I O 6 3" 517 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT BUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library F106 .J27 The American scene / OLIN LIB^j^TEQlJO^-ATION Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030992006 THE AMERICAN SCENE BY HENRY JAMES HARPER &■ BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMVl I 5 IOC K^n^ioH-S" Copyright, 1907, by Harfkr & Brothers. All rights reserved. Published February, 1907. CONTENTS CHAP. _^ PAGK I. New England: an Autumn Impression .... i II. New York Revisited 70 III. New York and the Hudson: a Spring Impression 113 IV. New York: Social Notes 153 V. The Bowery and Thereabouts 187 VI. The Sense of Newport 202 VII. Boston 218 VIII. Concord and Salem 247 IX. Philadelphia 263 X. Baltimore 292 XI. Washington 320 XII. Richmond 351 XIII. Charleston 3 8 ° XIV. Florida 406 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 freslmess-ef-eye, outward and inward, which, with the further contribution of a state o f de sire, is com- monly held a precious agent of perception. I felt nq. 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 in- telligence 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, impene- trable. I would take my stand on my gathered im- pressions, since it was all for them, for them only, that I returned; I would in fact go to the stake for them — PREFACE which is a sign of the value that I both in particular and in general attach to them and that I have endeavored to preserve for them in this transcription. My cultivated sense of aspect s 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 imper- turbably 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 ac- cordingly stand naked and unashamed. It should unfail- ingly 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 prop- erties of the social air, that the newspapers, reports, sur- veys and blue-books would seem to confess themselves powerless to "handle," and that yet represented to me a greater array of items, a heav er 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 oTHieTEselfr would prove much too numerous even for a capacity all given to them for some ten months; but at least there- fore, 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 repre- sentation, 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. September 28, 1906. vi THE AMERICAN SCENE THE AMERICAN SCENE i NEW ENGLAND an Autumn impression 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 re- called frdm very fair 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 con- fusion and change; a process under Which, Verily, rec- ognition became mdre 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, oh emerging from the compa rative ly ass ured, order of the great berth o|Jhjii3iip7Thai„re£S^gSisS was difficult: there, only too cbnfbuhdihgly 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 i THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 "distinguish- ed" 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 cob- bles, 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 sharp- ness all emphasized by the anguish of effort); the cor- pulent 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 conSderearand 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 success- fully pleads on so many others. The light of the Septem- ber 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 2 NEW ENGLAND went, that Naples, that Tangiers or Constantinople has probably nothing braver to flaunt, and mingle with ex- cited 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 re- action, 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 flui dity-of-appre-- cigiiea — 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 back- ward view is already a distance with "tone" — of the service it rendered me and of the various p ercepti ve penetr ations, 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 ex- perience 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 larg^st--surr^ndei^tc^in3pr^sdQns. Clearly, how- ever, these were not for the present — and such as they were — to be kept at bay; the hour of reckoning, obvious- ly, 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. 3 THE AMERICAN SCENE It was fairly droll, for instance, the quantity of visiai that began to press during a wayside rest in a houa of genial but discriminating hospitality that opened it doors just where the fiddle-string of association coul< most intensely vibrate, just where the sense qf "olc New York," of the earlier stages of the picture now si violently overpainted, found most of its occasions- found them, to extravagance, within and without. Th< gqod easy Square, known in childhood, and as if the Ugh' were yellower there from that small accident, bristlec 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 communi- cating rooms, portraits and relics and records, jaintly ^liaitttly-aesthetic, 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 ^h^umfcrjbedriast, which appealed with scarce more empliasis than so many tail-pieces of closed chapters. The whole impression had fairly a rococo tone ; and it was in this perceptibly golder air, the air of old empty New York afternoons of the waning summer-time, when the long, the perpendiculai 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, dedi- cated 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 Yorli house-painter, and playing upon the chord of remem- brance, 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 4 NEW ENGLAND up— that the rather pettifogging plan of the city, the fruity 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 stude nt of m anners, 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 " subje ct," the matter was quite , beyond calculation by the time he had tumbled, in such a glorified "four-wheeler," and with such an odd con- sciousness 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 dis- embarked, with the first word exchangedj 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 harshenihg of that element. Nothing could have been more to the spectator's 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 deliriously be left~tF^ip^nTTike~goTden 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 entertain- 5 THE AMERICAN SCENE Anient, so divinely inexpensive, by the way. The im- mense 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 appear- ance, with so gentle and patient an eye ; the gayety of the light, the gladness of the air, and, above all (for it most came back to that), the unconscious affluence, the„ v arie ty jlL-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 spread- ing 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, every- where, should strike him as pe5niarly7 as almost affect- ingly, 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.. ; Appear.ance;'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 col- 6 NEW ENGLAND lected 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 o wn ridicu loiis. jvrnpm-t.y a " d s ^ n — the romantic, if not the pathetic circumstance of onelFnavmg had to wait till now to read even such meagre" meanings as this into a page at which one's ge- agraphy::might SO easily have opened. It might have threatened, for twenty minutes, to be almost complicat- ing, but the truth was recorded: it was an adventure, unmistakably, to have a revelation m ade 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 assodatioji 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 7 THE AMERICAN SCENE -might be. The huge new houses, up and down, looked over their smart, short lawns as with a certain familiaf prominence in their profiles, which was borne out by the accent, loud, assertive, yet benevolent withal, with which they confessed to their extreme expensivetiess, "Oh, yes ; we were awfully dear, for what We are aiid for what we tj " — it was proud, but it was rather rueful; with the odd appearance everywhere as of florid creations JKait- ing, a little bewilderingly, for their justification , waiting for the next clause in the sequence; waJtmgJfa_ShQrt for life, for time, for interest, fdr character, for identity ifc -self to come to them, quite as large spreadTtabT?S of superfluous shops may wait for guests and customers: The scene overflowed with curious suggestion; it comes back to me with the afternoon air aiid the amiable flat- ness, the note of the sea in a drowsy mood; arid I thus somehow think of the great white boxes as standing there With the silvered ghostlihess (for all the silver involved) of a series of candid new moons. It could only be the occupants, moreover who were driving on the vas't, feat 1 tireless 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 shabbi- ness 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 hot 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 JSS??sion _into_£pace — as if to symbolize the rapidity of theiT_recession into time. They have been left so far 8 MEW ENGLAND behind by the expensive, as the expensive is now prac- ticed; in spite of having apparently been originally a sufficient expression of it. This pqujd pass, it seemed, for the greatest vividness Of the piptur-e: — that the expensive, for New York in VitfaggiGtHTQt even on such subordinate showing, is like a train covering ground at maximum speed and pushing On, at present, into, regions unmeasurable. It included, hqwever, 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 man- ners as if they had been a row of lustres reflected in the. pojished flqqr of a b^Ur oom . Here was the expensive as a power by itself, a pqwer unguided, undirected, prac- tically unapplied, really exerting itself in a void that could make it no response, that had nothing— poor gen- tle, patient, meful. but altogether helpless, void!— to offer in return. The game was that of its doing, each party to the whqje pombination, what it pquld, but with the result of the common effort's falling so shqrt. Nqthr ing cquld be qf a livelier interest — with. the question of mjnjjersjJwj^aJnr^ffiew^ — than tp nqte - th^tTt^elnQsTal'" yet acponyplished at such a post was the air of unraiti-: gated 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 misplaped con- fidence, qr whatever one may call it, there was no achieved protection, no constituted mystery of retreat, no saving pomplexity, npt so much as might be represented by a foot of garden wail or a preliminary sketch of interposing shade. The homely principle under which the picture held at all tqgether was that of the famous freedom of the cat tP look at the king; that seemed, so clearly, through-^ out, 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 eaeh other, at short range, from head to 9 THE AMERICAN SCENE foot; while the open road, the chariots, the buggies, the 'moioTS, the pedestrians — which last number, indeed, was remarkably small— ^r&^^d-^LJhax.Mase-hotix^S^jec- j^raciJ5^!4Jhjjparti5S.to it. It was in fact all one participation, with an effect deterrent to those ingenui- ties, 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 o f mann ers : the fact that in such condi- tions there~couTcS'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 inter- course, their relations, their pleasures, their general ad- vantage and justifigajtipii ? Do, that is, in affirming their wealth wimsuch 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- lxj^W ElSj^LAND gaps," they practically admitted, and with no shade of embarrassment; "expensive as we are, we have nothing to do with^continuity^^ejpOT^ibiUty^^Jra^jnission, and i theleasT ~ don't in the leasT care what becomes of us after we have served our present purpose." On the detail of this im- pression, however, I needn't insist; the essence of it, which was all that was worth catching, was one's recog- nition 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 ever- lastingly 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 fagt 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 gen- eral stage, was the game going to take? The whole spectacle, with the question, opened out, diffusing posi- tively 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 THE AMERICAN SCENE very dontite of the piece could be given* the subject formulated: the great adventure Of a society reaching but into the apparent void fof the ariienitiei, the cbrlsurn^ mationsi after having earnestly gathered in so many ti the preparations and necessities. "Into the apparent 'Void" — I had to insist oh that, since without it there )would be neither comedy nor tragedy- besides which sb •little was Wanting, in the way of vacancy, to the corh- -pletehess of the appearance. What Would lurk beneath this— -or indeed what; wouldn't, what mightn't— to thiek- eri the plot frbrri stage to stage and to intensify the action ? The stdry-seekef would be present , quite iri- tihiately present, at the general effort— showing, ddubfe less, as quite heroic in many a case— ^-tO gOuge ari interest out of the vacancy, gouge it With tools Of prieSj even as copper and gold and diamonds are extracted, by elaborate processes; from earth-sectiOris Of small superficial ex= pfession. What was sUch an effort, on it§ associated side, fOf the attentive mind, but a niofe Or less advent 1 UrOus fight, Carried On frOm scene to scene; with fluctua- tions and variations, the shifting quantity of sucbe§s anti 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, fdr" the long, the immitigable process 1 Of time. It Was a pfomis§, clearly, of the highest entertainment. It was presently to coihe back to rrie, hoWever, that there were other sbrts, too— so many sorts, in fact, fof the ancient contemplative person, that selection and omission, in face of them, become almo§t a pain, and the sacrifice of even the least of these immediate sequences' of impression in its freshness a lively regret. But With- out much foreshortening is no representation, arid I wa9 promptly to become conscious, at all events, of quite a different part of the picture, and Of personal perception^ 12 NEW ENGLAND .o 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 recogni- tion^ that Of the sense of some bedimmed summer of the distant prime flushing back into life and asking to give again as m^ch as possible of what it had given before — all in spite, too, of much unacquaintedness, of the new- ness, to my eyes, through the mild September glow of the particular rich region. _J_cahMt_rich without com- p unction, degp ite its sever al poverties, caring "TfKlgjEhat h alf the c harm, or half the response, to it, may have been ^meles^ T ^hjJg$ij£gJ ' ;: since .IhaJ^hutr 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, gr"at]easf 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, pf mere New Hampshire — the mild September glow and even the clear October blaze were things to play on the chords— pf— me mory and as sociationT— to say nothing of those'^of surprise, with an admirable art of their owm Th e tune may have dropped at last, but it Succeeded f pr . a month in being strangely sweet, and in producing, qmte 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 purious, unexpected, inscrutable side. Why was the whole connotation so delicately Arcadian, Uke that Of the Arcadia of an old tapestry, an old legend, an old love-story in fifteen volumes, one of those of Mademoiselle de Scuderi? Why, in default of other ele- i3 THE AMERICAN SCENE ments 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 thresh- old, the dried-up well, the cart-track vague and lost — these seemed the only notes to interfere, in their meagre- hess, with the queeZ-Qther, 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 Moun- tain, and thence, to escape, took his leap into the abyss — even so sharp an echo of a definite far-off past, en- riching the effect of an admirable silvered summit (for Chocorua Mountain carries its gray head quite with the grandest air), spent itself in the mere idleness of the un- discriminated, 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 rhapso- dize 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 "1-4— -""" NEW ENGLAND was in such quantity as one hadn't for years had to deal with ; and thafnught 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 ancb* took a particular light. This light, from whatever sourq©' proceeding, cast an irresistible spell, bathed the picture in the confessed resignation of early autumn, the charm- ing 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 con- scious hush of the landscape, which kept one in presence as of a world created, a stage set, a sort of ample capac- ity 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 past- ures, 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 — -th^se_thingsj)ut ; 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 un- expectedly 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-gray rock cropping through 15 THE AMERICAN SCENE thinly -grassed acres with a placed and "composed" /felicity that suggested the furniture of a drawing-room? The great bowlders in the woods, the pulpit-stones, the couchant and rampant beasts, the isolated cliffs and lichened cathedrals, had all, seen, as one passed, through 1 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— I ^the place was furnished by its own good taste; its bosky ring shut it in, the two or three gaps of the old forgottenf enclosure made symmetrical doors, the sweet old stones had the surface of gray 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 doubt-? less but the alertness of the touch of autumn, the im- prisoned painter, the Bohemian with a rusty jacket, who had already broken out with palette and brush; yet the way the color begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a wood- side 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 16 NEW ENGLAND 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-colored pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you note their manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gayety, 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 yield- ing 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, in- j deed, 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 recur- rence of water gives a polish to the manner itself, so to speak, of nature; thanks to which, in any case, the mem- ory of a characteristic perfection attaches, I find, to cer- tain 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 THE AMERICAN SCENE circle of forest, of boat that, across the water, put noise- lessly 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, over T whelming, 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 con- venience 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 hap- pened — 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 f — 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 18 NEW ENGLAND 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 ac- cent, 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 prompt- ings, 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 19 THE AMERICAN SCENE that but the feminine attitude ? — not the actual, current, j 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 sub- mission 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] 1 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 use- ful, 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 back- ground, that traceable truth that a stout human experi- ment 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 in- solently 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 to- gether what we may do for each other— something that is not merely estimable in more or less greasy green- backs. See how 'sympathetic' I am," the still voice NEW ENGLAND seemed everywhere to proceed, "and how I am therefore better than my fate; see how I lend myself to poetry^ and sociability — positively to aesthetic 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 fam- ilies, 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 be- gan 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 al- most promised to glow with a reflected light. It was a clew, 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 argu- ment, 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 won- derment 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 condi- tions, 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 con- veniently 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 21 THE AMERICAN SCENE association as loomed thus large, was certain to have to fix itself somewhere. What was one to say of appear- ances 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, appurte- _nances, 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, i 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 popu- lation 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 admoni- tion of all we had, from far back, so easily and comfort- ably 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 puiled 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 observa- tions first languished into life that importance simply didn't exist at all, and its absence was everywhere for- ' lornly, 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 NEW ENGLAND anywhere expressed (and its highest nights were but in the matter of fresh paint or a swept dooryard), a sum- mer person was usually the author of the boon. The teams, the carts, the conveyances in their kinds, the sal- low, 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 be- gin with; and the shrill effect of the New England meet- ing-house, in general, so merely continuous and con- gruous, 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 towards 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, in- evitably, 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 theo- logical enterprise, in the tradition and on the scale of commercial and industrial enterprise, had no attenuation worth mentioning. The case, in the New Hampshire 23 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 feudal- ism. If there was no point here at which they had per- ceptibly 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 expla- nation 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 aijozms: if, with so little reference to their past, present or future possibility, they could be said to have been even so much honored as to be abolished. The pounce at any rate was, for a guiding light, effect^ ual; the guiding light worked to the degree of seeming -at times positively to save the restless analyst from mad- -ness. He could make the absence of forms responsible, and he could thus react without bitterness — react abso- lutely 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__£g, as a recognized accessory to manners, intro- duced and d^ve!oped7"the uglme"ss^hight"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 desti- tution? One thoughtfully asked that, though at the cost of being occasionally pulled up by odd glimpses of NEW ENGLAND the underlying existence of a standard. There was the wage - standard, to begin with; the wellnigh awestruck view of the high rate of remuneration open to the most abysmally formless of "hired" men, indeed to field or house labor, expert or inexpert, on the part of either sex, in any connection: the ascertainment of which was one i of the "bewilderments" I just now spoke of, one of the failures of consistency in the gray 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 ap- pear 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 al- most 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 maitresse de maison, a summer person trained to resigna- tion, as preliminary to a message brought, as he then mentions, from the "washerlady." These are the phe- nomena, 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 ten- derly 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 evojuiicua^f-jnanners, the latent drama to come: the aesthetic enrichment of the summer people r so far as they should be capable or worthy of it, by con- tact with the consoling background, so full of charming 25 THE AMERICAN SCENE secrets, and the forces thus conjoined for the production and the^n^ositioa-offorms. Thrown back again almost altogether, as by thejefsey 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. 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 jtheir train a hundred happy variations. I kept tight pold of my temporary clew, 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 Ap- pearance, 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, towards 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 26 NEW ENGLAND and had altered, unmistakably, the old felicity of pro- portion. 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; gray 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 contem- plation: 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 i _sacred__gro_ye, 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 posi- tive 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 stand- ing 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 27 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 benevcieat-institiitian 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, per- suaded him perfectly to peace. This, on September Sun- day 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 contrib- ute to the effect. It was the great, gay river, singing as it went, like some reckless adventurer, good-humored 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 i9 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 extrava- gantly my mere sense of driving presently, though after 28 NEW ENGLAND 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, New Hampshire, 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 supporETotheconviction 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 in- ference 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 verandas of contemplation, but admitting to such 29 THE AMERICAN SCENE images of furnished peace, within, as could but illustrate ararejjer^onalhistory. 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 parlors, 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 ideffl±fie^~oflSpli-and_Jane, their_inability to es cape j j33mr z -partieipatkaia--^Jui-^^mmunities. 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 mas- terly 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 way- farer, 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 30 NEW ENGLAND 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 betters than so many of the phases of its fate, so there are spots ., where you see it turn up at you, under some familiar taste- less 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 neigh- bor, 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 compara- tively 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, New Hampshire, 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 curios- ity 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 3 31 THE AMERICAN SCENE the confidence of their personal relation. Their personal relation — that of the young man was with the two sunt mer 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 coachr man, the guard, the quick-eared four-in-hand, being far 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, in- numerable questions, amid which he felt himself sink be? yond 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 flap* ping their wings; whereby they were shown in possession of many of the movements of life. Life, however, hv volved in some degree esggrience — 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 im- ' modesty; 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. Clearly, none the less, there were puzzles and puzzles, and I had almost immediately the amusement of waking 32 NEW ENGLAND 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 im- mediate vision, was to a broad band erf 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 overfringed 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 re- minders. 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 proyoca : ,. t ion, from i ts type,. Its type, ...so. ..easily formulated, , so completely~fiIied, was there the last thing at night and the^st thing, in the^mojrning; Jhere was rest ; for the mind ^-forthat, certainly,- of. jthej-eatless analyst— in having it so" exactly under one's hand. After that one could read-iato-itother meanings without straining or disturb- ing 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 head- land projected, as by some water-colorist master of the trick, into a mere brave Wash of cobalt. It interfered, the sweet promontory, with its generous Boston bungalow, its verandas still haunted with old summer-times, and so 33 THE AMERICAN SCENE "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 step?; 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 nutter its wings, it may bruise its breast; , against surfaces either too hard or too blank. "The I manners, the manners: where and what are they, and what have they to tell?" — that haunting curiosity, essen- 1 tial to the honor 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 blank- ness; there were always the little white houses of the village, there were always the elegant elms, feebler and more feathery here than farther 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, Matte- 34 NEW ENGLAND poisett, 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 I a basis of items that failed somehow, count and recount \ them as one would, to justify the effect and make up the j 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 promis- cuous 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 await- lhg~melir"the form - of nunimTzed 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 hair-pin, the buggy disembodied save for its wheels, the whole thing the barestjiri!ra£tion_of_iJie-^^ circum- stances, altogether, that struck the note, the right, the 35 / THE AMERICAN SCENE persistent one — that of my baffled endeavor, while in the neighborhood, 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 pf a long stretch of new "stone" road, that, socially, eeo-> nomically, every contributive scrap of this detail W3S required. I drained my small companion, by gentle pressure, of such side-lights as he could project, consisting almost wholly, as they did, of a prompt and shrill, an oddly-emphasized "Yes, sir!" to each interrogative at' tempt to break ground. The summer people had al- ready departed— with, as it seemed to me, undue pre-: cipitation; the very hotel offered, in its many- windowed bulk, the semblance of a mere huge brittle searsheU 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 the%. I remember the sense that something must b e dPW for penetration, for discovery; I remember an earnest stroll, undertaken for a view of waterside life, whieh 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 prod- ding the sea-bottom for oysters; also in the diseovery of an animated centre of industry of which oysters again were the motive: a mute citizen or two pse!^ 36 NEW ENGLAND ing 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 remain- ing 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 f I had again to take it for a mystery. 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, Eardness~aF~countenance with an art of its own. The "descriptive Tterm 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.'TxPr&spond to its appeal for admiration, practically 37 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 trib- ute is always ready and easy, and you are spared all shocks of surprise and saved any extravagance of dis- ^criminatioa. 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 color, the almost shameless toler- ance of nature for the poor human experiment, are 38 NEW ENGLAND 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 savor. 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 remark- able 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-colored 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 re- 39 o THE AMERICAN SCENE f moval 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 par- ticular felicities there within the general — and any- thing very particular, in the land at large, always gave 4the case an appearance of rarity. When the great eln> gallery happens to be garnished with old houses, and the old houses happen to show style and form and pro^ portion, 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 Eng- land village may placidly await any comer. Farmingtotl sits with this confidence on the top of a ridge that presents itself in its fringed length — a straight avenue seen in prd- file — 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 art air that so offcefl affects us as drained precisely, and wellnigh to our gasp' ing, of any exception to the common? The indication I here glance at secures for the place in advance, as yoti 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 haughti%« ness, 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 refine ments 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 ex^ cellent; though, if we know it very well, we make no vtiU gar noise about it: we only just stand here, in our long double line, in the manner of mature and just slightly- 40 NEW ENGLAND reduced gentlewomen seated against the wall at an even- ing party (some party where mature gentlewomen un- usually abound), and neither too boldly affront the light nor shrink from the favoring 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 t 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 resi- dent 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 £)f 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 difr ferent 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 pre- tend 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 littler 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 some- times 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 endeavored to suggest; 4i THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 r ; 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 some- times, 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 neighbor- hoods it warns, for climax of its characteristic curtness, to 42 1 NEW ENGLAND "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 sidf of the subject as a tuft for provisional clutching. It sprouts in that soil, none the less, betimes, this appret- hension that the ' ' common man " an H fj if^rrvm m nn woman hav e here their ap pointed-paradise and sphere, and" that the sign ofit _is the a beyance, on many a scene, of any wants, any tastes, a ny nabiti"^~any tra3itrons - BuT theirs; The bullying railway orders them off their Tfwn~decehfl ave'nue 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 f" 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 com- mon, 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 im- plication 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 wwcommon. There are no "kinds" of people; 43 THE AMERICAN SCENE there are simply people, very, very few, and all of one kind, the kind who thus simply invest themselves for /you in the gray truth that they don't go to the publid- N house. It's a negative garment, but it must serve you; which it makes shift to do while you keep on askingj 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 of three of these strong patches of surface-embroidery re^ main with me as curious and interesting. Never was such by-play as in a great new house on a hill-top that overlooked the most composed of communities; a house apparently conceived — and with great felicity — on thg 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 corn- pressed lips of half-conscious inanition. One hadn't cjtdte 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 any- thing like the same extent; and though the consequent taste, as a mixture with the other tastes, was of the queer-* est, 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. 44 NEW ENGLAND 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 mean- while 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 ques- tion a prey to vagueness — it being obvious that vice re- quires 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 45 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 "inter- esting" 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 smutcfc 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 Cenci-drama, 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 magnifi- cence 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 46 NEW ENGLAND 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 grand- est 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 respon- sively 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 4 47 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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, over- passed; 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 civil- ization 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 4 8 NEW ENGLAND increase and multiply; was, indeed, with a mild con- sistency, 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 Common- wealth 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, puffmgly, 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 patri- archs 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 com- parison, for curiosity, not as the streets of Massachusetts. The best here, to speak of, was that the motor under- went 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 encoun- tered 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 49 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 "jfreely affirmed, the superstition of cookery should yet be I 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, mediaeval Albany. 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 So NEW ENGLAND 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 disEs~dang"Iing from familiar and reiterated names. Why, at the same time, one might ask, had the consciousness of irritation from these/' vai n forms ^ not grown greater? why had the incon- venience, 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 post- poned 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 flavored 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 neigh- borhoods, the work of time loomed large, and the dif- ference 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 repu- diation of TiheTpast, scTfar^as there had been a past to 5i r "THE AMERICAN SCENE Repudiate, so far as the past was a positive ratberjliati a~ negative quantity. There had been plenty in it, as- suredly, 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 candor 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 savors 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 colorless, 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 suffi- ciently noisy newspapers might want. That, moreover,:; was but another name for the largest and straightest per- ception the restless analyst had yet risen to — the per- ception that awaits the returning absentee ' from this 52 NEW ENGLAND 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,_^e_lo^seJboards of -its -theatric stage to ian^hiOrdtnate^mrp^_ceJ ! e^ed jumble, is the monstrous_ ~grrr| nf Dpmnrrppy^ wVuVVi 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 ir which they determine and qualify manners, feelings, i 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 clew worth mentioning in the labyrinth. The condition, notoriously, represents an immense boon, but what does the enjoyment of the boon represent? The clew is never out of your hands, whatever other ob- jects, extremely disconnected from it, may appear at the moment to fill them. The democratic consistency, con- summately 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 think- . ing of that one, which has everything else at its mercy. What indeed is this circumstance that the condition is 53 THE AMERICAN SCENE thus magnified but the commanding value of the picture, its message and challenge to intelligent curiosity ? Curi- osity 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 noth- ing, 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 im- ' plication the democratic intensity could always figure. There was little need, for that matter, to drag it into the foreground on the evening of my renewed introduc- ,, tion to the particular Boston neighborhood — the only one of them all — with which I had been formerly some- what 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 Sep- tember night and through a town-picture as of extraor- dinary 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 Amer- ican earth-smell, which in the darkness fairly poetized i the suburbs, and with the queer, far, wild throb of shrill- ing 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? 54 NEW ENGLAND 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 sur- face — 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 exten- sion of his view was to cause him to cultivate. Re^] assurance is required, before the spectacle of American manners at large, whenever one most acutely perceives how little honor they tend to heap on the art of dis- crimination, 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, 55 p THE AMERICAN SCENE the humblest of them, to the imagination — the imaging tion 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 in- extinguishable. 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 or- ganism 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 pro- duction 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 con- sciousness, either derision or respect. They excited, as befell, an extraordinary tenderness — on which con- clusion 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 NEW ENGLAND — 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 scene, 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 telltale twilight that seemed to give them, intellectually, "away"; the beauti- ful 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, pre- historic 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 guTfTOdBie, and, with a suspicion jof_weak_p_laces T 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 idyl, and one would walk in the idyl, 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 reflec- tion 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, every- thing broke, everything went — everything was trans- 57 THE AMERICAN SCENE posed at least into another key. But for the time so much had been gained — the happy trick had been played.: 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 it s con- sciousness, the right prOTisj.on__.had been made for the jSSentberifig" mincL ThlTplace was addressed in truth solargely" 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 com- pany 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 repre- sentation of life and character, a projection of genius, which even that great painter has never outdone. In- numerable, 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 person- , ality, 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 58 NEW ENGLAND 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 por- trait 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 honor and of hos- pitality which, under the name of the Alumni Hall, dis- penses (apart from its containing a noble auditorium) laurels to the dead and dinners to the living. The re- cording tablets of the members of the University sac- rificed, 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 spreads 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 im- mediately 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 S9 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 re- educed, 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, i 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 s 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 magnif- icent place, but it makes poor places; an,d 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 es- pecial drawing of the belt at Harvard is an admirably interesting example of the way in which the formal en- closure 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 es- tablished 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 com- 60 NEW ENGLAND parative exhibition of the tone of time — so prompt an ecstasy and so deep a relief reward, in America, every- where, any sugges ted source of interest that is not the interest of importunate newness. That source overflows, "alHrtHers-run'TEE^ 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-pane d 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 vivacijy_joi. appeal, through this more marked constitution of a milieu for it. Here, verily, questions could swarm; for there was scarce an impres- sion of the local life at large that didn't play into them. t 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, i THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 At isn't perpetually stale — foreign matter into our hetero- geneous system. But even without that a haunting wonder as to what might be becoming of us all, "typical- ly," ethnically, and thereby physiognomically, linguisti- cally, 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 off — 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 fore- cast 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 pre- ponderance, wherever he turns and twjsts, of the un- mitigate<^-^businessj ; maiil!__i^ce, ranging through its various pOssibilitiesTits extraordinary actualities, of in- tensity. 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 narrow- ly specialized, their less commercialized, distinctly more generalized, physiognomic character. The superiority thus noted, and which is quite another matter from the 62 NEW ENGLAND 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 ob- servation snatches, from the first, with an immense sense of its portee. 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 conversible 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 purei 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 increas- ing 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 con- crete 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 be- gins to look at American life brush in hand, he is in dan- ger of seeing, in comparison, almost nothing else in it — nothing, that is, so characteristic as this apparent priva-' , tion, 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 s 63 THE AMERICAN SCENE current opportunities. It in any case remains vivid that American life may, as regards much of its mani- festation, fall upon the earnest view as a society of women "located" in a world of men, which is so differ- ent 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 unre- deemed 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 con- tribution 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 re- call 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?" 64 NEW ENGLAND 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 ex- tension 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 com- mercial, the immediate, and, all too often, the ugly, so any human product that those elements fail conspicuous- , ly 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 aesthetic waistband. 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 6 5 THE AMERICAN SCENE a builded breakwater against the assault of matters de- manding 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 ad- vance 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 re- solve themselves now into three or four of an intrinsic color so dim as to be otherwise wellnigh indistinguish- able. Why, if one could tell it, would it be so wonder- ful, 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 even- ing; with a wintry pink light in the west, the special shade, fading into a heartless prettiness of gray, 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 66 NEW ENGLAND 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 unchrist- ened children. They lack thus, for the great occasions^ the great formal necessities, their "papers." It was x thanks to Lowell even more immediately than to Long- fellow that Cambridge had its papers — though if I find myself putting that word into the past tense it is per- haps because of the irresistible admonition, too (proceed- ing so from a thousand local symptoms), that titles em- bodied 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 com-" panions. 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 67 THE AMERICAN SCENE /spectral (in its own turn) stare of the Stadium— per- ceived as a portent of the more roaring, more reported and excursionized scene ; and in particular seemed to see J. R. L.'s robust humor yield to the recognition of the irony of fate, dear to every poet, in one of its most point- ed forms. That humor had played of old, charmingly, over the thesis that Cambridge, Massachusetts, was, taken altogether, the most inwardly civilized, most in- timately 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 there- fore 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 posses- sion 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 disconcert- ments 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 68 NEW ENGLAND 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 towards Watertown, all verandas 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 country- side 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 gre- garious, the concentric, and pervaded moreover by the rustle of petticoats too distinguishable from any garment- hem of the sacred nine. The desecrated, the destroyed resort had favored, 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 re- cover — 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. n NEW YORK REVISITED THE single impression or particular vision most an- swering 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 pro- ceeding 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 beguile- ment of the artless traveller, had doubtless much to say to the ensuing state oi mind, the happily-excited and amused view of the great face of New York. The ex- tent, 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 7° NEW YORK REVISITED their symbol, some collective presence of great circling and plunging, hovering and perching sea-birds, white- winged images of the spirit, of the r estless freedo m 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 steamefiT" 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 what- ever; and yet the sense of the scene (which had at sev- eral previous junctures, as well, put forth to my imag- ination its power) was commanding and thrilling, was in certain lights almost charming. So it befell, exactly, that an element of myste ry and wonder entered into the impression — the interest of trying to make out, in the absence of features of the sort usually 'supposed indis- pensable, the reason of the beauty and the joy. It is indubitably a "great" bay, a great harbor, but no one item of the romantic, or even of the picturesque, as com- monly 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 Cape- 7i THE AMERICAN SCENE town, 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 aU^thatJjhe. imaginative response to the conditions here presented may just happen to proceed from the intek lertuale^rava^an£e_pf_the^ given observer. When this personage-is open to corruption'Dy almost any large view of_an-iat-e»sity 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. There' fore it is that I find myself rather backward with a per- ceived sanction, of an at all proportionate kind, for the fine exhilaration with which, in this free wayfaring re- lation 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 dis- tance, 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_jArears 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 clamor of detonationf 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_un; precedentedly out" of the composition; in the bigness 72 NEW YORK REVISITED ^ndJbravery _aiidiE^Qlencg^s2eci^y, of everything that rushed and shrieked; in the air jis~ of a _great__ intricate frenzied dance, half merry, half desperate^ or at least half " defiant , jgerf ormed"*on the huge * watery floor' This ap- pearance of the, boldl, I§_cing-together, across. the :_ waters, of the s cat tere d members of the monstrous organism — l^£iag-a^.by_.th^ceiiseless play of an enormous system of steam-sittttles.j3r electric bobbins (I scarce know what tojcalljthem) , commensurate in form with their infinite work — does perhaps more than anything else to give the jTEcITof the vision of__enprgy. 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 forever fly further and faster and draw harder; the future complex- ity of the web, all under the sky and over the sea, be- coming thus that of some colossal set of clockworks, some Steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and ham- mering fists and opening and closing jaws. The im- measurable 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 bright- ness 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, 73 THE AMERICAN SCENE for all I know to the contrary, New Orleans, that con- trive to abound before everything else in color, and so to make a rich and instant and obvious show. But mem- ory 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 candor of its avidity and the freshness of its audacity, is most conveyed. The "tall buildings," which have so prompt- ly 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 im- pudently "novel" — this in common with so many other terrible things in America — and they are triumphant payers of dividends; all of which uncontested and un- abashed 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 archi- tectural 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, posi- tively, this is all that is wanted for emphasis of your final impression. Such growths, you feel, have con- 74 NEW YORK REVISITED fessedly 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 bound- less 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 mar- ket. Such a structure as the comparatively window- less 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 forever 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, 75 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 dishonored condition, supported only by the consciousness that the _dish onor 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 threat- ened: a fact at which no one, indeed, appears to be shocked, from which no one draws the least of the in- ferences 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 76 NEW YORK REVISITED 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 indeli- bility 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 arm-chair, 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 im- s mediate presence; the difference, from pole to pole, was 3'so vivid and concrete that no single shade of any one of ■Its aspects was lost. This impact of the whole condensed spast at once produced a horrible, hateful sense of personal I antiquity. i' Yet was it after all that those monsters of the mere ijitnarket, as I have called them, had more to say, on the [•'question of "effect," than I had at first allowed? — since sifthey are the element that looms largest for me through i particular impression, ,with remembered parts and $ << 77 \ THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 in- tensity 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 crowd- ed with its features that I rejoice, I confess, in not hav- ing 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 78 NEW YORK REVISITED quite 1 as violent children stamp on snails and caterpil- lars. 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 mountain- masses — for, to be just all round, there was some evi- dence 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 com- mercial and over- windowed as they are, a fleeting dis- tinction. 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 multi- tudinous 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 com- plicated watch throbs with the one purpose of telling you the hour and the minute, testified overwhelmingly to the c haracte r 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 6 . 79 ^ THE AMERICAN SCENE jj question, fed by however brief an experience, kept' over- flowing the cup and spreading in a wide waste of specula- tion. 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 Emile Zola and his love of the human aggre gation, the artificial microcosm, which had to spend itself on great sEops7~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 U 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 "busi- ness" 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 shin* ing 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 moun- tain-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 NEW YORK REVISITED 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 reduce^ov'^oli^oM:- presence., which is, nine-tenths of~their virtue, receiving thus, at such / hands, its supreme consecration. This consecration J 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^N field, all the sounds and silences, grim, pushing trudging / silences too, of the universal will to move — to move, move , j m ove, 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 harbor oi. 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 grumb- lings of the key, they stand appealing and waiting, 81 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 Eljis 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 forever in his mouth. He had thought he knew be- fore, thought he had the sense of the degree in which it is his American fate to share the sancity of his Ameri- can consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriot- ism, 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 shafteTnim 82 NEW YORK REVISITED — 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 jia d an apparition, seen a j^host_m_his supposedly— safe Toki Jiause^7 r LetaTokJhe. unwary, there- fore, odsit-EUis-Idaad^ ) 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 L fixed element, the reminder not to be dodged. One's su preme relation , as one had always put it, wa s one s relation to onejs countr y — 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 in- dignity of change. Is not our instinct in this mat- ter, 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 prim ary s tage of alienism which New York most offers foiigm^operates, for the native, as their note of settled possession, something .theyjh.aye nobody toJ;hank^tor; so thafwHsettled possession is wKaTPwe, on our side, seem reduced to — the implication of which, in its turn, is that, to recover confidence and regain lost ground, 8 3 :• THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 lus'i Ijetwesaa— possession— as4— dispossession. This sense of disp_osse§fiiQn^4a- be— bridLabout itphaunted me go, I was toJEeel^-in the Ijew 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 consciousnes s as that of /the Switzer and the Scot. 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 mo- ments, to an a rtful evasion of theactual. There was no escape from the" ubiquitous alien into the future, or even into the present ; there was an escape b "t into the past. I count as quite a triumph in this interest ari~unSroken ease of frequentation of that ancient end of Fifth Avenue to the whole neighborhood 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 diffi- culty 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 84 NEW YORK REVISITED pursuing imagination, the quickened memory, by this fact of the felt moral and social value of this compara- tively unimpaired morsel of the Fifth Avenue heritage. Its reference to a pleasanter, easier, hazier past is ab- solutely comparative, just as the past in question itself enjoys as such the merest courtesy-title. It is all re- cent 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 build- ing, grossly tall and grossly ugly, has failed of an ad- mirable chance of distinguished consideration for it, and the dignity of many of its peaceful fronts has suc- cumbed to the presence of those industries whose fore- most 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 extraor- dinary 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 midwinter; there had been but the meagre fact of a discomfort and an ugliness less formidable here than elsewhere. When, towards the top of the town, circula-, tion, 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 de- canted, getting back to these latitudes resembled really 85 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 nar- row central ridge with trolley-cars stuffed to suffoca- tion, 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 rigor of marginal rela- tion 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 repre- sented 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 life- time has intervened. I found myself intimately recog- nizing every house my officious tenth year had, in the way of imagined adventure, introduced to me — incom- parable master of ceremonies after all; the privilege had been offered since to millions of other subjects that 86 NEW YORK REVISITED 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, more- over, 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 — la- mentable 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 mediaeval 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, 87 THE AMERICAN SCENE of which arrested me, again and again, to fascination, The shabby red house, with its mere two storys, its lowly "stoop," its dislocated iron-work 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 neighboring 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 dough- nuts, 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 pre- tence that nearly nothing was changed had most to come in; for a high, square, impersonal structure, pro- claiming 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 gray and more or less "hallowed" University build- ing — 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 88 NEW YORK REVISITED 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 Wash- ington 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 forever 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 JL. 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 facade of fifty floors, does one "see" the pious plate recording the honor 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, 89 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 un- diminished 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_sererutyofescape and „ survival positively works as a blin^Tonthe 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 con- ditions, 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 over- takes 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 man- ner, 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 90 NEW YORK REVISITED 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 author- ity which makes the difference, ever afterwards, be- tween 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 deep- ly 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 par- ticular prepared honor 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 9i THE AMERICAN SCENE 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, charming- est, 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 prac- tised 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 assthetic 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 aesthetic 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 92 NEW YORK REVISITED 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 super- lative 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 f 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 days till un- grudged 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 es- caped, in the event, the extremity of grudging. It lives on securely, by the mercy of fate — lives on in the deli- cacy of its beauty, speaking volumes again (more vol- umes, distinctly, than are anywhere else spoken) for the exquisite truth of the conferred value of interesting ob- jects, 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 93 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 aesthetic 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 com- munity 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 hover- ing 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 gayety of detail undiminished and "quaint- ness" 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 some- how 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 im- punity of such audacities being, in America, one of the last of the lessons the repatriated absentee finds him- 94 NEW YORK REVISITED self 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 penetra- tion 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 pro- vincialism of their conditions, as to many of which noth- 7 95 THE AMERICAN SCENE ing 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 color, 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 telltale 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. 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--emhraeingi_pQssessiQn, 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 Hable to easy 96 NEW YORK REVISITED efror, I know, when he finds this, that or the other caught ' glimpse the supretnely 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 appre- hension 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 tif marking the more its sudden high pitch, the character of violence which all its warmth, its color and glitter so completely muffle. There is violence outside, mitigatijig- sddly the frontal majesty of the monument, leaving it exposed to the vulgar assault of the street by the opera- tion" of those dire facts of absence of margin, of meagre- ness-trf site, Of the brevity of the block, oFthe inveteracy of the hear thoroughfare) which leave _.'.' styled" in con- struction, 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 orte alternative, arid the great adventure, of seeking his reward in the sky. Of their license to pursue it there to any extent what- ever New-Yorkers are, I think, a trifle too assertively proud; no court of approach, no interspace worth men- tioh, 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 bpiirgeois Scheme df cdrnposition^ and distribution, the uncorrected"" THE AMERICAN SCENE labor 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 longi- tudinal 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 en- dowed 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^helolesslyjs. One of ^hig^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 will- ing 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 98 NEW YORK REVISITED 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 accumu- lated 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 communica- tion, 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, i1T5 that you are in presence of a revelation of the possibili- 1 ties of the hotel — for which the American spirit has j found so unprecedented a use and a value; leading it on to express so a social, indeed positively an aesthetic ideal, "^ and making it so, at this supreme pitch, a synonym for ; civilization, for the capture of conceived manners them- \ selves, 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 j 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 es- ; pecial their old discrimination in favor of the private : life. The business for them — for communities to which 1 the American ease in such matters is not native — goes J much less of itself and produces as yet a scantier show; ( 99 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 fany thing; so that the machinery, so much less general- ized, works in a smaller, stiffer way. This one caravan- sary 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 rigor 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 encom- passing material splendor, a wealth and variety of con- stituted 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 masquerad- ing dress, muffled almost to suffocation as in the gold brocade of their pretended majesties and their concilia- tory 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 unteffl- pered monotony; manages to be so, on such ground as IOO NEW YORK REVISITED 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, con- ditions, have so much in common, they should seem at J all to make up a conscious miscellany. That question,"" however, the question of the play and range, the prac- tical elasticity, of t he social samene ss, 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 re alized ide al and of that f> 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 b£ pe jf ec t human felicity. It had the admirable sign that it was, precisely, so compj^hjmsh^ely collective_ — that it made so^ vividly, iriThe old phrase, for the greijtgil_J5|ippTriess of "the greatest "humb"er7""TFs" rara beauty, one feTfTwith instant clarity of perception, wasj that it was, for a "mixed" social manifestation, blissfully j exempt from any principle or possibility of disaccord with L 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 r ioi THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 equjlibriumT Here ""was a'"wtirld"''whsse relation to its "form and medju|n^was]^rar^"CTitjr-imperturbable; here was a coneeption of publicity as the vital medium organized with the aut hori ty with which the American genius for organization, put on Tts mettle, alone could organize it. The" whale~trlihg 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 uncer- tain which of them one was, at a given turn of the maze, most admiring. When I reflect indeed that wihout my clew 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 charite of the theatrical pro- fession 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 102 NEW YORK REVISITED 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 Ameri- c an 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. En- countered 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 char- acter; indeed as the very interesting supreme examples of a type which has even on the American ground, doubt- less, 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. When- ever 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 j conscious of every note of every instrument, controlling and com- manding 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 in- deed? One sees it thus, in its crude plasticity, almost 103 the American scene in th'e likeness of an army of puppets whose strings the wealth of his technical imagination teaches him innumer- able ways of pulling, and yet whose innocent, wHosg 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 perfec- tion 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, mild- ness 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 gdes forth to meet it as a guest of honor, 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 un- scathed 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 'criticisej' 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 104 NEW YORK REVISITED 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 impres- sion? 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 'horri- ble,' 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 J>uch fancies as that IT waTTcSXir- . pp.ivfihly rpearvT t.n he cnarrnjng, you are tangled by that weakness in some_jmderhand imagination of its ^pCs sibly, one pr~these days, as a riper fruit of time, becommg~so. To do that, you indeed sneakingly pro- - vide,TFmust get away from itself; but you are ready to f ollow" its hypo thetic dance even to the mainland and to the very end of its tether." What makes the general ■relation of ~y our 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 _Jte~sa.y_tng, 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, io5 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 oi 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 'paftTof 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 b eauty, the creature the most blatant of whose pretensions is that she is one of those \o whom everything is alwaysforgiven. On what ground ' forgiven' ? of bourse 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 dis- tinct cultivation of her company for which the contem- plative 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 be- guiled state contained in them, resembled nothing so much as the visits so often still incorrigibly made to com- promised charmers. I defy even a master of morbid observation to perambulate New York unless he be 106 NEW YORK REVISITED 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. ,_ Xhe--yer-y— si ^n,of i ts energy is that it does n't believe in itself; it failsto succeed, even at a cost_ of„nmlions, mpersuadmg jfou jhaEit^doeS: Tts missionjgould appear to be, exactly,, to gildthetemporary, with its gold, as many inches thick as f may be , ancf " 'tnen , with a fresh shrug, a shrug of its splerrdid^yhTcisrn for its freshly detected inability to con- vince, give up its actual work, however exorbTtanET" as the meresTTof-stop-gaps. The difficulty with the compro- mised 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 awhile, 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 107 THE AMERICAN SCENE illusion of finality was within one's memory magnificent and complete, but as to which one feels to-day that theit 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 Unintendiflg 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 jinmista kable New Y ork admission of unattempted, imp ossible, mat urity. The hewTanFanaTthe new~Rome do atleast propose, I think, to be old — one of these days; the new London even, ereclTlts — IEe is on leaseholds destitute oT dignity, yet does, for the period, a ppear to believe in h erself. 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 piiyj 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 aild 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 flourish- ed — "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 biit td 108 NEW YORK REVISITED tear you down, for if I were to let sentiment and sincerity once take root, were to let^any ^derness_of_association oncea^cumulate, or any 'love of the old' once pass unsnubbed, what would become of us, who have our hands on the whipstock7p!easeT""Pbrtunately we've learned the se cret for keeping association at bay. We've learned th ai the grea^thjiigjLSjirot to~suffer it to so much as bSgim Wherever _it 3oes begin we find we're lost ; but asjKp takes someT3me~we"get in^h^adT~TTsTh6""reason, If~youmus ; £^Ko' wf = w1iy""you^na3r'' "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 stair- cases 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 con- ceived 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 tear- ing, 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 sec- tions of streets, to which the rich taste of history is for- bidden even while their fresh young lips are just touch- ing the cup, something charmingly done, here and there, 109 THE AMERICAN SCENE some bid for-±he-ampl©r~permanence, seems to say to you That "the particular j>l§ce^n]3Lasks, as a human home, to leaHTiHeTife it has begun, only asks to enfold generations and gather in traditions, to show itself capable of growing nip to character and authority. Houses of the best taste ,are like clothes of the best tailors — it takes their age to ishow us how good they are ; and I frequently recognized, jin 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 inde- scribably 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 al- most always is, and we meet here even that happy acci- dent, already encountered and acclaimed, in its few examples, down-town, of the object shining almost ab- surdly 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 ridicu- lously, as being (like the saved City Hall, or like the pleasant old garden-walled house on the northwest cor- ner of Washington Square and Fifth Avenue) of so benef- icent 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_wholeplay of " weahh_ajod_energy and untutore d liberty, of the mo ve- ment pl,,,a..i^a±h^^rcMTizatiqh reflected, as brick and stone and marble may reflect, througrTaTt the contrasts of prodigious flight and portentous stumble, is to acknowl- edge, positively, that one's rambles were delightful, and that the district abutting on the east side of the Park, in no NEW YORK REVISITED particular, never engaged my attention without, by the same stroke, making the s ocial ques tion dance before it in a hundred interesting forms. The social question qujte_fins_thj^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 rue- fully, 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, infalli- bly, stay up; it has not the frightened look, measuring the spaces around, of a small child set on a mantel-shelf and about to cry out. If old societies are. interesting, however, I amfar from thinking that young ones may not. 1-ip. 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 impres- sion 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 pri- vate ease in general — the amiable side of those numer- ous 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) 8 III THE AMERICAN SCENE is a line of research closed to me, alas, by my fatally un- initiated state. _, My point is, at all events, that you can- not be " hard," .really, . with .an,y.sadety-.t,hat . affects you as ready to learn from you, and .&oiB.^this,a:ejgpurce for it of your detachment combining with your proximity, what in the name of all its possessions and all its destitu- tions it would honestly be "at." Ill NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON A SPRING IMPRESSION IT was a concomitant, always, of the down-town hour that it could be felt as most playing into theLSurrendered 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 nourishes (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 "3 THE AMERICAN SCENE indeed to think of mvj relation to^-N ear, York as, in that manner, almost inexpressibly intimate, and as hence making, for daily sensation, akeyBoard 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 oc- casion than that the taste of each dish in the banquet recalls the taste :_9i_mos£j3f-tfae-others ; which is what I mean-b3!jhe_Jlcpniinuit£ i lL.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 quar- ter 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 neighborhoods of the lower East side, ancK 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 sum- mer, 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 114 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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 in- terest 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 brood- ing 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, towards an expensive effect of landscape gardening. To pause before them, for in- terest in their labor, was, and would have been every- where, 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 .com- - munjcation_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 US THE AMERICAN SCENE Jfaring 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 pro- ceeding. Had that not ever been, exactly, a part of the vague warmth, the intrinsic color, of any honest man's rural walk in his England or his Italy, his Germany or ^iis France, and was not the effect of its so suddenly dropping out, in the land of jjmyersajjbrotherhood— 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 ap- pealed, 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 neighboring 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-eyedi "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 re- plied, 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. 116 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON' To inquire of these things on the spot, to betray, tha£ 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-bratherhood with aliens- -in-the first grossness of their alienism. "TEe" 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, cannot from the nature of the case be, in any lifetime of their own. Their children areV 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 nnllions_joJLljJdia_iransf^ growing up__in regard to_jyhom^hfi_idea f ^f_in±imacg«--Ql... relation may be as j£re.ely„sherished as you like. They are the stuff of whom brothers ancTsfsfers are made, and the making proceeds on a scale that really need leave nothing to desire. All this you take in, with a wonder- ing mind, and injthejight of it the greatj^ethnic^'^gues;. tion rises befofe..,vou^jQn^'nj3CTesrjgn^inF^cS Ie' and wi th a corresponding^ majesty. Once it has set your obser- vation, to say noERttrg*" of your imagination, working, it becomes for you, as you go and come, the wonder- ment to which everything ministers and that is quick- ened wellnigh 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 caldron — the caldron of the " American " charac- ter — 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 117 THE AMERICAN SCENE such impressions, can continue to attach to such a term [as the ' Anxerican/character ? — what type, as the result of such a prodigious amalgam, such a hotchpotch of racial ingredierite^~TF"tcTbe 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 aesthetic, margin supplied by which accompanies the spectator as his own positively complete comfort. It is more than a comfort to him, truly, in all the con- ditions, 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 ^/legible word, accordingly, the great inscrutable answer to ques- tions, 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 en- sign 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, througn- 118 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON out 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 relat on 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 thank- ed, accordingly, forthe_bigne^ The state of flat fatigue, obviously, is not an opinion, save in the sense attributed 119 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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. 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 reinforce- ments, 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 pre- liminary. The corner growing warmer and warmer, i 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 ex- pression of much of the medium in which one consciously moves. It is formed by this fact that the alien is tak- ing 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 I20 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON in the wonder of what becomes, as it were, of the ob- stinate, 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 ex- tremely 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 ? — whJfihjS-j^the-^ea^oyer a large - part at 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 mo-^ ments ? 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, N 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. Re- peatedly, in the electric cars, one seemed invited to take 121 THE AMERICAN SCENE that for granted— there being occasions, days and weeks together, when the electric cars offer you nothing else to / think of. The earful, again and again, is a foreign ear- ful; a row of faces, up and down, testifying, without ex- ception, 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 ^gnse of isola- tion. It was not for this that the observeron wnose behalf I more particularly write had sought to take up again the swee±_sense_of-.the-na±aL»ir. 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 wh^IeTxiEdtSm~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 wellnigh 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 disinterestedhesswhich 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 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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, cer- tainly, 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 "Eevated" 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 consequenpe and ac- tion 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 whitewashing brush. Here, perhaps, was the nearest approach to a seizable step in the evolution of the on-coming 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 him- self 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 "" 123 THE AMERICAN SCENE A 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 remark- able 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 segis, 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 impor- tant preliminary truth; which makes him for us, we must own, till more comes of it, a tolerably neutral and color- less 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 foreign- ers, 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 colorless. The Italians, who, over the whole land, strike us, I am afraid, 124 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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 in- halation or two of the clear native air; shed it with a conscientious completeness which leaves one looking for any faint trace of it. "Color," 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 com- forting 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 125 THE AMERICAN SCENE world, to produce them, and you ask yourself, with inde- pendent 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 quali- ties 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 caldron, for the great stew, has such circumference and such depth that we can only deal here with ultimate syntheses, ulti- mate 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. 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 126 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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 invi- tation 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 person- ality, on that occasion the very medium itself through which the whole spectacle showed, so colors my impres- sions 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 neighborhood; 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 house - tops 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 mul- » 127 THE AMERICAN SCENE tiplication, multiplicati£n_of everything, was the domi- nant note, at the bottom of some vast sallow aquarium in which innumerable fish, of overdeveloped proboscis, were to bump together, forever, amid heaped spoils of the sea. The children swarmed above all — here Was multipli- cation 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 over - flow, in the whole quarter, is the main fact of life — I was to~tearn 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 main- tained light. The advanced age of so many of the figures, the ubiquity of the children, carried out in fact this 128 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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 experi- ence. 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, 129 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 dis- tance 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 for- gotten 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 antlike 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 130 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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 r 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 "ten- ement-house"; the New Jerusalem would so have tri- umphed, 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 harboring some five-and-twenty families. But this, ex- actly, was the way it testified — this circumstance of the simultaneous enjoyment by five-and-twenty families, orj "tenement" lines, of conditions so little sordid, so highly "evolved." I remember the evolved fire-proof staircase ,V 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 I 3i THE AMERICAN SCENE wants and the splendor 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 inve£exa|ferise, N in the American air, of_ey.eryLvalue, and especially of the dower 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. Import- ances 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 mo- ment 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~pQSsrty ; and this new style of I poverty, from street to street, stuck out of the possible i purchasers, one's jostling fellow-pedestrians, and made I them, to every man and woman, individual throbs in the i 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 unfamilial' a pitch, was an indication that made up for a great many 132 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON others. It is when this one in particular is forced home to you — this immense, vi-vid_ gene ral Hft of poverty an d general appreciation of the living*uiut Vpayingjjroplirty in himself — that the picture seems most tockar^rnlTtrTe 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 liv- ing unites, property- in himself becoming more and more merely such a .property as may consist with a relation to properties_oyerwhelmingly greater and that allow the adang_sf_no_ cuiestions and the making, for coexistence 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, a.&. freedom to grow up to be blighted, and it may be the only free- dom in store for the smaller fry of future generations. If it is accordingly of the smaller fry I speak, and of how lggejhfiy. massed on that evening of endless admonitions, this will be because I caught them thus in their com- parative'humility and at an early stage of their American growth. The life-thread has, I suppose, to be of a cer- tain '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_mean- whiHLsateetl-an d-undisguised— nowhere sweeter than in the half-dozen picked beer-houses and cafes in which our ingenuous enquete, 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 wpndrously testified, by their range and their individual 133 THE AMERICAN SCENE color, 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 plentitude 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 An the light of letters, that is in the 'light of our language >as literature has hitherto known it, that one stared at this aU-uncon5ciQusjmpjjdeace_of_the^ of future ravage. The man of letters, in the iTnited States, has u 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 honor. For that honor, the honor that sits astride of the consecrated English tradition, to his mind, quite as old knighthood astride of its caparisoned charger, the dragon most rous- ing, over the land, the proper spirit of St. George, is just this immensity of the alien presence climbing highex-and "higher, -climbing itself Jnto thVyery light o f publicit y. 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 ex- asperating. Under the impression of the mere mob the question doesn't come up, but in these haunts of com- parative civility we saw the mob sifted and strained, and 134 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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 pre- hensile hook for the. hnguistic 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 caf6s — and increasingly as their place in the scale was higher — showed to my inner sense, beneath their bedizenment, asjarture-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. Thea ccent of th e 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. The huge jagged city, it must be nevertheless said, has always at the worst, for propitiation, the resource of i3S THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 colossaj 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 jriver-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 tp the type of the broken hair-comb turned up; the streets that abut from the East condescend at their corners to any crud- ity 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, 136 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON A seinse of the waste of criticism, however, a sense that is almost in itseTFconsohngTriescends upon the fond critic after his vision has fixed the scene awhile in this light of its lost accessibility to some informed and benev- olent 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 Aesthetic wound, I think, quite as promptly as we feel it open. The particular ugliness, or combination of ugli- nesses, 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 dif- ferent extemporization. Thejwhole thing is the vividest of lectures on the subject of individualism, and on the Strange" truth, no doubt, that TruT^prihciple may in the Tield^Tjf ; art — at ieast 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-interest- ing question, for the artist, of the entirely relative nature and value of "treatment." A manner so right in one relation jjiay be so wrong in another, and a house-front So "amusing" for its personal note, or its perversity, in a short' perspectiveT'niay amid larger elements merely dishonor the harmony. And yet why should the charm "ever fall outfof the "personal," which is so often the very condition of the exquisite ? Why should conformity and subordination, that acceptance of control and assent to 137 THE AMERICAN SCENE Of' ... r ' 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 fo; instance the aesthetic nobleness of such a question as tha of the authority with which the spreading Hudson, at the opening of its gates, would have imposed on the con- structive powers, if listened to, some proportionate order — would, in other words, have admirably given us col- lectivism 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^TThe 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 neighborhood. 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 138 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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 honor, after all, of sitting there at the Beau- tiful 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 pre-occupation ; 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 con*., science 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 con- fused impression was of a kind of waiting abundance, an *39 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 environ-, ment, unpossessed of the agreeable, accessible country-, side 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 hut 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 armor-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 140 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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 aesthetic consideration, the artistic value of either memorial, melted away and became ir- relevant. 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 ih 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 cere- mony 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 River- side 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 141 THE AMERICAN SCENE "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 questian_at any rate puts itself — as new questions in America are always putting themselves: Po_certain impressions there represent the absolute extinctio n of "nTjT sensihjlifiPR, nr- do they representoh1y"hew forms of them? The inquiry would be doubtless easier tb~answer if "so many of these feelings were not mainly known to us just by their at- tendant forms. At this rate, or on such a showing, in the United States, attendant forms being, in every quar- ter, 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 commemo- rations it is one of the most missed. On the whole I distinctly "liked" it. It is still vivid to me that, returning in the springtime 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 142 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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, oppor- tunity 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 bor- der and were aware, precisely of the queer feast we should find in her. The recognition, I profess, was a preposter- ous 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 bois- terous hoiden. It was doubtless a matter only of de- grees 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 enter- tainment of antique Albany. At antique Albany, to a certainty, the matureTriatron 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 glazes of all-but-filial tears. Thus it was, . IO s "--- 1+3"' THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 trav- eller, of the American railway-journey at its best. That ordeal was in any case at its best here, and the perpetu- ally interesting river kept its course, by my right elbow, with such splendid consistency that, as I recall the im- pression, 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—'whlch 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 orily 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 raffine, 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 mince-meat 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 ptit, 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 144 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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 combinaton of felicities? Was it just because the felicities were all vaguenesses, and the "beau- ties," even the most celebrated, all blurs?— was it per- chance 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- styie__could-the.n_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 gray water-color 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 i45 THE AMERICAN SCENE positive interest of the grand style. One had therefore bnly 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 simplify- ing 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 sha'n'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 146 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON 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 gray water-color 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 im- pression. 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 doubt- less too much to say, in fine, that the Institution, at West Point, "suffers" comparatively, for vulgar in- dividual 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. 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 147 THE AMERICAN SCENE accent) only to the enhancement of its chafm. It was a matter once more of hanging over the Hudson on the side opposite West Point, but farther down; the situation was founded, as at West Point, on the presence of the great feature and on the consequent general lift of fore' ground 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 rflere kind vaguenesses, on any anxious deprecation of distinct- ness. There was no vagueness now; a wealth of dis- tinctness, 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 Tightness. 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 or authority. The things that have lasted, in short, what- ever 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 takg§. time, and that the productiqn_of inJeresfTTn particular, takes_.?aiMi4iine. Desperate again and again the ingenuity of the offered, 148 NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON the obtruded substitute, and pathetic in many an in- stance 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 charac- ter is scarce less precious on the part of the homes of men in a raw medium than on the part of respon- sible persons at a difficult crisis. This virtue was there within and without and on every face; but perhaps no- where 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 Ameri- can 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 gen- eral iridescence of a past pf 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 roman- tic^ 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 149 THE AMERICAN SCENE and the trees and the peaches and the pony seemed prodigious, and to the remembrance of which the won- der of Rip Van Winkle and that of the "Hudson River School" of landscape art were, a little later on, to con- tribute 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 Sunny- side, 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 quiet indefinable air of the little American literary past. The place is in- evitably, 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 dream- land 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 hap- pened in the case of other shy retreats of anchorites NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON d oomed to c elebrily — 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 "lit-|\ tie" Am£rj£anr4tterary 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 com- paratively 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 Wol- fert's Roost had been, a hundred years before the date of living'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 un- broken spell of the same Indian summer I a moment ago had occasion to help myself out with; a fond ap- pearance 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 adminis- tered or refused sustenance, this is all, and quite the best 151 THE AMERICAN SCENE thing, it would seem, that we need do for them: it ex- hausts, or rather it forestalls, the futilities of discrimina- tion. 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 splendor of their possession of better conditions than his. It has taken our ugly era to thrus lPin the radrojjdaLiJjefoolTcjf the slope, among the masking trees; the railroachthat is part, exactly, of the pdnap-and circumstance, the quick- ened 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 ha ve to name th e railroads- it seems so_to give away~n^_case. There was no rail- road, however, till long after Irving's settlement-^he sur- vived the railroad but by a few years, and my case is simply that, disengaging his Sunnyside from its beauti- ful 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 ad- mirable 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 honor 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 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 wasted I know not how else to name it — that flung its odd, mel- ancholy 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 construc- tion (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 * S3 THE AMERICAN SCENE pine can only speak with sympathy — of the really-human, the communicative, side of that viyjji^hi3w_Qf_a_society •tadngJxiJ3uild_it§eJi, with every elaboration, into some ^her£nt^ense_of_itsslf, and literally putting forth inter- rogative 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 awkward- ness 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 com- parison, 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 demon- stration 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 Euro- pean 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 func- tions, forms, the whole element of custom and per- petuity, to any massiveness of private ease, however great. Massive private ease attended with no force of assertion beyond the hour is an anomaly rarely en- countered, therefore, in countries where the social ar- rangements strike one as undertaking, by their very 154 NEW YORK 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 re- minded; 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 engage- ment 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 imagina- tion, 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 re- minding you, what guarantees, what majestic continuity and heredity, that represents. Where are not only your 155 THE AMERICAN SCENE eldest son and his eldest son, those prime indispenga 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 presents pure and simple, squaring itself between an aBsenTluture 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 sup' J plied 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 noth* ing, and it is that very small matter of Newport ex- actly 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 ofr the conditions of New York opulence. The show of the case to-day-^oh, so vividly and pathetically! — is that New York and other bpulehce, ""creating the place, for a series of years, as part IjOSSjefJoft of "American society" to find out, by ex- perimentj^hat it would be at, now has no further use Jqt it— has only learned from it, at an immense ex» penditure, 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 NEW YORK 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 — or 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 ten- tative only, bristling with friezes and pinnacles, but discemibly deficient in reasons, shall not collectively form another. It_i^_jthe_hard fate_of new aristocracies that .the elem ent jQfjerrpx,„with them,. .. has" to ie _ con- temporary — not releg ated, Jo_ .the -dimness -of the past, but receivuig~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 TFTrTNew 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 soeialjjrganism^floundering there all helplessly, more or. less floated by its immense good-will and the splendor oTifs'immediate environment, but betrayed by its paucity r^r*rzsX~resouxc&.^ The occasion I allude to was simply a Mi lmeF party^ of the most genial intention, but at which the note of high ornament, of the general uplifted situ- ation, 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, un- accompanied 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, gra- cious and glittering with gems, were in tiaras and a sem- blance of Court-trains, a sort of prescribed official magnif- i57 THE AMERICAN SCENE icence; 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_sQciaL .sequence, no application, and that, as a tribute to the ideaf, to .the exquisite, it wanted cpjnpas5£ j cstrrjp5£t r -SQ^ sort of consecration. The cHHiculty, the irony, of the hour was that so many of the implications of complete- ness, 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 color 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 al- *58 NEW YORK ready hinted, than anything else in the country. But it illustrates further that foredoomed grope^jmaliiir in the conquest of the amenities — the strange necessity "under "wnicrTthe social interest labors of finding out for it self, as a pr elmimaryV what civilization really is-. T 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 com- prehensive substitute for all other conceivable vessels; the ^o/£^oc^_co,nsciojisness^_thus .clambering into it, under stress, ^as- the whole, community crams into the other public receptacles, the desperate cars of the Sub- way dr~the vast elevators of the tall buildings. The DperaTTSdeed, 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 con- gruity and consistency, to curtsey to — their only pos- sible course becoming thus, it would seem, to make obei- sance, clingingly, to each other. This truth points again the effect of a picture poor in the male presence; for to " i59 THE AMERICAN SCENE whatmale presence of native growth is it thinkable that thewearer ot~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 genu- flection, 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. I found it interesting to note, furthermore, that the very Clubs, on whose behalf, if anywhere, expert tradi- tion might have operated, betrayed with a bonhomie touching in the midst of their magnificence the empirical character. Was not their admirable, their unique, hos- pitality, 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 corre- spondence than others I had had knowledge of; generally 160 NEW YORK 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 pri- vate 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 him- self continually making, but the universal custom of the house with almost no one of its indoor parts dis- tinguishable 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 Amer- ican 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 differ- ence has been marvellously, triumphantly brought about ; and, with all the ingenuity of young, fresh, frolicsome architecture aiding and abetting, has been made to 161 THE AMERICAN SCENE flourish, alike in the small structure and the great, as the vgry 4a w of -the structural fact. Thus we have the law fulfilledjha±_every part of every house shall be, as nearly --as_.jmay_i.ej 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 enlarge- ment 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 re- flecting 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, de- scending, and all as for the purpose of giving his pres- ence "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^jn--America lirz ——— V ft EW YORK are said for the house; so that if all that he wants is to keep catcTxmgHffie' 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, verandas, 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 com- partments, 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 rigor of comfort has nothing to do. I cherish certain remembered 163 THE AMERICAN SCENE aspects for their general vivid eloquence — for the sake of my impression of the type of great generous club-estab- lishments in which the "empiricism" of that already- observed idea of the conquest of splendor 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. Tran- quillity results largely from taste tactfully applied, taste lighted above all by experience and possessed of a clew for its labyrinth. There is no such clew, 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 conser- /vative 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. 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 164 NEW YORK 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 debutantes and impatient youths, expert in the cotillion, 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 prej- udice to confidence. The confidence and the innocence are those of children whose world has ever been prac- tically 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 toler- able 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 mo- ments 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 in- capacity for attention, its ingenuous blankness to-day over the appetites and clamors of yesterday, its chronic state of besprinklement with the sawdust of its ripped- i65 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 speak- ing, for the childish life, is not that exactly the key of much of the spectacle? — the safety of the vast flat ex- panse where every margin abounds and nothing too un- toward 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 towards Fifth Avenue ; opens towards the glittering monument to Sherman, towards the most death-dealing, perhaps, of all the climaxes of electric car cross-currents, towards the loosest of all the loose distributions of the over- topping "apartment" and other hotel, towards the most jovial of all the sacrifices of preconsidered composition, towards the finest of all the reckless revelations, in short, of the brave New York humor. The best thing in the picture, obviously, is Saint-Gaudens's great group, splen- did 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 vul- garity 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 166 NEW YORK 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 grad- ually, 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 ad- mirably 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 inter- 167 THE AMERICAN SCENE weaving — 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 pre- text 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 ter- rible, 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 monument- ally signified; it is enough that their having been per- petrated is the very ground of the monument. And jmonuments should always have a clean, clear meaning. I must positively get into the gate of the Park, how- ever — 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 sesthetic sense) of the precinct of approach to it, that must positively have been because the Park diffuses its grace. One grasped at every pre- text 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 168 NEW YORK 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 mu- nicipally-instituted pleasure-grounds of the greater and the smaller cities, abound about the world and every- where, 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 orig- inal New York scheme represents in truth a wonder- ful 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 169 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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, hithesfco, the aesthetic appetite has had to address itself, and the place has therefore borne the brunt of many a per- emptory 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 honor 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 tea en in thus its remark- able little history, there is no ende&.rment of appreciation that we are not ready to lay, as a tribute, o t 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 clamor 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 170 NEW YORK 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 valor 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 in- gratiation 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 ad- ventures 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 favoring 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 171 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 Piazza 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 que s- tion," 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_gQt_there, from their distances, and would get away again, in the so formidable public conveyances, loomed, in3hejaac£ ground, rather like a skeleton at the feast; but the_general note was thereby, intensely, the "popular," arid 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 re- member 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 buFTSf my "way e t rther _ T6 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 speciat7x;eTtain 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, 172 NEW YORK the vision of the country as, supremely, a field for the unhampered revel, the unchecked essor, material and moral^oi-theJ-'-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 commpnjnan^he_;yery common woman, and the very_cgrnmon child; but all enjoying what I have called Jheir promotion, their rise in the social scale, with that absence of acknowledging flutter, that serenity of assur- ance, 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 deli- cacies 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 more- 173 THE AMERICAN SCENE over 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 con- dition the brooding analyst, with the social question never, after all, too much in abeyance, could clap, in private, the most reactionarjf„haiids*~«~ 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 shoe- dealer 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 wasTa' world in which every one, wlffiDuTTexception, 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 mis- cellaneous 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 J 74 NEW YORK 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 in-" veterate 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 stand- ard 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 im- provisation 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 m which this evidence is presented are often, among the people, strikingly artless, but they are a marked advance on the omnipresent op- posite signs, those of a systematic detachment from the chair of anguish, with which any promiscuous "Euro- pean" 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 " Calif ornian " smile, indeed, expressed, more or less copiously, in undissimulated cubes of the precious metatX plays between lips that render scant other tribute to j 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 " 175 f THE AMERICAN SCENE. mportant, which the restored absentee, long surrounded lsewhere with the strangest cynicisms of indifference on his article, makes the subject of one of his very first notes. Svery one, in "society," has good, handsome, pretty, Las above all cherished and tended, teeth; so that the iffered spectacle, frequent in other societies, of strange [regularities, protrusions, deficiencies, fangs and tusks ,nd cavities, is quite refreshingly and consolingly absent. ?he consequences of care and forethought, from an early ge, thus write themselves on the facial page distinctly ,nd happily, and it is not too much to say that the total how is, among American aspects, cumulatively charm- rig. One sees it sometimes balance, for charm, against a reater number of less fortunate items, in that totality, han one would quite know how to begin estimating. But I have strayed again far from my starting-point ,nd have again, I fear, succumbed to the danger of em- iroidering my small original proposition with too many, ,nd scarce larger, derivatives. I left the Plaza, I left he Park steeped in the rose-color of such a brightness >f Sunday and of summer as had given me, on a couple i occasions, exactly what I desired — a simplified at- ention, namely, and the power to rest for the time in he appearance that the awful aliens were flourishing here in perfections of costume and contentment. One lad only to take them in as more completely, conven- antly and expensively endimanchis than one had ever, in the whole, seen any other people, in order to feel that me was calling down upon all the elements involved the lenediction of the future — and calling it down most of ,11 on one's, embraced, permission not to worry anymore^ t was by way of not worrying, accordingly, that I found a another presentment of the general scene, chanced ipon at a subsequent hour, all sorts of interesting and larmonious suggestions. These adventures of the critical pirit were such mere mild walks and talks as I almost ilush to offer, on this reduced scale, as matter of his- 176 NEW YORK tory; but I draw courage from the remembrance that his- tory 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 proprietory 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 par- ticipants 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 colored by the pretty light, and I scarce 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. Ransack- ing 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 177 THE AMERICAN SCENE even mere hinted promise, of history and opportunity, that the attitude affected me as the last revelation of modernity. What made the revelation was J,he«.coIl|c^[ve sharpness, so to speak, of this vocal note, o fferin g any price, offering everything, wanting orxly t o 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 honor, our purchase. We have everything, don't you see? every capacity and appetite, every advantage of education and every sus- ceptibility 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 color, a Paul Veronese com- pany; even the women, in spite of pearls and brocade and golden hair, failed of that type, and still more in- evitably 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, how- ever, mainly, no doubt, an affair of the supporting marble terrace, the platform of my crowd, with as many col- umns of onyx and curtains of velvet as any great pict- ure could need. About these there would be no diffi- culty 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 neighborhood a great empty stage, expensively, extravagantly set, and the detail in frontage i 7 3 NEW YORK and cornice and architrave, in every feature of every edifice, as sharp as the uttered words of the plea I have just imagined. The American air, I take advantage of this connection to remember, lends, a felicity to all the exactitudes of architecture and sculpture, favors sharp effects, dis- engages 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 em- phatically 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 179 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 n?h jwhere tell their great cold calculated story, in measured I chapter and verse, better than to the strong sea-light of New York. This medium has the abundance qf 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 t& replace the granitic mass of the old Reservoir, ultima \T\mh 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 pro- pose 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 jthan 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 fqr '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 1 80 NEW YORK eloquently plead; but it has another blest value, for the imagination, for the nerves, as a check on the con- stant 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 mili- tary drill, the imperative order to "step lively," into some tight mechanic receptacle, fearfully and won- derfully 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 gre- garious 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, iff" 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 northeast 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 181 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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, round- about, as if the passion of the Elevated and of the Ele- vator 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 favored this purpose, and al- most 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 in- timations, 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 de- fensive 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 NEW YORK delicacy, many of them perhaps still to be developed, but attesting the possibilities of the soil. My Presby- terian 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 :arLd""actidn— it affected me, amid its summer .ajrs„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 be- come the victim of some such mischance as would put me into relation again, the ambulance or the police aid- ing, with these precious saving presences. They might re-establish for me, before the final extinction or dismis- sal, 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 fldnerie this, and one of those memories, once more, that I' find myself standing off from, as under the shadow of their too nu- merous 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 183 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 after- wards 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 1 never really disguisable; we got 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 dis- appearance 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 itape on the glorious road? This also gave out a shimmer from the middle time, but with the present favoring 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 184 ) ■:>■ 'kfeW^YORK a }mndreii,ypices _ of that. huge process of historic waste that the ' place in general keeps putting before you; 'hut showing it in ~a~ light that ' drew but "the" harshness or the sadness, the pang, whatever- it had seemed- else- where, 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 aesthetic 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, be- wildering 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 move- ments 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 Educa- tion 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 appear- ance — 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 dis- embodied 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. Mar- quand'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, i8 S I THE AMERICAN SCENE 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, duririgTihe years to come, bask here as in a climate it has never before en- joyed. 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 Anost 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, how- ever, 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 rigors that take place all in the aesthetic 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. 186 V THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS 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_J.^fo und m yself 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 mo- ment a fine melodramatic opportunity. This small ad- venture — 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 ele- ment 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 187 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 He- brew 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 conscious- ness of the same general terms of intercourse for in- stance, 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 gray 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 " produce tion" 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 aes- thetic idiosyncrasy). I should say, in short, if it didn't savor 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 1 88 THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS the American resembled the English closely enough, so the instincts from which it sprang were instincts fa- miliar to the whole body of spectators, whose dim sense of art (to use again the big word) was only not thor- oughly 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 pea-nuts and the orange-peel, as quite harmoniously Irish. From the corner of the box of my so improved playhouse farther 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 reminis- cence, that these almost "high-class" luxuries, cirqluat- ing in such a company, were a sort of supreme symbol of the pzsxnoted state of the aspirant to American condi- tions. He, or more particularly she, had been promoted, and, more or less at a bound, to the habitual use of choco- late-creams, and indeed of other dainties, refined and ingenious, compared with which these are quiet 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 189 THE AMERICAN SCENE countries an expensive and select dietary. The whole phenomenon of this omnipresent and essentially "popu- lar" 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 honored 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 repre- sented, 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- colored 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 or- ganized 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 labor, 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 num- ber 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 Sat- urday 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 190 THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS type, if I may so far strain a point, in such a case, and in the interest of my young friend's excellent perform- ance, 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 any- thing 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 trues, 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 ineradi- cable Anglo-Saxon policy, or our seemingly deep-seated necessity, of keeping, where "representation" is con- cerned, so far away from the truth and the facts of life as really to betray a fear in us of possibly doing some- thing like them should we be caught nearer. "Foreign- ers," in general, unmistakably, in any attempt to render life, obey the instinct of keeping closer, positively recog- nize 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 an_oux.art af .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 13 I9 1 THE AMERICAN SCENE superior Yankee machinery (illustrated in the case be- fore them, for instance, by a wonderful folding bed ill 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 withstand- ing 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 foot- 1 lights, 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, oil the vertiginous bridge of American confectottery — 4nd 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 with- out 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 dis- cord 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 peace* ful history, the very history that succeeds, for our edifi- cation, in not consisting of battles and blood and tears. I was happily to find, at all events, that I had not, on that occasion, done with the Bowery, or with its neigh- 19a THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS bprhood — 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 bill- iard-room and a bowling-alley, all sociably squeezed to- gether; finding space, above all, for a collection of ex- traordinarily 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 ques- tion of the quality of intellect, the subtlety of character, 193 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 enquete, 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 border- I land 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 recogni- tion 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 counte- nance (common to that place) put off its guard by curios- ity, 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 unfor- gettable 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 pre- senting my question in its finest terms. To conduct a i94 — --""" THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS successful establishment, to be a spokesman, an adminis- trator, an employer of labor and converser on subjects, let alone a citizen and a tax-payer, was to have an exist- ence abounding in relations and to be subject to the law that i. relation, however imperfectly human- or -sociah^is at the worst a matter that can only he. -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 ap- pearance 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 fo 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 in- terest 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 ques- tion is only of the kept recollection of a cafe" pure and simple, particularly pure and particularly simple in fact, inasmuch as it dispensed none but "soft" drinks and i9S THE AMERICAN SCENE presented itself thus in the light, the quiet, tempered, intensely individual light, of a beer-house innocent of beer. I have indeed no other exciise"tbr calling iFa/beer'-house 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 bal- ances 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 suggest tion 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 un- ashamed 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 favor 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 196 THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS 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 every- where 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 sup-; pressed all aids to service and succeeded, as by an in- spiration 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. Aftep 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, 197 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 them- selves 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 favor of "society" which is fatal to everything it touches and which so quick- ly leaves the places of its passage unfit for its own use and uninteresting for any other. This establishment had learned to lay on local color with malice prepense— the local color 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 forever throwing the nuptial ring to the still more richly-dowered Atlantic. I speak again less of the nuptial rites them- selves than of those immediate fruits that struck me everywhere as so characteristic — so equally characteristic, 198 THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS I mean, of each party to the union. The flourishing es- tablishment of my present reference offered distinctly its outland picture, but showed it in an American frame, and the features of frame and picture arranged them- selves shrewdly together. Quiet couples, elderly bour- geois 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 hav< been of some evening note of Dantzig or of Buda-Pesth But the conditioning foreign, and the visibility of theii 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 cafe" 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 fa- mous 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 phi- losophy, 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 color 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 199 THE AMERICAN SCENE solutions of continuity, Jn his inward assimilation ,$ lour heritage and point of vi,ew, majtghed^s. JJjsseJKggkjja. our own side, by such signs of large'and comparatively witless concession. What, oh, what ' again, were~lie~and his going to make of us? Well, there was the impression, and that was a ques* tion on which, for a certain intensity in it, our advent- ure 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 my- self 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 savory science that struck one as vaguely vast, as possibly gardened about, and that, blazing into the still- ness of the small hours, dazzled one with the show of its copious and various activity, The whole vision wag less intimate than elsewhere, but it was a world of cus- tom quite away from any mere Delmonjco 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 chap- ter- 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 bol masque, 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 unat- tempted First? Nothing would induce me to cut down the romance of it, in remembrance, to a mere address, 200 THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS least of all to an awful New York one; New York ad- dresses 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 bac- chanal, so hugely hatted and feathered and flounced, yet apparently so innocent, almost so patriarchal again, and matching, in its mixture, with nothing one had else- where 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 NEWPORT, on my finding myself back there, threat- ened me sharply, quite at first, with that predica- ment 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 rea- sons 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 conven- iently, 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 recog- nize that it had never condescended to give a scrap of THE SENSE OP NEWPORT reasoned account of itself (as a favorite of fortune and the haunt of the raffing) ; 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 shak- ing 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 bor- rowed at the best and applicable but to a corner. Does not this vagueness of condition, however, fitly symbol- ize 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 re- finement 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 dim- ples 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, al- most requiring, for justice, a magnif ying-glass ; and he winces at the sight of certain other obtruded ways of 203 \ THE AMERICAN SCENE dealing with it. The touchstone of taste was indeed to operate, for the critical, the tender spirit, from the mo- ment 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 any- thing 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 at- tempts 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 in- 2Q4 THE SENSE OF NEWPORT timately, 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 slimmer- 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 pen- cilled 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 his- tory 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 con- stantly 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 milch concerned I found myself, I profess, after I had taken in this fact of a very distinct general conse- quence, that the whole interest of the vision was quick- ened by it; and that when, in particular, on one of the last days of June, among the densely-arrayed villas, I 205 THE AMERICAN SCENE had followed the beautiful "ocean drive" to its utter- most reach and back without meeting either another vehicle or a single rider, let alone a single . pedestrian,_J recognized matter for the intellectual thrill that attests a social revolution foreseen and completed. The term T use may appear extravagant, but it was a fact, none the less, that I seemed to take full in my face, on this occa- sion, 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 laeen at. I saw, beyond all doubt, on the spot — and there came in, exactly, the thrill; I could re- member 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 denouement. How this climax or solution had' been arrived at — that, clearly, for the spec- tator, 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 pictur 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 206 THE SENSE OF NEWPORT 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. 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 "cot- tages" 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 chang- ing: 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 prop- erty of the local air, the exqmsite_law_of_Jhe^ relative — the application of which, on the spot, is required to make 14 207 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 con- scious 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 gayety, 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 fat 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 "poirits," 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 gray page of to-day, the suggestive passages I remembered; but I was to find, to my satis- faction, that there was still no more mistaking their pleasant sense than there had ever been: a quiet, mild water-side 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 ver- andas, 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 discrimina- tion, 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 208 THE SENSE OF NEWPORT 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 prehistpripally cast forth and the great Roger Will- iams had handspmely welcomed, or to the other habita- tions, the felicitous cottages, with their galleries on the 5ay and towards the sunset, their pleasure-boats at their little wharves, and the supposition, that clung to them, of their harboring the less fashionable of the outer Great, but also the more cultivated and the more artistic. Every- thing was there still, as I say, and quite as much as any- thing the prolonged echo of that ingenuous old-time dis- tinction. 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 dp 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 — posi- tively better than one had ventured to suppose in one's cg.re 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 awe- struck by the ancient State House that overlooks the 209 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 treas- ure 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 Hey den, 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 honorable 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 re- mains 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 tantaliz- ing message its clean, serious windows, never yet debased, struck me as still giving. But it was still (something 210 'THE SENSE OF NEWPORT told me) a question of not putting, anywhere, too many _jprjesumptions 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 neighbor 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 raffine 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 parlors, its general panelled amplitude and dignity: the due taster of such things putting himself straight into pos- session on the spot, and, though wondering at the in- difference 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 quar- ter 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 farther 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 bathing- sands, with the big pond, behind them, set in its stone- walled featureless fields; to do these things and many THE AMERICAN SCENE others; every one of them thus accompanied by the admission that all that had been had been little ( was tb feel dead and buried generations push Off even the trans- parence of their shrotid and get into motion for the peopling of a scene that a present posterity has outgrown. The company of the middle years, the sb considerably prolonged formative, tentative, imaginative Newport time, hadn't outgrown it — this catastrophe was still to come, as it constitutes, precisely, the striking dramatic ^ denouement 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 gayly) ; it long remained, for its happiness, quite at One with this most favored resort of its comparative inno- cence. In the attesting presence of all the Constant elements^ of natural conditions that have, after all, per- sisted more than changed, a hundred far-away passages of the extinct life and joy, and of the comparative inno- cence, 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 over- spread the picture, hanging it there as the Newport aspedi 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 en- large it, as they fondly fancied, even for the experience of a sophisticated world. They danced and they drbve and they rode, they dirifed 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 laWhs and verandas I saw them gather, on the Old shining sands I saw them gallop, past the low headlands I saw THE SENSE OF NEWPORT 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 embodi- ments 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 gayety, fo the front. Hadn't it been above all, in its good faith, the Age of Beauties — the blessed age when it was sq easy to be, "on the Avenue," a Beauty, and when it was sp easy, not less, not to doubt of the un- surpassahihty 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 fqr 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 tp 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 bound- less extent — as one of the wonders of the world; as in- deed 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 pf 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, 213 THE AMERICAN SCENE 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 blase 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 gath- ered 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-con- scious, 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 circum- stances, 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, 214 THE SENSE OF NEWPORT of a formed critic al hab it. These things had been felt as making them excrescences on the American surface, where nobody ever criticised, 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 hiber- nated, 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 tkeir 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 per- haps 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 cus- tomary thousands, was the beauty of the good walk, over the lovely little land, revealed. The customary 21S THE AMERICAN SCENE thousands here, as throughout the United States, never set foot to earth — yet this had happened so, of qld, 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 pould 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 stretchy fond arms across the sea. There used to be distant, places beyond Bateman's, or better still on the opposite isle of Cpnanicut, now blighted with ugly uses, where nursing a nostalgia on the sun-warmed rocks was ahnost 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 grpss- Tiess. How should they have wished to leave seed pnly 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 impres- sion of a divine little drive, roundabout them and pretty well everywhere, taken, for renewal of acquaintanpe, while November was still mild. I sought another re- newal, as I have intimated, in the vacant splendor 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 til e immediate and contiguous — had taken it over, was ropre than ever, to the fancy, like some dim, simplified ghost of a small Greek island, where the clear walls of spine pillared portico or pavilion, perched afar, looked like those of temples of the gods, and where Nature, de- prived of that ease in merely massing herself pn which "American scenery," as we lump it together, is tpa apt 216 THE SENSE OF NEWPORT to depend for its effect, might have shown a piping shep- herd 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 lump- ish — 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, bah Only be that there is absolutely nothing to be done; iibtliing 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, con- sulting 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 Tfagmerits 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 "im- pression" 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, how- ever, 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 favoring influence I ask myself why I should have had, after all, the notion of overlaid deposits of ex- perience. The experience had anciently been small — 218 BOSTON 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 col- lapsed; 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. It was in strictness only a matter of noting the harsh- ness 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 sum- mit 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 com- paratively sensible manner the warm breath of history, 219 THE AMERICAN SCENE the history of something as against the history of noth- ing? — so that, being gone, or generally going, they en- abled 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 neighborhood of the enlarged State House, where a great raw clearance has been made, mempry met that pang of loss, knew itself sufficiently bereft; fo see the vanished objects, a scant but adequate cluster of "nooks," of such odds and ends as parochial sphemes 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 ro- mantic 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 w^st, 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. Birt 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 tp 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 220 BOSTON 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; ham- mer 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 .JiadjEallen out of one's own biography, afld" ohe~pTung