No American, not a commercial or otherwise hardened traveler, can have a
soul so dead as to be incapable of emotion when, on his return from a
long trip abroad, he catches sight of the low-lying and insignificant
Long Island coast. One's excitement begins, indeed, with the pilot-boat.
The pilot-boat is the first concrete symbol of those native and normal
relations with one's fellow-men, which one has so long observed in
infinitely varied manifestation abroad, but always as a spectator and a
stranger, and which one is now on the eve of sharing himself. As she
comes up swiftly, white and graceful, drops her pilot, crosses the
steamer's bows, tacks, and picks up her boat in the foaming wake, she
presents a spectacle beside which the most picturesque Mediterranean
craft, with colored sails and lazy evolutions, appear mistily in the
memory as elements of a feeble and conventional ideal. The ununiformed
pilot clambers on board, makes his way to the bridge, and takes command
with an equal lack of French manner and of English affectation
distinctly palpable to the sense, sharpened by long absence into
observing native characteristics as closely as foreign ones. If the
season be right the afternoon is bright, the range of vision apparently
limitless, the sky nearly cloudless and, by contrast with the European
firmament, almost colorless, the July sun such as no Parisian or
Londoner ever saw. The French reproach us for having no word for
"patrie" as distinct from "pays"; we have the thing at all events, and
cherish it, and it needs only the proximity of the foreigner, from whom
in general we are so widely separated, to give our patriotism a tinge of
the veriest chauvinism that exists in France itself.
We fancy the feeling old-fashioned, and imagine ours to be the most
cosmopolitan, the least prejudiced temperament in the world. It is
reasonable that it should be. The extreme sensitiveness noticed in us by
all foreign observers during the antebellum epoch, and ascribed by
Tocqueville to our self-distrust, is naturally inconsistent with our
position and circumstances to-day. A population greater than that of any
of the great nations, isolated by the most enviable geographical
felicity in the world from the narrowing influences of international
jealousy apparent to every American who travels in Europe, is
increasingly less concerned at criticism than a struggling provincial
republic of half its size. And along with our self-confidence and our
carelessness of "abroad," it is only with the grosser element among us
that national conceit has deepened; in general, we are apt to fancy we
have become cosmopolitan in proportion as we have lost our
provincialism. With us surely the individual has not withered, and if
the world has become more and more to him, it is because it is the world
at large and not the pent-up confines of his own country's history and
extent. "La patrie" in danger would be quickly enough rescued--there is
no need to prove that over again, even to our own satisfaction; but in
general "la patrie" not being in any danger, being on the contrary
apparently on the very crest of the wave of the world, it is felt not to
need much of one's active consideration, and passively indeed is viewed
by many people, probably, as a comfortable and gigantic contrivance for
securing a free field in which the individual may expand and develop.
"America," says Emerson, "America is Opportunity." After all, the
average American of the present day says, a country stands or falls by
the number of properly expanded and developed individuals it possesses.
But the happening of any one of a dozen things unexpectedly betrays that
all this cosmopolitanism is in great measure, and so far as sentiment is
concerned, a veneer and a disguise. Such a happening is the very change
from blue water to gray that announces to the returning American the
nearness of that country which he sometimes thinks he prizes more for
what it stands for than for itself. It is not, he then feels with a
sudden flood of emotion, that America is home, but that home is America.
America comes suddenly to mean what it never meant before.
Unhappily for this exaltation, ordinary life is not composed of
emotional crises. It is ordinary life with a vengeance which one
encounters in issuing from the steamer dock and facing again his native
city. Paris never looked so lovely, so exquisite to the sense as it now
appears in the memory. All that Parisian regularity, order, decorum, and
beauty into which, although a stranger, your own activities fitted so
perfectly that you were only half-conscious of its existence, was not,
then, merely normal, wholly a matter of course. Emerging into West
Street, amid the solicitations of hackmen, the tinkling jog-trot of the
most ignoble horse-cars you have seen since leaving home, the dry dust
blowing into your eyes, the gaping black holes of broken pavements, the
unspeakable filth, the line of red brick buildings prematurely decrepit,
the sagging multitude of telegraph wires, the clumsy electric lights
depending before the beer saloon and the groggery, the curious confusion
of spruceness and squalor in the aspect of these latter, which also seem
legion--confronting all this for the first time in three years, say, you
think with wonder of your disappointment at not finding the Tuileries
Gardens a mass of flowers, and with a blush of the times you have told
Frenchmen that New York was very much like Paris. New York is at this
moment the most foreign-looking city you have ever seen; in going abroad
the American discounts the unexpected; returning after the insensible
orientation of Europe, the contrast with things recently familiar is
prodigious, because one is so entirely unprepared for it. One thinks to
be at home, and finds himself at the spectacle. New York is less like
any European city than any European city is like any other. It is
distinguished from them all--even from London--by the ignoble character
of the _res publicæ_, and the refuge of taste, care, wealth, pride,
self-respect even, in private and personal regions. A splendid carriage,
liveried servants without and Paris dresses within, rattling over the
scandalous paving, splashed by the neglected mud, catching the rusty
drippings of the hideous elevated railway, wrenching its axle in the
tram-track in avoiding a mountainous wagon load of commerce on this hand
and a garbage cart on that, caught in a jam of horse-cars and a blockade
of trucks, finally depositing its dainty freight to pick its way across
a sidewalk eloquent of official neglect and private contumely, to a shop
door or a residence stoop--such a contrast as this sets us off from
Europe very definitely and in a very marked degree.
There is no palpable New York in the sense in which there is a Paris, a
Vienna, a Milan. You can touch it at no point. It is not even ocular.
There is instead a Fifth Avenue, a Broadway, a Central Park, a Chatham
Square. How they have dwindled, by the way. Fifth Avenue might be any
one of a dozen London streets in the first impression it makes on the
retina and leaves on the mind. The opposite side of Madison Square is
but a step away. The spacious hall of the Fifth Avenue Hotel has shrunk
to stifling proportions. Thirty-fourth Street is a lane; the City Hall a
bandbox; the Central Park a narrow strip of elegant landscape whose
lateral limitations are constantly forced upon the sense by the Lenox
Library on one side and a monster apartment house on the other. The
American fondness for size--for pure bigness--needs explanation, it
appears; we care for size, but inartistically; we care nothing for
proportion, which is what makes size count. Everything is on the same
scale; there is no play, no movement. An exception should be made in
favor of the big business building and the apartment house which have
arisen within a few years, and which have greatly accentuated the
grotesqueness of the city's sky-line as seen from either the New Jersey
or the Long Island shore. They are perhaps rather high than big; many of
them were built before the authorities noticed them and followed
unequally in the steps of other civilized municipal governments, from
that of ancient Rome down, in prohibiting the passing of a fixed limit.
But bigness has also evidently been one of their architectonic motives,
and it is to be remarked that they are so far out of scale with the
surrounding buildings as to avoid the usual commonplace, only by
creating a positively disagreeable effect. The aspect of Fifty-seventh
Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, for example, is certainly
that of the world upside down: a Gothic church utterly concealed, not to
say crushed, by contiguous flats, and confronted by the overwhelming
"Osborne," which towers above anything in the neighborhood, and perhaps
makes the most powerful impression that the returned traveler receives
during his first week or two of strange sensations. Yet the "Osborne's"
dimensions are not very different from those of the Arc de l'Étoile. It
is true it does not face an avenue of majestic buildings a mile and a
half long and two hundred and thirty feet wide, but the association of
these two structures, one a private enterprise and the other a public
monument, together with the obvious suggestions of each, furnish a not
misleading illustration of both the spectacular and the moral contrast
between New York and Paris, as it appears unduly magnified no doubt to
the sense surprised to notice it at all.
Still another reason for the foreign aspect of the New Yorker's native
city is the gradual withdrawing of the American element into certain
quarters, its transformation or essential modification in others, and in
the rest the presence of the lees of Europe. At every step you are
forced to realize that New York is the second Irish and the third or
fourth German city in the world. However great our success in drilling
this foreign contingent of our social army into order and reason and
self-respect--and it is not to be doubted that this success gives us a
distinction wholly new in history--nevertheless our effect upon its
members has been in the direction of development rather than of
assimilation. We have given them our opportunity, permitted them the
expansion denied them in their own several feudalities, made men of
serfs, demonstrated the utility of self-government under the most trying
conditions, proved the efficacy of our elastic institutions on a scale
truly grandiose; but evidently, so far as New York is concerned, we have
done this at the sacrifice of a distinct and obvious nationality. To an
observant sense New York is nearly as little national as Port Said. It
contrasts absolutely in this respect with Paris, whose assimilating
power is prodigious; every foreigner in Paris eagerly seeks
Parisianization.
Ocularly, therefore, the "note" of New York seems that of characterless
individualism. The monotony of the chaotic composition and movement is,
paradoxically, its most abiding impression. And as the whole is
destitute of definiteness, of distinction, the parts are,
correspondingly, individually insignificant. Where in the world are all
the types? one asks one's self in renewing his old walks and desultory
wanderings. Where is the New York counterpart of that astonishing
variety of types which makes Paris what it is morally and pictorially,
the Paris of Balzac as well as the Paris of M. Jean Béraud. Of a sudden
the lack of nationality in our familiar literature and art becomes
luminously explicable. One perceives why Mr. Howells is so successful in
confining himself to the simplest, broadest, most representative
representatives, why Mr. James goes abroad invariably for his
_mise-en-scène_, and often for his characters, why Mr. Reinhart lives in
Paris, and Mr. Abbey in London. New York is this and that, it is
incontestably unlike any other great city, but compared with Paris, its
most impressive trait is its lack of that organic quality which results
from variety of types. Thus compared, it seems to have only the variety
of individuals which results in monotony. It is the difference between
noise and music. Pictorially, the general aspect of New York is such
that the mind speedily takes refuge in insensitiveness. Its
expansiveness seeks exercise in other directions--business, dissipation,
study, æstheticism, politics. The life of the senses is no longer
possible. This is why one's sense for art is so stimulated by going
abroad, and one's sense for art in its freest, frankest, most universal
and least special, intense and enervated development, is especially
exhilarated by going to Paris. It is why, too, on one's return one can
note the gradual decline of his sensitiveness, his severity--the
progressive atrophy of a sense no longer called into exercise. "I had no
conception before," said a Chicago broker to me one day in Paris, with
intelligent eloquence, "of a finished city!" Chicago undoubtedly
presents a greater contrast to Paris than does New York, and so,
perhaps, better prepares one to appreciate the Parisian quality, but the
_returned_ New Yorker cannot fail to be deeply impressed with the
finish, the organic perfection, the elegance, and reserve of the Paris
mirrored in his memory. Is it possible that the uniformity, the monotony
of Paris architecture, the prose note in Parisian taste, should once
have weighed upon his spirit? Riding once on the top of a Paris tramway,
betraying an understanding of English by reading an American newspaper,
that sub-consciousness of moral isolation which the foreigner feels in
Paris as elsewhere, was suddenly and completely destroyed by my next
neighbor, who remarked with contemptuous conviction and a Manhattan
accent: "When you've seen one block of this infernal town you've seen it
all!" He felt sure of sympathy in advance. Probably few New Yorkers
would have differed with him. The universal light stone and brown paint,
the wide sidewalks, the asphalt pavement, the indefinitely multipled
kiosks, the prevalence of a few marked kinds of vehicles, the uniformed
workmen and workwomen, the infinite reduplication, in a word, of easily
recognized types, is at first mistaken by the New Yorker for that dead
level of uniformity which is, of all things in the world, the most
tiresome to him in his own city. After a time, however, he begins to
realize three important facts: In the first place these phenomena, which
so vividly force themselves on his notice that their reduplication
strikes him more than their qualities, are nevertheless of a quality
altogether unexampled in his experience for fitness and agreeableness;
in the second place, they are details of a whole, members of an
organism, and not they, but the city which they compose, the "finished
city" of the acute Chicagoan, is the spectacle; in the third place they
serve as a background for the finest group of monuments in the world. On
his return he perceives these things with a melancholy _a non lucendo_
luminousness. The dead level of Murray Hill uniformity he finds the most
agreeable aspect in the city.
And the reason is that Paris has habituated him to the exquisite, the
rational, pleasure to be derived from that organic spectacle a "finished
city," far more than that Murray Hill is respectable and appropriate,
and that almost any other prospect, except in spots of very limited area
which emphasize the surrounding ugliness, is acutely displeasing. This
latter is certainly very true. We have long frankly reproached ourselves
with having no art commensurate with our distinction in other
activities, resignedly attributing the lack to our hitherto necessary
material preoccupation. But what we are really accounting for in this
way is our lack of Titians and Bramantes. We are for the most part quite
unconscious of the character of the American æsthetic substratum, so to
speak. As a matter of fact, we do far better in the production of
striking artistic personalities than we do in the general medium of
taste and culture. We figure well invariably at the _Salon_. At home the
artist is simply either driven in upon himself, or else awarded by a
_naïve clientèle_, an eminence so far out of perspective as to result
unfortunately both for him and for the community. He pleases himself,
follows his own bent, and prefers salience to conformability for his
work, because his chief aim is to make an effect. This is especially
true of those of our architects who have ideas. But these are the
exceptions, of course, and the general aspect of the city is
characterized by something far less agreeable than mere lack of
symmetry; it is characterized mainly by an all-pervading bad taste in
every detail into which the element of art enters or should enter--that
is to say, nearly everything that meets the eye.
However, on the other hand, Parisian uniformity may depress exuberance,
it is the condition and often the cause of the omnipresent good taste.
Not only is it true that, as Mr. Hamerton remarks, "in the better
quarters of the city a building hardly ever rises from the ground unless
it has been designed by some architect who knows what art is, and
endeavors to apply it to little things as well as great"; but it is
equally true that the national sense of form expresses itself in every
appurtenance of life as well as in the masses and details of
architecture. In New York our noisy diversity not only prevents any
effect of _ensemble_ and makes, as I say, the old commonplace brown
stone regions the most reposeful and rational prospects of the city, but
it precludes also, in a thousand activities and aspects, the operation
of that salutary constraint and conformity without which the most
acutely sensitive individuality inevitably declines to a lower level of
form and taste. _La mode_, for example, seems scarcely to exist at all;
or at any rate to have taken refuge in the chimney-pot hat and the
_tournure_. The dude, it is true, has been developed within a few years,
but his distinguishing trait of personal extinction has had much less
success and is destined to a much shorter life than his appellation,
which has wholly lost its original significance in gaining its present
popularity. Every woman one meets in the street has a different bonnet.
Every street car contains a millinery museum. And the mass of them may
be judged after the circumstance that one of the most fashionable Fifth
Avenue _modistes_ flaunts a sign of enduring brass announcing "English
Round Hats and Bonnets." The enormous establishments of ready-made men's
clothing seem not yet to have made their destined impression in the
direction of uniformity. The contrast in dress of the working classes
with those of Paris is as conspicuously unfortunate æsthetically, as
politically and socially it may be significant; ocularly, it is a
substitution of a cheap, faded, and ragged imitation of _bourgeois_
costume for the marvel of neatness and propriety which composes the
uniform of the Parisian _ouvrier_ and _ouvrière_. Broadway below Tenth
Street is a forest of signs which obscure the thoroughfare, conceal the
buildings, overhang the sidewalks, and exhibit severally and
collectively a taste in harmony with the Teutonic and Semitic enterprise
which, almost exclusively, they attest. The shop-windows' show, which is
one of the great spectacles of Paris, is niggard and shabby; that of
Philadelphia has considerably more interest, that of London nearly as
much. Our clumsy coinage and countrified currency; our eccentric
book-bindings; that class of our furniture and interior decoration which
may be described as American rococo; that multifariously horrible
machinery devised for excluding flies from houses and preventing them
from alighting on dishes, for substituting a draught of air for stifling
heat, for relieving an entire population from that surplusage of
old-fashioned breeding involved in shutting doors, for rolling and
rattling change in shops, for enabling you to "put only the exact fare
in the box"; the racket of pneumatic tubes, of telephones, of aerial
trains; the practice of reticulating pretentious façades with
fire-escapes in lieu of fire-proof construction; the vast mass of our
nickel-plated paraphernalia; our zinc cemetery monuments; our comic
valentines and serious Christmas cards, and grocery labels, and "fancy"
job-printing and theater posters; our conspicuous cuspadores and our
conspicuous need of more of them; the "tone" of many articles in our
most popular journals, their references to each other, their
illustrations; the Sunday panorama of shirt-sleeved ease and the
week-day fatigue costume of curl papers and "Mother Hubbards" general in
some quarters; our sumptuous new bar-rooms, decorated perhaps on the
principle that _le mauvais goût mène au crime_--all these phenomena, the
list of which might be indefinitely extended, are so many witnesses of a
general taste, public and private, which differs cardinally from that
prevalent in Paris.
In fine, the material spectacle of New York is such that at last, with
some anxiety, one turns from the external vileness of every prospect to
seek solace in the pleasure that man affords. But even after the
wholesome American reaction has set in, and your appetite for the life
of the senses is starved into indifference for what begins to seem to
you an unworthy ideal; after you are patriotically readjusted and feel
once more the elation of living in the future owing to the dearth of
sustenance in the present--you are still at the mercy of perceptions too
keenly sharpened by your Paris sojourn to permit blindness to the fact
that Paris and New York contrast as strongly in moral atmosphere as in
material aspect. You become contemplative, and speculate pensively as to
the character and quality of those native and normal conditions, those
Relations, which finally you have definitely resumed. What is it--that
vague and pervasive moral contrast which the American feels so potently
on his return from abroad? How can we define that apparently undefinable
difference which is only the more sensible for being so elusive? Book
after book has been written about Europe from the American
standpoint--about America from the European standpoint. None of them has
specified what everyone has experienced. The spectacular and the
material contrasts are easily enough characterized, and it is only the
unreflecting or the superficial who exaggerate the importance of them.
We are by no means at the mercy of our appreciation of Parisian
spectacle, of the French machinery of life. We miss or we do not miss
the Salon Carré, the view of the south transept of Notre Dame as one
descends the rue St. Jacques, the Théâtre Français, the concerts, the
Luxembourg Gardens, the excursions to the score of charming suburban
places, the library at the corner, the convenient cheap cab, the manners
of the people, the quiet, the climate, the constant entertainment of the
senses. We have in general too much work to do to waste much time in
regretting these things. In general, work is by natural selection so
invariable a concomitant of our unrivaled opportunity to work
profitably, that it absorbs our energies so far as this palpable sphere
is concerned. But what is it that throughout the hours of busiest work
and closest application, as well as in the preceding and following
moments of leisure and the occasional intervals of relaxation, makes
everyone vaguely perceive the vast moral difference between life here at
home and life abroad--notably life in France? What is the subtle
influence pervading the moral atmosphere in New York, which so markedly
distinguishes what we call life here from life in Paris or even in
Pennedepie?
It is, I think, distinctly traceable to the intense individualism which
prevails among us. Magnificent results have followed our devotion to
this force; incontestably, we have spared ourselves both the acute and
the chronic misery for which the tyranny of society over its constituent
parts is directly responsible. We have, moreover, in this way not only
freed ourselves from the tyranny of despotism, such for example as is
exerted socially in England and politically in Russia, but we have
undoubtedly developed a larger number of self-reliant and potentially
capable social units than even a democratic system like that of France,
which sacrifices the unit to the organism, succeeds in producing. We may
truly say that, material as we are accused of being, we turn out more
_men_ than any other nationality. And if some Frenchman points out that
we attach an esoteric sense to the term "man," and that at any rate our
men are not better adapted than some others to a civilized environment
which demands other qualities than honesty, energy, and intelligence, we
may be quite content to leave him his objection, and to prefer what
seems to us manliness, to civilization itself. At the same time we
cannot pretend that individualism has done everything for us that could
be desired. In giving us the man it has robbed us of the _milieu_.
Morally speaking, the _milieu_ with us scarcely exists. Our difference
from Europe does not consist in the difference between the European
_milieu_ and ours; it consists in the fact that, comparatively speaking
of course, we have no _milieu_. If we are individually developed, we are
also individually isolated to a degree elsewhere unknown. Politically we
have parties who, in Cicero's phrase, "think the same things concerning
the republic," but concerning very little else are we agreed in any mass
of any moment. The number of our sauces is growing, but there is no
corresponding diminution in the number of our religions. We have no
communities. Our villages even are apt, rather, to be aggregations.
Politics aside, there is hardly an American view of any phenomenon or
class of phenomena. Every one of us likes, reads, sees, does what he
chooses. Often dissimilarity is affected as adding piquancy of paradox.
The judgment of the ages, the consensus of mankind, exercise no tyranny
over the individual will. Do you believe in this or that, do you like
this or that, are questions which, concerning the most fundamental
matters, nevertheless form the staple of conversation in many circles.
We live all of us apparently in a divine state of flux. The question
asked at dinner by a lady in a neighboring city of a literary stranger,
"What do you think of Shakespeare?" is not exaggeratedly peculiar. We
all think differently of Shakespeare, of Cromwell, of Titian, of
Browning, of George Washington. Concerning matters as to which we must
be fundamentally disinterested, we permit ourselves not only prejudice
but passion. At the most we have here and there groups of personal
acquaintance only, whose members are in accord in regard to some one
thing, and quickly crystallize and precipitate at the mention of
something that is really a corollary of the force which unites them. The
efforts that have been made in New York, within the past twenty years,
to establish various special _milieus_, so to speak, have been pathetic
in their number and resultlessness. Efforts of this sort are of course
doomed to failure, because the essential trait of the _milieu_ is
spontaneous existence, but their failure discloses the mutual repulsion
which keeps the molecules of our society from uniting. How can it be
otherwise when life is so speculative, so experimental, so wholly
dependent on the personal force and idiosyncrasies of the individual?
How shall we accept any general verdict pronounced by persons of no more
authority than ourselves, and arrived at by processes in which we are
equally expert? We have so little consensus as to anything, because we
dread the loss of personality involved in submitting to conventions, and
because personality operates centrifugally alone. We make exceptions in
favor of such matters as the Copernican system and the greatness of our
own future. There _are_ things which we take on the credit of the
consensus of authorities, for which we may not have all the proofs at
hand. But as to conventions of all sorts, our attitude is apt to be one
of suspicion and uncertainty. Mark Twain, for example, first won his way
to the popular American heart by exposing the humbugs of the
Cinque-cento. Specifically the most teachable of people, nervously eager
for information, Americans are nevertheless wholly distrustful of
generalizations made by anyone else, and little disposed to receive
blindly formularies and classifications of phenomena as to which they
have had no experience. And of experience we have necessarily had,
except politically, less than any civilized people in the world.
We are infinitely more at home amid universal mobility. We want to act,
to exert ourselves, to be, as we imagine, nearer to nature. We have our
tastes in painting as in confectionery. Some of us prefer Tintoretto to
Rembrandt, as we do chocolate to cocoanut. In respect of taste it would
be impossible for the gloomiest skeptic to deny that this is an
exceedingly free country. "I don't know anything about the subject
(whatever the subject may be), but I know what I like," is a remark
which is heard on every hand, and which witnesses the sturdiness of our
struggle against the tyranny of conventions and the indomitable nature
of our independent spirit. In criticism the individual spirit fairly
runs a-muck; it takes its lack of concurrence as credentials of
impartiality often. In constructive art everyone is occupied less with
nature than with the point of view. Mr. Howells himself displays more
delight in his naturalistic attitude than zest in his execution, which,
compared with that of the French naturalists, is in general
faint-hearted enough. Everyone writes, paints, models, exclusively the
point of view. Fidelity in following out nature's suggestions, in
depicting the emotions nature arouses, a sympathetic submission to
nature's sentiment, absorption into nature's moods and subtle
enfoldings, are extremely rare. The artist's eye is fixed on the
treatment. He is "creative" by main strength. He is penetrated with a
desire to get away from "the same old thing," to "take it" in a new way,
to draw attention to himself, to shine. One would say that every
American nowadays who handles a brush or designs a building, was
stimulated by the secret ambition of founding a school. We have in art
thus, with a vengeance, that personal element which is indeed its savor,
but which it is fatal to make its substance. We have it still more
conspicuously in life. What do you think of him, or her? is the first
question asked after every introduction. Of every new individual we meet
we form instantly some personal impression. The criticism of character
is nearly the one disinterested activity in which we have become expert.
We have for this a peculiar gift, apparently, which we share with
gypsies and money-lenders, and other people in whom the social instinct
is chiefly latent. Our gossip takes on the character of personal
judgments rather than of tittle-tattle. It concerns not what So-and-So
has done, but what kind of a person So-and-So is. It would hardly be too
much to say that So-and-So never leaves a group of which he is not an
intimate without being immediately, impartially but fundamentally,
discussed. To a degree not at all suspected by the author of the phrase,
he "leaves his character" with them on quitting any assemblage of his
acquaintance.
The great difficulty with our individuality and independence is that
differentiation begins so soon and stops so far short of real
importance. In no department of life has the law of the survival of the
fittest, that principle in virtue of whose operation societies become
distinguished and admirable, had time to work. Our social
characteristics are inventions, discoveries, not survival. Nothing with
us has passed into the stage of instinct. And for this reason some of
our "best people," some of the most "thoughtful" among us, have less of
that quality best characterized as social maturity than a Parisian
washerwoman or _concierge_. Centuries of sifting, ages of gravitation
toward harmony and homogeneity, have resulted for the French in a
delightful immunity from the necessity of "proving all things"
remorselessly laid on every individual of our society. Very many
matters, at any rate, which to the French are matters of course, our
self-respect pledges us to a personal examination of. The idea of
sparing ourselves trouble in thinking occurs to us far more rarely than
to other peoples. We have certainly an insufficient notion of the
superior results reached by economy and system in this respect.
In one of Mr. Henry James's cleverest sketches, _Lady Barberina_, the
English heroine marries an American and comes to live in New York. She
finds it dull. She is homesick without quite knowing why. Mr. James is
at his best in exhibiting at once the intensity of her disgust and the
intangibility of its provocation. We are not all like "Lady Barb." We do
not all like London, whose materialism is only more splendid, not less
uncompromising than our own; but we cannot help perceiving that what
that unfortunate lady missed in New York was the _milieu_--an
environment sufficiently developed to permit spontaneity and free play
of thought and feeling, and a certain domination of shifting merit by
fixed relations which keeps one's mind off that disagreeable subject of
contemplation, one's self. Everyone seems acutely self-conscious; and
the self-consciousness of the unit is fatal, of course, to the composure
of the _ensemble_. The number of people intently minding their P's and
Q's, reforming their orthoepy, practicing new discoveries in etiquette,
making over their names, and in general exhibiting that activity of the
amateur known as "going through the motions" to the end of bringing
themselves up, as it were, is very noticeable in contrast with French
oblivion to this kind of personal exertion. Even our simplicity is apt
to be _simplesse_. And the conscientiousness in educating others
displayed by those who are so fortunate as to have reached perfection
nearly enough to permit relaxation in self-improvement, is only equaled
by the avidity in acquisitiveness displayed by the learners themselves.
Meantime the composure born of equality, as well as that springing from
unconsciousness, suffers. Our society is a kind of Jacob's ladder, to
maintain equilibrium upon which requires an amount of effort on the part
of the personally estimable gymnasts perpetually ascending and
descending, in the highest degree hostile to spontaneity, to serenity,
and stability.
Naturally, thus, everyone is personally preoccupied to a degree unknown
in France. And it is not necessary that this preoccupation should
concern any side of that multifarious monster we know as "business." It
may relate strictly to the paradox of seeking employment for leisure.
Even the latter is a terribly conscious proceeding. We go about it with
a mental deliberateness singularly in contrast with our physical
precipitancy. But it is mainly "business," perhaps, that accentuates our
individualism. The condition of _désœuvrement_ is positively
disreputable. It arouses the suspicion of acquaintance and the anxiety
of friends. Occupation to the end of money-getting is our normal
condition, any variation from which demands explanation, as little
likely to be entirely honorable. Such occupation is, as I said, the
inevitable sequence of the opportunity for it, and is the wiser and more
dignified because of its necessity to the end of securing independence.
What the Frenchman can secure merely by the exercise of economy is with
us only the reward of energy and enterprise in acquisition--so
comparatively speculative and hazardous is the condition of our
business. And whereas with us money is far harder to keep, and is
moreover something which it is far harder to be without than is the case
in France, the ends of self-respect, freedom from mortification, and
getting the most out of life, demand that we should take constant
advantage of the fact that it is easier to get. Consequently everyone
who is, as we say, worth anything, is with us adjusted to the prodigious
dynamic condition which characterizes our existence. And such occupation
is tremendously absorbing. Our opportunity is fatally handicapped by
this remorseless necessity of embracing it. It yields us fruit after its
kind, but it rigorously excludes us from tasting any other. Everyone is
engaged in preparing the working drawings of his own fortune. There is
no co-operation possible, because competition is the life of enterprise.
In the resultant manners the city illustrates Carlyle's "anarchy plus
the constable." Never was the struggle for existence more palpable,
more naked, and more unpictorial. "It is the art of mankind to polish
the world," says Thoreau somewhere, "and everyone who works is scrubbing
in some part." Everyone certainly is here at work, yet was there ever
such scrubbing with so little resultant polish? The disproportion would
be tragic if it were not grotesque. Amid all "the hurry and rush of life
along the sidewalks," as the newspapers say, one might surely expect to
find the unexpected. The spectacle ought certainly to have the interest
of picturesqueness which is inherent in the fortuitous. Unhappily,
though there is hurry and rush enough, it is the bustle of business, not
the dynamics of what is properly to be called life. The elements of the
picture lack dignity--so completely as to leave the _ensemble_ quite
without accent. More incidents in the drama of real life will happen
before midnight to the individuals who compose the orderly Boulevard
procession in Paris than those of its chaotic Broadway counterpart will
experience in a month. The latter are not really more impressive because
they are apparently all running errands and include no _flâneurs_. The
_flâneur_ would fare ill should anything draw him into the stream.
Everything being adjusted to the motive of looking out for one's self,
any of the sidewalk civility and mutual interest which obtain in Paris
would throw the entire machine out of gear. Whoever is not in a hurry is
in the way. A man running after an omnibus at the Madeleine would come
into collision with fewer people and cause less disturbance than one who
should stop on Fourteenth Street to apologize for an inadvertent jostle,
or to give a lady any surplusage of passing room. He would be less
ridiculous. A friend recently returned from Paris told me that, on
several street occasions, his involuntary "Excuse me!" had been mistaken
for a salutation and answered by a "How do you do?" and a stare of
speculation. Apologies of this class sound to us, perhaps, like a
subtle and deprecatory impeachment of our large tolerance and universal
good nature.
In this way our undoubted self-respect undoubtedly loses something of
its bloom. We may prefer being jammed into street-cars and pressed
against the platform rails of the elevated road to the tedious waiting
at Paris 'bus stations--to mention one of the perennial and principal
points of contrast which monopolize the thoughts of the average American
sojourner in the French capital. But it is terribly vulgarizing. The
contact and pressure are abominable. To a Parisian the daily experience
in this respect of those of our women who have no carriages of their
own, would seem as singular as the latter would find the Oriental habit
of regarding the face as more important than other portions of the
female person to keep concealed. But neither men nor women can persist
in blushing at the intimacy of rudeness to which our crowding subjects
them in common. The only resource is in blunted sensibility. And the
manners thus negatively produced we do not quite appreciate in their
enormity because the edge of our appreciation is thus necessarily
dulled. The conductor scarcely ceases whistling to poke you for your
fare. Other whistlers apparently go on forever. Loud talking follows
naturally from the impossibility of personal seclusion in the presence
of others. Our Sundays have lost secular decorum very much in proportion
as they have lost Puritan observance. If we have nothing quite
comparable with a London bank holiday, or with the conduct of the
popular cohorts of the Epsom army; if only in "political picnics" and
the excursions of "gangs" of "toughs" we illustrate absolute barbarism,
it is nevertheless true that, from Central Park to Coney Island, our
people exhibit a conception of the fitting employment of periodical
leisure which would seem indecorous to a crowd of Belleville
_ouvriers_. If we have not the cad, we certainly possess in abundance
the species "hoodlum," which, though morally far more refreshing, is yet
aesthetically intolerable; and the hoodlum is nearly as rare in Paris as
the cad. Owing to his presence and to the atmosphere in which he
thrives, we find ourselves, in spite of the most determined democratic
convictions, shunning crowds whenever it is possible to shun them. The
most robust of us easily get into the frame of mind of a Boston young
woman, to whom the Champs-Élysées looked like a railway station, and who
wished the people would get up from the benches and go home. Our life
becomes a life of the interior; wherefore, in spite of a climate that
permits walks abroad, we confine out-door existence to Newport lawns and
camps in the Adirondacks; and whence proceeds that carelessness of the
exterior which subordinates architecture to "household art," and makes
of our streets such mere thoroughfares lined with "homes."
The manners one encounters in street and shop in Paris are, it is well
known, very different from our own. But no praise of them ever quite
prepares an American for their agreeableness and simplicity. We are
always agreeably surprised at the absence of elaborate manner which
eulogists of French manners in general omit to note; and indeed it is an
extremely elusive quality. Nothing is further removed from that
intrusion of the national _gemüthlichkeit_ into so impersonal a matter
as affairs, large or small, which to an occasional sense makes the
occasional German manner enjoyable. Nothing is farther from the
obsequiousness of the London shopman, which rather dazes the American
than pleases him. Nothing, on the other hand, is farther from our own
bald dispatch. With us every shopper expects, or at any rate is prepared
for, obstruction rather than facilitation on the seller's side. The
drygoods counter, especially when the attendant is of the gentler sex,
is a kind of _chevaux-de-frise_. The retail atmosphere is charged with
an affectation of unconsciousness; not only is every transaction
impersonal, it is mechanical; ere long it must become automatic. In many
cases there is to be encountered a certain defiant attitude to the last
degree unhappy in its effects on the manners involved--a certain
self-assertion which begs the question, else unmooted, of social
equality, with the result for the time being of the most unsocial
relation probably existing among men. Perfect personal equality for the
time being invariably exists between customer and tradesman in France;
the man or woman who serves you is first of all a fellow-creature; a
shop, to be sure, is not a _conversazione_, but if you are in a
loquacious or inquisitive mood you will be deemed neither frivolous nor
familiar--nor yet an inanimate obstacle to the flow of the most
important as well as the most impetuous of the currents of life.
Certainly, in New York, we are too vain of our bustle to realize how
mannerless and motiveless it is. The essence of life is movement, but so
is the essence of epilepsy. Moreover the life of the New Yorker who
chases street-cars, eats at a lunch counter, drinks what will "take
hold" quickly at a bar he can quit instantly, reads only the head-lines
of his newspaper, keeps abreast of the intellectual movement by
inspecting the display of the Elevated Railway newsstands while he fumes
at having to wait two minutes for his train, hastily buys his tardy
ticket of sidewalk speculators, and leaves the theater as if it were on
fire--the life of such a man is, notwithstanding all its futile
activity, varied by long spaces of absolute mental stagnation, of moral
coma. Not only is our hurry not decorous, not decent; it is not real
activity, it is as little as possible like the animated existence of
Paris, where the moral nature is kept in constant operation, intense or
not as the case may be, in spite of the external and material
tranquillity. Owing to this lack of a real, a rational activity, our
individual civilization, which seems when successful a scramble, and
when unlucky a _sauve qui peut_, is, morally as well as spectacularly,
not ill described in so far as its external aspect is concerned by the
epithet _flat_. Enervation seems to menace those whom hyperæsthesia
spares.
* * * * *
"We go to Europe to become Americanized," says Emerson, but France
Americanizes us less in this sense than any other country of Europe, and
perhaps Emerson was not thinking so much of her democratic development
into social order and efficiency as of the less American and more feudal
European influences, which do indeed, while we are subject to them,
intensify our affection for our own institutions, our confidence in our
own outlook. One must admit that in France (which nowadays follows our
ideal of liberty perhaps as closely as we do hers of equality and
fraternity, and where consequently our political notions receive few
shocks) not only is the life of the senses more agreeable than it is
with us, but the mutual relations of men are more felicitous also. And
alas! Americans who have savored these sweets cannot avail themselves of
the implication contained in Emerson's further words--words which
approach nearer to petulance than anything in his urbane and placid
utterances--"those who prefer London or Paris to America may be spared
to return to those capitals." "Il faut vivre, combattre, et finir avec
les siens," says Doudan, and no law is more inexorable. The fruits of
foreign gardens are, however delectable, enchanted for us; we may not
touch them; and to pass our lives in covetous inspection of them is as
barren a performance as may be imagined. For this reason the question
"Should you like better to live here or abroad?" is as little practical
as it is frequent. The empty life of the "foreign colonies" in Paris is
its sufficient answer. Not only do most of us _have_ to stay at home,
but for everyone except the inconsiderable few who can better do abroad
the work they have to do, and except those essentially un-American waifs
who can contrive no work for themselves, life abroad is not only less
profitable but less pleasant. The American endeavoring to acclimatize
himself in Paris hardly needs to have cited to him the words of
Epictetus: "Man, thou hast forgotten thine object; thy journey was not
_to_ this, but _through_ this"--he is sure before long to become
dismally persuaded of their truth. More speedily than elsewhere perhaps,
he finds out in Paris the truth of Carlyle's assurance: "It is, after
all, the one unhappiness of a man. That he cannot work; that he cannot
get his destiny as a man fulfilled." For the work which insures the
felicity of the French life of the senses and of French human relations
he cannot share; and, thus, the question of the relative attractiveness
of French and American life--of Paris and New York--becomes the idle and
purely speculative question as to whether one would like to change his
personal and national identity.
And this an American may permit himself the chauvinism of believing a
less rational contradiction of instinct in himself than it would be in
the case of anyone else. And for this reason: that in those elements of
life which tend to the development and perfection of the individual soul
in the work of fulfilling its mysterious destiny, American character and
American conditions are especially rich. Bunyan's genius exhibits its
characteristic felicity in giving the name of Hopeful to the successor
of that Faithful who perished in the town of Vanity. It would be a mark
of that loose complacency in which we are too often offenders, to
associate the scene of Faithful's martyrdom with the Europe from which
definitively we set out afresh a century ago; but it is impossible not
to recognize that on our forward journey to the celestial country of
national and individual success, our conspicuous inspiration and
constant comforter is that hope whose cheering ministrations the "weary
Titans" of Europe enjoy in far narrower measure. Living in the future
has an indisputably tonic effect upon the moral sinews, and contributes
an exhilaration to the spirit which no sense of attainment and achieved
success can give. We are after all the true idealists of the world.
Material as are the details of our preoccupation, our sub-consciousness
is sustained by a general aspiration that is none the less heroic for
being, perhaps, somewhat _naïf_ as well. The times and moods when one's
energy is excited, when something occurs in the continuous drama of life
to bring sharply into relief its vivid interest and one's own intimate
share therein, when nature seems infinitely more real than the societies
she includes, when the missionary, the pioneer, the constructive spirit
is aroused, are far more frequent with us than with other peoples. Our
intense individualism happily modified by our equality, our constant,
active, multiform struggle with the environment, do at least, as I said,
produce men; and if we use the term in an esoteric sense we at least
know its significance. Of our riches in this respect New York alone
certainly gives no exaggerated idea--however it may otherwise epitomize
and typify our national traits. A walk on Pennsylvania Avenue; a drive
among the "homes" of Buffalo or Detroit--or a dozen other true centers
of communal life which have a concrete impressiveness that for the most
part only great capitals in Europe possess; a tour of college
commencements in scores of spots consecrated to the exaltation of the
permanent over the evanescent; contact in any wise with the prodigious
amount of right feeling manifested in a hundred ways throughout a
country whose prosperity stimulates generous impulse, or with the
number of "good fellows" of large, shrewd, humorous views of life,
critical perhaps rather than constructive, but at all events untouched
by cynicism, perfectly competent and admirably confident, with a
livelier interest in everything within their range of vision than can be
felt by anyone mainly occupied with sensuous satisfaction, saved from
boredom by a robust imperviousness, ready to begin life over again after
every reverse with unenfeebled spirit, and finding, in the working out
of their own personal salvation according to the gospel of necessity and
opportunity, that joy which the pursuit of pleasure misses--experiences
of every kind, in fine, that familiarize us with what is especially
American in our civilization, are agreeable as no foreign experiences
can be, because they are above all others animating and sustaining. Life
in America has for everyone, in proportion to his seriousness, the zest
that accompanies the "advance on Chaos and the Dark." Meantime, one's
last word about the America emphasized by contrast with the organic and
_solidaire_ society of France, is that, for insuring order and
efficiency to the lines of this advance, it would be difficult to
conceive too gravely the utility of observing attentively the work in
the modern world of the only other great nation that follows the
democratic standard, and is perennially prepared to make sacrifices for
ideas.
[From _French Traits_, by W. C. Brownell. Copyright, 1888, 1889, by
Charles Scribner's Sons.]