I found it interesting to note, furthermore, that the very Clubs, on
whose behalf, if anywhere, expert tradition might have operated,
betrayed with a _bonhomie_ touching in the midst of their magnificence
the empirical character. Was not their admirable, their unique,
hospitality, for that matter, an empirical note—a departure from the
consecrated collective egoism governing such institutions in worlds, as
I have said, otherwise arranged? Let the hospitality in this case at
least stand for the prospective discovery of a new and better law, under
which the consecrated egoism itself will have become the “provincial”
sign. Endless, at all events, the power of one or two of these splendid
structures to testify to the state of manners—of manners
undiscourageably seeking the superior stable equilibrium. There had
remained with me as illuminating, from years before, the confidential
word of a friend on whom, after a long absence from New York, the
privilege of one of the largest clubs had been conferred. “The place is
a palace, for scale and decoration, but there is only one kind of
letter-paper.” There would be more kinds of letter-paper now, I take
it—though the American club struck me everywhere, oddly, considering the
busy people who employ it, as much less an institution for attending to
one’s correspondence than others I had had knowledge of; generally
destitute, in fact, of copious and various appliances for that purpose.
There is such a thing as the imagination of the writing-table, and I
nowhere, save in a few private houses, came upon its fruits; to which I
must add that this is the one connection in which the provision for ease
has not an extraordinary amplitude, an amplitude unequalled anywhere
else. One emphatic reservation, throughout the country, the restored
absentee finds himself continually making, but the universal custom of
the house with almost no one of its indoor parts distinguishable from
any other is an affliction against which he has to learn betimes to
brace himself. This diffused vagueness of separation between apartments,
between hall and room, between one room and another, between the one you
are in and the one you are not in, between place of passage and place of
privacy, is a provocation to despair which the public institution shares
impartially with the luxurious “home.” To the spirit attuned to a
different practice these dispositions can only appear a strange
perversity, an extravagant aberration of taste; but I may here touch on
them scarce further than to mark their value for the characterization of
manners.
They testify at every turn, then, to those of the American people, to
the prevailing “conception of life”; they correspond, within doors, to
the as inveterate suppression of almost every outward exclusory
arrangement. The instinct is throughout, as we catch it at play, that of
minimizing, for any “interior,” the guilt or odium or responsibility,
whatever these may appear, of its _being_ an interior. The custom rages
like a conspiracy for nipping the interior in the bud, for denying its
right to exist, for ignoring and defeating it in every possible way, for
wiping out successively each sign by which it may be known from an
exterior. The effacement of the difference has been marvellously,
triumphantly brought about; and, with all the ingenuity of young, fresh,
frolicsome architecture aiding and abetting, has been made to flourish,
alike in the small structure and the great, as the very law of the
structural fact. Thus we have the law fulfilled that every part of every
house shall be, as nearly as may be, visible, visitable, penetrable, not
only from every other part, but from as many parts of as many other
houses as possible, if they only be near enough. Thus we see
systematized the indefinite extension of all spaces and the definite
merging of all functions; the enlargement of every opening, the
exaggeration of every passage, the substitution of gaping arches and far
perspectives and resounding voids for enclosing walls, for practicable
doors, for controllable windows, for all the rest of the essence of the
room-character, that room-suggestion which is so indispensable not only
to occupation and concentration, but to conversation itself, to the play
of the social relation at any other pitch than the pitch of a shriek or
a shout. This comprehensive canon has so succeeded in imposing itself
that it strikes you as reflecting inordinately, as positively serving
you up for convenient inspection, under a clear glass cover, the social
tone that has dictated it. But I must confine myself to recording, for
the moment, that it takes a whole new discipline to put the visitor at
his ease in so merciless a medium; he finds himself looking round for a
background or a limit, some localizing fact or two, in the interest of
talk, of that “good” talk which always falters before the complete
proscription of privacy. He sees only doorless apertures, vainly
festooned, which decline to tell him where he is, which make him still a
homeless wanderer, which show him other apertures, corridors,
staircases, yawning, expanding, ascending, descending, and all as for
the purpose of giving his presence “away,” of reminding him that what he
says must be said for the house. He is beguiled in a measure by reading
into these phenomena, ever so sharply, the reason of many another
impression; he is beguiled by remembering how many of the things said in
America _are_ said for the house; so that if all that he wants is to
keep catching the finer harmony of effect and cause, of explanation and
implication, the cup of his perception is full to overflowing.
That satisfaction does represent, certainly, much of his quest; all the
more that what he misses, in the place—the comfort and support, for
instance, of windows, porches, verandahs, lawns, gardens, “grounds,”
that, by not taking the whole world into their confidence, have not the
whole world’s confidence to take in return—ranges itself for him in that
large mass of American idiosyncrasy which contains, unmistakably, a
precious principle of future reaction. The desire to rake and be raked
has doubtless, he makes out, a long day before it still; but there are
too many reasons why it should not be the last word of _any_ social
evolution. The social idea has too inevitably secrets in store, quite
other constructive principles, quite other refinements on the idea of
intercourse, with which it must eventually reckon. It will be certain at
a given moment, I think, to head in a different direction altogether;
though obviously many other remarkable things, changes of ideal, of
habit, of key, will have to take place first. The conception of the
home, and _a fortiori_ of the club, as a combination of the hall of
echoes and the toy “transparency” held against the light, will meanwhile
sufficiently prevail to have made my reference to it not quite futile.
Yet I must after all remember that the reservation on the ground of
comfort to which I just alluded applies with its smallest force to the
interchangeability of club compartments, to the omnipresence of the
majestic open arch in club conditions. Such conditions more or less
prescribe that feature, and criticism begins only when private houses
emulate the form of clubs. What I had mainly in mind was another of
these so inexhaustible values of my subject; with which the question of
rigour of comfort has nothing to do. I cherish certain remembered
aspects for their general vivid eloquence—for the sake of my impression
of the type of great generous club-establishments in which the
“empiricism” of that already-observed idea of the conquest of splendour
could richly and irresponsibly flower. It is of extreme interest to be
reminded, at many a turn of such an exhibition, that it takes an endless
amount of history to make even a little tradition, and an endless amount
of tradition to make even a little taste, and an endless amount of
taste, by the same token, to make even a little tranquillity.
Tranquillity results largely from taste tactfully applied, taste lighted
above all by experience and possessed of a clue for its labyrinth. There
is no such clue, for club-felicity, as some view of congruities and
harmonies, completeness of correspondence between aspects and uses. A
sense for that completeness is a thing of slow growth, one of the
flowers of tradition precisely; of the good conservative tradition that
walks apart from the extravagant use of money and the unregulated appeal
to “style”—passes in fact, at its best, quite on the other side of the
way. This discrimination occurs when the ground has the good fortune to
be already held by some definite, some transmitted conception of the
adornments and enhancements that consort, and that do not consort, with
the presence, the habits, the tone, of lounging, gossiping, smoking,
newspaper-reading, bridge-playing, cocktail-imbibing men. The
club-developments of New York read here and there the lesson of the
strange deserts in which the appeal to style may lose itself, may wildly
and wantonly stray, without a certain light of the fine old gentlemanly
prejudice to guide it.