IX

All of which is sufficiently to imply, again, that for adventurous

contemplation, at any of the beguiled hours of which I pretend here but

to give the general happier drift, there was scarce such a thing as a

variation of insistence. As every fact was convertible into a fancy,

there was only an encouraged fusion of possible felicities and possible

mistakes, stop-gaps before the awful advent of a “serious sense of

critical responsibility.” Or say perhaps rather, to alter the image,

that there was only a builded breakwater against the assault of matters

demanding a _literal_ notation. I walked, at the best, but on the

breakwater—looking down, if one would, over the flood of the real, but

much more occupied with the sight of the old Cambridge ghosts, who

seemed to advance one by one, even at that precarious eminence, to meet

me. My small story would gain infinitely in richness if I were able to

name them, but they swarmed all the while too thick, and of but two or

three of them alone is it true that they push their way, of themselves,

through any silence. It was thus at any rate a question—as I have indeed

already sufficiently shown—of what one read _into_ anything, not of what

one read out of it; and the occasions that operated for that mild magic

resolve themselves now into three or four of an intrinsic colour so dim

as to be otherwise well-nigh indistinguishable. Why, if one could tell

it, would it be so wonderful, for instance, to have stood on the low

cliff that hangs over the Charles, by the nearer side of Mount Auburn,

and felt the whole place bristle with merciless memories? It was late in

the autumn and in the day—almost evening; with a wintry pink light in

the west, the special shade, fading into a heartless prettiness of grey,

that shows with a polar chill through the grim tracery of November. Just

opposite, at a distance, beyond the river and its meadows, the white

face of the great empty Stadium stared at me, as blank as a rising

moon—with Soldiers’ Field squaring itself like some flat memorial slab

that waits to be inscribed. I had seen it inscribed a week or two before

in the fantastic lettering of a great intercollegiate game of football,

and that impression had been so documentary, as to the capacity of the

American public for momentary gregarious emphasis, that I regret having

to omit here all the reflections it prompted.

They were not, however, what was now relevant, save in so far as the

many-mouthed uproar they recalled was a voice in the more multitudinous

modern hum through which one listened almost in vain for the sound of

the old names. One of these in particular rose to my lips—it was

impossible to stand there and not reach out a hand to J. R. L. as to a

responsive personal presence, the very genius of the spot, who had given

it from so early the direct literary consecration without which even the

most charming seats of civilization go through life awkwardly and

ruefully, after the manner of unchristened children. They lack thus, for

the great occasions, the great formal necessities, their “papers.” It

was thanks to Lowell even more immediately than to Longfellow that

Cambridge _had_ its papers—though if I find myself putting that word

into the past tense it is perhaps because of the irresistible

admonition, too (proceeding so from a thousand local symptoms), that

titles embodied in literary form are less and less likely, in the

Harvard air, to be asked for. That is clearly not the way the wind sets:

we see the great University sit and look very hard, at blue horizons of

possibility, across the high table-land of her future; but the light of

literary desire is not perceptibly in her eye (nothing is more striking

than the recent drop in her of any outward sign of literary curiosity);

precisely for which reason it was, doubtless, in part, that the changed

world seemed reflected with a certain tragic intensity even in faces

ever so turned to cheerful lights as those of my two constructive

companions.

I had passed high, square, sad old Elmwood on the way to my cliff over

the Charles, and had wonderingly lingered a little about it. I had

passed Mr. Longfellow’s immemorial, historical, admired residence, still

ample and symmetrical and visibly tourist-haunted (the only detected

ruffle of its noble calm); elements of the picture that had rekindled

for an hour the finer sensibility, the finer continuity and piety. It

was because of these things, again, that I felt the invoked pair beside

me presently turn away, as under a chill, from that too spectral (in its

own turn) stare of the Stadium—perceived as a portent of the more

_roaring_, more reported and excursionized scene; and in particular

seemed to see J. R. L.’s robust humour yield to the recognition of the

irony of fate, dear to every poet, in one of its most pointed forms.

That humour had played of old, charmingly, over the thesis that

Cambridge, Mass., was, taken altogether, the most inwardly civilized,

most intimately humane, among the haunts of men; whereby it had

committed itself, this honest adventurer, to a patient joy in the

development of the _genius loci_, and was therefore without provision,

either of poetry or of prose, against the picture of proportions and

relations overwhelmingly readjusted. If the little old place, with its

accessible ear, had been so brave, what was the matter with the big new

one, going in, as it would itself say, for greater braveries still?

Nothing, no doubt, but that the possession of an ear would be ceasing to

count as an advantage. In what produced form, for instance, if he had

been right, was now represented the love of letters of which he had been

so distinguished an example? If he had on the other hand _not_ been

right—well, it would all be rather dreadful. Such, at all events, may be

the disconcertments of a revisiting spirit—when he has happened to

revisit too ingenious an old friend.

The old friend moreover had meanwhile had, and in relation to this

large loose fringe of the town, there so freely disposed, one of his

very own disconcertments; he had turned his steps, for the pleasure of

memory, to Fresh Pond, dear to the muses of youth, the Sunday

afternoons of spring, and had to accept there his clearest vision

perhaps of the new differences and indifferences. The little nestling

lake of other days had ceased to nestle; there was practically no

Fresh Pond any more, and I seemed somehow to see why the muses had

fled even as from the place at large. The light flutter of their robes

had surrounded far-away walks and talks: one could at this day, on

printed, on almost faded pages, give chapter and verse for the effect,

audible on the Sunday afternoons, of their habit of murmurous hinted

approval. Other things had come by makeweight; the charming Country

Club on toward Watertown, all verandahs and golf-links and

tennis-lawns, all tea and ices and self-consciousness; and there had

come, thereabouts too, the large extension of the “Park System,” the

admirable commissioners’ roads that reach across the ruder countryside

like the arms of carnivorous giants stretching over a tea-table of

blackberries and buns. But these things were in the eternal American

note, the note of the gregarious, the concentric, and pervaded

moreover by the rustle of petticoats too distinguishable from any

garmenthem of the sacred nine. The desecrated, the destroyed resort

had favoured, save on rare feast-days, the single stroll, or at the

worst the double, dedicated to shared literary secrets; which was why

I almost angrily missed, among the ruins, what I had mainly gone back

to recover—some echo of the dreams of youth, the titles of tales, the

communities of friendship, the sympathies and patiences, in fine, of

dear W. D. H.

II

NEW YORK REVISITED

I

The single impression or particular vision most answering to the

greatness of the subject would have been, I think, a certain hour of

large circumnavigation that I found prescribed, in the fulness of the

spring, as the almost immediate crown of a return from the Far West. I

had arrived at one of the transpontine stations of the Pennsylvania

Railroad; the question was of proceeding to Boston, for the occasion,

without pushing through the terrible town—why “terrible,” to my sense,

in many ways, I shall presently explain—and the easy and agreeable

attainment of this great advantage was to embark on one of the mightiest

(as appeared to me) of train-bearing barges and, descending the western

waters, pass round the bottom of the city and remount the other current

to Harlem; all without “losing touch” of the Pullman that had brought me

from Washington. This absence of the need of losing touch, this breadth

of effect, as to the whole process, involved in the prompt floating of

the huge concatenated cars not only without arrest or confusion, but as

for positive prodigal beguilement of the artless traveller, had

doubtless much to say to the ensuing state of mind, the happily-excited

and amused view of the great face of New York. The extent, the ease, the

energy, the quantity and number, all notes scattered about as if, in the

whole business and in the splendid light, nature and science were

joyously romping together, might have been taking on again, for their

symbol, some collective presence of great circling and plunging,

hovering and perching seabirds, white-winged images of the spirit, of

the restless freedom of the Bay. The Bay had always, on other

opportunities, seemed to blow its immense character straight into one’s

face—coming “at” you, so to speak, bearing down on you, with the full

force of a thousand prows of steamers seen exactly on the line of their

longitudinal axis; but I had never before been so conscious of its

boundless cool assurance or seemed to see its genius so grandly at play.

This was presumably indeed because I had never before enjoyed the

remarkable adventure of taking in so much of the vast bristling

promontory from the water, of ascending the East River, in especial, to

its upper diminishing expanses.

Something of the air of the occasion and of the mood of the moment

caused the whole picture to speak with its largest suggestion; which

suggestion is irresistible when once it is sounded clear. It is all,

absolutely, an expression of things lately and currently _done_, done on

a large impersonal stage and on the basis of inordinate gain—it is not

an expression of any other matters whatever; and yet the sense of the

scene (which had at several previous junctures, as well, put forth to my

imagination its power) was commanding and thrilling, was in certain

lights almost charming. So it befell, exactly, that an element of

mystery and wonder entered into the impression—the interest of trying to

make out, in the absence of features of the sort usually supposed

indispensable, the reason of the beauty and the joy. It is indubitably a

“great” bay, a great harbour, but no one item of the romantic, or even

of the picturesque, as commonly understood, contributes to its effect.

The shores are low and for the most part depressingly furnished and

prosaically peopled; the islands, though numerous, have not a grace to

exhibit, and one thinks of the other, the real flowers of geography in

this order, of Naples, of Capetown, of Sydney, of Seattle, of San

Francisco, of Rio, asking how if _they_ justify a reputation, New York

should seem to justify one. Then, after all, we remember that there are

reputations and reputations; we remember above all that the imaginative

response to the conditions here presented may just happen to proceed

from the intellectual extravagance of the given observer. When this

personage is open to corruption by almost any large view of an intensity

of life, his vibrations tend to become a matter difficult even for _him_

to explain. He may have to confess that the group of evident facts fails

to account by itself for the complacency of his appreciation. Therefore

it is that I find myself rather backward with a perceived sanction, of

an at all proportionate kind, for the fine exhilaration with which, in

this free wayfaring relation to them, the wide waters of New York

inspire me. There is the beauty of light and air, the great scale of

space, and, seen far away to the west, the open gates of the Hudson,

majestic in their degree, even at a distance, and announcing still

nobler things. But the real appeal, unmistakably, is in that note of

vehemence in the local life of which I have spoken, for it is the appeal

of a particular type of dauntless power.

The aspect the power wears then is indescribable; it is the power of

the most extravagant of cities, rejoicing, as with the voice of the

morning, in its might, its fortune, its unsurpassable conditions, and

imparting to every object and element, to the motion and expression of

every floating, hurrying, panting thing, to the throb of ferries and

tugs, to the plash of waves and the play of winds and the glint of

lights and the shrill of whistles and the quality and authority of

breeze-borne cries—all, practically, a diffused, wasted clamour of

_detonations_—something of its sharp free accent and, above all, of

its sovereign sense of being “backed” and able to back. The universal

_applied_ passion struck me as shining unprecedentedly out of the

composition; in the bigness and bravery and insolence, especially, of

everything that rushed and shrieked; in the air as of a great

intricate frenzied dance, half merry, half desperate, or at least half

defiant, performed on the huge watery floor. This appearance of the

bold lacing-together, across the waters, of the scattered members of

the monstrous organism—lacing as by the ceaseless play of an enormous

system of steam-shuttles or electric bobbins (I scarce know what to

call them), commensurate in form with their infinite work—does perhaps

more than anything else to give the pitch of the vision of energy. One

has the sense that the monster grows and grows, flinging abroad its

loose limbs even as some unmannered young giant at his “larks,” and

that the binding stitches must for ever fly further and faster and

draw harder; the future complexity of the web, all under the sky and

over the sea, becoming thus that of some colossal set of clockworks,

some steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and hammering fists

and opening and closing jaws. The immeasurable bridges are but as the

horizontal sheaths of pistons working at high pressure, day and night,

and subject, one apprehends with perhaps inconsistent gloom, to

certain, to fantastic, to merciless multiplication. In the light of

this apprehension indeed the breezy brightness of the Bay puts on the

semblance of the vast white page that awaits beyond any other perhaps

the black overscoring of science.

Let me hasten to add that its present whiteness is precisely its

charming note, the frankest of the signs you recognize and remember it

by. That is the distinction I was just feeling my way to name as the

main ground of its doing so well, for effect, without technical scenery.

There are great imposing ports—Glasgow and Liverpool and London—that

have already their page blackened almost beyond redemption from any such

light of the picturesque as can hope to irradiate fog and grime, and

there are others, Marseilles and Constantinople say, or, for all I know

to the contrary, New Orleans, that contrive to abound before everything

else in colour, and so to make a rich and instant and obvious show. But

memory and the actual impression keep investing New York with the tone,

predominantly, of summer dawns and winter frosts, of sea-foam, of

bleached sails and stretched awnings, of blanched hulls, of scoured

decks, of new ropes, of polished brasses, of streamers clear in the blue

air; and it is by this harmony, doubtless, that the projection of the

individual character of the place, of the candour of its avidity and the

freshness of its audacity, is most conveyed. The “tall buildings,” which

have so promptly usurped a glory that affects you as rather surprised,

as yet, at itself, the multitudinous sky-scrapers standing up to the

view, from the water, like extravagant pins in a cushion already

overplanted, and stuck in as in the dark, anywhere and anyhow, have at

least the felicity of carrying out the fairness of tone, of taking the

sun and the shade in the manner of towers of marble. They are not all of

marble, I believe, by any means, even if some may be, but they are

impudently new and still more impudently “novel”—this in common with so

many other terrible things in America—and they are triumphant payers of

dividends; all of which uncontested and unabashed pride, with flash of

innumerable windows and flicker of subordinate gilt attributions, is

like the flare, up and down their long, narrow faces, of the lamps of

some general permanent “celebration.”

You see the pin-cushion in profile, so to speak, on passing between

Jersey City and Twenty-third Street, but you get it broadside on, this

loose nosegay of architectural flowers, if you skirt the Battery, well

out, and embrace the whole plantation. Then the “American beauty,” the

rose of interminable stem, becomes the token of the cluster at large—to

that degree that, positively, this is all that is wanted for emphasis of

your final impression. Such growths, you feel, have confessedly arisen

but to be “picked,” in time, with a shears; nipped short off, by waiting

fate, as soon as “science,” applied to gain, has put upon the table,

from far up its sleeve, some more winning card. Crowned not only with no

history, but with no credible possibility of time for history, and

consecrated by no uses save the commercial at any cost, they are simply

the most piercing notes in that concert of the expensively provisional

into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself. They never

begin to speak to you, in the manner of the builded majesties of the

world as we have heretofore known such—towers or temples or fortresses

or palaces—with the authority of things of permanence or even of things

of long duration. One story is good only till another is told, and

sky-scrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another

word be written. This shall be possibly a word of still uglier meaning,

but the vocabulary of thrift at any price shows boundless resources, and

the consciousness of that truth, the consciousness of the finite, the

menaced, the essentially _invented_ state, twinkles ever, to my

perception, in the thousand glassy eyes of these giants of the mere

market. Such a structure as the comparatively windowless bell-tower of

Giotto, in Florence, looks supremely serene in its beauty. You don’t

feel it to have risen by the breath of an interested passion that,

restless beyond all passions, is for ever seeking more pliable forms.

Beauty has been the object of its creator’s idea, and, having found

beauty, it has found the form in which it splendidly rests.

Beauty indeed was the aim of the creator of the spire of Trinity Church,

so cruelly overtopped and so barely distinguishable, from your

train-bearing barge, as you stand off, in its abject helpless humility;

and it may of course be asked how much of this superstition finds voice

in the actual shrunken presence of that laudable effort. Where, for the

eye, is the felicity of simplified Gothic, of noble pre-eminence, that

once made of this highly-pleasing edifice the pride of the town and the

feature of Broadway? The answer is, as obviously, that these charming

elements are still there, just where they ever were, but that they have

been mercilessly deprived of their visibility. It aches and throbs, this

smothered visibility, we easily feel, in its caged and dishonoured

condition, supported only by the consciousness that the dishonour is no

fault of its own. We commune with it, in tenderness and pity, through

the encumbered air; our eyes, made, however unwillingly, at home in

strange vertiginous upper atmospheres, look down on it as on a poor

ineffectual thing, an architectural object addressed, even in its prime

aspiration, to the patient pedestrian sense and permitting thereby a

relation of intimacy. It was to speak to me audibly enough on two or

three other occasions—even through the thick of that frenzy of Broadway

just where Broadway receives from Wall Street the fiercest application

of the maddening lash; it was to put its tragic case there with

irresistible lucidity. “Yes, the wretched figure I am making is as

little as you see my fault—it is the fault of the buildings whose very

first care is to deprive churches of their visibility. There are but two

or three—two or three outward and visible churches—left in New York

‘anyway,’ as you must have noticed, and even they are hideously

threatened: a fact at which no one, indeed, appears to be shocked, from

which no one draws the least of the inferences that stick straight out

of it, which every one seems in short to take for granted either with

remarkable stupidity or with remarkable cynicism.” So, at any rate, they

may still effectively communicate, ruddy-brown (where not browny-black)

old Trinity and any pausing, any attending survivor of the clearer

age—and there is yet more of the bitterness of history to be tasted in

such a tacit passage, as I shall presently show.

Was it not the bitterness of history, meanwhile, that on that day of

circumnavigation, that day of highest intensity of impression, of which

I began by speaking, the ancient rotunda of Castle Garden, viewed from

just opposite, should have lurked there as a vague nonentity? One had

known it from far, far back and with the indelibility of the childish

vision—from the time when it was the commodious concert-hall of New

York, the firmament of long-extinguished stars; in spite of which

extinction there outlives for me the image of the infant phenomenon

Adelina Patti, whom (another large-eyed infant) I had been benevolently

taken to hear: Adelina Patti, in a fan-like little white frock and

“pantalettes” and a hussar-like red jacket, mounted on an armchair, its

back supporting her, wheeled to the front of the stage and warbling like

a tiny thrush even in the nest. Shabby, shrunken, barely discernible

to-day, the ancient rotunda, adjusted to other uses, had afterwards, for

many decades, carried on a conspicuous life—and it was the present

remoteness, the repudiated barbarism of all this, foreshortened by one’s

own experience, that dropped the acid into the cup. The sky-scrapers and

the league-long bridges, present and to come, marked the point where the

age—the age for which Castle Garden could have been, in its day, a

“value”—had come out. That in itself was nothing—ages do come out, as a

matter of course, so far from where they have gone in. But it had done

so, the latter half of the nineteenth century, in one’s own more or less

immediate presence; the difference, from pole to pole, was so vivid and

concrete that no single shade of any one of its aspects was lost. This

impact of the whole condensed past at once produced a horrible, hateful

sense of personal antiquity.

Yet was it after all that those monsters of the mere market, as I have

called them, had more to say, on the question of “effect,” than I had at

first allowed?—since they are the element that looms largest for me

through a particular impression, with remembered parts and pieces

melting together rather richly now, of “down-town” seen and felt from

the inside. “Felt”—I use that word, I dare say, all presumptuously, for

a relation to matters of magnitude and mystery that I could begin

neither to measure nor to penetrate, hovering about them only in

magnanimous wonder, staring at them as at a world of immovably-closed

doors behind which immense “material” lurked, material for the artist,

the painter of life, as we say, who shouldn’t have begun so early and so

fatally to fall away from possible initiations. This sense of a baffled

curiosity, an intellectual adventure forever renounced, was surely

enough a state of feeling, and indeed in presence of the different

half-hours, as memory presents them, at which I gave myself up both to

the thrill of Wall Street (by which I mean that of the whole wide edge

of the whirlpool), and the too accepted, too irredeemable ignorance, I

am at a loss to see what intensity of response was wanting. The

imagination might have responded more if there had been a slightly less

settled inability to understand what every one, what any one, was really

doing; but the picture, as it comes back to me, is, for all this foolish

subjective poverty, so crowded with its features that I rejoice, I

confess, in not having more of them to handle. No open apprehension,

even if it be as open as a public vehicle plying for hire, can carry

more than a certain amount of life, of a kind; and there was nothing at

play in the outer air, at least, of the scene, during these glimpses,

that didn’t scramble for admission into mine very much as I had seen the

mob seeking entrance to an up-town or a down-town electric car fight for

life at one of the apertures. If it had been the final function of the

Bay to make one feel one’s age, so, assuredly, the mouth of Wall Street

proclaimed it, for one’s private ear, distinctly enough; the breath of

existence being taken, wherever one turned, as that of youth on the run

and with the prize of the race in sight, and the new landmarks crushing

the old quite as violent children stamp on snails and caterpillars.

The hour I first recall was a morning of winter drizzle and mist, of

dense fog in the Bay, one of the strangest sights of which I was on my

way to enjoy; and I had stopped in the heart of the business quarter to

pick up a friend who was to be my companion. The weather, such as it

was, worked wonders for the upper reaches of the buildings, round which

it drifted and hung very much as about the flanks and summits of

emergent mountainmasses—for, to be just all round, there _was_ some

evidence of their having a message for the eyes. Let me parenthesize,

once for all, that there are other glimpses of this message, up and down

the city, frequently to be caught; lights and shades of winter and

summer air, of the literally “finishing” afternoon in particular, when

refinement of modelling descends from the skies and lends the white

towers, all new and crude and commercial and over-windowed as they are,

a fleeting distinction. The morning I speak of offered me my first

chance of seeing one of them from the inside—which was an opportunity I

sought again, repeatedly, in respect to others; and I became conscious

of the force with which this vision of their prodigious working, and of

the multitudinous life, as if each were a swarming city in itself, that

they are capable of housing, may beget, on the part of the free

observer, in other words of the restless analyst, the impulse to

describe and present the facts and express the sense of them. Each of

these huge constructed and compressed communities, throbbing, through

its myriad arteries and pores, with a single passion, even as a

complicated watch throbs with the one purpose of telling you the hour

and the minute, testified overwhelmingly to the _character_ of New

York—and the passion of the restless analyst, on his side, is for the

extraction of character. But there would be too much to say, just here,

were this incurable eccentric to let himself go; the impression in

question, fed by however brief an experience, kept overflowing the cup

and spreading in a wide waste of speculation. I must dip into these

depths, if it prove possible, later on; let me content myself for the

moment with remembering how from the first, on all such ground, my

thought went straight to poor great wonder-working Émile Zola and _his_

love of the human aggregation, the artificial microcosm, which had to

spend itself on great shops, great businesses, great “apartment-houses,”

of inferior, of mere Parisian scale. His image, it seemed to me, really

asked for compassion—in the presence of this material that his energy of

evocation, his alone, would have been of a stature to meddle with. What

if _Le Ventre de Paris_, what if _Au Bonheur des Dames_, what if

_Pot-Bouille_ and _L’Argent_, could but have come into being under the

New York inspiration?

The answer to that, however, for the hour, was that, in all probability,

New York was not going (as it turns such remarks) to produce both the

maximum of “business” spectacle and the maximum of ironic reflection of

it. Zola’s huge reflector got itself formed, after all, in a far other

air; it had hung there, in essence, awaiting the scene that was to play

over it, long before the scene really approached it in scale. The

reflecting surfaces, of the ironic, of the epic order, suspended in the

New York atmosphere, have yet to show symptoms of shining out, and the

monstrous phenomena themselves, meanwhile, strike me as having, with

their immense momentum, got the start, got ahead of, in proper parlance,

any possibility of poetic, of dramatic capture. That conviction came to

me most perhaps while I gazed across at the special sky-scraper that

overhangs poor old Trinity to the north—a south face as high and wide as

the mountain-wall that drops the Alpine avalanche, from time to time,

upon the village, and the village spire, at its foot; the interest of

this case being above all, as I learned, to my stupefaction, in the fact

that the very creators of the extinguisher are the churchwardens

themselves, or at least the trustees of the church property. What was

the case but magnificent for pitiless ferocity?—that inexorable law of

the growing invisibility of churches, their everywhere reduced or

abolished _presence_, which is nine-tenths of their virtue, receiving

thus, at such hands, its supreme consecration. This consecration was

positively the greater that just then, as I have said, the vast

money-making structure quite horribly, quite romantically justified

itself, looming through the weather with an insolent cliff-like

sublimity. The weather, for all that experience, mixes intimately with

the fulness of my impression; speaking not least, for instance, of the

way “the state of the streets” and the assault of the turbid air seemed

all one with the look, the tramp, the whole quality and _allure_, the

consummate monotonous commonness, of the pushing male crowd, moving in

its dense mass—with the confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence,

any perception; a welter of objects and sounds in which relief,

detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights. It

appeared, the muddy medium, all one with every other element and note as

well, all the signs of the heaped industrial battle-field, all the

sounds and silences, grim, pushing, trudging silences too, of the

universal will to move—to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an

appetite at any price.

In the Bay, the rest of the morning, the dense raw fog that delayed the

big boat, allowing sight but of the immediate ice-masses through which

it thumped its way, was not less of the essence. Anything blander, as a

medium, would have seemed a mockery of the facts of the terrible little

Ellis Island, the first harbour of refuge and stage of patience for the

million or so of immigrants annually knocking at our official door.

Before this door, which opens to them there only with a hundred forms

and ceremonies, grindings and grumblings of the key, they stand

appealing and waiting, marshalled, herded, divided, subdivided, sorted,

sifted, searched, fumigated, for longer or shorter periods—the effect of

all which prodigious process, an intendedly “scientific” feeding of the

mill, is again to give the earnest observer a thousand more things to

think of than he can pretend to retail. The impression of Ellis Island,

in fine, would be—as I was to find throughout that so many of my

impressions would be—a chapter by itself; and with a particular page for

recognition of the degree in which the liberal hospitality of the

eminent Commissioner of this wonderful service, to whom I had been

introduced, helped to make the interest of the whole watched drama

poignant and unforgettable. It is a drama that goes on, without a pause,

day by day and year by year, this visible act of ingurgitation on the

part of our body politic and social, and constituting really an appeal

to amazement beyond that of any sword-swallowing or fire-swallowing of

the circus. The wonder that one couldn’t keep down was the thought that

these two or three hours of one’s own chance vision of the business were

but as a tick or two of the mighty clock, the clock that never, never

stops—least of all when it strikes, for a sign of so much winding-up,

some louder hour of our national fate than usual. I think indeed that

the simplest account of the action of Ellis Island on the spirit of any

sensitive citizen who may have happened to “look in” is that he comes

back from his visit not at all the same person that he went. He has

eaten of the tree of knowledge, and the taste will be for ever in his

mouth. He had thought he knew before, thought he had the sense of the

degree in which it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his

American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with

the inconceivable alien; but the truth had never come home to him with

any such force. In the lurid light projected upon it by those courts of

dismay it shakes him—or I like at least to imagine it shakes him—to the

depths of his being; I like to think of him, I positively _have_ to

think of him, as going about ever afterwards with a new look, for those

who can see it, in his face, the outward sign of the new chill in his

heart. So is stamped, for detection, the questionably privileged person

who has had an apparition, seen a ghost in his supposedly safe old

house. Let not the unwary, therefore, visit Ellis Island.

The after-sense of that acute experience, however, I myself found, was

by no means to be brushed away; I felt it grow and grow, on the

contrary, wherever I turned: other impressions might come and go, but

this affirmed claim of the alien, however immeasurably alien, to share

in one’s supreme relation was everywhere the fixed element, the reminder

not to be dodged. One’s supreme relation, as one had always put it, was

one’s relation to one’s country—a conception made up so largely of one’s

countrymen and one’s countrywomen. Thus it was as if, all the while,

with such a fond tradition of what these products predominantly were,

the idea of the country itself underwent something of that profane

overhauling through which it appears to suffer the indignity of change.

Is not our instinct in this matter, in general, essentially the safe

one—that of keeping the idea simple and strong and continuous, so that

it shall be perfectly sound? To touch it overmuch, to pull it about, is

to put it in peril of weakening; yet on this free assault upon it, this

readjustment of it in _their_ monstrous, presumptuous interest, the

aliens, in New York, seemed perpetually to insist. The combination there

of their quantity and their quality—that loud primary stage of alienism

which New York most offers to sight—operates, for the native, as their

note of settled possession, something they have nobody to thank for; so

that _un_settled possession is what we, on our side, seem reduced to—the

implication of which, in its turn, is that, to recover confidence and

regain lost ground, we, not they, must make the surrender and accept the

orientation. We must go, in other words, _more_ than half-way to meet

them; which is all the difference, for us, between possession and

dispossession. This sense of dispossession, to be brief about it,

haunted me so, I was to feel, in the New York streets and in the packed

trajectiles to which one clingingly appeals from the streets, just as

one tumbles back into the streets in appalled reaction from _them_, that

the art of beguiling or duping it became an art to be cultivated—though

the fond alternative vision was never long to be obscured, the

imagination, exasperated to envy, of the ideal, in the order in

question; of the luxury of some such close and sweet and _whole_

national consciousness as that of the Switzer and the Scot.