III

If the Bay had seemed to me, as I have noted, most to help the fond

observer of New York aspects to a sense, through the eyes, of embracing

possession, so the part played there for the outward view found its

match for the inward in the portentous impression of one of the great

caravansaries administered to me of a winter afternoon. I say with

intention “administered”: on so assiduous a guide, through the endless

labyrinth of the Waldorf-Astoria was I happily to chance after turning

out of the early dusk and the January sleet and slosh into permitted,

into enlightened contemplation of a pandemonium not less admirably

ordered, to all appearance, than rarely intermitted. The seer of great

cities is liable to easy error, I know, when he finds this, that or the

other caught glimpse the supremely significant one—and I am willing to

preface with that remark my confession that New York told me more of her

story at once, then and there, than she was again and elsewhere to tell.

With this apprehension that she was in fact fairly shrieking it into

one’s ears came a curiosity, corresponding, as to its kind and its

degree of interest; so that there was nought to do, as we picked our

tortuous way, but to stare with all our eyes and miss as little as

possible of the revelation. That harshness of the essential conditions,

the outward, which almost any large attempt at the amenities, in New

York, has to take account of and make the best of, has at least the

effect of projecting the visitor with force upon the spectacle prepared

for him at this particular point and of marking the more its sudden high

pitch, the character of violence which all its warmth, its colour and

glitter so completely muffle. There is violence outside, mitigating

sadly the frontal majesty of the monument, leaving it exposed to the

vulgar assault of the street by the operation of those dire facts of

absence of margin, of meagreness of site, of the brevity of the block,

of the inveteracy of the near thoroughfare, which leave “style,” in

construction, at the mercy of the impertinent cross-streets, make

detachment and independence, save in the rarest cases, an insoluble

problem, preclude without pity any element of court or garden, and open

to the builder in quest of distinction the one alternative, and the

great adventure, of seeking his reward in the sky.

Of their licence to pursue it there to any extent whatever New Yorkers

are, I think, a trifle too assertively proud; no court of approach, no

interspace worth mention, ever forming meanwhile part of the ground-plan

or helping to receive the force of the breaking public wave. New York

pays at this rate the penalty of her primal topographic curse, her old

inconceivably bourgeois scheme of composition and distribution, the

uncorrected labour of minds with no imagination of the future and blind

before the opportunity given them by their two magnificent water-fronts.

This original sin of the longitudinal avenues perpetually, yet meanly

intersected, and of the organized sacrifice of the indicated

alternative, the great perspectives from East to West, might still have

earned forgiveness by some occasional departure from its pettifogging

consistency. But, thanks to this consistency, the city is, of all great

cities, the least endowed with any blest item of stately square or

goodly garden, with any happy accident or surprise, any fortunate nook

or casual corner, any deviation, in fine, into the liberal or the

charming. That way, however, for the regenerate filial mind, madness may

be said to lie—the way of imagining what might have been and putting it

all together in the light of what so helplessly is. One of the things

that helplessly are, for instance, is just this assault of the street,

as I have called it, upon any direct dealing with our caravansary. The

electric cars, with their double track, are everywhere almost as tight a

fit in the narrow channel of the roadway as the projectile in the bore

of a gun; so that the Waldorf-Astoria, sitting by this absent margin for

life with her open lap and arms, is reduced to confessing, with a

strained smile, across the traffic and the danger, how little, outside

her mere swing-door, she can do for you. She seems to admit that the

attempt to get at her may cost you your safety, but reminds you at the

same time that any good American, and even any good inquiring stranger,

is supposed willing to risk that boon for her. “_Un bon mouvement_,

therefore: you must make a dash for it, but you’ll see I’m worth it.” If

such a claim as this last be ever justified, it would indubitably be

justified here; the survivor scrambling out of the current and up the

bank finds in the amplitude of the entertainment awaiting him an instant

sense as of applied restoratives. The amazing hotel-world quickly closes

round him; with the process of transition reduced to its minimum he is

transported to conditions of extraordinary complexity and brilliancy,

operating—and with proportionate perfection—by laws of their own and

expressing after their fashion a complete scheme of life. The air

swarms, to intensity, with the _characteristic_, the characteristic

condensed and accumulated as he rarely elsewhere has had the luck to

find it. It jumps out to meet his every glance, and this unanimity of

its spring, of all its aspects and voices, is what I just now referred

to as the essence of the loud New York story. That effect of violence in

the whole communication, at which I thus hint, results from the

inordinate mass, the quantity of presence, as it were, of the testimony

heaped together for emphasis of the wondrous moral.

The moral in question, the high interest of the tale, is that you are in

presence of a revelation of the possibilities of the hotel—for which the

American spirit has found so unprecedented a use and a value; leading it

on to express so a social, indeed positively an æsthetic ideal, and

making it so, at this supreme pitch, a synonym for civilization, for the

capture of conceived manners themselves, that one is verily tempted to

ask if the hotel-spirit may not just _be_ the American spirit most

seeking and most finding itself. That truth—the truth that the present

is more and more the day of the hotel—had not waited to burst on the

mind at the view of this particular establishment; we have all more or

less been educated to it, the world over, by the fruit-bearing action of

the American example: in consequence of which it has been opened to us

to see still other societies moved by the same irresistible spring and

trying, with whatever grace and ease they may bring to the business, to

unlearn as many as possible of their old social canons, and in especial

their old discrimination in favour of the private life. The business for

them—for communities to which the American ease in such matters is not

native—goes much less of itself and produces as yet a scantier show; the

great difference with the American show being that in the United States

every one is, for the lubrication of the general machinery, practically

in everything, whereas in Europe, mostly, it is only certain people who

are in anything; so that the machinery, so much less generalized, works

in a smaller, stiffer way. This one caravansary makes the American case

vivid, gives it, you feel, that quantity of illustration which renders

the place a new thing under the sun. It is an expression of the

gregarious state breaking down every barrier but two—one of which, the

barrier consisting of the high pecuniary tax, is the immediately

obvious. The other, the rather more subtle, is the condition, for any

member of the flock, that he or she—in other words especially she—be

presumably “respectable,” be, that is, not discoverably anything else.

The rigour with which any appearance of pursued or desired adventure is

kept down—adventure in the florid sense of the word, the sense in which

it remains an euphemism—is not the least interesting note of the whole

immense promiscuity. Protected at those two points the promiscuity

carries, through the rest of the range, everything before it.

It sat there, it walked and talked, and ate and drank, and listened and

danced to music, and otherwise revelled and roamed, and bought and sold,

and came and went there, all on its own splendid terms and with an

encompassing material splendour, a wealth and variety of constituted

picture and background, that might well feed it with the finest

illusions about itself. It paraded through halls and saloons in which

art and history, in masquerading dress, muffled almost to suffocation as

in the gold brocade of their pretended majesties and their conciliatory

graces, stood smirking on its passage with the last cynicism of

hypocrisy. The exhibition is wonderful for that, for the suggested sense

of a promiscuity which manages to be at the same time an inordinate

untempered monotony; manages to be so, on such ground as this, by an

extraordinary trick of its own, wherever one finds it. The combination

forms, I think, largely, the very interest, such as it is, of these

phases of the human scene in the United States—if only for the pleasant

puzzle of our wondering how, when types, aspects, conditions, have so

much in common, they should seem at all to make up a conscious

miscellany. That question, however, the question of the play and range,

the practical elasticity, of the social sameness, in America, will meet

us elsewhere on our path, and I confess that all questions gave way, in

my mind, to a single irresistible obsession. This was just the ache of

envy of the spirit of a society which had found there, in its prodigious

public setting, so exactly what it wanted. One was in presence, as never

before, of a realized ideal and of that childlike rush of surrender to

it and clutch at it which one was so repeatedly to recognize, in

America, as the note of the supremely gregarious state. It made the

whole vision unforgettable, and I am now carried back to it, I confess,

in musing hours, as to one of my few glimpses of perfect human felicity.

It had the admirable sign that it was, precisely, so comprehensively

collective—that it made so vividly, in the old phrase, for the greatest

happiness of the greatest number. Its rare beauty, one felt with instant

clarity of perception, was that it was, for a “mixed” social

manifestation, blissfully exempt from any principle or possibility of

disaccord with itself. It was absolutely a fit to its conditions, those

conditions which were both its earth and its heaven, and every part of

the picture, every item of the immense sum, every wheel of the wondrous

complexity, was on the best terms with all the rest.

The sense of these things became for the hour as the golden glow in

which one’s envy burned, and through which, while the sleet and the

slosh, and the clangorous charge of cars, and the hustling, hustled

crowds held the outer world, one carried one’s charmed attention from

one chamber of the temple to another. For that is how the place speaks,

as great constructed and achieved harmonies mostly speak—as a temple

builded, with clustering chapels and shrines, to an idea. The hundreds

and hundreds of people in circulation, the innumerable huge-hatted

ladies in especial, with their air of finding in the gilded and storied

labyrinth the very firesides and pathways of home, became thus the

serene faithful, whose rites one would no more have sceptically brushed

than one would doff one’s disguise in a Mohammedan mosque. The question

of who they all might be, seated under palms and by fountains, or

communing, to some inimitable New York tune, with the shade of Marie

Antoinette in the queer recaptured actuality of an easy Versailles or an

intimate Trianon—such questions as that, interesting in other societies

and at other times, insisted on yielding here to the mere eloquence of

the general truth. Here was a social order in positively stable

equilibrium. Here was a world whose relation to its form and medium was

practically imperturbable; here was a conception of publicity _as_ the

vital medium organized with the authority with which the American genius

for organization, put on its mettle, alone could organize it. The whole

thing remains for me, however, I repeat, a gorgeous golden blur, a

paradise peopled with unmistakable American shapes, yet in which, the

general and the particular, the organized and the extemporized, the

element of ingenuous joy below and of consummate management above,

melted together and left one uncertain which of them one was, at a given

turn of the maze, most admiring. When I reflect indeed that without my

clue I should not have even known the maze—should not have known, at the

given turn, whether I was engulfed, for instance, in the _vente de

charité_ of the theatrical profession and the onset of persuasive

peddling actresses, or in the annual tea-party of German

lady-patronesses (of I know not what) filling with their Oriental

opulence and their strange idiom a playhouse of the richest rococo,

where some other expensive anniversary, the ball of a guild or the

carouse of a club, was to tread on their heels and instantly mobilize

away their paraphernalia—when I so reflect I see the sharpest dazzle of

the eyes as precisely the play of the genius for organization.

There are a thousand forms of this ubiquitous American force, the most

ubiquitous of all, that I was in no position to measure; but there was

often no resisting a vivid view of the form it may take, on occasion,

under pressure of the native conception of the hotel. Encountered

embodiments of the gift, in this connection, master-spirits of

management whose influence was as the very air, the very expensive air,

one breathed, abide with me as the intensest examples of American

character; indeed as the very interesting supreme examples of a type

which has even on the American ground, doubtless, not said its last

word, but which has at least treated itself there to a luxury of

development. It gives the impression, when at all directly met, of

having at its service something of that fine flame that makes up

personal greatness; so that, again and again, as I found, one would have

liked to see it more intimately at work. Such failures of opportunity

and of penetration, however, are but the daily bread of the visionary

tourist. Whenever I dip back, in fond memory, none the less, into the

vision I have here attempted once more to call up, I see the whole thing

overswept as by the colossal extended arms, waving the magical baton, of

some high-stationed orchestral leader, the absolute presiding power,

conscious of every note of every instrument, controlling and commanding

the whole volume of sound, keeping the whole effect together and making

it what it is. What may one say of such a spirit if not that he

understands, so to speak, the forces he sways, understands his boundless

American material and plays with it like a master indeed? One sees it

thus, in its crude plasticity, almost in the likeness of an army of

puppets whose strings the wealth of his technical imagination teaches

him innumerable ways of pulling, and yet whose innocent, whose always

ingenuous agitation of their members he has found means to make them

think of themselves as delightfully free and easy. Such was my

impression of the perfection of the concert that, for fear of its being

spoiled by some chance false note, I never went into the place again.

It might meanwhile seem no great adventure merely to walk the streets;

but (beside the fact that there is, in general, never a better way of

taking in life), this pursuit irresistibly solicited, on the least

pretext, the observer whose impressions I note—accustomed as he had ever

been conscientiously to yield to it: more particularly with the

relenting year, when the breath of spring, mildness being really

installed, appeared the one vague and disinterested presence in the

place, the one presence not vociferous and clamorous. Any definite

presence that doesn’t bellow and bang takes on in New York by that

simple fact a distinction practically exquisite; so that one goes forth

to meet it as a guest of honour, and that, for my own experience, I

remember certain aimless strolls as snatches of intimate communion with

the spirit of May and June—as abounding, almost to enchantment, in the

comparatively _still_ condition. Two secrets, at this time, seemed to

profit by that influence to tremble out; one of these to the effect that

New York would really have been “meant” to be charming, and the other to

the effect that the restless analyst, willing at the lightest persuasion

to let so much of its ugliness edge away unscathed from his analysis,

must have had for it, from far back, one of those loyalties that are

beyond any reason.

“It’s all very well,” the voice of the air seemed to say, if I may so

take it up; “it’s all very well to ‘criticize,’ but you distinctly take

an interest and are the victim of your interest, be the grounds of your

perversity what they will. You can’t escape from it, and don’t you see

that this, precisely, is what _makes_ an adventure for you (an

adventure, I admit, as with some strident, battered, questionable

beauty, truly some ‘bold bad’ charmer), of almost any odd stroll, or

waste half-hour, or other promiscuous passage, that results for you in

an impression? There is always your bad habit of receiving through

almost any accident of vision more impressions than you know what to do

with; but that, for common convenience, is your eternal handicap and may

not be allowed to plead here against your special responsibility. You

_care_ for the terrible town, yea even for the ‘horrible,’ as I have

overheard you call it, or at least think it, when you supposed no one

would know; and you see now how, if you fly such fancies as that it was

conceivably meant to be charming, you are tangled by that weakness in

some underhand imagination of its possibly, one of these days, as a

riper fruit of time, becoming so. To do that, you indeed sneakingly

provide, it must get away from itself; but you are ready to follow its

hypothetic dance even to the mainland and to the very end of its tether.

What makes the general relation of your adventure with it is that, at

bottom, you are all the while wondering, in presence of the aspects of

its genius and its shame, what elements or parts, if any, would be worth

its saving, worth carrying off for the fresh embodiment and the better

life, and which of them would have, on the other hand, to face the

notoriety of going _first_ by the board. I have literally heard you

qualify the monster as ‘shameless’—though that was wrung from you, I

admit, by the worst of the winter conditions, when circulation, in any

fashion consistent with personal decency or dignity, was merely mocked

at, when the stony-hearted ‘trolleys,’ cars of Juggernaut in their power

to squash, triumphed all along the line, when the February blasts became

as cyclones in the darkened gorges of masonry (which down-town, in

particular, put on, at their mouths, the semblance of black rat-holes,

holes of gigantic rats, inhabited by whirlwinds;) when all the pretences

and impunities and infirmities, in fine, had massed themselves to be

hurled at you in the fury of the elements, in the character of the

traffic, in the unadapted state of the place to almost _any_ dense

movement, and, beyond everything, in that pitch of all the noises which

acted on your nerves as so much wanton provocation, so much conscious

cynicism. The fury of sound took the form of derision of the rest of

your woe, and thus it _might_, I admit, have struck you as brazen that

the horrible place should, in such confessed collapse, still be

swaggering and shouting. It might have struck you that great cities,

with the eyes of the world on them, as the phrase is, should be capable

either of a proper form or (failing this) of a proper compunction; which

tributes to propriety were, on the part of New York, equally wanting.

This made you remark, precisely, that nothing was wanting, on the other

hand, to that analogy with the character of the bad bold beauty, the

creature the most blatant of whose pretensions is that she is one of

those to whom everything is always forgiven. On what ground ‘forgiven’?

of course you ask; but note that you ask it while you’re in the very act

of forgiving. Oh yes, you are; you’ve as much as said so yourself. So

there it all is; arrange it as you can. Poor dear bad bold beauty; there

must indeed be something about her——!”

Let me grant then, to get on, that there _was_ doubtless, in the better

time, something about her; there was enough about her, at all events, to

conduce to that distinct cultivation of her company for which the

contemplative stroll, when there was time for it, was but another name.

The analogy was in truth complete; since the repetition of such walks,

and the admission of the beguiled state contained in them, resembled

nothing so much as the visits so often still incorrigibly made to

compromised charmers. I defy even a master of morbid observation to

perambulate New York unless he be interested; so that in a case of

memories so gathered the interest must be taken as a final fact. Let me

figure it, to this end, as lively in every connection—and so indeed no

more lively at one mild crisis than at another. The crisis—even of

observation at the morbid pitch—is inevitably mild in cities intensely

new; and it was with the quite peculiarly insistent newness of the upper

reaches of the town that the spirit of romantic inquiry had always, at

the best, to reckon. There are new cities enough about the world,

goodness knows, and there are new parts enough of old cities—for

examples of which we need go no farther than London, Paris and Rome, all

of late so mercilessly renovated. But the newness of New York—unlike

even that of Boston, I seemed to discern—had this mark of its very own,

that it affects one, in every case, as having treated itself as still

more provisional, if possible, than any poor dear little interest of

antiquity it may have annihilated. The very sign of its energy is that

it doesn’t believe in itself; it fails to succeed, even at a cost of

millions, in persuading you that it does. Its mission would appear to

be, exactly, to gild the temporary, with its gold, as many inches thick

as may be, and then, with a fresh shrug, a shrug of its splendid

cynicism for its freshly detected inability to convince, give up its

actual work, however exorbitant, as the merest of stop-gaps. The

difficulty with the compromised charmer is just this constant inability

to convince; to convince ever, I mean, that she is serious, serious

about any form whatever, or about anything but that perpetual passionate

pecuniary purpose which plays with all forms, which derides and devours

them, though it may pile up the cost of them in order to rest a while,

spent and haggard, in the illusion of their finality.

The perception of this truth grows for you by your simply walking

up Fifth Avenue and pausing a little in presence of certain forms,

certain exorbitant structures, in other words, the elegant

domiciliary, as to which the illusion of finality was within one’s

memory magnificent and complete, but as to which one feels to-day

that their life wouldn’t be, as against any whisper of a higher

interest, worth an hour’s purchase. They sit there in the florid

majesty of the taste of their time—a light now, alas, generally

clouded; and I pretend of course to speak, in alluding to them, of

no individual case of danger or doom. It is only a question of

that unintending and unconvincing expression of New York

everywhere, as yet, on the matter of the _maintenance_ of a given

effect—which comes back to the general insincerity of effects, and

truly even (as I have already noted) to the insincerity of the

effect of the sky-scrapers themselves. There results from all

this—and as much where the place most smells of its millions as

elsewhere—that unmistakable New York admission of unattempted,

impossible maturity. The new Paris and the new Rome do at least

propose, I think, to be old—one of these days; the new London

even, erect as she is on leaseholds destitute of dignity, yet

does, for the period, appear to believe in herself. The vice I

glance at is, however, when showing, in our flagrant example, on

the forehead of its victims, much more a cause for pitying than

for decrying them. Again and again, in the upper reaches, you

pause with that pity; you learn, on the occasion of a kindly

glance up and down a quiet cross-street (there being objects and

aspects in many of them appealing to kindness), that such and such

a house, or a row, is “coming down”; and you gasp, in presence of

the elements involved, at the strangeness of the moral so pointed.

It rings out like the crack of that lash in the sky, the play of

some mighty teamster’s whip, which ends by affecting you as the

poor New Yorker’s one association with the idea of “powers above.”

“No”—this is the tune to which the whip seems flourished—“there’s

no step at which you shall rest, no form, as I’m constantly

showing you, to which, consistently with my interests, you _can_.

I build you up but to tear you down, for if I were to let

sentiment and sincerity once take root, were to let any tenderness

of association once accumulate, or any ‘love of the old’ once pass

unsnubbed, what would become of _us_, who have our hands on the

whipstock, please? Fortunately we’ve learned the secret for

keeping association at bay. We’ve learned that the great thing is

not to suffer it to so much as begin. Wherever it does begin we

find we’re lost; but as that takes some time we get in ahead. It’s

the reason, if you must know, why you shall ‘run,’ all, without

exception, to the fifty floors. We defy you even to aspire to

venerate shapes so grossly constructed as the arrangement in fifty

floors. You may have a feeling for keeping on with an old

staircase, consecrated by the tread of generations—especially when

it’s ‘good,’ and old staircases are often so lovely; but how can

you have a feeling for keeping on with an old elevator, how can

you have it any more than for keeping on with an old omnibus?

You’d be ashamed to venerate the arrangement in fifty floors,

accordingly, even if you could; whereby, saving you any moral

trouble or struggle, they are conceived and constructed—and you

must do us the justice of this care for your sensibility—in a

manner to put the thing out of the question. In such a manner,

moreover, as that there shall be immeasurably more of them, in

quantity, to tear down than of the actual past that we are now

sweeping away. Wherefore we shall be kept in precious practice.

The word will perhaps be then—who knows?—for building from the

earth-surface downwards; in which case it will be a question of

tearing, so to speak, ‘up.’ It little matters, so long as we

blight the superstition of rest.”

Yet even in the midst of this vision of eternal waste, of conscious,

sentient-looking houses and rows, full sections of streets, to which the

rich taste of history is forbidden even while their fresh young lips are

just touching the cup, something charmingly done, here and there, some

bid for the ampler permanence, seems to say to you that the particular

place only asks, as a human home, to lead the life it has begun, only

asks to enfold generations and gather in traditions, to show itself

capable of growing up to character and authority. Houses of the best

taste are like clothes of the best tailors—it takes their age to show us

how good they are; and I frequently recognized, in the region of the

upper reaches, this direct appeal of the individual case of happy

construction. Construction at large abounds in the upper reaches,

construction indescribably precipitate and elaborate—the latter fact

about it always so oddly hand in hand with the former; and we should

exceed in saying that felicity is always its mark. But some highly

liberal, some extravagant intention almost always is, and we meet here

even that happy accident, already encountered and acclaimed, in its few

examples, down-town, of the object shining almost absurdly in the light

of its merely comparative distinction. All but lost in the welter of

instances of sham refinement, the shy little case of real refinement

detaches itself ridiculously, as being (like the saved City Hall, or

like the pleasant old garden-walled house on the north-west corner of

Washington Square and Fifth Avenue) of so beneficent an admonition as to

show, relatively speaking, for priceless. These things, which I may not

take time to pick out, are the salt that saves, and it is enough to say

for their delicacy that they are the direct counterpart of those other

dreadful presences, looming round them, which embody the imagination of

new kinds and new clustered, emphasized quantities of vulgarity. To

recall these fine notes and these loud ones, the whole play of wealth

and energy and untutored liberty, of the movement of a breathless

civilization reflected, as brick and stone and marble may reflect,

through all the contrasts of prodigious flight and portentous stumble,

is to acknowledge, positively, that one’s rambles were delightful, and

that the district abutting on the east side of the Park, in particular,

never engaged my attention without, by the same stroke, making the

social question dance before it in a hundred interesting forms.

The social question quite fills the air, in New York, for any spectator

whose impressions at all follow themselves up; it wears, at any rate, in

what I have called the upper reaches, the perpetual strange appearance

as of Property perched high aloft and yet itself looking about, all

ruefully, in the wonder of what it is exactly doing there. We see it

perched, assuredly, in other and older cities, other and older social

orders; but it strikes us in those situations as knowing a little more

where it is. It strikes us as knowing how it has got up and why it must,

infallibly, stay up; it has not the frightened look, measuring the

spaces around, of a small child set on a mantelshelf and about to cry

out. If old societies are interesting, however, I am far from thinking

that young ones may not be more so—with their collective countenance so

much more presented, precisely, to observation, as by their artless need

to get themselves explained. The American world produces almost

everywhere the impression of appealing to any attested interest for the

word, the _fin mot_, of what it may mean; but I somehow see those parts

of it most at a loss that are already explained not a little by the

ample possession of money. This is the amiable side there of the large

developments of private ease in general—the amiable side of those

numerous groups that are rich enough and, in the happy vulgar phrase,

bloated enough, to be candidates for the classic imputation of

haughtiness. The amiability proceeds from an essential vagueness;

whereas real haughtiness is never vague about itself—it is only vague

about others. That is the human note in the huge American rattle of

gold—so far as the “social” field is the scene of the rattle. The

“business” field is a different matter—as to which the determination of

the audibility in it of the human note (so interesting to try for if one

had but the warrant) is a line of research closed to me, alas, by my

fatally uninitiated state. My point is, at all events, that you cannot

be “hard,” really, with any society that affects you as ready to learn

from you, and from this resource for it of your detachment combining

with your proximity, what in the name of all its possessions and all its

destitutions it would honestly be “at.”

III

NEW YORK AND THE HUDSON

A SPRING IMPRESSION

I

It was a concomitant, always, of the down-town hour that it could be

felt as _most_ playing into the surrendered consciousness and making the

sharpest impression; yet, since the up-town hour was apt, in its turn,

to claim the same distinction, I could only let each of them take its

way with me as it would. The oddity was that they seemed not at all to

speak of different things—by so quick a process does any one aspect, in

the United States, in general, I was to note, connect itself with the

rest; so little does any link in the huge looseness of New York, in

especial, appear to come as a whole, or as final, out of the fusion. The

fusion, as of elements in solution in a vast hot pot, is always going

on, and one stage of the process is as typical or as vivid as another.

Whatever I might be looking at, or be struck with, the object or the

phase was an item in the pressing conditions of the place, and as such

had more in common with its sister items than it had in difference from

them. It mattered little, moreover, whether this might be a proof that

New York, among cities, most deeply languishes and palpitates, or

vibrates and flourishes (whichever way one may put it) under the breath

of her conditions, or whether, simply, this habit of finding a little of

_all_ my impressions reflected in any one of them testified to the

enjoyment of a real relation with the subject. I like indeed to think of

my relation to New York as, in that manner, almost inexpressibly

intimate, and as hence making, for daily sensation, a keyboard as

continuous, and as free from hard transitions, as if swept by the

fingers of a master-pianist. You cannot, surely, say more for your sense

of the underlying unity of an occasion than that the taste of each dish

in the banquet recalls the taste of most of the others; which is what I

mean by the “continuity,” not to say the affinity, on the island of

Manhattan, between the fish and the sweets, between the soup and the

game. The whole feast affects one as eaten—that is the point—with the

general queer sauce of New York; a preparation as freely diffused,

somehow, on the East side as on the West, in the quarter of Grand Street

as in the quarter of Murray Hill. No fact, I hasten to add, would appear

to make the place more amenable to delineations of the order that may be

spoken of as hanging together.

I must confess, notwithstanding, to not being quite ready to point

directly to the common element in the dense Italian neighbourhoods of

the lower East side, and in the upper reaches of Fifth and of Madison

Avenues; though indeed I wonder at this inability in recollecting two or

three of those charming afternoons of early summer, in Central Park,

which showed the fruit of the foreign tree as shaken down there with a

force that smothered everything else. The long residential vistas I have

named were within a quarter of an hour’s walk, but the alien was as

truly in possession, under the high “aristocratic” nose, as if he had

had but three steps to come. If it be asked why, the alien still

striking you so as an alien, the singleness of impression, throughout

the place, should still be so marked, the answer, close at hand, would

seem to be that the alien himself fairly _makes_ the singleness of

impression. Is not the universal sauce essentially _his_ sauce, and do

we not feel ourselves feeding, half the time, from the ladle, as greasy

as he chooses to leave it for us, that he holds out? Such questions were

in my ears, at all events, with the cheerful hum of that babel of

tongues established in the vernal Park, and they supplied, beyond doubt,

the livelier interest of any hour of contemplation there. I hate to

drift into dealing with them at the expense of a proper tribute, kept

distinct and vivid, to the charming bosky precinct itself, the great

field of recreation with which they swarmed; but it could not be the

fault of the brooding visitor, and still less that of the restored

absentee, if he was conscious of the need of mental adjustment to

phenomena absolutely fresh. He could remember still how, months before,

a day or two after his restoration, a noted element of one of his first

impressions had been this particular revealed anomaly. He had been, on

the Jersey shore, walking with a couple of friends through the grounds

of a large new rural residence, where groups of diggers and ditchers

were working, on those lines of breathless haste which seem always, in

the United States, of the essence of any question, toward an expensive

effect of landscape gardening. To pause before them, for interest in

their labour, was, and would have been everywhere, instinctive; but what

came home to me on the spot was that whatever _more_ would have been

anywhere else involved had here inevitably to lapse.

What lapsed, on the spot, was the element of communication with the

workers, as I may call it for want of a better name; that element which,

in a European country, would have operated, from side to side, as the

play of mutual recognition, founded on old familiarities and heredities,

and involving, for the moment, some impalpable exchange. The men, in the

case I speak of, were Italians, of superlatively southern type, and any

impalpable exchange struck me as absent from the air to positive

intensity, to mere unthinkability. It was as if contact were out of the

question and the sterility of the passage between us recorded, with due

dryness, in our staring silence. This impression was for one of the

party a shock—a member of the party for whom, on the other side of the

world, the imagination of the main furniture, as it might be called, of

any rural excursion, of _the_ rural in particular, had been, during

years, the easy sense, for the excursionist, of a social relation with

any encountered type, from whichever end of the scale proceeding. Had

that not ever been, exactly, a part of the vague warmth, the intrinsic

colour, of any honest man’s rural walk in his England or his Italy, his

Germany or his France, and was not the effect of its so suddenly

dropping out, in the land of universal brotherhood—for I was to find it

drop out again and again—rather a chill, straightway, for the heart, and

rather a puzzle, not less, for the head? Shortly after the spring of

this question was first touched for me I found it ring out again with a

sharper stroke. Happening to have lost my way, during a long ramble

among the New Hampshire hills, I appealed, for information, at a parting

of the roads, to a young man whom, at the moment of my need, I happily

saw emerge from a neighbouring wood. But his stare was blank, in answer

to my inquiry, and, seeing that he failed to understand me and that he

had a dark-eyed “Latin” look, I jumped to the inference of his being a

French Canadian. My repetition of my query in French, however, forwarded

the case as little, and my trying him with Italian had no better effect.

“What _are_ you then?” I wonderingly asked—on which my accent loosened

in him the faculty of speech. “I’m an Armenian,” he replied, as if it

were the most natural thing in the world for a wage-earning youth in the

heart of New England to be—so that all I could do was to try and make my

profit of the lesson. I could have made it better, for the occasion, if,

even on the Armenian basis, he had appeared to expect brotherhood; but

this had been as little his seeming as it had been that of the diggers

by the Jersey shore.

To inquire of these things on the spot, to betray, that is, one’s sense

of the “chill” of which I have spoken, is of course to hear it admitted,

promptly enough, that there is no claim to brotherhood with aliens in

the first grossness of their alienism. The material of which they

consist is being dressed and prepared, at this stage, for brotherhood,

and the consummation, in respect to many of them, will not be, can not

from the nature of the case be, in any lifetime of their own. Their

children are another matter—as in fact the children throughout the

United States, are an immense matter, are almost the greatest matter of

all; it is the younger generation who will fully profit, rise to the

occasion and enter into the privilege. The machinery is colossal—nothing

is more characteristic of the country than the development of this

machinery, in the form of the political and social habit, the common

school and the newspaper; so that there are always millions of little

transformed strangers growing up in regard to whom the idea of intimacy

of relation may be as freely cherished as you like. _They_ are the stuff

of whom brothers and sisters are made, and the making proceeds on a

scale that really need leave nothing to desire. All this you take in,

with a wondering mind, and in the light of it the great “ethnic”

question rises before you on a corresponding scale and with a

corresponding majesty. Once it has set your observation, to say nothing

of your imagination, working, it becomes for you, as you go and come,

the wonderment to which everything ministers and that is quickened

well-nigh to madness, in some places and on some occasions, by every

face and every accent that meet your eyes and ears. The sense of the

elements in the cauldron—the cauldron of the “American”

character—becomes thus about as vivid a thing as you can at all quietly

manage, and the question settles into a form which makes the

intelligible answer further and further recede. “What meaning, in the

presence of such impressions, can continue to attach to such a term as

the ‘American’ character?—what type, as the result of such a prodigious

amalgam, such a hotch-potch of racial ingredients, is to be conceived as

shaping itself?” The challenge to speculation, fed thus by a thousand

sources, is so intense as to be, as I say, irritating; but practically,

beyond doubt, I should also say, you take refuge from it—since your case

would otherwise be hard; and you find your relief not in the least in

any direct satisfaction or solution, but absolutely in that blest

general drop of the immediate need of conclusions, or rather in that

blest general feeling for the impossibility of them, to which the

philosophy of any really fine observation of the American spectacle must

reduce itself, and the large intellectual, quite even the large

æsthetic, margin supplied by which accompanies the spectator as his one

positively complete comfort.

It is more than a comfort to him, truly, in all the conditions, this

accepted vision of the too-defiant scale of numerosity and quantity—the

effect of which is so to multiply the possibilities, so to open, by the

million, contingent doors and windows: he rests in it at last as an

absolute luxury, converting it even into a substitute, into _the_

constant substitute, for many luxuries that are absent. He doesn’t

_know_, he can’t _say_, before the facts, and he doesn’t even want to

know or to say; the facts themselves loom, before the understanding, in

too large a mass for a mere mouthful: it is as if the syllables were too

numerous to make a legible word. The _il_legible word, accordingly, the

great inscrutable answer to questions, hangs in the vast American sky,

to his imagination, as something fantastic and _abracadabrant_,

belonging to no known language, and it is under this convenient ensign

that he travels and considers and contemplates, and, to the best of his

ability, enjoys. The interesting point, in the connection, is moreover

that this particular effect of the scale of things is the only effect

that, throughout the land, is not directly adverse to joy. Extent and

reduplication, the multiplication of cognate items and the continuity of

motion, are elements that count, there, in general, for fatigue and

satiety, prompting the earnest observer, overburdened perhaps already a

little by his earnestness, to the reflection that the country is too

large for any human convenience, that it can scarce, in the scheme of

Providence, have been meant to be dealt with as we are trying, perhaps

all in vain, to deal with it, and that its very possibilities of

population themselves cause one to wince in the light of the question of

intercourse and contact. That relation to its superficies and

content—the relation of flat fatigue—is, with the traveller, a constant

quantity; so that he feels himself justified of the inward, the

philosophic, escape into the immensity. And as it is the restored

absentee, with his acquired habit of nearer limits and shorter journeys

and more muffled concussions, who is doubtless most subject to flat

fatigue, so it is this same personage who most avails himself of the

liberty of waiting to see. It is an advantage—acting often in the way of

a compensation, or of an appeal from the immediate—that he becomes,

early in his period of inquiry, conscious of intimately invoking, in

whatever apparent inconsistency it may lodge him. There is too much of

the whole thing, he sighs, for the personal relation with it; and yet he

would desire no inch less for the relation that he describes to himself

best perhaps either as the provisionally-imaginative or as the

distantly-respectful. Diminution of quantity, even by that inch, might

mark the difference of his having to begin to recognize from afar, as

through a rift in the obscurity, the gleam of some propriety of opinion.

What would a man make, many things still being as they are, he finds

himself asking, of a _small_ America?—and what may a big one, on the

other hand, still not make of itself? Goodness be thanked, accordingly,

for the bigness. The state of flat fatigue, obviously, is not an

opinion, save in the sense attributed to the slumber of the gentleman of

the anecdote who had lost consciousness during the reading of the

play—it belongs to the order of mere sensation and impression; and as to

these the case is quite different: he may have as many of each as he can

carry.