IV

The huge jagged city, it must be nevertheless said, has always at the

worst, for propitiation, the resource of its easy reference to its

almost incomparable river. New York may indeed be jagged, in her long

leanness, where she lies looking at the sky in the manner of some

colossal hair-comb turned upward and so deprived of half its teeth that

the others, at their uneven intervals, count doubly as sharp spikes;

but, unmistakably, you can bear with some of her aspects and her airs

better when you have really taken in that reference—which I speak of as

easy because she has in this latter time begun to make it with an

appearance of some intention. She has come at last, far up on the West

side, into possession of her birthright, into the roused consciousness

that some possibility of a river-front may still remain to her; though,

obviously, a justified pride in this property has yet to await the birth

of a more responsible sense of style in her dealings with it, the dawn

of some adequate plan or controlling idea. Splendid the elements of

position, on the part of the new Riverside Drive (over the small

suburbanizing name of which, as at the effect of a second-rate shop-worn

article, we sigh as we pass); yet not less irresistible the pang of our

seeing it settle itself on meagre, bourgeois, happy-go-lucky lines. The

pity of this is sharp in proportion as the “chance” has been

magnificent, and the soreness of perception of what merely might have

been is as constant as the flippancy of the little vulgar “private

houses” or the big vulgar “apartment hotels” that are having their own

way, so unchallenged, with the whole question of composition and

picture. The fatal “tall” pecuniary enterprise rises where it will, in

the candid glee of new worlds to conquer; the intervals between take

whatever foolish little form they like; the sky-line, eternal victim of

the artless jumble, submits again to the type of the broken hair-comb

turned up; the streets that abut from the East condescend at their

corners to any crudity or poverty that may suit their convenience. And

all this in presence of an occasion for noble congruity such as one

scarce knows where to seek in the case of another great city.

A sense of the waste of criticism, however, a sense that is almost in

itself consoling, descends upon the fond critic after his vision has

fixed the scene awhile in this light of its lost accessibility to some

informed and benevolent despot, some power working in one great way and

so that the interest of beauty should have been better saved. Is not

criticism wasted, in other words, just by the reason of the constant

remembrance, on New York soil, that one is almost impudently cheated by

any part of the show that pretends to prolong its actuality or to rest

on its present basis? Since every part, however blazingly new, fails to

affect us as doing more than hold the ground for something else, some

conceit of the bigger dividend, that is still to come, so we may bind up

the æsthetic wound, I think, quite as promptly as we feel it open. The

particular ugliness, or combination of uglinesses, is no more final than

the particular felicity (since there are several even of these up and

down the town to be noted), and whatever crudely-extemporized look the

Riverside heights may wear to-day, the spectator of fifty years hence

will find his sorrow, if not his joy, in a different extemporization.

The whole thing is the vividest of lectures on the subject of

individualism, and on the strange truth, no doubt, that this principle

may in the field of art—at least if the art be architecture—often

conjure away just that mystery of distinction which it sometimes so

markedly promotes in the field of life. It is also quite as suggestive

perhaps on the ever-interesting question, for the artist, of the

entirely relative nature and value of “treatment.” A manner so right in

one relation may be so wrong in another, and a house-front so “amusing”

for its personal note, or its perversity, in a short perspective, may

amid larger elements merely dishonour the harmony. And yet why _should_

the charm ever fall out of the “personal,” which is so often the very

condition of the exquisite? Why should conformity and subordination,

that acceptance of control and assent to collectivism in the name of

which our age has seen such dreary things done, become on a given

occasion the one _not_ vulgar way of meeting a problem?

Inquiries these, evidently, that are answerable only in presence of the

particular cases provoking them; when indeed they may hold us as under a

spell. Endless for instance the æsthetic nobleness of such a question as

that of the authority with which the spreading Hudson, at the opening of

its gates, would have imposed on the constructive powers, if listened

to, some proportionate order—would, in other words, have admirably given

us collectivism at its highest. One has only to stand there and _see_—of

such value are lessons in “authority.” But the great vista of the stream

alone speaks of it—save in so far at least as the voice is shared, and

to so different, to so dreadful a tune, by the grossly-defacing railway

that clings to the bank. The authority of railways, in the United

States, sits enthroned as none other, and has always, of course, in any

vision of aspects, to be taken into account. Here, at any rate, it is

the rule that has prevailed; the other, the high interest of the

possible picture, is one that lapses; so that the cliffs overhang the

water, and at various points descend to it in green slopes and hollows

(where the landscape-gardener does what he can), only to find a wealth

of visible baseness installed there before them. That so familiar

circumstance, in America, of the completion of the good thing ironically

and, as would often seem for the time, insuperably baffled, meets here

one of its liveliest illustrations. It at all events helps to give

meanwhile the mingled pitch of the whole concert that Columbia College

(to sound the old and easier name) should have “moved up”—moved up

twice, if I am not mistaken—to adorn with an ampler presence this very

neighbourhood. It has taken New York to invent, for the thickening of

classic shades, the “moving” University; and does not that quite mark

the tune of the dance, of the local unwritten law that forbids almost

_any_ planted object to gather in a history where it stands, forbids in

fact any accumulation that may not be recorded in the mere bank-book?

This last became long ago _the_ historic page.

It is, however, just because the beauty of the Hudson seems to speak of

other matters, and because the sordid city has the honour, after all, of

sitting there at the Beautiful Gate, that I alluded above to her

profiting in a manner, even from the point of view of “taste,” by this

close and fortunate connection. The place puts on thus, not a little,

the likeness of a large loose family which has had queer adventures and

fallen into vulgar ways, but for which a glorious cousinship never quite

repudiated by the indifferent princely cousin—_bon prince_ in this as in

other matters—may still be pleaded. At the rate New York is growing, in

fine, she will more and more “command,” in familiar intercourse, the

great perspective of the River; so that here, a certain point reached,

her whole case must change and her general opportunity, swallowing up

the mainland, become a new question altogether. Let me hasten to add

that in the light of this opportunity even the most restless analyst can

but take the hopeful view of her. I fear I am finding too many personal

comparisons for her—than which indeed there can be no greater sign of a

confessed preoccupation; but she figures, once again, as an heir whose

expectations are so vast and so certain that no temporary sowing of wild

oats need be felt to endanger them. As soon as the place begins to

spread at ease real responsibility of all sorts will begin, and the

good-natured feeling must surely be that the civic conscience in her, at

such a stage, will fall into step. Of the spreading woods and waters

amid which the future in question appears still half to lurk, that

mainland region of the Bronx, vast above all in possibilities of Park,

out of which it already appears half to emerge, I unluckily failed of

occasion to take the adequate measure. But my confused impression was of

a kind of waiting abundance, an extraordinary quantity of “nature,” for

the reformed rake, that is the sobered heir, to play with. It is the

fashion in the East to speak of New York as poor of environment,

unpossessed of the agreeable, accessible countryside that crowns the

convenience not only of London and of Paris, but even, with more

humiliating promptitude, that of Boston, of Philadelphia, of Baltimore.

In spite, however, of the memory, from far back, of a hundred marginal

Mahattanese miseries, an immediate belt of the most sordid character, I

cannot but think of this invidious legend as attempting to prove too

much.

The countryside is there, on the most liberal of scales—it is the

townside, only, that, having the great waters and the greater distances

generally to deal with, has worn so rude and demoralized a face as to

frighten the country away. And if the townside is now making after the

countryside fast, as I say, and with a little less of the mere roughness

of the satyr pursuing the nymph, what finer warrant could be desired

than such felicities of position as those enjoyed, on the Riverside

heights, by the monument erected to the soldiers and sailors of the

Civil War and, even in a greater degree, by the tomb of General Grant?

These are verily monumental sites of the first order, and I confess

that, though introduced to them on a bleak winter morning, with no

ingratiation in any element, I felt the critical question, as to the

structures themselves, as to taste or intention, as to the amount of

involved or achieved consecration or profanation, carried off in the

general greatness of the effect. I shall in fact always remember that

icy hour, with the temple-crowned headlands, the wide Hudson vista white

with the cold, all nature armour-plated and grim, as an extraordinarily

strong and simple composition; made stern and kept simple as for some

visit of the God of Battles to his chosen. He might have been riding

there, on the north wind, to look down at them, and one caught for the

moment, the true hard light in which military greatness should be seen.

It shone over the miles of ice with its lustre of steel, and if what,

thus attested, it makes one think of was its incomparable,

indestructible “prestige,” so that association affected me both then and

on a later occasion as with a strange indefinable consequence—an

influence in which the æsthetic consideration, the artistic value of

either memorial, melted away and became irrelevant. For here, if ever,

was a great democratic demonstration caught in the fact, the nakedest

possible effort to strike the note of the august. The tomb of the single

hero in particular presents itself in a manner so opposed to our common

ideas of the impressive, to any past vision of sepulchral state, that we

can only wonder if a new kind and degree of solemnity may not have been

arrived at in this complete rupture with old consecrating forms.

The tabernacle of Grant’s ashes stands there by the pleasure-drive,

unguarded and unenclosed, the feature of the prospect and the property

of the people, as open as an hotel or a railway-station to any coming

and going, and as dedicated to the public use as builded things in

America (when not mere closed churches) only can be. Unmistakable its

air of having had, all consciously, from the first, to raise its head

and play its part without pomp and circumstance to “back” it, without

mystery or ceremony to protect it, without Church or State to intervene

on its behalf, with only its immediacy, its familiarity of interest to

circle it about, and only its proud outlook to preserve, so far as

possible, its character. The tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides is a

great national property, and the play of democratic manners sufficiently

surrounds it; but as compared to the small pavilion on the Riverside

bluff it is a holy of holies, a great temple jealously guarded and

formally approached. And yet one doesn’t conclude, strange to say, that

the Riverside pavilion fails of its expression a whit more than the

Paris dome; one perhaps even feels it triumph by its use of its want of

reserve as a very last word. The admonition of all of which possibly

is—I confess I but grope for it—that when there has been in such cases a

certain other happy combination, an original sincerity of intention, an

original propriety of site, and above all an original high value of name

and fame, something in this line really supreme, publicity, familiarity,

immediacy, as I have called them, _carried far enough_, may stalk in and

out of the shrine with their hands in their pockets and their hats on

their heads, and yet not dispel the Presence. The question at any rate

puts itself—as new questions in America are always putting themselves:

Do certain impressions there represent the absolute extinction of old

sensibilities, or do they represent only new forms of them? The inquiry

would be doubtless easier to answer if so many of these feelings were

not mainly known to us just _by_ their attendant forms. At this rate, or

on such a showing, in the United States, attendant forms being, in every

quarter, remarkably scarce, it would indeed seem that the sentiments

implied _are_ extinct; for it would be an abuse of ingenuity, I fear, to

try to read mere freshness of form into some of the more rank failures

of observance. There are failures of observance that stand, at the best,

for failures of sense—whereby, however, the question grows too great.

One must leave the tomb of Grant to its conditions and its future with

the simple note for it that if it be not in fact one of the most

effective of commemorations it is one of the most missed. On the whole I

distinctly “liked” it.

V

It is still vivid to me that, returning in the spring-time from a few

weeks in the Far West, I re-entered New York State with the absurdest

sense of meeting again a ripe old civilization and travelling through a

country that showed the mark of established manners. It will seem, I

fear, one’s perpetual refrain, but the moral was yet once more that

values of a certain order are, in such conditions, all relative, and

that, as some wants of the spirit _must_ somehow be met, one knocks

together any substitute that will fairly stay the appetite. We had

passed great smoky Buffalo in the raw vernal dawn—with a vision, for me,

of curiosity, character, charm, whatever it might be, too needfully

sacrificed, opportunity perhaps forever missed, yet at the same time a

vision in which the lost object failed to mock at me with the last

concentration of shape; and history, as we moved Eastward, appeared to

meet us, in the look of the land, in its more overwrought surface and

thicker detail, quite as if she had ever consciously declined to cross

the border and were aware, precisely, of the queer feast we should find

in her. The recognition, I profess, was a preposterous ecstasy: one

couldn’t have felt more if one had passed into the presence of some

seated, placid, rich-voiced gentlewoman after leaving that of an honest

but boisterous hoyden. It was doubtless a matter only of degrees and

shades, but never was such a pointing of the lesson that a sign of any

sort may count double if it be but artfully placed. I spent that day,

literally, in the company of the rich-voiced gentlewoman, making my

profit of it even in spite of a second privation, the doom I was under

of having only, all wistfully, all ruefully, to avert my lips from the

quaint silver bowl, as I here quite definitely figured it, in which she

offered me the entertainment of antique Albany. At antique Albany, to a

certainty, the mature matron involved in my metaphor would have put on a

particular grace, and as our train crossed the river for further

progress I almost seemed to see her stand at some gable-window of Dutch

association, one of the two or three impressed there on my infantile

imagination, to ask me why then I had come so far at all.

I could have replied but in troubled tones, and I looked at the rest of

the scene for some time, no doubt, as through the glaze of all but

filial tears. Thus it was, possibly, that I saw the River shine, from

that moment on, as a great romantic stream, such as could throw not a

little of its glamour, for the mood of that particular hour, over the

city at its mouth. I had not even known, in my untravelled state, that

we were to “strike” it on our way from Chicago, so that it represented,

all that afternoon, so much beauty thrown in, so much benefit beyond the

bargain—the so hard bargain, for the traveller, of the American

railway-journey at its best. That ordeal was in any case at its best

here, and the perpetually interesting river kept its course, by my right

elbow, with such splendid consistency that, as I recall the impression,

I repent a little of having just now reflected with acrimony on the cost

of the obtrusion of track and stations to the Riverside view. One must

of course choose between dispensing with the ugly presence and enjoying

the scenery by the aid of the same—which but means, really, that to use

the train at all had been to put one’s self, for any proper justice to

the scenery, in a false position. That, however, takes us too far back,

and one can only save one’s dignity by laying all such blames on our

detestable age. A decent respect for the Hudson would confine us to the

use of the boat—all the more that American river-steamers have had, from

the earliest time, for the true _raffiné_, their peculiar note of

romance. A possible commerce, on the other hand, with one’s time—which

is always also the time of so many other busy people—has long since made

mincemeat of the rights of contemplation; rights as reduced, in the

United States, to-day, and by quite the same argument, as those of the

noble savage whom we have banished to his narrowing reservation. Letting

that pass, at all events, I still remember that I was able to put, from

the car-window, as many questions to the scene as it could have answered

in the time even had its face been clearer to read.

Its face was veiled, for the most part, in a mist of premature spring

heat, an atmosphere draping it indeed in luminous mystery, hanging it

about with sun-shot silver and minimizing any happy detail, any element

of the definite, from which the romantic effect might here and there

have gained an accent. There was not an accent in the picture from the

beginning of the run to Albany to the end—for which thank goodness! one

is tempted to say on remembering how often, over the land in general,

the accents are wrong. Yet if the romantic effect as we know it

elsewhere mostly depends on them, why _should_ that glamour have so

shimmered before me in their absence?—how should the picture have

managed to be a constant combination of felicities? Was it just

_because_ the felicities were all vaguenesses, and the “beauties,” even

the most celebrated, all blurs?—was it perchance on that very account

that I could meet my wonder so promptly with the inference that what I

had in my eyes on so magnificent a scale was simply, was famously,

“style”? I was landed by that conclusion in the odd further proposition

that style could then exist without accents—a quandary soon after to be

quenched, however, in the mere blinding radiance of a visit to West

Point. I was to make that memorable pilgrimage a fortnight later—and I

was to find my question, when it in fact took place, shivered by it to

mere silver atoms. The very powers of the air seemed to have taken the

case in hand and positively to have been interested in making it

transcend all argument. Our Sunday of mid-May, wet and windy, let loose,

over the vast stage, the whole procession of storm-effects; the raw

green of wooded heights and hollows was only everywhere rain-brightened,

the weather playing over it all day as with some great grey water-colour

brush. The essential character of West Point and its native nobleness of

position can have been but intensified, I think, by this artful process;

yet what was mainly unmistakable was the fact again of the suppression

of detail as in the positive interest of the grand style. One had

therefore only to take detail as another name for accent, the accent

that might prove compromising, in order to see it made good that style

_could_ do without them, and that the grand style in fact almost always

must. How on this occasion the trick was played is more than I shall

attempt to say; it is enough to have been conscious of our being, from

hour to hour, literally bathed in that high element, with the very face

of nature washed, so to speak, the more clearly to express and utter it.

Such accordingly is the strong silver light, all simplifying and

ennobling, in which I see West Point; see it as a cluster of high

promontories, of the last classic elegance, overhanging vast receding

reaches of river, mountain-guarded and dim, which took their place in

the geography of the ideal, in the long perspective of the poetry of

association, rather than in those of the State of New York. It was as if

the genius of the scene had said: “No, you _shan’t_ have accent, because

accent is, at the best, local and special, and might here by some

perversity—how do I know after all?—interfere. I want you to have

something unforgettable, and therefore you shall have _type_—yes,

absolutely have type, and even tone, without accent; an impossibility,

you may hitherto have supposed, but which you have only to look about

you now really to see expressed. And type and tone of the very finest

and rarest; type and tone good enough for Claude or Turner, if they

could have walked by these rivers instead of by their thin rivers of

France and Italy; type and tone, in short, that gather in shy detail

under wings as wide as those with which a motherly hen covers her

endangered brood. So there you are—deprived of all ‘accent’ as a peg for

criticism, and reduced thereby, you see, to asking me no more

questions.” I was able so to take home, I may add, this formula of the

matter, that even the interesting facts of the School of the Soldier

which have carried the name of the place about the world almost put on

the shyness, the air of conscious evasion and escape, noted in the above

allocution: they struck me as forsaking the foreground of the picture.

It was part of the play again, no doubt, of the grey water-colour brush:

there was to be no consent of the elements, that day, to anything but a

generalized elegance—in which effect certainly the clustered, the

scattered Academy played, on its high green stage, its part. But, of all

things in the world, it massed, to my vision, more mildly than I had

somehow expected; and I take that for a feature, precisely, of the pure

poetry of the impression. It lurked there with grace, it insisted

without swagger—and I could have hailed it just for this reason indeed

as a presence of the last distinction. It is doubtless too much to say,

in fine, that the Institution, at West Point, “suffers” comparatively,

for vulgar individual emphasis, from the overwhelming liberality of its

setting—and I perhaps chanced to see it in the very conditions that most

invest it with poetry. The fact remains that, both as to essence and as

to quantity, its prose seemed washed away, and I shall recall it in the

future much less as the sternest, the world over, of all the seats of

Discipline, than as some great Corot-composition of young, vague,

wandering figures in splendidly-classic shades.