distractedly improvised--as it at least at the moment appeared--movement
for the relief of the doomed Antwerp, but was, later on, after the
return of the force so engaged, for a few days in London, whither he
had come up from camp in Dorsetshire, briefly invalided; thanks to which
accident I had on a couple of occasions my last sight of him. It was
all auspiciously, well-nigh extravagantly, congruous; nothing certainly
could have been called more modern than all the elements and suggestions
of his situation for the hour, the very spot in London that could
best serve as a centre for vibrations the keenest and most various; a
challenge to the appreciation of life, to that of the whole range of the
possible English future, at its most uplifting. He had not yet so much
struck me as an admirable nature _en disponibilite_ and such as any
cause, however high, might swallow up with a sense of being the sounder
and sweeter for. More definitely perhaps the young poet, with all the
wind alive in his sails, was as evident there in the guise of the young
soldier and the thrice welcome young friend, who yet, I all recognisably
remember, insisted on himself as little as ever in either character,
and seemed even more disposed than usual not to let his intelligibility
interfere with his modesty. He promptly recovered and returned to camp,
whence it was testified that his specific practical aptitude, under the
lively call, left nothing to be desired--a fact that expressed again, to
the perception of his circle, with what truth the spring of inspiration
worked in him, in the sense, I mean, that his imagination itself
shouldered and made light of the material load. It had not yet, at the
same time, been more associatedly active in a finer sense; my own next
apprehension of it at least was in reading the five admirable sonnets
that had been published in "New Numbers" after the departure of his
contingent for the campaign at the Dardanelles. To read these in
the light of one's personal knowledge of him was to draw from them,
inevitably, a meaning still deeper seated than their noble beauty, an
authority, of the purest, attended with which his name inscribes itself
in its own character on the great English scroll. The impression,
the admiration, the anxiety settled immediately--to my own sense at
least--as upon something that would but too sharply feed them, falling
in as it did with that whole particularly animated vision of him of
which I have spoken. He had never seemed more animated with our newest
and least deluded, least conventionalised life and perception and
sensibility, and that formula of his so distinctively fortunate, his
overflowing share in our most developed social heritage which had
already glimmered, began with this occasion to hang about him as one of
the aspects, really a shining one, of his fate.
So I remember irrepressibly thinking and feeling, unspeakably
apprehending, in a word; and so the whole exquisite exhalation of his
own consciousness in the splendid sonnets, attach whatever essentially
or exclusively poetic value to it we might, baffled or defied us as
with a sort of supreme rightness. Everything about him of keenest and
brightest (yes, absolutely of brightest) suggestion made so for his
having been charged with every privilege, every humour, of our merciless
actuality, our fatal excess of opportunity, that what indeed could the
full assurance of this be but that, finding in him the most charming
object in its course, the great tide was to lift him and sweep him away?
Questions and reflections after the fact perhaps, yet haunting for the
time and during the short interval that was still to elapse--when, with
the sudden news that he _had_ met his doom, an irrepressible "of course,
of course!" contributed its note well-nigh of support. It was as if the
peculiar richness of his youth had itself marked its limit, so that what
his own spirit was inevitably to feel about his "chance"--inevitably
because both the high pitch of the romantic and the ironic and the
opposed abyss of the real came together in it--required, in the wondrous
way, the consecration of the event. The event came indeed not in the
manner prefigured by him in the repeatedly perfect line, that of the
received death-stroke, the fall in action, discounted as such; which
might have seemed very much because even the harsh logic and pressure of
history were tender of him at the last and declined to go through more
than the form of their function, discharging it with the least violence
and surrounding it as with a legendary light. He was taken ill, as an
effect of blood-poisoning, on his way from Alexandria to Gallipoli, and,
getting ominously and rapidly worse, was removed from his transport to a
French hospital ship, where, irreproachably cared for, he died in a few
hours and without coming to consciousness. I deny myself any further
anticipation of the story to which further noble associations attach,
and the merest outline of which indeed tells it and rounds it off
absolutely as the right harmony would have it. It is perhaps even a
touch beyond any dreamt-of harmony that, under omission of no martial
honour, he was to be carried by comrades and devoted waiting sharers,
whose evidence survives them, to the steep summit of a Greek island of
infinite grace and there placed in such earth and amid such beauty of
light and shade and embracing prospect as that the fondest reading of
his young lifetime could have suggested nothing better. It struck us at
home, I mean, as symbolising with the last refinement his whole instinct
of selection and response, his relation to the overcharged appeal of his
scene and hour. How could he have shown more the young English poetic
possibility and faculty in which we were to seek the freshest reflection
of the intelligence and the soul of the new generation? The generosity,
I may fairly say the joy, of his contribution to the general perfect
way makes a monument of his high rest there at the heart of all that was
once noblest in history.
HENRY JAMES
LETTERS FROM AMERICA
I
ARRIVAL
However sedulously he may have avoided a preparatory reading of
those 'impressions' of America which our hurried and observant Great
continually record for the instruction of both nations, the pilgrim who
is crossing the Atlantic for the first time cannot approach Sandy Hook
Bar with so completely blank a mind as he would wish. So, at least, I
found. It is not so much that the recent American invasion of London
music-halls has bitten into one's brain a very definite taste of a
jerking, vital, _bizarre_ 'rag-time' civilisation. But the various and
vivid comments of friends to whom the news of a traveller's departure
is broken excite and predispose the imagination. That so many people who
have been there should have such different and decided opinions about
it! It must be at least remarkable. I felt the thrill of an explorer
before I started. "A country without conversation," said a philosopher.
"The big land has a big heart," wrote a kindly scholar; and, by the same
post, from another critic, "that land of crushing hospitality!" "It's
Hell, but it's fine," an artist told me. "El Cuspidorado," remarked an
Oxford man, brilliantly. But one wiser than all the rest wrote: "Think
gently of the Americans. They are so very young; and so very anxious to
appear grown-up; and so very lovable." This was more generous than the
unvarying comment of ordinary English friends when they heard of my
purpose, "My God!" And it was more precise than those nineteen several
Americans, to each of whom I said, "I am going to visit America,"
and each of whom replied, after long reflection, "Wal! it's a great
country!"
Travelling by the ordinary routes, you meet the American people a week
before you meet America. And my excitement to discover what, precisely,
this nation was _at_, was inflamed rather than damped by the attitude of
a charming American youth who crossed by the same boat. That simplicity
that is not far down in any American was very beautifully on the
delightful surface with him. The second day out he sidled shyly up
to me. "Of what nationality _are_ you?" he asked. His face showed
bewilderment when he heard. "I thought all Englishmen had moustaches,"
he said. I told him of the infinite variety, within the homogeneity,
of our race. He did not listen, but settled down near me with the eager
kindliness of a child. "You know," he said, "you'll never understand
America. No, Sir. No Englishman can understand America. I've been in
London. In your Houses of Parliament there is one door for peers to go
in at, and one for ordinary people. Did I laugh some when I saw that?
You bet your America's not like that. In America one man's just as good
as another. You'll never understand America." I was all humility. His
theme and his friendliness fired him. He rose with a splendour which, I
had to confess to myself, England could never have given to him. "Would
you like to hear me re-cite to you the Declaration of Independence?" he
asked. And he did.
So it was with a fairly blank mind, and yet a hope of understanding, or
at least of seeing, something very remarkably fresh, that I woke to
hear we were in harbour, and tumbled out on deck at six of a fine summer
morning to view a new world. New York Harbour is loveliest at night
perhaps. On the Staten Island ferry boat you slip out from the darkness
right under the immense sky-scrapers. As they recede they form into a
mass together, heaping up one behind another, fire-lined and majestic,
sentinel over the black, gold-streaked waters. Their cliff-like boldness
is the greater, because to either side sweep in the East River and the
Hudson River, leaving this piled promontory between. To the right hangs
the great stretch of the Brooklyn Suspension Bridge, its slight curve
very purely outlined with light; over it luminous trams, like shuttles
of fire, are thrown across and across, continually weaving the stuff of
human existence. From further off all these lights dwindle to a radiant
semicircle that gazes out over the expanse with a quiet, mysterious
expectancy. Far away seaward you may see the low golden glare of Coney
Island.
But there was beauty in the view that morning, also, half an hour after
sunrise. New York, always the cleanest and least smoky of cities, lay
asleep in a queer, pearly, hourless light. A thin mist softened the
further outlines. The water was opalescent under a silver sky, cool and
dim, very slightly ruffled by the sweet wind that followed us in from
the sea. A few streamers of smoke flew above the city, oblique and
parallel, pennants of our civilisation. The space of water is great, and
so the vast buildings do not tower above one as they do from the street.
Scale is lost, and they might be any size. The impression is, rather, of
long, low buildings stretching down to the water's edge on every side,
and innumerable low black wharves and jetties and piers. And at one
point, the lower end of the island on which the city proper stands, rose
that higher clump of the great buildings, the Singer, the Woolworth, and
the rest. Their strength, almost severity, of line and the lightness of
their colour gave a kind of classical feeling, classical, and yet not
of Europe. It had the air, this block of masonry, of edifices built to
satisfy some faith, for more than immediate ends. Only, the faith was
unfamiliar. But if these buildings embodied its nature, it is cold and
hard and light, like the steel that is their heart. The first sight of
these strange fanes has queer resemblances to the first sight of that
lonely and secret group by Pisa's walls. It came upon me, at that
moment, that they could not have been dreamed and made without some
nobility. Perhaps the hour lent them sanctity. For I have often noticed
since that in the early morning, and again for a little about sunset,
the sky-scrapers are no longer merely the means and local convenience
for men to pursue their purposes, but acquire that characteristic of the
great buildings of the world, an existence and meaning of their own.
Our boat moved up the harbour and along the Hudson River with a superb
and courteous stateliness. Round her snorted and scuttled and puffed
the multitudinous strange denizens of the harbour. Tugs, steamers,
queer-shaped ferry-boats, long rafts carrying great lines of trucks from
railway to railway, dredgers, motor-boats, even a sailing-boat or two;
for the day's work was beginning. Among them, with that majesty that
only a liner entering a harbour has, she went, progressed, had her
moving--English contains no word for such a motion--"_incessu patuit
dea_." A goddess entering fairyland, I thought; for the huddled beauty
of these buildings and the still, silver expanse of the water seemed
unreal. Then I looked down at the water immediately beneath me, and knew
that New York was a real city. All kinds of refuse went floating by:
bits of wood, straw from barges, bottles, boxes, paper, occasionally
a dead cat or dog, hideously bladder-like, its four paws stiff and
indignant towards heaven.
This analysis of fairyland turned me towards the statue of Liberty,
already passed and growing distant. It is one of those things you have
long wanted to see and haven't expected to admire, which, seen, give you
a double thrill, that they're at last _there_, and that they're better
than your hopes. For Liberty stands nobly. Americans, always shy about
their country, have learnt from the ridicule which Europeans, on mixed
aesthetic and moral grounds, pour on this statue, to dismiss it with an
apologetic laugh. Yet it is fine--until you get near enough to see
its clumsiness. I admired the great gesture of it. A hand fell on my
shoulder, and a voice said, "Look hard at that, young man! That's the
first time you've seen Liberty--and it will be the last till you turn
your back on this country again." It was an American fellow-passenger,
one of the tall, thin type of American, with pale blue eyes of an
idealistic, disappointed expression, and an Indian profile. The other
half of America, personated by a small, bumptious, eager, brown-faced
man, with a cigar raking at an irritating angle from the corner of his
mouth, joined in with, "Wal! I should smile, I guess this is the Land of
Freedom, anyway." The tall man swung round: "Freedom! do you call it a
free land, where--" He gave instances of the power of the dollar. The
other man kept up the argument by spitting and by asseveration. As the
busy little tugs, with rugs on their noses, butted the great liner into
her narrow dock, the pessimist launched his last shafts. The short man
denied nothing. He drew the cigar from his lips, shot it back with a
popping noise into the round hole cigars had worn at the corner of
his mouth, and said, "Anyway, it's some country." I was introduced to
America.
II
NEW YORK
In five things America excels modern England--fish, architecture, jokes,
drinks, and children's clothes. There may be others. Of these I am
certain. The jokes and drinks, which curiously resemble each other,
are the best. There is a cheerful violence about them; they take their
respective kingdoms by storm. All the lesser things one has heard turn
out to be delightfully true. The first hour in America proves them.
People here talk with an American accent; their teeth are inlaid with
gold; the mouths of car-conductors move slowly, slowly, with an oblique
oval motion, for they are chewing; pavements are 'sidewalks.' It is all
true.... But there were other things one expected, though in no precise
form. What, for instance, would it be like, the feeling of whatever
democracy America has secured?
I landed, rather forlorn, that first morning, on the immense covered
wharf where the Customs mysteries were to be celebrated. The place was
dominated by a large, dirty, vociferous man, coatless, in a black
shirt and black apron. His mouth and jaw were huge; he looked like a
caricaturist's Roosevelt. 'Express Company' was written on his forehead;
labels of a thousand colours, printed slips, pencils and pieces of
string, hung from his pockets and his hands, were held behind his ears
and in his mouth. I laid my situation and my incompetence before him,
and learnt right where to go and right when to go there. Then he flung
a vast, dingy arm round my shoulders, and bellowed, "We'll have your
baggage right along to your hotel in two hours." It was a lie, but
kindly. That grimy and generous embrace left me startled, but an
initiate into Democracy.
The other evening I went a lonely ramble, to try to detect the essence
of New York. A wary eavesdropper can always surprise the secret of a
city, through chance scraps of conversation, or by spying from a window,
or by coming suddenly round corners. I started on a 'car.' American
tram-cars are open all along the side and can be entered at any point in
it. The side is divided by vertical bars. It looks like a cage with the
horizontal lines taken out. Between these vertical bars you squeeze into
the seat. If the seat opposite you is full, you swing yourself along the
bars by your hands till you find room. The Americans become terrifyingly
expert at this. I have seen them, fat, middle-aged business men,
scampering up and down the face of the cars by means of their hands,
swinging themselves over and round and above each other, like nothing
in the world so much as the monkeys at the Zoo. It is a people informed
with vital energy. I believe that this exercise, and the habit of
drinking a lot of water between meals, are the chief causes of their
good health.
The Broadway car runs mostly along the backbone of the queer island on
which this city stands. So the innumerable parallel streets that cross
it curve down and away; and at this time street after street to the west
reveals, and seems to drop into, a mysterious evening sky, full of dull
reds and yellows, amber and pale green, and a few pink flecks, and in
the midst, sometimes, the flushed, smoke-veiled face of the sun. Then
greyness, broken by these patches of misty colour, settles into the
lower channels of the New York streets; while the upper heights of the
sky-scrapers, clear of the roofs, are still lit on the sunward side with
a mellow glow, curiously serene. To the man in the mirk of the street,
they seem to exude this light from the great spaces of brick. At this
time the cars, always polyglot, are filled with shop-hands and workers,
and no English at all is heard. One is surrounded with Yiddish, Italian,
and Greek, broken by Polish, or Russian, or German. Some American
anthropologists claim that the children of these immigrants show marked
changes, in the shape of skull and face, towards the American type. It
may be so. But the people who surround one are mostly European-born.
They represent very completely that H.C.F. of Continental appearance
which is labelled in the English mind 'looking like a foreigner'; being
short, swarthy, gesticulatory, full of clatter, indeterminately alien.
Only in their dress and gait have they--or at least the men among
them--become at all American.
The American by race walks better than we; more freely, with a taking
swing, and almost with grace. How much of this is due to living in a
democracy, and how much to wearing no braces, it is very difficult to
determine. But certainly it is the land of belts, and therefore of more
loosely moving bodies. This, and the padded shoulders of the coats, and
the loosely-cut trousers, make a figure more presentable, at a distance,
than most urban civilisations turn out. Also, Americans take their coats
off, which is sensible; and they can do it the more beautifully because
they are belted, and not braced. They take their coats off anywhere and
any-when, and somehow it strikes the visitor as the most symbolic thing
about them. They have not yet thought of discarding collars; but they
are unashamedly shirt-sleeved. Any sculptor, seeking to figure this
Republic in stone, must carve, in future, a young man in shirt-sleeves,
open-faced, pleasant, and rather vulgar, straw hat on the back of his
head, his trousers full and sloppy, his coat over his arm. The motto
written beneath will be, of course, 'This is some country.' The
philosophic gazer on such a monument might get some way towards
understanding the making of the Panama Canal, that exploit that no
European nation could have carried out.
What facial type the sculptor would give the youth is harder to
determine, and very hard to describe. The American race seems to
have developed two classes, and only two, the upper-middle and the
lower-middle. Their faces are very distinct. The upper-class head is
long, often fine about the forehead and eyes, and very cleanly outlined.
The eyes have an odd, tired pathos in them--mixed with the friendliness
that is so admirable--as if of a perpetual never quite successful effort
to understand something. It is like the face of an only child who has
been brought up in the company of adults. I am convinced it is
partly due to the endeavour to set their standards by the culture and
traditions of older nations. But the mouth of such men is the most
typical feature. It is small, tight, and closed downwards at the
corners, the lower lip very slightly protruding. It has little
expression in it, and no curves. There the Puritan comes out. But no
other nation has a mouth like this. It is shared to some extent by the
lower classes; but their mouths tend to be wider and more expressive.
Their foreheads are meaner, and their eyes hard, but the whole face
rather more adaptive and in touch with life. These, anyhow, are the
types that strike one in the Eastern cities. And there are intermediate
varieties, as of the genial business-man, with the narrow forehead and
the wide, smooth--the too wide and too smooth--lower face. Smoothness
is the one unfailing characteristic. Why do American faces hardly ever
wrinkle? Is it the absence of a soul? It must be. For it is less true
of the Bostonian than of the ordinary business American, in whose life
exhilaration and depression take the place of joy and suffering. The
women's faces are more indeterminate, not very feminine; many of them
wear those 'invisible' pince-nez which centre glitteringly about the
bridge of the nose, and get from them a curious air of intelligence.
Handsome people of both sexes are very common; beautiful, and pretty,
ones very rare....
I slipped from my car up about Fortieth Street, the region where the
theatres and restaurants are, the 'roaring forties.' Broadway here
might be the offspring of Shaftesbury Avenue and Leicester Square, with,
somehow, some of Fleet Street also in its ancestry. I passed two men on
the sidewalk, their hats on the back of their heads, arguing fiercely.
One had slightly long hair. The other looked the more truculent, and was
saying to him, intensely, "See here! We contracted with you to supply
us with sonnets at five dollars per sonnet--" I passed up a side-street,
one of those deserted ways that abound just off the big streets,
resorts, apparently, for such people and things as are not quite
strident or not quite energetic enough for the ordinary glare of
life; dim places, fusty with hesternal excitements and the thrills of
yesteryear. Against a flight of desolate steps leant a notice. I stopped
to read it. It said:
"You must see Cockie,
Positively the only bird that can both dance and sing.
She is almost superhuman."
There was no explanation; Cockie may have been dead for years. I went,
musing on her possible fates, towards the pride and spaciousness of
Fifth Avenue.
Fifth Avenue is handsome, the handsomest street imaginable. It is what
the streets of German cities try to be. The buildings are large, square,
'imposing,' built with the solidity of opulence. The street, as a whole,
has a character and an air of achievement. "Whatever else may be doubted
or denied, American civilisation has produced this." One feels rich
and safe as one walks. Back in Broadway, New York dropped her mask,
and began to betray herself once again. A little crowd, expressionless,
intent, and volatile, before a small shop, drew me. In the shop-window
was a young man, pleasant-faced, a little conscious, and a little bored,
dressed very lightly in what might have been a runner's costume. He was
bowing, twisting, and posturing in a slow rhythm. From time to time he
would put a large card on a little stand in the corner. The cards bore
various legends. He would display a card that said, "THIS UNDERWEAR DOES
NOT IMPEDE THE MOVEMENT OF THE BODY IN ANY DIRECTION." Then he moved
his body in every direction, from position to position, probable or
improbable, and was not impeded. With a terrible dumb patience he turned
the next card: "IT GIVES WITH THE BODY IN VIOLENT EXERCISING." The young
man leapt suddenly, lunged, smote imaginary balls, belaboured invisible
opponents, ran with immense speed but no progress, was thrown to earth
by the Prince of the Air, kicked, struggled, then bounded to his feet
again. But all this without a word. "IT ENABLES YOU TO KEEP COOL WHILE
EXERCISING." The young man exercised, and yet was cool. He did this, I
discovered later, for many hours a day.