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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fb7a537 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #68717 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68717) diff --git a/old/68717-0.txt b/old/68717-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index e278a75..0000000 --- a/old/68717-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,14405 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of The American scene, by Henry James - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: The American scene - -Author: Henry James - -Release Date: August 8, 2022 [eBook #68717] - -Language: English - -Produced by: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading - Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from - images generously made available by The Internet Archive) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SCENE *** - - - - - - 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. - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - - - - RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED, - BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND - BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. - - - - - CHAPMAN & HALL’S NEW BOOKS - - - _H. G. WELLS on America._ - - =The Future in America - A Search after Realities.= - - =By H. G. 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There is a close and intimate -criticism of the economic process, enlivened by thumbnail sketches of -typical personalities, and a wide and acute review of the American mind. - -Mr. Wells gives impressions of several American universities, makes a -vigorous onslaught on the culture of Boston and the refinement of -Washington; there are conversations with the President, Mr. Booker T. -Washington, and other typical figures. - - - _Prince Kropotkin’s New Book._ - - =The Conquest of Bread= - - =By PRINCE PETER KROPOTKIN=, - - Author of “Fields, Factories, and Workshops,” - “The Memoirs of a Revolutionist,” &c. - - =Demy 8vo. - 10s. 6d. net.= - -This brilliantly-written, sincere, and penetrative study of modern -conditions of life and labour, by one of the foremost sociologists of -his age, must appeal to any one who is interested in the common welfare -of humanity. Examples are drawn from every European country, and a -definite programme laid down for the amelioration of contemporary -hardships and inequalities. - - - _New Work by L. T. HOBHOUSE._ - - =Morals in Evolution= - - =A Study in Comparative Ethics.= - - =By L. T. HOBHOUSE=, - - Author of “The Labour Movement,” - “The Theory of Knowledge,” - “Mind in Evolution,” - “Democracy and Reaction,” &c. - - =Two Volumes, - Demy 8vo. - 21s. net.= - -This book deals historically with the private and the moral -consciousness in man. It falls into two parts. The first deals with -custom, _i.e._ the rules of conduct which are generally recognised in -any society. The most important of these are discussed under different -heads, _e.g._ laws of marriage and the position of women; class -relations, caste, slavery and free labour; the laws of war; commercial -and private property; methods of providing for the poor. 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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. 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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. 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} - .ol_1 li {font-size: .9em; } - .x-ebookmaker .ol_1 li {padding-left: 1em; text-indent: 0em; } - body {font-family: Georgia, serif; text-align: justify; } - table {font-size: .9em; padding: 1.5em .5em 1em; page-break-inside: avoid; - clear: both; } - div.titlepage {text-align: center; page-break-before: always; - page-break-after: always; } - div.titlepage p {text-align: center; text-indent: 0em; font-weight: bold; - line-height: 1.5; margin-top: 3em; } - .ph1 { text-indent: 0em; font-weight: bold; font-size: xx-large; - margin: .67em auto; page-break-before: always; } - .ph2 { text-indent: 0em; font-weight: bold; font-size: x-large; margin: .75em auto; - page-break-before: always; } - .ad2 { text-indent: 0em; font-weight: bold; margin: .75em auto; - page-break-before: always; } - .x-ebookmaker p.dropcap:first-letter { float: left; } - /* ]]> */ </style> - </head> - <body> -<p style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The American scene, by Henry James</p> -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online -at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you -are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the -country where you are located before using this eBook. -</div> - -<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The American scene</p> -<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Henry James</p> -<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: August 8, 2022 [eBook #68717]</p> -<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</p> - <p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; text-align:left'>Produced by: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)</p> -<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SCENE ***</div> - -<div class='tnotes covernote'> - -<p class='c000'><strong>Transcriber’s Note:</strong></p> - -<p class='c000'>The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.</p> - -</div> - -<div class='titlepage'> - -<div> - <h1 class='c001'>THE AMERICAN SCENE</h1> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> -<div class='nf-center c002'> - <div>BY</div> - <div class='c003'>HENRY JAMES</div> - <div class='c002'>LONDON</div> - <div class='c003'><span class='sc'>CHAPMAN AND HALL, Ltd</span></div> - <div class='c003'>1907</div> - </div> -</div> - -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> -<div class='nf-center c004'> - <div><span class='small'><span class='sc'>Richard Clay & Sons, Limited</span>,</span></div> - <div><span class='small'>BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND</span></div> - <div><span class='small'>BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.</span></div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_v'>v</span> - <h2 class='c005'>PREFACE</h2> -</div> - -<p class='c006'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_vi'>vi</span>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 -<em>had</em> cared and understood.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<div class='lg-container-r'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'>H. J.</div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_vii'>vii</span> - <h2 class='c005'>CONTENTS</h2> -</div> - -<table class='table0'> - <tr> - <th class='c008'></th> - <th class='c009'> </th> - <th class='c010'><span class='small'>PAGE</span></th> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>I.</td> - <td class='c009'>NEW ENGLAND: AN AUTUMN IMPRESSION</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_1'>1</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>II.</td> - <td class='c009'>NEW YORK REVISITED</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_72'>72</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>III.</td> - <td class='c009'>NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON: A SPRING IMPRESSION</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_116'>116</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>IV.</td> - <td class='c009'>NEW YORK: SOCIAL NOTES</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_158'>158</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>V.</td> - <td class='c009'>THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_194'>194</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>VI.</td> - <td class='c009'>THE SENSE OF NEWPORT</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_209'>209</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>VII.</td> - <td class='c009'>BOSTON</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_226'>226</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>VIII.</td> - <td class='c009'>CONCORD AND SALEM</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_256'>256</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>IX.</td> - <td class='c009'>PHILADELPHIA</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_273'>273</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>X.</td> - <td class='c009'>BALTIMORE</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_303'>303</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>XI.</td> - <td class='c009'>WASHINGTON</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_332'>332</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>XII.</td> - <td class='c009'>RICHMOND</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_365'>365</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>XIII.</td> - <td class='c009'>CHARLESTON</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_395'>395</a></td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'> </td> - <td class='c009'> </td> - <td class='c010'> </td> - </tr> - <tr> - <td class='c008'>XIV.</td> - <td class='c009'>FLORIDA</td> - <td class='c010'><a href='#Page_422'>422</a></td> - </tr> -</table> - -<div class='chapter ph1'> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> -<div class='nf-center c004'> - <div>THE AMERICAN SCENE</div> - </div> -</div> - -</div> - -<div> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_1'>1</span> - <h2 class='c005'>I<br /> NEW ENGLAND<br /> <span class='large'>AN AUTUMN IMPRESSION</span></h2> -</div> -<h3 class='c011'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>was</em> difficult: there, only too -confoundingly familiar and too serenely exempt from -change, the waterside squalor of the great city put forth -<span class='pageno' id='Page_2'>2</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>not</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_3'>3</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_4'>4</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_5'>5</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_6'>6</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_7'>7</span>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_8'>8</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="it" xml:lang="it">villeggiatura</span></i>—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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_9'>9</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>This could pass, it seemed, for the greatest vividness -of the picture—that the expensive, for New York in -<i><span lang="it" xml:lang="it">villeggiatura</span></i>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_10'>10</span>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 <em>one</em> 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 -<em>be</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>What had it been their idea to <em>do</em>, the good people—do, -exactly, <em>for</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_11'>11</span>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 <em>is</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>The example went straight to the point, and thus was -<span class='pageno' id='Page_12'>12</span>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 <em>that</em> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">donnée</span></i> 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 <em>out</em> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_13'>13</span>roundabout experience, for troublesome history, for the -long, the immitigable process of time. It was a promise, -clearly, of the highest entertainment.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>is</em> Arcadia in fact, and questions drop, -or at least get themselves deferred and shiftlessly shirked; -in conformity with which truth the New England hills -<span class='pageno' id='Page_14'>14</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>Why was the whole connotation so <em>delicately</em> 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 <em>type</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_15'>15</span>meagreness, with the queer <em>other</em>, 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 <em>quantity</em>? 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_16'>16</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>It might be an ado about trifles—and half the poetry, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_17'>17</span>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_18'>18</span>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 <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">terra firma</span></i>, 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_19'>19</span>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, <em>feminine</em>?—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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>“Oh Italy, thou woman-land!” breaks out Browning, -more than once, straight at <em>that</em> 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_20'>20</span>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 <em>land’s</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>It is perhaps absurd to have to hasten to add that -doing what you would with it, in these irresponsible -<span class='pageno' id='Page_21'>21</span>senses, simply left out of account, for the country in -general, the proved, the notorious fact that nothing useful, -nothing profitable, nothing directly economic, <em>could</em> -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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">allure</span></i> 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 <em>with</em> 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_22'>22</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">entente</span></i>, 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>appearances</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_23'>23</span>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 <em>importance</em>, -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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>What the squire and the parson do, between them, for -<span class='pageno' id='Page_24'>24</span>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 <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">par excellence</span></i> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_25'>25</span>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 <em>forms</em>; 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<em>be</em>, 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, <em>could</em> 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 <em>to</em> them, not to be -<span class='pageno' id='Page_26'>26</span>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 <em>but</em> that one? “Are you the woman of the house?” -a rustic cynically squalid, and who makes it a condition -of <em>any</em> intercourse that he be received at the front door -of the house, not at the back, asks of a <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">maîtresse de -maison</span></i>, 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.</p> - -<div> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_27'>27</span> - <h3 class='c013'>III</h3> -</div> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_28'>28</span>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 <em>would</em> 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; -<span class='pageno' id='Page_29'>29</span>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 <em>should</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_30'>30</span>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 <em>couldn’t</em>, 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_31'>31</span>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 <em>seated</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_32'>32</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">quelconque</span></i>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_33'>33</span>their personal relation. Their personal relation—that of -the young man was with the two summer girls, whose -own was all with <em>him</em>; 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 <em>that</em>, how was the perception of any concurrent -presence, how was the human or social function at all, -compatible with the <em>degree</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>IV</h3> - -<p class='c012'>Clearly, none the less, there were puzzles and puzzles, -and I had almost immediately the amusement of waking -<span class='pageno' id='Page_34'>34</span>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 <em>most</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_35'>35</span>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 <em>into</em> 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 -<em>manners</em>, 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>all</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_36'>36</span>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 <em>unreasoned</em> -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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_37'>37</span>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 <em>without</em> 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, <em>sir</em>!” 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 <em>them</em>. I remember the sense that something -<em>must</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_38'>38</span>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 <em>made</em>? I had again to take it -for a mystery.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>V</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_39'>39</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_40'>40</span>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 <em>fusion</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_41'>41</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_42'>42</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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—<em>that</em> had really been the -lesson; and it was with a far different poetry, the sweet -<span class='pageno' id='Page_43'>43</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>they</em> seemed to say is what I have -mentioned; but what secrets, meanwhile, did the rest of -the scene keep? <em>Were</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_44'>44</span>monstrous Dutch toy, by its steeple of quaint and classic -carpentry; but this monument appeared to <em>testify</em> 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 <em>all</em>?” it is as if you had had -your account of a scheme fashioned preponderantly in -their image.</p> - -<p class='c007'><span class='pageno' id='Page_45'>45</span>I mean in <em>theirs</em> 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 <em>un</em>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 <em>are</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_46'>46</span>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 <em>prepared</em>. -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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_47'>47</span>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 <em>can</em> 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 <em>shouldn’t</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>There was not flatness, accordingly, though there -might be dire dreariness, in some of those impressions -<span class='pageno' id='Page_48'>48</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_49'>49</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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; -<span class='pageno' id='Page_50'>50</span>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. <em>Had</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_51'>51</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_52'>52</span>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, <em>as</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>VI</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_53'>53</span>adventures, even of minor type, so preposterously postponed -should be able to deck themselves at last with a -kind of accumulation of freshness.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>previous</em> (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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><span class='pageno' id='Page_54'>54</span>This savours perhaps of distorted reflection, but there -was really a light over it in which the whole spectacle -was to shine. <em>The will to grow</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_55'>55</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_56'>56</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>VII</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>changes</em>—ever so many and so amusing and so -agreeable. The intensity is compatible with <em>them</em>—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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_57'>57</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>other</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_58'>58</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">mise -en scène</span></i>, the multiplied resources, halls, faculties, museums, -undergraduate and postgraduate habitations (these last -<span class='pageno' id='Page_59'>59</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<div> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_60'>60</span> - <h3 class='c013'>VIII</h3> -</div> - -<p class='c012'>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, <em>donatorio</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_61'>61</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_62'>62</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><span class='pageno' id='Page_63'>63</span>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.”</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">milieu</span></i> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_64'>64</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">pot au feu</span></i>, -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, <em>personally</em>, 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, <em>whom did they look like the sons of</em>?—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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_65'>65</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">portée</span></i>. -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 <em>the</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_66'>66</span>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 <em>range</em> 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 -<em>sorts</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><span class='pageno' id='Page_67'>67</span>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 <em>one</em> kind?” At the same time that I could remember -this, however, I could also remember that the -consistently <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">bourgeois</span></i> 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.</p> - -<div> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_68'>68</span> - <h3 class='c013'>IX</h3> -</div> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>literal</em> 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 <em>into</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_69'>69</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>had</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_70'>70</span>reflected with a certain tragic intensity even in faces -ever so turned to cheerful lights as those of my two -constructive companions.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>roaring</em>, 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 <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">genius loci</span></i>, 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 <em>not</em> been right—well, it would all -be rather dreadful. Such, at all events, may be the -<span class='pageno' id='Page_71'>71</span>disconcertments of a revisiting spirit—when he has -happened to revisit too ingenious an old friend.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_72'>72</span> - <h2 class='c005'>II<br /> NEW YORK REVISITED</h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c011'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_73'>73</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>done</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_74'>74</span>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 <em>they</em> 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 <em>him</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_75'>75</span>practically, a diffused, wasted clamour of <em>detonations</em>—something -of its sharp free accent and, above all, of its -sovereign sense of being “backed” and able to back. -The universal <em>applied</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_76'>76</span>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.”</p> - -<p class='c007'>You see the pin-cushion in profile, so to speak, on -passing between Jersey City and Twenty-third Street, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_77'>77</span>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 -<em>invented</em> 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_78'>78</span>having found beauty, it has found the form in which it -splendidly rests.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_79'>79</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_80'>80</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_81'>81</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>was</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_82'>82</span>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 <em>character</em> 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 -<em>his</em> 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 <cite><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Le Ventre de Paris</span></cite>, -what if <cite><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Au Bonheur des Dames</span></cite>, what if <cite><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Pot-Bouille</span></cite> and -<cite><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">L’Argent</span></cite>, could but have come into being under the -New York inspiration?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_83'>83</span>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 -<em>presence</em>, 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">allure</span></i>, 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_84'>84</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_85'>85</span>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 <em>have</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_86'>86</span>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 <em>their</em> 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 <em>un</em>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, <em>more</em> 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 <em>them</em>, 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 <em>whole</em> national consciousness as that of -the Switzer and the Scot.</p> - -<div> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_87'>87</span> - <h3 class='c013'>II</h3> -</div> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_88'>88</span>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 <em>should</em> count for “tone,” figure as the old -ivory of an overscored tablet.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_89'>89</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_90'>90</span>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 <em>was</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_91'>91</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_92'>92</span>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 <em>not</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_93'>93</span>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 <em>comparative</em> 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 <i><span lang="it" xml:lang="it">piazzetta</span></i>; 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. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_94'>94</span>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 <em>could</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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. <em>They</em>, 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_95'>95</span>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, <em>the</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_96'>96</span>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 <em>him</em>? -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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>been</em> 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 <em>conferred</em> 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 <em>with</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_97'>97</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_98'>98</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_99'>99</span>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 <em>that</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>III</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_100'>100</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_101'>101</span>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. “<i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Un bon mouvement</span></i>, -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_102'>102</span>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 -<em>characteristic</em>, 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>be</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_103'>103</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_104'>104</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><span class='pageno' id='Page_105'>105</span>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 <em>as</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_106'>106</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">vente de charité</span></i> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_107'>107</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>still</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_108'>108</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>“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 <em>makes</em> 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 <em>care</em> 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 <em>first</em> by the board. I have literally heard you -<span class='pageno' id='Page_109'>109</span>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 <em>any</em> 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 -<em>might</em>, 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——!”</p> - -<p class='c007'>Let me grant then, to get on, that there <em>was</em> doubtless, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_110'>110</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_111'>111</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>maintenance</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_112'>112</span>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 <em>can</em>. 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 <em>us</em>, 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_113'>113</span>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.”</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_114'>114</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_115'>115</span>the <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">fin mot</span></i>, 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.”</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_116'>116</span> - <h2 class='c005'>III<br /> NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON<br /> <span class='large'>A SPRING IMPRESSION</span></h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c013'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>It was a concomitant, always, of the down-town hour -that it could be felt as <em>most</em> 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 <em>all</em> my -impressions reflected in any one of them testified to the -<span class='pageno' id='Page_117'>117</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<em>makes</em> the singleness of impression. Is not the universal -<span class='pageno' id='Page_118'>118</span>sauce essentially <em>his</em> 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 <em>more</em> would have been anywhere -else involved had here inevitably to lapse.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_119'>119</span>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 -<em>the</em> 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 <em>are</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_120'>120</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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. <em>They</em> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_121'>121</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>the</em> constant substitute, for many luxuries that are -absent. He doesn’t <em>know</em>, he can’t <em>say</em>, 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 <em>il</em>legible -word, accordingly, the great inscrutable answer to questions, -hangs in the vast American sky, to his imagination, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_122'>122</span>as something fantastic and <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">abracadabrant</span></i>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_123'>123</span>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 <em>small</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_124'>124</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>not</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_125'>125</span>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 <em>launched</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>The great fact about his companions was that, foreign -as they might be, newly inducted as they might be, they -were <em>at home</em>, 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 <em>he</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_126'>126</span>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 <em>all</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>had</em> been, and that this -immediately glazed them over as with some mixture, of -<span class='pageno' id='Page_127'>127</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">chez lui</span></i>. 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_128'>128</span>a dim calculation of bearings, which yet never takes a -backward step, expand to the full measure of it.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>them</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_129'>129</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>What <em>does</em> 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; -<span class='pageno' id='Page_130'>130</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>III</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_131'>131</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_132'>132</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_133'>133</span>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 -<em>that</em>: 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_134'>134</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_135'>135</span>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 <em>could</em> 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 <em>for</em> 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”?</p> - -<p class='c007'><span class='pageno' id='Page_136'>136</span>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 <em>general</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_137'>137</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">enquête</span></i>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_138'>138</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_139'>139</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>IV</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_140'>140</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>A sense of the waste of criticism, however, a sense -that is almost in itself consoling, descends upon the fond -<span class='pageno' id='Page_141'>141</span>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 <em>should</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_142'>142</span>dreary things done, become on a given occasion the -one <em>not</em> vulgar way of meeting a problem?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<em>see</em>—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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_143'>143</span>almost <em>any</em> 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 <em>the</em> historic page.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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—<i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">bon prince</span></i> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_144'>144</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_145'>145</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_146'>146</span>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, -<em>carried far enough</em>, 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 <em>by</em> 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 <em>are</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>V</h3> - -<p class='c012'>It is still vivid to me that, returning in the spring-time -from a few weeks in the Far West, I re-entered New -<span class='pageno' id='Page_147'>147</span>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 <em>must</em> 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_148'>148</span>one of the two or three impressed there on my infantile -imagination, to ask me why then I had come so far -at all.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">raffiné</span></i>, 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_149'>149</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>should</em> 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 -<em>because</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_150'>150</span>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 <em>could</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>shan’t</em> 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 <em>type</em>—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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_151'>151</span>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.</p> - -<div> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_152'>152</span> - <h3 class='c013'>VI</h3> -</div> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>constitutes</em> -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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_153'>153</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>most</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_154'>154</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_155'>155</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_156'>156</span>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 <em>our</em> 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 <em>his</em> Sunnyside -from its beautiful extensions and arriving thus at the -<span class='pageno' id='Page_157'>157</span>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.</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_158'>158</span> - <h2 class='c005'>IV<br /> NEW YORK<br /> <span class='large'>SOCIAL NOTES</span></h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c013'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>serious</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_159'>159</span>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 <em>of</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_160'>160</span>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, <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">parure</span></i>, -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. <em>There</em> 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 <em>of</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_161'>161</span>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 <em>his</em> 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.”</p> - -<p class='c007'>“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 <em>can</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_162'>162</span>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 <em>on</em>.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_163'>163</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_164'>164</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>grope</em> 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 <em>is</em>. If the -men are not to be taken as contributing to it, but only -the women, what new case is <em>that</em>, 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 <em>whole</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_165'>165</span>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 <em>should</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>I found it interesting to note, furthermore, that the -very Clubs, on whose behalf, if anywhere, expert -tradition might have operated, betrayed with a <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">bonhomie</span></i> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_166'>166</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_167'>167</span>minimizing, for any “interior,” the guilt or odium or -responsibility, whatever these may appear, of its <em>being</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_168'>168</span>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 <em>are</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>any</em> 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 <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">a fortiori</span></i> of the club, as a combination of -the hall of echoes and the toy “transparency” held -<span class='pageno' id='Page_169'>169</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_170'>170</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>III</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">débutantes</span></i> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_171'>171</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_172'>172</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_173'>173</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_174'>174</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>IV</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>too</em> narrow and very much -too short, had directly prescribed to it, from its origin, -to “do,” officially, on behalf of the City, the publicly -<span class='pageno' id='Page_175'>175</span>amiable, and <em>all</em> 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, -<em>that</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_176'>176</span>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 <em>for</em> 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 -<em>ingratiation</em> of the Park. You are perfectly aware, as -you hang about her in May and June, that you <em>have</em>, as -<span class='pageno' id='Page_177'>177</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">cabotine</span></i> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_178'>178</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>One is liable to observe it in <em>any</em> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">essor</span></i>, 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. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_179'>179</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>The brooding analyst had in fact, from the first of his -<span class='pageno' id='Page_180'>180</span>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 <em>is</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_181'>181</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">le sourire -Californien</span></i>, 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_182'>182</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">endimanchés</span></i> 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. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_183'>183</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_184'>184</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_185'>185</span>edifice, as sharp as the uttered words of the plea I have -just imagined.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>V</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">pastiche</span></i> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_186'>186</span>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, <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">ultima Thule</span></i> of the -northward walk of one’s early time.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_187'>187</span>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 <em>then</em> taking, then finding, -place—something like Robinson Crusoe’s famous thrill -before Friday’s footprint in the sand.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_188'>188</span>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 <em>direct</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_189'>189</span>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. <em>There</em>, 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">flânerie</span></i> 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 <em>is</em>, 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; -<span class='pageno' id='Page_190'>190</span>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 <em>whole</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">étape</span></i> on the glorious road? This -also gave out a shimmer from the middle time, but with -<span class='pageno' id='Page_191'>191</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_192'>192</span>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 <em>all</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_193'>193</span>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.</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_194'>194</span> - <h2 class='c005'>V<br /> THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS</h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c011'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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, <em>the</em> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_195'>195</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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” -<span class='pageno' id='Page_196'>196</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<em>promoted</em> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">vieux -jeu</span></i>. This last remark might in fact open up for us, had -<span class='pageno' id='Page_197'>197</span>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”?</p> - -<p class='c007'>I must not let the question, however, carry me too -far—quite away from the point I was about to make -<span class='pageno' id='Page_198'>198</span>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 <em>that place</em>, 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">trucs</span></i>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_199'>199</span>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 <em>our</em> 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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_200'>200</span>Such at all events are the roundabout processes of -peaceful history, the very history that succeeds, for our -edification, in <em>not</em> consisting of battles and blood and -tears.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">ballerine</span></i>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_201'>201</span>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 <em>consistent</em> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">enquête</span></i>, that I would gladly have -prolonged, just there, my opportunity to sound it.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>not</em> 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 <em>how</em> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">banal</span></i> 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_202'>202</span>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 <em>be</em> 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 <em>as</em> the treacherous sum of your poverties.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_203'>203</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_204'>204</span>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, -<em>was</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>III</h3> - -<p class='c012'>After this there were other places, mostly higher in the -scale, and but a couple of which my memory recovers. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_205'>205</span>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 <em>intention</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_206'>206</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_207'>207</span>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 <em>his</em> 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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_208'>208</span>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 <em>was</em> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">bal -masqué</span></i>, 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!”</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_209'>209</span> - <h2 class='c005'>VI<br /> THE SENSE OF NEWPORT</h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c011'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>had</em> 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 <em>to</em> describe or define, so that one’s -fondness had fairly rested on this sweet oddity in it. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_210'>210</span>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 -<i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">raffiné</span></i>); 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_211'>211</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_212'>212</span>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 <em>because</em> (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 <em>is</em> beautiful, -it <em>is</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><span class='pageno' id='Page_213'>213</span>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 -<em>there</em> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">dénouement</span></i>. <em>How</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_214'>214</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>being</em> -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 -<em>would</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_215'>215</span>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 <em>was</em> 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 <em>note</em>, is -capable on occasion of making that note effectively sound. -It <em>will</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, <em>the</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_216'>216</span>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 <em>picture</em>, -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_217'>217</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_218'>218</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">raffiné</span></i> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_219'>219</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>had</em> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">dénouement</span></i> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_220'>220</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>be</em>, “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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_221'>221</span>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 -<em>pure</em> Newport time, the most perfectly guarded by a -sense of margin and of mystery.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_222'>222</span>to the <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">blasé</span></i> 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 <em>could</em> have hibernated, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_223'>223</span>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 <cite><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Revue des Deux Mondes</span></cite>, 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>their</em> earth that made that -adventure most possible. At Newport, as the phrase -was, in autumnal, in vernal hibernation, you <em>could</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_224'>224</span>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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_225'>225</span>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.</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_226'>226</span> - <h2 class='c005'>VII<br /> BOSTON</h2> -</div> - -<p class='c006'>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 <em>have</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_227'>227</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_228'>228</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><span class='pageno' id='Page_229'>229</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_230'>230</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_231'>231</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>away</em>—away, -always and everywhere, from the old presumptions and -<span class='pageno' id='Page_232'>232</span>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 <em>that</em> 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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_233'>233</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_234'>234</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">honnête</span></i>—the -very type and model, for a pleasant street-view, of -the character. The aspects that might elsewhere have -competed were <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">honnêtes</span></i> and weak, whereas Park Street -was <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">honnête</span></i> and strong—strong as founded on <em>all</em> 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_235'>235</span>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.”</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_236'>236</span>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 -<em>could</em> 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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_237'>237</span>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 <em>not</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_238'>238</span>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 <em>their</em> 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 <em>his</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_239'>239</span>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 <em>from</em> 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 <em>present</em>, -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_240'>240</span>Church, for the hour, the most interesting mass of brick -and mortar and (if I may risk the supposition) timber in -America.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_241'>241</span>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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_242'>242</span>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 <em>being</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_243'>243</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>seat</em> of everything, -even to the handful of happy deviations from the regular -produced, we may fancy, by one of those “historic” -<span class='pageno' id='Page_244'>244</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_245'>245</span>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 <em>that</em> 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.</p> - -<div> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_246'>246</span> - <h3 class='c013'>III</h3> -</div> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>serenity</em>, the -<span class='pageno' id='Page_247'>247</span>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 <em>in</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_248'>248</span>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 <em>why</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>idea</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_249'>249</span>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).</p> - -<p class='c007'>The Boston institution then is a great and complete -institution, with this reserve of its striking the restored -absentee as practically without <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">penetralia</span></i>. A library -without <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">penetralia</span></i> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_250'>250</span>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 <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">penetralia</span></i>; -so that when <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">penetralia</span></i> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">élite</span></i>. Such visions, such felicities, such -couchant lions and recorded names and stirred memories -as these, encountered in the early autumn twilight, <em>colour</em> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_251'>251</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>for</em> a railway-station, the ubiquitous -children, <em>most</em> irrepressible little democrats of the democracy, -the vain quest, above all, of the deeper depths -aforesaid, some part that should be sufficiently <em>within</em> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_252'>252</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">raffiné</span></i> of almost -any other clime. I should say to him that he has not -<em>seen</em> 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_253'>253</span>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 <em>lonely</em> 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 <em>them</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_254'>254</span>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 <em>as</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_255'>255</span>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.</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_256'>256</span> - <h2 class='c005'>VIII<br /> CONCORD AND SALEM</h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c011'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>“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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_257'>257</span>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 <em>see</em> 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 <em>for</em> 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 <em>had</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_258'>258</span>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 <em>are</em>; which indeed is the only sort of improvement -that is not questionable.”</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>known</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_259'>259</span>admirable day, everything, in its own way and order, -unmistakably came <em>out</em>—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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_260'>260</span>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 <em>feeling</em>, -above all, still so directly testify, at any fresh-sounding -form of such an announcement.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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) <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">tutti -quanti</span></i>; 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_261'>261</span>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 <em>I</em> can do for it: so hang over me well!”—that’s -what they all seem to say.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_262'>262</span>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 <em>precluded</em> 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 <em>would</em> -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 <em>our</em> latent, lurking, waiting -interest like, a Jew in a dusky back-shop, providentially -bait the trap.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_263'>263</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_264'>264</span>respectful; meets, in the general interest, waving it -vaguely away, any closer assault of criticism.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>would</em> 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_265'>265</span>which he drew from elsewhere. It is admirably, to-day, -as if we were still seeing these things <em>in</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_266'>266</span>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 <cite>The Scarlet Letter</cite>.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_267'>267</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_268'>268</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_269'>269</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_270'>270</span>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 <em>become</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>he</em> might have -done so if he hadn’t, as I say, understood. But he -understood everything, and knew when to insist and -<span class='pageno' id='Page_271'>271</span>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 -<em>necessity</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_272'>272</span>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—<em>then</em> most of all, -sometimes, quite insolently bloated; and we recognize -ruefully that we are forever condemned to know it only -after the fact.</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_273'>273</span> - <h2 class='c005'>IX<br /> PHILADELPHIA</h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c011'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>have</em> 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 <em>make</em> 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, <em>for</em> incoherence. That, I think, was -what I had been mainly occupied with in New York; -<span class='pageno' id='Page_274'>274</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">méridional</span></i>; 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>Philadelphia, incontestably then, was the American -<span class='pageno' id='Page_275'>275</span>city of the large type, that didn’t <em>bristle</em>—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 -<em>didn’t</em> “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 -<em>are</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_276'>276</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">allure</span></i> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_277'>277</span>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 <em>our</em> 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 <em>whole</em> 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 <em>society</em>, 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>New York, in that sense, had appeared to me then -not a society at all, and it was rudimentary that Chicago -<span class='pageno' id='Page_278'>278</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">cadres</span></i> were all full; her -imagination was at peace. This, exactly again, would -be the reason of the bristling of the other places: the -<i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">cadres</span></i> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_279'>279</span>of organic social relations it represents; by which logic -Philadelphia would represent nothing <em>but</em> organic social -relations. The degrees of consanguinity were the <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">cadres</span></i>; -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 <em>not</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_280'>280</span>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 -<em>must</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>I found myself liking them, then, as I moved among -them, just in proportion as they conformed, in detail, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_281'>281</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_282'>282</span>air, and that there were few of its agitations to which -they had not something to say.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>all</em> 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 <em>town</em>, serves so successfully for my sense of -Philadelphia that I should feel as if a little masterpiece -<span class='pageno' id='Page_283'>283</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>case</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_284'>284</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_285'>285</span>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 -<i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">tutoiement</span></i>), 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 <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">modus vivendi</span></i>. 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 -<em>any</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>How shall he confess at once boldly and shyly enough -that the situation had at the end of a very short time -<span class='pageno' id='Page_286'>286</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">ancien régime</span></i>, -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_287'>287</span>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, <em>constituting</em> 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.</p> - -<div> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_288'>288</span> - <h3 class='c013'>III</h3> -</div> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>shouldn’t</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_289'>289</span>serenity and symmetry of pink and drab, and its actual -emphasis of detachment from the vulgar brush of things, -that is <em>not</em> charming; and there is nothing, the city -through, that doesn’t receive a mild sidelight, that of a -reflected interest, from its neighbourhood.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<em>has</em> 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 <em>not</em> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">tenue</span></i> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_290'>290</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">point de repère</span></i>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_291'>291</span>the biggest billionaire. These are the values resorted to -in default of higher, for with <em>some</em> coloured rag or other -the general imagination, snatching its chance, must dress -its doll.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">coup</span></i>. One fancies, under the -high spring of the ceiling and before the great embrasured -window-sashes of the principal room, some -<span class='pageno' id='Page_292'>292</span>clever man of the period, after a long look round, taking -the hint. “<em>What</em> an admirable place for a Declaration -of something! What could one here—what <em>couldn’t</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_293'>293</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_294'>294</span>representing an odd town-nook than any other corner -of American life that I remember; American life having -been organized, <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">ab ovo</span></i>, 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 <em>was</em>, 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.</p> - -<div> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_295'>295</span> - <h3 class='c013'>IV</h3> -</div> - -<p class='c012'>I can but continue to lose myself, for these connections, -in my <em>whole</em> sense of the intermission, as I -have called it, of the glare. The mellower light prevailed, -somehow, <em>all</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_296'>296</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_297'>297</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_298'>298</span>stare; but no after-sense of such vibrations, however -lively, presumes to take itself as communicable.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_299'>299</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_300'>300</span>protest recorded in his <cite>American Notes</cite>. 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_301'>301</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>all</em> 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, <em>as</em> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_302'>302</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">crânerie</span></i> 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.</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_303'>303</span> - <h2 class='c005'>X<br /> BALTIMORE</h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c011'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_304'>304</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_305'>305</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_306'>306</span>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 <em>their</em> -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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>It would probably be again the freshness, of this confessedly -subjective sort, it would probably be again the -<span class='pageno' id='Page_307'>307</span>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_308'>308</span>in the guise of patterns or relics, by any mere sharp -shears of journalism.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_309'>309</span>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) <em>with</em> 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 <em>he</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_310'>310</span>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 <em>that</em>, 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, <em>her</em> intelligence at least -of everything. It might have been there fairly as reassurance. -“Yes, they have lived with <em>me</em>, and it has -done them good, and we have buried together all their -<span class='pageno' id='Page_311'>311</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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; -<span class='pageno' id='Page_312'>312</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_313'>313</span>manners, in other words, to make it presentable—by -which I understand to make it <em>sufficiently</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_314'>314</span>not embrace here more Methodism than might consort -with it, nor the Methodism pretend to cultivate with any -success the hibiscus and the pomegranate.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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; -<span class='pageno' id='Page_315'>315</span>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 <em>manner</em>. 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 <em>that</em>; 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_316'>316</span>other rages and other errors, but even the grace of the -American time-measure can do nothing for it.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>III</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_317'>317</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_318'>318</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>con</em>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_319'>319</span>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 <em>most</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>No example could speak more of that enlargement of -function, for constituting some picture of life, which many -<span class='pageno' id='Page_320'>320</span>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 <em>the</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_321'>321</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>somehow</em> 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, <em>will</em> stand, other facts not preventing, for almost -<span class='pageno' id='Page_322'>322</span>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 <em>all</em> 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?</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>IV</h3> - -<p class='c012'>There <em>were</em> 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 -<em>complete</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_323'>323</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>There had been one—I mean a blest Country Club—in -the neighbourhood of Boston (where indeed I believe -<span class='pageno' id='Page_324'>324</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_325'>325</span>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 <em>whole</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_326'>326</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>there</em>—in the intensity and continuity of the -association, and the interest of the case was in its thus -<span class='pageno' id='Page_327'>327</span>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 <em>could</em> 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 <em>are</em> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">en -masse</span></i>. This is the effect they have when, all impediments -and objections on the dock removed, they do <em>that</em>.” -And later on, at the afternoon’s end, on the platform of -the large agreeable riverside station which spread there, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_328'>328</span>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 -<em>are</em> when they’ve disembarked.”</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_329'>329</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_330'>330</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_331'>331</span>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.</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_332'>332</span> - <h2 class='c005'>XI<br /> WASHINGTON</h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c011'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_333'>333</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_334'>334</span>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 <em>real</em> -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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_335'>335</span>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 <em>is</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_336'>336</span><em>all</em> 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 <em>is</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><span class='pageno' id='Page_337'>337</span>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 <em>communicated</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>It is for the same reason for which we are always -<span class='pageno' id='Page_338'>338</span>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 <em>only</em> (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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_339'>339</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_340'>340</span>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, <em>the</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_341'>341</span>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 -<em>how</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_342'>342</span>on any ground, so organized a social indifference to the -vulgar vociferous Market. Washington may of course -<em>know</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_343'>343</span>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 <em>as</em> 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 -<em>subject</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_344'>344</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>What <em>was</em>, 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 <em>conscious</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_345'>345</span>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 -<em>could</em> 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 <em>but</em> 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 -<em>other</em> 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 <em>has</em> pounced, and -how, outside business, she has made it over in her image. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_346'>346</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>III</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>successful</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_347'>347</span>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.”</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_348'>348</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_349'>349</span>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 <em>con</em>vulsion, I am tempted to say—must -break out in Washington?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>can</em> 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 <em>being</em> settled there—in -the practical way which is yet also the dramatic. -<i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">Solvitur ambulando</span></i>; 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_350'>350</span>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 <em>can</em> 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, -<em>the</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>could</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_351'>351</span>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, <em>talked himself</em> -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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_352'>352</span>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 <em>would</em> -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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>IV</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>can</em> -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 <em>never</em> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_353'>353</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>kind</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_354'>354</span>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 -<em>has</em> 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 <em>are</em>, 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_355'>355</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_356'>356</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">agrément</span></i>, or future possibility, -yields to this one high luxury of our old friendship with -France.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_357'>357</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<em>determined</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_358'>358</span>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 <em>with</em>? -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 <em>directly</em> 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_359'>359</span>extemporized lions or scapegoats, required social and -educational figure-heads and “values,” having to serve -in <em>all</em> 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>V</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_360'>360</span>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 <em>amusing</em>—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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>democratic assimilation</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_361'>361</span>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!</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_362'>362</span>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 <em>working</em> of the whole thing?—specimens, -indeed, highly concentrated and refined, and made -thereby, I admit, more charming and insidious.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_363'>363</span>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 <em>all</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_364'>364</span>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.</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_365'>365</span> - <h2 class='c005'>XII<br /> RICHMOND</h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c011'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_366'>366</span>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 <em>amusement</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_367'>367</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_368'>368</span>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 <em>how</em> to look and to see, one should keep out of it -altogether. But if one does, if one <em>can</em> 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 <em>from</em> the accessory, one has only, at -best, to muffle one’s head for shame and await deserved -extinction.”</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_369'>369</span>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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_370'>370</span><em>most</em> 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 <em>taking</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_371'>371</span>the rank, sweet gardens of which Northern resources had -once been held so cheap?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>references</em>—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 <em>have</em> flourished. Thus, by a turn of my -<span class='pageno' id='Page_372'>372</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_373'>373</span>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 <em>weak</em>—“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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_374'>374</span>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 <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">ad usum Delphini</span></i>—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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">rococo</span></i> 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 <em>were</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_375'>375</span>conscious, on their behalf, of a sort of ingenuity of -tenderness.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_376'>376</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_377'>377</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>III</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_378'>378</span>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 <em>his</em> 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—<em>there</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_379'>379</span>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_380'>380</span>to the casual eye, the general pretension of -churches?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_381'>381</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>as</em> 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 <em>had</em> 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 <em>i</em>, -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” -<span class='pageno' id='Page_382'>382</span>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 <em>what</em> order -we must wait to see.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">portée</span></i>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_383'>383</span>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. -<em>They</em> were buried, if one would, in the “deposit”—where -the restless analyst might scratch, all tenderly, to find -them.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_384'>384</span>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 -<em>had</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_385'>385</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_386'>386</span>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 <em>idea</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_387'>387</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_388'>388</span>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 <em>I</em> 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—<em>as</em> Northern; but whose consciousness -would have been poor and unfurnished without this cool -platonic passion. With what other pattern, personal -views apart, <em>could</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_389'>389</span>touched on some of these!) that, all fair, engaging, -smiling, as he stood there, he would have done to a -Southern negro.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>IV</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>whole</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_390'>390</span>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 <em>their</em> word even when their -supreme right in it is most vulgarly and loudly disputed. -They are the <em>rich</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">penetralia</span></i>, 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_391'>391</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_392'>392</span>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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_393'>393</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_394'>394</span>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 <em>is</em>, 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.</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_395'>395</span> - <h2 class='c005'>XIII<br /> CHARLESTON</h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c011'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_396'>396</span>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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_397'>397</span>Carolinian demonstration, was that somebody had <em>cared</em> -enough—and that happily there had been somebody <em>to</em> -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 <em>it</em> or for anything. That -fairly <em>made</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>were</em>—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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_398'>398</span>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 <em>were</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_399'>399</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>If it was not success, however, for the strayed amateur -<span class='pageno' id='Page_400'>400</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><span class='pageno' id='Page_401'>401</span>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 <em>more</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_402'>402</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_403'>403</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>palazzini</em>. 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_404'>404</span>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 <em>within</em>—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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>what</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_405'>405</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_406'>406</span>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 <em>all</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_407'>407</span>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 <em>some</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_408'>408</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_409'>409</span>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. <em>That</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_410'>410</span>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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>had</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_411'>411</span>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 <em>seen</em>, 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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_412'>412</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>III</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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: <em>such</em> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_413'>413</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_414'>414</span>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 <em>sterilized</em> 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 -<em>bled</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_415'>415</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">parti-pris</span></i>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_416'>416</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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”—<em>the</em> -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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">nuance</span></i> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_417'>417</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">bonhomie</span></i> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>This image really gives us the best word for the -<span class='pageno' id='Page_418'>418</span>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 <em>everything</em> 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 -<cite>The Souls of Black Folk</cite>, by that most accomplished -of members of the negro race, Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois? -Had the <em>only</em> 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 -<em>antedate</em>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_419'>419</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_420'>420</span>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 <em>is</em> 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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">état d’âme</span></i>—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!”</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>didn’t</em>, after all, -land, but recoiled rather and forbore, making my skiff -<span class='pageno' id='Page_421'>421</span>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.</p> - -<div class='chapter'> - <span class='pageno' id='Page_422'>422</span> - <h2 class='c005'>XIV<br /> FLORIDA</h2> -</div> - -<h3 class='c011'>I</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_423'>423</span>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 <em>your</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<em>this</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_424'>424</span>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 <em>then</em> 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 <em>placed</em>—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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>undisputedly</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_425'>425</span>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 <em>but</em> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_426'>426</span>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 <em>was</em> 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 <em>was</em> -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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>It was not, probably, that, inflated though they might -<span class='pageno' id='Page_427'>427</span>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 <em>asked</em>, -when one reflected, to be almost the only figures in -the social landscape—hadn’t wanted the fierce light to -beat <em>all</em> on themselves. They hadn’t actively usurped -the appearance of carrying on life without aid of any -sort from other <em>kinds</em> of persons, other types, presences, -classes. If these others were absent it wasn’t <em>their</em> -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_428'>428</span>results, at the worst, in a certain amount of social -training.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>there</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_429'>429</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>II</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_430'>430</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>their</em> 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 <em>corollæ</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_431'>431</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>“Ah, once <em>place</em> 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 <em>all</em> the grace, <em>all</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_432'>432</span>make it out for me?—would come of itself. Haven’t I, -however, as it is, been too long abandoned and too <em>much</em> -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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_433'>433</span>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: <em>was</em> this the Mincio, <em>were</em> -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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_434'>434</span>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 <i><span lang="es" xml:lang="es">al fresco</span></i>, 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 <i><span lang="it" xml:lang="it">piazzetta</span></i>, 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_435'>435</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>III</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_436'>436</span>one seemed perhaps to yearn for another touch: “Ah, the -hotels of course—plenty of <em>them</em>, 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 <em>that</em>. 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_437'>437</span>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 <cite>The War Trail</cite>, a -work that had seemed matchless to my fourteenth year, -for was not the train itself rumbling straight into <em>that</em> -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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_438'>438</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_439'>439</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_440'>440</span>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 -<em>taking</em> 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 <em>too</em> extraordinary; but the great collective, plastic -public, so vague yet about many things, didn’t <em>know</em> -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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_441'>441</span>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_442'>442</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>articulate</em> 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. -<span class='pageno' id='Page_443'>443</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>IV</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>but</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_444'>444</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_445'>445</span>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 <em>primarily</em> 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 <em>when it shall -appear</em>. 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>“What is wanting in the way of taste?” is the right -form of the inquiry—that small circumstance alone being -<em>positively</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_446'>446</span>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 <em>desire for taste</em>, 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? <em>Is</em> 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, <em>shall</em> have -to continue to be represented, indefinitely, but by a -<span class='pageno' id='Page_447'>447</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>It has sprung from the genius of the divine Pair, the -Dioscuri themselves—as Castor and Pollux were the sons -<span class='pageno' id='Page_448'>448</span>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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>For the boarders, verily, were the great indicated -<span class='pageno' id='Page_449'>449</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">vitrine</span></i>, -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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_450'>450</span>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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>V</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_451'>451</span>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, <em>this</em>, 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?</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_452'>452</span>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">bahuts</span></i> 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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_453'>453</span>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_454'>454</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_455'>455</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>And it was not of course that the marks of uniformity, -among so many persons, were not on <em>their</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_456'>456</span>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 -<em>them</em>?</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>VI</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 <em>was</em> an “old town”—receded -<span class='pageno' id='Page_457'>457</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>The results are of the oddest; they hang all traceably -together; wonderful in short the general spectacle and -<span class='pageno' id='Page_458'>458</span>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_459'>459</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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, -<span class='pageno' id='Page_460'>460</span>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 <cite>Baedeker</cite>. 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.</p> - -<h3 class='c013'>VII</h3> - -<p class='c012'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_461'>461</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_462'>462</span>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 <em>make</em> a fine sense, that -here surely then was the greater antiquity of the two, the -antiquity of the infinite <em>previous</em>, 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 <em>plate</em>, -in perfect condition, but with the impression of History -all yet to be made.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <em>could</em> it be, a ground for -complacency of view, in any country not visited for the -very love of wildness, for positive joy in barbarism? -<span class='pageno' id='Page_463'>463</span>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>“I see what you are <em>not</em> 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 <em>you</em> 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 <em>creation</em> 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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_464'>464</span>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!”</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 -<span class='pageno' id='Page_465'>465</span>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.</p> -<div class='pbb'> - <hr class='pb c003' /> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> -<div class='nf-center c004'> - <div><span class='small'><span class='sc'>Richard Clay & Sons, Limited</span>,</span></div> - <div><span class='small'>BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND</span></div> - <div><span class='small'>BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.</span></div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> -<div class='nf-center c004'> - <div><span class='xlarge'>CHAPMAN & HALL’S NEW BOOKS</span></div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='lg-container-l c002'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><em>H. G. WELLS on America.</em></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong><span class='large'>The Future in America</span></strong></div> - <div class='line in2'><strong>A Search after Realities.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> - <div class='nf-center'> - <div><strong>By H. G. WELLS</strong>,</div> - <div class='c003'>Author of “Anticipations,”</div> - <div>“Mankind in the Making,”</div> - <div>“A Modern Utopia,” &c.</div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='lg-container-r'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Demy 8vo.</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>10s. 6d. net.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'><cite>The Future in America</cite> is an attempt to make a comprehensive picture of one -intelligent visitor’s impression of America as a whole. It contains some vivid description -of the town scenery of America, but it aims to be much more than a record -of things seen. There is a close and intimate criticism of the economic process, -enlivened by thumbnail sketches of typical personalities, and a wide and acute review -of the American mind.</p> - -<p class='c007'>Mr. Wells gives impressions of several American universities, makes a vigorous -onslaught on the culture of Boston and the refinement of Washington; there are -conversations with the President, Mr. Booker T. Washington, and other typical -figures.</p> - -<div class='lg-container-l c002'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><em>Prince Kropotkin’s New Book.</em></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><span class='large'><strong>The Conquest of Bread</strong></span></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> - <div class='nf-center'> - <div><strong>By PRINCE PETER KROPOTKIN</strong>,</div> - <div class='c003'>Author of “Fields, Factories, and Workshops,”</div> - <div>“The Memoirs of a Revolutionist,” &c.</div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='lg-container-r'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Demy 8vo.</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>10s. 6d. net.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'>This brilliantly-written, sincere, and penetrative study of modern conditions of life -and labour, by one of the foremost sociologists of his age, must appeal to any one -who is interested in the common welfare of humanity. Examples are drawn from -every European country, and a definite programme laid down for the amelioration of -contemporary hardships and inequalities.</p> - -<div class='lg-container-l c002'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><em>New Work by L. T. HOBHOUSE.</em></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Morals in Evolution</strong></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line in2'><strong>A Study in Comparative Ethics.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> - <div class='nf-center'> - <div><strong>By L. T. HOBHOUSE</strong>,</div> - <div class='c003'>Author of “The Labour Movement,”</div> - <div>“The Theory of Knowledge,”</div> - <div>“Mind in Evolution,”</div> - <div>“Democracy and Reaction,” &c.</div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='lg-container-r'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Two Volumes,</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>Demy 8vo.</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>21s. net.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'>This book deals historically with the private and the moral consciousness in man. -It falls into two parts. The first deals with custom, <em>i.e.</em> the rules of conduct which -are generally recognised in any society. The most important of these are discussed -under different heads, <em>e.g.</em> laws of marriage and the position of women; class -relations, caste, slavery and free labour; the laws of war; commercial and private -property; methods of providing for the poor. In each case the attempt is made to -sketch in outline the changes encountered as we pass from the lowest savagery to -contemporary civilisation. The second volume deals with the ideas lying at the root -of custom, <em>i.e.</em> principally in religion on its ethical side. Primitive religions are -briefly examined, and the principal ethical features of the great world religions are -passed in review. The ethical doctrines of Confucius and of ancient and modern -moral philosophy are next dealt with, and the work concludes with certain inferences -as to the general trend of ethical development.</p> - -<div class='lg-container-l c002'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><em>A New Study of Rousseau.</em></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong><span class='large'>Jean Jacques Rousseau</span></strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>A New Criticism.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> - <div class='nf-center'> - <div><strong>By FREDERIKA MACDONALD</strong>,</div> - <div class='c003'>Author of “Iliad of the East,”</div> - <div>“Studies in the France of Voltaire and Rousseau.”</div> - <div>With Numerous Illustrations, Facsimiles, &c.</div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='lg-container-r'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Two Volumes,</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>Demy 8vo.</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>24s. net.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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 <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">correspondance -littéraire</span></i>: the second instrument of the plot.</p> - -<p class='c007'>A number of photographs and facsimiles of manuscripts are supplied with the -text.</p> - -<div class='lg-container-l c002'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><em>New Carlyle Letters.</em></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><span class='large'><strong>Carlyle and the London Library</strong></span></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line in2'><strong>A Collection of Original Letters to</strong></div> - <div class='line in2'><strong>W. D. Christie on the Founding of</strong></div> - <div class='line in2'><strong>the London Library in 1841.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> - <div class='nf-center'> - <div><strong>By THOMAS CARLYLE.</strong></div> - <div class='c003'>Arranged by MARY CHRISTIE, and Edited by FREDERIC HARRISON, Litt.D.</div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='lg-container-r'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Crown 8vo.</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>3s. 6d. net.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<div class='lg-container-l c002'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><em>The Economics of the Future.</em></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><span class='large'><strong>The Return to the Land</strong></span></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> - <div class='nf-center'> - <div><strong>By SENATOR JULES MELINE</strong>,</div> - <div class='c003'>Leader of the Moderate Republicans in France: Former Minister of Agriculture; Minister of Commerce; Premier. With a Preface by <span class='sc'>Justin McCarthy</span>.</div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='lg-container-r'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Crown 8vo.</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>5s. net.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>“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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>“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 <cite>Thousand and One Nights</cite>.”</p> - -<div class='lg-container-l c002'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><em>Reminiscences of an Actor.</em></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Joseph Jefferson</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>Reminiscences of a Fellow-Player.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> - <div class='nf-center'> - <div><strong>By FRANCIS WILSON</strong>,</div> - <div class='c003'>Author of “The Eugene Field I Knew,”</div> - <div>“Recollections of a Player,” &c., &c.</div> - <div>With 33 Portraits and other Illustrations.</div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='lg-container-r'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Demy 8vo.</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>10s. 6d. net.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<div class='lg-container-l c002'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><em>A Study of Hypnotism.</em></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong><span class='large'>Hypnotism and Spiritism</span></strong></div> - <div class='line in2'><strong>A Critical and Medical Study.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> - <div class='nf-center'> - <div><strong>By Dr. GIUSEPPE LAPPONI</strong>,</div> - <div class='c003'>Chief Physician to Their Holinesses Leo XIII. and Pius X.;</div> - <div>Professor of Anthropology in the Academy at Rome.</div> - <div>Translated by Mrs. <span class='sc'>Philip Gibbs</span>.</div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='lg-container-r'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Crown 8vo.</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>6s.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<div class='lg-container-l c002'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><em>A New Work by CHARLES G. HARPER.</em></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><span class='large'><strong>The Old Inns of Old England</strong></span></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line in2'><strong>A Picturesque Account of the Ancient</strong></div> - <div class='line in2'><strong>and Storied Hostelries of our own</strong></div> - <div class='line in2'><strong>Country.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> - <div class='nf-center'> - <div><strong>By CHARLES G. HARPER</strong>,</div> - <div class='c003'>Author of “The Stage Coach and Mail in Days of Yore,”</div> - <div>“The Brighton Road,” &c., &c.</div> - <div>With upwards of 200 Illustrations, chiefly by the Author.</div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='lg-container-r'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Two Volumes,</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>Demy 8vo.</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>Gilt Top,</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>42s. net.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<div class='lg-container-l c002'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><em>A Study in Sociology.</em></div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong><span class='large'>The Polish Jew</span></strong></div> - <div class='line in2'><strong>His Social and Economic Value.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> - <div class='nf-center'> - <div><strong>By BEATRICE C. BASKERVILLE.</strong></div> - </div> -</div> - -<div class='lg-container-r'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'><strong>Demy 8vo.</strong></div> - <div class='line'><strong>10s. 6d. net.</strong></div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'>“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.</p> - -<div class='chapter ad2'> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> -<div class='nf-center c004'> - <div><span class='large'>THE NATIONAL EDITION</span></div> - <div class='c003'>OF THE WORKS OF</div> - <div class='c003'><span class='xlarge'><strong>Charles Dickens</strong></span></div> - <div class='c003'>Including upwards of One Hundred and Thirty Articles now collected for the first time.</div> - <div class='c003'>HIS</div> - <div class='c003'><strong>LETTERS, SPEECHES, PLAYS, and POEMS</strong>,</div> - <div class='c003'>TOGETHER WITH</div> - <div class='c003'><strong>FORSTER’S LIFE OF THE AUTHOR</strong>.</div> - </div> -</div> - -</div> - -<p class='c006'>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.</p> - -<div class='nf-center-c0'> - <div class='nf-center'> - <div>Strictly limited to 750 sets for England and America. Complete in 40 Volumes.</div> - <div>Royal 8vo. Price <strong>10s. 6d.</strong> net per vol.</div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><strong>THE TEXT.</strong>—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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>The edition contains all the collected papers from whatever source that seemed -worthy of permanent association with the name of their author—from <cite>The Examiner</cite>, -<cite>Daily News</cite>, <cite>Household Words</cite>, <cite>All the Year Round</cite>, over 130 in all—the most -notable of these being all Dickens’s contributions to <cite>Household Words</cite>, some -90 in number, <em>which have been identified for the first time by indisputable -evidence</em>.</p> - -<p class='c007'><strong>THE ILLUSTRATIONS.</strong>—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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><strong>THE ARTISTS.</strong>—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.</p> - -<div class='lg-container-b'> - <div class='linegroup'> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line in2'>ARTISTS REPRESENTED.</div> - </div> - <div class='group'> - <div class='line'>George Cruikshank.</div> - <div class='line'>Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).</div> - <div class='line'>Robert Seymour.</div> - <div class='line'>John Leech.</div> - <div class='line'>R. W. Buss.</div> - <div class='line'>C. R. Leslie, R.A.</div> - <div class='line'>Frank Stone, A.R.A.</div> - <div class='line'>T. Webster, R.A.</div> - <div class='line'>George Cattermole.</div> - <div class='line'>Daniel Maclise, R.A.</div> - <div class='line'>H. Warren.</div> - <div class='line'>Kenny Meadows.</div> - <div class='line'>Richard Doyle.</div> - <div class='line'>J. Mahony.</div> - <div class='line'>E. G. Dalziel.</div> - <div class='line'>G. J. Pinwell.</div> - <div class='line'>W. Maddox.</div> - <div class='line'>J. Absolon.</div> - <div class='line'>F. Corbeaux.</div> - <div class='line'>Marcus Stone, R.A.</div> - <div class='line'>Clarkson Stonefield, R.A.</div> - <div class='line'>Samuel Palmer.</div> - <div class='line'>F. W. Topham.</div> - <div class='line'>Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A.</div> - <div class='line'>Sir John Tenniel, R.A.</div> - <div class='line'>Fred. Walker.</div> - <div class='line'>Arthur Boyd Houghton.</div> - <div class='line'>W. P. Frith, R.A.</div> - <div class='line'>F. A. Fraser.</div> - <div class='line'>H. French.</div> - <div class='line'>Townley Green.</div> - <div class='line'>Charles Green.</div> - <div class='line'>Sir Luke Fildes, R.A.</div> - <div class='line'>Charles Alston Collins.</div> - </div> - </div> -</div> - -<p class='c007'><strong>THE ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS</strong> will be—</p> - -<p class='c007'>All the original covers, printed from the wood blocks on tinted paper.</p> - -<p class='c007'>All the pictorial covers of the “People’s Edition,” printed from the wood blocks -on tinted paper.</p> - -<p class='c007'>The steel vignette title-pages to the “Library Edition.”</p> - -<p class='c007'>The frontispieces of the First Cheap Edition, by Leslie, Webster, A. Boyd -Houghton, Frank Stone, Marcus Stone, R.A., Stanfield, Phiz, Cruikshank, and -others.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>The frontispieces and other plates from “Master Humphrey’s Clock,” which, on -account of their size, do not appear in other editions.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'>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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><strong>ITS COMPLETENESS.</strong>—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.</p> - -<p class='c007'><strong>THE BINDING.</strong>—The edition will be bound by Messrs. 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