I
NEW ENGLAND
AN AUTUMN IMPRESSION
I
Conscious that the impressions of the very first hours have always the
value of their intensity, I shrink from wasting those that attended my
arrival, my return after long years, even though they be out of order
with the others that were promptly to follow and that I here gather in,
as best I may, under a single head. They referred partly, these instant
vibrations, to a past recalled from very far back; fell into a train of
association that receded, for its beginning, to the dimness of extreme
youth. One’s extremest youth had been full of New York, and one was
absurdly finding it again, meeting it at every turn, in sights, sounds,
smells, even in the chaos of confusion and change; a process under
which, verily, recognition became more interesting and more amusing in
proportion as it became more difficult, like the spelling-out of foreign
sentences of which one knows but half the words. It was not, indeed, at
Hoboken, on emerging from the comparatively assured order of the great
berth of the ship, that recognition _was_ difficult: there, only too
confoundingly familiar and too serenely exempt from change, the
waterside squalor of the great city put forth again its most inimitable
notes, showed so true to the barbarisms it had not outlived that one
could only fall to wondering what obscure inward virtue had preserved
it. There was virtue evident enough in the crossing of the water, that
brave sense of the big, bright, breezy bay; of light and space and
multitudinous movement; of the serried, bristling city, held in the easy
embrace of its great good-natured rivers very much as a battered and
accommodating beauty may sometimes be “distinguished” by a gallant less
fastidious, with his open arms, than his type would seem to imply. But
what was it that was still holding together, for observation, on the
hither shore, the same old sordid facts, all the ugly items that had
seemed destined so long ago to fall apart from their very cynicism?—the
rude cavities, the loose cobbles, the dislodged supports, the
unreclaimed pools, of the roadway; the unregulated traffic, as of
innumerable desperate drays charging upon each other with tragic
long-necked, sharp-ribbed horses (a length and a sharpness all
emphasized by the anguish of effort); the corpulent constables, with
helmets askew, swinging their legs, in high detachment, from coigns of
contemplation; the huddled houses of the other time, red-faced, off
their balance, almost prone, as from too conscious an affinity with
“saloon” civilization.
It was, doubtless, open to the repentant absentee to feel these things
sweetened by some shy principle of picturesqueness; and I admit that I
asked myself, while I considered and bumped, why what was “sauce for the
goose” should _not_ be in this case sauce for the gander; and why
antique shabbiness shouldn’t plead on this particular waterside the
cause it more or less successfully pleads on so many others. The light
of the September day was lovely, and the sun of New York rests mostly,
with a laziness all its own, on that dull glaze of crimson paint, as
thick as on the cheek of the cruder coquetry, which is, in general,
beneath its range, the sign of the old-fashioned. Yes; I could remind
myself, as I went, that Naples, that Tangiers or Constantinople has
probably nothing braver to flaunt, and mingle with excited recognition
the still finer throb of seeing in advance, seeing even to alarm, many
of the responsibilities lying in wait for the habit of headlong critical
or fanciful reaction, many of the inconsistencies in which it would
probably have, at the best, more or less defiantly to drape itself. Such
meditations, at all events, bridged over alike the weak places of
criticism and some of the rougher ones of my material passage. Nothing
was left, for the rest of the episode, but a kind of fluidity of
appreciation—a mild, warm wave that broke over the succession of aspects
and objects according to some odd inward rhythm, and often, no doubt,
with a violence that there was little in the phenomena themselves
flagrantly to justify. It floated me, my wave, all that day and the
next; so that I still think tenderly—for the short backward view is
already a distance with “tone”—of the service it rendered me and of the
various perceptive penetrations, charming coves of still blue water,
that carried me up into the subject, so to speak, and enabled me to step
ashore. The subject was everywhere—that was the beauty, that the
advantage: it was thrilling, really, to find one’s self in presence of a
theme to which everything directly contributed, leaving no touch of
experience irrelevant. That, at any rate, so far as feeling it went;
treating it, evidently, was going to be a matter of prodigious
difficulty and selection—in consequence of which, indeed, there might
even be a certain recklessness in the largest surrender to impressions.
Clearly, however, these were not for the present—and such as they
were—to be kept at bay; the hour of reckoning, obviously, would come,
with more of them heaped up than would prove usable, a greater quantity
of vision, possibly, than might fit into decent form: whereby,
assuredly, the part of wisdom was to put in as much as possible of one’s
recklessness while it was fresh.
It was fairly droll, for instance, the quantity of vision that began to
press during a wayside rest in a house of genial but discriminating
hospitality that opened its doors just where the fiddle-string of
association could most intensely vibrate, just where the sense of “old
New York,” of the earlier stages of the picture now so violently
overpainted, found most of its occasions—found them, to extravagance,
within and without. The good easy Square, known in childhood, and as if
the light were yellower there from that small accident, bristled with
reminders as vague as they were sweet; within, especially, the place was
a cool backwater, for time as well as for space; out of the slightly dim
depths of which, at the turn of staircases and from the walls of
communicating rooms, portraits and relics and records, faintly, quaintly
æsthetic, in intention at least, and discreetly—yet bravely, too, and
all so archaically and pathetically—Bohemian, laid traps, of a
pleasantly primitive order, for memory, for sentiment, for relenting
irony; gross little devices, on the part of the circumscribed past,
which appealed with scarce more emphasis than so many tail-pieces of
closed chapters. The whole impression had fairly a rococo tone; and it
was in this perceptibly golden air, the air of old empty New York
afternoons of the waning summer-time, when the long, the perpendicular
rattle, as of buckets, forever thirsty, in the bottomless well of
fortune, almost dies out in the merciful cross-streets, that the ample
rearward loggia of the Club seemed serenely to hang; the glazed,
disglazed, gallery dedicated to the array of small spread tables for
which blank “backs,” right and left and opposite, made a privacy; backs
blank with the bold crimson of the New York house-painter, and playing
upon the chord of remembrance, all so absurdly, with the scarcely less
simplified green of their great cascades of Virginia creeper, as yet
unturned: an admonition, this, for piety, as well as a reminder—since
one had somehow failed to treasure it up—that the rather pettifogging
plan of the city, the fruit, on the spot, of an artless age, happened to
leave even so much margin as that for consoling chances. There were
plenty of these—which I perhaps seem unduly to patronize in speaking of
them as only “consoling”—for many hours to come and while the easy wave
that I have mentioned continued to float me: so abysmal are the
resources of the foredoomed student of manners, or so helpless, at
least, his case when once adrift in that tide.
If in Gramercy Park already, three hours after his arrival, he had felt
himself, this victim, up to his neck in what I have called his
“subject,” the matter was quite beyond calculation by the time he had
tumbled, in such a glorified “four-wheeler,” and with such an odd
consciousness of roughness superimposed upon smoothness, far down-town
again, and, on the deck of a shining steamer bound for the Jersey shore,
was taking all the breeze of the Bay. The note of manners, the note that
begins to sound, everywhere, for the spirit newly disembarked, with the
first word exchanged, seemed, on the great clean deck, fairly to
vociferate in the breeze—and not at all, so far, as was pleasant to
remark, to the harshening of that element. Nothing could have been more
to the spectators purpose, moreover, than the fact he was ready to hail
as the most characteristic in the world, the fact that what surrounded
him was a rare collection of young men of business returning, as the
phrase is, and in the pride of their youth and their might, to their
“homes,” and that, if treasures of “type” were not here to be
disengaged, the fault would be all his own. It was perhaps this simple
sense of treasure to be gathered in, it was doubtless this very
confidence in the objective reality of impressions, so that they could
deliciously be left to ripen, like golden apples, on the tree—it was all
this that gave a charm to one’s sitting in the orchard, gave a strange
and inordinate charm both to the prospect of the Jersey shore and to
every inch of the entertainment, so divinely inexpensive, by the way.
The immense liberality of the Bay, the noble amplitude of the boat, the
great unlocked and tumbled-out city on one hand, and the low, accessible
mystery of the opposite State on the other, watching any approach, to
all appearance, with so gentle and patient an eye; the gaiety of the
light, the gladness of the air, and, above all (for it most came back to
that), the unconscious affluence, the variety in identity, of the young
men of business: these things somehow left speculation, left curiosity
exciting, yet kept it beguilingly safe. And what shall I say more of all
that presently followed than that it sharpened to the last
pleasantness—quite draining it of fears of fatuity—that consciousness of
strolling in the orchard that was all one’s own to pluck, and counting,
overhead, the apples of gold? I figure, I repeat, under this name those
thick-growing items of the characteristic that were surely going to drop
into one’s hand, for vivid illustration, as soon as one could begin to
hold it out.
Heavy with fruit, in particular, was the whole spreading bough that
rustled above me during an afternoon, a very wonderful afternoon, that I
spent in being ever so wisely driven, driven further and further, into
the large lucidity of—well, of what else shall I call it but a New
Jersey condition? That, no doubt, is a loose label for the picture; but
impressions had to range themselves, for the hour, as they could. I had
come forth for a view of such parts of the condition as might peep out
at the hour and on the spot, and it was clearly not going to be the
restless analyst’s own fault if conditions in general, everywhere,
should strike him as peculiarly, as almost affectingly, at the mercy of
observation. They came out to meet us, in their actuality, in the soft
afternoon; they stood, artless, unconscious, unshamed, at the very gates
of Appearance; they might, verily, have been there, in their plenitude,
at the call of some procession of drums and banners—the principal facts
of the case being collected along our passage, to my fancy, quite as if
they had been principal citizens. And then there was the further fact of
the case, one’s own ridiculous property and sign—the romantic, if not
the pathetic, circumstance of one’s having had to wait till now to read
even such meagre meanings as this into a page at which one’s geography
might so easily have opened. It might have threatened, for twenty
minutes, to be almost complicating, but the truth was recorded: it was
an adventure, unmistakably, to have a revelation made so convenient—to
be learning at last, in the maturity of one’s powers, what New Jersey
might “connote.” This was nearer than I had ever come to any such
experience; and it was now as if, all my life, my curiosity had been
greater than I knew. Such, for an excited sensibility, are the
refinements of personal contact. These influences then were present, as
a source of glamour, at every turn of our drive, and especially present,
I imagined, during that longest perspective when the road took no turn,
but showed us, with a large, calm consistency, the straight blue band of
summer sea, between the sandy shore and the reclaimed margin of which
the chain of big villas was stretched tight, or at least kept straight,
almost as for the close stringing of more or less monstrous pearls. The
association of the monstrous thrusts itself somehow into my retrospect,
for all the decent humility of the low, quiet coast, where the shadows
of the waning afternoon could lengthen at their will and the chariots of
Israel, on the wide and admirable road, could advance, in the glittering
eye of each array of extraordinarily exposed windows, as through an
harmonious golden haze.
There was gold-dust in the air, no doubt—which would have been again an
element of glamour if it had not rather lighted the scene with too crude
a confidence. It was one of the phases, full of its own marks and signs,
of New York, the immense, in _villeggiatura_—and, presently, with little
room left for doubt of what particular phase it might be. The huge new
houses, up and down, looked over their smart, short lawns as with a
certain familiar prominence in their profiles, which was borne out by
the accent, loud, assertive, yet benevolent withal, with which they
confessed to their extreme expensiveness. “Oh, yes; we were awfully
dear, for what we are and for what we do”—it was proud, but it was
rather rueful; with the odd appearance everywhere as of florid creations
waiting, a little bewilderingly, for their justification, waiting for
the next clause in the sequence, waiting in short for life, for time,
for interest, for character, for identity itself to come to them, quite
as large spread tables or superfluous shops may wait for guests and
customers. The scene overflowed with curious suggestion; it comes back
to me with the afternoon air and the amiable flatness, the note of the
sea in a drowsy mood; and I thus somehow think of the great white boxes
as standing there with the silvered ghostliness (for all the silver
involved) of a series of candid new moons. It could only be the
occupants, moreover, who were driving on the vast, featureless highway,
to and fro in front of their ingenuous palaces and as if pretending not
to recognize them when they passed; German Jewry—wasn’t it
conceivable?—tending to the stout, the simple, the kind, quite visibly
to the patriarchal, and with the old superseded shabbiness of Long
Branch partly for the goal of their course; the big brown wooden
barracks of the hotels, the bold rotunda of the gaming-room—monuments
already these, in truth, of a more artless age, and yet with too little
history about them for dignity of ruin. Dignity, if not of ruin at least
of reverence, was what, at other points, doubtless, we failed
considerably less to read into the cottage where Grant lived and the
cottage where Garfield died; though they had, for all the world, those
modest structures, exactly the effect of objects diminished by recession
into space—as if to symbolize the rapidity of their recession into time.
They have been left so far behind by the expensive, as the expensive is
now practised; in spite of having apparently been originally a
sufficient expression of it.
This could pass, it seemed, for the greatest vividness of the
picture—that the expensive, for New York in _villeggiatura_, even on
such subordinate showing, is like a train covering ground at maximum
speed and pushing on, at present, into regions unmeasurable. It
included, however, other lights, some of which glimmered, to my eyes, as
with the promise of great future intensity—hanging themselves as
directly over the question of manners as if they had been a row of
lustres reflected in the polished floor of a ball-room. Here was the
expensive as a power by itself, a power unguided, undirected,
practically unapplied, really exerting itself in a void that could make
it no response, that had nothing—poor gentle, patient, rueful, but
altogether helpless, void!—to offer in return. The game was that of its
doing, each party to the whole combination, what it could, but with the
result of the common effort’s falling so short. Nothing could be of a
livelier interest—with the question of manners always in view—than to
note that the most as yet accomplished at such a cost was the air of
unmitigated publicity, publicity as a condition, as a doom, from which
there could be no appeal; just as in all the topsy-turvy order, the
defeated scheme, the misplaced confidence, or whatever one may call it,
there was no achieved protection, no constituted mystery of retreat, no
saving complexity, not so much as might be represented by a foot of
garden wall or a preliminary sketch of interposing shade. The homely
principle under which the picture held at all together was that of the
famous freedom of the cat to look at the king; that seemed, so clearly,
throughout, the only motto that would work. The ample villas, in their
full dress, planted each on its little square of brightly-green carpet,
and as with their stiff skirts pulled well down, eyed each other, at
short range, from head to foot; while the open road, the chariots, the
buggies, the motors, the pedestrians—which last number, indeed, was
remarkably small—regarded at their ease both this reciprocity and the
parties to it. It was in fact all _one_ participation, with an effect
deterrent to those ingenuities, or perhaps indeed rather to those
commonplaces, of conjecture produced in general by the outward show of
the fortunate life. That, precisely, appeared the answer to the question
of manners: the fact that in such conditions there couldn’t _be_ any
manners to speak of; that the basis of privacy was somehow wanting for
them; and that nothing, accordingly, no image, no presumption of
constituted relations, possibilities, amenities, in the social, the
domestic order, was inwardly projected. It was as if the projection had
been so completely outward that one could but find one’s self almost
uneasy about the mere perspective required for the common acts of the
personal life, that minimum of vagueness as to what takes place in it
for which the complete “home” aspires to provide.
What had it been their idea to _do_, the good people—do, exactly, _for_
their manners, their habits, their intercourse, their relations, their
pleasures, their general advantage and justification? Do, that is, in
affirming their wealth with such innocent emphasis and yet not at the
same time affirming anything else. It would have rested on the
cold-blooded critic, doubtless, to explain why the crudity of wealth did
strike him with so direct a force; accompanied after all with no
paraphernalia, no visible redundancies of possession, not so much as a
lodge at any gate, nothing but the scale of many of the houses and their
candid look of having cost as much as they knew how. Unmistakably they
all proclaimed it—they would have cost still more had the way but been
shown them; and, meanwhile, they added as with one voice, they would
take a fresh start as soon as ever it should be. “We are only
instalments, symbols, stop-gaps,” they practically admitted, and with no
shade of embarrassment; “expensive as we are, we have nothing to do with
continuity, responsibility, transmission, and don’t in the least care
what becomes of us after we have served our present purpose.” On the
detail of this impression, however, I needn’t insist; the essence of it,
which was all that was worth catching, was one’s recognition of the odd
treachery that may practically lie in wait for isolated opulence. The
highest luxury of all, the supremely expensive thing, is constituted
privacy—and yet it was the supremely expensive thing that the good
people had supposed themselves to be getting: all of which, I repeat,
enriched the case, for the restless analyst, with an illustrative
importance. For what did it offer but the sharp interest of the match
everywhere and everlastingly played between the short-cut and the long
road?—an interest never so sharp as since the short-cut has been able to
find itself so endlessly backed by money. Money in fact _is_ the
short-cut—or the short-cut money; and the long road having, in the
instance before me, so little operated, operated for the effect, as we
may say, of the cumulative, the game remained all in the hands of its
adversary.
The example went straight to the point, and thus was the drama
presented: what turn, on the larger, the general stage, was the game
going to take? The whole spectacle, with the question, opened out,
diffusing positively a multitudinous murmur that was in my ears, for
some of the more subtly-romantic parts of the drive, as who should say
(the sweet American vaguenesses, hailed again, the dear old nameless,
promiscuous lengths of woodside and waterside), like the collective
afternoon hum of invisible insects. Yes; it was all actually going to be
drama, and _that_ drama; than which nothing could be more to the occult
purpose of the confirmed, the systematic story-seeker, or to that even
of the mere ancient contemplative person curious of character. The very
_donnée_ of the piece could be given, the subject formulated: the great
adventure of a society reaching out into the apparent void for the
amenities, the consummations, after having earnestly gathered in so many
of the preparations and necessities. “Into the apparent void”—I had to
insist on that, since without it there would be neither comedy nor
tragedy; besides which so little was wanting, in the way of vacancy, to
the completeness of the appearance. What would lurk beneath this—or
indeed what wouldn’t, what mightn’t—to thicken the plot from stage to
stage and to intensify the action? The story-seeker would be present,
quite intimately present, at the general effort—showing, doubtless, as
quite heroic in many a case—to gouge an interest _out_ of the vacancy,
gouge it with tools of price, even as copper and gold and diamonds are
extracted, by elaborate processes, from earth-sections of small
superficial expression. What was such an effort, on its associated side,
for the attentive mind, but a more or less adventurous fight, carried on
from scene to scene, with fluctuations and variations, the shifting
quantity of success and failure? Never would be such a chance to see how
the short-cut works, and if there be really any substitute for
roundabout experience, for troublesome history, for the long, the
immitigable process of time. It was a promise, clearly, of the highest
entertainment.