different. We have our own message to the future, which we must deliver
as soon as we understand it."
"Is it in Esperanto?"
"It is at least polyglot. But you are taking me too seriously. I wished
merely to qualify my midsummer impressions of a prevailing Celtic Boston
by my autumnal impressions of a persisting Puritanic Boston. But it is
wonderful how that strongly persistent past still characterizes the
present in every development. Even those Irish faces which I wouldn't
have ventured a joke with were no doubt sobered by it; and when the
Italians shall come forward to replace them it will be with no laughing
Pulcinello masks, but visages as severe as those that first challenged
the wilderness of Massachusetts Bay, and made the Three Hills tremble
to their foundations."
"It seems to us that you are yielding to rhetoric a little, aren't you?"
we suggested.
"Perhaps I am. But you see what I mean. And I should like to explain
further that I believe the Celtic present and the Pelasgic future will
rule Boston in their turn as the Puritanic past learned so admirably to
rule it: by the mild might of irony, by the beneficent power which, in
the man who sees the joke of himself enables him to enter brotherly into
the great human joke, and be friends with every good and kind thing."
"Could you be a little more explicit?"
"I would rather not for the moment. But I should like to make you
observe that the Boston to be has more to hope and less to fear from the
newer Americans than this metropolis where these are so much more
heterogeneous. Here salvation must be of the Jews among the swarming
natives of the East Side; but in Boston there is no reason why the
artistic instincts of the Celtic and Pelasgic successors of the Puritans
should not unite in that effect of beauty which is an effect of truth,
and keep Boston the first of our cities in good looks as well as good
works. With us here in New York a civic job has the chance of turning
out a city joy, but it is a fighting chance. In Boston there is little
doubt of such a job turning out a joy. The municipality of Boston has
had almost the felicity of Goldsmith--it has touched nothing which it
has not adorned. Wherever its hand has been laid upon Nature, Nature has
purred in responsive beauty. They used to talk about the made land in
Boston, but half Boston is the work of man, and it shows what the
universe might have been if the Bostonians had been taken into the
confidence of the Creator at the beginning. The Back Bay was only the
suggestion of what has since been done; and I never go to Boston without
some new cause for wonder. There is no other such charming union of
pleasaunce and residence as the Fenways; the system of parks is a garden
of delight; and now the State has taken up the work, no doubt at the
city's suggestion, and, turning from the land to the water, has laid a
restraining touch on the tides of the sea, which, ever since the moon
entered on their management, have flowed and ebbed through the channel
of the Charles. The State has dammed the river; the brine of the ocean
no longer enters it, but it feeds itself full of sweet water from the
springs in the deep bosom of the country. The Beacon Street houses back
upon a steadfast expanse as fresh as the constant floods of the Great
Lakes."
[Illustration: CHARLES EMBANKMENT, BELOW HARVARD BRIDGE]
"And we dare say that it looks as large as Lake Superior to Boston eyes.
What do they call their dam? The Charlesea?"
"You may be sure they will call it something tasteful and fit," our
friend responded, in rejection of our feeble mockery. "Charlesea would
not be bad. But what I wish to make you observe is that all which has
yet been done for beauty in Boston has been done from the unexhausted
instinct of it in the cold heart of Puritanism, where it 'burns frore
and does the effect of fire.' As yet the Celtic and Pelasgic agencies
have had no part in advancing the city. The first have been content with
voting themselves into office, and the last with owning their masters
out-of-doors; for the Irish are the lords, and the Italians are the
landlords. But when these two gifted races, with their divinely
implanted sense of art, shall join forces with the deeply conscienced
taste of the Puritans, what mayn't we expect Boston to be?"
"And what mayn't we expect New York to be on the same terms, or, say,
when the Celtic and Pelasgic and Hebraic and Slavic elements join with
the old Batavians, in whom the love of the artistic is by right also
native? Come! Why shouldn't we have a larger Boston here?"
"Because we are _too_ large," our friend retorted, undauntedly. "When
graft subtly crept among the nobler motives which created the park
system of Boston the city could turn for help to the State and get it;
but could our city get help from our State? Our city is too big to
profit by that help; our State too small to render it. The commonwealth
of Massachusetts is creating a new Garden of Eden on the banks of the
Charlesea; but what is the State of New York doing to emparadise the
shores of the Hudson?"
"All the better for us, perhaps," we stubbornly, but not very sincerely,
contended, "if we have to do our good works ourselves."
"Yes, if we do them. But shall they remain undone if we don't do them?
The city of New York is so great that it swings the State of New York.
The virtues that are in each do not complement one another, as the
virtues of Boston and Massachusetts do. Where shall you find, in our
house or in our grounds, the city and the State joining to an effect of
beauty? When you come to New York, what you see of grandeur is the work
of commercialism; what you see of grandeur in Boston is the work of
civic patriotism. We hire the arts to build and decorate the homes of
business; the Bostonians inspire them to devote beauty and dignity to
the public pleasure and use. No," our friend concluded with irritating
triumph, "we are too vast, too many, for the finest work of the civic
spirit. Athens could be beautiful--Florence, Venice, Genoa were--but
Rome, which hired or enslaved genius to create beautiful palaces,
temples, columns, statues, could only be immense. She could only huddle
the lines of Greek loveliness into a hideous agglomeration, and lose
their effect as utterly as if one should multiply Greek noses and Greek
chins, Greek lips and Greek eyes, Greek brows and Greek heads of violet
hair, in one monstrous visage. No," he exulted, in this mortifying image
of our future ugliness, "when a city passes a certain limit of space and
population, she adorns herself in vain. London, the most lovable of the
mighty mothers of men, has not the charm of Paris, which, if one cannot
quite speak of her virgin allure, has yet a youth and grace which lend
themselves to the fondness of the arts. Boston is fast becoming of the
size of Paris, but if I have not misread her future she will be careful
not to pass it, and become as New York is."
We were so alarmed by this reasoning that we asked in considerable
dismay: "But what shall we do? We could not help growing; perhaps we
wished to overgrow; but is there no such thing as ungrowing? When the
fair, when the sex which we instinctively attribute to cities, finds
itself too large in its actuality for a Directoire ideal, there are
means, there are methods, of reduction. Is there no remedy, then, for
municipal excess of size? Is there no harmless potion or powder by which
a city may lose a thousand inhabitants a day, as the superabounding fair
loses a pound of beauty? Is there nothing for New York analogous to
rolling on the floor, to the straight-front corset, to the sugarless,
starchless diet? Come, you must not deny us all hope! How did Boston
manage to remain so small? What elixirs, what exercises, did she take or
use? Surely she did not do it all by reading and thinking!" Our friend
continued somewhat inexorably silent, and we pursued: "Do you think
that by laying waste our Long Island suburbs, by burning the whole
affiliated Jersey shore, by strangling the Bronx, as it were, in its
cradle, and by confining ourselves rigidly to our native isle of
Manhattan, we could do something to regain our lost opportunity? We
should then have the outline of a fish; true, a nondescript fish; but
the fish was one of the Greek ideals of the female form." He was silent
still, and we gathered courage to press on. "As it is, we are not
altogether hideous. We doubt whether there are not more beautiful
buildings in New York now than there are in Boston; and as for statues,
where are the like there of our Macmonnies Hale, of our Saint-Gaudens
Farragut and Sherman, of our Ward Indian Hunter?"
"The Shaw monument blots them all out," our friend relentlessly
answered. "But these are merely details. Our civic good things are
accidental. Boston's are intentional. That is the great, the vital
difference."
It did not occur to us that he was wrong, he had so crushed us under
foot. But, with the trodden worm's endeavor to turn, we made a last
appeal. "And with the sky-scraper itself we still expect to do
something, something stupendously beautiful. Say that we have lost our
sky-line! What shall we not have of grandeur, of titanic loveliness,
when we have got a sky-scraper-line?"
It seemed to us that here was a point which he could not meet; and, in
fact, he could only say, whether in irony or not, "I would rather not
think."
We were silent, and, upon the reflection to which our silence invited
us, we found that we would rather not ourselves think of the image we
had invoked. We preferred to take up the question at another point.
"Well," we said, "in your impressions of Bostonian greatness we suppose
that you received the effect of her continued supremacy in authors as
well as authorship, in artists as well as art? You did not meet Emerson
or Longfellow or Lowell or Prescott or Holmes or Hawthorne or Whittier
about her streets, but surely you met their peers, alive and in the
flesh?"
"No," our friend admitted, "not at every corner. But what I did meet was
the effect of those high souls having abode there while on the earth.
The great Boston authors are dead, and the great Boston artists are
worse--they have come to New York; they have not even waited to die. But
whether they have died, or whether they have come to New York, they have
left their inspiration in Boston. In one sense the place that has known
them shall know them no more forever; but in another sense it has never
ceased to know them. I can't say how it is, exactly, but though you
don't see them in Boston, you feel them. But here in New York--our dear,
immense, slattern mother--who feels anything of the character of her
great children? Who remembers in these streets Bryant or Poe or Hallock
or Curtis or Stoddard or Stedman, or the other poets who once dwelt in
them? Who remembers even such great editors as Greeley or James Gordon
Bennett or Godkin or Dana? What malignant magic, what black art, is it
that reduces us all to one level of forgottenness when we are gone, and
even before we are gone? Have those high souls left their inspiration
here, for common men to breathe the breath of finer and nobler life
from? I won't abuse the millionaires who are now our only great figures;
even the millionaires are gone when they go. They die, and they leave no
sign, quite as if they were so many painters and poets. You can recall
some of their names, but not easily. No, if New York has any hold upon
the present from the past, it isn't in the mystical persistence of such
spirits among us."
"Well," we retorted, hardily, "we have no need of them. It is the high
souls of the future which influence us."
Our friend looked at us as if he thought there might be something in
what we said. "Will you explain?" he asked.
"Some other time," we consented.
XIII
THE WHIRL OF LIFE IN OUR FIRST CIRCLES
One of those recurrent selves who frequent the habitat of the Easy
Chair, with every effect of exterior identities, looked in and said,
before he sat down, and much before he was asked to sit down, "Are you
one of those critics of smart or swell society (or whatever it's called
now) who despise it because they can't get into it, or one of those
censors who won't go into it because they despise it?"
"Your question," we replied, "seems to be rather offensive, but we don't
know that it's voluntarily so, and it's certainly interesting. On your
part, will you say what has prompted you, just at the moment, to accost
us with this inquiry?" Before he could answer, we hastened to add:
"By-the-way, what a fine, old-fashioned, gentlemanly word _accost_ is!
People used to accost one another a great deal in polite literature.
'Seeing her embarrassment from his abrupt and vigorous stare, he thus
accosted her.' Or, 'Embarrassed by his fixed and penetrating regard, she
timidly accosted him.' It seems to us that we remember a great many
passages like these. Why has the word gone out? It was admirably fitted
for such junctures, and it was so polished by use that it slipped from
the pen without any effort of the brain, and--"
"I have no time for idle discussions of a mere literary nature," our
other self returned. "I am very full of the subject which I have sprung
upon you, and which I see you are trying to shirk."
"Not at all," we smilingly retorted. "We will answer you according to
your folly without the least reluctance. We are not in smart or swell
society because we cannot get in; but at the same time we would not get
in if we could, because we despise it too much. We wonder," we
continued, speculatively, "why we always suspect the society satirist of
suffering from a social snub? It doesn't in the least follow. Was Pope,
when he invited his S'in' John to
'leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of kings'
goaded to magnanimity by a slight from royalty? Was Mr. Benson when he
came over here from London excluded from the shining first circles of
New York and Newport, which are apparently reflected with such brilliant
fidelity in _The Relentless City_, and was he wreaking an unworthy
resentment in portraying our richly moneyed, blue-blooded society to the
life? How are manners ever to be corrected with a smile if the smile is
always suspected of being an agonized grin, the contortion of the
features by the throes of a mortified spirit? Was George William Curtis
in his amusing but unsparing _Potiphar Papers_--"
"Ah, now you are shouting!" our other self exclaimed.
"Your slang is rather antiquated," we returned, with grave severity.
"But just what do you mean by it in this instance?"
"I mean that manners are never corrected with a smile, whether of
compassion or of derision. The manners that are bad, that are silly,
that are vulgar, that are vicious, go on unchastened from generation to
generation. Even the good manners don't seem to decay: simplicity,
sincerity, kindness, don't really go out, any more than the other
things, and fortunately the other things are confined only to a small
group in every civilization, to the black sheep of the great,
whity-brown or golden-fleeced human family."
"What has all this vague optimism to do with the _Potiphar Papers_ and
smart society and George William Curtis?" we brought the intruder
sharply to book.
"A great deal, especially the part relating to the continuity of bad
manners. I've just been reading an extremely clever little book by a new
writer, called _New York Society on Parade_, which so far as its basal
facts are concerned might have been written by the writer of 'Our Best
Society' and the other _Potiphar Papers_. The temperament varies from
book to book; Mr. Ralph Pulitzer has a neater and lighter touch than
George William Curtis; his book is more compact, more directly and
distinctly a study, and it is less alloyed with the hopes of society
reform which could be more reasonably indulged fifty-six years ago. Do
you remember when 'Our Best Society' came out in the eldest _Putnam's
Magazine_, that phoenix of monthlies which has since twice risen from
its ashes? Don't pretend that our common memory doesn't run back to the
year 1853! We have so many things in common that I can't let you
disgrace the firm by any such vain assumption of extreme youth!"
"Why should we assume it? The Easy Chair had then been three years
firmly on its legs, or its rockers, and the succession of great spirits,
now disembodied, whom its ease invited, were all more or less in mature
flesh. We remember that paper on 'Our Best Society' vividly, and we
recall the shock that its facts concerning the Upper Ten Thousand of New
York imparted to the innocent, or at least the virtuous, Lower Twenty
Millions inhabiting the rest of the United States. Do you mean to say
that the Four Hundred of this day are no better than the Ten Thousand of
that? Has nothing been gained for quality by that prodigious reduction
in quantity?"
"On the contrary, the folly, the vanity, the meanness, the
heartlessness, the vulgarity, have only been condensed and concentrated,
if we are to believe Mr. Pulitzer; and I don't see why we should doubt
him. Did you say you hadn't seen his very shapely little study? It
takes, with all the unpitying sincerity of a kodak, the likeness of our
best society in its three most characteristic aspects; full-face at
dinner, three-quarters-face at the opera, and profile at a ball, where
proud beauty hides its face on the shoulder of haughty commercial or
financial youth, and moneyed age dips its nose in whatever symbolizes
the Gascon wine in the paternal library. Mr. Pulitzer makes no attempt
at dramatizing his persons. There is no ambitious Mrs. Potiphar with a
longing for fashionable New York worlds to conquer, yet with a secret
heartache for the love of her country girlhood; no good, kind, sordid
Potiphar bewildered and bedevilled by the surroundings she creates for
him; no soft Rev. Cream Cheese, tenderly respectful of Mammon while
ritually serving God; no factitious Ottoman of a Kurz Pasha, laughingly
yet sadly observant of us playing at the forms of European society.
Those devices of the satirist belonged to the sentimentalist mood of the
Thackerayan epoch. But it is astonishing how exactly history repeats
itself in the facts of the ball in 1910 from the ball of 1852. The
motives, the _personnel_, almost the _materiel_, the incidents, are the
same. I should think it would amuse Mr. Pulitzer, imitating nature from
his actual observation, to find how essentially his study is the same
with that of Curtis imitating nature fifty-seven years ago. There is
more of nature in bulk, not in variety, to be imitated now, but as Mr.
Pulitzer studies it in the glass of fashion, her mean, foolish, selfish
face is the same. He would find in the sketches of the Mid-Victorian
satirist all sorts of tender relentings and generous hopes concerning
the 'gay' New York of that time which the Early Edwardian satirist
cannot indulge concerning the gay New York of this time. It seems as if
we had really gone from bad to worse, not qualitatively--we
couldn't--but quantitatively. There is more money, there are more men,
more women, but otherwise our proud world is the proud world of 1853."
"You keep saying the same thing with 'damnable iterance,'" we remarked.
"Don't you suppose that outside of New York there is now a vast society,
as there was then, which enjoys itself sweetly, kindly, harmlessly? Is
there no gentle Chicago or kind St. Louis, no pastoral Pittsburg, no
sequestered Cincinnati, no bucolic Boston, no friendly Philadelphia,
where 'the heart that is humble may look for' disinterested pleasure in
the high-society functions of the day or night? Does New York set the
pace for all these places, and are dinners given there as here, not for
the delight of the guests, but as the dire duty of the hostesses? Do the
inhabitants of those simple sojourns go to the opera to be seen and not
to hear? Do they follow on to balls before the piece is done only to
bear the fardels of ignominy heaped upon them by the german's leaders,
or to see their elders and fatters getting all the beautiful and costly
favors while their own young and gracile loveliness is passed slighted
by because they give no balls where those cruel captains can hope to
shine in the van? It seems to us that in our own far prime--now
well-nigh lost in the mists of antiquity--life was ordered kindlier;
that dinners and opera-parties and dances were given
'To bless and never to ban.'"
"Very likely, on the low society level on which our joint life moved,"
our other self replied, with his unsparing candor. "You know we were a
country village, city-of-the-second-class personality. Even in the
distant epoch painted in the _Potiphar Papers_ the motives of New York
society were the same as now. It was not the place where birth and rank
and fame relaxed or sported, as in Europe, or where ardent innocence
played and feasted as in the incorrupt towns of our interior. If Curtis
once represented it rightly, it was the same ridiculous, hard-worked,
greedy, costly, stupid thing which Mr. Pulitzer again represents it."
"And yet," we mused aloud, "this is the sort of thing which the
'unthinking multitude' who criticise, or at least review, books are
always lamenting that our fiction doesn't deal with. Why, in its
emptiness and heaviness, its smartness and dulness, it would be the
death of our poor fiction!"
"Well, I don't know," our counterpart responded. "If our fiction took it
on the human ground, and ascertained its inner pathos, its real
lamentableness, it might do a very good thing with those clubmen and
society girls and _grandes dames_. But that remains to be seen. In the
mean time it is very much to have such a study of society as Mr.
Pulitzer has given us. For the most part it is 'satire with no pity in
it,' but there's here and there a touch of compassion, which moves the
more because of its rarity. When the author notes that here and there a
pretty dear finds herself left with no one to take her out to supper at
the ball, his few words wring the heart. 'These poor victims of their
sex cannot, like the men, form tables of their own. All that each can do
is to disappear as swiftly and as secretly as possible, hurrying home in
humiliation for the present and despair for the future.'"
"Do such cruel things really happen in our best society?" we palpitated,
in an anguish of sympathy.
"Such things and worse," our other self responded, "as when in the
german the fair debutante sees the leader advancing toward her with a
splendid and costly favor, only to have him veer abruptly off to bestow
it on some fat elderling who is going to give the next ball. But Mr.
Pulitzer, though he has these spare intimations of pity, has none of the
sentiment which there is rather a swash of in the _Potiphar Papers_.
It's the difference between the Mid-Victorian and the Early Edwardian
point of view. Both satirists are disillusioned, but in the page of
Curtis there is
'The tender grace of a day that is dead'
and the soft suffusion of hope for better things, while in the page of
Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are
enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the
distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed,
well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers'
offices and lawyers' offices to the dinners and opera-boxes and dances
of fashion. 'The girls and women are of a higher average of beauty than
any European ball-room could produce. The men, too, are generally well
built, tall, and handsome, easily distinguishable from the waiters,' Mr.
Pulitzer assures us."
"Well, oughtn't that to console?" we defied our other self. "Come! It's
a great thing to be easily distinguishable from the waiters, when the
waiters are so often disappointed 'remittance men' of good English
family, or the scions of Continental nobility. We mustn't ask
everything."
"No, and apparently the feeding is less gross than it was in Curtis's
less sophisticated time. Many of the men seem still to smoke and booze
throughout the night with the host in his 'library,' but the dancing
youth don't get drunk as some of them did at Mrs. Potiphar's supper, and
people don't throw things from their plates under the table."