I make that point, for what it is worth, only to remind myself of
another occasion on which the romantic note sounded for me with the last
intensity, and yet on which the picture swarmed with accents—as, absent
or present, I must again call them—that contributed alike to its
interest and to its dignity. The proof was complete, on this second
Sunday, with the glow of early summer already in possession, that
affirmed detail was not always affirmed infelicity—since the scene here
bristled with detail (and detail of the importance that frankly
_constitutes_ accent) only to the enhancement of its charm. It was a
matter once more of hanging over the Hudson on the side opposite West
Point, but further down; the situation was founded, as at West Point, on
the presence of the great feature and on the consequent general lift of
foreground and distance alike, and yet infinitely sweet was it to gather
that style, in such conditions and for the success of such effects, had
not really to depend on mere kind vaguenesses, on any anxious
deprecation of distinctness. There was no vagueness now; a wealth of
distinctness, in the splendid light, met the eyes—but with the very
result of showing them how happily it could play. What it came back to
was that the accents, in the delightful old pillared and porticoed house
that crowned the cliff and commanded the stream, were as right as they
were numerous; so that there immediately followed again on this
observation a lively recognition of the ground of the rightness. To
wonder what this was could be but to see, straightway, that, though many
reasons had worked together for them, mere time had done more than all;
that beneficence of time enjoying in general, in the United States, so
little even of the chance that so admirably justifies itself, for the
most part, when interference happens to have spared it. Cases of this
rare mercy yet exist, as I had had occasion to note, and their
consequent appeal to the touched sense within us comes, as I have also
hinted, with a force out of all proportion, comes with a kind of
accepted insolence of authority. The things that have lasted, in short,
whatever they may be, “succeed” as no newness, try as it will, succeeds,
inasmuch as their success is a created interest.
There we catch the golden truth which so much of the American world
strikes us as positively organized to gainsay, the truth that production
takes time, and that the production of interest, in particular, takes
_most_ time. Desperate again and again the ingenuity of the offered, the
obtruded substitute, and pathetic in many an instance its confessed
failure; this remark being meanwhile relevant to the fact that my
charming old historic house of the golden Sunday put me off, among its
great trees, its goodly gardens, its acquired signs and gathered
memories, with no substitute whatever, even the most specious, but just
paid cash down, so to speak, ripe ringing gold, over the counter, for
all the attention it invited. It had character, as one might say, and
character is scarce less precious on the part of the homes of men in a
raw medium than on the part of responsible persons at a difficult
crisis. This virtue was there within and without and on every face; but
perhaps nowhere so present, I thought, as in the ideal refuge for summer
days formed by the wide north porch, if porch that disposition may be
called—happiest disposition of the old American country-house—which sets
tall columns in a row, under a pediment suitably severe, to present them
as the “making” of a high, deep gallery. I know not what dignity of old
afternoons suffused with what languor seems to me always, under the
murmur of American trees and by the lap of American streams, to abide in
these mild shades; there are combinations with depths of congruity
beyond the plummet, it would seem, even of the most restless of
analysts, and rather than try to say why my whole impression here melted
into the general iridescence of a past of Indian summers hanging about
mild ghosts half asleep, in hammocks, over still milder novels, I would
renounce altogether the art of refining. For the iridescence consists,
in this connection, of a shimmer of association that still more refuses
to be reduced to terms; some sense of legend, of aboriginal mystery,
with a still earlier past for its dim background and the insistent idea
of the River as above all romantic for its warrant. Helplessly analyzed,
perhaps, this amounts to no more than the very childish experience of a
galleried house or two round about which the views and the trees and the
peaches and the pony seemed prodigious, and to the remembrance of which
the wonder of Rip Van Winkle and that of the “Hudson River School” of
landscape art were, a little later on, to contribute their glamour.
If Rip Van Winkle had been really at the bottom of it all, nothing could
have furthered the whole case more, on the occasion I speak of, than the
happy nearness of the home of Washington Irving, the impression of which
I was thus able, in the course of an hour, to work in—with the effect of
intensifying more than I can say the old-time charm and the general
legendary fusion. These are beautiful, delicate, modest matters, and how
can one touch them with a light enough hand? How can I give the
comparatively coarse reasons for my finding at Sunnyside, which
contrives, by some grace of its own, to be at once all ensconced and
embowered in relation to the world, and all frank and uplifted in
relation to the river, a perfect treasure of mild moralities? The
highway, the old State road to Albany, bristling now with the
cloud-compelling motor, passes at the head of a deep, long lane,
winding, embanked, overarched, such an old-world lane as one scarce ever
meets in America; but if you embrace this chance to plunge away to the
left you come out for your reward into the quite indefinable air of the
little American literary past. The place is inevitably, to-day, but a
qualified Sleepy Hollow—the Sleepy Hollow of the author’s charming
imagination was, as I take it, off somewhere in the hills, or in some
dreamland of old autumns, happily unprofanable now; for “modernity,”
with its terrible power of working its will, of abounding in its sense,
of gilding its toy—modernity, with its pockets full of money and its
conscience full of virtue, its heart really full of tenderness, has
seated itself there under pretext of guarding the shrine. What has
happened, in a word, is very much what has happened in the case of other
shy retreats of anchorites doomed to celebrity—the primitive cell has
seen itself encompassed, in time, by a temple of many chambers, all
dedicated to the history of the hermit. The cell is still there at
Sunnyside, and there is even yet so much charm that one doesn’t attempt
to say where the parts of it, all kept together in a rich conciliatory
way, begin or end—though indeed, I hasten to add, the identity of the
original modest house, the shrine within the gilded shell, has been
religiously preserved.
One has, in fact, I think, no quarrel whatever with the amplified state
of the place, for it is the manner and the effect of this amplification
that enable us to read into the scene its very most interesting message.
The “little” American literary past, I just now said—using that
word—(whatever the real size of the subject) because the caressing
diminutive, at Sunnyside, is what rises of itself to the lips; the small
uncommodious study, the limited library, the “dear” old portrait-prints
of the first half of the century—very dear to-day when properly signed
and properly sallow—these things, with the beauty of the site, with the
sense that the man of letters of the unimproved age, the age of
processes still comparatively slow, could have wanted no deeper, softer
dell for mulling material over, represent the conditions that encounter
now on the spot the sharp reflection of our own increase of arrangement
and loss of leisure. This is the admirable interest of the exhibition of
which Wolfert’s Roost had been, a hundred years before the date of
Irving’s purchase, the rudimentary principle—that it throws the facts of
our earlier “intellectual activity” into a vague golden perspective, a
haze as of some unbroken spell of the same Indian summer I a moment ago
had occasion to help myself out with; a fond appearance than which
nothing could minister more to envy. If we envy the spinners of prose
and tellers of tales to whom our American air anciently either
administered or refused sustenance, this is all, and quite the best
thing, it would seem, that we need do for them: it exhausts, or rather
it forestalls, the futilities of discrimination. Strictly critical,
mooning about Wolfert’s Roost of a summer Sunday, I defy even the
hungriest of analysts to be: his predecessors, the whole connected
company, profit so there, to his rueful vision, by the splendour of
their possession of better conditions than his. It has taken _our_ ugly
era to thrust in the railroad at the foot of the slope, among the
masking trees; the railroad that is part, exactly, of the pomp and
circumstance, the quickened pace, the heightened fever, the narrowed
margin expressed within the very frame of the present picture, as I say,
and all in the perfect good faith of collateral piety. I had hoped not
to have to name the railroad—it seems so to give away my case. There was
no railroad, however, till long after Irving’s settlement—he survived
the railroad but by a few years, and my case is simply that, disengaging
_his_ Sunnyside from its beautiful extensions and arriving thus at the
sense of his easy elements, easy for everything but rushing about and
being rushed at, the sense of his “command” of the admirable river and
the admirable country, his command of all the mildness of his life, of
his pleasant powers and his ample hours, of his friends and his
contemporaries and his fame and his honour and his temper and, above
all, of his delightful fund of reminiscence and material, I seemed to
hear, in the summer sounds and in the very urbanity of my entertainers,
the last faint echo of a felicity forever gone. That is the true voice
of such places, and not the imputed challenge to the chronicler or the
critic.
IV
NEW YORK
SOCIAL NOTES
I
Were I not afraid of appearing to strike to excess the so-called
pessimistic note, I should really make much of the interesting,
appealing, touching vision of waste—I know not how else to name it—that
flung its odd melancholy mantle even over one’s walks through the parts
of the town supposedly noblest and fairest. For it proceeded, the
vision, I think, from a source or two still deeper than the most
obvious, the constant shocked sense of houses and rows, of recent
expensive construction (that had cost thought as well as money, that had
taken birth presumably as a _serious_ demonstration, and that were
thereby just beginning to live into history) marked for removal, for
extinction, in their prime, and awaiting it with their handsome faces so
fresh and yet so wan and so anxious. The most tragic element in the
French Revolution, and thence surely the most tragic in human annals,
was the so frequent case of the very young sent to the scaffold—the
youths and maidens, all bewildered and stainless, lately born into a
world decked for them socially with flowers, and for whom, none the less
suddenly, the horror of horrors uprose. They were literally the victims
I thought of, absurd as it may seem, under the shock in question; in
spite of which, however, even this is not what I mean by my impression
of the squandered effort. I have had occasion to speak—and one can only
speak with sympathy—of the really human, the communicative, side of that
vivid show of a society trying to build itself, with every elaboration,
into some coherent sense _of_ itself, and literally putting forth
interrogative feelers, as it goes, into the ambient air; literally
reaching out (to the charmed beholder, say) for some measure and some
test of its success. This effect of certain of the manifestations of
wealth in New York is, so far as I know, unique; nowhere else does
pecuniary power so beat its wings in the void, and so look round it for
the charity of some hint as to the possible awkwardness or possible
grace of its motion, some sign of whether it be flying, for good taste,
too high or too low. In the other American cities, on the one hand, the
flights are as yet less numerous—though already promising no small
diversion; and amid the older congregations of men, in the
proportionately rich cities of Europe, on the other hand, good taste is
present, for reference and comparison, in a hundred embodied and
consecrated forms. Which is why, to repeat, I found myself recognizing
in the New York predicament a particular character and a particular
pathos. The whole costly up-town demonstration was a record, in the last
analysis, of individual loneliness; whence came, precisely, its
insistent testimony to waste—waste of the still wider sort than the mere
game of rebuilding.
That quite different admonition of the general European spectacle, the
effect, in the picture of things, as of a large, consummate economy,
traditionally practised, springs from the fact that old societies, old,
and even new, aristocracies, are arranged exactly to supply functions,
forms, the whole element of custom and perpetuity, to any massiveness of
private ease, however great. Massive private ease attended with no force
of assertion beyond the hour is an anomaly rarely encountered,
therefore, in countries where the social arrangements strike one as
undertaking, by their very nature and pretension, to make the future as
interesting as the past. These conditions, the romantic ones for the
picture-seeker, are generally menaced, one is reminded; they tend to
alter everywhere, partly by the very force of the American example, and
it may be said that in France, for instance, they have done nothing but
alter for a hundred years. It none the less remains true that for once
that we ask ourselves in “Europe” what is going to become of a given
piece of property, whether family “situation,” or else palace, castle,
picture, _parure_, other attribute of wealth, we indulge in the question
twenty times in the United States—so scant an engagement does the
visible order strike us as taking to provide for it. _There_ comes in
the note of loneliness on the part of these loose values—deep as the
look in the eyes of dogs who plead against a change of masters. The
visible order among ourselves undertakes at the most that they shall
change hands, and the meagreness and indignity of this doom affect them
as a betrayal just in proportion as they have grown great. Uppermost
Fifth Avenue, for example, is lined with dwellings the very intention
both of the spread and of the finish of which would seem to be to imply
that they are “entailed” as majestically as red tape can entail them.
But we know how little they enjoy any such courtesy or security; and,
but for our tender heart and our charming imagination, we would blight
them in their bloom with our restless analysis. “It’s all very well for
you to look as if, since you’ve had no past, you’re going in, as the
next best thing, for a magnificent compensatory future. What are you
going to make your future _of_, for all your airs, we want to know?—what
elements of a future, as futures have gone in the great world, are at
all assured to you? Do what you will, you sit here only in the lurid
light of ‘business,’ and you know, without our reminding you, what
guarantees, what majestic continuity and heredity, that represents.
Where are not only your eldest son and _his_ eldest son, those prime
indispensables for any real projection of your estate, unable as they
would be to get rid of you even if they should wish; but where even is
the old family stocking, properly stuffed and hanging so heavy as not to
stir, some dreadful day, in the cold breath of Wall Street? No, what you
are reduced to for ‘importance’ is the present, pure and simple,
squaring itself between an absent future and an absent past as solidly
as it can. You overdo it for what you are—you overdo it still more for
what you may be; and don’t pretend, above all, with the object-lesson
supplied you, close at hand, by the queer case of Newport, don’t
pretend, we say, not to know what we mean.”
“We say,” I put it, but the point is that we say nothing, and it is that
very small matter of Newport exactly that keeps us compassionately
silent. The present state of Newport shall be a chapter by itself, which
I long to take in hand, but which must wait its turn; so that I may
mention it here only for the supreme support it gives to this reading of
the conditions of New York opulence. The show of the case to-day—oh, so
vividly and pathetically!—is that New York and other opulence, creating
the place, for a series of years, as part of the effort of “American
society” to find out, by experiment, what it would be at, now has no
further use for it—has only learned from it, at an immense expenditure,
how to get rid of an illusion. “We’ve found out, after all (since it’s a
question of what we would be ‘at’), that we wouldn’t be at Newport—if we
can possibly be anywhere else; which, with our means, we indubitably
_can_ be: so that we leave poor dear Newport just ruefully to show it.”
That remark is written now over the face of the scene, and I can think
nowhere of a mistake confessed to so promptly, yet in terms so
exquisite, so charmingly cynical; the terms of beautiful houses and
delicate grounds closed, condemned and forsaken, yet so “kept up,” at
the same time, as to cover the retreat of their projectors. The very air
and light, soft and discreet, seem to speak, in tactful fashion, for
people who would be embarrassed to be there—as if it might shame them to
see it proved against them that they could once have been so artless and
so bourgeois. The point is that they have learned not to be by the
rather terrible process of exhausting the list of mistakes. Newport, for
them—of for us others—is only one of these mistakes; and we feel no
confidence that the pompous New York houses, most of them so flagrantly
tentative, and tentative only, bristling with friezes and pinnacles, but
discernibly deficient in reasons, shall not collectively form another.
It is the hard fate of new aristocracies that the element of error, with
them, has to be contemporary—not relegated to the dimness of the past,
but receiving the full modern glare, a light fatal to the fond theory
that the best society, everywhere, has grown, in all sorts of ways, in
spite of itself. We see it in New York trying, trying its very hardest,
to grow, not yet knowing (by so many indications) what to grow _on_.
There comes back to me again and again, for many reasons, a particular
impression of this interesting struggle in the void—a constituted image
of the upper social organism floundering there all helplessly, more or
less floated by its immense good-will and the splendour of its immediate
environment, but betrayed by its paucity of real resource. The occasion
I allude to was simply a dinner-party, of the most genial intention, but
at which the note of high ornament, of the general uplifted situation,
was so consistently struck that it presented itself, on the page of New
York life, as a purple patch without a possible context—as consciously,
almost painfully, unaccompanied by passages in anything like the same
key. The scene of our feast was a palace and the perfection of setting
and service absolute; the ladies, beautiful, gracious and glittering
with gems, were in tiaras and a semblance of court-trains, a sort of
prescribed official magnificence; but it was impossible not to ask one’s
self with what, in the wide American frame, such great matters might be
supposed to consort or to rhyme. The material pitch was so high that it
carried with it really no social sequence, no application, and that, as
a tribute to the ideal, to the exquisite, it wanted company, support,
some sort of consecration. The difficulty, the irony, of the hour was
that so many of the implications of completeness, that is, of a
sustaining social order, were absent. There was nothing for us to do at
eleven o’clock—or for the ladies at least—but to scatter and go to bed.
There was nothing, as in London or in Paris, to go “on” to; the going
“on” is, for the New York aspiration, always the stumbling-block. A
great court-function would alone have met the strain, met the terms of
the case—would alone properly have crowned the hour. When I speak of the
terms of the case I must remind myself indeed that they were not all of
one complexion; which is but another sign, however, of the inevitable
jaggedness of the purple patch in great commercial democracies. The high
colour required could be drawn in abundance from the ladies, but in a
very minor degree, one easily perceived, from the men. The impression
was singular, but it was there: had there been a court-function the
ladies must have gone on to it alone, trusting to have the proper
partners and mates supplied them on the premises—supplied, say, with the
checks for recovery of their cloaks. The high pitch, all the exalted
reference, was of the palatial house, the would-be harmonious women, the
tiaras and the trains; it was not of the amiable gentlemen, delightful
in their way, in whose so often quaint presence, yet without whose
immediate aid, the effort of American society to arrive at the “best”
consciousness still goes forward.
This failure of the sexes to keep step socially is to be noted, in the
United States, at every turn, and is perhaps more suggestive of
interesting “drama,” as I have already hinted, than anything else in the
country. But it illustrates further that foredoomed _grope_ of wealth,
in the conquest of the amenities—the strange necessity under which the
social interest labours of finding out for itself, as a preliminary,
what civilization really _is_. If the men are not to be taken as
contributing to it, but only the women, what new case is _that_, under
the sun, and under what strange aggravations of difficulty therefore is
the problem not presented? We should call any such treatment of a
different order of question the empirical treatment—the limitations and
aberrations of which crop up, for the restless analyst, in the most
illustrative way. Its presence is felt unmistakably, for instance, in
the general extravagant insistence on the Opera, which plays its part as
the great vessel of social salvation, the comprehensive substitute for
all other conceivable vessels; the _whole_ social consciousness thus
clambering into it, under stress, as the whole community crams into the
other public receptacles, the desperate cars of the Subway or the vast
elevators of the tall buildings. The Opera, indeed, as New York enjoys
it, one promptly perceives, is worthy, musically and picturesquely, of
its immense function; the effect of it is splendid, but one has none the
less the oddest sense of hearing it, as an institution, groan and creak,
positively almost split and crack, with the extra weight thrown upon
it—the weight that in worlds otherwise arranged is artfully scattered,
distributed over all the ground. In default of a court-function our
ladies of the tiaras and court-trains might have gone on to the
opera-function, these occasions offering the only approach to the
implication of the tiara known, so to speak, to the American law. Yet
even here there would have been no one for them, in congruity and
consistency, to curtsey to—their only possible course becoming thus, it
would seem, to make obeisance, clingingly, to each other. This truth
points again the effect of a picture poor in the male presence; for to
what male presence of native growth is it thinkable that the wearer of
an American tiara _should_ curtsey? Such a vision gives the measure of
the degree in which we see the social empiricism in question putting,
perforce, the cart before the horse. In worlds otherwise arranged,
besides there being always plenty of subjects for genuflection, the
occasion itself, with its character fully turned on, produces the tiara.
In New York this symbol has, by an arduous extension of its virtue, to
produce the occasion.