _honnêtes_ and weak, whereas Park
Street was _honnête_ and strong—strong as founded on _all_ the moral,
material, social solidities, instead of on some of them only; which made
again all the difference. Personal names, as notes of that large
emanation, need scarcely be invoked—they might even have a weakening
effect; the force of the statement was in its collective, cumulative
look, as if each member of the row, from the church at the Tremont
Street angle to the amplest, squarest, most purple presence at the
Beacon Street corner (where it always had a little the air of a sturdy
proprietor with back to the fire, legs apart and thumbs in the armholes
of an expanse of high-coloured plush waistcoat), was but a syllable in
the word Respectable several times repeated. One had somehow never heard
it uttered with so convincing an emphasis. But the shops, up and down,
are making all this as if it had never been, pleasant “premises” as they
have themselves acquired; and it was to strike me from city to city, I
fear, that the American shop in general pleads but meagrely—whether on
its outer face or by any more intimate art—for indulgence to its
tendency to swarm, to bristle, to vociferate. The shop-front, observed
at random, produced on me from the first, and almost everywhere alike, a
singular, a sinister impression, which left me uneasy till I had found a
name for it: the sense of an economic law of which one had not for years
known the unholy rigour, the vision of “protected” production and of
commodities requiring certainly, in many cases, every advantage
Protection could give them. They looked to me always, these exhibitions,
consciously and defiantly protected—insolently safe, able to be with
impunity anything they would; and when once that lurid light had settled
on them I could see them, I confess, in none other; so that the objects
composing them fell, throughout, into a vicious and villainous
category—quite as if audibly saying: “Oh come; don’t look among us for
what you won’t, for what you shan’t find, the best quality attainable;
but only for that quite other matter, the best value we allow you. You
must take us or go without, and if you feel your nose thus held to the
grindstone by the hard fiscal hand, it’s no more than you deserve for
harbouring treasonable thoughts.”

So it was, therefore, that while the imagination and the memory
strayed—strayed away to other fiscal climates, where the fruits of
competition so engagingly ripen and flush—the streets affected one at
moments as a prolonged show-case for every arrayed vessel of
humiliation. The fact that several classes of the protected products
appeared to consist of articles that one might really anywhere have
preferred did little, oddly enough, to diminish the sense of severe
discipline awaiting the restored absentee on contact with these
occasions of traffic. The discipline indeed is general, proceeding as it
does from so many sources, but it earns its name, in particular, from
the predicament of the ingenuous inquirer who asks himself if he can
“really bear” the combination of such general manners and such general
prices, of such general prices and such general manners. He has a
helpless bewildered moment during which he wonders if he mightn’t bear
the prices a little better if he were a little better addressed, or bear
the usual form of address a little better if the prices were in
themselves, given the commodity offered, a little less humiliating to
the purchaser. Neither of these elements of his dilemma strikes him as
likely to abate—the general cost of the things to drop, or the general
grimness of the person he deals with over the counter to soften; so that
he reaches out again for balm to where he has had to seek it under other
wounds, falls back on the cultivation of patience and regret, on large
international comparison. He is confronted too often, to his sense, with
the question of what may be “borne”; but what does he see about him if
not a vast social order in which the parties to certain relations are
all the while marvellously, inscrutably, desperately “bearing” each
other? He may wonder, at his hours, how, under the strain, social
cohesion does not altogether give way; but that is another question,
which belongs to a different plane of speculation. For he asks himself
quite as much as anything else how the shopman or the shoplady can bear
to be barked at in the manner he constantly hears used to them by
customers—he recognizes that no agreeable form of intercourse _could_
survive a day in such air: so that what is the only relation finding
ground there but a necessary vicious circle of gross mutual endurance?

These reflections connect themselves moreover with that most general of
his restless hauntings in the United States—not only with the lapse of
all wonderment at the immense number of absentees unrestored and making
their lives as they may in other countries, but with the preliminary
American postulate or basis for any successful accommodation of life.
This basis is that of active pecuniary gain and of active pecuniary gain
only—that of one’s making the conditions so triumphantly pay that the
prices, the manners, the other inconveniences, take their place as a
friction it is comparatively easy to salve, wounds directly treatable
with the wash of gold. What prevails, what sets the tune, is the
American scale of gain, more magnificent than any other, and the fact
that the whole assumption, the whole theory of life, is that of the
individual’s participation in it, that of his being more or less
punctually and more or less effectually “squared.” To make so much money
that you won’t, that you don’t “mind,” don’t mind anything—that is
absolutely, I think, the main American formula. Thus your making no
money—or so little that it passes there for none—and being thereby
distinctly reduced to minding, amounts to your being reduced to the
knowledge that America is no place for you. To mind as one minds, for
instance, in Europe, under provocation or occasion offered, and yet to
have to live under the effect of American pressure, is speedily to
perceive that the knot can be untied but by a definite pull of one or
the other string. The immense majority of people pull, luckily for the
existing order, the string that consecrates their connection with it;
the minority (small, however, only in comparison) pull the string that
loosens that connection. The existing order is meanwhile safe, inasmuch
as the faculty of making money is in America the commonest of all and
fairly runs the streets: so simple a matter does it appear there, among
vast populations, to make betimes enough _not_ to mind. Yet the
withdrawal of the considerable group of the pecuniarily disqualified
seems no less, for the present, an assured movement; there will always
be scattered individuals condemned to mind on a scale beyond any scale
of making. The relation of this modest body to the country of their
birth, which asks so much, on the whole—so many surrenders and
compromises, and the possession above all of such a prodigious head for
figures—before it begins, in its wonderful way, to give or to “pay,”
would appear to us supremely touching, I think, as a case of communion
baffled and blighted, if we had time to work it out. It would bathe in
something of a tragic light the vivid truth that the “great countries”
are all, more and more, happy lands (so far as any can be called such)
for any, for every sort of person rather than the middle sort. The upper
sort—in the scale of wealth, the only scale now—can to their hearts’
content build their own castles and move by their own motors; the lower
sort, masters of gain in _their_ degree, can profit, also to their
hearts’ content, by the enormous extension of those material facilities
which may be gregariously enjoyed; they are able to rush about, as never
under the sun before, in promiscuous packs and hustled herds, while to
the act of so rushing about all felicity and prosperity appear for them
to have been comfortably reduced. The frustrated American, as I have
hinted at him, scraping for _his_ poor practical solution in the
depleted silver-mine of history, is the American who “makes” too little
for the castle and yet “minds” too much for the hustled herd, who can
neither achieve such detachment nor surrender to such society, and who
most of all accordingly, in the native order, fails of a working basis.
The salve, the pecuniary salve, in Europe, is sensibly less, but less on
the other hand also the excoriation that makes it necessary, whether
from above or below.


                                   II

Let me at all events say for the Park Street Church, while I may still,
on my hilltop, keep more or less in line with it, that this edifice
persistently “holds the note,” as yet, the note of the old felicity, and
remains by so doing a precious public servant. Strange enough,
doubtless, to find one’s self pleading sanctity for a theological
structure sanctified only by such a name—as who should say the Park
Street Hotel or the Park Street Post-office; so much clearer would the
claim seem to come were it the case of another St. Clement Danes or of
another St. Mary-le-Strand. But in America we get our sanctity as we
can, and we plead it, if we are wise, wherever the conditions suffer the
faintest show of colour for it to flush through. Again and again it is a
question, on behalf of the memorial object (and especially when
preservation is at stake), of an interest and an appeal proceeding
exactly _from_ the conditions, and thereby not of an absolute, but of a
relative force and weight; which is exactly the state of the matter with
the Park Street Church. This happy landmark is, in strictness, with its
mild recall, by its spire, of Wren’s bold London examples, the
comparatively thin echo of a far-away song—playing its part, however,
for harmonious effect, as perfectly as possible. It is admirably placed,
quite peculiarly _present_, on the Boston scene, and thus, for one
reason and another, points its moral as not even the State House does.
So we see afresh, under its admonition, that charm is a flower of wild
and windblown seed—often not to be counted on when most anxiously
planted, but taking its own time and its own place both for enriching
and for mocking us. It mocks assuredly, above all, our money and our
impatience, elements addressed to buying or “ordering” it, and only asks
that when it does come we shall know it and love it. When we fail of
this intelligence it simply, for its vengeance, boycotts us—makes us
vulgar folk who have no concern with it. Then if we ever miss it we can
never get it back—though our deepest depth of punishment of course is to
go on fatuously not missing it, the joy of ourselves and of each other
and the derision of those who know. These reflections were virtually
suggested to me, on the eve of my leaving Boston, by ten words addressed
to my dismay; the effect of which was to make Park Street Church, for
the hour, the most interesting mass of brick and mortar and (if I may
risk the supposition) timber in America.

The words had been spoken, in the bright July air, by a friend
encountered in the very presence of the mild monument, on the
freshly-perceived value of which, for its position, for its civil
function, I had happened irrepressibly to exclaim. Thus I learned that
its existence might be spoken of as gravely menaced—menaced by a scheme
for the erection of a “business-block,” a huge square of innumerable
tiers and floors, thousands of places of trade, the trade that in such a
position couldn’t fail to be roaring. In the eye of financial envy the
church was but a cumberer of the ground, and where, about us, had we
seen financial envy fail when it had once really applied the push of its
fat shoulder? Drunk as it was with power, what was to be thought of as
resisting it? This was a question, truly, to frighten answers away—until
I presently felt the most pertinent of all return as if on tiptoe. The
perfect force of the case as a case, as an example, that was the answer
of answers; the quite ideal pitch of the opportunity for virtue. Ideal
opportunities are rare, and this occasion for not sacrificing the high
ornament and cynosure of the town to the impudence of private greed just
happens to be one, and to have the finest marks of the character. One
had but to imagine a civilized community reading these marks, feeling
that character, and then consciously and cynically falling below its
admirable chance, to take in the impossibility of any such blot on the
page of honour, any such keen appetite for the base alternative. It
would be verily the end—the end of the old distinguished life, of the
common intelligence that had flowered formerly, for attesting fame, from
so strong a sap and into so thick and rich a cluster. One had thought of
these things as one came and went—so interesting to-day in Boston are
such informal consultations of the oracle (that of the very air and
“tone”), such puttings to it of the question of what the old New England
spirit may have still, intellectually, æsthetically, or for that matter
even morally, to give; of what may yet remain, for productive scraping,
of the formula of the native Puritanism educated, the formula once
capacious enough for the “literary constellation” of the Age of Emerson.
Is that cornucopia empty, or does some handful of strong or at least
sound fruit lurk to this day, a trifle congested by keeping, up in the
point of the horn? What, if so, are, in the ambient air, the symptoms of
this possibility? What are the signs of intellectual promise, poetic,
prosaic, philosophic, in the current generations, those actually
learning their principal lesson, as one assumes, from the great
University hard by? The old formula, that of Puritanism educated, has
it, in fine, except for “business,” anything more to communicate?—or do
we perhaps mistake the case in still speaking, by reason of the
projected shadow of Harvard, of “education” as at all involved?

Oh, for business, for a commercial, an organizing energy of the first
order, the indications would seem to abound; the air being full of them
as of one loud voice, and nowhere so full perhaps as at that Park Street
corner, precisely, where it was to be suggested to me that their meaning
was capable on occasion of turning to the sinister. The commercial
energy at least was educated, up to the eyes—Harvard was still caring
for that more than for anything else—but the wonderments, or perhaps
rather the positive impressions I have glanced at, bore me constant
company, keeping the last word, all emphasis of answer, back as if for
the creation of a dramatic suspense. I liked the suspense, none the
less, for what it had in common with “intellectual curiosity,” and it
gave me a light, moreover, which was highly convenient, helping me to
look at everything in some related state to this proposition of the
value of the Puritan residuum—the question of whether value is
expressed, for instance, by the little tales, mostly by ladies, and
about and for children romping through the ruins of the Language, in the
monthly magazines. Some of my perceptions of relation might seem forced,
for other minds, but it sufficed me that they were straight and clear
for myself—straight and clear again, for example, when (always on my
hilltop and raking the prospect over for memories) I quite assented to
the tacit intimation that a long æsthetic period had closed with the
disappearance of the old Museum Theatre. This had been the theatre of
the “great” period—so far as such a description may fit an establishment
that never produced during that term a play either by a Bostonian or by
any other American; or it had at least, with however unequal steps, kept
the great period company, made the Boston of those years quite
complacently participate in its genial continuity. This character of its
_being_ an institution, its really being a theatre, with a repertory and
a family of congruous players, not one of them the baleful
actor-manager, head and front of all the so rank and so acclaimed
vulgarities of our own day—this nature in it of not being the mere empty
shell, the indifferent cave of the winds, that yields a few nights’
lodging, under stress, to the passing caravan, gave it a dignity of
which I seemed to see the ancient city gratefully conscious, fond and
jealous, and the thought of which invites me to fling over it now
perhaps too free a fold of the mantle of romance. And yet why too free?
is what I ask myself as I remember that the Museum had for long years a
repertory—the repertory of its age—a company and a cohesion, theatrical
trifles of the cultivation of which no present temple of the drama from
end to end of the country appears to show a symptom. Therefore I spare a
sigh to its memory, and, though I doubtless scarce think of it as the
haunt of Emerson, of Hawthorne or of Mr. Ticknor, the common conscience
of the mid-century in the New England capital insists on showing, at
this distance of time, as the richer for it.

That then was one of the missed elements, but the consequent melancholy,
I ought promptly to add, formed the most appropriate soil for stray
sprouts of tenderness in respect to the few aspects that had not
suffered. The old charm of Mount Vernon Street, for instance, wandering
up the hill, almost from the waterside, to the rear of the State House,
and fairly hanging about there to rest like some good flushed lady, of
more than middle age, a little spent and “blown”—this ancient grace was
not only still to be felt, but was charged, for depth of interest, with
intenser ghostly presences, the rich growth of time, which might have
made the ample slope, as one mounted, appear as beautifully peopled as
Jacob’s Ladder. That was exactly the kind of impression to be desired
and welcomed; since ghosts belong only to places and suffer and perish
with them. It was as if they themselves moreover were taking pleasure in
this place, fairly indeed commending to me the fine old style of the
picture. Nothing less appeared to account for my not having, in the
other age, done it, as the phrase is, full justice, recognized in it so
excellent a peace, such a clear Boston bravery—all to the end that it
should quite strike me, on the whole, as not only, for the minor stretch
and the domestic note, the happiest street-scene the country could show,
but as pleasant, on those respectable lines, in a degree not surpassed
even among outland pomps. Oh, the wide benignity of brick, the goodly,
friendly, ruddy fronts, the felicity of scale, the solid _seat_ of
everything, even to the handful of happy deviations from the regular
produced, we may fancy, by one of those “historic” causes which so
rarely complicate, for humanization, the blankness of the American
street-page, and the occasional occurrence of which, in general, as I am
perhaps too repeatedly noting, excites on the part of the starved
story-seeker a fantastic insistence. I find myself willing, after all,
to let my whole estimate of these mere mild monuments of private worth
pass for extravagant if it but leave me a perch for musing on the oddity
of our nature which makes us still like the places we have known or
loved to grow old, when we can scarcely bear it in the people. To walk
down Mount Vernon Street to Charles was to have a brush with that truth,
to recognize at least that we like the sense of age to come, locally,
when it comes with the right accompaniments, with the preservation of
character and the continuity of tradition, merits I had been admiring on
the brow of the eminence. From the other vision, the sight of the
“decline in the social scale,” the lapse into shabbiness and into bad
company, we only suffer, for the ghosts in that case either refuse to
linger, or linger at the most with faces ashamed and as if appealing
against their association.

Such was the condition of the Charles Street ghosts, it seemed to
me—shades of a past that had once been so thick and warm and happy; they
moved, dimly, through a turbid medium in which the signs of their old
life looked soiled and sordid. Each of them was there indeed, from far,
far back; they met me on the pavement, yet it was as if we could pass
but in conscious silence, and nothing could have helped us, for any
courage of communion, if we had not enjoyed the one merciful refuge that
remained, where indeed we could breathe again, and with intensity, our
own liberal air. Here, behind the effaced anonymous door, was the little
ark of the modern deluge, here still the long drawing-room that looks
over the water and toward the sunset, with a seat for every visiting
shade, from far-away Thackeray down, and relics and tokens so thick on
its walls as to make it positively, in all the town, the votive temple
to memory. Ah, if it hadn’t been for _that_ small patch of common
ground, with its kept echo of the very accent of the past, the
revisiting spirit, at the bottom of the hill, could but have muffled his
head, or but have stifled his heart, and turned away for ever. Let me
even say that—always now at the bottom of the hill—it was in this
practical guise he afterwards, at the best, found himself roaming. It is
from about that point southward that the new splendours of Boston
spread, and will clearly continue to spread, but it opened out to me as
a tract pompous and prosaic, with which the little interesting city, the
city of character and genius, exempt as yet from the Irish yoke, had had
absolutely nothing to do. This disconnection was complete, and the
southward, the westward territory made up, at the most, a platform or
stage from which the other, the concentrated Boston of history, the
Boston of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes,
Ticknor, Motley, Prescott, Parkman and the rest (in the sense either of
birthplace or of central or sacred city) could be seen in as definite,
and indeed now in almost as picturesquely mediæval, a concretion, appear
to make as black and minute and “composed” a little pyramidal image, as
the finished background of a Durer print. It seemed to place itself
there, in the middle distance, on the sharp salience of its commingled
Reforms and Reserves—reformers and reservists rubbing shoulders in the
common distinctness of their detachment from an inexpressive generation,
and the composition rounding itself about as with the very last of its
loose ends snipped off or tucked in.


                                  III

There are neither loose ends nor stray flutters, whether of the old
prose or the old poetry, to be encountered on the large lower level,
though there are performances of a different order, in the shadow of
which such matters tend to look merely, and perhaps rather meagrely,
subjective. It is all very rich and prosperous and monotonous, the large
lower level, but oh, so inexpressibly vacant! Where the “new land”
corresponds most to its name, rejoices most visibly and complacently in
its newness, its dumped and shovelled foundations, the home till
recently of a mere vague marine backwater, there the long, straight
residential avenues, vistas quite documentary, as one finds one’s self
pronouncing them, testify with a perfection all their own to a whole
vast side of American life. The winter winds and snows, and the eternal
dust, run races in them over the clearest course anywhere provided for
that grim competition; the league-long brick pavements mirror the
expansive void, for many months of the year, in their smooth, tight
ice-coats (and ice over brick can only be described as heels over head),
and the innumerable windows, up and down, watch each other, all
hopelessly, as for revelations, indiscretions, audible, resonant,
rebellious or explosive breakages of the pane from within, that never
disturb the peace. (No one will begin, and the buried hatchet, in spite
of whatever wistful looks to where it lies, is never dug up.) So it is
that these sustained affirmations of one of the smoothest and the most
settled social states “going” excite perversely, on the part of the
restless analyst, questions that would seem logically the very last
involved. We call such aspects “documentary” because they strike us,
more than any others, as speaking volumes for the possible _serenity_,
the common decency, the quiet cohesion, of a vast commercial and
professional bourgeoisie left to itself. Here was such an order caught
in the very fact, the fact of its living maximum. A bourgeoisie without
an aristocracy to worry it is of course a very different thing from a
bourgeoisie struggling _in_ that shade, and nothing could express more
than these interminable perspectives of security the condition of a
community leading its life in the social sun.

Why, accordingly, of December afternoons, did the restless analyst,
pausing at eastward-looking corners, find on his lips the vague refrain
of Tennyson’s “long, unlovely street”? Why, if Harley Street, if
Wimpole, is unlovely, should Marlborough Street, Boston, be so—beyond
the mere platitude of its motiveless name? Here is no monotony of black
leasehold brick, no patent disavowal, in the interest of stale and
strictly subordinate gentilities, of expression, animation, variety,
curiosity; here, on the contrary, is often the individual house-front in
all its independence and sometimes in all its felicity: this whole
region being, like so many such regions in the United States to-day, the
home of the free hand, a field for the liveliest architectural
experiment. There are interesting, admirable houses—though always too
much of the detestable vitreous “bow”—and there is above all what there
is everywhere in America for saving, or at least for propping up, the
situation, that particular look of the clear course and large
opportunity ahead, which, when taken in conjunction with all the will to
live, all the money to spend, all the knowledge to acquire and apply,
seems to marshal the material possibilities in glittering illimitable
ranks. Beacon Street, moreover, used to stretch back like a workable
telescope for the focussing, at its higher extremity, in an air of which
the positive defect is to be too seldom prejudicial, of the gilded dome
of the State House—fresh as a Christmas toy seen across the floor of a
large salubrious nursery. This made a civic vignette that furnished a
little the desert of cheerful family life. But Marlborough Street, for
imperturbable reasons of its own, used periodically to break my heart.
It was of no use to make a vow of hanging about till I should have
sounded my mystery—learned to say _why_ black, stale Harley Street, for
instance, in featureless row after row, had character and depth, while
what was before me fell upon my sense with the thinness of tone of a
precocious child—and still more why this latter effect should have been,
as it were, so insistently irritating. If there be strange ways of
producing an interest, to the critical mind, there are doubtless still
stranger ways of not producing one, and it was important to me, no
doubt, to make “my” defunct and compact and expressive little Boston
appear to don all the signs of that character that the New Land, and
what is built thereon, miss. How could one consider the place at all
unless in a light?—so that one had to decide definitely on one’s light.

This it was after all easy to do from the moment one had determined to
concede to the New Land the fact of possession of everything convenient
and handsome under heaven. Peace could always come with this recognition
of all the accessories and equipments, a hundred costly things, parks
and palaces and institutions, that the earlier community had lacked; and
there was an individual connection—only one, presently to be noted—in
which the actual city might seem for an hour to have no capacity for the
uplifting _idea_, no aptitude for the finer curiosity, to envy the past.
But meanwhile it was strange that even so fine a conception, finely
embodied, as the new Public Library, magnificently superseding all
others, was committed to speak to one’s inner perception still more of
the power of the purse and of the higher turn for business than of the
old intellectual, or even of the old moral, sensibility. Why else then
should one have thought of some single, some admirable hour of Emerson,
in one of the dusky, primitive lecture-halls that have ceased to be, or
of some large insuperable anti-slavery eloquence of Wendell Phillips’s,
during the same term and especially during the War, as breathing more of
the consciousness of literature and of history than all the promiscuous
bustle of the Florentine palace by Copley Square? Not that this latter
edifice, the fruit of immense considerations, has not its honourable
interest too; which it would have if only in the light of the constant
truth that almost any American application or practice of a general
thought puts on a new and original aspect. Public libraries are a
thoroughly general thought, and one has seen plenty of them, one is
seeing dreadfully many, in these very days, the world over; yet to be
confronted with an American example is to have sight straightway of more
difference than community, and to glean on the spot fresh evidence of
that democratic way of dealing which it has been the American office to
translate from an academic phrase into a bristling fact. The notes of
difference of the Florentine palace by Copley Square—more delicately
elegant, in truth, if less sublimely rugged, than most Florentine
palaces—resolve themselves, like so many such notes everywhere, into our
impression here, once more, that every one is “in” everything, whereas
in Europe so comparatively few persons are in anything (even as yet in
“society,” more and more the common refuge or retreat of the masses).

The Boston institution then is a great and complete institution, with
this reserve of its striking the restored absentee as practically
without _penetralia_. A library without _penetralia_ may affect him but
as a temple without altars; it will at any rate exemplify the
distinction between a benefit given and a benefit taken, a borrowed, a
lent, and an owned, an appropriated convenience. The British Museum, the
Louvre, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the treasures of South Kensington,
are assuredly, under forms, at the disposal of the people; but it is to
be observed, I think, that the people walk there more or less under the
shadow of the right waited for and conceded. It remains as difficult as
it is always interesting, however, to trace the detail (much of it
obvious enough, but much more indefinable) of the personal port of a
democracy that, unlike the English, is social as well as political. One
of these denotements is that social democracies are unfriendly to the
preservation of _penetralia_; so that when _penetralia_ are of the
essence, as in a place of study and meditation, they inevitably go to
the wall. The main staircase, in Boston, has, with its amplitude of wing
and its splendour of tawny marble, a high and luxurious beauty—bribing
the restored absentee to emotion, moreover, by expanding, monumentally,
at one of its rests, into admirable commemoration of the Civil War
service of the two great Massachusetts Volunteer regiments of _élite_.
Such visions, such felicities, such couchant lions and recorded names
and stirred memories as these, encountered in the early autumn twilight,
_colour_ an impression—even though to say so be the limit of breach of
the silence in which, for persons of the generation of the author of
these pages, appreciation of them can best take refuge: the refuge to
which I felt myself anon reduced, for instance, opposite the State
House, in presence of Saint-Gaudens’s noble and exquisite monument to
Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. There are works of
memorial art that may suddenly place themselves, by their operation in a
given case, outside articulate criticism—which was what happened, I
found, in respect to the main feature, the rich staircase of the
Library. Another way in which the bribe, as I have called it, of that
masterpiece worked on the spot was by prompting one to immediate charmed
perception of the character of the deep court and inner arcade of the
palace, where a wealth of science and taste has gone to producing a
sense, when the afternoon light sadly slants, of one of the myriad
gold-coloured courts of the Vatican.

These are the refinements of the present Boston—keeping company as they
can with the healthy animation, as it struck me, of the rest of the
building, the multitudinous bustle, the coming and going, as in a
railway-station, of persons with carpet-bags and other luggage, the
simplicity of plan, the open doors and immediate accesses, admirable
_for_ a railway-station, the ubiquitous children, _most_ irrepressible
little democrats of the democracy, the vain quest, above all, of the
deeper depths aforesaid, some part that should be sufficiently _within_
some other part, sufficiently withdrawn and consecrated, not to
constitute a thoroughfare. Perhaps I didn’t adequately explore; but
there was always the visible scale and scheme of the building. It was a
shock to find the so brave decorative designs of Puvis de Chavannes, of
Sargent and Abbey and John Elliott, hanging over mere chambers of
familiarity and resonance; and then, I must quickly add, it was a shock
still greater perhaps to find one had no good reason for defending them
against such freedoms. What was sauce for the goose was sauce for the
gander: had one not in other words, in the public places and under the
great loggias of Italy, acclaimed it as just the charm and dignity of
these resorts that, in their pictured and embroidered state, they still
serve for the graceful common life? It was true that one had not been
imprisoned in that consistency in the Laurentian, in the Ambrosian
Library—and at any rate one was here on the edge of abysses. Was it not
splendid, for example, to see, in Boston, such large provision made for
the amusement of children on rainy afternoons?—so many little heads bent
over their story-books that the edifice took on at moments the
appearance worn, one was to observe later on, by most other American
edifices of the same character, that of a lively distributing-house of
the new fiction for the young. The note was bewildering—yet would one,
snatching the bread-and-molasses from their lips, cruelly deprive the
young of rights in which they have been installed with a majesty nowhere
else approaching that of their American installation? I am not wrong,
probably, at all events, in qualifying such a question as that as
abysmal, and I remember how, more than once, I took refuge from it in
craven flight, straight across the Square, to the already so
interesting, the so rapidly-expanding Art Museum.

There, for some reason, questions exquisitely dropped; perhaps only for
the reason that things sifted and selected have, very visibly, the
effect of challenging the confidence even of the rash. It is of the
nature of objects doomed to show distinction that they virtually make a
desert round them, and peace reigned unbroken, I usually noted, in the
two or three Museum rooms that harbour a small but deeply-interesting
and steadily-growing collection of fragments of the antique. Here the
restless analyst found work to his hand—only too much; and indeed in
presence of the gem of the series, of the perhaps just too conscious
grace of a certain little wasted and dim-eyed head of Aphrodite, he felt
that his function should simply give way, in common decency, to that of
the sonneteer. For it is an impression by itself, and I think quite
worth the Atlantic voyage, to catch in the American light the very fact
of the genius of Greece. There are things we don’t know, feelings not to
be foretold, till we have had that experience—which I commend to the
_raffiné_ of almost any other clime. I should say to him that he has not
_seen_ a fine Greek thing till he has seen it in America. It is of
course on the face of it the most merciless case of transplanting—the
mere moral of which, none the less, for application, becomes by no means
flagrant. The little Aphrodite, with her connections, her antecedents
and references exhibiting the maximum of breakage, is no doubt as
_lonely_ a jewel as ever strayed out of its setting; yet what does one
quickly recognize but that the intrinsic lustre will have, so far as
that may be possible, doubled? She has lost her background, the divine
creature—has lost her company, and is keeping, in a manner, the
strangest; but so far from having lost an iota of her power, she has
gained unspeakably more, since what she essentially stands for she here
stands for alone, rising ineffably to the occasion. She has in short, by
her single presence, as yet, annexed an empire, and there are strange
glimmers of moments when, as I have spoken of her consciousness, the
very knowledge of this seems to lurk in the depth of her beauty. Where
was she ever more, where was she ever so much, a goddess—and who knows
but that, being thus divine, she foresees the time when, as she has
“moved over,” the place of her actual whereabouts will have become one
of her shrines? Objects doomed to distinction make round them a desert,
I have said; but that is only for any gross confidence in other matters.
For confidence in _them_ they make a garden, and that is why I felt this
quarter of the Boston Art Museum bloom, under the indescribable dim
eyes, with delicate flowers. The impression swallowed up every other;
the place, whatever it was, was supremely justified, and I was left cold
by learning that a much bigger and grander and richer place is presently
to overtop it.

The present establishment “dates back,” back almost to the good Boston
of the middle years, and is full of all sorts of accumulated and
concentrated pleasantness; which fact precisely gives the signal, by the
terrible American law, for its coming to an end and giving a chance to
the untried. It is a consistent application of the rotary system—the
untried always awaiting its turn, and quite perceptibly stamping and
snorting while it waits; all heedless as it is, poor innocent untried,
of the certain hour of the impatiences before which it too will have to
retreat. It is not indeed that the American laws, so operating, have not
almost always their own queer interest; founded as they are, all
together, on one of the strongest of the native impulses. We see this
characteristic again and again at play, see it in especial wherever we
see (which is more than frequently enough) a university or a college
“started” or amplified. This process almost always takes the form,
primarily, of more lands and houses and halls and rooms, more
swimming-baths and football-fields and gymnasia, a greater luxury of
brick and mortar, a greater ingenuity, the most artful conceivable, of
accommodation and installation. Such is the magic, such the presences,
that tend, more than any other, to figure _as_ the Institution, thereby
perverting not a little, as need scarce be remarked, the finer
collegiate idea: the theory being, doubtless, and again most
characteristically, that with all the wrought stone and oak and painted
glass, the immense provision, the multiplied marbles and tiles and
cloisters and acres, “people will come,” that is, individuals of value
will, and in some manner work some miracle. In the early American time,
doubtless, individuals of value had to wait too much for things; but
that is now made up by the way things are waiting for individuals of
value. To which I must immediately add, however—and it is the ground of
my allusion of a moment ago—that no impression of the “new” Boston can
feel itself hang together without remembrance of what it owes to that
rare exhibition of the living spirit lately achieved, in the interest of
the fine arts, and of all that is noblest in them, by the unaided and
quite heroic genius of a private citizen. To attempt to tell the story
of the wonderfully-gathered and splendidly-lodged Gardner Collection
would be to displace a little the line that separates private from
public property; and yet to find no discreet word for it is to appear to
fail of feeling for the complexity of conditions amid which so undaunted
a devotion to a great idea (undaunted by the battle to fight, losing,
alas, with State Protection of native art, and with other scarce less
uncanny things) has been able consummately to flower. It is in presence
of the results magnificently attained, the energy triumphant over
everything, that one feels the fine old disinterested tradition of
Boston least broken.



                                  VIII
                           CONCORD AND SALEM


                                   I

I felt myself, on the spot, cast about a little for the right expression
of it, and then lost any hesitation to say that, putting the three or
four biggest cities aside, Concord, Massachusetts, had an identity more
palpable to the mind, had nestled in other words more successfully
beneath her narrow fold of the mantle of history, than any other
American town. “Compare me with places of my size, you know,” one seemed
to hear her plead, with the modesty that, under the mild autumn sun, so
well became her russet beauty; and this exactly it was that prompted the
emphasis of one’s reply, or, as it may even be called, of one’s
declaration.

“Ah, my dear, it isn’t a question of places of your ‘size,’ since among
places of your size you’re too obviously and easily first: it’s a
question of places, so many of them, of fifty times your size, and which
yet don’t begin to have a fraction of your weight, or your character, or
your intensity of presence and sweetness of tone, or your moral charm,
or your pleasant appreciability, or, in short, of anything that is
yours. Your ‘size’? Why, you’re the biggest little place in America—with
only New York and Boston and Chicago, by what I make out, to surpass
you; and the country is lucky indeed to have you, in your sole and
single felicity, for if it hadn’t, where in the world should we go,
inane and unappeased, for the particular communication of which you have
the secret? The country is colossal, and you but a microscopic speck on
the hem of its garment; yet there’s nothing else like you, take you all
round, for we _see_ you complacently, with the naked eye, whereas-there
are vast sprawling, bristling areas, great grey ‘centres of population’
that spread, on the map, like irremediable grease-spots, which fail
utterly of any appeal to our vision or any control of it, leaving it to
pass them by as if they were not. If you are so thoroughly the opposite
of one of these I don’t say it’s all your superlative merit; it’s
rather, as I have put it, your felicity, your good fortune, the result
of the half-dozen happy turns of the wheel in your favour. Half-a-dozen
such turns, you see, are, for any mortal career, a handsome allowance;
and your merit is that, recognizing this, you have not fallen below your
estate. But it’s your fortune, above all, that’s your charm. One doesn’t
want to be patronizing, but you didn’t, thank goodness, make yours.
That’s what the other places, the big ones that are as nothing to you,
are trying to do, the country over—to make theirs; and, from the point
of view of these remarks, all in vain. Your luck is that you didn’t have
to; yours had been, just as it shows in you to-day, made _for_ you, and
you at the most but gratefully submitted to it. It must be said for you,
however, that you keep it; and it isn’t every place that would have been
capable——! You keep the look, you keep the feeling, you keep the air.
Your great trees arch over these possessions more protectingly, covering
them in as a cherished presence; and you have settled to your tone and
your type as to treasures that can now never be taken. Show me the other
places in America (of the few that have _had_ anything) from which the
best hasn’t mainly been taken, or isn’t in imminent danger of being.
There is old Salem, there is old Newport, which I am on my way to see
again, and which, if you will, are, by what I hear, still comparatively
intact; but their having was never a having like yours, and they adorn,
precisely, my little tale of your supremacy. No, I don’t want to be
patronizing, but your only fault is your tendency to improve—I mean just
by your duration as you _are_; which indeed is the only sort of
improvement that is not questionable.”

Such was the drift of the warm flood of appreciation, of reflection,
that Concord revisited could set rolling over the field of a prepared
sensibility; and I feel as if I had quite made my point, such as it is,
in asking what other American village could have done anything of the
sort. I should have been at fault perhaps only in speaking of the
interest in question as visible, on that large scale, to the “naked
eye”; the truth being perhaps that one wouldn’t have been so met
half-way by one’s impression unless one had rather particularly _known_,
and that knowledge, in such a case, amounts to a pair of magnifying
spectacles. I remember indeed putting it to myself on the November
Sunday morning, tepid and bright and perfect for its use, through which
I walked from the station under the constant archway of the elms, as yet
but indulgently thinned: would one know, for one’s self, what had
formerly been the matter here, if one hadn’t happened to be able to get
round behind, in the past, as it were, and more or less understand?
Would the operative elements of the past—little old Concord Fight,
essentially, and Emerson and Hawthorne and Thoreau, with the rest of the
historic animation and the rest of the figured and shifting
“transcendental” company, to its last and loosest ramifications—would
even these handsome quantities have so lingered to one’s intelligent
after-sense, if one had not brought with one some sign by which they too
would know; dim, shy spectralities as, for themselves, they must, at the
best, have become? Idle, however, such questions when, by the chance of
the admirable day, everything, in its own way and order, unmistakably
came _out_—every string sounded as if, for all the world, the loose New
England town (and I apply the expression but to the relations of objects
and places), were a lyre swept by the hand of Apollo. Apollo was the
spirit of antique piety, looking about, pausing, remembering, as he
moved to his music; and there were glimpses and reminders that of course
kept him much longer than others.

Seated there at its ease, as if placidly familiar with pilgrims and
quite taking their homage for granted, the place had the very aspect of
some grave, refined New England matron of the “old school,” the widow of
a high celebrity, living on and on in possession of all his relics and
properties, and, though not personally addicted to gossip or to
journalism, having become, where the great company kept by her in the
past is concerned, quite cheerful and modern and responsive. From her
position, her high-backed chair by the window that commands most of the
coming and going, she looks up intelligently, over her knitting, with no
vision of any limit on her part as yet, to this attitude, and with
nothing indeed to suggest the possibility of a limit save a hint of that
loss of temporal perspective in which we recognize the mental effect of
a great weight of years. I had formerly the acquaintance of a very
interesting lady, of extreme age, whose early friends, in “literary
circles,” are now regarded as classics, and who, toward the end of her
life, always said, “You know Charles Lamb has produced a play at Drury
Lane,” or “You know William Hazlitt has fallen in love with such a very
odd woman.” Her facts were perfectly correct; only death had beautifully
passed out of her world—since I don’t remember her mentioning to me the
demise, which she might have made so contemporary, either of Byron or of
Scott. When people were ill she admirably forbore to ask about them—she
disapproved wholly of such conditions; and there were interesting
invalids round about her, near to her, whose existence she for long
years consummately ignored. It is some such quiet backward stride as
those of my friend that I seem to hear the voice of old Concord take in
reference to her annals, and it is not too much to say that where her
soil is most sacred, I fairly caught, on the breeze, the mitigated
perfect tense. “You know there has been a fight between our men and the
King’s”—one wouldn’t have been surprised, that crystalline Sunday noon,
where so little had changed, where the stream and the bridge, and all
nature, and the _feeling_, above all, still so directly testify, at any
fresh-sounding form of such an announcement.

I had forgotten, in all the years, with what thrilling clearness that
supreme site speaks—though anciently, while so much of the course of the
century was still to run, the distinctness might have seemed even
greater. But to stand there again was to take home this foreshortened
view, the gained nearness, to one’s sensibility; to look straight over
the heads of the “American Weimar” company at the inestimable hour that
had so handsomely set up for them their background. The Fight had been
the hinge—so one saw it—on which the large revolving future was to turn;
or it had been better, perhaps, the large firm nail, ringingly driven
in, from which the beautiful portrait-group, as we see it to-day, was to
hang. Beautiful exceedingly the local Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne
and (in a fainter way) _tutti quanti_; but beautiful largely because the
fine old incident down in the valley had so seriously prepared their
effect. That seriousness gave once for all the pitch, and it was verily
as if, under such a value, even with the seed of a “literary circle” so
freely scattered by an intervening hand, the vulgar note would in that
air never be possible. As I had inevitably, in long absence, let the
value, for immediate perception, rather waste itself, so, on the spot,
it came back most instantly with the extraordinary sweetness of the
river, which, under the autumn sun, like all the American rivers one had
seen or was to see, straightway took the whole case straightway into its
hands. “Oh, you shall tell me of your impression when you have felt what
_I_ can do for it: so hang over me well!”—that’s what they all seem to
say.

I hung over Concord River then as long as I could, and recalled how
Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson himself, have expressed with due sympathy
the sense of this full, slow, sleepy, meadowy flood, which sets its pace
and takes its twists like some large obese benevolent person, scarce so
frankly unsociable as to pass you at all. It had watched the Fight, it
even now confesses, without a quickening of its current, and it draws
along the woods and the orchards and the fields with the purr of a mild
domesticated cat who rubs against the family and the furniture. Not to
be recorded, at best, however, I think, never to emerge from the state
of the inexpressible, in respect to the spot, by the bridge, where one
most lingers, is the sharpest suggestion of the whole scene—the power
diffused in it which makes it, after all these years, or perhaps indeed
by reason of their number, so irresistibly touching. All the
commemorative objects, the stone marking the burial-place of the three
English soldiers, the animated image of the young belted American yeoman
by Mr. Daniel French, the intimately associated element in the presence,
not far off, of the old manse, interesting theme of Hawthorne’s pen,
speak to the spirit, no doubt, in one of the subtlest tones of which
official history is capable, and yet somehow leave the exquisite
melancholy of everything unuttered. It lies too deep, as it always so
lies where the ground has borne the weight of the short, simple act,
intense and unconscious, that was to determine the event, determine the
future in the way we call immortally. For we read into the scene too
little of what we may, unless this muffled touch in it somehow reaches
us so that we feel the pity and the irony of the _precluded_ relation on
the part of the fallen defenders. The sense that was theirs and that
moved them we know, but we seem to know better still the sense that
wasn’t and that couldn’t, and that forms our luxurious heritage as our
eyes, across the gulf, seek to meet their eyes; so that we are almost
ashamed of taking so much, such colossal quantity and value, as the
equivalent of their dimly-seeing offer. The huge bargain they made for
us, in a word, made by the gift of the little all they had—to the
modesty of which amount the homely rural facts grouped there together
have appeared to go on testifying—this brilliant advantage strikes the
imagination that yearns over them as unfairly enjoyed at their cost. Was
it delicate, was it decent—that is _would_ it have been—to ask the
embattled farmers, simple-minded, unwitting folk, to make us so
inordinate a present with so little of the conscious credit of it? Which
all comes indeed, perhaps, simply to the most poignant of all those
effects of disinterested sacrifice that the toil and trouble of our
forefathers produce for us. The minute-men at the bridge were of course
interested intensely, as they believed—but such, too, was the artful
manner in which we see _our_ latent, lurking, waiting interest like, a
Jew in a dusky back-shop, providentially bait the trap.

Beyond even such broodings as these, and to another purpose, moreover,
the communicated spell falls, in its degree, into that pathetic oddity
of the small aspect, and the rude and the lowly, the reduced and
humiliated above all, that sits on so many nooks and corners, objects
and appurtenances, old contemporary things—contemporary with the doings
of our race; simplifying our antecedents, our annals, to within an inch
of their life, making us ask, in presence of the rude relics even of
greatness, mean retreats and receptacles, constructionally so poor, from
what barbarians or from what pigmies we have sprung. There are certain
rough black mementos of the early monarchy, in England and Scotland,
there are glimpses of the original humble homes of other greatness as
well, that strike in perfection this grim little note; which has the
interest of our being free to take it, for curiosity, for luxury of
thought, as that of the real or that of the romantic, and with which,
again, the deep Concord rusticity, momentary medium of our national
drama, essentially consorts. We remember the small hard facts of the
Shakespeare house at Stratford; we remember the rude closet, in
Edinburgh Castle, in which James VI of Scotland was born, or the other
little black hole, at Holyrood, in which Mary Stuart “sat” and in which
Rizzio was murdered. These, I confess, are odd memories at Concord;
although the manse, near the spot where we last paused, and against the
edge of whose acre or two the loitering river seeks friction in the
manner I have mentioned, would now seem to have shaken itself a trifle
disconcertingly free of the ornamental mosses scattered by Hawthorne’s
light hand; it stands there, beyond its gate, with every due similitude
to the shrunken historic site in general. To which I must hasten to add,
however, that I was much more struck with the way these particular
places of visitation resist their pressure of reference than with their
affecting us as below their fortune. Intrinsically they are as
naught—deeply depressing, in fact, to any impulse to reconstitute, the
house in which Hawthorne spent what remained to him of life after his
return from the Italy of his Donatello and his Miriam. Yet, in common
with everything else, this mild monument benefits by that something in
the air which makes us tender, keeps us respectful; meets, in the
general interest, waving it vaguely away, any closer assault of
criticism.

It is odd, and it is also exquisite, that these witnessing ways should
be the last ground on which we feel moved to ponderation of the “Concord
school”—to use, I admit, a futile expression; or rather, I should
doubtless say, it _would_ be odd if there were not inevitably something
absolute in the fact of Emerson’s all but lifelong connection with them.
We may smile a little as we “drag in” Weimar, but I confess myself, for
my part, much more satisfied than not by our happy equivalent, “in
American money,” for Goethe and Schiller. The money is a potful in the
second case as in the first, and if Goethe, in the one, represents the
gold and Schiller the silver, I find (and quite putting aside any
bimetallic prejudice) the same good relation in the other between
Emerson and Thoreau. I open Emerson for the same benefit for which I
open Goethe, the sense of moving in large intellectual space, and that
of the gush, here and there, out of the rock, of the crystalline cupful,
in wisdom and poetry, in Wahrheit and Dichtung; and whatever I open
Thoreau for (I needn’t take space here for the good reasons) I open him
oftener than I open Schiller. Which comes back to our feeling that the
rarity of Emerson’s genius, which has made him so, for the attentive
peoples, the first, and the one really rare, American spirit in letters,
couldn’t have spent his career in a charming woody, watery place, for so
long socially and typically and, above all, interestingly homogeneous,
without an effect as of the communication to it of something
ineffaceable. It was during his long span his immediate concrete,
sufficient world; it gave him his nearest vision of life, and he drew
half his images, we recognize, from the revolution of its seasons and
the play of its manners. I don’t speak of the other half, which he drew
from elsewhere. It is admirably, to-day, as if we were still seeing
these things _in_ those images, which stir the air like birds, dim in
the eventide, coming home to nest. If one had reached a “time of life”
one had thereby at least heard him lecture; and not a russet leaf fell
for me, while I was there, but fell with an Emersonian drop.


                                   II

It never failed that if in moving about I made, under stress, an
inquiry, I should prove to have made it of a flagrant foreigner. It
never happened that, addressing a fellow-citizen, in the street, on one
of those hazards of possible communion with the indigenous spirit, I
should not draw a blank. So, inevitably, at Salem, when, wandering
perhaps astray, I asked my way to the House of the Seven Gables, the
young man I had overtaken was true to his nature; he stared at me as a
remorseless Italian—as remorseless, at least, as six months of Salem
could leave him. On that spot, in that air, I confess, it was a
particular shock to me to be once more, with my so good general
intention, so “put off”; though, if my young man but glared frank
ignorance of the monument I named, he left me at least with the interest
of wondering how the native estimate of it as a romantic ruin might
strike a taste formed for such features by the landscape of Italy. I
will not profess that by the vibration of this note the edifice of my
fond fancy—I mean Hawthorne’s Salem, and the witches’, and that of other
eminent historic figures—was not rather essentially shaken; since what
had the intention of my pilgrimage been, in all good faith, in artless
sympathy and piety, but a search again, precisely, for the New England
homogeneous—for the renewal of that impression of it which had lingered
with me from a vision snatched too briefly, in a midsummer gloaming,
long years ago. I had been staying near, at that far-away time, and, the
railroad helping, had got myself dropped there for an hour at just the
right moment of the waning day. This memory had been, from far back, a
kept felicity altogether; a picture of goodly Colonial habitations,
quite the high-water mark of that type of state and ancientry, seen in
the clear dusk, and of almost nothing else but a pleasant harbour-side
vacancy, the sense of dead marine industries, that finally looked out at
me, for a climax, over a grass-grown interval, from the blank windows of
the old Customs House of the Introduction to _The Scarlet Letter_.

I could on that occasion have seen, with my eye on my return-train,
nothing else; but the image of these things I had not lost, wrapped up
as it even was, for the fancy, in some figment of the very patch of old
embroidered cloth that Hawthorne’s charming prefatory pages unfold for
us—pages in which the words are as finely “taken” as the silk and gold
stitches of poor Hester Prynne’s compunctious needle. It had hung, all
the years, closely together, and had served—oh, so conveniently!—as the
term of comparison, the rather rich frame, for any suggested vision of
New England life unalloyed. The case now was the more marked that,
already, on emerging from the station and not knowing quite where to
look again for my goodly Georgian and neo-Georgian houses, I had had to
permit myself to be directed to them by a civil Englishman, accosted by
the way, who, all kindness and sympathy, immediately mentioned that they
formed the Grosvenor Square, as might be said, of Salem. We conversed
for the moment, and settled, as he told me, in the town, he was most
sustaining; but when, a little later on, I stood there in admiration of
the noble quarter, I could only feel, even while doing it every justice,
that the place was not quite what my imagination had counted on. It was
possibly even better, for the famous houses, almost without exception
ample and charming, seemed to me to show a grace even beyond my
recollection; the only thing was that I had never bargained for looking
at them through a polyglot air. Look at them none the less, and at the
fine old liberal scale, and felt symmetry, and simple dignity, and solid
sincerity of them, I gratefully did, with due speculation as to their
actual chances and changes, as to what they represent to-day as social
“values,” and with a lively impression, above all, of their preserved
and unsophisticated state. That was a social value—which I found myself
comparing, for instance, with similar aspects, frequent and excellent,
in old English towns.

The Salem houses, the best, were all of the old English family, and,
from picture to picture, all the parts would have matched; but the
moral, the social, the political climate, even more than the breath of
nature, had had in each case a different action, had begotten on either
side a different consciousness. Or was it nearer even to say that these
things had on one side begotten a consciousness, and had on the other
begotten comparatively none? The approximation would have been the more
interesting as each arrayed group might pass for a supreme expression of
respectability. It would be the tone and weight, the quantity and
quality, of the respectability that make the difference; massive and
square-shouldered, yet rather battered and mottled, chipped and frayed,
at last rather sceptical and cynical, in fine, in the English
figure—thin and clear, consistently sharp, boldly unspotted, blankly
serene, in the American. It was more amusing at any rate to spin such
fancies, in reaction from the alien snub, than simply to see one’s
antitheses reduced to a mere question of the effect of climate. There
would be yet more to say for the Salem picture, many of the “bits” of
which remain, as Ruskin might have put it, entirely delightful; but
their desperate clean freshness was what was more to abide with me after
the polyglot air had cleared a little. The spacious, courteous doorways
of the houses, expansively columned, fluted, framed; their large honest
windows, in ample tiers, only here and there dishonoured by the modern
pane; their high bland foreheads, in short, with no musty secrets in the
eaves—yes, not one, in spite of the “speciality,” in this respect, of
the Seven Gables, to which I am coming—clarify too much perhaps the
expressive mask, the look of experience, depress the balance toward the
type of the expensive toy, shown on its shelf, but too good to be
humanly used. It’s as if the old witches had been suffered to live
again, penally, as public housemaids, using nocturnally, for purposes of
almost viciously-thorough purification, the famous broomsticks they used
wantonly to ride.

Was it a sacred terror, after this, that stayed me from crossing the
threshold of the Witch House?—in spite of the quite definite sturdy
stamp of this attraction. I think it was an almost sacred tenderness
rather, the instinct of not pressing too hard on my privilege and of not
draining the offered cup to the lees. It is always interesting, in
America, to see any object, some builded thing in particular, look as
old as it possibly can; for the sight of which effort we sometimes hold
our breath as if to watch, over the course of the backward years, the
straight “track” of the past, the course of some hero of the foot-race
on whom we have staked our hopes. How long will he hold out, how far
back will he run, and where, heroically blown, will he have to drop? Our
suspense is great in proportion to our hope, and if we are nervously
constituted we may very well, at the last, turn away for anxiety. It was
really in some such manner I was affected, I think, before the Salem
Witch House, in presence of the mystery of antiquity. It is a modest
wooden structure, consciously primitive, standing, if I remember
rightly, in some effective relation to a street-corner and putting no
little purpose into its archaism. The pity is, however, that unrelieved
wooden houses never very curiously testify—as I was presently to learn,
to my cost, from the dreadful anti-climax of the Seven Gables. They look
brief and provisional at the best—look, above all, incorrigibly and
witlessly innocent. The quite sufficiently sturdy little timbered mass
by the Salem street, none the less, with a sidelong crook or twist that
we may take as symbolizing ancient perversity, runs the backward race as
long-windedly as we may anywhere, over the land, see it run. Had I gone
in, as a frank placard invited me, I might have better measured the
exploit; yet, on the other hand, fearing frank placards, in general, in
these cases, fearing nothing so much as reconstituted antiquity, I might
have lost a part of my good little impression—which otherwise, as a
small pale flower plucked from a withered tree, I could fold away,
intact, between the leaves of my romantic herbarium.

I wanted, moreover, to be honest, not to fail, within the hour, of two
other urgent matters, my train away (my sense of Salem was too destined
to be train-haunted) and a due visitation of the Seven Gables and of the
birth-house of their chronicler. It was in the course of this errand
that I was made to feel myself, as I have mentioned, living, rather
witlessly, in a world unknown to the active Salemite of to-day—a world
embodied, I seemed to make out, in the large untidy industrial quarter
that had sprung up since my early visit. Did I quite escape from this
impression before alighting at last happily upon the small stale
structure that had sheltered the romancer’s entrance into life and that
now appears, according to the preference of fancy, either a strange
recipient of the romantic germ or the very spot to cause it, in protest
and desperation, to develop? I took the neighbourhood, at all events,
for the small original Hawthornesque world, keeping the other, the smoky
modernism, at a distance, keeping everything, in fact, at a distance—on
so spare and bare and lean and mean a face did the bright hard sky
strike me as looking down. The way to think of it evidently was in some
frank rural light of the past, that of all the ancient New England
simplicities, with the lap of wide waters and the stillness of rocky
pastures never far off (they seem still indeed close at hand), and with
any number of our present worryings and pamperings of the “literary
temperament” too little in question to be missed. It kept at a distance,
in fact, so far as my perception was concerned, everything but a little
boy, a dear little harsh, intelligent, sympathetic American boy, who
dropped straight from the hard sky for my benefit (I hadn’t seen him
emerge from elsewhere) and turned up at my side with absolute confidence
and with the most knowing tips. He might have been a Weimar tout or a
Stratford amateur—only he so beautifully wasn’t. That is what I mean by
my having alighted happily; the little boy was so completely master of
his subject, and we formed, on the spot, so close an alliance. He made
up to me for my crude Italian—the way they _become_ crude over here!—he
made up to me a little even for my civil Englishman; he was exactly what
I wanted—a presence (and he was the only thing far or near) old enough,
native and intimate enough, to reach back and to understand.

He showed me the window of the room in which Hawthorne had been born;
wild horses, as the phrase is, wouldn’t have dragged me into it, but
_he_ might have done so if he hadn’t, as I say, understood. But he
understood everything, and knew when to insist and when not to; knew,
for instance, exactly why I said “Dear, dear, are you very sure?” after
he had brought me to sight of an object at the end of a lane, by a vague
waterside, I think, and looking across to Marblehead, that he invited me
to take, if I could, for the Seven Gables. I couldn’t take it in the
least, as happens, and though he was perfectly sure, our reasons, on
either side, were equally clear to him—so that in short I think of him
as the very genius of the place, feeding his small shrillness on the
cold scraps of Hawthorne’s leaving and with the making of his
acquaintance alone worth the journey. Yet the fact that, the Seven
Gables being in question, the shapeless object by the waterside wouldn’t
do at all, not the least little bit, troubled us only till we had thrown
off together, with a quick, competent gesture and at the breaking of
light, the poor illusion of a _necessity_ of relation between the
accomplished thing, for poetry, for art, and those other quite equivocal
things that we inflate our ignorance with seeing it suggested by. The
weak, vague domiciliary presence at the end of the lane may have “been”
(in our poor parlance) the idea of the admirable book—though even here
we take a leap into dense darkness; but the idea that is the inner force
of the admirable book so vividly forgets, before our eyes, any such
origin or reference, “cutting” it dead as a low acquaintance and
outsoaring the shadow of its night, that the connection has turned a
somersault into space, repudiated like a ladder kicked back from the top
of a wall. Hawthorne’s ladder at Salem, in fine, has now quite gone, and
we but tread the air if we attempt to set our critical feet on its steps
and its rounds, learning thus as we do, and with infinite interest as I
think, how merely “subjective” in us are our discoveries about genius.
Endless are its ways of besetting and eluding, of meeting and mocking
us. When there are appearances that might have nourished it we see it as
swallowing them all; yet we see it as equally gorged when there are no
appearances at all—_then_ most of all, sometimes, quite insolently
bloated; and we recognize ruefully that we are forever condemned to know
it only after the fact.



                                   IX
                              PHILADELPHIA


                                   I

To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it,
analytically, minded—over and beyond an inherent love of the general
many-coloured picture of things—is to be subject to the superstition
that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and
addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper
to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at
once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the
matter. That perverse person is obliged to take it for a working theory
that the essence of almost any settled aspect of anything may be
extracted by the chemistry of criticism, and may give us its right name,
its formula, for convenient use. From the moment the critic finds
himself sighing, to save trouble in a difficult case, that the cluster
of appearances can _have_ no sense, from that moment he begins, and
quite consciously, to go to pieces; it being the prime business and the
high honour of the painter of life always to _make_ a sense—and to make
it most in proportion as the immediate aspects are loose or confused.
The last thing decently permitted him is to recognize incoherence—to
recognize it, that is, as baffling; though of course he may present and
portray it, in all richness, _for_ incoherence. That, I think, was what
I had been mainly occupied with in New York; and I quitted so qualified
a joy, under extreme stress of winter, with a certain confidence that I
should not have moved even a little of the way southward without
practical relief: relief which came in fact ever so promptly, at
Philadelphia, on my feeling, unmistakably, the change of half the
furniture of consciousness. This change put on, immediately, the
friendliest, the handsomest aspect—supplied my intelligence on the spot
with the clear, the salient note. I mean by this, not that the happy
definition or synthesis instantly came—came with the perception that
character and sense were there, only waiting to be disengaged; but that
the note, as I say, was already, within an hour, the germ of these
things, and that the whole flower, assuredly, wouldn’t fail to bloom. I
was in fact sniffing up its fragrance after I had looked out for three
minutes from one of the windows of a particularly wide-fronted house and
seen the large residential square that lay before me shine in its native
light. This light, remarkably tender, I thought, for that of a winter
afternoon, matched with none other I had ever seen, and announced
straight off fifty new circumstances—an enormous number, in America, for
any prospect to promise you in contradistinction from any other. It was
not simply that, beyond a doubt, the outlook was more _méridional_; a
still deeper impression had begun to work, and, as I felt it more and
more glimmer upon me, I caught myself about to jump, with a single leap,
to my synthesis. I of course stayed myself in the act, for there would
be too much, really, yet to come; but the perception left me, I even
then felt, in possession of half the ground on which later experience
would proceed. It was not too much to say, as I afterwards saw, that I
had in those few illumined moments put the gist of the matter into my
pocket.

Philadelphia, incontestably then, was the American city of the large
type, that didn’t _bristle_—just as I was afterwards to recognize in St.
Louis the nearest approach to companionship with her in this respect;
and to recognize in Chicago, I may parenthetically add, the most
complete divergence. It was not only, moreover, at the ample, tranquil
window there, that Philadelphia _didn’t_ “bristle” (by the record of my
moment) but that she essentially couldn’t and wouldn’t ever; that no
movement or process could be thought of, in fine, as more foreign to her
genius. I do not just now go into the question of what the business of
bristling, in an American city, may be estimated as consisting of; so
infallibly is one aware when the thousand possible quills _are_ erect,
and when, haply, they are not—such a test does the restored absentee
find, at least, in his pricked sensibility. A place may abound in its
own sense, as the phrase is, without bristling in the least—it is liable
indeed to bristle most, I think, when not too securely possessed of any
settled sense to abound in. An imperfect grasp of such a luxury is not
the weakness of Philadelphia—just as that admirable comprehensive
flatness in her which precludes the image of the porcupine figured to me
from the first, precisely, as her positive source of strength. The
absence of the note of the perpetual perpendicular, the New York, the
Chicago note—and I allude here to the material, the constructional
exhibition of it—seemed to symbolize exactly the principle of indefinite
level extension and to offer refreshingly, a challenge to horizontal, to
lateral, to more or less tangental, to rotary, or, better still, to
absolute centrifugal motion. If it was to befall me, during my brief but
various acquaintance with the place, not to find myself more than two or
three times hoisted or lowered by machinery, my prime illumination had
been an absolute forecast of that immunity—a virtue of general
premonition in it at which I have already glanced. I should in fact, I
repeat, most truly or most artfully repaint my little picture by mixing
my colours with the felt amenity of that small crisis, and by showing
how this, that and the other impression to come had had, while it
lasted, quite the definite prefigurement that the chapters of a book
find in its table of contents. The afternoon blandness, for a fugitive
from Madison Avenue in January snow, didn’t mean nothing; the little
marble steps and lintels and cornices and copings, all the so clear, so
placed accents in the good prose text of the mildly purple houses across
the Square, which seemed to wear them, as all the others did, up and
down the streets, in the manner of nice white stockings, neckties,
collars, cuffs, didn’t mean nothing; and this was somehow an assurance
that joined on to the vibration of the view produced, a few hours
before, by so merely convenient a circumstance as my taking my place, at
Jersey City, in the Pennsylvania train.

I had occasion, repeatedly, to find the Pennsylvania Railroad a
beguiling and predisposing influence—in relation to various objectives;
and indeed I quite lost myself in the singularity of this effect, which
existed for me, certainly, only in that connection, touching me with a
strange and most agreeable sense that the great line in question, an
institution with a style and _allure_ of its own, is not, even the world
over, as other railroads are. It absolutely, with a little
frequentation, affected me as better and higher than its office or
function, and almost as supplying one with a mode of life intrinsically
superior; as if it ought really to be on its way to much grander and
more charming places than any that happen to mark its course—as if
indeed, should one persistently keep one’s seat, not getting out
anywhere, it would in the end carry one to some such ideal city. One
might under this extravagant spell, which always began to work for me at
Twenty-third Street, and on the constantly-adorable Ferry, have fancied
the train, disvulgarized of passengers, steaming away, in disinterested
empty form, to some terminus too noble to be marked in _our_ poor
schedules. The consciousness of this devotion would have been thus like
that of living, all sublimely, up in a balloon. It was not, however—I
recover myself—that if I had been put off at Philadelphia I was not, for
the hour, contented; finding so immediately, as I have noted, more
interest to my hand than I knew at first what to do with. There was the
quick light of explanation, following on everything else I have
mentioned—the light in which I had only to turn round again and see
where I was, and how it was, in order to feel everything “come out”
under the large friendliness, the ordered charm and perfect peace of the
Club, housing me with that _whole_ protection the bestowal of which on
occasion is the finest grace of the hospitality of American clubs.
Philadelphia, manifestly, was beyond any other American city, a
_society_, and was going to show as such, as a thoroughly confirmed and
settled one—which fact became the key, precisely, to its extension on
one plane, and to its having no pretext for bristling. Human groups that
discriminate in their own favour do, one remembers, in general, bristle;
but that is only when they have not been really successful, when they
have not been able to discriminate enough, when they are not, like
Philadelphia, settled and confirmed and content. It would clearly be
impossible not to regard the place before me as possessed of this secret
of serenity to a degree elsewhere—at least among ourselves—unrivalled.
The basis of the advantage, the terms of the secret, would be still to
make out—which was precisely the high interest; and I was afterwards to
be justified of my conviction by the multiplication of my lights.

New York, in that sense, had appeared to me then not a society at all,
and it was rudimentary that Chicago would be one still less; neither of
them, as a human group, having been able to discriminate in its own
favour with anything like such success. The proof of that would be,
obviously, in one’s so easily imputing to them alteration, extension,
development; a change somehow unimaginable in the case of Philadelphia,
which was a fixed quantity and had filled to the brim, one felt—and
wasn’t that really to be part of the charm?—the measure of her
possibility. Boston even was thinkable as subject to mutation; had I not
in fact just seemed to myself to catch her in the almost uncanny
inconsequence of change? There had been for Boston the old epigram that
she wasn’t a place, but a state of mind; and that might remain, since we
know how frequently states of mind alter. Philadelphia then wasn’t a
place, but a state of consanguinity, which is an absolute final
condition. She had arrived at it, with nothing in the world left to
bristle for, or against; whereas New York, and above all Chicago, were
only, and most precariously, on the way to it, and indeed, having
started too late, would probably never arrive. There were, for them,
interferences and complications; they knew, and would yet know, other
conditions, perhaps other beatitudes; only the beatitude I speak of—that
of being, in the composed sense, a society—was lost to them forever.
Philadelphia, without complications or interferences, enjoyed it in
particular through having begun to invoke it in time. And now she had
nothing more to invoke; she had everything; her _cadres_ were all full;
her imagination was at peace. This, exactly again, would be the reason
of the bristling of the other places: the _cadres_ of New York, Chicago,
Boston, being as to a third of them empty and as to another third
objectionably filled—with much consequent straining, reaching, heaving,
both to attain and to eject. What makes a society was thus, more than
anything else, the number of organic social relations it represents; by
which logic Philadelphia would represent nothing _but_ organic social
relations. The degrees of consanguinity were the _cadres_; every one of
them was full; it was a society in which every individual was as many
times over cousin, uncle, aunt, niece, and so on through the list, as
poor human nature is susceptible of being. These degrees are, when one
reflects, the only really organic social relations, and when they are
all there for every one the scheme of security, in a community, has been
worked out. Philadelphia, in other words, would not only be a family,
she would be a “happy” one, and a probable proof that the happiness
comes as a matter of course if the family but be large enough.
Consanguinity provides the marks and features, the type and tone and
ease, the common knowledge and the common consciousness, but number
would be required to make these things social. Number, accordingly, for
her perfection, was what Philadelphia would have—it having been clear to
me still, in my charming Club and at my illuminating window, that she
couldn’t _not_ be perfect. She would be, of all goodly villages, the
very goodliest, probably, in the world; the very largest, and flattest,
and smoothest, the most rounded and complete.


                                   II

The simplest account of such success as I was to have in putting my
vision to the test will be, I think, to say that the place never for a
moment belied to me that forecast of its animated intimacy. Yet it might
be just here that a report of my experience would find itself
hampered—this learning the lesson, from one vivid page of the
picture-book to another, of how perfectly “intimate” Philadelphia is.
Such an exhibition would be, prohibitively, the exhibition of private
things, of private things only, and of a charmed contact with them, were
it not for the great circumstance which, when what I have said has been
fully said, remains to be taken into account. The state of infinite
cousinship colours the scene, makes the predominant tone; but you get a
light upon it that is worth all others from the moment you see it as,
ever so savingly, historic. This perception moreover promptly operates;
I found it stirred, as soon as I went out or began to circulate, by all
immediate aspects and signs. The place “went back”; or, in other words,
the social equilibrium, forestalling so that of the other cities, had
begun early, had had plenty of time on its side, and thus had its
history behind it—the past that looms through it, not at all luridly,
but so squarely and substantially, to-day, and gives it, by a mercy, an
extension other than the lateral. This, frankly, was required, it struck
me, for the full comfort of one’s impression—for a certain desirable and
imputable richness. The backward extension, in short, is the very making
of Philadelphia; one is so uncertain of the value one would attach to
her being as she is, if she hadn’t been so by prescription and for a
couple of centuries. This has established her right and her competence;
the fact is the parent, so to speak, of her consistency and serenity; it
has made the very law under which her parts and pieces have held so
closely together. To walk her streets is to note with all promptness
that William Penn _must_ have laid them out—no one else could possibly
have done it so ill. It was his best, though, with our larger sense for
a street, it is far from ours; we at any rate no more complain of them,
nor suggest that they might have been more liberally conceived, than we
so express ourselves about the form of the chairs in sitting through a
morning call.

I found myself liking them, then, as I moved among them, just in
proportion as they conformed, in detail, to the early pattern—the
figure, for each house, of the red-faced old gentleman whose thick
eyebrows and moustache have turned to white; and I found myself
detesting them in any instance of a new front or a new fashion. They
were narrow, with this aspect as of a double file of grizzled veterans,
or they were nothing; the narrowness had been positively the channel or
conduit of continuity of character: it made the long pipe on which the
tune of the place was played. From the moment it was in any way
corrected the special charm broke—the charm, a rare civic possession, as
of some immense old ruled and neatly-inked chart, not less carefully
than benightedly flattened out, stretching its tough parchment under the
very feet of all comings and goings. This was an image with which, as it
furthermore seemed to me, everything else consorted—above all the
soothing truth that Philadelphia was, yes, beyond cavil, solely and
singly Philadelphian. There was an interference absent, or one that I at
least never met: that sharp note of the outlandish, in the strict sense
of the word, which I had already found almost everywhere so
disconcerting. I pretend here of course neither to estimate the numbers
in which the grosser aliens may actually have settled on these bland
banks of the Delaware, nor to put my finger on the principle of the
shock I had felt it, and was still to feel it, in their general power to
administer; for I am not now concerned so much with the impression made
by one’s almost everywhere meeting them, as with the impression made by
one’s here and there failing of it. They may have been gathered, in
their hordes, in some vast quarter unknown to me and of which I was to
have no glimpse; but what would this have denoted, exactly, but some
virtue in the air for reducing their presence, or their effect, to
naught? There precisely was the difference from New York—that they
themselves had been in that place half the virtue, or the vice, of the
air, and that there were few of its agitations to which they had not
something to say.

The logic of the case had been visible to me, for that matter, on my
very first drive from the train—from that precious “Pennsylvania”
station of Philadelphia which was to strike me as making a nearer
approach than elsewhere to the arts of ingratiation. There was an object
or two, windowed and chimneyed, in the central sky—but nothing to speak
of: I then and there, in a word, took in the admirable flatness. And if
it seemed so spacious, by the same token, this was because it was
neither eager, nor grasping, nor pushing. It drew its breath at its
ease, clearly—never sounding the charge, the awful “Step lively!” of New
York. The fury of the pavement had dropped, in fine, as I was to see it
drop, later on, between Chicago and St. Louis. This affected me on the
spot of symbolic, and I was to have no glimpse of anything that gainsaid
the symbol. It was somehow, too, the very note of the homogeneous;
though this indeed is not, oddly enough, the head under which at St.
Louis my impression was to range itself. I at all events here gave
myself up to the vision—that of the vast, firm chess-board, the
immeasurable spread of little squares, covered _all_ over by perfect
Philadelphians. It was an image, in face of some of the other features
of the view, dissimilar to any by which one had ever in one’s life been
assaulted; and this elimination of the foreign element has been what was
required to make it consummate. Nothing is more notable, through the
States at large, than that hazard of what one may happen, or may not
happen, to see; but the only use to be made of either accident is,
clearly, to let it stand and to let it serve. This intensity and
ubiquity of the local tone, that of the illimitable _town_, serves so
successfully for my sense of Philadelphia that I should feel as if a
little masterpiece of the creative imagination had been destroyed by the
least correction. And there is, further, the point to make that if I
knew, all the while, that there was something more, and different, and
less beatific, under and behind the happy appearance I grasped, I knew
it by no glimmer of direct perception, and should never in the world
have guessed it if some sound of it had not, by a discordant voice,
been, all superfluously, rather tactlessly, dropped into my ear.

It was not, however, disconcerting at the time, this presentation, as in
a flash, of the other side of the medal—the other side being, in a word,
as was mentioned to me, one of the most lurid pages in the annals of
political corruption. The place, by this revelation, was two distinct
things—a Society, from far back, the society I had divined, the most
genial and delightful one could think of, and then, parallel to this,
and not within it, nor quite altogether above it, but beside it and
beneath it, behind it and before it, enclosing it as in a frame of fire
in which it still had the secret of keeping cool, a proportionate City,
the most incredible that ever was, organized all for plunder and rapine,
the gross satisfaction of official appetite, organized for eternal
iniquity and impunity. Such were the conditions, it had been hinted to
me—from the moment the medal spun round; but I even understate, I think,
in speaking of the knowledge as only not disconcerting. It was better
than that, for it positively added the last touch of colour to my framed
and suspended picture. Here, strikingly then, was an American _case_,
and presumably one of the best; one of the best, that is, for some study
of the wondrous problem, admiration and amazement of the nations, who
yearn over it from far off: the way in which sane Society and pestilent
City, in the United States, successfully cohabit, each keeping it up
with so little of fear or flutter from the other. The thing presents
itself, in its prime unlikelihood, as a thorough good neighbouring of
the Happy Family and the Infernal Machine—the machine so rooted as to
continue to defy removal, and the family still so indifferent, while it
carries on the family business of buying and selling, of chattering and
dancing, to the danger of being blown up. It is all puzzled out, from
afar, as a matter of the exchange, and in a large decree of the
observance, from side to side, of guarantees, and the interesting thing
to get at, for the student of manners, will ever be just this mystery of
the terms of the bargain. I must add, none the less, that, though one
was one’s self, inevitably and always and everywhere, that student, my
attention happened to be, or rather was obliged to be, confined to one
view of the agreement. The arrangement is, obviously, between the great
municipalities and the great populations, on the grand scale, and I
lacked opportunity to look at it all round. I had but my glimpse of the
apparently wide social acceptance of it—that is I saw but the face of
the medal most directly turned to the light of day, and could note that
nowhere so much as in Philadelphia was any carking care, in the social
mind, any uncomfortable consciousness, as of a skeleton at the banquet
of life, so gracefully veiled.

This struck me (on my looking back afterwards with more knowledge) as
admirable, as heroic, in its way, and as falling in altogether with
inherent habits of sociability, gaiety, gallantry, with that felt
presence of a “temperament” with which the original Quaker drab seems to
flush—giving it, as one might say for the sake of the figure, something
of the iridescence of the breast of a well-fed dove. The original Quaker
drab is still there, and, ideally, for the picture, up and down the
uniform streets, one should see a bland, broad-brimmed, square-toed
gentleman, or a bonneted, kerchiefed, mittened lady, on every little
flight of white steps; but the very note of the place has been the
“worldly” overscoring, for most of the senses, of the primitive
monotone, the bestitching of the drab with pink and green and silver.
The mixture has been, for a social effect, admirably successful, thanks,
one seems to see, to the subtle, the charming absence of pedantry in the
Quaker purity. It flushes gracefully, that temperate prejudice (with its
predisposition to the universal _tutoiement_), turning first but to the
prettiest pink; so that we never quite know where the drab has ended and
the colour of the world has begun. The “disfrocked” Catholic is too
strange, the paganized Puritan too angular; it is the accommodating
Friend who has most the secret of a _modus vivendi_. And if it be asked,
I may add, whether, in this case of social Philadelphia, the genius for
life, and what I have called the gallantry of it above all, wouldn’t
have been better shown by a scorn of _any_ compromise to which the
nefarious City could invite it, I can only reply that, as a lover,
always of romantic phenomena, and an inveterate seeker for them, I
should have been deprived, by the action of that particular virtue, of
the thrilled sense of a society dancing, all consciously, on the thin
crust of a volcano. It is the thinness of the crust that makes, in such
examples, the wild fantasy, the gay bravery, of the dance—just as I
admit that a preliminary, an original extinction of the volcano would
have illustrated another kind of virtue. The crust, for the social
tread, would in this case have been firm, but the spectator’s
imagination would have responded less freely, I think, to the appeal of
the scene. If I may indeed speak my whole thought for him he would so
have had to drop again, to his regret, the treasure of a small analogy
picked up on its very threshold.

How shall he confess at once boldly and shyly enough that the situation
had at the end of a very short time begun to strike him, for all its
immeasurably reduced and simplified form, as a much nearer approach to
the representation of an “old order,” an _ancien régime_, socially
speaking, than any the field of American manners had seemed likely to
regale him with? Grotesque the comparison if pushed; yet how had he
encountered the similitude if it hadn’t been hanging about? From the
moment he adopted it, at any rate, he found it taking on touch after
touch. The essence of old orders, as history lights them, is just that
innocent beatitude of consanguinity, of the multiplication of the
assured felicities, to which I have already alluded. From this, in
Philadelphia, didn’t the rest follow?—the sense, for every one, of being
in the same boat with every one else, a closed circle that would find
itself happy enough if only it could remain closed enough. The boat
might considerably pitch, but its occupants would either float merrily
together or (almost as merrily) go down together, and meanwhile the
risk, the vague danger, the jokes to be made about it, the general
quickened sociability and intimacy, were the very music of the
excursion. There are even yet to be observed about the world fragments
and ghosts of old social orders, thin survivals of final cataclysms, and
it was not less positive than beguiling that the common marks by which
these companies are known, and which we still distinguish through their
bedimmed condition, cropped up for me in the high American light, making
good my odd parallel at almost every point. Yet if these signs of a
slightly congested, but still practically self-sufficing, little world
were all there, they were perhaps there most, to my ear, in the fact of
the little world’s proper intimate idiom and accent: a dialect as much
its very own, even in drawing-rooms and libraries, as the Venetian is
that of Venice or the Neapolitan is that of Naples—representing the
common things of association, the things easily understood and felt, and
charged as no other vehicle could be with the fund of local reference.
There is always the difference, of course, that at Venice and at Naples,
“in society,” an alternative, either that of French or of the classic,
the more or less academic Italian, is offered to the uninitiated
stranger, whereas in Philadelphia he is candidly, consistently,
sometimes almost contagiously entertained in the free vernacular. The
latter may easily become, in fact, under its wealth of idiosyncrasy and
if he have the favouring turn of mind, a tempting object of linguistic
study; with the bridge built for him, moreover, that, unlike the
Venetian, the Neapolitan and most other local languages, it contains,
itself, colloquially, a notable element of the academic and the classic.
It struck me even, truly, as, with a certain hardness in it,
_constituting_ the society that employed it—very much as the egg is made
oval by its shell; and really, if I may say all, as taking its stand a
bit consciously sometimes, if not a bit defiantly, on its own proved
genius. I remember the visible dismay of a gentleman, a pilgrim from
afar, in a drawing-room, at the comment of a lady, a lady of one of the
new generations indeed, and mistress of the tone by which I had here and
there occasion to observe that such ornaments of the new generation
might be known. “Listen to the creature: he speaks English!”—it was the
very opposite of the indulgence or encouragement with which, in a
Venetian drawing-room (I catch my analogies as I can) the sound of
French or of Italian might have been greeted. The poor “creature’s”
dismay was so visible, clearly, for the reason that such things have
only to be said with a certain confidence to create a certain
confusion—the momentary consciousness of some such misdeed, from the
point of view of manners, as the speaking of Russian at Warsaw. I have
said that Philadelphia didn’t bristle, but the heroine of my anecdote
caused the so genial city to resemble, for the minute, linguistically,
an unreconciled Poland.


                                  III

But why do I talk of the new generations, or at any rate of the abyss in
them that may seem here and there beyond one’s shallow sounding, when,
all the while, at the back of my head, hovers the image in the guise of
which antiquity in Philadelphia looks most seated and most interesting?
Nowhere throughout the country, I think, unless it be perchance at Mount
Vernon, does our historic past so enjoy the felicity of an “important”
concrete illustration. It survives there in visible form as it nowhere
else survives, and one can doubtless scarce think too largely of what
its mere felicity of presence, in these conditions, has done, and
continues, and will continue, to do for the place at large. It may seem
witless enough, at this time of day, to arrive from Pennsylvania with
“news” of the old State House, and my news, I can only recognize, began
but with being news for myself—in which character it quite shamelessly
pretended both to freshness and to brilliancy. Why _shouldn’t_ it have
been charming, the high roof under which the Declaration of Independence
had been signed?—that was of course a question that might from the first
have been asked of me, and with no better answer in wait for it than
that, after all, it might just have happened, in the particular
conditions, not to be; or else that, in general, one is allowed a
margin, on the spot, for the direct sense of consecrated air, for that
communication of its spirit which, in proportion as the spirit has been
great, withholds itself, shyly and nobly, from any mere forecast. This
it is exactly that, by good fortune, keeps up the sanctity of shrines
and the lessons of history, to say nothing of the freshness of
individual sensibility and the general continuity of things. There is
positively nothing of Independence Hall, of its fine old Georgian
amplitude and decency, its large serenity and symmetry of pink and drab,
and its actual emphasis of detachment from the vulgar brush of things,
that is _not_ charming; and there is nothing, the city through, that
doesn’t receive a mild sidelight, that of a reflected interest, from its
neighbourhood.

This element of the reflected interest, and more particularly of the
reflected distinction, is for the most part, on the American scene, the
missed interest—despite the ingenuities of wealth and industry and
“energy” that strain so touchingly often, and even to grimace and
contortion, somehow to supply it. One finds one’s self, when it _has_
happened to intervene, weighing its action to the last grain of gold.
One even puts to one’s self fantastic cases, such as the question, for
instance, of what might, what might _not_ have happened if poor dear
reckless New York had been so distinguished or so blest—with the bad
conscience she is too intelligent not to have, her power to be now and
then ashamed of her “form,” lodged, after all, somewhere in her
interminable boots. One has of course to suppress there the prompt
conviction that the blessing—that of the possession of an historical
monument of the first order—would long since have been replaced by the
higher advantage of a row of sky-scrapers yielding rents; yet the
imagination none the less dallies with the fond vision of some respect
somehow instilled, some deference somehow suggested, some revelation of
the possibilities of a public _tenue_ somehow effected. Fascinating in
fact to speculate a little as to what a New York held in respect by
something or other, some power not of the purse, might have become. It
is bad, ever, for lusty youth, especially with a command of means, to
grow up without knowing at least one “nice family”—if the family be not
priggish; and this is the danger that the young Philadelphia, with its
eyes on the superior connection I am speaking of, was enabled to escape.
The charming old pink and drab heritage of the great time was to be the
superior connection, playing, for the education of the place, the part
of the nice family. Socially, morally, even æsthetically, the place was
to be thus more or less inevitably built round it; but for which good
fortune who knows if even Philadelphia too might have not been vulgar?
One meets throughout the land enough instances of the opposite luck—the
situation of immense and “successful” communities that have lacked,
originally, anything “first-rate,” as they might themselves put it, to
be built round; anything better, that is, than some profitable hole in
the earth, some confluence of rivers or command of lakes or railroads:
and one sees how, though this deficiency may not have made itself felt
at first, it has inexorably loomed larger and larger, the drawback of it
growing all the while with the growth of the place. Our sense of such
predicaments, for the gatherings of men, comes back, I think, and with
an intensity of interest, to our sense of the way the human imagination
absolutely declines everywhere to go to sleep without some apology at
least for a supper. The collective consciousness, in however empty an
air, gasps for a relation, as intimate as possible, to something
superior, something as central as possible, from which it may more or
less have proceeded and round which its life may revolve—and its dim
desire is always, I think, to do it justice, that this object or
presence shall have had as much as possible an heroic or romantic
association. But the difficulty is that in these later times, among such
aggregations, the heroic and romantic elements, even under the earliest
rude stress, have been all too tragically obscure, belonged to
smothered, unwritten, almost unconscious private history: so that the
central something, the social _point de repère_, has had to be
extemporized rather pitifully after the fact, and made to consist of the
biggest hotel or the biggest common school, the biggest factory, the
biggest newspaper office, or, for climax of desperation, the house of
the biggest billionaire. These are the values resorted to in default of
higher, for with _some_ coloured rag or other the general imagination,
snatching its chance, must dress its doll.

As a real, a moral value, to the general mind, at all events, and not as
a trumped-up one, I saw the lucky legacy of the past, at Philadelphia,
operate; though I admit that these are, at best, for the mooning
observer, matters of appreciation, mysteries of his own sensibility.
Such an observer has early to perceive, and to conclude on it once for
all, that there will be little for him in the American scene unless he
be ready, anywhere, everywhere, to read “into” it as much as he reads
out. It is at its best for him when most open to that friendly
penetration, and not at its best, I judge, when practically most closed
to it. And yet how can I pretend to be able to say, under this
discrimination, what was better and what was worse in Independence
Hall?—to say how far the charming facts struck me as going of
themselves, or where the imagination (perhaps on this sole patch of
ground, by exception, a meddler “not wanted anyhow”) took them up to
carry them further. I am reduced doubtless to the comparative sophism of
making my better sense here consist but of my sense of the fine interior
of the building. One sees them immediately as “good,” delightfully good,
on architectural and scenic lines, these large, high, wainscoted
chambers, as good as any could thinkably have been at the time;
embracing what was to be done in them with such a noble congruity (which
in all the conditions they might readily have failed of, though they
were no mere tent pitched for the purpose) that the historic
imagination, reascending the centuries, almost catches them in the act
of directly suggesting the celebrated _coup_. One fancies, under the
high spring of the ceiling and before the great embrasured window-sashes
of the principal room, some clever man of the period, after a long look
round, taking the hint. “_What_ an admirable place for a Declaration of
something! What could one here—what _couldn’t_ one really declare?” And
then after a moment: “I say, why not our Independence?—capital thing
always to declare, and before any one gets in with anything tactless.
You’ll see that the fortune of the place will be made.” It really takes
some such frivolous fancy as that to represent with proper extravagance
the reflection irresistibly rising there and that it yet would seem
pedantic to express with solemnity: the sense, namely, of our beautiful
escape in not having had to “declare” in any way meanly, of our good
fortune in having found half the occasion made to our hand.

High occasions consist of many things, and it was extraordinary luck for
our great date that not one of these, even as to surface and appearance,
should have been wanting. There might easily have been traps laid for us
by some of the inferior places, but I am convinced (and more completely
than of anything else in the whole connection) that the genius of
historic decency would have kept us enslaved rather than have seen us
committed to one of those. In that light, for the intelligent pilgrim,
the Philadelphia monument becomes, under his tread, under the touch of
his hand and the echo of his voice, the very prize, the sacred thing
itself, contended for and gained; so that its quality, in fine, is
irresistible and its dignity not to be uttered. I was so conscious, for
myself, I confess, of the intensity of this perception, that I dip deep
into the whole remembrance without touching bottom; by which I mean that
I grope, reminiscentially, in the full basin of the general experience
of the spot without bringing up a detail. Distinct to me only the way
its character, so clear yet so ample, everywhere hangs together and
keeps itself up; distinct to me only the large sense, in halls and
spreading staircase and long-drawn upper gallery, of one of those rare
precincts of the past against which the present has kept beating in
vain. The present comes in and stamps about and very stertorously
breathes, but its sounds are as naught the next moment; it is as if one
felt there that the grandparent, reserved, irresponsive now, and having
spoken his word, in his finest manner, once for all, must have long ago
had enough of the exuberance of the young grandson’s modernity. But of
course the great impression is that of the persistent actuality of the
so auspicious room in which the Signers saw their tossing ship into
port. The lapse of time here, extraordinarily, has sprung no leak in the
effect; it remains so robust that everything lives again, the interval
drops out and we mingle in the business: the old ghosts, to our inward
sensibility, still make the benches creak as they free their full
coat-skirts for sitting down; still make the temperature rise, the pens
scratch, the papers flutter, the dust float in the large sun-shafts; we
place them as they sit, watch them as they move, hear them as they
speak, pity them as they ponder, know them, in fine, from the arch of
their eyebrows to the shuffle of their shoes.

I am not sure indeed that, for mere archaic insolence, the little old
Hall of the Guild of Carpenters, my vision of which jostles my memory of
the State House, does not carry it even with a higher hand—in spite of a
bedizenment of restoration, within, which leads us to rejoice that the
retouchings of the greater monument expose themselves comparatively so
little. The situation of this elegant structure—of dimensions and form
that scarce differ, as I recall them, from those of delicate little
Holden Chapel, of the so floridly-overlaid gable, most articulate single
word, in College Yard, of the small builded sense of old Harvard—comes
nearer to representing an odd town-nook than any other corner of
American life that I remember; American life having been organized, _ab
ovo_, with an hostility to the town-nook which has left no scrap of
provision for eyes needing on occasion a refuge from the general glare.
The general glare seemed to me, at the end of something like a passage,
in the shade of something like a court, and in the presence of something
like a relic, to have mercifully intermitted, on that fine Philadelphia
morning; I won’t answer for the exact correspondence of the conditions
with my figure of them, since the shade I speak of may have been but the
shade of “tall” buildings, the vulgarest of new accidents. Yet I let my
impression stand, if only as a note of the relief certain always to
lurk, at any turn of the American scene, in the appearance of any
individual thing within, or behind, or at the end, or in the depth, of
any other individual thing. It makes for the sense of complexity,
relieves the eternal impression of things all in a row and of a single
thickness, an impression which the usual unprecedented length of the
American alignment (always its source of pride) does by itself little to
mitigate. Nothing in the array is “behind” anything else—an odd result,
I admit, of the fact that so many things affirm themselves as
preponderantly before. Little Carpenters’ Hall _was_, delightfully,
somewhere behind; so much behind, as I perhaps thus fantastically see
it, that I dare say I should not be able to find my way to it again if I
were to try. Nothing, for that matter, would induce me to revisit in
fact, I feel, the object I so fondly evoke. It might have been, for this
beautiful posteriority, somewhere in the City of London.


                                   IV

I can but continue to lose myself, for these connections, in my _whole_
sense of the intermission, as I have called it, of the glare. The
mellower light prevailed, somehow, _all_ that fine Philadelphia morning,
as well as on two or three other occasions—and I cannot, after all,
pretend I don’t now see why. It was because one’s experience of the
place had become immediately an intimate thing—intimate with that
intimacy that I had tasted, from the first, in the local air; so that,
inevitably, thus, there was no keeping of distinct accounts for public
and private items. An ancient church or two, of aspect as Anglican still
as you please, and taking, for another case, from the indifferent bustle
round it, quite the look of Wren’s mere steepled survivals in the
backwaters of London churchyards; Franklin’s grave itself, in its own
backwater of muffled undulations, close to the indifferent bustle;
Franklin’s admirable portrait by Duplessis in the council-room of an
ancient, opulent Trust, a conservative Company, vague and awful to my
shy sense, that was housed after the fashion of some exclusive,
madeira-drinking old gentleman with obsequious heirs: these and other
matters, wholly thrilling at the time, float back to me as on the
current of talk and as in the flood, so to speak, of hospitality. If
Philadelphia had, in opposition to so many other matters, struck me as
coherent, there would be surely no point of one’s contact at which this
might so have come home as in those mysterious chambers and before the
most interesting of the many far-scattered portraits of Franklin—the
portrait working as some sudden glimpse of the fine old incised seal,
kept in its glass cabinet, that had originally stamped all over, for
identification, the comparatively soft local wax. One thinks of
Franklin’s reputation, of his authority—and however much they may have
been locally contested at the time—as marking the material about him
much as his name might have marked his underclothing or his
pocket-books. Small surprise one had the impression of a Society, with
such a figure as that to start conversation. He seemed to preside over
it all while one lingered there, as if he had been seated, at the
mahogany, relentingly enough, near his glass of madeira; seemed to be
“in” it even more freely than by the so interesting fact of his still
having, in Philadelphia, in New York, in Boston, through his daughter,
so numerous a posterity. The sense of life, life the most positive, most
human and most miscellaneous, expressed in his aged, crumpled, canny
face, where the smile wittily profits, for fineness, by the comparative
collapse of the mouth, represents a suggestion which succeeding
generations may well have found it all they could do to work out. It is
impossible, in the place, after seeing that portrait, not to feel him
still with them, with the genial generations—even though to-day, in the
larger, more mixed cup, the force of his example may have suffered some
dilution.

It was a savour of which, at any rate, for one’s own draught, one could
but make the most; and I went so far, on this occasion, as fairly to
taste it there in the very quality of my company—in that of the
distinguished guidance and protection I was enjoying, which could only
make me ask myself in what finer modern form one would have wished to
see Franklin’s humanity and sagacity, his variety and ingenuity, his
wealth of ideas and his tireless application of them, embodied. There
was verily nothing to do, after this, but to play over the general
picture that light of his assumption of the general ease of things—of
things at any rate thereabouts; so that I now see each reminiscence,
whatever the time or the place, happily governed and coloured by it.
Times and places, in such an experience, ranged themselves, after a
space, like valued objects in one of the assorted rooms of a
“collection.” Keep them a little, tenderly handled, wrapped up, stowed
away, and they then come forth, into the room swept and garnished,
susceptible of almost any pleasing arrangement. The only thing is that
you shall scarce know, at a given moment, amid your abundance, which of
them to take up first; there being always in them, moreover, at best,
the drawback of value from mere association, that keepsake element of
objects in a reliquary. Is not this, however, the drawback for
exhibition of almost any item of American experience that may not
pretend to deal with the mere monstrosities?—the immensities of size and
space, of trade and traffic, of organisation, political, educational,
economic. From the moment one’s record is not, in fine, a loud
statistical shout, it falls into the order of those shy things that
speak, at the most (when one is one’s self incapable even of the merest
statistical whisper), but of the personal adventure—in other words but
of one’s luck and of one’s sensibility. There are incidents, there are
passages, that flush, in this fashion, to the backward eye, under the
torch. But what solemn statement is one to make of the “importance,” for
example, of such a matter as the Academy soirée (as they say in London)
of the Philadelphia winter, the festive commemoration of some long span
of life achieved by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts? We may have
been thrilled, positively, by the occasion, by the interesting
encounters and discoveries, artistic and personal, to which it
ministered; we may have moved from one charmed recognition to another,
noting Sargents and Whistlers by the dozen, and old forgotten French
friends, foreign friends in general, older and younger; noting young
native upstarts, creatures of yesterday and to-morrow, who invite, with
all success, a stand and a stare; but no after-sense of such vibrations,
however lively, presumes to take itself as communicable.

One would regret, on the other hand, failing to sound some echo of a
message everywhere in the United States so audible; that of the
clamorous signs of a hungry social growth, the very pulses, making all
their noise, of the engine that works night and day for a theory of
civilization. There are moments at which it may well seem that, putting
the sense of the spectacle even at its lowest, there is no such
amusement as this anywhere supplied; the air through which everything
shows is so transparent, with steps and stages and processes as distinct
in it as the appearance, from a street-corner, of a crowd rushing on an
alarm to a fire. The gregarious crowd “tells,” in the street, and the
indications I speak of tell, like chalk-marks, on the demonstrative
American black-board—an impression perhaps never so much brought home to
me as by a wondrous Sunday morning at the edge of a vast vacant
Philadelphia street, a street not of Penn’s creation and vacant of
everything but an immeasurable bourgeois blankness. I had turned from
that scene into a friendly house that was given over, from top to toe,
to a dazzling collection of pictures, amid which I felt myself catch in
the very act one of the great ingurgitations of the hungry machine, and
recognize as well how perfect were all the conditions for making it a
case. What could have testified less, on the face of it, than the
candour of the street’s insignificance?—a pair of huge parted lips
protesting almost to pathos their innocence of anything to say: which
was exactly, none the less, where appetite had broken out and was
feeding itself to satiety. Large and liberal the hospitality, remarkably
rich the store of acquisition, in the light of which the whole energy of
the keen collector showed: the knowledge, the acuteness, the audacity,
the incessant watch for opportunity. These abrupt and multiplied
encounters, intensities, ever so various, of individual curiosity, sound
the æsthetic note sometimes with unprecedented shrillness and then again
with the most muffled discretion. Was the note muffled or shrill,
meanwhile, as I listened to it—under a fascination I fully
recognized—during an hour spent in the clustered palæstra of the
University of Pennsylvania? Here the winter afternoon seemed to throw
itself artfully back, across the centuries, the climates, the seasons,
the very faiths and codes, into the air of old Greece and the age of
gymnastic glory: artfully, I rather insist, because I scarce know what
fine emphasis of modernism hung about it too. I put that question,
however, only to deny myself the present luxury of answering it; so
thickly do the visitor’s University impressions, over the land, tend to
gather, and so markedly they suggest their being reported of together. I
note my palæstral hour, therefore, but because it fell through what it
seemed to show me, straight into what I had conceived of the
Philadelphia scheme, the happy family given up, though quite on “family”
lines, to all the immediate beguilements and activities; the art in
particular of cultivating, with such gaiety as might be, a brave civic
blindness.

I became conscious of but one excrescence on this large smooth surface;
it is true indeed that the excrescence was huge and affected me as
demanding in some way to be dealt with. The Pennsylvania Penitentiary
rears its ancient grimness, its grey towers and defensive moats (masses
at least that uncertain memory so figures for me) in an outlying quarter
which struck me as borrowing from them a vague likeness to some more or
less blighted minor city of Italy or France, black Angers or dead
Ferrara—yet seated on its basis of renown and wrapped in its legend of
having, as the first flourishing example of the strictly cellular
system, the complete sequestration of the individual prisoner, thought
wonderful in its day, moved Charles Dickens to the passionate protest
recorded in his _American Notes_. Of such substance was the story of
these battlements; yet it was unmistakable that when one had crossed the
drawbridge and passed under the portcullis the air seemed thick enough
with the breath of the generations. A prison has, at the worst, the
massive majesty, the sinister peace of a prison; but this huge house of
sorrow affected me as, uncannily, of the City itself, the City of all
the cynicisms and impunities against which my friends had, from far
back, kept plating, as with the old silver of their sideboards, the
armour of their social consciousness. It made the whole place, with some
of its oddly antique aspects and its oddly modern freedoms, look doubly
cut off from the world of light and ease. The suggestions here were
vast, however; too many of them swarm, and my imagination must defend
itself as it can. What I was most concerned to note was the complete
turn of the wheel of fortune in respect to the measure of mere
incarceration suffered, from which the worst of the rigour had visibly
been drawn. Parts of the place suggested a sunny Club at a languid hour,
with members vaguely lounging and chatting, with open doors and
comparatively cheerful vistas, and plenty of rocking-chairs and
magazines. The only thing was that, under this analogy, one found one’s
self speculating much on the implied requisites for membership. It was
impossible not to wonder, from face to face, what these would have been,
and not to ask what one would have taken them to be if the appearance of
a Club had been a little more complete. I almost blush, I fear, for the
crude comfort of my prompt conclusion. One would have taken them to
consist, without exception, of full-blown basenesses; one couldn’t, from
member to member, from type to type, from one pair of eyes to another,
take them for anything less. Where was the victim of circumstances,
where the creature merely misled or betrayed? He fitted no type, he
suffered in no face, he yearned in no history, and one felt, the more
one took in his absence, that the numerous substitutes for him were good
enough for each other.

The great interest was in this sight of the number and variety of ways
of looking morally mean; and perhaps also in the question of how much
the effect came from its being proved upon them, of how little it might
have come if they had still been out in the world. Considered as
criminals the moral meanness here was their explication. Considered as
morally mean, therefore, would possible criminality, out in the world,
have been in the same degree their sole sense? Was the fact of prison
_all_ the mere fact of opportunity, and the fact of freedom all the mere
fact of the absence of it? One inclined to believe that—the
simplification was at any rate so great for one’s feeling: the cases
presented became thus, consistently, cases of the vocation, and from the
moment this was clear the place took on, in its way, almost the harmony
of a convent. I talked for a long time with a charming reprieved
murderer whom I half expected, at any moment, to see ring for coffee and
cigars: he explained with all urbanity, and with perfect lucidity, the
real sense of the appearance against him, but I none the less felt sure
that his merit was largely in the refinement wrought in him by so many
years of easy club life. He was as natural a subject for commutation as
for conviction, and had had to have the latter in order to have the
former—in the enjoyment, and indeed in the subtle criticism, of which,
_as_ simple commutation he was at his best. They were there, all those
of his companions, I was able to note, unmistakably at their best. One
could, as I say, sufficiently rest in it, and to do that kept, in a
manner, the excrescence, as I have called it, on the general scene,
within bounds. I was moreover luckily to see the general scene
definitely cleared again, cleared of everything save its own social
character and its practical philosophy—and at no moment with these
features so brightly presented as during a few days’ rage of winter
round an old country-house. The house was virtually distant from town,
and the conditions could but strike any visitor who stood whenever he
might with his back to the fire, where the logs were piled high, as made
to press on all the reserves and traditions of the general temperament;
those of gallantry, hilarity, social disposability, crowned with the
grace of the sporting instinct. What was it confusedly, almost
romantically, like, what “old order” commemorated in fiction and
anecdote? I had groped for this, as I have shown, before, but I found
myself at it again. Wasn’t it, for freedom of movement, for jingle of
sleigh-bells, for breasting of the elements, for cross-country drives in
the small hours, for _crânerie_ of fine young men and high wintry colour
of muffled nymphs, wasn’t it, brogue and all, like some audible echo of
close-packing, chancing Irish society of the classic time, seen and
heard through a roaring blizzard? That at least, with his back to the
fire, was where the restless analyst was landed.



                                   X
                               BALTIMORE


                                   I

It had doubtless not been merely absurd, as the wild winter proceeded,
to find one’s self so enamoured of the very name of the South that one
was ready to take it in any small atmospheric instalment and to feel the
echo of its voice in the yell of any engine that happened not to drag
one either directly North or directly West. One tended at least, on
these terms, in some degree, toward the land where the citron blooms,
and that was something to go on with, a handful of small change accepted
for the time as a pledge of great gold pieces to come. It is
astonishing, along the Atlantic coast, how, from the moment the North
ceases to insist, the South may begin to presume; ever so little, no
doubt, at first, yet with protrusive feelers that tell how she only
wants the right sensibility, the true waiting victim, to play upon. It
is a question certainly of where, on the so frequently torpid stretch of
shore I speak of, the North does cease to insist; or perhaps I should
more correctly say a question of when it does. It appeared incapable of
this fine tact almost anywhere, I confess, at the season, the first
supposedly relenting weeks, of my facing in earnest to Florida; and the
interest indeed of that slightly grim adventure was to be in the way it
ministered to the coincidence, for me, of two quite opposed strains of
reflection. On the one hand nothing could “say” more to the subject long
expatriated, condemned by the terms of his exile to a chronic
consciousness of grey northern seas, than to feel how, from New York, or
even from Boston, he had but to sit still in his portentous car, had but
to exercise a due concentrated patience, in order to become aware,
without personal effort or suffered transfer, of that most charming of
all watchable processes, the gradual soft, the distinctively
demoralized, conversion of the soul of Nature. This conversion, if I may
so put it without profanity, has always struck me, on any southward
course, as a return, on the part of that soul, from a comparatively grim
Theistic faith to the ineradicable principle of Paganism; a conscious
casting-off of the dread theological abstraction—an abstraction still,
even with all Puritan stiffening—in the interest of multiplied, lurking,
familiar powers; divinities, graces, presences as unseen but as inherent
as the scents clinging to the folds of Nature’s robe. It would be on
such occasions the fault of the divine familiars themselves if their
haunts and shrines were empty, for earth and air and day and night, as
we go, still affect us as moods of their sympathy, still vibrate to the
breath of their passage; so that our progress, under the expanding sun,
resembles a little less a journey through space than a retracing of the
course of the ages.

These are fine fancies, however, and what is more to my point is that
the theory (so agreeable to entertain at Jersey City) of a direct
connection between the snow-banks and the orange-groves is a thing of
sweetness only so long as practically unshaken. There is continuity,
goodness knows, always in America—it is the last thing that is ever
broken: the question for the particular case is but continuity of what?
The basis of my individual hope had been that of the reign of the
orange-grove; but what it proved, at the crisis I name, was positively
that of the usurpation of the snow-bank. It was possible, indubitably,
in such conditions, to go to Charleston on sledges—which made in fact,
after all, for directness of connection. It made moreover, by the same
token, for a certain sinister light on the general truth of our grand
territorial unity. It was as if the winter, at the end of February,
abroad for a walk, had marched as promptly and inevitably from the
Arctic Circle to the Gulf as it might have proceeded, with pride in its
huge clear course, from the top of Broadway to the Battery. This brought
home again, as I myself went, I remember, one of those three or four
main ideas, suggested by the recurrent conditions, which become as
obsessions for the traveller in the States—if he have a mind, that is,
so indecently exposed to ideas: the sense, constantly fed, and from a
hundred sources, that, as Nature abhors a vacuum, so it is of the genius
of the American land and the American people to abhor, whenever may be,
a discrimination. They are reduced, together, under stress, to making
discriminations, but they make them, I think, as lightly and scantily as
possible. With the lively insistence of that impression, even though it
quite undermined my fond view of a loose and overreaching citronic belt,
I found my actually monotonous way beguiled. Practically, till I reached
Charleston, this way, disclaiming every invidious intent, refused to be
dissociated from anything else in the world: it was only another case of
the painting with a big brush, a brush steeped in crude universal white,
and of the colossal size this implement was capable of assuming.
Gradations, transitions, differences of any sort, temporal, material,
social, whether in man or in his environment, shrank somehow, under its
sweep, to negligible items; and one had perhaps never yet seemed so to
move through a vast simplified scheme. The illustration was once more,
in fine, of the small inherent, the small accumulated resistance, in
American air, to any force that does simplify. One found the signs of
such resistance as little in the prospect enjoyed from the car-window as
one distinguished them in the vain images of the interior; those human
documents, deciphered from one’s seat in the Pullman, which yet do
always, in _their_ way, for the traveller, constitute precious evidence.
The spread of this single great wash of winter from latitude to latitude
struck me in fact as having its analogy in the vast vogue of some
infinitely-selling novel, one of those happy volumes of which the
circulation roars, periodically, from Atlantic to Pacific and from great
windy State to State, in the manner, as I have heard it vividly put, of
a blazing prairie fire; with as little possibility of arrest from
“criticism” in the one case as from the bleating of lost sheep in the
other. Everything, so to speak, was monotonized, and the whole social
order might have had its nose, for the time, buried, by one levelling
doom, in the pages that, after the break of the spell, it would never
know itself to mention again. Of course, one remembered meanwhile, there
were spells and spells, and the free field—the particular freedom of
which is the point of my remark—would on occasion be just as open to the
far-exhaled breath of the South. That in fact is what I was to find
it—though I thought all delightfully—later in the season, when the
freedom of the field struck me as pure benefit. I was not, at the end of
February, really to meet it (as I had looked for it) before crossing the
Florida line; but toward the middle of June I was to meet it,
enchantingly, at Baltimore, and this, then, as I had not stopped there
in my previous course, was, even beyond the wondrous February Florida,
to reveal to me, grateful for any such favour, the South in her
freshness. The freshness was in part, no doubt—and even perhaps to
extravagance—mine; I testify at all events first for Baltimore.

It would probably be again the freshness, of this confessedly subjective
sort, it would probably be again the state of alert response to any
favour of the class just hinted at; but the immediate effect of the
Maryland capital was to place it, to my troubled vision, and quite at
the head of its group, in a category of images and memories small at the
best and the charm of which casts a shadow, none the less, even as the
rose wears a thorn. I refer indeed in this slightly portentous figure to
the mere familiar truth that if representative values and the traceable
or the imaginable connections of things happen to have, on occasion, for
your eyes and your intelligence, an existence of any intensity, your
case, as a traveller, an observer, a reporter, is “bound” from the
first, under the stirred impression, to loom for you in some distressful
shape. These representative values and constructive connections, the
whole of the latent vividness of things, not only remain, under
expression, subject to no definite chemical test, no mathematical proof
whatever, but almost turn their charming backs and toss their wilful
heads at one’s poor little array of terms and equivalents. There thus
immediately rises for the lone visionary, betrayed and arrested in the
very act of vision, that spectre of impotence which dogs the footsteps
of perception and whose presence is like some poison-drop in the silver
cup. Baltimore put on for me, from the first glance, the form of the
silver cup filled with the mildest, sweetest decoction; but I had no
sooner begun to taste of it than I began to taste also of the infused
bitter. It had, in its way, during that first early hour or two of the
summer evening, a perfect felicity: which meant, for the touched
intelligence, that it was full of pleasantly-playing reference and
reflection, that it exhaled on the spot, as the word goes, an
atmosphere; that it wore, to contemplation, in fine, a character as
marked with mild accents as some faded old uniform is marked with
tarnished buttons and braid—albeit these sources of interest were too
closely of the texture to be snipped off, in the guise of patterns or
relics, by any mere sharp shears of journalism.

I arrived late in the day, and the day had been lovely; I alighted at a
large fresh peaceful hostelry, imposingly modern yet quietly affable,
and, having recognized the deep, soft general note, even from my
windows, as that of a kind of mollified vivacity, I sought the streets
with as many tacit questions as I judged they would tolerate, or as the
waning day would allow me to put. It took but that hour, as I strolled
in the early eventide, to give me the sense of the predicament I have
glanced at; that of finding myself committed to the view of Baltimore as
quite insidiously “sympathetic,” quite inordinately amiable—which
amounted, in other words, to the momentous proposition that she was
interesting—and still of wondering, by the same stroke, how I was to
make any such statement plausible. Character is founded on elements and
features, so many particular parts which conduce to an expression. So I
walked about the dear little city looking for the particular parts—all
with the singular effect of rather failing to find them and with my
impression of felicity at the same time persistently growing. The
felicity was certainly not that of a mere blank; there must accordingly
have been items and objects, signs and tokens, there must have been
causes of so charming a consequence; there must have been the little
numbers (not necessarily big, if only a tall enough column) for the
careful sum on my slate. What happened then, remarkably, was that while
I mechanically so argued my impression was fixing itself by a wild logic
of its own, and that I was presently to see how it would, when once
settled to a certain intensity, snap its fingers at warrants and
documents. If it was a question of a slate the slate was used, at
school, I remembered, for more than one purpose; so that mine, by my
walk’s end, instead of a show of neat ciphering, exhibited simply a bold
drawn image—which had the merit moreover of not being in the least a
caricature. The moral of this was precious—that of the fine impunity
with which, if one but had sensibility, the ciphering could be neglected
and in fact almost contemned: always, that is (and only) _with_ one’s
finer wits about one. Without them one was at best, really, nowhere—even
with “items” by the thousand; so that the place became, quite adorably,
a lesson in the use of that resource. It would be “no good” to a
journalist—for _he_ is nowhere, ever, without his items; but it would be
everything, always, to the mere restless analyst. He might by its aid
stand against all comers; and this alike in pleasure and in pain, in the
bruised or in the soothed condition. That was the real way to work
things out, and to feel it so brought home would by itself sufficiently
crown this particular small pilgrimage.


                                   II

If my sensibility yielded so completely to Baltimore, however, I should
add, this was no doubt partly because the air seemed from the first to
breathe upon it a pledge of no bruises. I mounted, in the golden June
light, the neatest, amplest, emptiest street-vista, the builded side of
a steepish hill, and, having come in due course to a spacious summit,
laid out with monumental elegance and completely void, for the time, of
the human footstep, I saw that to suffer in any fibre I should have
positively, somewhere, to hurl myself upon the spears. Not a point
protruded then or afterwards; and the cunning of the restless analyst is
essentially such that, with friction long enough in abeyance to leave
him a start, he is already astride of his happier thesis, seated firm,
having “elected” to be undismountable, and riding it as hard as it will
go. The absence of friction, on my monumental hilltop and in the
prospects it overhung, constituted, I was to find, an absolute
circus-ring for this exercise; and it is much to be able to say, while
performing in the circus (even if but mainly to the public of one’s own
conscience), that one has never had the sense of a safer hour. The
safety of Baltimore, I should indeed mention, consisted perhaps a little
overmuch, during that first flush, in its apparently vacant condition:
it affected me as a sort of perversely cheerful little city of the dead;
and from the dead, naturally, comes no friction. Was it cheerful, that
is, or was it only resigned and discreet?—with the manner of the good
breeding that doesn’t publicly prate of family troubles. I found myself
handling, in imagination, these large quantities only because, as I
suppose, it was impossible not to remember on that spot of what native
generation one had come. It took no greater intensity of the South than
Baltimore could easily give to figure again, however fadedly, and all as
a ghostly presence, the huge shadow of the War, and to reproduce that
particular bloodstained patch of it which, in the very first days, the
now so irresponsible and absent community about me had flung across the
path of the North. This one echo of old Time made the connections, for
the instant, all vibrate, and the scene before me, somehow, as it stood,
had to account for the great revolution. It was as if _that_, for the
restless analyst, had to be disposed of before anything else: whereby,
precisely, didn’t the amenity of his impression partly spring from the
descent there, on the spot, in a quick white flash, of the most august
of the Muses? It was History in person that hovered, just long enough
for me to recognize her and to read, in her strange deep eyes, _her_
intelligence at least of everything. It might have been there fairly as
reassurance. “Yes, they have lived with _me_, and it has done them good,
and we have buried together all their past—about which, wise creature as
I am, I allow them, of course, all piety. But this—what you make out
around us—is their real collective self, which I am delighted to commend
to you. I’ve found Baltimore a charming patient.” That was, in ten
minutes, what it had come to; as if the brush of the sublime garment had
by itself cleared the air. If there was a fine warm hush everywhere it
was indeed partly that of this historic peace.

But for the rest it only meant that the world was at such a season out
of town. Houses were everywhere closed, and the neat perspectives, all
domiciliary and all, as I have hinted, tending mildly to a vague
elegance, were the more neat and more elegant, though doubtless also the
more mild and the more vague, for their being so inanimate. A certain
vividness of high decency seemed in spite of it to possess them, and
this suggestion of the real southern glow, yet with no southern
looseness, was clearly something by itself—all special and local and
all, or almost all, expressed in repeated vistas of little brick-faced
and protrusively door-stepped houses, which, overhung by tall, regular
umbrage, suggested rows of quiet old ladies seated, with their toes
tucked-up on uniform footstools, under the shaded candlesticks of
old-fashioned tea-parties. The little ladylike squares, though below any
tide-mark of fashion, were particularly frequent; in which case it was
as if the virtuous dames had drawn together round a large green table,
albeit to no more riotous end than that each should sit before her
individual game of patience. One sounds inevitably the note of the
“virtue”—so little, in general, can any picture of American
town-appearance hang together without it. It amounts, everywhere, to
something intenser than the implied absence of “vice”; it amounts to a
sort of registered absence of the conception or the imagination of it,
and still more of the provision for it; though, all the while, as one
goes and comes, one feels that no community can really be as purged of
peccant humours as the typical American has for the most part found
itself foredoomed to look. It has been caught in the mechanism of that
consistency—to an effect of convenience, doubtless, much more than to
any other; and has thus, in the whole vast connection, a relation to
appearances that is all its own. The “European” scene, at a thousand
points, looks all its sophistications straight out at us—or looks, in
other words, at least as perverse as it practically is. The American, on
the other hand, expressing physiognomically no sophistications at
all—though plenty of quite common candours, crudities and
vulgarities—makes one ask if the cash-register, the ice-cream freezer,
the lightning-elevator, the “boys’ paper,” and other such overflows, do
truly represent the sum of its passions. Incontestably, at all events,
this immensely ingenuous aspect counts, for any country and any scheme
of life, as a great force, just as the appearance of the stale and the
congested residing in the comparatively battered mask of experience
counts as a weakness: to conceive which the mind’s eye has only to fix a
little the colossal American face grimacing with anything of a subtler
consciousness. That image, if actually presented, would become, as we
feel, appalling. The inexorable fate of the countenance in question may
be so to learn to grimace in time, but though few processes are slow, in
the United States, and few exhibitions not contagious, any such
transition, assuredly, will not be rapid, any more than any such
tendency will easily predominate.

All of which would have carried me far from the simple sweetness of
Baltimore, were it not that, for the restless analyst, there is no such
thing as an unrelated fact, no such thing as a break in the chain of
relations. Many a perceived American aspect, for that matter, would by
itself have little to give; the student of manners, in other words, to
make it presentable—by which I understand to make it _sufficiently_
interesting—must first discover connections for it and then borrow from
these, if possible, the elements of a wardrobe. And though it should
sound a little monstrous, moreover, one had somehow not been prepared
for so delicate an effect of propriety; since there are cases too,
indubitably, in which propriety can show for almost as coarse as
anything else. It couldn’t have been, either, that one had expected any
positive air of licence; but the fact was, I suppose, that, for a
constitutional story-seeker, a certain still, small shock, a prompt need
of readjustment of view, was involved in one’s finding the element of
the bourgeois crop up, so inveterately, in latitudes generally
associated, so far as one knew them elsewhere, with some perceptible
sacrifice to the sway of the senses. I had already, at this date, as I
have noted, dipped deep into our own uttermost South, and had there had
to reckon with that first slight disconcertment awaiting the observer
whose southern categories happen to have been wholly European. His
simplest expression for the anomaly he meets is that he sees the
citronic belt all incongruously Protestantized: that big word (for so
small a bewilderment perhaps) sticks to him and worries him—almost as
absurdly, I grant, as if he had expected Charleston and Savannah to
betray the moral accent of Naples or Seville. He had not, assuredly,
done this; but he had as little allowed, in imagination, for the
hyperborean note. A South without church-fronts and church-interiors had
been superficially as strange, in its way, as a Methodism of the
sub-tropic night, a Methodism of the orange and the palm. Such were the
treacheries of association; though what indeed would observation be, for
interest, if it were not, just by these armed surprises, constantly
touched with adventure? The beauty of Baltimore was, all this time, that
one could feel it as potentially harmonizing; the citronic belt would
not embrace here more Methodism than might consort with it, nor the
Methodism pretend to cultivate with any success the hibiscus and the
pomegranate.

That I could entertain so many incoherent ideas in half-an-hour was in
any case a proof that I felt, for the occasion, left in possession;
quite as the visitor as yet unintroduced may feel during some long
preliminary wait in a drawing-room. He looks at the furniture, pictures,
books; he studies in these objects the character of the house and of his
hosts, and if there be some domestic treasure visibly more important and
conspicuous than the others, it engages his attention as either with a
fatal or an engaging force. The top of the central eminence, with its
air of an ample plan and of sweeping the rest of the circle, figured the
documentary parlour and my enjoyed leave to touch and examine; so that
when it was a question, in particular, of the monument to Washington,
the high column, in the middle, with its surmounting figure and its
spreading architectural base, this presence was, for all the world, like
that of some vast and stately old-fashioned clock, a decorative “piece,”
an heirloom from generations now respectably remote, occupying an
inordinate space in proportion to the other conveniences. The
ornamental, the “important” clock is apt to be in especial, at such a
crisis, a tell-tale object; its range of testimony, of possible
treachery, is immense, and cases are not unknown, I gather, in which it
has put the doubting visitor to flight. The greater the felicity,
thereby, for the overtopping Baltimore timepiece, which hung about in
mild reassurance, promptly aware that it wasn’t a bit vulgar, but, on
the contrary, of a pleasant jejune academic pomp that suggested to the
fancy some melancholy, some spectral, man-at-arms mounting guard at the
angles, in due military form, over suspected treasures of Style. One
could imagine, somehow, under the summer stars, the mystic vigil of
these mild heroes; and one could above all catch again the interesting
hint of the terms on which, in the United States, the consecration of
time may be found operating. It has a trick there all of its own, thanks
to which the effect of duration is produced very much as, before the
footlights, the prestidigitator produces the effect of extracting a live
fowl from a hat. This is a law under which, the material permitting, the
decades count as centuries and the centuries as æons. The misfortune is
that too often the material, futile and treacherous, doesn’t permit. Yet
the law is in the happiest cases none the less strikingly vindicated.
There, for instance—to pursue undiscouraged my figure of the guest in
the empty parlour—were the best houses, the older, the ampler, the more
blandly quadrilateral; which in spite of their still faces met one’s
arrest, at their commodious corners and other places of vantage, with an
unmistakable _manner_. The quiet assurance of a position in the
world—the world, the only one, with which they were concerned—testified
again, in an interesting way, to the simple source of their
impressiveness, showing how almost any modern interval could have been
long enough to make them nobly antique if such interval might only have
been vulgar enough. The age of “brown stone” was to have found no
difficulty in _that_; the prolongation of its rage for a quarter of a
century amply sufficed to dignify every antecedent thing it had spared
(as the survivors of reigns of Terror grow by mere survival
distinguished); while, steeped in dishonour up to the eyebrows, that is
up to its false cornices of painted and sanded wood and iron, it was
never to enjoy, for itself, the advantage it elsewhere conferred.
Nothing has ever been vulgar enough to rehabilitate the odd ugliness, so
distinct, yet after all so undemonstrable, of this luckless material;
the way one shuddered, in particular, at the touch, on balustrade and
elsewhere, of the sanded iron! It has been followed by other rages and
other errors, but even the grace of the American time-measure can do
nothing for it.


                                  III

It was of course the fact that the “values” here were all such, and such
alone, as might be reflected from the social conditions and the state of
manners, even if reflected, for the hour, almost into empty space—it was
this that gave weight to each perceived appearance and permitted none to
show as trivial enough to project me, in reaction or in inanition, upon
the comparative obviousness of the “burnt district.” There is almost
always a burnt district to eke out the interest of an American city—it
is the pride of the citizen and the resource of the visitor when all
else fails; and I can scarce, I think, praise Baltimore so liberally as
to note that this was the last of her beauties I was conscious of. She
had lost by fire, a few months before, the greater part of her business
quarter, which she was now rapidly and artfully calling back to
existence; but the entertainment she offered me was guiltless, ever so
gracefully and gallantly guiltless, as it struck me, of reference, even
indirect, to the majesty either of ruin or of remedy. One was, on
further acquaintance, thoroughly beguiled, but the burnt district had so
little to do with it that the days came and went without my so much as
discovering its whereabouts. Wonderful little Baltimore, in which,
whether when perched on a noble eminence or passing from one seat of the
humanities, one seat of hospitality, to another—a process mainly
consisting indeed, as it seemed to me, of prompt drives through romantic
parks and woodlands that were all suburban yet all Arcadian—I caught no
glimpse of traffic, however mild, nor spied anything “tall” at the end
of any vista. This was in itself really a benediction, since I had
nowhere, from the first, been infatuated with tallness; I was infatuated
only with the question of manners, in their largest sense—to the finer
essence of which tallness had already defined itself to me as positively
abhorrent. What occurred betimes, and ever so happily, was simply that
the delicate blank of those first hours flushed into animation, and that
with this indeed the embroidery of the fine canvas turned thick and
rich. It came back again, no doubt, in the inveterate way, to the
University presence, and to the eagerness with which, on the American
scene, as I tire not, you see, of repeating, the visiting spirit, on
such occasions, throws itself straight into sanctuary. It breaks in at
any cost, this distracted appetite, and, recomposing the elements to
their greater distinction, if need be, and with a high imaginative hand,
makes of the combination obtained the only firm standpoint for the rest
of the view. It has even in this connection an occasional sharp chill;
air-borne rumours reach it of perversities and treacheries, conspiracies
possibly hatching in the very bosom of the temple and against its very
faith. One hears of the University idea threatened in more than one of
the great institutions—reduced to some pettifogging conception of a
short brisk term and a simplified culture; a lively thrifty training for
“business-competition.” This is a blow to the collective fond fancies
set humming, at once, in almost any scholastic shade—under the effect of
which one can but give one’s own scant scholar’s hood, while one winces,
a further protesting pull over abashed brows. It would have been a
question, very much, of what I call breaking-in (into the Johns Hopkins)
at this moment, had I not here been indulged, in all liberality, with an
impression the more charming, in a manner, for the fact of halls and
courts brooding in vacation stillness. Perversely adorable always—and I
scarce know why—the late afternoon light in deserted haunts of study;
with the secret of supreme dignity lurking, above all, in high, dusky,
wainscoted chambers where the sound of one’s footfall lingers, to one’s
pleasure, like a caress, and where portraits of the appurtenant
worthies, the heroes and patrons, grow vague in the twilight. It is a
tribute to the forces of idealism lurking again and again, over the
country, in the amenity of the general Collegiate appearance, that the
last thing these conditions overtly suggest, or seem to accept as their
imputed virtue, is this precipitation of the young intelligence into the
mere vociferous market.

I scarcely know why, however, I should have appeared, even by waving it
away, to make room at our banquet for the possible skeleton of the
false, the barbarizing, note; since the natural pitch of Baltimore, the
pictorial, so to speak, as well as the social, struck me, once a certain
contact established, as that of disinterested sensibility, the passion
of which her University is the highest and clearest example. There was
on the splendid Sunday in particular a warm, soft fusion of aspects—a
_con_fusion, in fact, while I now gather it in—which seems to defy,
though all unconsciously, the sharper edge of discrimination and to
offer itself, insistently, as a general wash of brave Southern shade,
the play of a liquid brush of which the North knows nothing. The
episodes melt together, yet they also, under a little pressure, come
happily apart, and over the large sun-chequered picture the generous
boughs hang heavy. Admirable I found them, the Maryland boughs, and so
immediately disposed about the fortunate town, by parkside and lonely
lane, by trackless hillside and tangled copse, that the depth of rural
effect becomes at once bewildering. You wonder at the absent
transitions, you look in vain for the shabby fringes—or at least, under
my spell, I did; you have never seen, on the lap of nature, so large a
burden so neatly accommodated. Baltimore sits there as some quite robust
but almost unnaturally good child might sit on the green apron of its
nurse, with no concomitant crease or crumple, no uncontrollable “mess,”
by the nursery term, to betray its temper. It was with something like
that figure before me that I kept communing, as I say, with the bland
presence. Even a morning hour or two at the great University
Hospital—for one’s experience of the higher tone, one’s irrepressible
pursuit of charm, in America, has, to its great enrichment, these odd
sequences—even that beginning of the day did nothing to obtrude the ugly
or to overemphasize the real; it simply contributed, under some
perversion that I can neither explain nor defend, to the general grace
of the picture. Why should the great Hospital, with its endless chambers
of woe, its whole air as of _most_ directly and advisedly facing, as the
hospitals of the world go, the question of the immensities of pain—why
should such an impression actually have turned, under the spell, to fine
poetry, to a mere shining vision of the conditions, the high beauty of
applied science? The conditions, positively, as I think of them after
the interval, make the poetry—the large art, above all, by which, in a
place bristling with its terrible tale, everything was made to seem
fair, and fairest even while it most intimately concurred in the work.
In short if the Hospital was fundamentally Universitarian—as of the
domain of the great Medical Faculty—so it partook for me, in its own
way, of the University glamour, and so the tempered morning, and the
shaded splendour, and the passive rows, the grim human alignments that
became, in their cool vistas, delicate “symphonies in white,” and, more
even than anything else, the pair of gallant young Doctors who ruled,
for me, so gently, the whole still concert, abide with me, collectively,
as agents of the higher tone.

No example could speak more of that enlargement of function, for
constituting some picture of life, which many an American element or
object, many an institution, has to be felt as practising—usually with
high success. It comes back, one notes for the thousandth time, to that
redistribution and reconsecration of values, of representative weight,
which it is _the_ interesting thing, over the land, to see take
effect—to see in special take all the effect of which it is capable.
There are a thousand “European” values that are absent, and, whether as
a consequence or not of that, there are innumerable felt solutions of
the social continuity. The instinct of missing—by which I mean not at
all either the consciousness or the confession of lacking—keeps up,
however, its own activity; for the theory at least of the native spirit
is to consent wittingly to no privation. It has a genius, the native
spirit, for desiring things of the existence, and even of the
possibility of which it is actually unaware, and it views the totality
of nature and the general life of man, I think, as more than anything
else commissioned and privileged to wait on these awakenings. Thus new
values arise as expansion proceeds; the marked character of which, for
comparative sociology, is that they are not at all as other values. What
they “count” for is the particular required American quantity; and we
see again and again how large a quantity symbol and figure have to
represent. The interesting thing is that, on the spot, the
representation does practically cover the ground: it covers elements
that in communities employing a different scale require for their
expression (and perhaps sometimes to an effect of waste) a much greater
number of terms. Hence the constant impression of elasticity, and that
of those pressures of necessity under which value and virtue, character
and quantity, greatness and glory even, to a considerable extent, are
imputed and projected. There has to be a facility for the working of any
social form—facility of comparison and selection in some communities,
facility of rapid conversion in others That is where the American
material is elastic, where it affects one, as a whole, in the manner of
some huge india-rubber cloth fashioned for “field” use and warranted to
bear inordinate stretching.

One becomes aware thus wherever one turns, both of the tension and of
the resistance; everything and every one, all objects and elements, all
systems, arrangements, institutions, functions, persons, reputations,
give the sense of their pulling hard at the india-rubber: almost always,
wonderfully, without breaking it off, yet never quite with the effect of
causing it to lie thick. The matter of interest, however, is just this
fact that its thinness should so generally—in some cases, to all intents
and purposes, so richly—suffice; suffice, that is, for producing
unaided, impressions of a sort that make their way to us in “Europe”
through superimposed densities, a thousand thicknesses of tradition.
Which is what one means, again, by the differing “values”; the thinness
doing perforce, on the one side, much of the work done by the thickness
on the other: the work, in particular, of the appeal to the fond
observer. He is by his very nature committed everywhere to his
impression—which means essentially, I think, that he is foredoomed, in
one place as in another, to “put in” a certain quantity of emotion and
reflection. The turn his sensibility takes depends of course on what is
before him; but when is it ever not in some manner exposed and alert? If
it be anything really of a touchstone it is more disposed, I hold, to
easy bargains than to hard ones; it only wants to be _somehow_
interested, and is not without the knowledge that an emotion is after
all, at the best or the worst, but an emotion. All of which is a
voluminous commentary, I admit, on the modest text that I perhaps made
the University Hospital stand for too many things. That establishes at
all events my contention—that the living fact, in the United States,
_will_ stand, other facts not preventing, for almost anything you may
ask of it. Other facts, at Baltimore, didn’t prevent—there being none,
outside the University circle, of any perceptibly public, any majestic
or impressive or competitive order. So it was as if this particular
experience had been (as the visitation of cities goes) that of _all_
present art and organization, that of all antiquity, history, piety,
sociability, that of the rich real and the rich romantic, in fine, at a
stroke. Had there been more to see and to feel I should possibly have
seen and felt more; yet what was absent, with this sense of feeling and
seeing so much?


                                   IV

There _were_ other facts, in abundance, I hasten to add; only they
were not, as I say, competitive, not of the public or majestic
order—so that they the less imposed, for appreciation, any
rearrangement of values. They were a matter still of the famous, the
felicitous Sunday—into which as into an armful of the biggest and
bravest June roses I seemed to find my perceptions cluster. Foremost
among these meanwhile was that of the plentiful presence, freshly
recognized, of absolute values too—which offer themselves, in the
midst of the others, with a sharpness of their own, and which owe
nothing, for interest, to any question of the general scale. The
Country Club, for instance, as I have already had occasion to note,
is everywhere a clear American felicity; a _complete_ product of the
social soil and air which alone have made it possible, and wearing
whenever met that assured face of the full-blown flower and the
proved proposition. These institutions speak so of American life as
a success that they affected me at moments as crying aloud to be
commemorated—since it is on American life only that they are
founded, and since they render it, to my mind, the good office of
making it keep all its graces and of having caused it to shed, by
the same stroke, the elements that are contrary to these. Nothing is
more suggestive than to recognize, each time, on the premises, the
thing that “wouldn’t do in Europe”—for a judgment of the reasons of
its doing so well in the one hemisphere and so ill in the other
promptly becomes illuminating. The illumination is one at which, had
I space, I should have liked to light here a candle or two—partaking
indeed by that character of a like baffled virtue in many another
group of social phenomena. The Country Club testifies, in short, and
gives its evidence, from the box, with the inimitable, invaluable
accent of American authority. It becomes, for the restless analyst,
one of the great garden-lamps in which the flame of Democracy burns
whitest and steadiest and most floods the subject; taking its place
thus on the positive side of a line which has its other side
overscored with negatives. I may seem too much to brood upon it, but
the interest of the American scene being, beyond any other, the
show, on so immense a scale, of what Democracy, pushing and breaking
the ice like an Arctic explorer, is making of things, any scrap that
contributes to it wears a part of its dignity. To have been
beforehand with the experiments, with several rather risky ones at
least, and to have got on with these so beautifully while other
rueful nations prowl, in the dusk, inquisitive but apprehensive,
round the red windows of the laboratory, peeping, for the last news,
between each other’s shoulders—all this is, for the democratic
force, to have stolen a march over no little of the ground, and to
have gained time on such a scale as perhaps to make the belated of
the earth, the critical group at the windows, still live to think of
themselves as having too much wasted it.

There had been one—I mean a blest Country Club—in the neighbourhood of
Boston (where indeed I believe there were a dozen, at least as
exemplary, out of my range); there had been another, quite marvellous,
on the Hudson—one of a numerous array, probably, within an hour’s run of
New York; there had been a supreme specimen, supreme for a documentary
worth, even at Charleston (I reserve to myself to explain in due course,
and ah, in such an exquisite sense, my “even”). This had made for me, if
you will, a short list, but it had made a long admonition, to which the
embowered institution near Baltimore was to add a wonderful emphasis. An
admonition of what? it will meanwhile be asked: to which the answer may
perhaps, for the moment, not be more precipitate than by one’s saying
that with any feeling for American life you soon enough see. You see its
most complete attestation of its believing in itself unlimitedly, and
also of its being right about itself at more points than it is wrong.
You see it apply its general theory of its nature and strength—much of
this doubtless quite an unconscious one—with a completeness and a
consistency that will strike you also (or that ought to) as constituting
an unconscious heroism. You will see it accept in detail, with a sublime
serenity, certain large social consequences—the consequences of the
straight application, in the most delicate conditions, of the prime
democratic idea. As this idea is that of an universal eligibility, so
you see it, under the application, beautifully resist the strain. So you
see, in a word, everything staked on the conception of the young Family
as a clear social unit—which, when all is said and done, remains,
roundabout you, the ubiquitous fact. The conception of the Family is,
goodness knows, “European” enough; but the difference resides in its
working on one side of the world in the vertical and on the other in the
horizontal sense. If its identity in “Europe,” that is, resides more
especially in its perpendicular, its backward and forward extension, its
ascent and descent of the long ladder of time, so it develops in the
United States mainly by its lateral spread, as one may say; expressing
itself thus rather by number than by name, and yet taking itself for
granted, when one comes to compare, with an intensity to which mere
virtue of name elsewhere scarce helps it. American manners, as they
stand, register therefore the apotheosis of the Family—a truth for which
they have by no means received due credit; and it is in the light of
Country Clubs that all this becomes vivid. These organizations accept
the Family as the social unit—accept its extension, its _whole_
extension, through social space, and accept it as many times over as the
question comes up: which is what one means by their sublime and
successful consistency. No, if I may still insist, nothing anywhere
accepts anything as the American Country Club accepts these whole
extensions.

That is why I speak of it as accepting the universal eligibility. With
no palpable result does the democratic idea, in the States, more bristle
than with the view that the younger are “as good” as the elder; family
life is in fact, as from child to parent, from sister to brother, from
wife to husband, from employed to employer, the eminent field of the
democratic demonstration. This then is the unit that, with its latent
multiplications, the Country Club takes over—and it is easy to see how
such units must multiply. This is the material to which it addresses,
with such effect, the secret of its power. I may of course be asked what
I mean by an eligibility that is “universal”; but it seems needless to
remark that even the most inclusive social scheme must in a large
community always stop somewhere Distinctly diverting, often, to
Americans, the bewilderment of the “European” mind on the subject of
“differences” and of the practicability of precautions for maintaining
these; so beset is that mind, to the American view, with this theory,
this habit or need of precautions, and so disposed apparently to fear,
in its anxiety, that without the precautions the differences—dreadful
thought—may cease. The American theory is, I think, but vague, and the
inevitable consciousness of differences reduced to a matter of
practice—a matter which, on the whole, very much takes care of itself.
Glimpses and revelations come to it, across the sea, on the great wave
of modern publicity—images of a social order in which the precautions,
as from above to below, are more striking than the differences and
thereby out of proportion to them: an appearance that reads a lesson, of
a sort, as to leaving precautions alone. It is true, at any rate, that
no application of the aristocratic, none of the democratic, idea is ever
practically complete; discriminations are produced by the mere working
of the machine, and they so engage alike almost every one’s interest,
meet alike almost every one’s convenience. Nature and industry keep
producing differences as fast as constitutions keep proclaiming
equality, and there are always, at the best, in any really liberal
scheme or human view, more conscious inaptitudes to convince of their
privilege than conscious possibilities to remind of their limits. All of
which reflections, however, I agree, would probably have remained a
little dim even for the restless analyst, had not the most shining of
his examples bathed the subject, to his eyes, in radiance. This could
only be, as I have intimated, that of the bright institution on the
Hudson, as half-an-hour’s vision of it, one splendid Sunday of the
May-time put it before me—all in terms so eloquent that I would fain
have translated them on the spot.

For there, to every appearance, was the high perfection of the type—the
ample, spreading, galleried house, hanging over the great river, with
its beautiful largeness of provision for associated pleasures. The
American note was _there_—in the intensity and continuity of the
association, and the interest of the case was in its thus enjoying, for
the effect, all the advantages that experience, chastening experience,
and taste, “real” taste, could heap upon it. Somewhere in one’s mind,
doubtless, lurked the apprehension that such a “proposition” might, in
that emphatic form, have betrayed a thousand flaws—whereas all one
_could_ say face to face with it, treading its great verandahs and
conversation-rooms, its halls of refreshment, repose and exercise, its
kitchens and its courts and its baths and its gardens, its wondrous
inside and outside palæstra, was that it positively revealed new forms
of felicity. It was thus a new and original thing—rare phenomenon—and
actually an “important” one; for what did it represent (all
discriminations made and recognized) but the active Family, as a final
social fact, or in other words the sovereign People, as a pervasive and
penetrative mass, “doing” themselves on unprecedented lines? They had
invoked, certainly, high and congruous countenance; but vain I thought
the objection made when I exclaimed to a friend on these marvels. “It
depends upon whom I call the People? Of course it depends: so I call
them, exactly, the groups and figures we see, here before us, enjoying,
and enjoying both so expertly and so discreetly, these conveniences and
luxuries. That’s their interest—that they _are_ the people; for what
interest, under the sun, would they have if they weren’t? They are the
people ‘arrived,’ and, what is more, disembarked: that’s all the
difference. It seems a difference because elsewhere (in ‘Europe,’ say
again), though we see them begin, at the very most, to arrive, socially,
we yet practically see them still on the ship—we have never yet seen
them disembark thus _en masse_. This is the effect they have when, all
impediments and objections on the dock removed, they do _that_.” And
later on, at the afternoon’s end, on the platform of the large agreeable
riverside station which spread there, close at hand, as the appanage of
the club itself, I could but call attention to the manner in which every
impression reinforced my moral. The Families, the parties, the groups
and couples (the element of the Individual, as distinguished from that
of the Family, being remarkably absent) had gathered in the soft
eventide for the return to New York, and it was impossible not to read
each sign of the show in the vivid “popular” light. Only one did so—and
this was the great point—with a positive uplifting of the spirit.
Everything hung together and every one was charming. It was my
explanatory word therefore to my companion. “That’s what the People
_are_ when they’ve disembarked.”

Having said so much—and with the sense, strange as it may appear, that
there would still be much to say—I must add that I suddenly seem to see
consternation in the charming face of the establishment, deep in the
Baltimore countryside, my impression of which was to lay a train for
these reflections: so that with a conscience less clear I might take the
image as a warning against the vice of reading too much meaning into
simple intentions. Therefore let me admit that the conscious purpose of
this house of hospitality didn’t look beyond the immediate effect of
luncheon or dinner on one of its deep southern verandahs, with great
trees, close at hand, flinging their shade, with the old garden of the
old country home that the Club had inherited forming one prospect, and
with a deep woodland valley, stream-haunted if I am not mistaken, giving
breadth of style to another. The Maryland boughs, for that matter,
creating in the upper air great classic serenities of shade, give
breadth of style; and the restless analyst, all grateful, and truly for
the nonce at rest, could but ruefully note how little they had borrowed
from any Northern, and least of all from any New England, model their
almost academic grace. They might have borrowed it straight from
far-away Claudes and Turners; yet one made no point of that either—their
interest was so sufficiently their own. Distances of view have often in
the North the large elegance, but nearnesses almost never; these are at
their worst constitutionally coarse and at their best merely
well-meaning. I was to find food all day for that observation; I was to
remain under a charm of which breadth of style was the key. Earth and
air, between them, had taken it in hand—so that one was always moving,
somehow, under arches that were “triumphal” or sitting in bowers that
made one think of temples. It was not that man, or that art, had done
much, though indeed they had incurred no shame and had even been capable
of a masterpiece, seen in the waning light, of which I shall presently
speak. It was the diffused, mitigated glow, the happy medium itself that
continued to be meanwhile half the picture. I wandered through it from
one impression to another, and I keep, with intensity, that of the
admirable outlying Park, treasure of the town, through which I had
already three or four times driven, but the holiday life of which, on
the warm Sunday night, humming, languidly, under the stars, as with
spent voices of the homeward-bound, attested more than ever its valuable
function.

That must have been, in the whole pleasant incoherence, on my way back
from the sweet old Carroll house, climax of an afternoon drive, yet
before another, an ultimate visit, which was the climax of everything. I
have sufficiently noted already the charming law under which, in the
States, any approach to really ripe architectural charm—for the real
ripeness is indispensable—enjoys advantages, those of mystery and
sanctity, that are achieved in “Europe” but on greatly harder terms. The
observed practice of this art, at times singularly subtle, is in fact
half the reward of one’s attention, puzzled though the latter may none
the less be to see how the trick is played. So much at any rate one
remembers; yet where, after all, would the sweet old Carroll house,
nestling under its wood in the late June afternoon, and with something
vaguely haunted in its lonely refinement, not have made an insidious
appeal? There are sweet old Carroll houses, I believe, on several other
sites—the luckiest form perhaps in which a flourishing family may have
been moved to write its annals. The intimation of “annals” hangs about
the place, and again we try to capture, under the charming pillared
portico, before the mild red brick and the pale pediment and facings, in
the series of high chambers, quite instinct with style (small far-off
cousins of such “apartments,” say, as those of Kensington Palace, though
they cover, bungalow-fashion, scarce more than one floor), some
lingering, living accents of such a profession of history. We capture
verily, I think, nothing; we merely project a little, from one room and
from one mild aspect of the void to another, our old habit of
suppositions. Bred of other historic contacts, it instinctively puts
forth feelers; but the feelers drop, after a little, like hands that
meet nothing; our suppositions themselves, as I have called them, and
which but return to us like toy ships that won’t sail, are all they find
tangible. There is satisfaction of a sort, however, even in such
arrested questions, when, as before this delicate faintly-resonant
shell, each other element also helping, they have been vividly enough
suggested. Later on, for the real crown of my day, no wonderments were
checked and no satisfactions imperfect. Attained, for the high finish of
the evening, by another plunge, behind vaguely-playing carriage-lamps,
into the bosky, odorous, quite ridiculously-romantic suburban night,
this was the case of an ancient home without lapses or breaks, where the
past and the present were in friendliest fusion, so that the waiting
future evidently slumbered with confidence; and where, above the easy
open-air “Southern” hospitality, an impression now of shafts of mild
candle-light across overlaced outer galleries and of throbs of nature’s
voice in the dark vaster circle, the Maryland boughs, at their best,
presided in the unforgettable grand manner.



                                   XI
                               WASHINGTON


                                   I

I was twice in Washington, the first time for a winter visit, the second
to meet the wonderful advance of summer, to which, in that climate of
many charms, the first days of May open wide the gates. This latter
impression was perforce much the more briefly taken; yet, though I had
gathered also from other past occasions, far-away years now, something
of the sense of the place at the earlier season, I find everything
washed over, at the mention of the name, by the rare light, half green,
half golden, of the lovely leafy moment. I see all the rest, till I make
the effort to break the spell, through that voluminous veil; which
operates, for memory, quite as the explosion of spring works, even to
the near vision, in respect to the American scene at large—dressing it
up as if for company, preparing it for social, for human intercourse,
making it in fine publicly presentable, with an energy of renewal and an
effect of redemption not often to be noted, I imagine, on other
continents. Nowhere, truly, can summer have such work cut out for it as
here—nowhere has it to take upon itself to repaint the picture so
completely. In the “European” landscape, in general, some, at least, of
the elements and objects remain upon the canvas; here, on the other
hand, one seems to see intending Nature, the great artist of the season,
decline to touch that surface unless it be first swept clean—decline, at
any rate, to deal with it save by ignoring all its perceived
pretensions. Vernal Nature, in England, in France, in Italy, has still a
use, often a charmed or amused indulgence, for the material in hand, the
furniture of the foreground, the near and middle distances, the
heterogeneous human features of the face of the land. She looks at her
subject much as the portrait-painter looks at the personal properties,
this or that household object, the official uniform, the badges and
ornaments, the favourite dress, of his sitter—with an “Oh, yes, I can
bring them in; they’re just what I want, and I see how they will help me
out.” But I try in vain to recall a case in which, either during the New
England May and June, or during those of the Middle States (since these
groups of weeks have in the two regions a differing identity and value),
the genius in question struck me as adopting with any frankness, as
doing more than passively, helplessly accept, the supplied
paraphernalia, the signs of existing life. The business is clearly to
get rid of them as far as may be, to cover and smother them;
dissimulating with the biggest, freest brush their impertinence and
their ugliness.

I must ask myself, I meanwhile recognize, none the less, why I should
have found Mount Vernon exquisite, the first of May, if the interest had
all to be accounted for in the light of nature. The light of nature was
there, splendid and serene; the Potomac opened out in its grandest
manner; the bluff above the river, before the sweep of its horizon,
raised its head for the historic crown. But it was not for a moment to
be said that this was the whole story; the human interest and the human
charm lay in wait and held one fast—so that, if one had been making
light, elsewhere, of their suggestion and office, one had at least this
case seriously to reckon with. I speak straightway, thus, of Mount
Vernon, though it be but an outlying feature of Washington, and at the
best a minor impression; the image of the particular occasion is seated
so softly in my path. There was a glamour, in fine, for the
excursion—that of an extraordinarily gracious hospitality; and the
glamour would still have been great even if I had not, on my return to
the shadow of the Capitol, found the whole place transfigured. The
season was over, the President away, the two Houses up, the shutters
closed, the visitor rare; and one lost one’s way in the great green
vistas of the avenues quite as one might have lost it in a “sylvan
solitude”—that is in the empty alleys of a park. The emptiness was
qualified at the most, here and there, by some encounter with a stray
diplomatic agent, wreathed for the most part in sincerer smiles than we
are wont to attribute to his class. “This”—it was the meaning of these
inflections—“was the _real_ Washington, a place of enchantment; so that
if the enchantment were never less who could ever bring himself to go
away?” The enchantment had been so much less in January—one could easily
understand; yet the recognition seemed truly the voice of the hour, and
one picked it up with a patriotic flutter not diminished by the fact
that the speaker would probably be going away, and with delight, on the
morrow.

The memory of some of the smiles and inflections comes back in that
light; Washington being the one place in America, I think, where those
qualities are the values and vehicles, the medium of exchange. No small
part of the interest of the social scene there consists, inevitably, for
any restless analyst, in wonder about the “real” sentiments of appointed
foreign participants, the delegates of Powers and pledged alike to
penetration and to discretion, before phenomena which, whatever they may
be, differ more from the phenomena of other capitals and other societies
than they resemble them. This interest is susceptible, on occasion, of
becoming intense; all the more that curiosity must, for the most part,
pursue its object (that of truly looking over the alien shoulder and of
seeing, judging, building, fearing, reporting with the alien sense) by
subtle and tortuous ways. This represents, first and last, even for a
watcher abjectly irresponsible, a good deal of speculative tension; so
that one’s case is refreshing in presence of the clear candour of such a
proposition as that the national capital _is_ charming in proportion as
you don’t see it. For that is what it came to, in the bowery condition;
the as yet unsurmounted bourgeois character of the whole was screened
and disguised; the dressing-up, in other words, was complete, and the
great park-aspect gained, and became nobly artificial, by the very
complexity of the plan of the place—the perpetual perspectives, the
converging, radiating avenues, the frequent circles and crossways, where
all that was wanted for full illusion was that the bronze generals and
admirals, on their named pedestals, should have been great garden-gods,
mossy mythological marble. This would have been the perfect note; the
long vistas yearned for it, and the golden chequers scattered through
the gaps of the high arches waited for some bending nymph or some
armless Hermes to pick them up. The power of the scene to evoke such
visions sufficiently shows, I think, what had become, under the mercy of
nature, of the hard facts, as one must everywhere call them; and yet
though I could, diplomatically, patriotically pretend, at the right
moment, that such a Washington was the “real” one, my assent had all the
while a still finer meaning for myself.

I am hanging back, however, as with a sacred terror, from Mount Vernon,
where indeed I may not much linger, or only enough to appear not to have
shirked the responsibility incurred at the opening of these remarks.
There, in ample possession, was masking, dissimulating summer, the
envelope and disguise to which I have hinted that the American picture
owes, on its human side, _all_ its best presentability; and at the same
time, unmistakably, there was the spell, as quite a distinct matter, of
the hard little facts in themselves. How came it that if they could
throw a spell they were yet so abject and so negligible? How came it
that if they had no intrinsic sweetness, no visible dignity, they could
yet play their part in so unforgettable an impression? The answer to
this can only be, I think, that we happen here to “strike,” as they say,
one of the rarest of cases, a spot on which all sorts of sensibilities
are touched and on which a lively emotion, and one yet other than the
æsthetic, makes us its prey. The old high-placed house, unquestionably,
is charming, and the felicity of the whole scene, on such a day as that
of my impression, scarce to be uttered. The little hard facts, facts of
form, of substance, of scale, facts of essential humility and exiguity,
none the less, look us straight in the face, present themselves
literally to be counted over—and reduce us thereby to the recognition of
our supreme example of the rich interference of association. Association
does, at Mount Vernon, simply what it likes with us—it is of so
beautiful and noble a sort; and to this end it begins by making us unfit
to say whether or no we would in its absence have noticed the house for
any material grace at all. We scarce care more for its being proved
picturesque, the house, than for its being proved plain; its
architectural interest and architectural nullity become one and the same
thing for us. If asked what we should think of it if it hadn’t been, or
if we hadn’t known it for, Washington’s, we retort that the inquiry is
inane, since it is not the possessive case, but the straight, serene
nominative, that we are dealing with. The whole thing _is_
Washington—not his invention and his property, but his presence and his
person; with discriminations (as distinguished from enthusiasms) as
invidious and unthinkable as if they were addressed to his very ears.

The great soft fact, as opposed to the little hard ones, is the beauty
of the site itself; that is definitely, if ever so delicately, sublime,
but it fails to rank among the artificial items that I began by speaking
of, those of so generally compromising an effect in the American
picture. Everything else is _communicated_ importance, and the magic so
wrought for the American sensibility—by which I mean the degree of the
importance and the sustained high pitch of the charm—place it,
doubtless, the world over, among the few supreme triumphs of such
communication. The beauty of the site, meanwhile, as we stand there,
becomes but the final aspect of the man; under which everything conduces
to a single great representative image, under which every feature of the
scene, every object in the house, however trivial, borrows from it and
profits by it. The image is the largest, clearest possible of the
resting, as distinguished from the restless, consciousness of public
service consummately rendered. The terms we commonly use for that
condition—peace with honour, well-earned repose, enjoyment of homage,
recognition of facts—render but dimly the luminous stillness in which,
on its commanding eminence, we see our image bathed. It hangs together
with the whole bright immensity of air and view. It becomes truly the
great white, decent page on which the whole sense of the place is
written. It does more things even besides; attends us while we move
about and goes with us from room to room; mounts with us the narrow
stairs, to stand with us in these small chambers and look out of the low
windows; takes up for us, to turn them over with spiritual hands, the
objects from which we respectfully forbear, and places an accent, in
short, through the rambling old phrase, wherever an accent is required.
Thus we arrive at the full meaning, as it were—thus we know, at least,
why we are so moved.

It is for the same reason for which we are always inordinately moved, on
American ground, I think, when the unconscious minor scale of the little
old demonstrations to which we owe everything is made visible to us,
when their disproportionate modesty is proved upon them. The reason
worked at Mount Vernon, for the restless analyst, quite as it had worked
a few months before, on the small and simple scene of Concord Fight: the
slight, pale, bleeding Past, in a patched homespun suit, stands there
taking the thanks of the bloated Present—having woundedly rescued from
thieves and brought to his door the fat, locked pocket-book of which
that personage appears the owner. The pocket-book contains, “unbeknown”
to the honest youth, bank-notes of incredible figure, and what breaks
our heart, if we be cursed with the historic imagination, is the
grateful, wan smile with which the great guerdon of sixpence is
received. I risk, floridly, the assertion that half the intensity of the
impression of Mount Vernon, for many a visitor, will ever be in this
vision there of Washington _only_ (so far as consciously) so rewarded.
Such fantastications, I indeed admit, are refinements of response to any
impression, but the ground had been cleared for them, and it ministered
to luxury of thought, for instance, that we were a small party at our
ease there, with no other circulation—with the prowling ghosts of
fellow-pilgrims, too harshly present on my previous occasion, all
conveniently laid. This alone represented privilege and power, and they
in turn, with their pomp and circumstance of a charming Government
launch, under official attendance, at the Navy-Yard steps, amid those
large, clean, protecting and protected properties of the State which
always make one think much of the State, whatever its actual
infirmities—these things, to say nothing of other rich enhancements,
above all those that I may least specify, flung over the day I scarce
know what iridescent reflection of the star-spangled banner itself, in
the folds of which I had never come so near the sense of being
positively wrapped. That consciousness, so unfamiliar, was, under the
test, irresistible; it pressed the spring, absolutely, of intellectual
exaltation—with the consequent loud resonance that my account of my
impressions doubtless sufficiently translates.


                                   II

Washington itself meanwhile—the Washington always, I premise, of the
rank outsider—had struck me from the first as presenting two distinct
faces; the more obvious of which was the public and official, the
monumental, with features all more or less majestically playing the
great administrative, or, as we nowadays put it, Imperial part. This
clustered, yet at the same time oddly scattered, city, a general
impression of high granite steps, of light grey corniced colonnades,
rather harmoniously low, contending for effect with slaty mansard roofs
and masses of iron excrescence, a general impression of somewhat vague,
empty, sketchy, fundamentals, however expectant, however spacious,
overweighted by a single Dome and overaccented by a single Shaft—this
loose congregation of values seemed, strangely, a matter disconnected
and remote, though remaining in its way portentous and bristling all
incoherently at the back of the scene. The back of the scene, indeed, to
one’s quite primary sense, might have been but an immense painted, yet
unfinished cloth, hung there to a confessedly provisional end and marked
with the queerness, among many queernesses, of looking always the same;
painted once for all in clear, bright, fresh tones, but never emerging
from its flatness, after the fashion of other capitals, into the truly,
the variously, modelled and rounded state. (It appeared provisional
therefore because looking as if it might have been unhooked and removed
as a whole; because any one object in it so treated would have made the
rest also come off.) The foreground was a different thing, a thing that,
ever so quaintly, seemed to represent the force really in possession;
though consisting but of a small company of people engaged perpetually
in conversation and (always, I repeat, for the rank outsider) singularly
destitute of conspicuous marks or badges. This little society easily
became, for the detached visitor, the city itself, _the_ national
capital and the greater part of the story; and that, ever, in spite of
the comparatively scant intensity of its political permeation. The
political echo was of course to be heard in it, and the public
character, in his higher forms, to be encountered—though only in “single
spies,” not in battalions; but there was something that made it much
more individual than any mere predominance of political or
administrative colour would have made it; leaving it in that case to do
no more than resemble the best society in London, or that in best
possession of the field in Paris.

Two sharp signs my remoter remembrance had shown me the then Washington
world, and the first met, as putting forth; one of these the fact of its
being extraordinarily easy and pleasant, and the other that of one’s
appearing to make out in it not more than half-a-dozen members of the
Lower House and not more than a dozen of the Upper. This kept down the
political permeation, and was bewildering, if one was able to compare,
in the light of the different London condition, the fact of the social
ubiquity there of the acceptable M.P. and that of the social frequency
even of his more equivocal hereditary colleague. A London nestling under
the towers of Westminster, yet practically void of members of the House
of Commons, and with the note of official life far from exclusively
sounding, that might have been in those days the odd image of
Washington, had not the picture been stamped with other variations
still. These were a whole cluster, not instantly to be made out, but
constituting the unity of the place as soon as perceived; representing
that finer extract or essence which the self-respecting observer is
never easy till he be able to shake up and down in bottled form. The
charming company of the foreground then, which referred itself so little
to the sketchy back-scene, the monstrous Dome and Shaft, figments of the
upper air, the pale colonnades and mere myriad-windowed Buildings, was
the second of the two faces, and the more one lived with it the more, up
to a certain point, one lived away from the first. In time, and after
perceiving _how_ it was what it so agreeably was, came the recognition
of common ground; the recognition that, in spite of strange passages of
the national life, liable possibly to recur, during which the President
himself was scarce thought to be in society, the particular precious
character that one had apprehended could never have ripened without a
general consensus. One had put one’s finger on it when one had seen
disengage itself from many anomalies, from not a few drolleries, the
superior, the quite majestic fact of the City of Conversation pure and
simple, and positively of the only specimen, of any such intensity, in
the world.

That had remained for me, from the other time, the properest name of
Washington, and nothing could so interest me, on a renewal of
acquaintance, too long postponed and then too woefully brief, as to find
my description wholly justified. If the emphasis added by “pure and
simple” be invariably retained, the description will continue, I think,
to embrace and exhaust the spectacle, while yet leaving it every inch of
its value. Clearly quite immeasurable, on American ground, the value of
such an assertion of a town-type directly opposed to the unvarying
American, and quite unique, on any ground, so organized a social
indifference to the vulgar vociferous Market. Washington may of course
_know_ more than she confesses—no community could perhaps really be as
ignorant as Washington used at any rate to look, and to like to look, of
this particular thing, of “goods” and shares and rises and falls and all
such sordidities; but she knows assuredly still the very least she can
get off with, and nothing even yet pleases her more than to forget what
she does know. She unlearns, she turns her back, while London, Paris,
Berlin, Rome, in their character of political centres, strike us as, on
the contrary, feverishly learning, trying more and more to do the exact
opposite. (I speak, naturally, as to Washington, of knowing actively and
interestedly, in the spirit of gain—not merely of the enjoyed lights of
political and administrative science, doubtless as abundant there as
anywhere else.) It might fairly have been, I used to think, that the
charming place—charming in the particular connection I speak of—had on
its conscience to make one forget for an hour the colossal greed of New
York. Nothing, in fact, added more to its charm than its appearing
virtually to invite one to impute to it some such vicarious compunction.

If I be reminded, indeed, that the distinction I here glance at is
negative, and be asked what then (if she knew nothing of the great
American interest) Washington did socially know, my answer, I recognize,
has at once to narrow itself, and becomes perhaps truly the least bit
difficult to utter. It none the less remains distinct enough that, the
City of Conversation being only in question, and a general subject of
all the conversation having thereby to be predicated, our responsibility
is met as soon as we are able to say what Washington mainly talks, and
appears always to go mainly talking, about. Washington talks about
herself, and about almost nothing else; falling superficially indeed, on
that ground, but into line with the other capitals. London, Paris,
Berlin, Rome, goodness knows, talk about themselves: that is each member
of this sisterhood talks, sufficiently or inordinately, of the great
number of divided and differing selves that form together her
controlling identity. London, for instance, talks of everything in the
world without thereby for a moment, as it were, ceasing to be
egotistical. It has taken everything in the world to make London up, so
that she is in consequence simply doomed never to get away from herself.
Her conversation is largely, I think, the very effort to do that; but
she inevitably figures in it but as some big buzzing insect which keeps
bumping against a treacherous mirror. It is in positive quest of an
identity of some sort, much rather—an identity other than merely
functional and technical—that Washington goes forth, encumbered with no
ideal of avoidance or escape: it is about herself _as_ the City of
Conversation precisely that she incessantly converses; adorning the
topic, moreover, with endless ingenuity and humour. But that,
absolutely, remains the case; which thus becomes one of the most
thorough, even if probably one of the most natural and of the happiest,
cases of collective self-consciousness that one knows. The spectacle, as
it at first met my senses, was that of a numerous community in ardent
pursuit of some workable conception of its social self, and trying
meanwhile intelligently to talk itself, and even this very
embarrassment, into a _subject_ for conversation. Such a picture might
not seem purely pleasing, on the side of variety of appeal, and I admit
one may have had one’s reserves about it; reserves sometimes reflected,
for example, in dim inward speculation—one of the effects of the
Washington air I have already glanced at—as to the amount of response it
might evoke in the diplomatic body. It may have been on my part a morbid
obsession, but the diplomatic body was liable to strike one there as
more characteristically “abysmal” than elsewhere, more impenetrably
bland and inscrutably blank; and it was obvious, certainly, that their
concern to help the place intellectually to find itself was not to be
expected to approach in intensity the concern even of a repatriated
absentee. You were concerned only if you had, by your sensibility, a
stake in the game; which was the last thing a foreign representative
would wish to confess to, this being directly opposed to all his
enjoined duties. It is no part of the office of such personages to
assist the societies to which they are accredited to find themselves—it
is much more their mission to leave all such vaguely and, so far as may
be, grotesquely groping: so apt are societies, in finding themselves, to
find other things too. This detachment from the whole mild convulsion of
effort, the considerate pretence of not being too aware of it, combined
with latent probabilities of alarm about it no less than of amusement,
represented, to the unquiet fancy, much more the spirit of the old-time
Legations.

What _was_, at all events, better fun, of the finer sort, than having
one’s self a stake in the outcome?—what helped the time (so much of it
as there was!) more to pass than just to join in the so fresh experiment
of constitutive, creative talk? The boon, it should always be mentioned,
meanwhile went on not in the least in the tone of solemnity. That would
have been fatal, because probably irritating, and it was where the good
star of Washington intervened. The tone was, so to speak, of _conscious_
self-consciousness, and the highest genius for conversation doubtless
dwelt in the fact that the ironic spirit was ready always to give its
very self away, fifty times over, for the love, or for any quickening,
of the theme. The foundation for the whole happy predicament remained,
moreover, of the firmest, and the essence of the case was to be as
easily stated as the great social fact is, in America, whether through
exceptions or aggravations, everywhere to be stated. Nobody was in
“business”—that was the sum and substance of it; and for the one large
human assemblage on the continent of which this was true the difference
made was huge. Nothing could strike one more than that it was the only
way in which, over the land, a difference _could_ be made, and than how,
in our vast commercial democracy, almost any difference—by which I mean
almost any exception—promptly acquires prodigious relief. The value here
was at once that the place could offer to view a society, the only one
in the country, in which Men existed, and that that rich little fact
became the key to everything. Superficially taken, I recognize, the
circumstance fails to look portentous; but it looms large immediately,
gains the widest bearing, in the light of any direct or extended
acquaintance with American conditions. From the moment it is adequately
borne in mind that the business-man, in the United States, may, with no
matter what dim struggles, gropings, yearnings, never hope to be
anything _but_ a business-man, the size of the field he so abdicates is
measured, as well as the fact of the other care to which his abdication
hands it over. It lies there waiting, pleading from all its pores, to be
occupied—the lonely waste, the boundless gaping void of “society”; which
is but a rough name for all the _other_ so numerous relations with the
world he lives in that are imputable to the civilized being. Here it is
then that the world he lives in accepts its doom and becomes, by his
default, subject and plastic to his mate; his default having made, all
around him, the unexampled opportunity of the woman—which she would have
been an incredible fool not to pounce upon. It needs little contact with
American life to perceive how she _has_ pounced, and how, outside
business, she has made it over in her image. She has been, up to now, on
the vast residual tract, in peerless possession, and is occupied in
developing and extending her wonderful conquest, which she appreciates
to the last inch of its extent.


                                  III

She has meanwhile probably her hours of amazement at the size of her
windfall; she cannot quite live without wonder at the oddity of her so
“sleeping” partner, the strange creature, by her side, with his values
and his voids, but who is best known to her as having yielded what she
would have clutched to the death. Yet these are mere mystic, inscrutable
possibilities—dreams, for us, of her hushed, shrouded hours: the face
she shows, on all the facts, is that of mere unwinking tribute to the
matter of course. The effect of these high signs of assurance in her has
been—and it is really her master-stroke—to represent the situation as
perfectly normal. Her companion’s attitude, totally destitute of high
signs, does everything it can to further this feat; so that, as disposed
together in the American picture, they testify, extraordinarily, to the
_successful_ rupture of a universal law, the sight is at first, for
observation, most mystifying. Then the impunity of the whole thing gains
upon us; the equilibrium strikes us, however strangely, as at least
provisionally stable; we see that a society in many respects workable
would seem to have been arrived at, and that we shall in any case have
time to study it. The phenomenon may easily become, for a spectator, the
sentence written largest in the American sky: when he is in search of
the characteristic, what else so plays the part? The woman is two-thirds
of the apparent life—which means that she is absolutely all of the
social; and, as this is nowhere else the case, the occasion is unique
for seeing what such a situation may make of her. The result elsewhere,
in Europe generally, of conditions in which men have actively
participated and to which, throughout, they personally contribute, she
has only the old story to tell, and keeps telling it after her fashion.
The woman produced by a women-made society alone has obviously quite a
new story—to which it is not for a moment to be gainsaid that the world
at large has, for the last thirty years in particular, found itself
lending an attentive, at times even a charmed, ear. The extent and
variety of this attention have been the specious measure of the personal
success of the type in question, and are always referred to when its
value happens to be challenged. “The American woman?—why, she has
beguiled, she has conquered, the globe: look at her fortune everywhere
and fail to accept her if you can.”

She has been, accordingly, about the globe, beyond all doubt, a huge
success of curiosity; she has at her best—and far beyond any
consciousness and intention of her own, lively as these for the most
part usually are—infinitely amused the nations. It has been found among
them that, for more reasons than we can now go into, her manner of
embodying and representing her sex has fairly made of her a new human
convenience, not unlike fifty of the others, of a slightly different
order, the ingenious mechanical appliances, stoves, refrigerators,
sewing-machines, type-writers, cash-registers, that have done so much,
in the household and the place of business, for the American name. By
which I am of course far from meaning that the revelation has been of
her utility as a domestic drudge; it has been much rather in the fact
that the advantages attached to her being a woman at all have been so
happily combined with the absence of the drawbacks, for persons
intimately dealing with her, traditionally suggested by that condition.
The corresponding advantages, in the light of almost any old order, have
always seemed inevitably paid for by the drawbacks; but here,
unmistakably, was a case in which—as at first appeared, certainly—they
were to be enjoyed very nearly for nothing. What it came to, evidently,
was that she had been grown in an air in which a hundred of the
“European” complications and dangers didn’t exist, and in which also she
had had to take upon herself a certain training for freedom. It was not
that she had had, in the vulgar sense, to “look out” for herself,
inasmuch as it was of the very essence of her position not to be
threatened or waylaid; but that she could develop her audacity on the
basis of her security, just as she could develop her “powers” in a
medium from which criticism was consistently absent. Thus she arrived,
full-blown, on the general scene, the least criticized object, in
proportion to her importance, that had ever adorned it. It would take
long to say why her situation, under this retrospect, may affect the
inner fibre of the critic himself as one of the most touching on record;
he may merely note his perception that she was to have been after all
but the sport of fate. For why need she originally, he wonders, have
embraced so confidently, so gleefully, yet so unguardedly, the terms
offered her to an end practically so perfidious? Why need she, unless in
the interest of her eventual discipline, have turned away with so light
a heart after watching the Man, the deep American man, retire into his
tent and let down the flap? She had her “paper” from him, their
agreement signed and sealed; but would she not, in some other air and
under some other sky, have been visited by a saving instinct? Would she
not have said “No, this is too unnatural; there must be a trap in it
somewhere—it’s addressed really, in the long run, to making a fool of
me?” It is impossible, of course, to tell; and her case, as it stands
for us, at any rate, is that she showed no doubts. It is not on the
American scene and in the presence of mere American phenomena that she
is even yet to be observed as showing them; but does not my digression
find itself meanwhile justified by the almost clear certainty that the
first symptoms of the revulsion—of the _con_vulsion, I am tempted to
say—must break out in Washington?

For here—and it is what I have been so long in coming to—here alone in
the American world, do we catch the other sex not observing the
agreement. I have described this anomaly, at Washington, as that of
Man’s socially “existing”; since we have seen that his fidelity to his
compact throughout the country in general has involved his not doing so.
What has happened, obviously, has been that his reasons, at a stroke,
have dropped, and that he finds himself, without them, a different
creature. He has discovered that he _can_ exist in other connections
than that of the Market, and that all he has therefore to settle is the
question of whether he may. The most delicate interest of Washington is
the fact that it is quite practically _being_ settled there—in the
practical way which is yet also the dramatic. _Solvitur ambulando_; it
is being settled—that is the charm—as it goes, settled without
discussion. It would be awkward and gross to say that Man has dealt any
conscious blow at the monopoly of his companion, or that her prestige,
as mistress of the situation, has suffered in any manner a noted
abatement. Yet none the less, as he has there, in a degree, socially
found himself and, allured by the new sense, is evidently destined to
seek much further still, the sensible effect, the change of impression
on one’s coming from other places, is of the most marked. Man is
solidly, vividly present, and the presence of Woman has consequently,
for the proposed intensity, to reckon with it. The omens on behalf of
the former appearance are just now strikingly enhanced, as happens, by
the accident of the rare quality, as it were, of the particular male
presence supremely presiding there; and it would certainly be strange
that this idea of the re-committal to masculine hands of some share at
least in the interests of civilization, some part of the social property
and social office, should not, from so high an example, have received a
new impulse and a new consecration. Easily enough, if we had space here
to consider it, might come up the whole picture of the new indications
thus afforded, the question of the degree in which a sex capable, in the
American air, of having so despoiled itself may really be capable of
retracing its steps and repairing its mistake. It would appear
inevitable to ask whether such a mistake on such a scale _can_ prove
effectively reparable—whether ground so lost can be effectively
recovered. Has not the American woman, with such a start, gained such an
irreducible advance, on the whole high plane of the amenities, that her
companion will never catch up with her? This last is an inquiry that I
must, alas, brush aside, though feeling it, as I have already noted,
_the_ most oddly interesting that the American spectacle proposes to us;
only saying, provisionally, that the aspect of manners through the
nation at large offers no warrant whatever for any prompt “No” to it.

It is not, however, of the nation at large I here speak; the case is of
the extremely small, though important and significant, fraction of the
whole represented by the Washington group—which thus shows us the
Expropriated Half in the very act of itself pondering that issue. Is the
man “up to it,” up to the major heritage, the man who _could_,
originally, so inconceivably, and for a mere mess of pottage if there
ever was one, let it go? “Are we up to it, really, at this time of day,
and what on earth will awfully become of us if the question, once put to
the test, shall have to be decided against us?” I think it not merely
fanciful to say that some dim, distressful interrogative sound of that
sort frequently reached, in the Washington air, the restless
analyst—though not to any quickening of his own fear. With a perfect
consciousness that it was still early to say, that the data are as yet
insufficient and that the missing quantity must absolutely be found
before it can be weighed and valued, he was none the less struck with
the felicity of many symptoms and would fairly have been able to believe
at moments that the character hitherto so effaced has but to show the
confidence of taking itself for granted. That act of itself reveals,
restores, reinstates and completes this character. Is it not, for that
matter, essentially implied in our recognition of the place as the City
of Conversation? The victim of effacement, the outcast at the door, has,
all the while we have been talking of him, _talked himself_ back; and if
anything could add to this happy portent it would be another that had
scarcely less bearing. Nowhere more than in Washington, positively, were
the women to have struck me as naturally and harmoniously in the social
picture—as happily, soothingly, proportionately, and no more than
proportionately, participant and ministrant. Hence the irresistible
conclusion that with the way really shown them they would only ask to
take it; the way being their assent to the truth that the abdication of
the Man proves ever (after the first flush of their triumph) as bad
really for their function as for his. Hence, in fine, the appearance
that, with the proportions re-established, they will come to recognize
their past world as a fools’ paradise, and their present, and still more
their future, as much more made to endure. They could not, one reasoned,
have been, in general, so perfectly agreeable unless they had been
pleased, and they could not have been pleased without the prospect of
gaining, by the readjusted relation, more, on the whole, than they were
to lose; without the prospect even again perhaps of truly and
insidiously gaining more than the other beneficiary. That _would_ be, I
think, the feminine conception of a readministered justice. Washington,
at such a rate, in any case, might become to them as good as “Europe,”
and a Europe of their own would obviously be better than a Europe of
other people’s. There are, after all, other women on the other
continents.


                                   IV

One might have been sure in advance that the character of a democracy
would nowhere more sharply mark itself than in the democratic substitute
for a court city, and Washington is cast in the mould that expresses
most the absence of salient social landmarks and constituted features.
Here it is that conversation, as the only invoked presence, betrays a
little its inadequacy to the furnishing forth, all by itself, of an
outward view. It tells us it must be there, since in all the wide empty
vistas nothing else is, and the general elimination _can_ but have left
it. A pleading, touching effect, indeed, lurks in this sense of it as
seated, at receipt of custom, by any decent door of any decent domicile
and watching the vacancy for reminder and appeal. It is left to
conversation alone to people the scene with accents; putting aside two
or three objects to be specified, there is _never_ an accent in it, up
and down, far and wide, save such as fall rather on the ear of the mind:
those projected by the social spirit starved for the sense of an
occasional emphasis. The White House is an accent—one of the lightest,
sharpest possible; and the Capitol, of course, immensely, another;
though the latter falls on the exclusively political page, as to which I
have been waiting to say a word. It should meanwhile be mentioned that
we are promised these enhancements, these illustrations, of the great
general text, on the most magnificent scale; a splendid projected and
announced Washington of the future, with approaches even now grandly
outlined and massively marked; in face of which one should perhaps
confess to the futility of any current estimate. If I speak thus of the
Capitol, however, let me not merely brush past the White House to get to
it—any more than feel free to pass into it without some preliminary
stare at that wondrous Library of Congress which glitters in fresh and
almost unmannerly emulation, almost frivolous irrelevance of form, in
the neighbourhood of the greater building. About the ingenuities and
splendours of this last costly structure, a riot of rare material and
rich ornament, there would doubtless be much to say—did not one
everywhere, on all such ground, meet the open eye of criticism simply to
establish with it a private intelligence, simply to respond to it by a
deprecating wink. The guardian of that altar, I think, is but too
willing, on such a hint, to let one pass without the sacrifice.

It is a case again here, as on fifty other occasions, of the tribute
instantly paid by the revisiting spirit; but paid, all without question,
to the general _kind_ of presence for which the noisy air, over the
land, feels so sensibly an inward ache—the presence that corresponds
there, no matter how loosely, to that of the housing and harbouring
European Church in the ages of great disorder. The Universities and the
greater Libraries (the smaller, for a hundred good democratic reasons,
are another question), repeat, in their manner, to the imagination, East
and West, the note of the old thick-walled convents and quiet cloisters:
they are large and charitable, they are sturdy, often proud and often
rich, and they have the incalculable value that they represent the only
intermission to inordinate rapacious traffic that the scene offers to
view. With this suggestion of sacred ground they play even upon the most
restless of analysts as they will, making him face about, with ecstasy,
any way they seem to point; so that he feels it his business much less
to count over their shortcomings than to proclaim them places of
enchantment. They are better at their worst than anything else at its
best, and the comparatively sweet sounds that stir their theoretic
stillness are for him as echoes of the lyre of Apollo. The Congressional
Library is magnificent, and would become thus a supreme sanctuary even
were it ten times more so: there would seem to be nothing then but to
pronounce it a delight and have done with it—or let the appalled
imagination, in other words, slink into it and stay there. But here is
pressed precisely, with particular force, the spring of the question
that takes but a touch to sound: is the case of this remarkable
creation, by exception, a case in which the violent waving of the
pecuniary wand _has_ incontinently produced interest? The answer can
only be, I feel, a shy assent—though shy indeed only till the logic of
the matter is apparent. This logic is that, though money alone can
gather in on such a scale the treasures of knowledge, these treasures,
in the form of books and documents, themselves organize and furnish
their world. They appoint and settle the proportions, they thicken the
air, they people the space, they create and consecrate all their
relations, and no one shall say that, where they scatter life, which
they themselves in fact _are_, history does not promptly attend.
Emphatically yes, therefore, the great domed and tiered, galleried and
statued central hall of the Congressional, the last word of current
constructional science and artistic resource, already crowns itself with
that grace.

The graceful thing in Washington beyond any other, none the less, is the
so happily placed and featured White House, the late excellent
extensions and embellishments of which have of course represented
expenditure—but only of the refined sort imposed by some mature
portionless gentlewoman on relatives who have accepted the principle of
making her, at a time of life, more honourably comfortable. The whole
ample precinct and margin formed by the virtual continuity of its
grounds with those expanses in which the effect of the fine Washington
Obelisk rather spends or wastes itself (not a little as if some loud
monosyllable had been uttered, in a preoccupied company, without a due
production of sympathy or sense)—the fortunate isolation of the White
House, I say, intensifies its power to appeal to that musing and mooning
visitor whose perceptions alone, in all the conditions, I hold worthy of
account. Hereabouts, beyond doubt, history had from of old seemed to me
insistently seated, and I remember a short spring-time of years ago when
Lafayette Square itself, contiguous to the Executive Mansion, could
create a rich sense of the past by the use of scarce other witchcraft
than its command of that pleasant perspective and its possession of the
most prodigious of all Presidential effigies, Andrew Jackson, as archaic
as a Ninevite king, prancing and rocking through the ages. If that
atmosphere, moreover, in the fragrance of the Washington April, was even
a quarter of a century since as a liquor of bitter-sweet taste,
overflowing its cup, what was the ineffable mixture now, with all the
elements further distilled, all the life further sacrificed, to make it
potent? One circled about the place as for meeting the ghosts, and one
paused, under the same impulse, before the high palings of the White
House drive, as if wondering at haunted ground. There the ghosts stood
in their public array, spectral enough and clarified; yet scarce making
it easier to “place” the strange, incongruous blood-drops, as one looked
through the rails, on that revised and freshened page. But one
fortunately has one’s choice, in all these connections, as one turns
away; the mixture, as I have called it, is really here so fine. General
Jackson, in the centre of the Square, still rocks his hobby and the
earth; but the fruit of the interval, to my actual eyes, hangs nowhere
brighter than in the brilliant memorials lately erected to Lafayette and
to Rochambeau. Artful, genial, expressive, the tribute of French talent,
these happy images supply, on the spot, the note without which even the
most fantasticating sense of our national past would feel itself rub
forever against mere brown homespun. Everything else gives way, for me,
I confess, as I again stand before them; everything, whether as historic
fact, or present _agrément_, or future possibility, yields to this one
high luxury of our old friendship with France.

The “artistic” Federal city already announced spreads itself then before
us, in plans elaborated even to the finer details, a city of palaces and
monuments and gardens, symmetries and circles and far radiations, with
the big Potomac for water-power and water-effect and the recurrent
Maryland spring, so prompt and so full-handed, for a perpetual
benediction. This imagery has, above all, the value, for the considering
mind, that it presents itself as under the wide-spread wings of the
general Government, which fairly make it figure to the rapt vision as
the object caught up in eagle claws and lifted into fields of air that
even the high brows of the municipal boss fail to sweep. The wide-spread
wings affect us, in the prospect, as great fans that, by their mere
tremor, will blow the work, at all steps and stages, clean and clear,
disinfect it quite ideally of any germ of the job, and prepare thereby
for the American voter, on the spot and in the pride of possession,
quite a new kind of civic consciousness. The scheme looms largest,
surely, as a demonstration of the possibilities of that service to him,
and nothing about it will be more interesting than to measure—though
this may take time—the nature and degree of his alleviation. Will the
new pride I speak of sufficiently inflame him? Will the taste of the new
consciousness, finding him so fresh to it, prove the right medicine? One
can only regret that we must still rather indefinitely wait to see—and
regret it all the more that there is always, in America, yet another
lively source of interest involved in the execution of such designs, and
closely involved just in proportion as the high intention, the formal
majesty, of the thing seems assured. It comes back to what we constantly
feel, throughout the country, to what the American scene everywhere
depends on for half its appeal or its effect; to the fact that the
social conditions, the material, pressing and pervasive, make the
particular experiment or demonstration, whatever it may pretend to,
practically a new and incalculable thing. This general Americanism is
often the one tag of character attaching to the case after every other
appears to have abandoned it. The thing is happening, or will have to
happen, in the American way—that American way which is more different
from all other native ways, taking country with country, than any of
these latter are different from each other; and the question is of how,
each time, the American way will see it through.

The element of suspense—beguilement, ever, of the sincere observer—is
provided for by the fact that, though this American way never fails to
come up, he has to recognize as by no means equally true that it never
fails to succeed. It is inveterately applied, but with consequences
bewilderingly various; which means, however, for our present moral, but
that the certainty of the _determined_ American effect is an element to
attend quite especially such a case as the employment of the arts of
design, on an unprecedented scale, for public uses, the adoption on this
scale of the whole æsthetic law. Encountered in America, phenomena of
this order strike us mostly as occurring in the historic void, as having
to present themselves in the hard light of that desert, and as needing
to extort from it, so far as they can, something of the shading of their
interest. Encountered in older countries, they show, on the contrary, as
taking up the references, as consenting perforce to the relations, of
which the air is already full, and as having thereby much rather to get
themselves expressive by charm than to get themselves expressive by
weight. The danger “in Europe” is of their having too many things to
say, and too many others to distinguish these from; the danger in the
States is of their not having things enough—with enough tone and
resonance furthermore to give them. What therefore will the
multitudinous and elaborate forms of the Washington to come have to
“say,” and what, above all, besides gold and silver, stone and marble
and trees and flowers, will they be able to say it _with_? That is one
of the questions in the mere phrasing of which the restless analyst
finds a thrill. There is a thing called interest that has to be produced
for him—positively as if he were a rabid usurer with a clutch of his
imperilled bond. He has seen again and again how the most expensive
effort often fails to lead up to interest, and he has seen how it may
bloom in soil of no more worth than so many layers of dust and ashes. He
has learnt in fact—he learns greatly in America—to mistrust any plea for
it _directly_ made by money, which operates too often as the great
puffing motor-car framed for whirling him, in his dismay, quite away
from it. And he has inevitably noted, at the same time, from how
comparatively few other sources this rewarding dividend on his invested
attention may be drawn. He thinks of these sources as few, that is,
because he sees the same ones, which are the references by which
interest is fed, used again and again, with a desperate economy; sees
the same ones, even as the human heroes, celebrities, extemporized lions
or scapegoats, required social and educational figure-heads and
“values,” having to serve in _all_ the connections and adorn all the
tales. That is one of the liveliest of his American impressions. He has
at moments his sense that, in presence of such vast populations and
instilled, emulous demands, there is not, outside the mere economic,
enough native history, recorded or current, to go round.


                                   V

It seemed to me on the spot, moreover, that such reflections were rather
more than less pertinent in face of the fact that I was again to find
the Capitol, whenever I approached, and above all whenever I entered it,
a vast and many-voiced creation. The thing depends of course somewhat on
the visitor, who will be the more responsive, I think, the further back
into the “origins” of the whole American spectacle his personal vision
shall carry him; but this hugest, as I suppose it, of all the homes of
debate only asks to put forth, on opportunity, an incongruous, a
various, an inexhaustible charm. I may as well say at once that I had
found myself from the first adoring the Capitol, though I may not
pretend here to dot all the i’s of all my reasons—since some of these
might appear below the dignity of the subject and others alien to its
simplicity. The ark of the American covenant may strike one thus, at any
rate, as a compendium of all the national ideals, a museum, crammed
full, even to overflowing, of all the national terms and standards,
weights and measures and emblems of greatness and glory, and indeed as a
builded record of half the collective vibrations of a people; their
conscious spirit, their public faith, their bewildered taste, their
ceaseless curiosity, their arduous and interrupted education. Such were
to my vision at least some of its aspects, but the place had a hundred
sides, and if I had had time to look for others still I felt I should
have found them. What it comes to—whereby the “pull,” in America, is of
the greatest—is that association really reigns there, and in the
richest, and even again and again in the drollest, forms; it is thick
and vivid and almost gross, it assaults the wondering mind. The
labyrinthine pile becomes thus inordinately _amusing_—taking the term in
its finer modern sense. The analogy may seem forced, but it affected me
as playing in Washington life very much the part that St. Peter’s, of
old, had seemed to me to play in Roman: it offered afternoon
entertainment, at the end of a longish walk, to any spirit in the humour
for the uplifted and flattered vision—and this without suggesting that
the sublimities in the two cases, even as measured by the profanest
mind, tend at all to be equal. The Washington dome is indeed capable, in
the Washington air, of admirable, of sublime, effects; and there are
cases in which, seen at a distance above its yellow Potomac, it varies
but by a shade from the sense—yes, absolutely the divine
campagna-sense—of St. Peter’s and the like-coloured Tiber.

But the question is positively of the impressiveness of the great
terraced Capitol hill, with its stages and slopes, staircases and
fountains, its general presentation of its charge. And if the whole mass
and prospect “amuse,” as I say, from the moment they are embraced, the
visitor curious of the _democratic assimilation_ of the greater
dignities and majesties will least miss the general logic. That is the
light in which the whole thing is supremely interesting; the light of
the fact, illustrated at every turn, that the populations maintaining it
deal with it so directly and intimately, so sociably and humorously. We
promptly take in that, if ever we are to commune in a concentrated way
with the sovereign people, and see their exercised power raise a
side-wind of irony for forms and arrangements other than theirs, the
occasion here will amply serve. Indubitably, moreover, at a hundred
points, the irony operates, and all the more markedly under such
possible interference; the interference of the monumental spittoons,
that of the immense amount of vulgar, of barbaric, decoration, that of
the terrible artistic tributes from, and scarce less to, the different
States—the unassorted marble mannikins in particular, each a portrayal
by one of the commonwealths of her highest worthy, which make the great
Rotunda, the intended Valhalla, resemble a stonecutter’s collection of
priced sorts and sizes. Discretion exists, throughout, only as a flower
of the very first or of these very latest years; the large middle time,
corresponding, and even that unequally, with the English Victorian, of
sinister memory, was unacquainted with the name, and waits there now, in
its fruits, but for a huge sacrificial fire, some far-flaring
act-of-faith of the future: a tribute to the æsthetic law which one
already feels stirring the air, so that it may arrive, I think, with an
unexampled stride. Nothing will have been more interesting, surely, than
so public a wiping-over of the æsthetic slate, with all the involved
collective compunctions and repudiations, the general exhibition of a
colossal conscience, a conscience proportionate to the size and wealth
of the country. To such grand gestures does the American scene lend
itself!

The elements in question are meanwhile there, in any case, just as the
sovereign people are there, “going over” their property; but we are
aware none the less of impressions—that of the ponderous proud Senate,
for instance, so sensibly massive; that of the Supreme Court, so simply,
one almost says so chastely, yet, while it breathes supremacy, so
elegantly, so all intellectually, in session—under which the view,
taking one extravagance with another, recurs rather ruefully to glimpses
elsewhere caught, glimpses of authority emblazoned, bewigged, bemantled,
bemarshalled, in almost direct defeat of its intention of gravity. For
the reinstated absentee, in these presences, the mere recovery of native
privilege was at all events a balm—after too many challenged appeals and
abused patiences, too many hushed circuitous creepings, among the
downtrodden, in other and more bristling halls of state. The sense of a
certain large, final benignity in the Capitol comes then, I think, from
this impression that the national relation to it is that of a huge
flourishing Family to the place of business, the estate-office, where,
in a myriad open ledgers, which offer no obscurity to the hereditary
head for figures, the account of their colossal revenue is kept. They
meet there in safe sociability, as all equally initiated and
interested—not as in a temple or a citadel, but by the warm domestic
hearth of Columbia herself; a motherly, chatty, clear-spectacled
Columbia, who reads all the newspapers, knows, to the last man, every
one of her sons by name, and, to the last boy, even her grandsons, and
is fenced off, at the worst, but by concentric circles of
rocking-chairs. It is impossible, as I say, not to be fondly conscious
of her welcome—unless again, and yet again, I read into the general air,
confusedly, too much of the happy accident of the basis of my
introduction. But if my sensibility responds with intensity to this, so
much the better; for what were such felt personal aids and influences,
after all, but cases and examples, embodied expressions of character,
type, distinction, products of the _working_ of the whole
thing?—specimens, indeed, highly concentrated and refined, and made
thereby, I admit, more charming and insidious.

It must also be admitted that to exchange the inner aspects of the vast
monument for the outer is to be reminded with some sharpness of a
Washington in which half the sides that have held our attention drop, as
if rather abashed, out of sight. Not its pleasant brightness as of a
winter watering-place, not its connections, however indirect, with the
older, but those with the newer, the newest, civilization, seem matter
of recognition for its various marble fronts; it rakes the prospect, it
rakes the continent, to a much more sweeping purpose, and is visibly
concerned but in immeasurable schemes of which it can consciously remain
the centre. Here, in the vast spaces—mere empty light and air, though
such pleasant air and such pretty light as yet—the great Federal future
seems, under vague bright forms, to hover and to stalk, making the
horizon recede to take it in, making the terraces too, below the long
colonnades, the admirable standpoints, the sheltering porches, of
political philosophy. The comparatively new wings of the building filled
me, whenever I walked here, with thanksgiving for their large and
perfect elegance: so, in Paris, might the wide mated fronts that are of
such a noble effect on either side of the Rue Royale shine in multiplied
majesty and recovered youth over an infinite Place de la Concorde. These
parts of the Capitol, on their Acropolis height, are ideally constructed
for “raking,” and for this suggestion of their dominating the American
scene in playhouse gallery fashion. You are somehow possessed of it
_all_ while you tread them—their marble embrace appears so the
complement of the vast democratic lap. Though I had them in general, for
contemplation, quite to myself, I met one morning a trio of Indian
braves, braves dispossessed of forest and prairie, but as free of the
builded labyrinth as they had ever been of these; also arrayed in neat
pot-hats, shoddy suits and light overcoats, with their pockets, I am
sure, full of photographs and cigarettes: circumstances all that
quickened their resemblance, on the much bigger scale, to Japanese
celebrities, or to specimens, on show, of what the Government can do
with people with whom it is supposed able to do nothing. They seemed
just then and there, for a mind fed betimes on the Leatherstocking
Tales, to project as in a flash an image in itself immense, but
foreshortened and simplified—reducing to a single smooth stride the
bloody footsteps of time. One rubbed one’s eyes, but there, at its
highest polish, shining in the beautiful day, was the brazen face of
history, and there, all about one, immaculate, the printless pavements
of the State.



                                  XII
                                RICHMOND


                                   I

It was, toward the end of the winter, fairly romantic to feel one’s self
“going South”—in verification of the pleasant probability that, since
one’s mild adventure had appeared beforehand, and as a whole, to promise
that complexion, there would now be aspects and occasions more
particularly and deeply dyed with it. The inevitability of his being
romantically affected—being so more often than not—had been taken for
granted by the restless analyst from the first; his feeling that he
might count upon it having indeed, in respect to his visit, the force of
a strong appeal. The case had come to strike him as perfectly clear—the
case for the singular history, the odd evolution of this confidence,
which might appear superficially to take some explaining. It was
“Europe” that had, in very ancient days, held out to the yearning young
American some likelihood of impressions more numerous and various and of
a higher intensity than those he might gather on the native scene; and
it was doubtless in conformity with some such desire more finely and
more frequently to vibrate that he had originally begun to consult the
European oracle. This had led, in the event, to his settling to live for
long years in the very precincts, as it were, of the temple; so that the
voice of the divinity was finally to become, in his ears, of all sounds
the most familiar. It was quite to lose its primal note of mystery, to
cease little by little to be strange, impressive and august—in the
degree, at any rate, in which it had once enjoyed that character. The
consultation of the oracle, in a word, the invocation of the possible
thrill, was gradually to feel its romantic essence enfeebled, shrunken
and spent. The European complexity, working clearer to one’s vision, had
grown usual and calculable—presenting itself, to the discouragement of
wasteful emotion and of “intensity” in general, as the very stuff, the
common texture, of the real world. Romance and mystery—in other words
the _amusement_ of interest—would have therefore at last to provide for
themselves elsewhere; and what curiously befell, in time, was that the
native, the forsaken scene, now passing, as continual rumour had it,
through a thousand stages and changes, and offering a perfect
iridescence of fresh aspects, seemed more and more to appeal to the
faculty of wonder. It was American civilization that had begun to spread
itself thick and pile itself high, in short, in proportion as the other,
the foreign exhibition had taken to writing itself plain; and to a world
so amended and enriched, accordingly, the expatriated observer, with his
relaxed curiosity reviving and his limp imagination once more on the
stretch, couldn’t fail again to address himself. Nothing could be of a
simpler and straighter logic: Europe had been romantic years before,
because she was different from America; wherefore America would now be
romantic because she was different from Europe. It was for this small
syllogism then to meet, practically, the test of one’s repatriation; and
as the palpitating pilgrim disembarked, in truth, he had felt it, like
the rifle of a keen sportsman, carried across his shoulder and ready for
instant use.

What employment it was thus to find, what game it was actually to bring
down, this directed and aimed appetite for sharp impressions, is a
question to which these pages may appear in a manner to
testify—constituting to that extent the “proof” of my fond calculation.
It was in respect to the South, meanwhile, at any rate, that the
calculation had really been fondest—on such a stored, such a waiting
provision of vivid images, mainly beautiful and sad, might one surely
there depend. The sense of these things would represent for the restless
analyst, more than that of any others, intensity of impression; so that
his only prime discomfiture was in his having had helplessly to see his
allowance of time cut short, reduced to the smallest compass in which
the establishment of a relation to any group of aspects might be held
conceivable. This last soreness, however—and the point is one to be
made—was not slow, I noted, to find itself healingly breathed upon. More
promptly in America than elsewhere does the relation to the group of
aspects begin to work—whatever the group, and I think I may add whatever
the relation, may be. Few elements of the picture are shy or lurking
elements—tangled among others or hidden behind them, packed close by
time and taking time to come out. They stand there in their row like the
letters of an alphabet, and this is why, in spite of the vast surface
exposed, any item, encountered or selected, contributes to the spelling
of the word, becomes on the spot generally informing and characteristic.
The word so recognized stands thus, immediately, for a multitude of
others and constitutes, to expert observation, an all-sufficient
specimen. “Here, evidently, more quickly than in Europe,” the visitor
says to himself, “one knows what there is and what there isn’t: whence
there is the less need, for one’s impression, of a multiplication of
cases.” A single case speaks for many—since it is again and again, as he
catches himself repeating, a question not of clustered meanings that
fall like over-ripe fruit into his lap, but of the picking out of the
few formed features, signs of character mature enough and firm enough to
promise a savour or to suffer handling. These scant handfuls illustrate
and typify, and, luckily, they are (as the evidence of manners and
conditions, over the world, goes) quickly gathered; so that an
impression founded on them is not an undue simplification. And I make
out, I think, the reflection with which our anxious explorer tacitly
concludes. “It’s a bad country to be stupid in—none on the whole so bad.
If one doesn’t know _how_ to look and to see, one should keep out of it
altogether. But if one does, if one _can_ see straight, one takes in the
whole piece at a series of points that are after all comparatively few.
One may neglect, by interspacing the points, a little of the accessory
matter, but one neglects none of the essential. And if one has not at
last learned to separate with due sharpness, pen in hand, the essential
_from_ the accessory, one has only, at best, to muffle one’s head for
shame and await deserved extinction.”


                                   II

It was in conformity with some such induction as the foregoing that I
had to feel myself, at Richmond, in the midst of abnormal wintry
rigours, take in at every pore a Southern impression; just as it was
also there, before a picture charmless at the best, I seemed to
apprehend, and not redeemed now by mistimed snow and ice, that I was to
recognize how much I had staked on my theory of the latent poetry of the
South. This theory, during a couple of rather dark, vain days,
constituted my one solace or support, and I was most of all occupied
with my sense of the importance of carrying it off again unimpaired. I
remember asking myself at the end of an hour or two what I had then
expected—expected of the interesting Richmond; and thereupon, whether or
no I mustered, on this first challenge, an adequate answer, trying to
supply the original basis of expectation. By that effort, as happened,
my dim perambulation was lighted, and I hasten to add that I felt the
second branch of my question easy enough to meet. How was the sight of
Richmond not to be a potent idea; how was the place not, presumably, to
be interesting, to a restless analyst who had become conscious of the
charge involved in that title as long ago as at the outbreak of the
Civil War, if not even still more promptly; and to whose young
imagination the Confederate capital had grown lurid, fuliginous, vividly
tragic—especially under the process through which its fate was to close
round it and overwhelm it, invest it with one of the great reverberating
historic names? They hang together on the dreadful page, the cities of
the supreme holocaust, the final massacres, the blood, the flames, the
tears; they are chalked with the sinister red mark at sight of which the
sensitive nerve of association forever winces. If the mere shadow had
that penetrative power, what affecting virtue might accordingly not
reside in the substances, the place itself, the haunted scene, as one
might figure it, of the old, the vast intensity of drama? One thing at
least was certain—that, however the sense of actual aspects was to
disengage itself, I could not possibly have drawn near with an
intelligence more respectfully and liberally prepared for hospitality to
it. So, conformably with all this, how could it further not strike me,
in presence of the presented appearances, that the needful perceptions
were in fact at play?

I recall the shock of that question after a single interrogative stroll,
a mere vague mile of which had thrown me back wondering and a trifle
mystified. One had had brutally to put it to one’s self after a
conscientious stare about: “This then the tragic ghost-haunted city,
this the centre of the vast blood-drenched circle, one of the _most_
blood-drenched, for miles and miles around, in the dire catalogue
aforesaid?” One had counted on a sort of registered consciousness of the
past, and the truth was that there appeared, for the moment, on the face
of the scene, no discernible consciousness, registered or unregistered,
of anything. Richmond, in a word, looked to me simply blank and
void—whereby it was, precisely, however, that the great emotion was to
come. One could never consent merely to _taking_ it for that:
intolerable the discredit so cast on one’s perceptive resources. The
great modern hotel, superfluously vast, was excellent; but it enjoyed as
a feature, as a “value,” an uncontested priority. It was a huge
well-pitched tent, the latest thing in tents, proclaiming in the desert
the name of a new industry. The desert, I have mentioned, was more or
less muffled in snow—that furthered, I admit, the blankness; the wind
was harsh, the sky sullen, the houses scarce emphasized at all as
houses; the “Southern character,” in fine, was nowhere. I should
doubtless have been embarrassed to say in what specific items I had
imagined it would naturally reside—save in so far as I had attached some
mystic virtue to the very name of Virginia: this instinctive imputation
constituting by itself, for that matter, a symptom of a certain
significance. I watched and waited, giving the virtue a chance to come
out; I wandered far and wide—as far, that is, as weather and season
permitted; they quite forbade, to my regret, the long drives involved in
a visitation of the old battlefields. The shallow vistas, the loose
perspectives, were as sadly simple as the faces of the blind. Was it
practically but a question then, deplorable thought, of a poor Northern
city?—with the bare difference that a Northern city of such extent
would, however stricken, have succeeded, by some Northern art in
pretending to resources. Where, otherwise, were the “old Southern
mansions” on the wide verandahs and in the rank, sweet gardens of which
Northern resources had once been held so cheap?

Well, I scarce remember at what point of my peregrination, at what quite
vague, senseless street-corner it was that I felt my inquiry—up to that
moment rather embarrassing—turn to clearness and the whole picture place
itself in a light in which contemplation might for the time find a
warrant and a clue. I at any rate almost like to live over the few
minutes in question—for the sake of their relief and their felicity. So
retracing them, I see that the spring had been pressed for them by the
positive force of one’s first dismay; a sort of intellectual bankruptcy,
this latter, that one felt one really couldn’t afford. There were no
_references_—that had been the trouble; but the reaction came with the
sense that the large, sad poorness was in itself a reference, and one by
which a hundred grand historic connections were on the spot, and quite
thrillingly, re-established. What was I tasting of, at that time of day,
and with intensity, but the far consequences of things, made absolutely
majestic by their weight and duration? I was tasting, mystically, of the
very essence of the old Southern idea—the hugest fallacy, as it hovered
there to one’s backward, one’s ranging vision, for which hundreds of
thousands of men had ever laid down their lives. I was tasting of the
very bitterness of the immense, grotesque, defeated project—the project,
extravagant, fantastic, and to-day pathetic in its folly, of a vast
Slave State (as the old term ran) artfully, savingly isolated in the
world that was to contain it and trade with it. This was what everything
round me meant—that that absurdity had once flourished there; and
nothing, immediately, could have been more interesting than the lesson
that such may remain, for long years, the tell-tale face of things where
such absurdities _have_ flourished. Thus, by a turn of my hand, or of my
head, interest was evoked; so that from this moment I had never to let
go of it. It was to serve again, it was to serve elsewhere, and in much
the same manner; all aspects straightway were altered by it, and the
pious pilgrim came round again into his own. He had wanted, his scheme
had fairly required, this particular part of the country to be
beautiful; he had really needed it to be, he couldn’t afford, in due
deference to the intellectual economy imposed on him, its not being.
When things were grandly sad, accordingly—sad on the great scale and
with a certain nobleness of ruin—an element of beauty seemed always
secured, even if one could scarce say why: which truth, clearly, would
operate fortunately for the compromised South.

It came back again—it was always, after this fashion, coming back, as if
to make me extravagantly repeat myself—to the quantity to be “read into”
the American view, in general, before it gives out an interest. The
observer, like a fond investor, must spend on it, boldly, ingeniously,
to make it pay; and it may often thus remind one of the wonderful soil
of California, which is nothing when left to itself and the fine
weather, but becomes everything conceivable under the rainfall. What
would many an American prospect be for him, the visitor bent on
appreciation frequently wonders, without his preliminary discharge upon
it of some brisk shower of general ideas? The arid sand has, in a
remarkable degree, the fine property of absorbing these latter and then
giving them back to the air in proportionate signs of life. There be
blooming gardens, on the other hand, I take it, where the foliage of
Time is positively too dense for the general idea to penetrate or to
perch—as if too many ideas had already been concerned and involved and
there were nothing to do but to accept the complete demonstration. It
was not to this order, at any rate, that my decipherable South was to
belong; but Richmond at least began to repay my outlay, from point to
point, as soon as the outlay had been made. The place was
_weak_—“adorably” weak: that was the word into which the whole
impression flowered, that was the idea, evidently, that all the rest of
the way as well, would be most brought home. That was the form, in
short, that the interest would take; the charm—immense, almost
august—being in the long, unbroken connections of the case. Here,
obviously, would be the prime source of the beauty; since if to be sad
was to be the reverse of blatant, what was the sadness, taken all round,
but the incurable after-taste of the original vanity and fatuity, with
the memories and penalties of which the very air seemed still charged? I
had recently been studying, a little, the record, reading, with other
things, the volume of his admirable History in which Mr. James Ford
Rhoades recounts the long preliminaries of the War and shows us, all
lucidly and humanely, the Southern mind of the mid-century in the very
convulsions of its perversity—the conception that, almost comic in
itself, was yet so tragically to fail to work, that of a world
rearranged, a State solidly and comfortably seated and tucked in, in the
interest of slave-produced Cotton.

The solidity and the comfort were to involve not only the wide
extension, but the complete intellectual, moral and economic
reconsecration of slavery, an enlarged and glorified, quite beatified,
application of its principle. The light of experience, round about, and
every finger-post of history, of political and spiritual science with
which the scene of civilization seemed to bristle, had, when questioned,
but one warning to give, and appeared to give it with an effect of huge
derision: whereby was laid on the Southern genius the necessity of
getting rid of these discords and substituting for the ironic face of
the world an entirely new harmony, or in other words a different scheme
of criticism. Since nothing in the Slave-scheme could be said to
conform—conform, that is, to the reality of things—it was the plan of
Christendom and the wisdom of the ages that would have to be altered.
History, the history of everything, would be rewritten _ad usum
Delphini_—the Dauphin being in this case the budding Southern mind. This
meant a general and a permanent quarantine; meant the eternal
bowdlerization of books and journals; meant in fine all literature and
all art on an expurgatory index. It meant, still further, an active and
ardent propaganda; the reorganization of the school, the college, the
university, in the interest of the new criticism. The testimony to that
thesis offered by the documents of the time, by State legislation, local
eloquence, political speeches, the “tone of the press,” strikes us
to-day as beyond measure queer and quaint and benighted—innocent above
all; stamped with the inalienable Southern sign, the inimitable _rococo_
note. We talk of the provincial, but the provinciality projected by the
Confederate dream, and in which it proposed to steep the whole helpless
social mass, looks to our present eyes as artlessly perverse, as
untouched by any intellectual tradition of beauty or wit, as some
exhibited array of the odd utensils or divinities of lone and primitive
islanders. It came over one that they _were_ there, in the air they had
breathed, precisely, lone—even the very best of the old Southerners;
and, looking at them over the threshold of approach that poor Richmond
seemed to form, the real key to one’s sense of their native scene was in
that very idea of their solitude and their isolation. Thus they affected
one as such passive, such pathetic victims of fate, as so played upon
and betrayed, so beaten and bruised, by the old burden of their
condition, that I found myself conscious, on their behalf, of a sort of
ingenuity of tenderness.

Their condition was to have waked up from far back to this thumping
legacy of the intimate presence of the negro, and one saw them not much
less imprisoned in it and overdarkened by it to-day than they had been
in the time of their so fallacious presumption. The haunting
consciousness thus produced is the prison of the Southern spirit; and
how was one to say, as a pilgrim from afar, that with an equal exposure
to the embarrassing fact one would have been more at one’s ease? I had
found my own threatened, I remember—my ease of contemplation of the
subject, which was all there could be question of—during some ten
minutes spent, a few days before, in consideration of an African type or
two encountered in Washington. I was waiting, in a cab, at the
railway-station, for the delivery of my luggage after my arrival, while
a group of tatterdemalion darkies lounged and sunned themselves within
range. To take in with any attention two or three of these figures had
surely been to feel one’s self introduced at a bound to the formidable
question, which rose suddenly like some beast that had sprung from the
jungle. These were its far outposts; they represented the Southern black
as we knew him not, and had not within the memory of man known him, at
the North; and to see him there, ragged and rudimentary, yet all
portentous and “in possession of his rights as a man,” was to be not a
little discomposed, was to be in fact very much admonished. One
understood at a glance how he must loom, how he must count, in a
community in which, in spite of the ground it might cover, there were
comparatively so few other things. The admonition accordingly remained,
and no further appeal was required, I felt, to disabuse a tactful mind
of the urgency of preaching, southward, a sweet reasonableness about
him. Nothing was less contestable, of course, than that such a sweet
reasonableness might play, in the whole situation, a beautiful part; but
nothing, also, was on reflection more obvious than that the counsel of
perfection, in such a case, would never prove oil upon the waters. The
lips of the non-resident were, at all events, not the lips to utter this
wisdom; the non-resident might well feel themselves indeed, after a
little, appointed to silence, and, with any delicacy, see their duty
quite elsewhere.

It came to one, soon enough, by all the voices of the air, that the
negro had always been, and could absolutely not fail to be, intensely
“on the nerves” of the South, and that as, in the other time, the
observer from without had always, as a tribute to this truth, to tread
the scene on tiptoe, so even yet, in presence of the immitigable fact, a
like discretion is imposed on him. He might depart from the discretion
of old, if he were so moved, intrusively, fanatically, even heroically,
and he would depart from it to-day, one quite recognized, with the same
effect of importunity, but not with the same effect of gallantry. The
moral of all of which fairly became, to my sense, a soft inward dirge
over the eternal “false position” of the afflicted South—condemned as
she was to institutions, condemned to a state of temper, of exasperation
and depression, a horrid heritage she had never consciously invited,
that bound up her life with a hundred mistakes and make-believes,
suppressions and prevarications, things that really all named themselves
in the noted provincialism. None of them would have lived in the air of
the greater world—which was the world that the North, with whatever
abatements, had comparatively been, and had conquered by being; so that
if the actual visitor was conscious now, as I say, of the appeal to his
tenderness, it was by this sight of a society still shut up in a world
smaller than what one might suppose its true desire, to say nothing of
its true desert. I can doubtless not sufficiently tell why, but there
was something in my whole sense of the South that projected at moments a
vivid and painful image—that of a figure somehow blighted or stricken,
discomfortably, impossibly seated in an invalid-chair, and yet fixing
one with strange eyes that were half a defiance and half a deprecation
of one’s noticing, and much more of one’s referring to, any abnormal
sign. The deprecation, in the Southern eyes, is much greater to-day, I
think, than the old lurid challenge; but my haunting similitude was an
image of the keeping-up of appearances, and above all of the maintenance
of a tone, the historic “high” tone, in an excruciating posture. There
was food for sympathy—and the restless analyst must repeat that when he
had but tasted of it he could but make of it his full meal. Which brings
him back, by a long way round, to the grim street-corner at Richmond
where he last left himself.


                                  III

He could look down from it, I remember, over roofs and chimneys, through
some sordid gap, at an abased prospect that quite failed to beckon—that
of the James River embanked in snow and attended by waterside industries
that, in the brown haze of the weather, were dingy and vague. There had
been an indistinct sign for him—“somewhere there” had stood the Libby
prison; an indication that flung over the long years ever so dreary a
bridge. He lingered to take it in—from so far away it came, the strange
apparition in the dress of another day; and with the interest of noting
at the same time how little it mattered for any sort of intensity
(whether of regret or of relief) that the structure itself, so sinister
to the mind’s eye, should have materially vanished. It was still there
enough to parade its poor ghosts, but the value of the ghosts,
precisely, was that they consented, all alike, on either side, to the
grand epic dimness. I recognize, moreover, with the lapse of time, the
positive felicity of my not having to connect them with the ruin of a
particular squalid tobacco-house. The concrete, none the less, did, in
the name of history, await me, and I indeed recollect pursuing it with
pertinacity, for conscience’ sake, all the way down a wide, steep
street, a place of traffic, of shops and offices and altogether shabby
Virginia vehicles, these last in charge of black teamsters who now
emphasized for me with every degree of violence that already-apprehended
note of the negro really at home. It fades, it melts away, with a
promptitude of its own almost, any random reflection of the American
picture; and though the restless analyst has arts of _his_ own for
fixing and saving it—as he at least on occasion fondly flatters
himself—he is too often reduced to wondering what it can have consisted
of in a given case save exactly that projected light of his conscience.
Richmond—_there_ at least was a definite fact—is a city of more or less
nobly-precipitous hills, and he recalls, of his visit to the avenue
aforesaid, no intellectual consequence whatever but the after-sense of
having remounted it again on the opposite side.

It was in succession to this, doubtless, that he found himself
consulting the obscure oracle of the old State House or Capitol, seat of
the Confederate legislature, strange intellectual centre of the general
enterprise. I scarce know in what manner I had expected it to regale
either my outward or my inward sense; one had vaguely heard that it was
“fine” and at the height, or in the key, of the old Virginian dignity.
The approach to it had been adorned, from far back, moreover, as one
remembered, with Crawford’s celebrated monument to Washington attended
by famous Virginians—which work indeed, I promptly perceived, answered
to its reputation, with a high elegance that was quite of the
mid-century, and yet that, indescribably archaic, made the mid-century
seem remote and quaint and queer, as disconnected from us as the
prolific age of Cyprus or of Crete. It is positive that of the “old”
American sculpture, about the Union, a rich study might be made. What
shall I say of this spot at large, and of the objects it presented to
view, if not that here, where all the elements of life had been most in
fiery fusion, everything was somehow almost abjectly frigid and thin?
The small shapeless Square, ancient acropolitan seat, ill placed on its
eminence, showed, I recollect, but a single figure in motion—that of a
gentleman to whom I presently put a question and who explained to me
that the Capitol, masked all round in dense scaffolding, though without
a labourer visible, had been “very bad,” a mere breakable shell, and was
now, from top to bottom, in course of reconstruction. The shell, one
could see, was empty and work suspended; and I had never, truly, it
seemed to me, seen a human institution so coldly and logically brought
low as this memorial mass, anything rewritten so mercilessly small as
this poor passage of a great historic text. The effect was as of a page
of some dishonoured author—printed “on grey paper with blunt type,” and
when I had learned from my informant that a fairly ample white house, a
pleasant, honest structure in the taste of sixty or eighty years since,
had been Jefferson Davis’s official residence during part of the War,
every source of interest had been invoked and had in its measure
responded. The impression obeys, I repeat, a rigorous law—it
irremediably fades, it melts away; but was there not, further, as a
feature of the scene, one of those decent and dumb American churches
which are so strangely possessed of the secret of minimizing, to the
casual eye, the general pretension of churches?

The extent to which the American air affects one as a non-conductor of
such pretensions is, in the presence of these heterogeneous objects, a
constant lively lesson. Looking for the most part no more established or
seated than a stopped omnibus, they are reduced to the inveterate
bourgeois level (that of private, accommodated pretensions merely) and
fatally despoiled of the fine old ecclesiastical arrogance. This, the
richest attribute they elsewhere enjoy, keeps clear of them only to
betray them, so that they remind one everywhere of organisms trying to
breathe in the void, or of those creatures of the deep sea who change
colour and shrink, as one has heard, when astray in fresh water. The
fresh water makes them indeed pullulate, but to the loss of
“importance,” and nothing could more have fallen in with that
generalization, for the restless analyst, than the very moral of the
matter, as he judged, lately put before him at the national capital.
Washington already bristles, for the considering eye, with national
affirmations—big builded forms of confidence and energy; but when you
have embraced them all, with the implication of all the others still to
come, you will find yourself wondering what it is you so oddly miss.
Numberless things are represented, and one interest after the other
counts itself in; the great Congressional Library crowns the hill beside
the Capitol, the Departments and Institutes cover their acres and square
their shoulders, the obelisk to the memory of Washington climbs still
higher; but something is absent more even than these masses are
present—till it at last occurs to you that the existence of a religious
faith on the part of the people is not even remotely suggested. Not a
Federal dome, not a spire nor a cornice pretends to any such symbolism,
and though your attention is thus concerned with a mere negative, the
negative presently becomes its sharp obsession. You reach out perhaps in
vain for something to which you may familiarly compare your unsatisfied
sense. You liken it perhaps not so much to a meal made savourless by the
failure of some usual, some central dish, as to a picture, nominally
finished, say, where the canvas shows, in the very middle, with all
originality, a fine blank space.

For it is most, doubtless, the æsthetic appetite in you—long richly fed
elsewhere—that goes unassuaged; it is your sense of the comprehensive
picture _as_ a comprehensive picture that winces, for recognition of
loss, like a touched nerve. What is the picture, collectively seen, you
ask, but the portrait, more or less elaborated, of a multitudinous
People, of a social and political order?—so that the effect is, for all
the world, as if, with the body and the limbs, the hands and feet and
coat and trousers, all the accessories of the figure showily painted,
the neat white oval of the face itself were innocent of the brush. You
marvel at the personage, you admire even the painting—which you are
largely reduced, however, to admiring in the hands and the boots, in the
texture of accompanying table-cloth, inkstand, newspaper (introduced
with a careless grace) and other paraphernalia. You wonder how he would
look if the face _had_ been done; though you have compensation,
meanwhile, I must certainly add, in your consciousness of assisting, as
you apprehensively stand there, at something new under the sun. The size
of the gap, the intensity of the omission, in the Washington prospect,
where so much else is representative, dots with the last sharpness the
distinct _i_, as it were, of one of the promptest generalizations of the
repatriated absentee. The field of American life is as bare of the
Church as a billiard-table of a centre-piece; a truth that the myriad
little structures “attended” on Sundays and on the “off” evenings of
their “sociables” proclaim as with the audible sound of the roaring of a
million mice. Or that analogy reinsists—of the difference between the
deep sea of the older sphere of spiritual passion and the shallow tide
in which the inhabiting particles float perforce near the surface. And
however one indicates one’s impression of the clearance, the clearance
itself, in its completeness, with the innumerable odd connected
circumstances that bring it home, represents, in the history of manners
and morals, a deviation in the mere measurement of which hereafter may
well reside a certain critical thrill. I say hereafter because it is a
question of one of those many measurements that would as yet, in the
United States, be premature. Of all the solemn conclusions one feels as
“barred,” the list is quite headed, in the States, I think, by this
particular abeyance of judgment. When an ancient treasure of precious
vessels, overscored with glowing gems and wrought, artistically, into
wondrous shapes, has, by a prodigious process, been converted, through a
vast community, into the small change, the simple circulating medium of
dollars and “nickels,” we can only say that the consequent permeation
will be of values of a new order. Of _what_ order we must wait to see.

All of which remarks would constitute a long excursion, I admit, from
the sacred edifice by the Richmond street, were it not for that saving
law, the enrichment of each hour on the American scene, that wings
almost any observed object with a power to suggest, a possible social
_portée_, soaring superior to its plain face. And I seem to recover the
sense of a pretext for incurable mooning, then and there, in my
introduction, but little delayed, to the next in the scant group of
local lions, the usual place of worship, as I understood, of the
Confederate leader, from his proper pew in which Jefferson Davis was
called, on that fine Sunday morning of the spring-time of 1865, by the
news of Lee’s surrender. The news had been big, but the place of worship
was small, and, linger in it as one would, fraternize as one would with
the mild old Confederate soldier, survivor of the epic age, who made, by
his account, so lean a living of his office of sexton, one could but
moodily resent, again, its trivialization of history—a process one
scarce knows how to name—its inaccessibility to legend. Perhaps, after
all, it represented, in its comfortable “denominational” commonness, the
right scene of concentration for the promoters of so barren a polity,
that idea of the perpetual Southern quarantine; but no leaders of a
great movement, a movement acclaimed by a whole nation and paid for with
every sacrifice, ever took such pains, alas, to make themselves not
interesting. It was positively as if legend would have nothing to say to
them; as if, on the spot there, I had seen it turn its back on them and
walk out of the place. This is the horse, ever, that one may take to the
water, but that drinks not against his will. That was at least what it
came back to—for the musing moralist: if the question is of legend we
dig for it in the deposit of history, but the deposit must be thick to
have given it a cover and let it accumulate. It was on the battlefields
and in all the blood-drenched radius that it would be thick; here,
decidedly, in the streets of melancholy Richmond, it was thin. Just so,
since it was the planners and plotters who had bidden unsuccessfully for
our interest, it was for the sacrificed multitude, the unsophisticated,
irresponsible agents, the obscure and the eminent alike, that
distinction might be pleaded. _They_ were buried, if one would, in the
“deposit”—where the restless analyst might scratch, all tenderly, to
find them.

He had fortunately at this moment his impression as to where, under such
an impulse, he had best look; and he turned his steps, as with an
appetite for some savour in his repast still too much withheld to that
Museum of the relics of the Confederacy installed some years since in
the eventual White House of Richmond, the “executive mansion” of the
latter half of the War. Here, positively, the spirit descended—and yet
all the more directly, it seemed to me, strange to say, by reason of the
very nudity and crudity, the historic, the pathetic poverty of the
exhibition. It fills the whole large house, each of the leagued States
enjoying an allotted space; and one assuredly feels, in passing from
room to room, that, up and down the South, no equal area can so offer
itself as sacred ground. Tragically, indescribably sanctified, these
documentary chambers that contained, so far as I remember, not a single
object of beauty, scarce one in fact that was not altogether ugly (so
void they were of intrinsic charm), and that spoke only of the absence
of means and of taste, of communication and resource. In these rude
accents they phrased their interest—which the unappeased visitor, from
the moment of his crossing the general threshold, had recognized in fact
as intense. He was at his old trick: he had made out, on the spot, in
other words, that here was a pale page into which he might read what he
liked. He had not exchanged ten words of civility with a little old
lady, a person soft-voiced, gracious, mellifluous, perfect for her
function, who, seated by her fire in a sort of official ante-room,
received him as at the gate of some grandly bankrupt plantation—he had
not surrendered to this exquisite contact before he felt himself up to
his neck in a delightful, soothing, tepid medium, the social tone of the
South that _had_ been. It was but the matter of a step over—he was
afloat on other waters, and had remounted the stream of Time. I said
just now that nothing in the Museum had beauty; but the little old lady
had it, with her thoroughly “sectional” good manners, and that
punctuality and felicity, that inimitability, one must again say, of the
South in her, in the patriotic unction of her reference to the sorry
objects about, which transported me as no enchanted carpet could have
done. No little old lady of the North could, for the high tone and the
right manner, have touched her, and poor benumbed Richmond might now be
as dreary as it liked: with that small observation made my pilgrimage
couldn’t be a failure.

The sorry objects about were old Confederate documents, already sallow
with time, framed letters, orders, autographs, extracts, tatters of a
paper-currency in the last stages of vitiation; together with faded
portraits of faded worthies, primitive products of the camera, the
crayon, the brush; of all of which she did the honours with a gentle
florid reverence that opened wide, for the musing visitor, as he
lingered and strolled, the portals, as it were, of a singularly
interesting “case.” It was the case of the beautiful, the attaching
oddity of the general Southern state of mind, or stage of feeling, in
relation to that heritage of woe and of glory of which the mementos
surrounded me. These mementos were the sorry objects, and as I pursued
them from one ugly room to another—the whole place wearing the air thus,
cumulatively, of some dim, dusty collection of specimens, prehistoric,
paleolithic, scientific, and making one grope for some verbal rendering
of the grey effect—the queer elements at play wrote themselves as large
as I could have desired. On every side, I imagine, from Virginia to
Texas, the visitor must become aware of them—the visitor, that is, who,
by exception, becomes aware of anything: was I not, for instance,
presently to recognize them, at their finest, for an almost comic
ambiguity, in the passionate flare of the little frontal inscription
behind which the Daughters of the Confederacy of the Charleston section
nurse the old wrongs and the old wounds? These afflictions are still,
thus, admirably ventilated, and what is wonderful, in the air, to-day,
is the comfort and cheer of this theory of an undying rancour. Every
facility is enjoyed for the publication of it, but as the generation
that immediately suffered and paid has almost wholly passed away, the
flame-coloured _idea_ has flowered out of the fact, and the interest,
the “psychologic” interest, is to see it so disengage itself, as legend,
as valuable, enriching, inspiring, romantic legend, and settle down to
play its permanent part. Practically, and most conveniently, one feels,
the South is reconciled, but theoretically, ideally, and above all for
the new generation and the amiable ladies, the ladies amiable like the
charming curatrix of the Richmond Museum, it burns with a smothered
flame. As we meanwhile look about us there, over a scene as sad,
throughout, as some raw spring eventide, we feel how something of the
sort must, in all the blankness, respond morally and socially to a want.

The collapse of the old order, the humiliation of defeat, the
bereavement and bankruptcy involved, represented, with its obscure
miseries and tragedies, the social revolution the most unrecorded and
undepicted, in proportion to its magnitude, that ever was; so that this
reversion of the starved spirit to the things of the heroic age, the
four epic years, is a definite soothing salve—a sentiment which has,
moreover, in the South, to cultivate, itself, intellectually, from
season to season, the field over which it ranges, and to sow with its
own hands such crops as it may harvest. The sorry objects, at Richmond,
brought it home—so low the æsthetic level: it was impossible, from room
to room, to imagine a community, of equal size, more disinherited of art
or of letters. These about one were the only echoes—daubs of
portraiture, scrawls of memoranda, old vulgar newspapers, old rude
uniforms, old unutterable “mid-Victorian” odds and ends of furniture,
all ghosts as of things noted at a country fair. The illiteracy seemed
to hover like a queer smell; the social revolution had begotten neither
song nor story—only, for literature, two or three biographies of
soldiers, written in other countries, and only, for music, the weird
chants of the emancipated blacks. Only for art, I was an hour later to
add, the monument to General Lee by M. Mercié of Paris; but to that, in
its suburban corner, and to the strange eloquence of its isolation, I
shall presently come. The moral of the show seemed to me meanwhile the
touching inevitability, in such conditions, of what I have called the
nursing attitude. “What on earth—nurse of a rich heroic past, nurse of a
fierce avenging future, nurse of any connection that would make for any
brood of visions about one’s knee—wouldn’t one have to become,” I found
myself inwardly exclaiming, “if one had this great melancholy void to
garnish and to people!” It was not, under this reflection, the actual
innocent flare of the altar of memory that was matter for surprise, but
that such altars should strike one, rather, as few and faint. They would
have been none too many for countenance and cheer had they blazed on
every hilltop.

The Richmond halls, at any rate, appeared, through the chill of the
season, scantly trodden, and I met in them no fellow-visitor but a young
man of stalwart and ingenuous aspect who struck me so forcibly, after a
little, as exhaling a natural piety that, as we happened at last to be
rapt in contemplation of the same sad glass case, I took advantage of
the occasion to ask him if he were a Southerner. His affirmative was
almost eager, and he proved—for all the world like the hero of a famous
novel—a gallant and nameless, as well as a very handsome, young
Virginian. A farmer by occupation, he had come up on business from the
interior to the capital, and, having a part of his morning on his hands,
was spending it in this visitation—made, as I gathered, by no means for
the first time, but which he still found absorbing. As a son of the new
South he presented a lively interest of type—linguistically not least
(since where doesn’t the restless analyst grope for light?)—and this
interest, the ground of my here recalling him, was promptly to arrive at
a climax. He pointed out to me, amid an array of antique regimentals,
certain objects identical with relics preserved in his own family and
that had belonged to his father, who, enrolled at the earliest age, had
fought to the end of the War. The old implements before us bore the
number of the Virginia regiment in which this veteran had first seen
service, and a question or two showed me how well my friend was
acquainted with his parent’s exploits. Enjoying, apparently—for he was
intelligent and humorous and highly conversable—the opportunity to talk
of such things (they being, as it were, so advantageously present there
with a vague Northerner), he related, felicitously, some paternal
adventure of which I have forgotten the particulars, but which comprised
a desperate evasion of capture, or worse, by the lucky smashing of the
skull of a Union soldier. I complimented him on his exact knowledge of
these old, unhappy, far-off things, and it was his candid response that
was charmingly suggestive. “Oh, I should be ready to do them all over
again myself!” And then, smiling serenely, but as if it behoved even the
least blatant of Northerners to understand: “That’s the kind of
Southerner _I_ am!” I allowed that he was a capital kind of Southerner,
and we afterwards walked together to the Public Library, where, on our
finally parting, I could but thank him again for being so much the kind
of Southerner I had wanted. He was a fine contemporary young American,
incapable, so to speak, of hurting a Northern fly—_as_ Northern; but
whose consciousness would have been poor and unfurnished without this
cool platonic passion. With what other pattern, personal views apart,
_could_ he have adorned its bare walls? So I wondered till it came to me
that, though he wouldn’t have hurt a Northern fly, there were things
(ah, we had touched on some of these!) that, all fair, engaging,
smiling, as he stood there, he would have done to a Southern negro.


                                   IV

The Public Libraries in the United States are, like the Universities,
a challenge to fond fancy; by which I mean that, if, taken together,
they bathe the scene with a strange hard light of their own, the
individual institution may often affect the strained pilgrim as a
blessedly restful perch. It constitutes, in its degree, wherever met,
a more explicit plea for the amenities, or at least a fuller
exhibition of them, than the place is otherwise likely to contain; and
I remember comparing them, inwardly, after periods of stress and
dearth, after long, vacant stretches, to the mast-heads on which spent
birds sometimes alight in the expanses of ocean. Their function for
the student of manners is by no means exhausted with that
attribute—they project, through the use made of them, twenty
interesting sidelights; but it was by that especial restorative, that
almost romantic character I have just glanced at, that I found myself
most solicited. It is to the inordinate value, in the picture, of the
non-commercial, non-industrial, non-financial note that they owe their
rich relief; being, with the Universities, as one never wearied of
noting, charged with the _whole_ expression of that part of the
national energy that is not calculable in terms of mere arithmetic.
They appeared to express it, at times, I admit, the strange national
energy, in terms of mere subjection to the spell of the last
“seller”—the new novel, epidemically swift, the ubiquity of which so
mirrors the great continental conditions of unity, equality and
prosperity; but this view itself was compatible with one’s sense of
their practical bid for the effect of distinction. There are a hundred
applications of the idea of civilization which, in a given place,
outside its Library, would be all wrong, if conceivably attempted, and
yet that immediately become right, incur in fact the highest sanction,
on passing that threshold. They often more or less fail of course,
they sometimes completely fail, to assert themselves even within the
precinct; but one at least feels that the precinct attends on them,
waits and confessedly yearns for them, consents indeed to be a
precinct only on the understanding that they shall not be forever
delayed. I wondered, everywhere, under stress of this perception, at
the general associations of the word that best describes them and that
remains so quaintly and admirably _their_ word even when their supreme
right in it is most vulgarly and loudly disputed. They are the _rich_
presences, even in the “rich” places, among the sky-scrapers, the
newspaper-offices, the highly-rented pews and the billionaires, and
they assert, with a blest imperturbable serenity, not only that
everything would be poor without them, but that even with them much is
as yet deplorably poor. They in fact so inexorably establish this
truth that when they are in question they leave little to choose, I
think, round about them, between the seats of wealth and the seats of
comparative penury: they are intrinsically so much more interesting
than either.

Was it then because Richmond at large, the “old” Richmond, seemed to lie
there in its icy shroud with the very dim smile of modesty, the invalid
gentleness, of a patient who has been freely bled—was it through profit
of this impression that the town Library struck me as flushing with
colour and resource, with confidence and temperament? The beauty of the
matter is that these _penetralia_, to carry it off as they do, call to
their aid, of necessity, no great store of possessions—play their trick,
if they must, with the mildest rarities. It sufficed, really, at
Richmond, that the solid structure—ample and detached indeed, and
keeping, where it stood, the best company the place could afford—should
make the affirmation furthest removed from the vain vaunt of the other
time, the pretence of a social order founded on delusions and
exclusions. Everything else was somehow, however indirectly, the bequest
of that sad age and partook more or less of its nature; this thing alone
either had nothing to do with it or had to do with it by an appealing, a
quite affecting lapse of logic—his half-hour’s appreciation of which had
for the restless analyst a positive melancholy sweetness. The place had
of course to be in its way a temple to the Confederate cause, but the
charm, in the spacious, “handsome,” convenient upper room, among books
of value and pictures of innocence, and glass cases of memorabilia more
refined than those of the collection I had previously visited, among
gentle readers, transported and oblivious, and the still gentler
specimens, if I rightly recollect, of the pale sisterhood of the
appointed and attendant fair who predominantly, throughout the States,
minister to intellectual appetite and perform the intellectual service,
directing and controlling them and, as would appear, triumphantly
minimizing their scope, feminizing their too possible male
grossnesses—the charm, I say, was now in the beautiful openness to the
world-relation, in the felt balm, really, of the disprovincializing
breath. Once such a summer air as that had begun softly to stir, even
the drearier little documents might flutter in it as confederately as
they liked. The terrible framed canvases, portraits of soldiers and
statesmen, strange images, on the whole, of the sectional great, might
seem to shake, faintly, on the wall, as in vague protest at a possible
doom. Disinherited of art one could indeed, in presence of such objects,
but feel that the old South had been; and might not this thin tremor, on
the part of several of those who had had so little care for it,
represent some sense of what the more liberal day—so announced there on
the spot—might mean for their meagre memories?

This was a question, however, that it naturally concerned me not to put
to the old mutilated Confederate soldier who, trafficking in photographs
in a corner of the room, rejoiced to proclaim the originals of the
portraits. Nothing could have been a happier link than the old
Confederate soldier—a link as from past to present and future, I mean,
even when individually addicted to “voicing” some of the more
questionable claims of the past. What will they be, at all events, the
Southern shrines of memory, on the day the last old Confederate soldier
shall have been gathered to his fate? Never, thanks to a low horizon,
had the human figure endowed with almost anything at all in the nature
of a presence or a silhouette such a chance to stand out; never had the
pictorial accident, on a vast grey canvas, such a chance to tell. But a
different matter from these, at Richmond, in fact the greatest matter of
all, is the statue of General Lee, which stands, high aloft and
extraordinarily by itself, at the far end of the main residential
street—a street with no imputable “character” but that of leading to it.
Faithful, experimentally, to a desperate practice, I yet had to renounce
here—in the main residential street—the subtle effort to “read” a sense
into the senseless appearances about me. This ranked, I scarce know why,
as a disappointment: I had presumed with a fond extravagance, I have
hinted, that they would give out here and there some unmistakable
backward reference, show, from the old overclambered but dispeopled
double galleries that I might liken to desecrated cloisters, some wan,
faded face of shrunken gentility. Frankly, however, with the best will
in the world—really too good a will, which found itself again and again
quite grimly snubbed—frankly I could do nothing: everything was there
but the material. The disposition had been a tribute to old Virginia,
but old Virginia quite unceremoniously washed her hands of me. I have
spoken of scratching, scratching for romance, and all tenderly, in the
deposit of history; but, plainly, no deposit would show, and I tried to
remember, for fairness, that Richmond had been after all but a modern
and upstart capital. Indistinct there, below the hill, was the James
River, and away in the mists of time “romantic” Jamestown, the creation
of a Stuart king. That would have to do, though it also, in its way, was
nothing; for meanwhile in truth, just here—here above all and in
presence of the monument completing the vista—were other things to
remember, provoked reflections that took on their own intensity.

The equestrian statue of the Southern hero, made to order in far-away
uninterested Paris, is the work of a master and has an artistic
interest—a refinement of style, in fact, under the impression of which
we seem to see it, in its situation, as some precious pearl of ocean
washed up on a rude bare strand. The very high florid pedestal is of the
last French elegance, and the great soldier, sitting his horse with a
kind of melancholy nobleness, raises his handsome head as he looks off
into desolate space. He does well, we feel, to sit as high as he may,
and to appear, in his lone survival, to see as far, and to overlook as
many things; for the irony of fate, crowning the picture, is surely
stamped in all sharpness on the scene about him. The place is the mere
vague centre of two or three crossways, without form and void, with a
circle half sketched by three or four groups of small, new, mean houses.
It is somehow empty in spite of being ugly, and yet expressive in spite
of being empty. “Desolate,” one has called the air; and the effect is,
strangely, of some smug “up-to-date” specimen or pattern of desolation.
So long as one stands there the high figure, which ends for all the
world by suggesting to the admirer a quite conscious, subjective, even a
quite sublime, effort to ignore, to sit, as it were, superior and
indifferent, enjoys the fact of company and thereby, in a manner, of
sympathy—so that the vast association of the futile for the moment drops
away from it. But to turn one’s back, one feels, is to leave it again
alone, communing, at its altitude, which represents thus some prodigious
exemplary perched position, some everlasting high stool of penitence,
with the very heaven of futility. So at least I felt brought round again
to meeting my first surprise, to solving the riddle of the historic
poverty of Richmond. It is the poverty that _is_, exactly, historic:
once take it for that and it puts on vividness. The condition attested
is the condition—or, as may be, one of the later, fainter, weaker
stages—of having worshipped false gods. As I looked back, before leaving
it, at Lee’s stranded, bereft image, which time and fortune have so
cheated of half the significance, and so, I think, of half the dignity,
of great memorials, I recognized something more than the melancholy of a
lost cause. The whole infelicity speaks of a cause that could never have
been gained.



                                  XIII
                               CHARLESTON


                                   I

To arrive at Charleston early in the chill morning was to appear to have
come quite adventurously far, and yet to be not quite clear about the
grounds of the appearance. Did it rest on impressions gathered by the
way, on the number of things one had been, since leaving Richmond, aware
of?—or was it rather explained by the long succession of hours, the
nights and days, consumed as mere tasteless time and without the
attending relish of excited interest? What, definitely, could I say I
had seen, that my journey should already presume to give itself airs, to
seat itself there as a chapter of experience? To consider of this
question was really, I think, after a little, to renew one’s
appreciation of the mystery and the marvel of experience. That accretion
may amount to an enormous sum, often, when the figures on the slate are
too few and too paltry to mention. It may count for enrichment without
one’s knowing why; and so again, on occasion, with a long column of
items, it may count for nothing at all. I reached Charleston ever so
much (as it seemed to me) the wiser—the wiser, that is, for the
impression of scarce distinguishable things. One made them out, with no
great brilliancy, as just Southern; but one would have missed the point,
I hasten to add, in failing to see what an application and what a value
they derived from that name. One was already beginning—that was the
truth—one’s convenient induction as to the nature of the South; and,
once that account was opened, how could everything, great or small,
positive or negative, not become straightway a contribution to it? The
large negatives, in America, have, as well as other matters, their
meaning and their truth: so what if my charged consciousness of the long
way from Richmond were that of a negative modified by small discomforts?

The discomforts indeed were as nothing, for importance—compared,
candidly, with the importance of the rest of the impression. The
process, certainly, however one qualified it, had been interrupted by
one of the most positive passages of one’s life—which may not figure
here, alas, unfortunately, as of the essence of my journey. Vast
brackets, applied, as it were, to the very face of nature, enclosed and
rounded this felicity; which was no more of the texture of the general
Southern stuff than a patch of old brocade would be of the woof of the
native homespun. I had, by a deviation, spent a week in a castle of
enchantment; but if this modern miracle, of which the mountains of North
Carolina happened to be the scene, would have been almost anywhere
miraculous, I could at least take it as testifying, all relevantly, all
directly, for the presence, as distinguished from the absence, of
feature. One felt how, in this light, the extent and the splendour of
such a place was but a detail; these things were accidents, without
which the great effect, the element that, in the beautiful empty air,
made all the difference, would still have prevailed. What was this
element but just the affirmation of resources?—made with great emphasis
indeed, but in a clear and exemplary way; so that if large wealth
represented some of them, an idea, a fine cluster of ideas, a will, a
purpose, a patience, an intelligence, a store of knowledge, immediately
workable things, represented the others. What it thus came to, on behalf
of this vast parenthetic Carolinian demonstration, was that somebody had
_cared_ enough—and that happily there had been somebody _to_ care; which
struck me at once as marking the difference for the rest of the text. My
view of the melancholy of it had been conveniently expressed, from hour
to hour, by the fond reflection, through the dreary land, that nobody
cared—cared really for _it_ or for anything. That fairly _made_ it
dreary, as the crazy timber viaducts, where the train crawled, and
sometimes nervously stopped, spanned the deep gorges and the admirable
nameless and more or less torrential streams; as the sense of landscape
in mere quantity became, once more, the vehicle of effect; and as we
pulled up at the small stations where the social scene might be
sufficiently penetrated, no doubt, from the car-window.

The social scene, shabby and sordid, and lost in the scale of space as
the quotable line is lost in a dull epic or the needed name in an ageing
memory, would have been as interesting, probably, as a “short story” in
one of the slangy dialects promoted by the illustrated monthly
magazines; but it affected me above all, and almost each time, I seem to
remember, as speaking of the number of things not cared for. There were
some presumably, though not at all discernibly, that _were_—enough to
beget the loose human cohesion, the scant consistency of parts and
pieces, to which the array by the railway platform testified; but
questions came up, plentifully, in respect to the whole picture, and if
the mass of interests that were absent was so remarkably large, this
would be certainly because such interests were ruled out. The grimness
with which, as by a hard inexorable fate, so many things were ruled out,
fixed itself most perhaps as the impression of the spectator enjoying
from his supreme seat of ease his extraordinary, his awful modern
privilege of this detached yet concentrated stare at the misery of
subject populations. (Subject, I mean, to this superiority of his bought
convenience—subject even as never, of old, to the sway of satraps or
proconsuls.) If the subject populations on the road to Charleston,
seemingly weak indeed in numbers and in energy, had to be viewed, at all
events, so vividly, as not “caring,” one made out quite with eagerness
that it was because they naturally couldn’t. The negroes were more
numerous than the whites, but still there _were_ whites—of aspect so
forlorn and depressed for the most part as to deprecate, though not
cynically, only quite tragically, any imputation of value. It was a
monstrous thing, doubtless, to sit there in a cushioned and kitchened
Pullman and deny to so many groups of one’s fellow-creatures any claim
to a “personality”; but this was in truth what one was perpetually
doing. The negroes, though superficially and doubtless not at all
intendingly sinister, were the lustier race; but how could they care (to
insist on my point) for such equivocal embodiments of the right
complexion? Yet these were, practically, within the picture the only
affirmations of life except themselves; and they obviously, they
notoriously, didn’t care for themselves. The moral of all of which was
that really, through the more and more southward hours, the wondering
stops and the blank renewals, it was only the restless analyst himself
who cared—and enough, after all, he finally felt, to make up for other
deficiencies.

He cared even when, in the watches of the night, he was roused, under
the bewilderment that was rarely to leave him, in America, at any stage
of any transaction to which the cars and their sparse stern
functionaries formed a party, for unpremeditated transfer to a dark and
friendless void where, with what grace he could, he awaited the February
dawn. The general American theory is that railway-travel within the
confines of the Republic is a matter of majestic simplicity and
facility—qualified at the worst by inordinate luxury; I should need
therefore an excursion here forbidden me to present another and perhaps
a too highly subjective view of it. There are lights in which the
majesty, if the question be of that, may strike the freshly repatriated,
or in other words the unwarned and inexpert, as quite grimly formidable;
lights, however, that must be left to shine for us in some other
connection. Let it none the less glimmer out of them for the moment that
this implication of the penalty of imperfect expertness is really a clue
to the essence of the matter; a core packed, in relation to the whole
subject of expertness, with fruitful suggestion. No single admonition,
in the States, I think, is more constant and vivid than the general mass
of intimation of what may happen to you, in transit, unless you have had
special and confirmed practice. You may have been without it in
“Europe,” for moving about, and yet not perish; but to be inexpert in
the American battle would be, it struck me, much more quickly to go
down. Your luggage, in America, is “looked after,” but you are not, save
so far as you receive on occasion a sharp order or a sharper shove: by
sufferance of which discipline, moreover, you by no means always
purchase a prompt delivery of your effects. This indeed is but a
translation of the general truth that it is the country in the world in
which you must do most things for yourself. It may be “better” for you
to have thus to do for yourself the secondary as well as the primary
things—but that is not here the question. It begins to strike you, at
all events, as soon as you begin to circulate, that your
fellow-travellers are for the most part, as to the complex act itself,
professional; whereas you may perform it all in “Europe” successfully
enough as an amateur. Whether to your glory or your shame you must of
course yourself decide; but impunity, nay more, success, may at least
attend your empiricism.

If it was not success, however, for the strayed amateur to have found
himself stranded in the small hours of morning by the vast vague
wayside, he still nevertheless remembers how quickly even this interlude
took on an interest. The gloom was scarce penetrable, but a light
glimmered here and there, and formless sheds and shanties, dim,
discomfortable things, straggled about and lost themselves.
Indistinguishable engines hooted, before and behind, where red fires
also flared and vanished; indistinguishable too, from each other, while
one sought a place of temporary deposit for the impedimenta that
attested one’s absurd want of rehearsal, were the cold steel of the
rails, the vague composition of the platform, and the kinder, the safer
breast of earth. The place was apparently a junction, and it was but a
question of waiting—of selecting as the wisest course, among the hoots
and the flares, to stand huddled just where one was. That almost
completely unservanted state which is so the mark, in general, of the
American station, was here the sole distinctness. I had succeeded in
artlessly becoming a perfectly isolated traveller, with nobody to warn
or comfort me, with nobody even to command. But it was precisely in this
situation that I felt again, as by the click of a spring, that my
adventure had, in spite of everything, or perhaps indeed just because of
everything, a charm all its own—and a charm, moreover, which I was to
have from that moment, for any connection, no difficulty whatever in
recognizing. It must have broken out more particularly, then and there,
in the breath of the night, which was verily now the bland air of the
South—mild, benignant, a benediction in itself as it hung about me, and
with that blest quality in it of its appearing a medium through which
almost any good might come. It was the air of the open gates—not, like
that of the North, of the closed; and one inhaled it, in short, on the
spot, as the very boon of one’s quest.

A couple of hours later, in the right train, which had at last arrived,
I had so settled to submission to this spell that it had wrought for me,
I think, all its magic—ministered absolutely to the maximum of
suggestion, which became thus, for my introduction to Charleston, the
presiding influence. What had happened may doubtless show for no great
matter in a bare verbal statement; yet it was to make all the
difference, I felt, for impressions (happy and harsh alike) still to
come. It couldn’t have happened without one’s beginning to wander; but
the lively interest was that the further one wandered the more the
suggestion spoke. The sense of the size of the Margin, that was the name
of it—the Margin by which the total of American life, huge as it already
appears, is still so surrounded as to represent, for the mind’s eye on a
general view, but a scant central flotilla huddled as for very fear of
the fathomless depth of water, the too formidable future, on the so much
vaster lake of the materially possible. Once that torch is at all
vividly lighted it flares, for any pair of open eyes, over every scene,
and with a presence that helps to explain their owner’s inevitable
failure to conclude. He feels it in all his uncertainties, and he never
just escapes concluding without the sense that this so fallacious
neatness would more or less absurdly have neglected or sacrificed it.
Not by any means that the Margin always affects him as standing for the
vision of a possible greater good than what he sees in the given
case—any more than as standing for a possible greater evil; these
differences are submerged in the immense fluidity; they lurk confused,
disengaged, in the mere looming mass of the _more_, the more and more to
come. And as yet nothing makes definite the probable preponderance of
particular forms of the more. The one all positive appearance is of the
perpetual increase of everything, the growth of the immeasurable
muchness that shall constitute the deep sea into which the seeker for
conclusions must cast his nets. The fact that, with so many things
present, so few of them are not on the way to become quite other, and
possibly altogether different, things, conduces to the peculiar interest
and, one often feels tempted to add, to the peculiar irritation of the
country.


                                   II

Charleston early in the morning, on my driving from the station, was, it
had to be admitted, no very finished picture, but at least, already, it
was different—ever so different in aspect and “feeling,” and above all
for intimation and suggestion, from any passage of the American scene as
yet deciphered; and such became on the spot one’s appetite for local
colour that one was fairly grateful to a friend who, by having promised
to arrive from the interior of the State the night before, gave one a
pretext for seeking him up and down. My quest, for the moment, proved
vain; but the intimations and suggestions, while I proceeded from door
to door in the sweet blank freshness of the day, of the climate, of the
streets, began to swarm at such a rate that I had the sense of gathering
my harvest with almost too eager a thrift. It was like standing steeped
at the bookstall itself in the volume picked up and opened—though I may
add that when I had presently retreated upon the hotel, to which I
should in the first instance have addressed myself, it was quite, for a
turning of pages, as if I had gone on with the “set.” Thus, before
breakfast, I entered upon my brief residence with the right vibrations
already determined and unable really to say which of a couple of
contacts just enjoyed would have most ministered to them. I had roused,
guilelessly, through an easy misunderstanding, two more or less sleeping
households; but if I had still missed my clue to my friend I had yet put
myself into possession of much of whatever else I had wanted. What had I
most wanted, I could easily ask myself, but some small inkling (a mere
specimen-scrap would do) of the sense, as I have to keep forever calling
my wanton synthesis, of “the South before the War”?—an air-bubble only
to be blown, in any case, through some odd fragment of a pipe. My pair
of early Charleston impressions were thus a pair of thin prismatic
bubbles—which could have floated before me moreover but for a few
seconds, collapsing even while I stood there.

Prismatically, none the less, they had shown me the “old” South; in one
case by the mere magic of the manner in which a small, scared, starved
person of colour, of very light colour, an elderly mulattress in an
improvised wrapper, just barely held open for me a door through which I
felt I might have looked straight and far back into the past. The past,
that of the vanished order, was hanging on there behind her—as much of
it as the scant place would accommodate; and she knew this, and that I
had so quickly guessed it; which led her, in fine, before I could see
more, and that I might not sound the secret of shy misfortune, of faded
pretension, to shut the door in my face. So, it seemed to me, had I been
confronted, in Italy, under quite such a morning air and light, quite
the same touch of a tepid, odorous medium, with the ancient sallow
crones who guard the locked portals and the fallen pride of provincial
_palazzini_. That was all, in the one instance; there had been no more
of it than of the little flare of a struck match—which lasted long
enough, however, to light the sedative cigarette, smoked and thrown
away, that renews itself forever between the picture-seeker’s lips. The
small historic whiff I had momentarily inhaled required the correction,
I should add, of the sweeter breath of my commentary. Fresh altogether
was the air behind the garden wall that next gave way to my pursuit;
there being a thrill, for that matter, in the fact that here at last
again, if nowhere else over the land, rose the real walls that alone
make real gardens and that admit to the same by real doors. Close such a
door behind you, and you are at once _within_—a local relation, a
possibility of retreat, in favour of which the custom of the North has
so completely ceased to discriminate. One sacrificed the North, with its
mere hard conceit of virtuously meeting exhibition—much as if a house
were just a metallic machine, number so-and-so in a catalogue—one
sacrificed it on the spot to this finer feeling for the enclosure.

That had really sufficed, no doubt, for my second initiation; since I
remember withdrawing, after my fruitless question, as on the completion
of a mystic process. Initiation into _what_ I perhaps couldn’t have
said; only, at the most, into the knowledge that what such Southern
walls generally shut in proves exactly what one would have wished. I was
to see this loose quantity afterwards in greater profusion; but for the
moment the effect was as right as that of privacy for the habit of the
siesta. The details escape me, or rather I tenderly withhold them. For
the siesta there—what would it have been most like but some deep doze,
or call it frankly some final sleep, of the idea of “success”? And how
could one better have described the privacy, with the mild street shut
off and with the deep gallery, where resignation might sit in the shade
or swing without motion in a hammock, shut in, than as some dim dream
that things were still as they had been—still pleasant behind garden
walls—before the great folly? I was to find myself liking, in the South
and in the most monstrous fashion, it appeared, those aspects in which
the consequences of the great folly were, for extent and gravity, still
traceable; I was cold-bloodedly to prefer them, that is, to the aspects,
occasionally to be met, from which the traces had been removed. And
this, I need hardly say, from a point of view having so little in common
with the vindictive as to be quite directly opposed to it. For what in
the world was one candidly to do? It is the manner of the purged and
renovated, the disconnected element, anywhere, after great trials, to
express itself in forms comparatively vulgar; whereas those parts of the
organism that, having been through the fire, still have kept the
scorches and scars, resemble for tone, for colour and value, the
products of the potter’s oven; when the potter, I mean, or when, in
other words, history, has been the right great artist. They at least are
not cheerful rawnesses—they have been baked beautiful and hard.

I even tried, I fear, when once installed there, to look at my hotel in
that light; availing myself, to this end, of its appearance of “dating,”
with its fine old neo-classic front and of a certain romantic grandeur
of scale, the scale positively of “Latin” construction, in my vast
saloon-like apartment, which opened to a high colonnade. The great
canopied and curtained bed was really in the grand manner, and the ghost
of a rococo tradition, the tradition of the transatlantic South, memory
of other lands, glimmered generally in the decoration. When once I
had—though almost exclusively under the charm of these particular faded
graces, I admit—again privately protested that the place might have been
a “palace,” my peace was made with Charleston: I was ripe for the last
platitude of appreciation. Let me say indeed that this consciousness had
from the first to struggle with another—the immediate sense of the
degree in which the American scene is lighted, on occasion, to the
critical eye, by the testimony of the hotel. As had been the case for me
already at Richmond, so here again the note of that truth was sounded;
the visitor interested in manners was too clearly not to escape it, and
I scarce know under what slightly sinister warning he braced himself to
the fact. He had not, as yet, for repatriation, been thrown much upon
the hotel; but this was the high sense of looking further and seeing
more, this present promise of that adventure. One is thrown upon it, in
America, as straight upon the general painted scene over which the
footlights of publicity play with their large crudity, and against the
freely-brushed texture and grain of which you thus rub your nose more
directly, and with less of ceremony, than elsewhere. There are endless
things in “Europe,” to your vision, behind and beyond the hotel, a
multitudinous complicated life; in the States, on the other hand, you
see the hotel as itself that life, as constituting for vast numbers of
people the richest form of existence. You have to go no distance for
this to come over you—twenty appearances so vividly speak of it. It is
not so much, no doubt, that “every one” lives at hotels, according to
the witless belief of “Europe,” but that you so quickly seem to measure
the very limited extent to which those who people them, the populations
they appeal to in general, may be conceived as “living” out of them. I
remember how often, in moving about, the observation that most remained
with me appeared to be this note of the hotel, and of the hotel-like
chain of Pullman cars, as the supreme social expression. For the
Pullmans too, in their way, were eloquent; they affected me ever, by the
end of twenty-four hours, as carrying, if not Cæsar and his fortune, at
least almost _all_ the facts of American life. There were some of course
that didn’t fit into them, but so many others did, and these fitted
somehow so perfectly and with such a congruity.

What it comes back to is that in such conditions the elements of the
situation show with all possible, though quite unnoted, intensity; they
tell you all about it (about the situation) in a few remarkably plain
and distinct words; they make you feel in short how its significance is
written upon it. It is as if the figures before you and all round you,
less different from each other, less different too, I think, from the
objects about them, whatever these in any case may be, than any equal
mass of appearances under the sun—it is as if every one and everything
said to you straight: “Yes, this is how we are; this is what it is to
enjoy our advantages; this moreover is all there is of us; we give it
all out. Make what you can of it!” The restless analyst would have had
indeed an unusual fit of languor if he had not begun from the first to
make of it what he could, divided even though he was between his sense
of this largely-written significance and his wonderment, none the less,
as to its value and bearing: which constituted, after all, a shade of
perplexity as to its meaning. “Yes, I see how you are, God knows”—he was
ready with his reply; “for nothing in the world is easier to see, even
in all the particulars. But what does it mean to be as you are?—since I
suppose it means something; something more than your mere one universal
type, with its small deflections but never a departure; something more
than your way of sitting in silence together at table, than your
extraordinary, your enormous passivity, than your apparent absence of
criticism or judgment of anything that is put before you or that happens
to you (beyond occasionally remarking that it’s ‘fine!’) than, in a
word, the fact of what you eat and the fact of how you eat it. You are
not final, complacently as you appear so much of the time to assume
it—your mere inevitable shaking about in the Margin must more or less
take care of that; since you can’t be so inordinately passive
(everywhere, one infers, but in your particular wary niche of your
‘business-block’) without being in _some_ degree plastic. Distinct as
you are, you are not even definite, and it would be terrible not to be
able to suppose that you are as yet but an instalment, a current number,
like that of the morning paper, a specimen of a type in course of
serialization-like the hero of the magazine novel, by the
highly-successful author, the climax of which is still far off. Thus, as
you are perpetually provisional, the hotels and the Pullmans—the
Pullmans that are like rushing hotels and the hotels that are like
stationary Pullmans—represent the stages and forms of your evolution,
and are not a bit, in themselves, more final than you are. The
particulars still to be added either to you or to them form an insoluble
question; and meanwhile, clearly, your actual stage will not be short.”
So much as that, I recall, had hummed about my ears at Richmond, where
the strong vertical light of a fine domed and glazed cortile, the
spacious and agreeable dining-hall of the inn, had rested on the human
scene as with an effect of mechanical pressure. If the scene constituted
evidence, the evidence might have been in course of being pressed out,
in this shining form, by the application of a weight and the turn of a
screw. There it was, accordingly; there was the social, the readable
page, with its more or less complete report of the conditions. The
report was to be fuller as to some of these at Charleston; but I had at
least grasped its general value. And I shall come back to the Charleston
report.

It would have been a sorry business here, however, if this had been
mainly the source of my impressions—which was so far from the case that
I had but to go forth, after breakfast, to find insidious charm, the
appeal of the outer, the larger aspect, await me at every turn. The day
announced itself as warm and radiant, and, keeping its promise to the
end, squared itself there as the golden frame of an interesting
picture—interesting above all from the moment one desired with any
intensity to find it so. The vision persists, with its charming,
touching features; yet when I look back and ask myself what can have
made my impression, all round, so positive, I am at a loss for elements
to refer it to. Elements there were, certainly; in especial the fact
that during these first bland hours, charged with the splendour of
spring, I caught the wide-eyed smile of the South, that expression of a
temperamental felicity in which shades of character, questions of real
feature, other marks and meanings, tend always to lose themselves. But a
deficiency was clear, which was neither more nor less than the
deficiency of life; without life, all gracefully, the picture managed to
compose itself. Even while one felt it do so one missed the precious
presence; so that there at least was food for wonderment, for admiration
of the art at play. To what, all the while, as one went, could one
compare the mystification?—to what if not to the image of some handsome
pale person, a beauty (to call her so) of other days, who, besides
confessing to the inanimate state from closed eyes and motionless lips,
from the arrest of respiration and gesture, was to leave one, by the
day’s end, with the sense of a figure prepared for romantic interment,
stretched in a fair winding-sheet, covered with admirable flowers,
surrounded with shining tapers. _That_, one reasoned, would be something
to have seen; and yet one’s interest was not so limited. Ruins, to be
interesting, have to be massive; and poor bitter-sweet Charleston
suffered, for the observer, by the merciless law of the thinness, making
too much for transparency, for the effect of paucity, still inherent in
American groupings; a law under which the attempt to subject them to
portraiture, to see them as “composing,” resembles the attempt to play
whist with an imperfect pack of cards. If one had already, at the North,
divined the general complexion as probably thin, in this sense,
everywhere—thin, that is, for all note-taking but the statistical, under
which it might of course show as portentously thick—it wouldn’t turn
dense or rich of a sudden, even in an air that could so drench it with
benignity. Therefore if the scene, as one might say, was but the
historic Desert without the historic Mausoleum, how was one’s impression
to give out, as it clearly would, the after-taste of experience?

To let this small problem worry me no longer than it might, I sought an
answer, and quickly found one, in the fortunate fact of my not having
failed, after all, of the admirably suggestive society of my
distinguished and competent friend. He _had_ arrived over-night,
according to my hope, and had only happened to lodge himself momentarily
out of my ken; so that as soon as I had his company to profit by I felt
the “analytic” burden of my own blessedly lifted. I took over his
analysis, infinitely better adjusted to the case and which clearly would
suffice for everything—if only it should itself escape disintegration.
Let me say at once that it quite averted—whether consciously or
unconsciously, whether as too formidably bristling or as too perfectly
pacific—that menace; which success was to provide for us both, I think,
a rounded felicity. My companion, a Northerner of Southern descent (as
well as still more immediately, on another side, of English), knew his
South in general and his Carolina of that ilk in particular, with an
intimacy that was like a grab-bag into which, for illustration, he might
always dip his hand (a movement that, had the grab-bag been “European,”
I should describe rather as a plunge of his arm: so that it comes back
again to the shallowness of the American grab-bag, as yet, for
illustrations other than the statistical). He held up for me his bright
critical candle, which even in the intrinsic Charleston vividness made
its gay flicker, and it was under this aid that, to my extreme
convenience, I was able to “feel” the place. My fortune had indeed an
odd sequel—which I mention for its appreciatory value; the mishaps and
accidents of appreciation being ever, in their way, I think, as
contributive to judgment as the felicities. I was to challenge, too
recklessly, the chances of a second day; having by the end of the first,
and by the taking of example, quite learned to treat the scene as a
grab-bag for my own hand. I went over it again, in an evil
hour—whereupon I met afresh the admonition, already repeatedly received,
that where, in the States, the interest, where the pleasure of
contemplation is concerned, discretion is the better part of valour and
insistence too often a betrayal. It is not so much that the hostile fact
crops up as that the friendly fact breaks down. If you have luckily
_seen_, you have seen; carry off your prize, in this case, instantly and
at any risk. Try it again and you don’t, you won’t, see; for there is in
all contemplation, there is even in any clear appreciation, an element
of the cruel. These things demand that your exposed object shall, first
of all, exist; and to exist for exposure is to be at the best impaled on
the naturalist’s pin. It takes superpositions, at any rate, to defy
sufficiently this sort of attention; it takes either the stoutnesses of
history or the rarest rarities of nature to resist fatal penetration.
That was to come home to me presently in Florida—through the touched
sense of the truth that Florida, ever so amiably, is weak. You may live
there serenely, no doubt—as in a void furnished at the most with velvet
air; you may in fact live there with an idea, if you are content that
your idea shall consist of grapefruit and oranges. Oranges, grapefruit
and velvet air constitute, in a manner, I admit, a feast; but press upon
the board with any greater weight and it quite gives way—its three or
four props treacherously forsake it. That is what I mean by the
impression, in the great empty peninsula, of weakness; which I was to
feel still clearer about on being able to compare it afterwards with the
impression of California. California was to have—if I may decently be
premature about it—her own treachery; but she was to wind one up much
higher before she let one down. I was to find her, especially at the
first flush, unlike sweet frustrated Florida, ever so amiably strong:
which came from the art with which she makes the stoutnesses, as I have
called them, of natural beauty stand you in temporary stead of the
leannesses of everything else (everything that might be of an order
equally interesting). This she is on a short acquaintance quite
insolently able to do, thanks to her belonging so completely to the
“handsome” side of the continent, of which she is the finest expression.
The aspect of natural objects, up and down the Pacific coast, is as
“aristocratic” as the comprehensive American condition permits anything
to be: it indeed appears to the ingenious mind to represent an instinct
on the part of Nature, a sort of shuddering, bristling need, to brace
herself in advance against the assault of a society so much less marked
with distinction than herself. If I was to conceive therefore under
these later lights, that her spirit had put forth nowhere on the
sub-tropical Atlantic shore anything to approach this conscious pride,
so, doubtless, the Carolinian effect, even at its sweetest, was to
strike me as related to it very much as a tinkle is related to a boom.


                                  III

To stray but for an instant into such an out-of-the-way corner of one’s
notes, however, is to give the lie to the tenderness that asserted
itself so promptly as the very medium of one’s perception. There was
literally no single object that, from morn to nightfall, it was not more
possible to consider with tenderness, a rich consistency of tenderness,
than to consider without it: _such_ was the subtle trick that Charleston
could still play. There echoed for me as I looked out from the Battery
the recent speech of a friend which had had at the time a depressing
weight; the Battery of the long, curved sea-front, of the waterside
public garden furnished with sad old historic guns, with live-oaks
draped in trailing moss, with palmettos that, as if still mindful of
their State symbolism, seem to try everywhere, though with a melancholy
sceptical droop, to repeat the old escutcheon; with its large, thrilling
view in particular—thrilling to a Northerner who stands there for the
first time. “Filled as I am, in general, while there,” my friend had
said, “with the sadness and sorrow of the South, I never, at Charleston,
look out to the old betrayed Forts without feeling my heart harden again
to steel.” One remembered that, on the spot, and one waited a little—to
see what was happening to one’s heart. I found this to take time indeed;
everything differed, somehow, from one’s old conceived image—or if I had
anciently grasped the remoteness of Fort Sumter, near the mouth of the
Bay, and of its companion, at the point of the shore forming the other
side of the passage, this lucidity had so left me, in the course of the
years, that the far-away dimness of the consecrated objects was almost a
shock. It was a blow even to one’s faded vision of Charleston viciously
firing on the Flag; the Flag would have been, from the Battery, such a
mere speck in space that the vice of the act lost somehow, with the
distance, to say nothing of the forty years, a part of its grossness.
The smitten face, however flushed and scarred, was out of sight, though
the intention of smiting and the force of the insult were of course
still the same. This reflection one made, but the old fancied
perspective and proportions were altered; and then the whole picture, at
that hour, exhaled an innocence. It was as blank as the face of a child
under mention of his naughtiness and his punishment of week before last.
The Forts, faintly blue on the twinkling sea, looked like vague marine
flowers; innocence, pleasantness ruled the prospect: it was as if the
compromised slate, sponged clean of all the wicked words and hung up on
the wall for better use, dangled there so vacantly as almost to look
foolish. Ah, there again was the word: the air still just tasted of the
antique folly; so that in presence of a lesson so sharp and so
prolonged, of the general _sterilized_ state, of the brightly-lighted,
delicate dreariness recording the folly, harshness was conjured away.
There was that in the impression which affected me after a little as one
of those refinements of irony that wait on deep expiations: one could
scarce conceive at this time of day that such a place had ever been
dangerously moved. It was the _bled_ condition, and mostly the depleted
cerebral condition, that was thus attested—as I had recognized it at
Richmond; and I asked myself, on the Battery, what more one’s sternest
justice could have desired. If my heart wasn’t to harden to steel, in
short, access to it by the right influence had found perhaps too many
other forms of sensibility in ambush.

To justify hardness, moreover, one would have had to meet something
hard; and if my peregrination, after this, had been a search for such an
element, I should have to describe it as made all in vain. Up and down
and in and out, with my companion, I strolled from hour to hour; but
more and more under the impression of the consistency of softness. One
could have expressed the softness in a word, and the picture so offered
would be infinitely touching. It was a city of gardens and absolutely of
no men—or of so few that, save for the general sweetness, the War might
still have been raging and all the manhood at the front. The gardens
were matter for the women; though even of the women there were few, and
that small company—rare, discreet, flitting figures that brushed the
garden walls with noiseless skirts in the little melancholy streets of
interspaced, overtangled abodes—were clad in a rigour of mourning that
was like the garb of a conspiracy. The effect was superficially prim,
but so far as it savoured of malice prepense, of the Southern, the
sentimental _parti-pris_, it was delightful. What was it all most like,
the incoherent jumble of suggestions?—the suggestion of a social
shrinkage and an economic blight unrepaired, irreparable; the suggestion
of by-ways of some odd far East infected with triumphant women’s rights,
some perspective of builded, plastered lanes over the enclosures of
which the flowering almond drops its petals into sharp deep bands of
shade or of sun. It is not the muffled ladies who walk about
predominantly in the East; but that is a detail. The likeness was
perhaps greater to some little old-world quarter of quiet convents where
only priests and nuns steal forth—the priests mistakable at a distance,
say, for the nuns. It was indeed thoroughly mystifying, the whole
picture—since I was to get, in the freshness of that morning, from the
very background of the scene, my quite triumphant little impression of
the “old South.” I remember feeling with intensity at two or three
points in particular that I should never get a better one, that even
this was precarious—might melt at any moment, by a wrong touch or a
false note, in my grasp—and that I must therefore make the most of it.
The rest of my time, I may profess, was spent in so doing. I made the
most of it in several successive spots: under the south wall of St.
Michael’s Church, the sweetest corner of Charleston, and of which there
is more to say; out in the old Cemetery on the edge of the lagoon, where
the distillation of the past was perhaps clearest and the bribe to
tenderness most effective; and even not a little on ground thereunto
almost adjacent, that of a kindly Country Club installed in a fine old
semi-sinister mansion, and holding an afternoon revel at which I was
privileged briefly to assist. The wrong touch and the false note were
doubtless just sensible in this last connection, where the question,
probed a little, would apparently have been of some new South that has
not yet quite found the effective way romantically, or at least
insidiously, to appeal. The South that is cultivating country-clubs is a
South presumably, in many connections, quite in the right; whereas the
one we were invidiously “after” was the one that had been so utterly in
the wrong. Even there, none the less, in presence of more than a single
marked sign of the rude Northern contagion, I disengaged, socially
speaking, a faint residuum which I mention for proof of the intensity of
my quest and of my appreciation.

There were two other places, I may add, where one could but work the
impression for all it was, in the modern phrase, “worth,” and where I
had, I may venture to say, the sense of making as much of it as was
likely ever to be made again. Meanings without end were to be read,
under tuition, into one of these, which was neither more nor less than
a slightly shy, yet after all quite serene place of refection, a
luncheon-room or tea-house, denominated for quaint reasons an
“Exchange”—_the_ very Exchange in fact lately commemorated in a
penetrating study, already much known to fame, of the little that is
left of the local society. My tuition, at the hands of my ingenious
comrade, was the very best it was possible to have. Nothing, usually,
is more wonderful than the quantity of significant character that,
with such an example set, the imagination may recognize in the
scantest group of features, objects, persons. I fantastically feasted
here, at my luncheon-table, not only, as the genius of the place
demanded, on hot chocolate, sandwiches and “Lady Baltimore” cake (this
last a most delectable compound), but on the exact _nuance_ of oddity,
of bravery, of reduced gentility, of irreducible superiority, to which
the opening of such an establishment, without derogation, by the proud
daughters of war-wasted families, could exquisitely testify. They
hovered, the proud impoverished daughters, singly or in couples,
behind the counter—a counter, again, delectably charged; they waited,
inscrutably, irreproachably, yet with all that peculiarly chaste
_bonhomie_ of the Southern tone, on the customers’ wants, even coming
to ascertain these at the little thrifty tables; and if the drama and
its adjusted theatre really contained all the elements of history,
tragedy, comedy, irony, that a pair of expert romancers, closely
associated for the hour, were eager to evoke, the scene would have
been, I can only say, supreme of its kind. That desire of the artist
to linger where the breath of a “subject,” faintly stirring the air,
reaches his vigilant sense, would here stay my steps—as this very
influence was in fact, to his great good fortune, to stay those of my
companion. The charm I speak of, the charm to cherish, however, was
most exhaled for me in other conditions—conditions that scarce permit
of any direct reference to their full suggestiveness. If I alluded
above to the vivid Charleston background, where its “mystification”
most scenically persists, the image is all rounded and complete, for
memory, in this connection at which—as the case is of an admirably
mature and preserved interior—I can only glance as I pass. The
puzzlement elsewhere is in the sense that though the elements of earth
and air, the colour, the tone, the light, the sweetness in fine,
linger on, the “old South” could have had no such unmitigated
mildness, could never have seen itself as subject to such strange
feminization. The feminization is there just to promote for us some
eloquent antithesis; just to make us say that whereas the ancient
order was masculine, fierce and moustachioed, the present is at the
most a sort of sick lioness who has so visibly parted with her teeth
and claws that we may patronizingly walk all round her.

This image really gives us the best word for the general effect of
Charleston—that of the practically vacant cage which used in the other
time to emit sounds, even to those of the portentous shaking of bars,
audible as far away as in the listening North. It is the vacancy that is
a thing by itself, a thing that makes us endlessly wonder. How, in an at
all complex, a “great political,” society, can _everything_ so have
gone?—assuming indeed that, under this aegis, very much ever had come.
How can everything so have gone that the only “Southern” book of any
distinction published for many a year is _The Souls of Black Folk_, by
that most accomplished of members of the negro race, Mr. W. E. B. Du
Bois? Had the _only_ focus of life then been Slavery?—from the point
onward that Slavery had reached a quarter of a century before the War,
so that with the extinction of that interest none other of any sort was
left. To say “yes” seems the only way to account for the degree of the
vacancy, and yet even as I form that word I meet as a reproach the face
of the beautiful old house I just mentioned, whose ample spaces had so
unmistakably echoed to the higher amenities that one seemed to feel the
accumulated traces and tokens gradually come out of their corners like
blest objects taken one by one from a reliquary worn with much handling.
The note of such haunted chambers as these—haunted structurally, above
all, quite as by the ghost of the grand style—was not, certainly, a
thinness of reverberation; so that I had to take refuge here in the fact
that everything appeared thoroughly to _antedate_, to refer itself to
the larger, the less vitiated past that had closed a quarter of a
century or so before the War, before the fatal time when the South,
mono-maniacal at the parting of the ways, “elected” for extension and
conquest. The admirable old house of the stately hall and staircase, of
the charming coved and vaulted drawing-room, of the precious mahogany
doors, the tall unsophisticated portraits, the delicate dignity of
welcome, owed nothing of its noble identity, nothing at all appreciable,
to the monomania. However that might be, moreover, I kept finding the
mere melancholy charm reassert itself where it could—the charm, I mean,
of the flower-crowned waste that was, by my measure, what the monomania
had most prepared itself to bequeathe. In the old Cemetery by the
lagoon, to which I have already alluded, this influence distils an
irresistible poetry—as one has courage to say even in remembering how
disproportionately, almost anywhere on the American scene, the general
place of interment is apt to be invited to testify for the presence of
charm. The golden afternoon, the low, silvery, seaward horizon, as of
wide, sleepy, game-haunted inlets and reed-smothered banks, possible
site of some Venice that had never mustered, the luxury, in the mild
air, of shrub and plant and blossom that the pale North can but
distantly envy; something that I scarce know how to express but as the
proud humility of the whole idle, easy loveliness, made even the
restless analyst, for the hour, among the pious inscriptions that scarce
ever belie the magniloquent clime or the inimitable tradition, feel
himself really capable of the highest Carolinian pitch.

To what height did he rise, on the other hand, on being introduced
another day, at no great distance from this point, and where the silvery
seaward outlook still prevails, to the lapsed and readministered
residence, also already named, that was to give him his one glimpse of
any local modernism? This was the nearest approach for him to any
reanimation of the flower-crowned waste, and he has still in memory, for
symbol of the modernism, a vision of the great living, blazing fire of
logs round which, as the afternoon had turned wet and chill, this
contribution to his view of a possible new society, a possible youthful
tone, a possible Southern future in short, had disposed itself. There
were men here, in the picture—a few, and young ones: that odd other
sense as of a becraped, feminized world was accordingly for the moment
in abeyance. For the moment, I say advisedly—for the moment only; since
what aspect of the social scene anywhere in the States strikes any
second glance as exempt from that condition? It is overwhelmingly
feminized or it _is_ not—that is the formula with which its claim to
existence pierces the ear. Lest, however, the recognition again of this
truth should lead me too far, I content myself with noting a matter
perhaps more relevant just here—one’s inevitable consciousness, in
presence of the “new” manifestations, that the South is in the
predicament of having to be tragic, as it were, in order to beguile. It
was very hard, I said to myself, and very cruel and very perverse, and
above all very strange; but what “use” had the restless analyst here for
a lively and oblivious type? Was there not something in the lively and
oblivious that, given the materials employed for it and the effect
produced by it, threw one back with renewed relish on the unforgetting
and the devoted, on the resentful and even, if need might be, the
vindictive? These things would represent certainly a bad _état
d’âme_—and was one thus cold-bloodedly, critically, to wish such a
condition perpetuated? The answer to that seemed to be, monstrously
enough, “Well, yes—for these people; since it appears the only way by
which they can be interesting. See when they try other ways! Their
sadness and sorrow, as my friend called it, has at least for it that it
has been expensively produced. Everything else, on the other hand,
anything that may pretend to be better—oh, so cheaply!”

One had already, in moving about, winced often enough at sight of where
one was, intellectually, to “land,” under these last consistencies of
observation and reflection; so I may put it here that I _didn’t_, after
all, land, but recoiled rather and forbore, making my skiff fast to no
conclusion whatever, only pushing out again and letting it, for a
supreme impression and to prepare in the aftertime the best remembrance,
drift where it would. So, accordingly, the aftertime having a little
arrived, it touches now once more of its own motion, carries me back and
puts me ashore on the one spot where the impression had been perfectly
felicitous. I have already named the place—under the mild, the bright
south wall of St. Michael’s Church, where the whole precinct offered the
full-blown Southern spring, that morning, the finest of all canvases to
embroider. The canvas here, yes, was of the best; not only did
Charleston show me none other so good, but I was doubtless to have met,
South or North, none of an equal happy grain and form. The high,
complicated, inflated spire of the church has the sincerity, approved of
time, that is so rare, over the land, in the work of man’s hands, laden
though these be with the millions he offers as a vain bribe to it; and
in the sweet old churchyard ancient authority seemed to me, on the
occasion of my visit, to sit, among the sun-warmed tombs and the
interrelated slabs and the extravagant flowers, as on the sole cushion
the general American bareness in such connections had left it. There was
more still of association and impression; I found, under this charm, I
confess, character in every feature. Even in the much-maintained
interior revolutions and renovations have respected its sturdy, rather
sombre essence: the place feels itself, in the fine old dusky archaic
way, the constituted temple of a faith—achieves, in a word, the air of
reality that one had seen in every other such case, from town to town
and from village to village, missed with an unconsciousness that had to
do duty for success.



                                  XIV
                                FLORIDA


                                   I

It is the penalty of the state of receiving too many impressions of too
many things that when the question arises of giving some account of
these a small sharp anguish attends the act of selection and the
necessity of omission. They have so hung together, have so almost
equally contributed, for the fond critic, to the total image, the
chapter of experience, whatever such may have been, that to detach and
reject is like mutilation or falsification; the history of any given
impression residing often largely in others that have led to it or
accompanied it. This I find the case, again and again, with my American
memories; there was something of a hundred of those I may not note in
each of those I may, and I feel myself, amid the swarm, pluck but a
fruit or two from any branch. When I think of Florida, for instance, I
think of twenty matters involved in the start and the approach; I think
of the moist, the slightly harsh, Sunday morning under the portico of
the Charleston Hotel; I think of the inauspicious drizzle about the
yellow omnibus, archaic and “provincial,” that awaited the departing
guests—remembering how these antique vehicles, repudiated, rickety
“stages” of the age ignorant of trolleys, affected me here and there as
the quaintest, most immemorial of American things, the persistent use of
which surely represented the very superstition of the past. I think of
the gentleman, in the watchful knot, who, while our luggage emerged, was
moved to say to me, for some reason, “I guess we manage our travelling
here better than in _your_ country!”—whereby he so easily triumphed,
blank as I had to remain as to the country he imputed to me. I think of
the inimitable detachment with which, at the very moment he spoke, the
negro porter engaged at the door of the conveyance put straight down
into the mud of the road the dressing-bag I was obliged, a few minutes
later, in our close-pressed company, to nurse on my knees; and I go so
far, even, as almost to lose myself in the sense of other occasions
evoked by that reminiscence; this marked anomaly, the apparently
deep-seated inaptitude of the negro race at large for any alertness of
personal service, having been throughout a lively surprise.

One had counted, with some eagerness, in moving southward, on the
virtual opposite—on finding this deficiency, encountered right and left
at the North, beautifully corrected; one had remembered the old Southern
tradition, the house alive with the scramble of young darkies for the
honour of fetching and carrying; and one was to recognize, no doubt, at
the worst, its melancholy ghost. Its very ghost, however, by my
impression, had ceased to walk; or, if this be not the case, the old
planters, the cotton gentry, were the people in the world the worst
ministered to. I could have shed tears for them at moments, reflecting
that it was for _this_ they had fought and fallen. The negro waiter at
the hotel is in general, by an oddity of his disposition, so zealous to
break for you two or three eggs into a tumbler, or to drop for you three
or four lumps of sugar into a coffee-cup, that he scarce waits, in
either case, for your leave; but these struck me everywhere as the limit
of his accomplishment. He lends himself sufficiently to the rough,
gregarious bustle of crowded feeding-places, but seemed to fall below
the occasion on any appeal to his individual promptitude. Which
reflections, doubtless, exactly illustrate my profession of a moment ago
as to the insidious continuity, the close inter-relation, of observed
phenomena. I might with a little audacity insist still further on
that—which was in fact what I had originally quite promised myself to
do. I certainly should have been half heart-broken at the hour itself,
for example, had I _then_ had to estimate as pure waste my state of
sensibility to the style and stamp of my companions; aspects and sounds
burned into my memory, as I find, but none the less overstraining, I am
obliged to feel, the frame of these remarks. So vivid on the spot was
the sense of these particular human and “sectional” appearances, and of
certain others of the same cluster, that they remained for me afterwards
beautifully _placed_—placed in this connection of the pilgrimage to Palm
Beach, and not the less relevant for being incidental. I was to find the
obvious “bagman,” the lusty “drummer” of the Southern trains and inns
(if there be not, as yet unrevealed to me, some later fond diminutive of
designation for the ubiquitous commercial traveller)—I was to find, I
say, this personage promptly insist on a category of his own, a category
which, at the moments I here recall, loomed so large as to threaten to
block out of view almost every other object.

Was I the victim of grave mischance? was my infelicity exceptional?—or
was the type with which the scene so abounded, were the specimens I was
thus to treasure, all of the common class and the usual frequency? I was
to treasure them as specimens of something I had surely never yet so
_undisputedly_ encountered. They went, all by themselves, as it were, so
far—were, as to facial character, vocal tone, primal rawness of speech,
general accent and attitude, extraordinarily base and vulgar; and it was
interesting to make out why this fact took on, for my edification, so
unwonted an intensity. The fact of the influence, on the whole man, of a
sordid and ravenous habit, was naturally no new thing; one had met him
enough about the world, the brawny peddler more or less gorged with the
fruits of misrepresentation and blatant and brazen in the key of his
“special line of goods” and the measure of his need. But if the figure
was immemorial, why did it now usurp a value out of proportion to other
values? What, for instance, were its remorseless reasons for treating
the restless analyst, at the breakfast-hour perhaps above all, to so
lurid a vision of its triumph? He had positively come to associate the
breakfast-hour, from hotel to dining-car and from dining-car to hotel,
with the perfect security of this exhibition, the sight of the type in
completely unchallenged possession. I scarce know why my sensibility, at
the juncture in question, so utterly gave way to it; why I appealed in
vain from one of these so solemnly-feeding presences to another. They
refused to the wondering mind any form of relief; they insisted, as I
say, with the strange crudity of their air of commercial truculence, on
being exactly as “low” as they liked. And the affirmation was made, in
the setting of the great greasy inelegant room, as quietly as possible,
and without the least intention of offence: there were ladies and
children all about—though indeed there may have been sometimes _but_ the
lone breakfasting child to reckon with; the little pale, carnivorous,
coffee-drinking ogre or ogress who prowls down in advance of its elders,
engages a table—dread vision!—and has the “run” of the bill of fare.

The great blank decency, at all events, was no more broken than, on the
general American scene, it ever is; yet the apprehension of marks and
signs, the trick of speculation, declined none the less to drop. Whom
were they constructed, such specimens, to talk with, to talk over, or to
talk under, and what form of address or of intercourse, what uttered,
what intelligible terms of introduction, of persuasion, of menace, what
developed, what specific human process of any sort, was it possible to
impute to them? What reciprocities did they imply, what presumptions did
they, could they, create? What happened, inconceivably, when such Greeks
met such Greeks, such faces looked into such faces, and such sounds, in
especial, were exchanged with such sounds? What women did they live
with, what women, living with them, could yet leave them as they were?
What wives, daughters, sisters, did they in fine make credible; and
what, in especial, was the speech, what the manners, what the general
dietary, what most the monstrous morning meal, of ladies receiving at
such hands the law or the licence of life? Questions, these latter, some
of which, all the while, were not imperceptibly answered—save that the
vainest, no doubt, was that baffled inquiry as to the thinkable ground,
amid such relations, of preliminary confidence. What _was_ preliminary
confidence, where it had to reckon so with the minimum of any finished
appearance? How, when people were like that, did any one trust any one
enough to begin, or understand any one enough to go on, or keep the
peace with any one enough to survive? Wasn’t it, however, at last, none
the less, the sign of a fallacy somewhere in my impression that the
peace _was_ kept, precisely, while I so luxuriously wondered?—the
consciousness of which presently led me round to something that was at
the least a temporary, a working answer. My friends the drummers bore me
company thus, in the smoking-car, through the deepening, sweetening
South (where the rain soon gave way to a refinement of mildness) all the
way to Savannah; at the end of which time, under the enchantment of the
spreading scene, I had more or less issued from my maze.

It was not, probably, that, inflated though they might be, after early
refreshment, with the inward conflict of a greater number of strange
sacrifices to appetite than I had ever before seen perpetrated at once,
they were really more gruesome examples of a class at best disquieting
than might elsewhere have been discovered; it was only that, by so sad a
law of their situation, they were at once more exposed and less
susceptible of bearing exposure. They so became, to my imagination, and
by a mere turn of the hand of that precious faculty, something like
victims and martyrs, creatures touchingly, tragically doomed. For they
hadn’t _asked_, when one reflected, to be almost the only figures in the
social landscape—hadn’t wanted the fierce light to beat _all_ on
themselves. They hadn’t actively usurped the appearance of carrying on
life without aid of any sort from other _kinds_ of persons, other types,
presences, classes. If these others were absent it wasn’t _their_ fault;
and though they devoured, at a matutinal sitting, thirty little saucers
of insane, of delirious food, this was yet a law which, over much of the
land, appeared to recognize no difference of application for age, sex,
condition or constitution, and it had not in short been their pretension
to take over the whole social case. It would have been so different,
this case, and the general effect, for the human scene, would have been
so different, with a due proportion of other presences, other figures
and characters, members of other professions, representatives of other
interests, exemplars of other possibilities in man than the mere
possibility of getting the better of his fellow-man over a “trade.”
Wondrous always to note is this sterility of aspect and this blight of
vulgarity, humanly speaking, where a single type has had the game, as
one may say, all in its hands. Character is developed to visible
fineness only by friction and discipline on a large scale, only by its
having to reckon with a complexity of forces—a process which results, at
the worst, in a certain amount of social training.

No kind of person—that was the admonition—is a very good kind, and still
less a very pleasing kind, when its education has not been made to some
extent by contact with other kinds, by a sense of the existence of other
kinds, and, to that degree, by a certain relation with them. This
education may easily, at a hundred points, transcend the teaching of the
big brick school-house, for all the latter’s claim to universality. The
last dose ever administered by the great wooden spoon so actively plied
_there_ is the precious bitter-sweet of a sense of proportion; yet to
miss that taste, ever, at the table of civilization is to feel ourselves
seated surely too much below the salt. We miss it when the social effect
of it fails—when, all so dismally or so monstrously, every one strikes
us as “after” but one thing, and as thus not only unaware of the absent
importances and values, but condemned and restricted, as a direct
consequence of it, to the mere raw stage of their own particular
connection. I so worked out, in a word, that what was the matter with my
friends was not at all that they were viciously full-blown, as one might
say, were the ultimate sort of monstrosity they had at first appeared;
but that they were, on the contrary, just unformed, undeveloped,
unrelated above all—unrelated to any merciful modifying terms of the
great social proposition. They were not in their place—not relegated,
shaded, embowered, protected; and, dreadful though this might be to a
stray observer of the fact, it was much more dreadful for themselves.
They had the helpless weakness and, I think even, somewhere in dim
depths, deeper down still than the awful breakfast-habit, the vaguely
troubled sense of it. They would fall into their place at a touch, were
the social proposition, as I have called it, completed; they would then
help, quite subordinately assist, the long sentence to read—relieved of
their ridiculous charge of supplying all its clauses. I positively at
last thought of them as appealing from this embarrassment; in which
sublime patience I was floated, as I say, to Savannah.


                                   II

After that it was plain sailing; in the sense, I mean, of the
respite—temporary at least—of speculation; of feeling impressions file
in and seat themselves as quietly as decorous worshippers (say mild old
ladies with neat prayer-books) taking possession of some long-drawn
family pew. It was absurd what I made of Savannah—which consisted for me
but of a quarter of an hour’s pause of the train under the wide arch of
the station, where, in the now quite confirmed blandness of the Sunday
noon, a bright, brief morning party appeared of a sudden to have
organized itself. Where was the charm?—if it wasn’t already, supremely,
in the air, the latitude, the season, as well as in the imagination of
the pilgrim capable not only of squeezing a sense from the important
city on these easy terms and with that desperate economy, but of reading
heaven knows what instalment of romance into a mere railroad matter. It
is a mere railroad matter, in the States, that a station should appear
at a given moment to yield to the invasion of a dozen or so of
bareheaded and vociferous young women in the company of young men to
match, and that they should all treat the place, in the public eye, that
of the crowded contemplative cars, quite as familiar, domestic, intimate
ground, set apart, it might be, for the discussion and regulation of
their little interests and affairs, and for that so oddly, so innocently
immodest ventilation of their puerile privacies at which the moralizing
visitor so frequently gasps. I recall my fleeting instants of Savannah
as the taste of a cup charged to the brim; I recall the swarming, the
hatless, pretty girls, with their big-bowed cues, their romping swains,
their inveterate suggestion of their having more to say about American
manners than any other single class; I recall the thrill produced by the
hawkers of scented Southern things, sprigs and specimens of flower and
fruit that mightn’t as yet be of the last exoticism, but that were
native and fresh and over-priced, and so all that the traveller could
ask.

But most of all, I think, I recall the quite lively resolve not to give
way, under the assault of the beribboned and “shirt-waisted” fair, to
the provocation of _their_ suggestiveness—even as I had fallen,
reflectively speaking, straight into the trap set for me by the
Charleston bagmen; a resolve taken, I blush to say, as a base economic
precaution only, and not because the spectacle before me failed to make
reflections swarm. They fairly hummed, my suppressed reflections, in the
manner of bees about a flower-bed, and burying their noses as deep in
the _corollæ_ of the subject. Had I allowed myself time before the train
resumed its direction, I should have thus found myself regarding the
youths and the maidens—but especially, for many reasons, the
maidens—quite in the light of my so earnestly-considered drummers, quite
as creatures extraordinarily disconcerting, at first, as to the whole
matter of their public behaviour, but covered a little by the mantle of
charity as soon as it became clear that what, like the poor drummers,
they suffer from, is the tragedy of their social, their cruel exposure,
that treachery of fate which has kept them so out of their place. It was
a case, I more than ever saw, like the case of the bagmen; the case of
the bagmen lighted it here, in the most interesting way, by propinquity
and coincidence. If the bagmen had seemed monstrous, in their occupancy
of the scene, by their disproportioned possession of it, so was not the
hint sufficient that this also explains much of the effect of the
American girl as encountered in the great glare of her publicity, her
uncorrected, unrelated state? There had been moments, as I moved about
the country, when she had seemed to me, for affirmation of presence, for
immunity from competition, fairly to share the field but with the
bagman, and fairly to speak as my inward ear had at last heard him
speak.

“Ah, once _place_ me and you’ll see—I shall be different, I shall be
better; for since I am, with my preposterous ‘position,’ falsely
beguiled, pitilessly forsaken, thrust forth in my ignorance and folly,
what do I know, helpless chit as I can but be, about manners or tone,
about proportion or perspective, about modesty or mystery, about a
condition of things that involves, for the interest and the grace of
life, other forms of existence than this poor little mine—pathetically
broken reed as it is, just to find itself waving all alone in the wind?
How can I do _all_ the grace, _all_ the interest, as I’m expected
to?—yes, literally all the interest that isn’t the mere interest on the
money. I’m expected to supply it all—while I wander and stray in the
desert. Was there ever such a conspiracy, on the part of a whole social
order, toward the exposure of incompetence? Were ever crude youth and
crude presumption left so unadmonished as to their danger of giving
themselves away? Who, at any turn, for an hour, ever pityingly
overshadows or dispossesses me? By what combination of other presences
ever am I disburdened, ever relegated and reduced, ever restored, in a
word, to my right relation to the whole? All I want—that is all I need,
for there is perhaps a difference—is, to put it simply, that my parents
and my brothers and my male cousins should consent to exist otherwise
than occultly, undiscoverably, or, as I suppose you’d call it,
irresponsibly. That’s a trouble, yes—but we take it, so why shouldn’t
they? The rest—don’t you make it out for me?—would come of itself.
Haven’t I, however, as it is, been too long abandoned and too _much_
betrayed? Isn’t it too late, and am I not, don’t you think, practically
lost?” Faintly and from far away, as through dense interpositions, this
questioning wail of the maiden’s ultimate distressed consciousness
seemed to reach me; but I had steeled my sense, as I have said, against
taking it in, and I did no more, at the moment, than all pensively
suffer it again to show me the American social order in the guise of a
great blank unnatural mother, a compound of all the recreant individuals
misfitted with the name, whose ear the mystic plaint seemed never to
penetrate, and whose large unseeing complacency suggested some massive
monument covered still with the thick cloth that precedes a public
unveiling. We wonder at the hidden marble or bronze; we suppose, under
the cloth, some attitude or expression appropriate to the image; but as
the removal of the cloth is perpetually postponed the character never
emerges. The American mother, enshrouded in her brown holland, has, by
this analogy, never emerged; only the daughter is meanwhile seated, for
the inspection of the world, at the base of the pedestal, hypothetically
supporting some weight, some mass or other, and we may each impute to
her, for this posture, the aspect we judge best to beseem her.

My point here, at any rate, is that I had quite forgotten her by the
time I was seated, after dinner that evening, on a bench in the small
public garden that formed a prospect for my hotel at Jacksonville. The
air was divinely soft—it was such a Southern night as I had dreamed of;
and the only oddity was that we had come to it by so simple a process.
We had travelled indeed all day, but the process seemed simple when
there was nothing of it, nothing to speak of, to remember, nothing that
succeeded in getting over the footlights, as the phrase goes, of the
great moving proscenium of the Pullman. I seemed to think of it, the
wayside imagery, as something that had been there, no doubt, as the
action or the dialogue are presumably there in some untoward drama that
spends itself at the back of the stage, that goes off, in a passion, at
side doors, and perhaps even bursts back, incoherently, through windows;
but that doesn’t reach the stall in which you sit, never quickens to
acuteness your sense of what is going on. So, as if the chair in the
Pullman had been my stall, my sense had been all day but of intervening
heads and tuning fiddles, of queer refreshments, such as only the
theatre and the Pullman know, offered, with vociferation, straight
through the performance. I was a little uncertain, afterwards, as to
when I had become distinctively aware of Florida; but the scenery of the
State, up to the point of my first pause for the night, had not got over
the footlights. I was promptly, however, to make good this loss; I felt
myself doing so quite with intensity under the hot-looking stars at
Jacksonville. I had come out to smoke for the evening’s end, and it
mattered not a scrap that the public garden was new and scant and crude,
and that Jacksonville is not a name to conjure with; I still could sit
there quite in the spirit, for the hour, of Byron’s immortal question as
to the verity of his Italian whereabouts: _was_ this the Mincio, _were_
those the distant turrets of Verona, and should I sup—well, if the train
to Palm Beach, arriving there on the morrow in time, should happen to
permit me? At Jacksonville I had, as I say, already supped, but I
projected myself, for the time, after Byron’s manner, into the exquisite
sense of the dream come true.

I was not to sup at all, as it proved, at Palm Beach—by the operation of
one of those odd, anomalous rigours that crop up even by the more
flowery paths of American travel; but I was meanwhile able, I found, to
be quite Byronically foolish about the St. John’s River and the various
structures, looming now through the darkness, that more or less adorned
its banks. The river served for my Mincio—which it moreover so greatly
surpassed in extent and beauty; while the remoter buildings figured
sufficiently any old city of the South. For that was the charm—that so
preposterously, with the essential notes of the impression so happily
struck, the velvet air, the extravagant plants, the palms, the oranges,
the cacti, the architectural fountain, the florid local monument, the
cheap and easy exoticism, the sense as of people feeding, off in the
background, very much _al fresco_, that is on queer things and with
flaring lights—one might almost have been in a corner of Naples or of
Genoa. Everything is relative—this illuminating commonplace, the clue to
any just perception of effects anywhere, came up for the thousandth
time; by the aid of which I easily made out that absolute and impeccable
poetry of site and circumstance is far to seek, but that I was now
immeasurably nearer to some poetic, or say even to some romantic, effect
in things than I had hitherto been. And I had tried to think Washington
relaxed, and Richmond itself romantic, and Charleston secretly ardent!
There always comes, to any traveller who doesn’t depart and arrive with
the mere security and punctuality of a registered letter, some moment
for his beginning to feel within him—it happens under some particular
touch—the finer vibration of a sense of the real thing. He thus knows it
when it comes, and it has the great value that it never need fail. There
is no situation, wherever he may turn, in which the note of that
especial reality, the note of character, for bliss or bale, may not
insist on emerging. The note of Florida emerged for me then on the
vulgar little dusky—and dusty—Jacksonville _piazzetta_, where other
vague persons sat about, amid those spikey sub-tropical things that show
how the South can be stiff as nothing else is stiff; while my rich sense
of it incited me to resent the fact that my visit had been denounced, in
advance, as of an ungenerous brevity. I had few days, deplorably few, no
doubt, to spend; but it was afterwards positive to me that, with my
image, as regards the essence of the matter, richly completed, I had
virtually foretasted it all on my dusky Jacksonville bench and in my
tepid Jacksonville stroll. Such reserves, in a complex of few
interweavings, must impose themselves, I think, even upon foolish
fondness, and Florida was quite remorselessly to appear to me a complex
of few interweavings.


                                  III

The next day, for instance, was all occupied with but one of these; the
railway run from Jacksonville to Palm Beach begins early and ends late,
yet I waited, the livelong time, for any other “factor” than that of the
dense cypress swamp to show so much as the tip of an ear. I had quite
counted on being thrilled by this very intensity and monotony of the
characteristic note; and I doubtless was thrilled—I invoked, I
cultivated the thrill, as we went, by every itinerant art that
experience had long since taught me; yet with a presentiment, all the
while, of the large field, in the whole impression, that this simplicity
would cover. Possible diversions doubtless occurred, had the attuned
spirit been moved to avail itself; Ormond, for instance, off to our
right, put in, toward the dim centre of the stretch, a claim as large as
a hard white racing-beach, an expanse of firm sand thirty miles long,
could make it. This, I recognized, might well be an appeal of the grand
and simple order—the huge band of shining silver beside the huge band of
sapphire sea; and I inquired a little as to what filled in the picture.
“Oh, the motor-cars, the bicycles and the trotting-waggons, tearing up
and down.” And then, as one seemed perhaps to yearn for another touch:
“Ah, the hotels of course—plenty of _them_, plenty of people; very
popular resort.” It sounded charming, with its hint again of two or
three great facts of composition—so definite that their paucity
constituted somehow a mild majesty; but it ministered none the less to a
reflection I had already, on occasion, found myself perhaps a little
perversely making. One was liable, in the States, on many a scene, to
react, as it were, from the people, and to throw one’s self passionately
on the bosom of contiguous Nature, whatever surface it might happen to
offer; one was apt to be moved, in possibly almost invidious preference,
or in deeper and sweeter confidence, to try what might be made of
_that_. Yet, all unreasonably, when any source of interest did express
itself in these mere rigorous terms, in these only—terms all of
elimination, just of sea and sky and river-breast and forest and beach
(the “beaches” in especial were to acquire a trick of getting on one’s
nerves!) that produced in turn a wanton wonder about the “human side,”
and a due recurrence to the fact that the human side had been from the
first one’s affair.

So, therefore, one seemed destined a bit incoherently to proceed; asking
one’s self again and again what the play would have been without the
scenery, sometimes “even such” scenery, and then once more not quite
seeing why such scenery (in especial) should propose to put one off with
so little of a play. The thing, absolutely, everywhere, was to provide
one’s own play; anything, everything made scenery for that, and the
recurrence of such questions made scenery most of all. I remember no
moment, over the land, when the mere Pullman itself didn’t overarch my
observations as a positive temple of the drama, and when the comedy and
the tragedy of manners didn’t, under its dome, hold me raptly attent.
With which there were other resources—a rising tide that, before we got
to Palm Beach, floated me back into remembered depths of youth. Why
shouldn’t I hold it not trivial that, as the day waned, and the evening
gathered, and the heat increased, and my companions removed, one after
the other, the articles of clothing that had consorted with our early
start, I felt myself again beneath the spell of Mayne Reid, captain of
the treasure-ship of romance and idol of my childhood? I might again
have held in my very hand _The War Trail_, a work that had seemed
matchless to my fourteenth year, for was not the train itself rumbling
straight into _that_ fantastic Florida, with its rank vegetation and its
warm, heroic, amorous air?—the Florida of the Seminoles and the
Everglades, of the high old Spanish Dons and the passionate Creole
beauties gracing the primal “society”; of Isolina de Vargas, whose
voluptuous form was lashed Mazeppa-like, at the climax of her fortunes,
to the fiery mustang of the wilderness, and so let loose adown the
endless vista of our young suspense. We had thus food for the mind, I
recall, if we were reduced to that; and I remember that, as my
buffet-car (there was none other) was hours late, the fond vision of the
meal, crown of the endless day, awaiting me ultimately at the famous
hotel, yielded all the inspiration necessary for not appealing again,
great though the stress and strain, to the indescribable charity of the
“buffet.” The produce of the buffet, the procedure of the buffet, were
alike (wherever resorted to) a sordid mockery of desire; so I but
suffered desire to accumulate till the final charming arrest, the
platform of the famous hotel, amid generous lights and greetings, and
excellent arrangements, and balmy Southern airs, and the breath of the
near sea, and the vague crests of great palms, announced the fulfilment
of every hope.

The question of whether one’s hope was really fulfilled, or of whether
one had, among all those items of ease, to go supperless to bed, would
doubtless appear beneath the dignity of even such history as this, were
it not for a single fact—which, then and there looming large to me,
blocked out, on the spot, all others. It is difficult to render the
intensity with which one felt the great sphere of the hotel close round
one, covering one in as with high, shining crystal walls, stretching
beneath one’s feet an immeasurable polished level, revealing itself in
short as, for the time, for the place, the very order of nature and the
very form, the only one, of the habitable world. The effect was like
nothing else of the sort one had ever known, and of surpassing interest,
truly, as any supreme illustration of manners, any complete and organic
projection of a “social” case is apt to be. The whole picture presented
itself as fresh and luminous—as was natural to phenomena shown in the
splendid Florida light and off there at the end of a huge peninsula
especially appointed to them, and kept clear, in their interest, as it
struck me, of any shadow of anything but themselves. One had been aware
enough, certainly, for long years, of that range of American aspects,
that diffusion of the American example, to which one had given, from far
back, for convenience, the name of hotel-civilization; why, accordingly,
was this renewed impression so hugely to impose itself; why was it, to
the eye of the restless analyst, to stand for so much more than ever
yet? Why was it, above all, so to succeed in making, with insistence,
its appeal?—an appeal if not to the finer essence of interest, yet to
several of the fond critic’s livelier sensibilities. Wasn’t, for that
matter, his asking of such questions as these the very state of being
interested?—and all the more that the general reply to them was not easy
to throw off.

The vision framed, the reflections suggested, corresponded closely with
those to which, in New York, some weeks before, on its harsh winter
afternoon, the Waldorf-Astoria had prescribed such a revel; but it was
wondrous that if I had there supposed the apogee of the impression (or,
better still, of the expression) reached, I was here to see the whole
effect written lucidly larger. The difference was doubtless that of the
crowded air and encumbered ground in the great Northern city—in the fact
that the demonstration is made in Florida as in a vast clean void
expressly prepared for it. It has nothing either in nature or in man to
reckon with—it carries everything before it; meaning, when I say “it,”
in this momentarily indefinite way, the perfect, the exquisite
adjustability of the “national” life to the sublime hotel-spirit. The
whole appearance operates as by an economy so thorough that no element
of either party to the arrangement is discoverably sacrificed; neither
is mutilated, docked in any degree of its identity, its amplitude of
type; nothing is left unexpressed in either through its relation with
the other. The relation would in fact seem to stimulate each to a view
of the highest expression as yet open to it. The advantage—in the sense
of the “upper hand”—may indeed be, at a few points, most with the
hotel-spirit, as the more concentrated of the two; there being so much
that is comparatively undeveloped and passive in the social organism to
which it looks for response, and the former agency, by its very nature
full-blown and expert, “trying it on” the latter much more than the
latter is ever perceptibly moved to try it on the former. The
hotel-spirit is an omniscient genius, while the character of the
tributary nation is still but struggling into relatively dim
self-knowledge. An illustration of this met me, precisely, at the very
hour of my alighting: one had entered, toward ten o’clock in the
evening, the hotel-world; it had become the all in all and made and
imposed its law.

This took the form, for me, at that hungry climax, at the end of the
long ordeal of the buffet-car, of a refusal of all food that night; a
rigour so inexorable that, had it not been for the charity of admirable
friends, able to provide me from a private store, I should have had to
go, amid all the suggestions of everything, fasting and faint to bed.
There one seemed to get the hotel-spirit _taking_ the advantage—taking
it unfairly; for whereas it struck me in general as educative,
distinctly, in respect to the society it deals with, keeping for the
most part well in advance of it, and leading it on to a larger view of
the social interest and opportunity than might otherwise accrue, here,
surely, it was false to its mission, it fell behind its pretension, its
general pretension not only of meeting all American ideals, but of
creating (the Waldorf-Astoria being in this sense, for example, a
perfect riot of creation) new and superior ones. Its basis, in those
high developments, is not that it merely gratifies them as soon as they
peep out, but that it lies in wait for them, anticipates and plucks them
forth even before they dawn, setting them up almost prematurely and
turning their face in the right direction. Thus the great national
ignorance of many things is artfully and benevolently practised upon;
thus it is converted into extraordinary appetites, such as can be but
expensively sated. The belated traveller’s appetite for the
long-deferred “bite” could scarce be described as _too_ extraordinary;
but the great collective, plastic public, so vague yet about many
things, didn’t _know_ that it couldn’t, didn’t know that, in communities
more knowing, the great glittering, costly caravansery, where the scale
of charges is an implication of a high refinement of service, grave
lapses are not condoned.

One appears ridiculously to be regretting that unsupplied mouthful, but
the restless analyst had in truth quickly enough left it behind, feeling
in his hand, already, as a clue, the long concatenation of interlinked
appearances. Things short in themselves might yet have such large
dimensions of meaning. The revelation, practically dazzling to the
uninformed many, was constantly proving, right and left, if one gave it
time, a trick played on the informed few; and there was no quarter of
the field, either the material or the “social,” in which that didn’t
sooner or later come out. The fact that the individual, with his
preferences, differences, habits, accidents, might still fare
imperfectly even where the crowd could be noted as rejoicing before the
Lord more ingenuously than on any other human scene, added but another
touch to one’s impression, already so strong, of the success with which,
throughout the land, even in conditions which might appear likely, on
certain sides, to beget reserves about it, the all-gregarious and
generalized life suffices to every need. I by no means say that it is
not touching, the so largely witless confidence with which the universal
impulse hurls its victims into the abyss of the hotel-spirit, trusting
it so blandly and inviting it to throw up, round and about them and far
and wide, the habitable, the practicable, the agreeable sphere toward
which other arts of construction fail. There were lights in which this
was to strike me as one of the most affecting of all social exhibitions;
lights, positively, in which I seemed to see again (as, once more, at
the universal Waldorf-Astoria) the whole housed populace move as in mild
and consenting suspicion of its captured and governed state, its having
to consent to inordinate fusion as the price of what it seemed pleased
to regard as inordinate luxury. Beguiled and caged, positively thankful,
in its vast vacancy, for the sense and the definite horizon of a cage,
were there yet not moments, were there yet not cases and connections, in
which it still dimly made out that its condition was the result of a
compromise into the detail of which there might some day be an alarm in
entering? The detail of the compromise exacted of the individual,
throughout American life, affects the observer as a great cumulative
sum, growing and growing while he awaits time and opportunity to go into
it; and I asked myself again and again if I couldn’t imagine the shadow
of that quantity by no means oppressively felt, yet already vaguely
perceived, and reflected a bit portentously in certain aspects of the
native consciousness.

The jealous cultivation of the common mean, the common mean only, the
reduction of everything to an average of decent suitability, the gospel
of precaution against the dangerous tendency latent in many things to
become too good for their context, so that persons partaking of them may
become too good for their company—the idealized form of all this
glimmered for me, as an admonition or a betrayal, through the charming
Florida radiance, constituting really the greatest interest of the
lesson one had travelled so far to learn. It might superficially seem
absurd, it might savour almost of blasphemy, to put upon the “romantic”
peninsula the affront of that particular prosaic meaning; but I profess
that none of its so sensibly thin sources of romance—thin because
everywhere asking more of the imagination than they could be detected in
giving it—appealed to me with any such force or testified in any such
quantity. Definitely, one had made one’s pilgrimage but to find the
hotel-spirit in sole _articulate_ possession, and, call this truth for
the mind an anti-climax if one would, none of the various climaxes, the
minor effects—those of Nature, for instance, since thereabouts, far and
wide, was no hinted history—struck me as for a moment dispossessing it
of supremacy. So little availed, comparatively, those of the jungle, the
air, the sea, the sky, the sunset, the orange, the pineapple, the palm;
so little such a one, amid all the garden climaxes, as that of the
divine bougainvillæa which, here and there, at Palm Beach, smothers
whole “homes” in its purple splendour. For the light of the hotel-spirit
really beat upon everything; it was the only torch held up for the view
or the sense of anything else. The case, therefore, was perfect, for
what did this mean but that its conscience, so to speak, its view of its
responsibility, would be of the highest, and that, given the whole
golden frame of the picture, the appearances could be nowhere else so
grandly in its favour? That prevision was to be in fact afterwards
confirmed to me.


                                   IV

On a strip of sand between the sea and the jungle in one quarter,
between the sea and the Lake in another, the clustered hotels, the
superior Pair in especial, stand and exhale their genius. One of them,
the larger, the more portentously brave, of the Pair, is a marvel
indeed, proclaiming itself of course, with all the eloquence of an
interminable towered and pinnacled and gabled and bannered sky-line, the
biggest thing of its sort in the world. Such is the responsive geniality
begotten by its apparently perfect adequacy to this pretension, or to
any other it might care to put forth, that one took it easily as leaving
far behind mere figures of speech and forms of advertisement; to stand
off and see it rear its incoherent crest above its gardens was to
remember—and quite with relief—nothing but the processional outline of
Windsor Castle that could appear to march with it. I say with relief
because the value of the whole affirmation, which was but the scale
otherwise expressed, seemed thereby assured: no world _but_ an
hotel-world could flourish in such a shadow. Every step, for a mile or
two round, conduced but to show how it did flourish; every aspect of
everything for which our reclaimed patch, our liberal square between sea
and jungle, yielded space, was a demonstration of that. The gardens and
groves, the vistas and avenues between the alignments of palms, the
fostered insolence of flame-coloured flower and golden fruit, were
perhaps the rarest attestation of all; so recent a conquest did this
seem to me of ground formerly abandoned, in the States, to the general
indifference. There came back to me from other years a vision of the
rude and sordid margins, the untended approaches surrounding, at
“resorts,” the crowded caravansery of the earlier time—and marking even
now, I inferred, those of the type that still survive; and I caught
verily at play that best virtue of the potent presence. The hotel was
leading again, not following—imposing the standard, not submitting to
it; teaching the affluent class how to “garden,” how, in fact, to tidy
up its “yard”—since affluence alone was supposable there; not receiving
at other hands the lesson. It was doing more than this—discriminating in
favour of the beautiful, and above all in favour of the “refined,” with
an energy that again, in the most interesting way, seemed to cause the
general question of the future of beauty in America to heave in its
unrest.

Fifty times, already, I had felt myself catching this vibration,
received some vivid impression of the growing quantity of force
available for that conquest—of all the latent powers of freedom of
space, of wealth, of faith and knowledge and curiosity, verily perhaps
even of sustained passion, potentially at its service. These
possibilities glimmer before one at times, in presence of some artistic
effect expensively yet intelligently, yet even charmingly produced, with
the result of your earnestly saying: “Why not more and more then, why
not an immense exploration, an immense exhibition, of such
possibilities? What is wanting for it, after all, in the way of——?” Just
there it is indeed that you pull yourself up—ah, in the way of what? You
are conscious that what you recognize in especial is not so much the
positive as the negative strength of the case. What you see is the space
and the freedom—which at every turn, in America, make one yearn to take
other things for granted. The ground is so clear of preoccupation, the
air so clear of prejudgment and doubt, that you wonder why the chance
shouldn’t be as great for the æsthetic revel as for the political and
economic, why some great undaunted adventure of the arts, meeting in its
path none of the aged lions of prescription, of proscription, of merely
jealous tradition, should not take place in conditions unexampled. From
the moment it is but a question of some one’s, of every one’s caring,
where was the conceivable quantity of care, where were the means and
chances of application, ever so great? And the precedent, the analogy,
of the universal organizing passion, the native aptitude for putting
affairs “through,” indubitably haunts you: you are so aware of the
acuteness and the courage that you fall but a little short of figuring
them as æsthetically contributive. But you do fall short; you remember
in time that great creations of taste and faith never express themselves
_primarily_ in terms of mere convenience and zeal, and that all the
waiting money and all the general fury have, at the most, the sole value
of being destined to be good for beauty _when it shall appear_. They
have it in them so little, by themselves, to make it appear, that your
unfinished question arrives easily enough, in that light, at its end.

“What is wanting in the way of taste?” is the right form of the
inquiry—that small circumstance alone being _positively_ contributive.
The others, the boundless field, the endless gold, the habit of great
enterprises, are, you feel, at most, simple negations of difficulty.
They affect you none the less, however, as a rank of stalwart soldiers
and servants who, as they stand at attention, plead from wistful eyes to
be enrolled and used; so that before any embodied symptom of the
precious principle they are there in the background of your thought.
These lingering instants spent in the presence of such symptoms, these
brief moments of æsthetic arrest—liable to occur in the most diverse
connections—have an interest that quite picks them, I think, from the
heap of one’s American hours. And the interest is always fine, throwing
one back as, by a further turn, it usually does, on the question of the
trick possibly played, for your appreciation, by mere negation of
difficulty. To what extent may the absence of difficulty, to what extent
may not facility of purchase and sweet simplicity of pride, surprise you
into taking them momentarily for a demonstration of taste? You remain on
your guard, very properly; but the interest, as I have called it,
doesn’t flag, none the less, since there is one mistake into which you
never need fall, and one charming, one touching appearance that you may
take as representing, wherever you meet it, a reality. When once you
have interpreted the admonitory sign I have just named as the inordinate
_desire for taste_, a desire breaking into a greater number of quaint
and candid forms, probably, than have ever been known upon earth, the
air is in a manner clearer, and you know sufficiently where you are.
Isn’t it cleared, moreover, beyond doubt, to the positive increase of
the interest, and doesn’t the question then become, almost thrillingly,
that of the degree to which this pathos of desire may be condemned to
remain a mere heartbreak to the historic muse? _Is_ that to be,
possibly, the American future—so far as, over such a mystery of
mysteries, glibness may be permitted? The fascination grows while you
wonder—as, from the moment you have begun to go into the matter at all,
wonder you certainly must. If with difficulties so conjured away by
power, the clear vision, the creative freshness, the real thing in a
word, _shall_ have to continue to be represented, indefinitely, but by a
gilded yearning, the inference is then irresistible that these blessings
are indeed of their essence a sovereign rarity. If with so many of the
conditions they yet hang back, on what particular occult furtherance
must they not incorruptibly depend? What are the other elements that
make for them, and in what manner and at what points does the wrong
combination of such elements, on the American scene, work for
frustration? Entrancing speculation!—which has brought me back by a long
circuit to the shining marble villa on the edge of Lake Worth.

I was about to allude to this wondrous creation as the supreme instance
of missionary effort on the part of the hotel-spirit—by which I mean of
the effort to illustrate and embody a group of its ideals, to give a
splendid concrete example of its ability to flower, at will, into
concentration, into conspicuous privacy, into a care for all the
refinements. The palace rears itself, behind its own high gates and
gilded, transparent barriers, at a few minutes’ walk from the great
caravanseries; it sits there, in its admirable garden, amid its statues
and fountains, the hugeness of its more or less antique vases and
sarcophagi—costliest reproductions all—as if to put to shame those
remembered villas of the Lake of Como, of the Borromean Islands, the
type, the climate, the horticultural elegance, the contained
curiosities, luxuries, treasures, of which it invokes only to surpass
them at every point. New with that consistency of newness which one sees
only in the States, it seems to say, somehow, that to some such heaven,
some such public exaltation of the Blest, those who have conformed with
due earnestness to the hotel-spirit, and for a sufficiently long
probation, may hope eventually to penetrate or perhaps actually retire.

It has sprung from the genius of the divine Pair, the Dioscuri
themselves—as Castor and Pollux were the sons of Zeus; and has this,
above all, of exemplary, that whereas one had in other climes and
countries often seen the proprietor of estates construct an hotel, or
hotels, on a piece of his property, and even, when rigid need was, in
proximity to his “home,” one had not elsewhere seen the home adjoined to
the hotel, and placed, with such magnificence, under its protection and,
as one might say, its star. In the former case—it was easy to
reflect—there had been ever, at best, an effect of incoherence; while
the beauty of logic, of the strictly consequent, was all on the side of
the latter. So much as that one may say; but I should find it hard to
express without some air of extravagance my sense of the beauty of the
lesson read to the general Palm Beach consciousness from behind the
gilded gates and between the large interstices of the enclosure. It had
the immense merit that it was suited, admirably, to the “boarders”; it
preached them the gospel of civilization all in their own terms and
without the waste of an accent; it was in short the apotheosis, the
ideal form of the final home that may pretend to crown a career of
sufficiently expensive boarding. Anything less gorgeous wouldn’t have
been proportioned to so much expense, nor anything more sequestered in
the key of such a mode of life. But I detach myself, with reluctance,
from the view of this interesting creation—interesting in its sense of
bathing the whole question of manners in a light. Anything that does
that is a boon to the restless analyst; and I remember rejoicing that he
should have been introduced promptly to the marble palace, which struck
him as rewarding attention the more attention was privileged and the
further it might penetrate. Such an experience was, all properly,
preliminary to a view of the rest of the scene; since otherwise,
frankly, in relation to what at all represented ideal were the boarders,
in their vast multitude, to be viewed?

For the boarders, verily, were the great indicated show, as I had
gathered in advance, at Palm Beach; it had been promised one, on all
sides, that there, as nowhere else, in America, one would find Vanity
Fair in full blast—and Vanity Fair not scattered, not discriminated and
parcelled out, as among the comparative privacies and ancientries of
Newport, but compressed under one vast cover, enclosed in a single huge
_vitrine_, which there would be nothing to prevent one’s flattening
one’s nose against for days of delight. It was into Vanity Fair,
accordingly, that one embraced every opportunity to press; it was the
boarders, frankly, who engaged one’s attention in default of any great
array of other elements. The other elements, it must be confessed,
strike the visitor as few; he has soon come to the end of them, even
though they consist of the greater part of the rest of the sense of
Florida. And he seems to himself to pursue them, mainly, at the tail,
and in the constant track of the boarders; these latter are so numerous,
and the clearing in the jungle so comparatively minute, that there is
scant occasion for the wandering apart which always forms, under the law
of the herd, the intenser joy. The velvet air, the colour of the sea,
the “royal” palms, clustered here and there, and, in their nobleness of
beauty, their single sublime distinction, putting every other mark and
sign to the blush, these are the principal figures of the sum—these,
with the custom of the short dip into the jungle, at two or three points
of which, approached by charming, winding wood-ways, the small but
genial fruit-farm offers hospitality—offers it in all the succulence of
the admirable pale-skinned orange and the huge sun-warmed grapefruit,
plucked from the low bough, where it fairly bumps your cheek for
solicitation, and partaken of, on the spot, as the immortal ladies of
Cranford partook of dessert—with a few steps aside, the back turned and
a betrayed ingurgitation. It is by means of a light perambulator, of
“adult size,” but constructed of wicker-work, and pendent from a bicycle
propelled by a robust negro, that the jungle is thus visited; the
bicycle follows the serpentine track, the secluded ranch is swiftly
reached, the peaceful retirement of the cultivators multitudinously
admired, the perambulator promptly re-entered, the darkey restored to
the saddle and his charge again to the hotel.


                                   V

It is all most agreeable and diverting, it is almost, the boarders
apart, romantic; but it is soon over, and there is not much more of it.
The uncanny conception, the rank eccentricity of a walk encounters
neither favour nor facility—but on the subject of the inveteracy with
which the conditions, over the land, conspire against that sweet
subterfuge there would be more to say than I may here deal with. One of
these gentle ranches was approached by water, as Palm Beach has a front
on its vast, fresh lake as well as seaward; a steam-launch puts you down
at the garden foot, and the place is less infested by the boarders, less
confessedly undefended, less artlessly ignorant in fine (thanks perhaps
to the mere interposing water) of any possible right to occultation; the
general absence of conception of that right, nowhere asserted, nowhere
embodied, everywhere in fact quite sacrificially abrogated, qualifying
at last your very sense of the American character—qualifying it very
much as a pervading unsaltedness qualifies the taste of a dinner. This
brief excursion remains with me, at any rate, as a delicate and
exquisite impression; the neck of land that stretched from the languid
lake to the anxious sea, the approach to real detachment, the gracious
Northern hostess, just veiled, for the right felicity, in a thin
nostalgic sadness, the precious recall in particular of having succeeded
in straying a little, through groves of the pensive palm, down to the
sandy, the vaguely-troubled shore. There was a certain concentration in
the hour, a certain intensity in the note, a certain intimacy in the
whole communion; I found myself loving, quite fraternally, the palms,
which had struck me at first, for all their human-headed gravity, as
merely dry and taciturn, but which became finally as sympathetic as so
many rows of puzzled philosophers, dishevelled, shock-pated, with the
riddle of the universe. This scantness and sweetness and sadness, this
strange peninsular spell, _this_, I said, was sub-tropical Florida—and
doubtless as permitted a glimpse as I should ever have of any such
effect. The softness was divine—like something mixed, in a huge silver
crucible, as an elixir, and then liquidly scattered. But the refinement
of the experience would be the summer noon or the summer night—it would
be then the breast of Nature would open; save only that, so lost in it
and with such lubrication of surrender, how should one ever come back?

As it was, one came back soon enough, back to one’s proper business:
which appeared to be, urgently, strictly, severely, the pursuit of the
boarders up and down the long corridors and round about the wide
verandahs of their crowded career. I had been admirably provided for at
the less egregious of the two hotels; which was vast and cool and fair,
friendly, breezy, shiny, swabbed and burnished like a royal yacht,
really immaculate and delightful; full of interesting lights and yet
standing but on the edge of the whirlpool, the centre of which formed
the heart of the adjacent colossus. One could plunge, by a short walk
through a luxuriance of garden, into the deeper depths; one could lose
one’s self, if so minded, in the labyrinth of the other show. There, if
Vanity Fair was not encamped, it was not for want of booths; the long
corridors were streets of shops, dealing, naturally, in commodities
almost beyond price—not the cheap gimcracks of the usual watering-place
barrack, but solid (when not elaborately ethereal), formidable,
incalculable values, of which it was of an admonitory economic interest
to observe the triumphant appeal. They hadn’t terrors, apparently, for
the clustered boarders, these idols and monsters of the market—neither
the wild fantastications of the milliner, the uncovered fires, disclosed
secrets of the gem-merchant, the errant tapestries and _bahuts_ of the
antiquarian, nor, what I found most impressive and what has everywhere
its picture-making force, those ordered dispositions and stretched
lengths of old “point” in the midst of which a quiet lady in black,
occupied with some small stitch of her own, is apt to raise at you, with
expensive deliberation, a grave, white Flemish face. The interest of the
general spectacle was supposed to be, I had gathered, that people from
all parts of the country contributed to it; and the value of the
testimony as to manners was that it brought to a focus so many elements
of difference. The elements of difference, whatever they might latently
have been, struck me as throughout forcibly simplified by the conditions
of the place; this prompt reducibility of a thousand figures to a common
denominator having been in fact, to my sense, the very moral of the
picture. Individuality and variety is attributed to “types,” in America,
on easy terms, and the reputation for it enjoyed on terms not more
difficult; so that what I was most conscious of, from aspect to aspect,
from group to group, from sex to sex, from one presented boarder to
another, was the continuity of the fusion, the dimness of the
distinctions.

The distinction that was least absent, however, would have been, I
judge, that of the comparative ability to spend and purchase; the
ability to spend with freedom being, as one made out, a positive
consistent with all sorts of negatives. That helped to make the whole
thing documentary—that you had to be financially more or less at your
ease to enjoy the privileges of the Royal Poinciana at all; enjoy them
through their extended range of saloons and galleries, fields of high
publicity all; pursue them from dining-halls to music-rooms, to
ball-rooms, to card-rooms, to writing-rooms, to a succession of places
of convenience and refreshment, not the least characteristic of which,
no doubt, was the terrace appointed to mid-morning and mid-afternoon
drinks—drinks, at the latter hour, that appeared, oddly, never to
comprise tea, the only one appreciated in “Europe” at that time of day.
(The quest of tea indeed, especially at the hour when it is most a
blessing, struck me as attended, throughout the country, with
difficulties, even with dangers; over ground where one’s steps are
beset, everywhere, with an infinite number of strange, sweet iced
liquidities—many of these, I hasten to add, charmingly congruous, in
their non-alcoholic ingenuity, with the heats of summer: a circumstance
that doesn’t prevent their flourishing equally in the rigour of cold.)
The implication of “ease” was thus a light to assist inquiry; it is
always a gained fact about people—as to “where” they are, if not as to
who or what—that they are either in confirmed or in casual possession of
money, and thereby, presumably, of all that money may, in this
negotiable world, represent. Add to this that the company came, in its
provided state, by common report, from “all over,” that it converged
upon Palm Beach from every prosperous corner of the land, and the case
was clear for a compendious view of American society in the largest
sense of the term. “Society,” as we loosely use the word, is made up of
the fortunate few, and, if that number be everywhere small at the best,
it was yet the fortunate who, after their fashion, filled the frame.
Every obligation lay upon me to “study” them as so gathered in, and I
did my utmost, I remember, to render them that respect; yet when I now,
after an interval, consult my notes, I find the page a blank, and when I
knock at the door of memory I find it perversely closed. If it consents
a little to open, rather, a countenance looks out—that of the
inscrutable warden of the precinct—and seems to show me the ambiguous
smile that accompanies on occasion the plea to be excused.

From which I infer that the form and pressure of the boarders, for all I
had expected of the promised picture, failed somehow to affect me as a
discussable quantity. It is of the nature of many American impressions,
accepted at the time as a whole of the particular story, simply to cease
to be, as soon as your back is turned—to fade, to pass away, to leave
not a wreck behind. This happens not least when the image, whatever it
may have been, has exacted the tribute of wonder or pleasure: it has
displayed every virtue but the virtue of being able to remain with you.
Its pressure and power have failed of some weight, some element of
density or intensity, some property or quality in short that makes for
the authority of a figure, for the complexity of a scene. The “European”
vision, in general, of whatever consisting, and even when making less of
an explicit appeal, has behind it a driving force—derived from sources
into which I won’t pretend here to enter—that make it, comparatively,
“bite,” as the plate of the etcher is bitten by aquafortis. That
doubtless is the matter, in the States, with the vast peaceful and
prosperous human show—in conditions, especially, in which its peace and
prosperity most shine out: it registers itself on the plate with an
incision too vague and, above all, too uniform. The paucity of one’s
notes is in itself, no doubt, a report of the consulted oracle; it
describes and reconstitutes for me the array of the boarders, this
circumstance that I only grope for their features and seek in vain to
discriminate between sorts and conditions. There were the two sexes, I
think, and the range of age, but, once the one comprehensive type was
embraced, no other signs of differentiation. How should there have been
when the men were consistently, in all cases, thoroughly obvious
products of the “business-block,” the business-block unmitigated by any
other influence definite enough to name, and the women were, under the
same strictness, the indulged ladies of such lords? The business-block
has perhaps, from the north-east to the south-west, its fine
diversities, but any variety so introduced eluded even the most brooding
of analysts.

And it was not of course that the marks of uniformity, among so many
persons, were not on _their_ side perfectly appreciable; it was only
that when one had noted them as marks of “success,” no doubt, primarily,
and then as those of great gregarious decency and sociability and
good-humour, one had exhausted the list. It was the scant diversity of
type that left me short, as a story-seeker or picture-maker;
contributive as this very fact might be to admiration of the costly
processes, as they thus appear, that ensure, and that alone ensure, in
other societies, the opposite of that scantness. With this, as the
foredoomed observer may never escape from the dreadful faculty that
rides him, the very simplifications had in the highest degree their
illustrative value; they gave all opportunity to anything or any one
that might be salient. They gave it to the positive bourgeois propriety,
serenely, imperturbably, massively seated, and against which any
experimental deviation from the bourgeois would have dashed itself in
vain. This neutrality of respectability might have been figured by a
great grey wash of some charged moist brush causing colour and outline,
on the pictured paper, effectually to run together. What resisted it
best was the look of “business success” in some of the men; when that
success had been very great (and there were indicated cases of its
prodigious greatness) the look was in its turn very great; when it had
been small, on the other hand, there was doubtless no look at all—since
there were no other conceivable sources of appearance. The people had
not, and the women least of all, one felt, in general, been transferred
from other backgrounds; the scene around them and behind them
constituted as replete a medium as they could ever have been conscious
of; the women in particular failed in an extraordinary degree to engage
the imagination, to offer it, so to speak, references or openings: it
faltered—doubtless respectfully enough—where they for the most part so
substantially and prosaically sat, failing of any warrant to go an inch
further. As for the younger persons, of whom there were many, as for the
young girls in especial, they were as perfectly in their element as
goldfish in a crystal jar: a form of exhibition suggesting but one
question or mystery. Was it they who had invented it, or had it
inscrutably invented _them_?


                                   VI

The case of St. Augustine afterwards struck me as presenting, on another
side, its analogy with the case at Palm Beach: if the “social interest”
had in the latter place appeared but of a weak constitution, so the
historic, at the former, was to work a spell of a simpler sort than one
had been brought up, as it were, to look to. Hadn’t one been brought up,
from far back, on the article of that faith in St. Augustine, by
periodical papers in the magazines, fond elucidations of its romantic
character, accompanied by drawings that gave one quite proudly, quite
patriotically, to think—that filled the cup of curiosity and yearning?
The old town—for the essence of the faith had been that there _was_ an
“old town”—receded into an all but untraceable past; it had been of all
American towns the earliest planted, and it bristled still with every
evidence of its Spanish antiquity. The illustrations in the magazines,
wondrous vignettes of old street vistas, old architectural treasures,
gateways and ramparts, odds and ends, nooks and corners, crowned with
the sweetness of slow decay, conveyed the sense of these delights and
renewed at frequent intervals their appeal. But oh, as I was to observe,
the school of “black and white” trained up by the magazines has much, in
the American air, to answer for: it points so vividly the homely moral
that when you haven’t what you like you must perforce like, and above
all misrepresent, what you have. Its translation of these perfunctory
passions into pictorial terms saddles it with a weight of responsibility
that would be greater, one can only say, if there ever were a critic,
some guardian of real values, to bring it to book. The guardians of real
values struck me as, up and down, far to seek. The whole matter indeed
would seem to come back, interestingly enough, to the general truth of
the æsthetic need, in the country, for much greater values, of certain
sorts, than the country and its manners, its aspects and arrangements,
its past and present, and perhaps even future, really supply; whereby,
as the æsthetic need is also intermixed with a patriotic yearning, a
supply has somehow to be extemporized, by any pardonable form of
pictorial “hankey-pankey”—has to be, as the expression goes, cleverly
“faked.” But it takes an inordinate amount of faking to meet the
supposed intensity of appetite of a body of readers at once more
numerous and less critical than any other in the world; so that,
frankly, the desperate expedient is written large in much of the
“artistic activity” of the country.

The results are of the oddest; they hang all traceably together;
wonderful in short the general spectacle and lesson of the scale and
variety of the faking. They renew again the frequent admonition that the
pabulum provided for a great thriving democracy may derive most of its
interest from the nature of its testimony to the thriving democratic
demand. No long time is required, in the States, to make vivid for the
visitor the truth that the nation is almost feverishly engaged in
producing, with the greatest possible activity and expedition, an
“intellectual” pabulum after its own heart, and that not only the arts
and ingenuities of the draftsman (called upon to furnish the picturesque
background and people it with the “aristocratic” figure where neither of
these revelations ever meets his eye) pay their extravagant tribute, but
that those of the journalist, the novelist, the dramatist, the
genealogist, the historian, are pressed as well, for dear life, into the
service. The illustrators of the magazines improvise, largely—that is
when not labouring in the cause of the rural dialects—improvise the
field of action, full of features at any price, and the characters who
figure upon it, young gods and goddesses mostly, of superhuman stature
and towering pride; the novelists improvise, with the aid of the
historians, a romantic local past of costume and compliment and
sword-play and gallantry and passion; the dramatists build up, of a
thousand pieces, the airy fiction that the life of the people in the
world among whom the elements of clash and contrast are simplest and
most superficial abounds in the subjects and situations and effects of
the theatre; while the genealogists touch up the picture with their
pleasant hint of the number, over the land, of families of royal blood.
All this constitutes a vast home-grown provision for entertainment,
rapidly superseding any that may be borrowed or imported, and that
indeed already begins, not invisibly, to press for exportation. As to
quantity, it looms immense, and resounds in proportion, yet with the
property, all its own, of ceasing to be, of fading like the mist of
dawn—that is of giving no account of itself whatever—as soon as one
turns on it any intending eye of appreciation or of inquiry. It is the
public these appearances collectively refer us to that becomes thus
again the more attaching subject; the public so placidly uncritical that
the whitest thread of the deceptive stitch never makes it blink, and
sentimental at once with such inveteracy and such simplicity that,
finding everything everywhere perfectly splendid, it fairly goes upon
its knees to be humbuggingly humbugged. It proves ever, by the ironic
measure, quite incalculably young.

That perhaps was all that had been the matter with it in presence of the
immemorial legend of St. Augustine as a mine of romance; St. Augustine
proving primarily, and of course quite legitimately, but an hotel, of
the first magnitude—an hotel indeed so remarkable and so pleasant that I
wondered what call there need ever have been upon it to prove anything
else. The Ponce de Leon, for that matter, comes as near producing, all
by itself, the illusion of romance as a highly modern, a most
cleverly-constructed and smoothly-administered great modern caravansery
can come; it is largely “in the Moorish style” (as the cities of Spain
preserve the record of that manner); it breaks out, on every pretext,
into circular arches and embroidered screens, into courts and cloisters,
arcades and fountains, fantastic projections and lordly towers, and is,
in all sorts of ways and in the highest sense of the word, the most
“amusing” of hotels. It did for me, at St. Augustine, I was well aware,
everything that an hotel could do—after which I could but appeal for
further service to the old Spanish Fort, the empty, sunny, grassy shell
by the low, pale shore; the mild, time-silvered quadrilateral that,
under the care of a single exhibitory veteran and with the still milder
remnant of a town-gate near it, preserves alone, to any effect of
appreciable emphasis, the memory of the Spanish occupation. One wandered
there for meditation—it is not congruous with the genius of Florida, I
gathered, to permit you to wander very far; and it was there perhaps
that, as nothing prompted, on the whole, to intenser musings, I suffered
myself to be set moralizing, in the manner of which I have just given an
example, over the too “thin” projection of legend, the too dry response
of association. The Spanish occupation, shortest of ineffectual
chapters, seemed the ghost of a ghost, and the burnt-out fire but such a
pinch of ashes as one might properly fold between the leaves of one’s
_Baedeker_. Yet if I made this remark I made it without bitterness;
since there was no doubt, under the influence of this last look, that
Florida still had, in her ingenuous, not at all insidious way, the
secret of pleasing, and that even round about me the vagueness was still
an appeal. The vagueness was warm, the vagueness was bright, the
vagueness was sweet, being scented and flowered and fruited; above all,
the vagueness was somehow consciously and confessedly weak. I made out
in it something of the look of the charming shy face that desires to
communicate and that yet has just too little expression. What it would
fain say was that it really knew itself unequal to any extravagance of
demand upon it, but that (if it might so plead to one’s tenderness) it
would always do its gentle best. I found the plea, for myself, I may
declare, exquisite and irresistible: the Florida of that particular tone
was a Florida adorable.


                                  VII

This last impression had indeed everything to gain from the sad rigour
of steps retraced, an inevitable return to the North (in the interest of
a directly subsequent, and thereby gracelessly roundabout, move
Westward); and I confess to having felt on that occasion, before the
dire backwardness of the Northern spring, as if I had, while travelling
in the other sense, but blasphemed against the want of forwardness of
the Southern. Every breath that one might still have drawn in the
South—might if twenty other matters had been different—haunted me as the
thought of a lost treasure, and I settled, at the eternal car-window, to
the mere sightless contemplation, the forlorn view, of an ugly—ah, such
an ugly, wintering, waiting world. My eye had perhaps been jaundiced by
the breach of a happy spell—inasmuch as on thus leaving the sad
fragments there where they had fallen I tasted again the quite
saccharine sweetness of my last experience of Palm Beach, and knew how I
should wish to note for remembrance the passage, supremely charged with
that quality, in which it had culminated. I asked myself what other
expression I should find for the incident, the afternoon before I left
the place, of one of those mild progresses to the head of Lake Worth
which distil, for the good children of the Pair, the purest poetry of
their cup. The poetic effect had braved the compromising aid of the
highly-developed electric launch in which the pilgrim embarks, and
braved as well the immitigable fact that his shrine, at the end of a
couple of hours, is, in the vast and exquisite void, but an institution
of yesterday, a wondrous floating tea-house or restaurant, inflated
again with the hotel-spirit and exhaling modernity at every pore.

These associations are—so far as association goes—the only ones; but the
whole impression, for simply sitting there in the softest lap the whole
South had to offer, seemed to me to dispense with any aid but that of
its own absolute felicity. It was, for the late return at least, the
return in the divine dusk, with the flushed West at one’s right, a
concert of but two or three notes—the alignment, against the golden sky,
of the individual black palms, a frieze of chiselled ebony, and the
texture, for faintly-brushed cheek and brow, of an air of such silkiness
of velvet, the very throne-robe of the star-crowned night, as one can
scarce commemorate but in the language of the loom. The shore of the
sunset and the palms, what was that, meanwhile, like, and yet with what
did it, at the moment one asked the question, refuse to have anything to
do? It was like a myriad pictures of the Nile; with much of the modern
life of which it suggested more than one analogy. These indeed all
dropped, I found, before I had done—it would have been a Nile so
simplified out of the various fine senses attachable. One had to put the
case, I mean, to _make_ a fine sense, that here surely then was the
greater antiquity of the two, the antiquity of the infinite _previous_,
of the time, before Pharaohs and Pyramids, when everything was still to
come. It was a Nile, in short, without the least little implication of a
Sphinx or, still more if possible, of a Cleopatra. I had the foretaste
of what I was presently to feel in California—when the general aspect of
that wondrous realm kept suggesting to me a sort of prepared but
unconscious and inexperienced Italy, the primitive _plate_, in perfect
condition, but with the impression of History all yet to be made.

Of how grimly, meanwhile, under the annual rigour, the world, for the
most part, waits to be less ugly again, less despoiled of interest, less
abandoned to monotony, less forsaken of the presence that forms its only
resource, of the one friend to whom it owes all it ever gets, of the
pitying season that shall save it from its huge insignificance—of so
much as this, no doubt, I sufficiently renewed my vision, and with
plenty of the reviving ache of a question already familiar. To what
extent was hugeness, to what extent _could_ it be, a ground for
complacency of view, in any country not visited for the very love of
wildness, for positive joy in barbarism? Where was the charm of
boundless immensity as overlooked from a car-window?—with the general
pretension to charm, the general conquest of nature and space, affirmed,
immediately round about you, by the general pretension of the Pullman,
the great monotonous rumble of which seems forever to say to you: “See
what I’m making of all this—see what I’m making, what I’m making!” I was
to become later on still more intimately aware of the spirit of one’s
possible reply to that, but even then my consciousness served, and the
eloquence of my exasperation seems, in its rude accents, to come back to
me.

“I see what you are _not_ making, oh, what you are ever so vividly not;
and how can I help it if I am subject to that lucidity?—which appears
never so welcome to you, for its measure of truth, as it ought to be!
How can I not be so subject, from the moment I don’t just irreflectively
gape? If I were one of the painted savages you have dispossessed, or
even some tough reactionary trying to emulate him, what you are making
would doubtless impress me more than what you are leaving unmade; for in
that case it wouldn’t be to _you_ I should be looking in any degree for
beauty or for charm. Beauty and charm would be for me in the solitude
you have ravaged, and I should owe you my grudge for every disfigurement
and every violence, for every wound with which you have caused the face
of the land to bleed. No, since I accept your ravage, what strikes me is
the long list of the arrears of your undone; and so constantly, right
and left, that your pretended message of civilization is but a colossal
recipe for the _creation_ of arrears, and of such as can but remain
forever out of hand. You touch the great lonely land—as one feels it
still to be—only to plant upon it some ugliness about which, never
dreaming of the grace of apology or contrition, you then proceed to brag
with a cynicism all your own. You convert the large and noble sanities
that I see around me, you convert them one after the other to crudities,
to invalidities, hideous and unashamed; and you so leave them to add to
the number of the myriad aspects you simply spoil, of the myriad
unanswerable questions that you scatter about as some monstrous
unnatural mother might leave a family of unfathered infants on doorsteps
or in waiting-rooms. This is the meaning surely of the inveterate rule
that you shall multiply the perpetrations you call ‘places’—by the sign
of some name as senseless, mostly, as themselves—to the sole end of
multiplying to the eye, as one approaches, every possible source of
displeasure. When nobody cares or notices or suffers, by all one makes
out, when no displeasure, by what one can see, is ever felt or ever
registered, why shouldn’t you, you may indeed ask, be as much in your
right as you need? But in that fact itself, that fact of the vast
general unconsciousness and indifference, looms, for any restless
analyst who may come along, the accumulation, on your hands, of the
unretrieved and the irretrievable!”

I remember how it was to come to me elsewhere, in such hours as those,
that south of Pennsylvania, for instance, or beyond the radius of
Washington, I had caught no glimpse of anything that was to be called,
for more than a few miles and by a stretch of courtesy, the honour, the
decency or dignity of a road—that most exemplary of all civil creations,
and greater even as a note of morality, one often thinks, than as a note
of facility; and yet had nowhere heard these particular arrears spoken
of as matters ever conceivably to be made up. I was doubtless aware that
if I had been a beautiful red man with a tomahawk I should of course
have rejoiced in the occasional sandy track, or in the occasional
mud-channel, just in proportion as they fell so short of the type. Only
in that case I shouldn’t have been seated by the great square of
plate-glass through which the missionary Pullman appeared to invite me
to admire the achievements it proclaimed. It was in this respect the
great symbolic agent; it seemed to stand for all the irresponsibility
behind it; and I am not sure that I didn’t continue, so long as I was in
it, to “slang” it for relief of the o’erfraught heart. “You deal your
wounds—that is the ‘trouble,’ as you say—in numbers so out of proportion
to any hint of responsibility for them that you seem ever moved to take;
which is the devil’s dance, precisely, that your vast expanse of level
floor leads you to caper through with more kinds of outward
clumsiness—even if also with more kinds of inward impatience and
avidity, more leaps and bounds of the spirit at any cost to grace—than
have ever before been collectively displayed. The expanse of the floor,
the material opportunity itself, has elsewhere failed; so that what is
the positive effect of their inordinate presence but to make the lone
observer, here and there, but measure with dismay the trap laid by the
scale, if he be not tempted even to say by the superstition, of
continuity? Is the germ of anything finely human, of anything agreeably
or successfully social, supposably planted in conditions of such endless
stretching and such boundless spreading as shall appear finally to
minister but to the triumph of the superficial and the apotheosis of the
raw? Oh for a split or a chasm, one groans beside your plate-glass, oh
for an unbridgeable abyss or an insuperable mountain!”—and I could so
indulge myself though still ignorant of how one was to groan later on,
in particular, after taking yet further home the portentous truth that
this same criminal continuity, scorning its grandest chance to break
down, makes but a mouthful of the mighty Mississippi. That was to be in
fact my very next “big” impression.

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 =Jean Jacques Rousseau
 A New Criticism.=

                       =By FREDERIKA MACDONALD=,

                     Author of “Iliad of the East,”
           “Studies in the France of Voltaire and Rousseau.”
              With Numerous Illustrations, Facsimiles, &c.

                                                           =Two Volumes,
                                                           Demy 8vo.
                                                           24s. net.=

This book claims to contain one of the most important literary
revelations ever made. The author has discovered that the original
documents upon which the existing view of Rousseau’s life and character
is based were entirely falsified by his enemies, and photographs are
given to show where the corrections have been made. The result is that
the whole story of Rousseau’s life will have to be reconsidered, and
that all existing biographies must be rectified.

The author contributes an introduction in which she states the purpose
and the method of her new criticism. The body of the book is divided
into five parts: Part I. showing the actual conditions of the question
before the new criticism commenced; Part II. giving details of the
historical inquiry, documentary proofs that Madame D’Epinay’s “Memoirs”
represent an instrument of the plot to create a false reputation for
Rousseau, and to hand it down to posterity; Part III. is devoted to the
plan and purpose of the false history of Rousseau interpolated in Madame
D’Epinay’s work, the mythical Jean Jacques of Grimm and Diderot, and
Diderot’s Tablettes and the legend of Rousseau’s seven crimes; Part IV.
deals with the legend of Rousseau’s seven crimes; whilst Part V. treats
of the _correspondance littéraire_: the second instrument of the plot.

A number of photographs and facsimiles of manuscripts are supplied with
the text.


 _New Carlyle Letters._

 =Carlyle and the London Library=

   =A Collection of Original Letters to
   W. D. Christie on the Founding of
   the London Library in 1841.=

                          =By THOMAS CARLYLE.=

  Arranged by MARY CHRISTIE, and Edited by FREDERIC HARRISON, Litt.D.

                                                           =Crown 8vo.
                                                           3s. 6d. net.=

Every one knows that it is to the energies of Thomas Carlyle that London
owes the great library bearing its name. Experiencing the great
disadvantage of not having books of reference at hand to work from, and
the utter impossibility of working on such gigantic schemes as his were
at the British Museum, he set on foot an agitation. The end was
recognised as good, and the great men of the day took up the cause and
carried it through. This little volume comprises the collection of
letters written by Carlyle to W. D. Christie, which brought about the
establishment of the valuable institution known as the London Library,
in St. James’s Square, now looked upon as indispensable.


 _The Economics of the Future._

 =The Return to the Land=

                       =By SENATOR JULES MELINE=,

    Leader of the Moderate Republicans in France: Former Minister of
  Agriculture; Minister of Commerce; Premier. With a Preface by JUSTIN
                               MCCARTHY.

                                                             =Crown 8vo.
                                                             5s. net.=

Mr. Justin McCarthy, in his Preface, says:—“This book seems to me
destined to make a deep mark upon the age. Senator Jules Méline, leader
of the Moderate Republicans in France, was Minister of Agriculture in
the Cabinet of Jules Ferry from 1883 to 1885; was elected President of
the representative chamber of France in 1889; and in 1896 became Prime
Minister, an office which he resigned not long after, having found
probably that his political views were not radical enough for the public
opinion of the country. The book is remarkable in every sense. With all
its practical teaching, with its minute and careful instruction on
manufacturing and industrial questions, there is not a dull page in it
from first to last. M. Méline has much of the feeling of the poet as
well as the reasoning power of the practical and the scientific teacher.
Even where the reader may not accept all the principles of political
economy on which M. Méline founds many parts of his case, that reader,
if he have an appreciative mind, cannot fail to admire the sincerity,
the power, and the persuasiveness of the author.

“The great object of the book is to convince the world that the return
to the land, and to the work which the land still offers in all or most
countries, is now the nearest and the surest means for the mitigation or
the removal of the troubles which have come on the working populations
everywhere, and that the present is the appropriate time for the
beginning of such a movement.

“The reader who begins this volume with nothing more than a creditable
desire to learn something about the development of manufacturing
industry here, there, and everywhere, soon finds himself absorbed in M.
Méline’s exposition as much as if he were reading a story of magic from
the _Thousand and One Nights_.”


 _Reminiscences of an Actor._

 =Joseph Jefferson
 Reminiscences of a Fellow-Player.=

                          =By FRANCIS WILSON=,

                  Author of “The Eugene Field I Knew,”
                 “Recollections of a Player,” &c., &c.
               With 33 Portraits and other Illustrations.

                                                          =Demy 8vo.
                                                          10s. 6d. net.=

It is seldom that a biographic volume brings together more fitly the
subject and the chronicler than does this juxtaposition of Joseph
Jefferson and Francis Wilson. Men in the same profession, they were
still further sympathetic by reason of their love of good books and good
pictures, and through their kindly and humorous view of human nature,
and in their enjoyment of the oddities of every-day life and character.
For many years Mr. Wilson was a hero-worshipper of Joseph Jefferson; as
a small boy he rubbed against him in the street, in order, boy-fashion,
to feel that he had touched the hem of his garment. When he grew to know
the man, he set down from time to time a full record of Jefferson’s
charming conversation. During the weeks of the all-star tour he made a
further record of the table-talk of Mr. Jefferson when surrounded with
that splendid body of actors which included Mrs. Drew, William H. Crane,
the Hollands, Julia Marlowe, Nat Goodwin, Fanny Rice, Robert Taber, and
Mr. Wilson himself. It was a company to draw out the best of Jefferson’s
varied experiences, and the best was set down by Mr. Wilson, and has
been reproduced in this delightful volume of reminiscences. Mr. Wilson
has written one of those books about the American stage that is sure to
have a permanent place; and moreover, by the good taste with which he
has written it, and by the excellent literary skill which he has shown,
he has produced a volume worthy of very high praise as a literary
performance.


 _A Study of Hypnotism._

 =Hypnotism and Spiritism
   A Critical and Medical Study.=

                       =By Dr. GIUSEPPE LAPPONI=,

       Chief Physician to Their Holinesses Leo XIII. and Pius X.;
           Professor of Anthropology in the Academy at Rome.
                    Translated by Mrs. PHILIP GIBBS.

                                                             =Crown 8vo.
                                                             6s.=

This book, which has made a tremendous stir upon the Continent, traces
the study of Hypnotism and Spiritism from the earliest ages to the
present day, and defines the future of the science and its probable
bearing upon national life.


 _A New Work by CHARLES G. HARPER._

 =The Old Inns of Old England=

   =A Picturesque Account of the Ancient
   and Storied Hostelries of our own
   Country.=

                        =By CHARLES G. HARPER=,

         Author of “The Stage Coach and Mail in Days of Yore,”
                     “The Brighton Road,” &c., &c.
       With upwards of 200 Illustrations, chiefly by the Author.

                                                           =Two Volumes,
                                                           Demy 8vo.
                                                           Gilt Top,
                                                           42s. net.=

Principal Chapters: General History of Inns—Pilgrims’ Inns and Monastic
Hostels—Inns in Literature—Pickwickian Inns—Dickensian Inns—Inns of Old
Romance—Rural Inns—Inns with Relics and Curiosities—Rhymes and
Inscriptions—Visitors’ Books—Innkeepers’ Epitaphs—Signs Painted by
Artists—Queer Signs in Quaint Places—Historic Inns—Highwaymen’s Inns—The
Highest Inns in England—Ingle-Nooks—Inns Retired from Business.

It is somewhat singular that no book has hitherto been published dealing
either largely or exclusively with inns and their story. This vacant
niche in the literature of the road is filled by the present volumes,
the latest in the series of works on the Historic Roads of England, and
the literature of travel in general, written by Mr. Charles G. Harper,
and intended eventually to comprise every aspect of our ancient
highways, and the life upon them in days of yore. It is believed that,
while, of necessity, not every picturesque inn could be mentioned or
illustrated in two large volumes, a fully representative set has been
included.

As in his earlier works, the author’s aim has been the entirely modern
one of seeking to amuse and interest the general reader, and the book is
therefore in no sense an architectural or antiquarian disquisition.


 _A Study in Sociology._

 =The Polish Jew
   His Social and Economic Value.=

                     =By BEATRICE C. BASKERVILLE.=

                                                          =Demy 8vo.
                                                          10s. 6d. net.=

“Many of the facts set forth in the book are so much at variance with
accepted opinions of the Polish Jew—both in Great Britain and the United
States of America—that I have been advised to preface them with the
assurance that they are not the outcome of a short visit to Poland, but
the result of eight years’ residence in the country. During this time I
have had every opportunity of observing the Polish Jew both in the towns
and settlements, and have been in contact with the leaders of thought on
all sides of the question from the Anti-Semite to the Jewish
nationalist. I have witnessed the growth of that revival which has now
spread throughout most of the settlements and all the large ghettos of
the country, and which has engendered hostility to the Gentile and
revolution against the powers that be. The fact that thousands of the
men and women here discussed annually emigrate to compete with the
English-speaking nations, has caused me to investigate their social and
economic value the more carefully, both for the sake of the pauper
aliens themselves and for that of the people among whom they eventually
settle.”—Extract from Author’s Preface.



                          THE NATIONAL EDITION

                            OF THE WORKS OF

                           =Charles Dickens=

 Including upwards of One Hundred and Thirty Articles now collected for
                            the first time.

                                  HIS

                 =LETTERS, SPEECHES, PLAYS, and POEMS=,

                             TOGETHER WITH

                    =FORSTER’S LIFE OF THE AUTHOR=.


The pictures, numbering upwards of 850, comprise all the Original
Illustrations; with a complete series of Portraits, Additional
Illustrations, Facsimiles and Reproductions of Handwriting, many of
which have not been included in any collected edition of the novelist’s
works; the whole printed upon India Paper, and mounted on Plate paper.

  Strictly limited to 750 sets for England and America. Complete in 40
                                Volumes.
                Royal 8vo. Price =10s. 6d.= net per vol.

The National Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens is designed to rank
as the final and definitive edition of his works, and to serve as a
worthy memorial to the connection which has subsisted for over seventy
years between the firm of Chapman and Hall and the immortal memory of
Charles Dickens. It is by far the most handsome edition of Dickens ever
placed upon the market, and being strictly limited in number is likely
to take its place in a very short time among those treasures of the
booklover which change hands at highly enhanced prices.

The edition is being printed by Messrs. T. and A. Constable of
Edinburgh, His Majesty’s Printers, in a type newly cast for the purpose,
upon pure rag paper of the highest quality.

=THE TEXT.=—The text used is that which was corrected by Charles Dickens
himself in the last two years of his life, and therefore contains all
the copyright emendations which he made when the volumes passed for the
last time through his hands.

The edition contains all the collected papers from whatever source that
seemed worthy of permanent association with the name of their
author—from _The Examiner_, _Daily News_, _Household Words_, _All the
Year Round_, over 130 in all—the most notable of these being all
Dickens’s contributions to _Household Words_, some 90 in number, _which
have been identified for the first time by indisputable evidence_.

=THE ILLUSTRATIONS.=—As regards the choice of illustrations, the
Publishers’ plan has been to include only those pictures which were
drawn for their editions during the life of the author, and which may
therefore be held to have received his personal approbation. Under this
arrangement they are able to reproduce for the first time in a Collected
Edition a number of illustrations not usually associated with the
novels, and the utmost care has been taken to do justice to the artists’
workmanship. The original illustrations are printed from a duplicate set
of the steel plates on the best India paper and mounted on plate paper—a
process which gives a greatly refined value to the delicacy of the
original steel plates.

=THE ARTISTS.=—Dickens, as is well known, took the keenest possible
interest in the illustrations to his books, and was very particular over
the choice of the artists. At the same time, his work offered such
infinite possibilities to pen and pencil, that all the best talent of
his time was eager to be employed in his service, with the result that
the muster-roll of the artists represented in the present edition
contains the names of all the leading masters of Black and White
throughout the Victorian Era. It may be said without exaggeration that
the illustrations alone form an historical picture gallery of their
time, as will be admitted when the following list is studied and
understood.

                         ARTISTS REPRESENTED.

                       George Cruikshank.
                       Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).
                       Robert Seymour.
                       John Leech.
                       R. W. Buss.
                       C. R. Leslie, R.A.
                       Frank Stone, A.R.A.
                       T. Webster, R.A.
                       George Cattermole.
                       Daniel Maclise, R.A.
                       H. Warren.
                       Kenny Meadows.
                       Richard Doyle.
                       J. Mahony.
                       E. G. Dalziel.
                       G. J. Pinwell.
                       W. Maddox.
                       J. Absolon.
                       F. Corbeaux.
                       Marcus Stone, R.A.
                       Clarkson Stonefield, R.A.
                       Samuel Palmer.
                       F. W. Topham.
                       Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A.
                       Sir John Tenniel, R.A.
                       Fred. Walker.
                       Arthur Boyd Houghton.
                       W. P. Frith, R.A.
                       F. A. Fraser.
                       H. French.
                       Townley Green.
                       Charles Green.
                       Sir Luke Fildes, R.A.
                       Charles Alston Collins.

=THE ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS= will be—

All the original covers, printed from the wood blocks on tinted paper.

All the pictorial covers of the “People’s Edition,” printed from the
wood blocks on tinted paper.

The steel vignette title-pages to the “Library Edition.”

The frontispieces of the First Cheap Edition, by Leslie, Webster, A.
Boyd Houghton, Frank Stone, Marcus Stone, R.A., Stanfield, Phiz,
Cruikshank, and others.

The plates by Phiz, Buss, Leech, Cruikshank, Maddox, Warren, Absolon,
Corbeaux, Frank Stone, and others, which were either cancelled from the
original edition or appeared separately as sets of extra illustrations.

The frontispieces and other plates from “Master Humphrey’s Clock,”
which, on account of their size, do not appear in other editions.

The illustrations which appeared only in the first editions of “A
Child’s History of England” and “Pictures from Italy,” by F. W. Topham
and Samuel Palmer respectively.

All these pictures will be printed from the steel plates and wood
blocks, where they exist, or from carefully reproduced blocks, on India
paper, and will be mounted, as in the cases of the other pictures.

=ITS COMPLETENESS.=—The edition therefore may claim to represent all the
authoritative literature emanating from the pen of Dickens, combining
with this rich material a unique pictorial record of the association of
contemporary art with the work of the greatest novelist of his
generation. It will be issued at the rate of two volumes monthly, with
one or two rare exceptions, when three volumes will appear together.

=THE BINDING.=—The edition will be bound by Messrs. James Burn and Co.,
of Kirby Street, Hatton Garden, in olive-green sateen, with a full gold
design on the back and side, and gilt top.

            _Full detailed 8 pp. Prospectus on Application._

------------------------------------------------------------------------



                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
      spelling.
 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.



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