II

The process of the mitigation and, still more, of the conversion of the

alien goes on, meanwhile, obviously, not by leaps and bounds or any form

of easy magic, but under its own mystic laws and with an outward air of

quite declining to be unduly precipitated. How little it may be thought

of in New York as a quick business we readily perceive as the effect of

merely remembering the vast numbers of their kind that the arriving

reinforcements, from whatever ends of the earth, find already in

possession of the field. There awaits the disembarked Armenian, for

instance, so warm and furnished an Armenian corner that the need of

hurrying to get rid of the sense of it must become less and less a

pressing preliminary. The corner growing warmer and warmer, it is to be

supposed, by rich accretions, he may take his time, more and more, for

becoming absorbed in the surrounding element, and he may in fact feel

more and more that he can do so on his own conditions. I seem to find

indeed in this latter truth a hint for the best expression of a whole

side of New York—the best expression of much of the medium in which one

consciously moves. It is formed by this fact that the alien is taking

his time, and that you go about with him meanwhile, sharing, all

respectfully, in his deliberation, waiting on his convenience, watching

him at his interesting work. The vast foreign quarters of the city

present him as thus engaged in it, and they are curious and portentous

and “picturesque” just by reason of their doing so. You recognize in

them, freely, those elements that are not elements of swift

convertibility, and you lose yourself in the wonder of what becomes, as

it were, of the obstinate, the unconverted residuum. The country at

large, as you cross it in different senses, keeps up its character for

you as the hugest thinkable organism for successful “assimilation”; but

the assimilative force itself has the residuum still to count with. The

operation of the immense machine, identical after all with the total of

American life, trembles away into mysteries that are beyond our present

notation and that reduce us in many a mood to renouncing analysis.

Who and what is an alien, when it comes to that, in a country peopled

from the first under the jealous eye of history?—peopled, that is, by

migrations at once extremely recent, perfectly traceable and urgently

required. They are still, it would appear, urgently required—if we look

about far enough for the urgency; though of that truth such a scene as

New York may well make one doubt. Which is the American, by these scant

measures?—which is _not_ the alien, over a large part of the country at

least, and where does one put a finger on the dividing line, or, for

that matter, “spot” and identify any particular phase of the conversion,

any one of its successive moments? The sense of the interest of so doing

is doubtless half the interest of the general question—the possibility

of our seeing lucidly presented some such phenomenon, in a given group

of persons, or even in a felicitous individual, as the dawn of the

American spirit while the declining rays of the Croatian, say, or of the

Calabrian, or of the Lusitanian, still linger more or less pensively in

the sky. Fifty doubts and queries come up, in regard to any such

possibility, as one circulates in New York, with the so ambiguous

element in the _launched_ foreign personality always in one’s eyes; the

wonder, above all, of whether there be, comparatively, in the vastly

greater number of the representatives of the fresh contingent, any

spirit that the American does not find an easy prey. Repeatedly, in the

electric cars, one seemed invited to take that for granted—there being

occasions, days and weeks together, when the electric cars offer you

nothing else to think of. The carful, again and again, is a foreign

carful; a row of faces, up and down, testifying, without exception, to

alienism unmistakable, alienism undisguised and unashamed. You do here,

in a manner perhaps, discriminate; the launched condition, as I have

called it, is more developed in some types than in others; but I

remember observing how, in the Broadway and the Bowery conveyances in

especial, they tended, almost alike, to make the observer gasp with the

sense of isolation. It was not for this that the observer on whose

behalf I more particularly write had sought to take up again the sweet

sense of the natal air.

The great fact about his companions was that, foreign as they might be,

newly inducted as they might be, they were _at home_, really more at

home, at the end of their few weeks or months or their year or two, than

they had ever in their lives been before; and that _he_ was at home too,

quite with the same intensity: and yet that it was this very equality of

condition that, from side to side, made the whole medium so strange.

Here again, however, relief may be sought and found—and I say this at

the risk of perhaps picturing the restored absentee as too constantly

requiring it; for there is fascination in the study of the innumerable

ways in which this sense of being at home, on the part of all the types,

may show forth. New York offers to such a study a well-nigh unlimited

field, but I seem to recall winter days, harsh, dusky, sloshy winter

afternoons, in the densely-packed East-side street-cars, as an

especially intimate surrender to it. It took its place thus, I think,

under the general American law of _all_ relief from the great equalizing

pressure: it took on that last disinterestedness which consists of one’s

getting away from one’s subject by plunging into it, for sweet truth’s

sake, still deeper. If I speak, moreover, of this general first

grossness of alienism as presented in “types,” I use that word for easy

convenience and not in respect to its indicating marked variety. There

are many different ways, certainly, in which obscure fighters of the

battle of life may look, under new high lights, queer and crude and

unwrought; but the striking thing, precisely, in the crepuscular,

tunnel-like avenues that the “Elevated” overarches—yet without

quenching, either, that constant power of any American exhibition rather

luridly to light itself—the striking thing, and the beguiling, was

always the manner in which figure after figure and face after face

already betrayed the common consequence and action of their whereabouts.

Face after face, unmistakably, was “low”—particularly in the men,

squared all solidly in their new security and portability, their vague

but growing sense of many unprecedented things; and as signs of the

reinforcing of a large local conception of manners and relations it was

difficult to say if they most affected one as promising or as

portentous.

The great thing, at any rate, was that they were all together so visibly

on the new, the lifted level—that of consciously not being what they

_had_ been, and that this immediately glazed them over as with some

mixture, of indescribable hue and consistency, the wholesale varnish of

consecration, that might have been applied, out of a bottomless

receptacle, by a huge white-washing brush. Here, perhaps, was the

nearest approach to a seizable step in the evolution of the oncoming

citizen, the stage of his no longer being for you—for any complacency of

the romantic, or even verily of the fraternizing, sense in you—the

foreigner of the quality, of the kind, that he might have been _chez

lui_. Whatever he might see himself becoming, he was never to see

himself that again, any more than you were ever to see him. He became

then, to my vision (which I have called fascinated for want of a better

description of it), a creature promptly despoiled of those “manners”

which were the grace (as I am again reduced to calling it) by which one

had best known and, on opportunity, best liked him. He presents himself

thus, most of all, to be plain—and not only in New York, but throughout

the country—as wonderingly conscious that his manners of the other

world, that everything you have there known and praised him for, have

been a huge mistake: to that degree that the sense of this luminous

discovery is what we mainly imagine his weighted communications to those

he has left behind charged with; those rich letters home as to the

number and content of which the Post Office gives us so remarkable a

statistic. If there are several lights in which the great assimilative

organism itself may be looked at, does it not still perhaps loom largest

as an agent for revealing to the citizen-to-be the error in question? He

hears it, under this aegis, proclaimed in a thousand voices, and it is

as listening to these and as, according to the individual, more or less

swiftly, but always infallibly, penetrated and convinced by them, that I

felt myself see him go about his business, see him above all, for some

odd reason, sit there in the street-car, and with a slow, brooding

gravity, a dim calculation of bearings, which yet never takes a backward

step, expand to the full measure of it.

So, in New York, largely, the “American” value of the immigrant who

arrives at all mature is restricted to the enjoyment (all prepared to

increase) of that important preliminary truth; which makes him for us,

we must own, till more comes of it, a tolerably neutral and colourless

image. He resembles for the time the dog who sniffs round the

freshly-acquired bone, giving it a push and a lick, betraying a sense of

its possibilities, but not—and quite as from a positive deep tremor of

consciousness—directly attacking it. There are categories of foreigners,

truly, meanwhile, of whom we are moved to say that only a mechanism

working with scientific force could have performed this feat of making

them colourless. The Italians, who, over the whole land, strike us, I am

afraid, as, after the Negro and the Chinaman, the human value most

easily produced, the Italians meet us, at every turn, only to make us

ask what has become of that element of the agreeable address in _them_

which has, from far back, so enhanced for the stranger the interest and

pleasure of a visit to their beautiful country. They shed it utterly, I

couldn’t but observe, on their advent, after a deep inhalation or two of

the clear native air; shed it with a conscientious completeness which

leaves one looking for any faint trace of it. “Colour,” of that pleasant

sort, was what they had appeared, among the races of the European

family, most to have; so that the effect I speak of, the rapid action of

the ambient air, is like that of the tub of hot water that reduces a

piece of bright-hued stuff, on immersion, to the proved state of not

“washing”: the only fault of my image indeed being that if the stuff

loses its brightness the water of the tub at least is more or less

agreeably dyed with it. That is doubtless not the case for the ambient

air operating after the fashion I here note—since we surely fail to

observe that the property washed out of the new subject begins to tint

with its pink or its azure his fellow-soakers in the terrible tank. If

this property that has quitted him—the general amenity of attitude in

the absence of provocation to its opposite—could be accounted for by its

having rubbed off on any number of surrounding persons, the whole

process would be easier and perhaps more comforting to follow. It will

not have been his first occasion of taking leave of short-sighted

comfort in the United States, however, if the patient inquirer postpones

that ideal to the real solicitation of the question I here touch on.

What _does_ become of the various positive properties, on the part of

certain of the installed tribes, the good manners, say, among them, as

to which the process of shedding and the fact of eclipse come so

promptly into play? It has taken long ages of history, in the other

world, to produce them, and you ask yourself, with independent

curiosity, if they may really be thus extinguished in an hour. And if

they are not extinguished, into what pathless tracts of the native

atmosphere do they virtually, do they provisionally, and so all

undiscoverably, melt? Do they burrow underground, to await their day

again?—or in what strange secret places are they held in deposit and in

trust? The “American” identity that has profited by their sacrifice has

meanwhile acquired (in the happiest cases) all apparent confidence and

consistency; but may not the doubt remain of whether the extinction of

qualities ingrained in generations is to be taken for quite complete?

Isn’t it conceivable that, for something like a final efflorescence, the

business of slow comminglings and makings-over at last ended, they may

rise again to the surface, affirming their vitality and value and

playing their part? It would be for them, of course, in this event, to

attest that they had been worth waiting so long for; but the

speculation, at any rate, irresistibly forced upon us, is a sign of the

interest, in the American world, of what I have called the “ethnic”

outlook. The cauldron, for the great stew, has such circumference and

such depth that we can only deal here with ultimate syntheses, ultimate

combinations and possibilities. Yet I am well aware that if these vague

evocations of them, in their nebulous remoteness, may charm the

ingenuity of the student of the scene, there are matters of the

foreground that they have no call to supplant. Any temptation to let

them do so is meanwhile, no doubt, but a proof of that impulse

irresponsibly to escape from the formidable foreground which so often,

in the American world, lies in wait for the spirit of intellectual

dalliance.