It was after all in the great hall of the Union perhaps (to come back to
that delicate day’s end) that the actual vibration of response seemed
most to turn to audible music—repeated, with all its suggestiveness, on
another occasion or two. For the case was unmistakably that just there,
more than anywhere, by a magnificent stroke, an inspiration working
perhaps even beyond its consciousness, the right provision had been made
for the remembering mind. The place was addressed in truth so largely to
an enjoying and producing future that it might seem to frown on mere
commemoration, on the backward vision; and yet, at the moment I speak
of, its very finest meaning might have been that of a liberal monument
to those who had come and gone, to the company of the lurking ghosts.
The air there was full of them, and this was its service, that it cared
for them all, and so eased off the intensity of their appeal. And yet it
appeared to play that part for a reason more interesting than reducible
to words—a reason that mainly came out for me while, in the admirable
hall aforesaid, I stood before Sargent’s high portrait of Major Henry
Lee Higginson, _donatorio_ of the house (as well as author, all round
about, of innumerable other civil gifts); a representation of life and
character, a projection of genius, which even that great painter has
never outdone. Innumerable, ever, are the functions performed and the
blessings wrought by the supreme work of art, but I know of no case in
which it has been so given to such a work to make the human statement
with a great effect, to interfuse a group of public acts with the
personality, with the characteristics, of the actor. The acts would
still have had all their value if the portrait had had less, but they
would not assuredly have been able to become so interesting, would not
have grown to affect each beneficiary, however obscure, as proceeding,
for him, from a possible relation, a possible intimacy. It is to the
question of intimacy with somebody or other that all great practical
public recognition is finally carried back—but carried only by the magic
carpet, when the magic carpet happens to be there. Mr. Sargent’s
portrait of Henry Higginson is exactly the magic carpet.
That was the “pull” (one kept on feeling) that this happy commemorative
creation of the Union had over the great official, the great bristling
brick Valhalla of the early “seventies,” that house of honour and of
hospitality which, under the name of the Alumni Hall, dispenses (apart
from its containing a noble auditorium) laurels to the dead and dinners
to the living. The recording tablets of the members of the University
sacrificed, on the Northern side, in the Civil War, are too impressive
not to retain here always their collective beauty; but the monumental
office and character suffer throughout from the too scant presence of
the massive and the mature. The great structure speads and soars with
the best will in the world, but succeeds in resembling rather some
high-masted ship at sea, in slightly prosaic equilibrium, than a thing
of builded foundations and embrasured walls. To which it is impossible
not immediately to add that these distinctions are relative and these
comparisons almost odious, in face of the recent generations, gathered
in from beneath emptier skies, who must have found in the big building
as it stands an admonition and an ideal. So much the better for the big
building, assuredly, and none so calculably the worse for the
generations themselves. The reflection follows close moreover that,
tactfully speaking, criticism has no close concern with Alumni Hall; it
is as if that grim visitor found the approaches closed to him—had to
enter, to the loss of all his identity, some relaxing air of mere
sentimental, mere shameless association. He turns his back, a trifle
ruefully whistling, and wanders wide; so at least I seemed to see him
do, all September, all October, and hereabouts in particular: I felt him
resignedly reduced, for the time, to looking over, to looking through,
the fence—all the more that at Cambridge there was at last something in
the nature of a fence so to be dealt with.
The smaller aspects, the sight of mere material arrears made up, may
seem unduly to have held me when I say that few fresh circumstances
struck me as falling more happily into the picture than this especial
decency of the definite, the palpable affirmation and belated
delimitation of College Yard. The high, decorated, recurrent gates and
the still insufficiently high iron palings—representing a vast ring and
even now incomplete—may appear, in spots, extemporized and thin; but
that signifies little in presence of the precious idea on the side of
which, in the land of the “open door,” the all-abstract outline, the
timid term and the general concession, they bravely range themselves.
The open door—as it figures here in respect to everything but trade—may
make a magnificent place, but it makes poor places; and in places,
despite our large mistrust of privacy, and until the national ingenuity
shall have invented a substitute for them, we must content ourselves
with living. This especial drawing of the belt at Harvard is an
admirably interesting example of the way in which the formal enclosure
of objects at all interesting immediately refines upon their interest,
immediately establishes values. The enclosure may be impressive from
without, but from within it is sovereign; nothing is more curious than
to trace in the aspects so controlled the effect of their established
relation to it. This resembles, in the human or social order, the
improved situation of the foundling who has discovered his family or of
the actor who has mastered his part.
The older buildings, in the Yard, profit indeed, on the spot, to the
story-seeking mind, by the fact of their comparative exhibition of the
tone of time—so prompt an ecstasy and so deep a relief reward, in
America, everywhere, any suggested source of interest that is not the
interest of importunate newness. That source overflows, all others run
thin; but the wonder and the satisfaction are that in College Yard more
than one of these should have finally been set to running thick. The
best pieces of the earlier cluster, from Massachusetts to Stoughton,
emerge from their elongation of history with a paler archaic pink in
their brickwork; their scant primitive details, small “quaintnesses” of
form, have turned, each, to the expressive accent that no short-cut of
“style” can ever successfully imitate, and from their many-paned
windows, where, on the ensconced benches, so many generations have
looked out, they fall, in their minor key, into the great main current
of ghostly gossip. “See, see, we are getting on, we are getting almost
ripe, ripe enough to justify the question of taste about us. We are
growing a complexion—which takes almost as long, and is in fact pretty
well the same thing, as growing a philosophy; but we are putting it on
and entering into the dignity of time, the beauty of life. We are in a
word beginning to begin, and we have that best sign of it, haven’t we?
that we make the vulgar, the very vulgar, think we are beginning to
end.”
That moreover was not the only relation thus richly promoted; there
could be no unrest of analysis worthy of the name that failed to
perceive how, after term had opened, the type of the young men coming
and going in the Yard gained, for vivacity of appeal, through this more
marked constitution of a _milieu_ for it. Here, verily, questions could
swarm; for there was scarce an impression of the local life at large
that didn’t play into them. One thing I had not yet done—I had not been,
under the best guidance, out to Ellis Island, the seat of the
Commissioner of Immigration, in the bay of New York, to catch in the
fact, as I was to catch later on, a couple of hours of the ceaseless
process of the recruiting of our race, of the plenishing of our huge
national _pot au feu_, of the introduction of fresh—of perpetually fresh
so far it isn’t perpetually stale—foreign matter into our heterogeneous
system. But even without that a haunting wonder as to what might be
becoming of us all, “typically,” ethnically, and thereby
physiognomically, linguistically, _personally_, was always in order. The
young men in their degree, as they flocked candidly up to college,
struck me as having much to say about it, and there was always the sense
of light on the subject, for comparison and reference, that a long
experience of other types and other manners could supply. Swarming
ingenuous youths, _whom did they look like the sons of_?—that inquiry,
as to any group, any couple, any case, represented a game that it was
positively thrilling to play out. There was plenty to make it so, for
there was, to begin with, both the forecast of the thing that might
easily settle the issue and the forecast of the thing that might easily
complicate it.
No impression so promptly assaults the arriving visitor of the United
States as that of the overwhelming preponderance, wherever he turns and
twists, of the unmitigated “business-man” face, ranging through its
various possibilities, its extraordinary actualities, of intensity. And
I speak here of facial cast and expression alone, leaving out of account
the questions of voice, tone, utterance and attitude, the chorus of
which would vastly swell the testimony and in which I seem to discern,
for these remarks at large, a treasure of illustration to come. Nothing,
meanwhile, is more concomitantly striking than the fact that the women,
over the land—allowing for every element of exception—appear to be of a
markedly finer texture than the men, and that one of the liveliest signs
of this difference is precisely in their less narrowly specialized,
their less commercialized, distinctly more generalized, physiognomic
character. The superiority thus noted, and which is quite another matter
from the universal fact of the mere usual female femininity, is far from
constituting absolute distinction, but it constitutes relative, and it
is a circumstance at which interested observation snatches, from the
first, with an immense sense of its _portée_. There are, with all the
qualifications it is yet open to, fifty reflections to be made upon the
truth it seems to represent, the appearance of a queer deep split or
chasm between the two stages of personal polish, the two levels of the
conversable state, at which the sexes have arrived. It is at all events
no exaggeration to say that the imagination at once embraces it as _the_
feature of the social scene, recognizing it as a subject fruitful beyond
the common, and wondering even if for pure drama, the drama of manners,
anything anywhere else touches it. If it be a “subject,” verily—with the
big vision of the intersexual relation as, at such an increasing rate, a
prey to it—the right measure for it would seem to be offered in the art
of the painter of life by the concrete example, the art of the dramatist
or the novelist, rather than in that of the talker, the reporter at
large. The only thing is that, from the moment the painter begins to
look at American life brush in hand, he is in danger of seeing, in
comparison, almost nothing else in it—nothing, that is, so
characteristic as this apparent privation, for the man, of his right
kind of woman, and this apparent privation, for the woman, of her right
kind of man.
The right kind of woman for the American man may really be, of course,
as things are turning out with him, the woman as to whom his most
workable relation is to support her and bear with her—just as the right
kind of man for the American woman may really be the man who intervenes
in her life only by occult, by barely divinable, by practically
disavowed courses. But the ascertainment and illustration of these
truths would be, exactly, very conceivably high sport for the ironic
poet—who has surely hitherto neglected one of his greatest current
opportunities. It in any case remains vivid that American life may, as
regards much of its manifestation, fall upon the earnest view as a
society of women “located” in a world of men, which is so different a
matter from a collection of men of the world; the men supplying, as it
were, all the canvas, and the women all the embroidery. Just this
vividness it was that held up the torch, through the Cambridge autumn,
to that question of the affiliation of the encountered Harvard
undergraduate which I may not abandon. In what proportion of instances
would it stick out that the canvas, rather than the embroidery, was what
he had to show? In what proportion would he wear the stamp of the
unredeemed commercialism that should betray his paternity? In what
proportion, in his appearance, would the different social “value”
imputable to his mother have succeeded in interposing? The discerned
answer to these inquiries is really, after all, too precious (in its
character of contribution to one’s total gathered wisdom) to be given
away prematurely; but there was at least always the sense, to which the
imagination reverted, that in the collegiate cloisters and academic
shades of other countries this absence of a possible _range_ of origin
and breeding in a young type had not been so felt. The question of
origin, the question of breeding, had been large—never settled in
advance; there had been fifty _sorts_ of persons, fifty representatives
of careers, to whom the English, the French, the German universitarian
of tender years might refer you for a preliminary account of him.
I speak of my keeping back, for the present, many of my ultimate
perceptions, but I may none the less recall my having had, all the
season, from early, the ring in my ears of a reply I had heard made, on
the spot, to a generous lady offering entertainment to a guest, a
stranger to the scene, whose good impression she had had at heart. “What
kind of people should I like to meet? Why, my dear madam, have you more
than _one_ kind?” At the same time that I could remember this, however,
I could also remember that the consistently _bourgeois_ fathers must
themselves in many cases have had mothers whose invitation to their male
offspring to clutch at their relatively finer type had not succeeded in
getting itself accepted. That constituted a fatal precedent, and it
would have to be in the female offspring, probably, that one should look
for evidences of the clutching—an extension of the inquiry for which
there was plenty of time. What did escape from submersion, meanwhile, as
is worth mentioning, was the golden state of being reminded at moments
that there are no such pleasure-giving accidents, for the mind, as
violations of the usual in conditions that make them really precarious
and rare. As the usual, in our vast crude democracy of trade, is the
new, the simple, the cheap, the common, the commercial, the immediate,
and, all too often, the ugly, so any human product that those elements
fail conspicuously to involve or to explain, any creature, or even any
feature, not turned out to pattern, any form of suggested rarity,
subtlety, ancientry, or other pleasant perversity, prepares for us a
recognition akin to rapture. These lonely ecstasies of the truly open
sense make up often, in the hustling, bustling desert, for such
“sinkings” of the starved stomach as have led one too often to have to
tighten one’s æsthetic waistband.