III

New York really, I think, is all formidable foreground; or, if it be

not, there is more than enough of this pressure of the present and the

immediate to cut out the close sketcher’s work for him. These things are

a thick growth all round him, and when I recall the intensity of the

material picture in the dense Yiddish quarter, for instance, I wonder at

its not having forestalled, on my page, mere musings and, as they will

doubtless be called, moonings. There abides with me, ineffaceably, the

memory of a summer evening spent there by invitation of a high public

functionary domiciled on the spot—to the extreme enhancement of the

romantic interest his visitor found him foredoomed to inspire—who was to

prove one of the most liberal of hosts and most luminous of guides. I

can scarce help it if this brilliant personality, on that occasion the

very medium itself through which the whole spectacle showed, so colours

my impressions that if I speak, by intention, of the facts that played

into them I may really but reflect the rich talk and the general

privilege of the hour. That accident moreover must take its place simply

as the highest value and the strongest note in the total show—so much

did it testify to the quality of appealing, surrounding life. The sense

of this quality was already strong in my drive, with a companion,

through the long, warm June twilight, from a comparatively conventional

neighbourhood; it was the sense, after all, of a great swarming, a

swarming that had begun to thicken, infinitely, as soon as we had

crossed to the East side and long before we had got to Rutgers Street.

There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got a

start, and the scene here bristled, at every step, with the signs and

sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds.

That it has burst all bounds in New York, almost any combination of

figures or of objects taken at hazard sufficiently proclaims; but I

remember how the rising waters, on this summer night, rose, to the

imagination, even above the housetops and seemed to sound their murmur

to the pale distant stars. It was as if we had been thus, in the

crowded, hustled roadway, where multiplication, multiplication of

everything, was the dominant note, at the bottom of some vast sallow

aquarium in which innumerable fish, of over-developed proboscis, were to

bump together, for ever, amid heaped spoils of the sea.

The children swarmed above all—here was multiplication with a vengeance;

and the number of very old persons, of either sex, was almost equally

remarkable; the very old persons being in equal vague occupation of the

doorstep, pavement, curbstone, gutter, roadway, and every one alike

using the street for overflow. As overflow, in the whole quarter, is the

main fact of life—I was to learn later on that, with the exception of

some shy corner of Asia, no district in the world known to the

statistician has so many inhabitants to the yard—the scene hummed with

the human presence beyond any I had ever faced in quest even of

refreshment; producing part of the impression, moreover, no doubt, as a

direct consequence of the intensity of the Jewish aspect. This, I think,

makes the individual Jew more of a concentrated person, savingly

possessed of everything that is in him, than any other human, noted at

random—or is it simply, rather, that the unsurpassed strength of the

race permits of the chopping into myriads of fine fragments without loss

of race-quality? There are small strange animals, known to natural

history, snakes or worms, I believe, who, when cut into pieces, wriggle

away contentedly and live in the snippet as completely as in the whole.

So the denizens of the New York Ghetto, heaped as thick as the splinters

on the table of a glass-blower, had each, like the fine glass particle,

his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter of Israel. This

diffused intensity, as I have called it, causes any array of Jews to

resemble (if I may be allowed another image) some long nocturnal street

where every window in every house shows a maintained light. The advanced

age of so many of the figures, the ubiquity of the children, carried out

in fact this analogy; they were all there for race, and not, as it were,

for reason: that excess of lurid meaning, in some of the old men’s and

old women’s faces in particular, would have been absurd, in the

conditions, as a really directed attention—it could only be the gathered

past of Israel mechanically pushing through. The way, at the same time,

this chapter of history did, all that evening, seem to push, was a

matter that made the “ethnic” apparition again sit like a skeleton at

the feast. It was fairly as if I could see the spectre grin while the

talk of the hour gave me, across the board, facts and figures, chapter

and verse, for the extent of the Hebrew conquest of New York. With a

reverence for intellect, one should doubtless have drunk in tribute to

an intellectual people; but I remember being at no time more conscious

of that merely portentous element, in the aspects of American growth,

which reduces to inanity any marked dismay quite as much as any high

elation. The portent is one of too many—you always come back, as I have

hinted, with your easier gasp, to _that_: it will be time enough to sigh

or to shout when the relation of the particular appearance to all the

other relations shall have cleared itself up. Phantasmagoric for me,

accordingly, in a high degree, are the interesting hours I here glance

at content to remain—setting in this respect, I recognize, an excellent

example to all the rest of the New York phantasmagoria. Let me speak of

the remainder only as phantasmagoric too, so that I may both the more

kindly recall it and the sooner have done with it.

I have not done, however, with the impression of that large evening in

the Ghetto; there was too much in the vision, and it has left too much

the sense of a rare experience. For what did it all really come to but

that one had seen with one’s eyes the New Jerusalem on earth? What less

than that could it all have been, in its far-spreading light and its

celestial serenity of multiplication? There it was, there it is, and

when I think of the dark, foul, stifling Ghettos of other remembered

cities, I shall think by the same stroke of the city of redemption, and

evoke in particular the rich Rutgers Street perspective—rich, so

peculiarly, for the eye, in that complexity of fire-escapes with which

each house-front bristles and which gives the whole vista so modernized

and appointed a look. Omnipresent in the “poor” regions, this neat

applied machinery has, for the stranger, a common side with the electric

light and the telephone, suggests the distance achieved from the old

Jerusalem. (These frontal iron ladders and platforms, by the way, so

numerous throughout New York, strike more New York notes than can be

parenthetically named—and among them perhaps most sharply the note of

the ease with which, in the terrible town, on opportunity,

“architecture” goes by the board; but the appearance to which they often

most conduce is that of the spaciously organized cage for the nimbler

class of animals in some great zoological garden. This general analogy

is irresistible—it seems to offer, in each district, a little world of

bars and perches and swings for human squirrels and monkeys. The very

name of architecture perishes, for the fire-escapes look like abashed

afterthoughts, staircases and communications forgotten in the

construction; but the inhabitants lead, like the squirrels and monkeys,

all the merrier life.) It was while I hung over the prospect from the

windows of my friend, however, the presiding genius of the district, and

it was while, at a later hour, I proceeded in his company, and in that

of a trio of contributive fellow-pilgrims, from one “characteristic”

place of public entertainment to another: it was during this rich

climax, I say, that the city of redemption was least to be taken for

anything less than it was. The windows, while we sat at meat, looked out

on a swarming little square in which an ant-like population darted to

and fro; the square consisted in part of a “district” public garden, or

public lounge rather, one of those small backwaters or refuges, artfully

economized for rest, here and there, in the very heart of the New York

whirlpool, and which spoke louder than anything else of a Jerusalem

disinfected. What spoke loudest, no doubt, was the great overtowering

School which formed a main boundary and in the shadow of which we all

comparatively crouched.

But the School must not lead me on just yet—so colossally has its

presence still to loom for us; that presence which profits so, for

predominance, in America, by the failure of concurrent and competitive

presences, the failure of any others looming at all on the same scale

save that of Business, those in particular of a visible Church, a

visible State, a visible Society, a visible Past; those of the many

visibilities, in short, that warmly cumber the ground in older

countries. Yet it also spoke loud that my friend was quartered, for the

interest of the thing (from his so interesting point of view), in a

“tenement-house”; the New Jerusalem would so have triumphed, had it

triumphed nowhere else, in the fact that this charming little structure

_could_ be ranged, on the wonderful little square, under that invidious

head. On my asking to what latent vice it owed its stigma, I was asked

in return if it didn’t sufficiently pay for its name by harbouring some

five-and-twenty families. But this, exactly, was the way it

testified—this circumstance of the simultaneous enjoyment by

five-and-twenty families, on “tenement” lines, of conditions so little

sordid, so highly “evolved.” I remember the evolved fire-proof

staircase, a thing of scientific surfaces, impenetrable to the microbe,

and above all plated, against side friction, with white marble of a

goodly grain. The white marble was surely the New Jerusalem note, and we

followed that note, up and down the district, the rest of the evening,

through more happy changes than I may take time to count. What struck me

in the flaring streets (over and beyond the everywhere insistent,

defiant, unhumorous, exotic face) was the blaze of the shops addressed

to the New Jerusalem wants and the splendour with which these were taken

for granted; the only thing indeed a little ambiguous was just this look

of the trap too brilliantly, too candidly baited for the wary side of

Israel itself. It is not _for_ Israel, in general, that Israel so

artfully shines—yet its being moved to do so, at last, in that luxurious

style, might be precisely the grand side of the city of redemption. Who

can ever tell, moreover, in any conditions and in presence of any

apparent anomaly, what the genius of Israel may, or may not, really be

“up to”?

The grateful way to take it all, at any rate, was with the sense of its

coming back again to the inveterate rise, in the American air, of every

value, and especially of the lower ones, those most subject to

multiplication; such a wealth of meaning did this keep appearing to pour

into the value and function of the country at large. Importances are all

strikingly shifted and reconstituted, in the United States, for the

visitor attuned, from far back, to “European” importances; but I think

of no other moment of my total impression as so sharply working over my

own benighted vision of them. The scale, in this light of the New

Jerusalem, seemed completely rearranged; or, to put it more simply, the

wants, the gratifications, the aspirations of the “poor,” as expressed

in the shops (which were the shops of the “poor”), denoted a new style

of poverty; and this new style of poverty, from street to street, stuck

out of the possible purchasers, one’s jostling fellow-pedestrians, and

made them, to every man and woman, individual throbs in the larger

harmony. One can speak only of what one has seen, and there were grosser

elements of the sordid and the squalid that I doubtless never saw. That,

with a good deal of observation and of curiosity, I should have failed

of this, the country over, affected me as by itself something of an

indication. To miss that part of the spectacle, or to know it only by

its having so unfamiliar a pitch, was an indication that made up for a

great many others. It is when this one in particular is forced home to

you—this immense, vivid _general_ lift of poverty and general

appreciation of the living unit’s paying property in himself—that the

picture seems most to clear and the way to jubilation most to open. For

it meets you there, at every turn, as the result most definitely

attested. You are as constantly reminded, no doubt, that these rises in

enjoyed value shrink and dwindle under the icy breath of Trusts and the

weight of the new remorseless monopolies that operate as no madnesses of

ancient personal power thrilling us on the historic page ever operated;

the living unit’s property in himself becoming more and more merely such

a property as may consist with a relation to properties overwhelmingly

greater and that allow the asking of no questions and the making, for

co-existence with them, of no conditions. But that, in the fortunate

phrase, is another story, and will be altogether, evidently, a new and

different drama. There is such a thing, in the United States, it is

hence to be inferred, as freedom to grow up to be blighted, and it may

be the only freedom in store for the smaller fry of future generations.

If it is accordingly of the smaller fry I speak, and of how large they

massed on that evening of endless admonitions, this will be because I

caught them thus in their comparative humility and at an early stage of

their American growth. The life-thread has, I suppose, to be of a

certain thickness for the great shears of Fate to feel for it. Put it,

at the worst, that the Ogres were to devour them, they were but the more

certainly to fatten into food for the Ogres.

Their dream, at all events, as I noted it, was meanwhile sweet and

undisguised—nowhere sweeter than in the half-dozen picked beer-houses

and cafés in which our ingenuous _enquête_, that of my fellow-pilgrims

and I, wound up. These establishments had each been selected for its

playing off some facet of the jewel, and they wondrously testified, by

their range and their individual colour, to the spread of that lustre.

It was a pious rosary of which I should like to tell each bead, but I

must let the general sense of the adventure serve. Our successive

stations were in no case of the “seamy” order, an inquiry into seaminess

having been unanimously pronounced futile, but each had its separate

social connotation, and it was for the number and variety of these

connotations, and their individual plenitude and prosperity, to set one

thinking. Truly the Yiddish world was a vast world, with its own deeps

and complexities, and what struck one above all was that it sat there at

its cups (and in no instance vulgarly the worse for them) with a

sublimity of good conscience that took away the breath, a protrusion of

elbow never aggressive, but absolutely proof against jostling. It was

the incurable man of letters under the skin of one of the party who

gasped, I confess; for it was in the light of letters, that is in the

light of our language as literature has hitherto known it, that one

stared at this all-unconscious impudence of the agency of future ravage.

The man of letters, in the United States, has his own difficulties to

face and his own current to stem—for dealing with which his liveliest

inspiration may be, I think, that they are still very much his own, even

in an Americanized world, and that more than elsewhere they press him to

intimate communion with his honour. For that honour, the honour that

sits astride of the consecrated English tradition, to his mind, quite as

old knighthood astride of its caparisoned charger, the dragon most

rousing, over the land, the proper spirit of St. George, is just this

immensity of the alien presence climbing higher and higher, climbing

itself into the very light of publicity.

I scarce know why, but I saw it that evening as in some dim dawn of that

promise to its own consciousness, and perhaps this was precisely what

made it a little exasperating. Under the impression of the mere mob the

question doesn’t come up, but in these haunts of comparative civility we

saw the mob sifted and strained, and the exasperation was the sharper,

no doubt, because what the process had left most visible was just the

various possibilities of the waiting spring of intelligence. Such

elements constituted the germ of a “public,” and it was impossible

(possessed of a sensibility worth speaking of) to be exposed to them

without feeling how new a thing under the sun the resulting public would

be. That was where one’s “lettered” anguish came in—in the turn of one’s

eye from face to face for some betrayal of a prehensile hook for the

linguistic tradition as one had known it. Each warm lighted and supplied

circle, each group of served tables and smoked pipes and fostered

decencies and unprecedented accents, beneath the extravagant lamps, took

on thus, for the brooding critic, a likeness to that terrible modernized

and civilized room in the Tower of London, haunted by the shade of Guy

Fawkes, which had more than once formed part of the scene of the

critic’s taking tea there. In this chamber of the present urbanities the

wretched man had been stretched on the rack, and the critic’s ear (how

else should it have been a critic’s?) could still always catch, in

pauses of talk, the faint groan of his ghost. Just so the East side

cafés—and increasingly as their place in the scale was higher—showed to

my inner sense, beneath their bedizenment, as torture-rooms of the

living idiom; the piteous gasp of which at the portent of lacerations to

come could reach me in any drop of the surrounding Accent of the Future.

The accent of the very ultimate future, in the States, may be destined

to become the most beautiful on the globe and the very music of humanity

(here the “ethnic” synthesis shrouds itself thicker than ever); but

whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for

English—in any sense for which there is an existing literary measure.