II

My recovery of impressions, after a short interval, yet with their flush

a little faded, may have been judged to involve itself with excursions

of memory—memory directed to the antecedent time—reckless almost to

extravagance. But I recall them to-day, none the less, for that value in

them which ministered, at happy moments, to an artful evasion of the

actual. There was no escape from the ubiquitous alien into the future,

or even into the present; there was an escape but into the past. I count

as quite a triumph in this interest an unbroken ease of frequentation of

that ancient end of Fifth Avenue to the whole neighbourhood of which

one’s earlier vibrations, a very far-away matter now, were attuned. The

precious stretch of space between Washington Square and Fourteenth

Street had a value, had even a charm, for the revisiting spirit—a mild

and melancholy glamour which I am conscious of the difficulty of

“rendering” for new and heedless generations. Here again the assault of

suggestion is too great; too large, I mean, the number of hares started,

before the pursuing imagination, the quickened memory, by this fact of

the felt moral and social value of this comparatively unimpaired morsel

of the Fifth Avenue heritage. Its reference to a pleasanter, easier,

hazier past is absolutely comparative, just as the past in question

itself enjoys as such the merest courtesy-title. It is all recent

history enough, by the measure of the whole, and there are flaws and

defacements enough, surely, even in its appearance of decency of

duration. The tall building, grossly tall and grossly ugly, has failed

of an admirable chance of distinguished consideration for it, and the

dignity of many of its peaceful fronts has succumbed to the presence of

those industries whose foremost need is to make “a good thing” of them.

The good thing is doubtless being made, and yet this lower end of the

once agreeable street still just escapes being a wholly bad thing. What

held the fancy in thrall, however, as I say, was the admonition,

proceeding from all the facts, that values of this romantic order are at

best, anywhere, strangely relative. It was an extraordinary statement on

the subject of New York that the space between Fourteenth Street and

Washington Square _should_ count for “tone,” figure as the old ivory of

an overscored tablet.

True wisdom, I found, was to let it, to make it, so count and figure as

much as it would, and charming assistance came for this, I also found,

from the young good-nature of May and June. There had been neither

assistance nor good-nature during the grim weeks of mid-winter; there

had been but the meagre fact of a discomfort and an ugliness less

formidable here than elsewhere. When, toward the top of the town,

circulation, alimentation, recreation, every art of existence, gave way

before the full onset of winter, when the upper avenues had become as so

many congested bottle-necks, through which the wine of life simply

refused to be decanted, getting back to these latitudes resembled really

a return from the North Pole to the Temperate Zone: it was as if the

wine of life had been poured for you, in advance, into some pleasant old

punch-bowl that would support you through the temporary stress. Your

condition was not reduced to the endless vista of a clogged tube, of a

thoroughfare occupied as to the narrow central ridge with trolley-cars

stuffed to suffocation, and as to the mere margin, on either side, with

snow-banks resulting from the cleared rails and offering themselves as a

field for all remaining action. Free existence and good manners, in New

York, are too much brought down to a bare rigour of marginal relation to

the endless electric coil, the monstrous chain that winds round the

general neck and body, the general middle and legs, very much as the

boa-constrictor winds round the group of the Laocoon. It struck me that

when these folds are tightened in the terrible stricture of the

snow-smothered months of the year, the New York predicament leaves far

behind the anguish represented in the Vatican figures. To come and go

where East Eleventh Street, where West Tenth, opened their kind short

arms was at least to keep clear of the awful hug of the serpent. And

this was a grace that grew large, as I have hinted, with the approach of

summer, and that made in the afternoons of May and of the first half of

June, above all, an insidious appeal. There, I repeat, was the delicacy,

there the mystery, there the wonder, in especial, of the unquenchable

intensity of the impressions received in childhood. They are made then

once for all, be their intrinsic beauty, interest, importance, small or

great; the stamp is indelible and never wholly fades. This in fact gives

it an importance when a lifetime has intervened. I found myself

intimately recognizing every house my officious tenth year had, in the

way of imagined adventure, introduced to me—incomparable master of

ceremonies after all; the privilege had been offered since to millions

of other objects that had made nothing of it, that had gone as they

came; so that here were Fifth Avenue corners with which one’s connection

was fairly exquisite. The lowered light of the days’ ends of early

summer became them, moreover, exceedingly, and they fell, for the quiet

northward perspective, into a dozen delicacies of composition and tone.

One could talk of “quietness” now, for the shrinkage of life so marked,

in the higher latitudes of the town, after Easter, the visible early

flight of that “society” which, by the old custom, used never to budge

before June or July, had almost the effect of clearing some of the

streets, and indeed of suggesting that a truly clear New York might have

an unsuspected charm or two to put forth. An approach to peace and

harmony might have been, in a manner, promised, and the sense of other

days took advantage of it to steal abroad with a ghostly tread. It kept

meeting, half the time, to its discomfiture, the lamentable little Arch

of Triumph which bestrides these beginnings of Washington

Square—lamentable because of its poor and lonely and unsupported and

unaffiliated state. With this melancholy monument it could make no terms

at all, but turned its back to the strange sight as often as possible,

helping itself thereby, moreover, to do a little of the pretending

required, no doubt, by the fond theory that nothing hereabouts was

changed. Nothing _was_, it could occasionally appear to me—there was no

new note in the picture, not one, for instance, when I paused before a

low house in a small row on the south side of Waverley Place and lived

again into the queer mediæval costume (preserved by the

daguerreotypist’s art) of the very little boy for whom the scene had

once embodied the pangs and pleasures of a dame’s small school. The dame

must have been Irish, by her name, and the Irish tradition, only

intensified and coarsened, seemed still to possess the place, the fact

of the survival, the sturdy sameness, of which arrested me, again and

again, to fascination. The shabby red house, with its mere two storeys,

its lowly “stoop,” its dislocated ironwork of the forties, the early

fifties, the record, in its face, of blistering summers and of the long

stages of the loss of self-respect, made it as consummate a morsel of

the old liquor-scented, heated-looking city, the city of no pavements,

but of such a plenty of politics, as I could have desired. And

neighbouring Sixth Avenue, overstraddled though it might be with feats

of engineering unknown to the primitive age that otherwise so persisted,

wanted only, to carry off the illusion, the warm smell of the bakery on

the corner of Eighth Street, a blessed repository of doughnuts, cookies,

cream-cakes and pies, the slow passing by which, on returns from school,

must have had much in common with the experience of the shipmen of old

who came, in long voyages, while they tacked and hung back, upon those

belts of ocean that are haunted with the balm and spice of tropic

islands.

These were the felicities of the backward reach, which, however, had

also its melancholy checks and snubs; nowhere quite so sharp as in

presence, so to speak, of the rudely, the ruthlessly suppressed

birth-house on the other side of the Square. That was where the pretence

that nearly nothing was changed had most to come in; for a high, square,

impersonal structure, proclaiming its lack of interest with a crudity

all its own, so blocks, at the right moment for its own success, the

view of the past, that the effect for me, in Washington Place, was of

having been amputated of half my history. The grey and more or less

“hallowed” University building—wasn’t it somehow, with a desperate

bravery, both castellated and gabled?—has vanished from the earth, and

vanished with it the two or three adjacent houses, of which the

birthplace was one. This was the snub, for the complacency of

retrospect, that, whereas the inner sense had positively erected there

for its private contemplation a commemorative mural tablet, the very

wall that should have borne this inscription had been smashed as for

demonstration that tablets, in New York, are unthinkable. And I have had

indeed to permit myself this free fantasy of the hypothetic rescued

identity of a given house—taking the vanished number in Washington Place

as most pertinent—in order to invite the reader to gasp properly with me

before the fact that we not only fail to remember, in the whole length

of the city, one of these frontal records of birth, sojourn, or death,

under a celebrated name, but that we have only to reflect an instant to

see any such form of civic piety inevitably and for ever absent. The

form is cultivated, to the greatly quickened interest of street-scenery,

in many of the cities of Europe; and is it not verily bitter, for those

who feel a poetry in the noted passage, longer or shorter, here and

there, of great lost spirits, that the institution, the profit, the

glory of any such association is denied in advance to communities

tending, as the phrase is, to “run” preponderantly to the sky-scraper?

Where, in fact, is the point of inserting a mural tablet, at any legible

height, in a building certain to be destroyed to make room for a

sky-scraper? And from where, on the other hand, in a façade of fifty

floors, does one “see” the pious plate recording the honour attached to

one of the apartments look down on a responsive people? We have but to

ask the question to recognize our necessary failure to answer it as a

supremely characteristic local note—a note in the light of which the

great city is projected into its future as, practically, a huge,

continuous fifty-floored conspiracy against the very idea of the ancient

graces, those that strike us as having flourished just in proportion as

the parts of life and the signs of character have _not_ been lumped

together, not been indistinguishably sunk in the common fund of mere

economic convenience. So interesting, as object-lessons, may the

developments of the American gregarious ideal become; so traceable, at

every turn, to the restless analyst at least, are the heavy footprints,

in the finer texture of life, of a great commercial democracy seeking to

abound supremely in its own sense and having none to gainsay it.

Let me not, however, forget, amid such contemplations, what may serve

here as a much more relevant instance of the operation of values, the

price of the as yet undiminished dignity of the two most southward of

the Fifth Avenue churches. Half the charm of the prospect, at that

extremity, is in their still being there, and being as they are; this

charm, this serenity of escape and survival positively works as a blind

on the side of the question of their architectural importance. The last

shade of pedantry or priggishness drops from your view of that element;

they illustrate again supremely your grasped truth of the _comparative_

character, in such conditions, of beauty and of interest. The special

standard they may or may not square with signifies, you feel, not a jot:

all you know, and want to know, is that they are probably menaced—some

horrible voice of the air has murmured it—and that with them will go, if

fate overtakes them, the last cases worth mentioning (with a single

exception), of the modest felicity that sometimes used to be. Remarkable

certainly the state of things in which mere exemption from the

“squashed” condition can shed such a glamour; but we may accept the

state of things if only we can keep the glamour undispelled. It reached

its maximum for me, I hasten to add, on my penetrating into the

Ascension, at chosen noon, and standing for the first time in presence

of that noble work of John La Farge, the representation, on the west

wall, in the grand manner, of the theological event from which the

church takes its title. Wonderful enough, in New York, to find one’s

self, in a charming and considerably dim “old” church, hushed to

admiration before a great religious picture; the sensation, for the

moment, upset so all the facts. The hot light, outside, might have been

that of an Italian _piazzetta_; the cool shade, within, with the

important work of art shining through it, seemed part of some

other-world pilgrimage—all the more that the important work of art

itself, a thing of the highest distinction, spoke, as soon as one had

taken it in, with that authority which makes the difference, ever

afterwards, between the remembered and the forgotten quest. A rich note

of interference came, I admit, through the splendid window-glass, the

finest of which, unsurpassably fine, to my sense, is the work of the

same artist; so that the church, as it stands, is very nearly as

commemorative a monument as a great reputation need wish. The deeply

pictorial windows, in which clearness of picture and fulness of

expression consort so successfully with a tone as of magnified gems, did

not strike one as looking into a yellow little square of the south—they

put forth a different implication; but the flaw in the harmony was, more

than anything else, that sinister voice of the air of which I have

spoken, the fact that one _could_ stand there, vibrating to such

impressions, only to remember the suspended danger, the possibility of

the doom. Here was the loveliest cluster of images, begotten on the

spot, that the preoccupied city had ever taken thought to offer itself;

and here, to match them, like some black shadow they had been condemned

to cast, was this particular prepared honour of “removal” that appeared

to hover about them.

One’s fear, I repeat, was perhaps misplaced—but what an air to live in,

the shuddering pilgrim mused, the air in which such fears are not

misplaced only when we are conscious of very special reassurances! The

vision of the doom that does descend, that had descended all round, was

at all events, for the half-hour, all that was wanted to charge with the

last tenderness one’s memory of the transfigured interior. Afterwards,

outside, again and again, the powers of removal struck me as looming,

awfully, in the newest mass of multiplied floors and windows visible at

this point. _They_, ranged in this terrible recent erection, were going

to bring in money—and was not money the only thing a self-respecting

structure could be thought of as bringing in? Hadn’t one heard, just

before, in Boston, that the security, that the sweet serenity of the

Park Street Church, charmingest, there, of aboriginal notes, the very

light, with its perfect position and its dear old delightful Wren-like

spire, of the starved city’s eyes, had been artfully practised against,

and that the question of saving it might become, in the near future,

acute? Nothing, fortunately, I think, is so much the “making” of New

York, at its central point, for the visual, almost for the romantic,

sense, as the Park Street Church is the making, by its happy coming-in,

of Boston; and, therefore, if it were thinkable that the peculiar

rectitude of Boston might be laid in the dust, what mightn’t easily come

about for the reputedly less austere conscience of New York? Once such

questions had obtained lodgment, to take one’s walks was verily to look

at almost everything in their light; and to commune with the sky-scraper

under this influence was really to feel worsted, more and more, in any

magnanimous attempt to adopt the æsthetic view of it. I may appear to

make too much of these invidious presences, but it must be remembered

that they represent, for our time, the only claim to any consideration

other than merely statistical established by the resounding growth of

New York. The attempt to take the æsthetic view is invariably blighted

sooner or later by their most salient characteristic, _the_ feature that

speaks loudest for the economic idea. Window upon window, at any cost,

is a condition never to be reconciled with any grace of building, and

the logic of the matter here happens to put on a particularly fatal

front. If quiet interspaces, always half the architectural battle, exist

no more in such a structural scheme than quiet tones, blest

breathing-spaces, occur, for the most part, in New York conversation, so

the reason is, demonstrably, that the building can’t afford them. (It is

by very much the same law, one supposes, that New York conversation

cannot afford stops.) The building can only afford lights, each light

having a superlative value as an aid to the transaction of business and

the conclusion of sharp bargains. Doesn’t it take in fact acres of

window-glass to help even an expert New Yorker to get the better of

another expert one, or to see that the other expert one doesn’t get the

better of _him_? It is easy to conceive that, after all, with this

origin and nature stamped upon their foreheads, the last word of the

mercenary monsters should not be their address to our sense of formal

beauty.

Still, as I have already hinted, there was always the case of the one

other rescued identity and preserved felicity, the happy accident of the

elder day still ungrudged and finally legitimated. When I say ungrudged,

indeed, I seem to remember how I had heard that the divine little City

Hall had _been_ grudged, at a critical moment, to within an inch of its

life; had but just escaped, in the event, the extremity of grudging. It

lives on securely, by the mercy of fate—lives on in the delicacy of its

beauty, speaking volumes again (more volumes, distinctly, than are

anywhere else spoken) for the exquisite truth of the _conferred_ value

of interesting objects, the value derived from the social, the

civilizing function for which they have happened to find their

opportunity. It is the opportunity that gives them their price, and the

luck of there being, round about them, nothing greater than themselves

to steal it away from them. They strike thus, virtually, the supreme

note, and—such is the mysterious play of our finer sensibility!—one

takes this note, one is glad to work it, as the phrase goes, for all it

is worth. I so work the note of the City Hall, no doubt, in speaking of

the spectacle there constituted as “divine”; but I do it precisely by

reason of the spectacle taken _with_ the delightful small facts of the

building: largely by reason, in other words, of the elegant, the gallant

little structure’s situation and history, the way it has played,

artistically, ornamentally, its part, has held out for the good cause,

through the long years, alone and unprotected. The fact is it has been

the very centre of that assault of vulgarity of which the innumerable

mementos rise within view of it and tower, at a certain distance, over

it; and yet it has never parted with a square inch of its character, it

has forced them, in a manner, to stand off. I hasten to add that in

expressing thus its uncompromised state I speak of its outward, its

æsthetic character only. So, at all events, it has discharged the

civilizing function I just named as inherent in such cases—that of

representing, to the community possessed of it, all the Style the

community is likely to get, and of making itself responsible for the

same.

The consistency of this effort, under difficulties, has been the story

that brings tears to the eyes of the hovering kindly critic, and it is

through his tears, no doubt, that such a personage reads the best

passages of the tale and makes out the proportions of the object. Mine,

I recognize, didn’t prevent my seeing that the pale yellow marble (or

whatever it may be) of the City Hall has lost, by some late excoriation,

the remembered charm of its old surface, the pleasant promiscuous patina

of time; but the perfect taste and finish, the reduced yet ample scale,

the harmony of parts, the just proportions, the modest classic grace,

the living look of the type aimed at, these things, with gaiety of

detail undiminished and “quaintness” of effect augmented, are all there;

and I see them, as I write, in that glow of appreciation which made it

necessary, of a fine June morning, that I should somehow pay the whole

place my respects. The simplest, in fact the only way, was, obviously,

to pass under the charming portico and brave the consequences: this

impunity of such audacities being, in America, one of the last of the

lessons the repatriated absentee finds himself learning. The crushed

spirit he brings back from European discipline never quite rises to the

height of the native argument, the brave sense that the public, the

civic building is his very own, for any honest use, so that he may tread

even its most expensive pavements and staircases (and very expensive,

for the American citizen, these have lately become,) without a question

asked. This further and further unchallenged penetration begets in the

perverted person I speak of a really romantic thrill: it is like some

assault of the dim seraglio, with the guards bribed, the eunuchs drugged

and one’s life carried in one’s hand. The only drawback to such freedom

is that penetralia it is so easy to penetrate fail a little of a due

impressiveness, and that if stationed sentinels are bad for the temper

of the freeman they are good for the “prestige” of the building.

Never, in any case, it seemed to me, had any freeman made so free with

the majesty of things as I was to make on this occasion with the

mysteries of the City Hall—even to the point of coming out into the

presence of the Representative of the highest office with which City

Halls are associated, and whose thoroughly gracious condonation of my

act set the seal of success upon the whole adventure. Its dizziest

intensity in fact sprang precisely from the unexpected view opened into

the old official, the old so thick-peopled local, municipal world: upper

chambers of council and state, delightfully of their nineteenth-century

time, as to design and ornament, in spite of rank restoration; but

replete, above all, with portraits of past worthies, past celebrities

and city fathers, Mayors, Bosses, Presidents, Governors, Statesmen at

large, Generals and Commodores at large, florid ghosts, looking so

unsophisticated now, of years not remarkable, municipally, for the

absence of sophistication. Here were types, running mainly to ugliness

and all bristling with the taste of their day and the quite touching

provincialism of their conditions, as to many of which nothing would be

more interesting than a study of New York annals in the light of their

personal look, their very noses and mouths and complexions and heads of

hair—to say nothing of their waistcoats and neckties; with such colour,

such sound and movement would the thick stream of local history then be

interfused. Wouldn’t its thickness fairly become transparent? since to

walk through the collection was not only to see and feel so much that

had happened, but to understand, with the truth again and again

inimitably pointed, why nothing could have happened otherwise; the whole

array thus presenting itself as an unsurpassed demonstration of the real

reasons of things. The florid ghosts look out from their exceedingly

gilded frames—all that _that_ can do is bravely done for them—with the

frankest responsibility for everything; their collective presence

becomes a kind of copious tell-tale document signed with a hundred

names. There are few of these that at this hour, I think, we

particularly desire to repeat; but the place where they may be read is,

all the way from river to river and from the Battery to Harlem, the

place in which there is most of the terrible town.