IV

I must positively get into the gate of the Park, however—even at the

risk of appearing to have marched round through Georgia to do so. I

found myself, in May and June, getting into it whenever I could, and if

I spoke just now of the loud and inexpensive charm (inexpensive in the

æsthetic sense) of the precinct of approach to it, that must positively

have been because the Park diffuses its grace. One grasped at every

pretext for finding it inordinately amiable, and nothing was more

noteworthy than that one felt, in doing so, how this was the only way to

play the game in fairness. The perception comes quickly, in New York, of

the singular and beautiful but almost crushing mission that has been

laid, as an effect of time, upon this limited territory, which has risen

to the occasion, from the first, so consistently and bravely. It is a

case, distinctly, in which appreciation and gratitude for a public

function admirably performed are twice the duty, on the visitor’s part,

that they may be in other such cases. We may even say, putting it simply

and strongly, that if he doesn’t here, in his thought, keep patting the

Park on the back, he is guilty not alone of a failure of natural

tenderness, but of a real deviation from social morality. For this mere

narrow oblong, much _too_ narrow and very much too short, had directly

prescribed to it, from its origin, to “do,” officially, on behalf of the

City, the publicly amiable, and _all_ the publicly amiable—all there

could be any question of in the conditions: incurring thus a heavier

charge, I respectfully submit, than one has ever before seen so

gallantly carried. Such places, the municipally-instituted

pleasure-grounds of the greater and the smaller cities, abound about the

world and everywhere, no doubt, agreeably enough play their part; but is

the part anywhere else as heroically played in proportion to the

difficulty? The difficulty in New York, _that_ is the point for the

restless analyst; conscious as he is that other cities even in spite of

themselves lighten the strain and beguile the task—a burden which here

on the contrary makes every inch of its weight felt. This means a good

deal, for the space comprised in the original New York scheme represents

in truth a wonderful economy and intensity of effort. It would go hard

with us not to satisfy ourselves, in other quarters (and it is of the

political and commercial capitals we speak), of some such amount of

“general” outside amenity, of charm in the town at large, as may here

and there, even at widely-scattered points, relieve the o’erfraught

heart. The sense of the picturesque often finds its account in strange

and unlikely matters, but has none the less a way of finding it, and so,

in the coming and going, takes the chance. But the New York problem has

always resided in the absence of any chance to take, however one might

come and go—come and go, that is, before reaching the Park.

To the Park, accordingly, and to the Park only, hitherto, the æsthetic

appetite has had to address itself, and the place has therefore borne

the brunt of many a peremptory call, acting out year after year the

character of the cheerful, capable, bustling, even if overworked,

hostess of the one inn, somewhere, who has to take all the travel, who

is often at her wits’ end to know how to deal with it, but who, none the

less, has, for the honour of the house, never once failed of

hospitality. That is how we see Central Park, utterly overdone by the

“run” on its resources, yet also never having had to make an excuse.

When once we have taken in thus its remarkable little history, there is

no endearment of appreciation that we are not ready to lay, as a

tribute, on its breast; with the interesting effect, besides, of our

recognizing in this light how the place has had to be, in detail and

feature, exactly what it is. It has had to have something for everybody,

since everybody arrives famished; it has had to multiply itself to

extravagance, to pathetic little efforts of exaggeration and deception,

to be, breathlessly, everywhere and everything at once, and produce on

the spot the particular romantic object demanded, lake or river or

cataract, wild woodland or teeming garden, boundless vista or bosky

nook, noble eminence or smiling valley. It has had to have feature at

any price, the clamour of its customers being inevitably _for_ feature;

which accounts, as we forgivingly see, for the general rather eruptive

and agitated effect, the effect of those old quaint prints which give in

a single view the classic, gothic and other architectural wonders of the

world. That is its sole defect—its being inevitably too self-conscious,

being afraid to be just vague and frank and quiet. I should compare her

again—and the propriety is proved by this instinctively feminine

pronoun—to an actress in a company destitute, through an epidemic or

some other stress, of all other feminine talent; so that she assumes on

successive nights the most dissimilar parts and ranges in the course of

a week from the tragedy queen to the singing chambermaid. That valour by

itself wins the public and brings down the house—it being really a

marvel that she should in no part fail of a hit. Which is what I mean,

in short, by the sweet _ingratiation_ of the Park. You are perfectly

aware, as you hang about her in May and June, that you _have_, as a

travelled person, beheld more remarkable scenery and communed with

nature in ampler or fairer forms; but it is quite equally definite to

you that none of those adventures have counted more to you for

experience, for stirred sensibility—inasmuch as you can be, at the best,

and in the showiest countries, only thrilled by the pastoral or the

awful, and as to pass, in New York, from the discipline of the streets

to this so different many-smiling presence is to be thrilled at every

turn.

The strange thing, moreover, is that the crowd, in the happiest seasons,

at favouring hours, the polyglot Hebraic crowd of pedestrians in

particular, has, for what it is, none but the mildest action on the

nerves. The nerves are too grateful, the intention of beauty everywhere

too insistent; it “places” the superfluous figures with an art of its

own, even when placing them in heavy masses, and they become for you

practically as your fellow-spectators of the theatre, whose proximity

you take for granted, while the little overworked _cabotine_ we have

hypothesized, the darling of the public, is vocalizing or capering. I

recall as singularly contributive in all this sense the impression of a

splendid Sunday afternoon of early summer, when, during a couple of

hours spent in the mingled medium, the variety of accents with which the

air swarmed seemed to make it a question whether the Park itself or its

visitors were most polyglot. The condensed geographical range, the

number of kinds of scenery in a given space, competed with the number of

languages heard, and the whole impression was of one’s having had but to

turn in from the Plaza to make, in the most agreeable manner possible,

the tour of the little globe. And that, frankly, I think, was the best

of all impressions—was seeing New York at its best; for if ever one

could feel at one’s ease about the “social question,” it would be

surely, somehow, on such an occasion. The number of persons in

circulation was enormous—so great that the question of how they had got

there, from their distances, and would get away again, in the so

formidable public conveyances, loomed, in the background, rather like a

skeleton at the feast; but the general note was thereby, intensely, the

“popular,” and the brilliancy of the show proportionately striking. That

is the great and only brilliancy worth speaking of, to my sense, in the

general American scene—the air of hard prosperity, the ruthlessly

pushed-up and promoted look worn by men, women and children alike. I

remember taking that appearance, of the hour or two, for a climax to the

sense that had most remained with me after a considerable previous

moving about over the land, the sense of the small quantity of mere

human sordidness of state to be observed.

One is liable to observe it in _any_ best of all possible worlds, and I

had not, in truth, gone out of my way either to avoid it or to look for

it; only I had met it enough, in other climes, without doing so, and

had, to be veracious, not absolutely and utterly missed it in the

American. Images of confirmed (though, strangely, of active, occupied

and above all “sensitive”) squalor had I encountered in New Hampshire

hills; also, below the Southern line, certain special, certain awful

examples, in Black and White alike, of the last crudity of condition.

These spots on the picture had, however, lost themselves in the general

attestation of the truth most forced home, the vision of the country as,

supremely, a field for the unhampered revel, the unchecked _essor_,

material and moral, of the “common man” and the common woman. How

splendidly they were making it all answer, for the most part, or to the

extent of the so rare public collapse of the individual, had been an

observation confirmed for me by a rapid journey to the Pacific coast and

back; yet I had doubtless not before seen it so answer as in this very

concrete case of the swarming New York afternoon. It was little to say,

in that particular light, that such grossnesses as want or tatters or

gin, as the unwashed face or the ill-shod, and still less the unshod,

foot, or the mendicant hand, became strange, unhappy, far-off things—it

would even have been an insult to allude to them or to be explicitly

complacent about their absence. The case was, unmistakably, universally,

of the common, the very common man, the very common woman and the very

common child; but all enjoying what I have called their promotion, their

rise in the social scale, with that absence of acknowledging flutter,

that serenity of assurance, which marks, for the impressed class, the

school-boy or the school-girl who is accustomed, and who always quite

expects, to “move up.” The children at play, more particularly the

little girls, formed the characters, as it were, in which the story was

written largest; frisking about over the greenswards, grouping together

in the vistas, with an effect of the exquisite in attire, of delicacies

of dress and personal “keep-up,” as through the shimmer of silk, the

gloss of beribboned hair, the gleam of cared-for teeth, the pride of

varnished shoe, that might well have created a doubt as to their

“popular” affiliation. This affiliation was yet established by

sufficiencies of context, and might well have been, for that matter, by

every accompanying vocal or linguistic note, the swarm of queer sounds,

mostly not to be interpreted, that circled round their pretty heads as

if they had been tamers of odd, outlandish, perching little birds. They

fell moreover into the vast category of those ubiquitous children of the

public schools who occupy everywhere, in the United States, so much of

the forefront of the stage, and at the sight of whose so remarkably clad

and shod condition the brooding analyst, with the social question never,

after all, too much in abeyance, could clap, in private, the most

reactionary hands.

The brooding analyst had in fact, from the first of his return,

recognized in the mere detail of the testimony everywhere offered to the

high pitch of the American shoe-industry, a lively incentive to cheerful

views; the population showing so promptly, in this connection, as the

best equipped in the world. The impression at first had been

irresistible: two industries, at the most, seemed to rule the American

scene. The dentist and the shoedealer divided it between them; to that

degree, positively, that in public places, in the perpetual electric

cars which seem to one’s desperation at times (so condemned is one to

live in them) all there measurably _is_ of the American scene, almost

any other typical, any other personal fact might be neglected, for

consideration, in the interest of the presentable foot and the

far-shining dental gold. It was a world in which every one, without

exception, no matter how “low” in the social scale, wore the best and

the newest, the neatest and the smartest, boots; to be added to which

(always for the brooding analyst) was the fascination, so to speak, of

noting how much more than any other single thing this may do for a

possibly compromised appearance. And if my claim for the interest of

this exhibition seems excessive, I refer the objector without hesitation

to a course of equivalent observation in other countries, taking an

equally miscellaneous show for his basis. Nothing was more curious than

to trace, on a great ferry-boat, for instance, the effect of letting

one’s eyes work up, as in speculation, from the lower to the higher

extremities of some seated row of one’s fellow passengers. The testimony

of the lower might preponderantly have been, always, to their

comparative conquest of affluence and ease; but this presumption gave

way, at successive points, with the mounting vision, and was apt to

break down entirely under the evidence of face and head. When I say

“head,” I mean more particularly, where the men were, concerned, hat;

this feature of the equipment being almost always at pains, and with the

oddest, most inveterate perversity, to defeat and discredit whatever

might be best in the others. Such are the problems in which a restless

analysis may land us.

Why should the general “feeling” for the boot, in the United States, be

so mature, so evolved, and the feeling for the hat lag at such a

distance behind it? The standard as to that article of dress struck me

as, everywhere, of the lowest; governed by no consensus of view, custom

or instinct, no sense of its “vital importance” in the manly aspect. And

yet the wearer of any loose improvisation in the way of a head-cover

will testify as frankly, in his degree, to the extreme consideration

given by the community at large, as I have intimated, to the dental

question. The terms in which this evidence is presented are often, among

the people, strikingly artless, but they are a marked advance on the

omnipresent opposite signs, those of a systematic detachment from the

chair of anguish, with which any promiscuous “European” exhibition is

apt to bristle. I remember to have heard it remarked by a French friend,

of a young woman who had returned to her native land after some years of

domestic service in America, that she had acquired there, with other

advantages, _le sourire Californien_, and the “Californian” smile,

indeed, expressed, more or less copiously, in undissimulated cubes of

the precious metal, plays between lips that render scant other tribute

to civilization. The greater interest, in this connection, however, is

that impression of the state and appearance of the teeth viewed among

the “refined” as supremely important, which the restored absentee, long

surrounded elsewhere with the strangest cynicisms of indifference on

this article, makes the subject of one of his very first notes. Every

one, in “society,” has good, handsome, pretty, has above all cherished

and tended, teeth; so that the offered spectacle, frequent in other

societies, of strange irregularities, protrusions, deficiencies, fangs

and tusks and cavities, is quite refreshingly and consolingly absent.

The consequences of care and forethought, from an early age, thus write

themselves on the facial page distinctly and happily, and it is not too

much to say that the total show is, among American aspects, cumulatively

charming. One sees it sometimes balance, for charm, against a greater

number of less fortunate items, in that totality, than one would quite

know how to begin estimating.

But I have strayed again far from my starting-point and have again, I

fear, succumbed to the danger of embroidering my small original

proposition with too many, and scarce larger, derivatives. I left the

Plaza, I left the Park steeped in the rose-colour of such a brightness

of Sunday and of summer as had given me, on a couple of occasions,

exactly what I desired—a simplified attention, namely, and the power to

rest for the time in the appearance that the awful aliens were

flourishing there in perfections of costume and contentment. One had

only to take them in as more completely, conveniently and expensively

_endimanchés_ than one had ever, on the whole, seen any other people, in

order to feel that one was calling down upon all the elements involved

the benediction of the future—and calling it down most of all on one’s

embraced permission not to worry any more. It was by way of not

worrying, accordingly, that I found in another presentment of the

general scene, chanced upon at a subsequent hour, all sorts of

interesting and harmonious suggestions. These adventures of the critical

spirit were such mere mild walks and talks as I almost blush to offer,

on this reduced scale, as matter of history; but I draw courage from the

remembrance that history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate

crudity of what “happens,” but the much finer complexity of what we read

into it and think of in connection with it. If a walk across the Park,

with a responsive friend, late on the golden afternoon of a warm

week-day, and if a consequent desultory stroll, for speculation’s sake,

through certain northward and eastward streets and avenues, of an

identity a little vague to me now, save as a blur of builded evidence as

to proprietary incomes—if such an incident ministered, on the spot, to a

boundless evocation, it then became history of a splendid order: though

I perhaps must add that it became so for the two participants alone, and

with an effect after all not easy to communicate. The season was over,

the recipients of income had retired for the summer, and the large clear

vistas were peopled mainly with that conscious hush and that spectral

animation characteristic of places kept, as with all command of time and

space, for the indifferent, the all but insolent, absentee. It was a

vast, costly, empty newness, redeemed by the rare quiet and coloured by

the pretty light, and I scare know, I confess, why it should have had

anything murmurous or solicitous to say at all, why its eloquence was

not over when it had thus defined itself as intensely rich and intensely

modern.

If I have spoken, with some emphasis, of what it “evoked,” I might

easily be left, it would appear, with that emphasis on my hands—did I

not catch, indeed, for my explanation, the very key to the anomaly.

Ransacking my brain for the sources of the impressiveness, I see them,

of a sudden, locked up in that word “modern”; the mystery clears in the

light of the fact that one was perhaps, for that half-hour, more

intimately than ever before in touch with the sense of the term. It was

exactly because I seemed, with the ear of the spirit, to hear the whole

quarter bid, as with one penetrating voice, for the boon of the future,

for some guarantee, or even mere hinted promise, of history and

opportunity, that the attitude affected me as the last revelation of

modernity. What made the revelation was the collective sharpness, so to

speak, of this vocal note, offering any price, offering everything,

wanting only to outbid and prevail, at the great auction of life. “See

how ready we are”—one caught the tone: “ready to buy, to pay, to

promise; ready to place, to honour, our purchase. We have everything,

don’t you see? every capacity and appetite, every advantage of education

and every susceptibility of sense; no ‘tip’ in the world, none that our

time is capable of giving, has been lost on us: so that all we now

desire is what you, Mr. Auctioneer, have to dispose of, the great

‘going’ chance of a time to come.” That was the sound unprecedentedly

evoked for me, and in a form that made sound somehow overflow into

sight. It was as if, in their high gallery, the bidders, New Yorkers

every one, were before one’s eyes; pressing to the front, hanging over

the balustrade, holding out clamorous importunate hands. It was not,

certainly, for general style, pride and colour, a Paul Veronese company;

even the women, in spite of pearls and brocade and golden hair, failed

of that type, and still more inevitably the men, without doublet,

mantle, ruff or sword; the nearest approach might have been in the great

hounds and the little blackamoors. But my vision had a kind of analogy;

for what were the Venetians, after all, but the children of a Republic

and of trade? It was, however, mainly, no doubt, an affair of the

supporting marble terrace, the platform of my crowd, with as many

columns of onyx and curtains of velvet as any great picture could need.

About these there would be no difficulty whatever; though this luxury of

vision of the matter had meanwhile no excuse but the fact that the hour

was charming, the waning light still lucid, the air admirable, the

neighbourhood a great empty stage, expensively, extravagantly set, and

the detail in frontage and cornice and architrave, in every feature of

every edifice, as sharp as the uttered words of the plea I have just

imagined.

V

The American air, I take advantage of this connection to remember, lends

a felicity to all the exactitudes of architecture and sculpture, favours

sharp effects, disengages differences, preserves lights, defines

projected shadows. Sculpture, in it, never either loses a value or

conceals a loss, and it is everywhere full of help to discriminated

masses. This remark was to be emphatically made, I found myself

observing, in presence of so distinct an appeal to high clearness as the

great Palladian pile just erected by Messrs. Tiffany on one of the upper

corners of Fifth Avenue, where it presents itself to the friendly sky

with a great nobleness of white marble. One is so thankful to it, I

recognize, for not having twenty-five stories, which it might easily

have had, I suppose, in the wantonness of wealth or of greed, that one

gives it a double greeting, rejoicing to excess perhaps at its merely

remaining, with the three fine arched and columned stages above its high

basement, within the conditions of sociable symmetry. One may break

one’s heart, certainly, over its only being, for “interest,” a great

miscellaneous shop—if one has any heart left in New York for such

adventures. One may also reflect, if any similar spring of reflection

will still serve, on its being, to the very great limitation of its

dignity, but a more or less pious _pastiche_ or reproduction, the copy

of a model that sits where Venetian water-steps keep—or used to

keep!—vulgar invasion at bay. But I hasten to add that one will do these

things only at the cost of not “putting in” wherever one can the patch

of optimism, the sigh of relief, the glow of satisfaction, or whatever

else the pardonably factitious emotion may be called—which in New York

is very bad economy. Look for interest where you may, cultivate a

working felicity, press the spring hard, and you will see that, to

whatever air Palladian piles may have been native, they can nowhere tell

their great cold calculated story, in measured chapter and verse, better

than to the strong sea-light of New York. This medium has the abundance

of some ample childless mother who consoles herself for her sterility by

an unbridled course of adoption—as I seemed again to make out in

presence of the tiers of white marble that are now on their way to

replace the granitic mass of the old Reservoir, _ultima Thule_ of the

northward walk of one’s early time.

The reservoir of learning here taking form above great terraces—which my

mind’s eye makes as great as it would like—lifts, once more, from the

heart the weight of the “tall” building it apparently doesn’t propose to

become. I could admire, in the unfinished state of the work, but the

lower courses of this inestimable structure, the Public Library that is

to gather into rich alliance and splendid ease the great minor Libraries

of the town; it was enough for my delight, however, that the conditions

engage for a covering of the earth rather than an invasion of the air—of

so supreme an effect, at the pitch things have reached, is this single

element of a generous area. It offers the best of reasons for speaking

of the project as inestimable. Any building that, being beautiful,

presents itself as seated rather than as standing, can do with your

imagination what it will; you ask it no question, you give it a free

field, content only if it will sit and sit and sit. And if you

interrogate your joy, in the connection, you will find it largely

founded, I think, on all the implications thus conveyed of a

proportionately smaller quantity of the great religion of the Elevator.

The lateral development of great buildings is as yet, in the United

States, but an opportunity for the legs, is in fact almost their sole

opportunity—a circumstance that, taken alone, should eloquently plead;

but it has another blest value, for the imagination, for the nerves, as

a check on the constant obsession of one’s living, of every one’s

living, by the packed and hoisted basket. The sempiternal lift, for

one’s comings and goings, affects one at last as an almost intolerable

symbol of the herded and driven state and of that malady of preference

for gregarious ways, of insistence on gregarious ways only, by which the

people about one seem ridden. To wait, perpetually, in a human bunch, in

order to be hustled, under military drill, the imperative order to “step

lively,” into some tight mechanic receptacle, fearfully and wonderfully

working, is conceivable, no doubt, as a sad liability of our nature, but

represents surely, when cherished and sacrificed to, a strange

perversion of sympathies and ideals. Anything that breaks the gregarious

spell, that relieves one of one’s share, however insignificant, of the

abject collective consciousness of being pushed and pressed in, with

something that one’s shoulders and one’s heels must dodge at their

peril, something that slides or slams or bangs, operating, in your rear,

as ruthlessly as the guillotine—anything that performs this office puts

a price on the lonely sweetness of a step or two taken by one’s self, of

deviating into some sense of independent motive power, of climbing even

some grass-grown staircase, with a dream perhaps of the thrill of

fellow-feeling _then_ taking, then finding, place—something like

Robinson Crusoe’s famous thrill before Friday’s footprint in the sand.

However these things might be, I recall further, as an incident of that

hour of “evocation,” the goodly glow, under this same illumination, of

an immense red building, off in the clear north-east quarter, which had

hung back, with all success, from the perpendicular form, and which

actually covered ground with its extensions of base, its wide

terrestrial wings. It had, I remember, in the early evening light, a

homely kindness of diffused red brick, and to make out then that it was

a great exemplary Hospital, one of the many marvels of New York in this

general order, was to admire the exquisite art with which, in such a

medium, it had so managed to invest itself with stillness. It was as

quiet there, on its ample interspace, as if the clamorous city,

roundabout, as if the passion of the Elevated and of the Elevator in

especial, were forever at rest and no one were stepping lively for miles

and miles away; so that visibly, it had a spell to cast and a character

to declare—things I was won over, on the spot, to desire a nearer view

of. Fortune presently favoured this purpose, and almost my last

impression of New York was gathered, on a very hot June morning, in the

long, cool corridors of the Presbyterian Hospital, and in those “halls

of pain,” the high, quiet, active wards, silvery-dim with their

whiteness and their shade, where the genius of the terrible city seemed

to filter in with its energy sifted and softened, with its huge

good-nature refined. There were reasons beyond the scope of these

remarks for the interest of that hour, but it is at least within the

scope that I recall noting there, all responsively, as not before, that

if the _direct_ pressure of New York is too often to ends that strike us

as vulgar, the indirect is capable, and perhaps to an unlimited degree,

of these lurking effects of delicacy. The immediate expression is the

expression of violence, but you may find there is something left,

something kept back for you, if that has not from the first fatally

deafened you. It carries with it an after-sense which put on for me,

under several happy intimations, the image of some garden of the finest

flowers—or of such as might be on the way to become the finest—masked by

an enormous bristling hedge of defensive and aggressive vegetation,

lacerating, defiant, not to be touched without blood. One saw the garden

itself, behind its hedge and approachable only by those in the

secret—one divined it to contain treasures of delicacy, many of them

perhaps still to be developed, but attesting the possibilities of the

soil. My Presbyterian Hospital was somehow in the garden, just where the

soil, the very human soil itself, was richest, and—though this may

appear an odd tribute to an institution founded on the principle of

instant decision and action—it affected me, amid its summer airs and its

boundless, soundless business, as surpassingly delicate. _There_, if

nowhere else, was adjustment of tone; there was the note of mildness and

the sense of manners; under the impression of which I am not sure of not

having made up my mind that, were I merely alone and disconcerted,

merely unprepared and unwarned, in the vast, dreadful place, as must

happen to so many a helpless mortal, I should positively desire or

“elect,” as they say, to become the victim of some such mischance as

would put me into relation again, the ambulance or the police aiding,

with these precious saving presences. They might re-establish for me,

before the final extinction or dismissal, some belief in manners and in

tone.

Was it in the garden also, as I say, that the Metropolitan Museum had

meanwhile struck me as standing?—the impression of a quite other hazard

of _flânerie_ this, and one of those memories, once more, that I find

myself standing off from, as under the shadow of their too numerous

suggestion. That institution _is_, decidedly, to-day, part of the inner

New York harmony that I have described as a touched after-sense; so that

if there were, scattered about the place, elements prompting rich, if

vague, evocations, this was recognizably one of the spots over which

such elements would have most freedom to play. The original Museum was a

thing of the far past; hadn’t I the vision of it, from ancient days,

installed, stately though scrappy, in a large eccentric house in West

Fourteenth Street, a house the prior period, even the early, impressive

construction of which one recalled from days still more ancient, days so

far away that to be able to travel back to them was almost as good, or

as bad, as being a centenarian? This superfluous consciousness of the

original seat of the Museum, of where and what it had been, was one of

those terrible traps to memory, about the town, which baited themselves

with the cheese of association, so to speak, in order to exhibit one

afterwards as “caught,” or, otherwise expressed, as old; such being the

convicted state of the unfortunate who knows the _whole_ of so many of

his stories. The case is never really disguisable; we get off perhaps

when we only know the ends of things, but beyond that our historic sense

betrays us. We have known the beginnings, we have been present, in the

various connections, at the birth, the life and the death, and it is

wonderful how traceably, in such a place as New York, careers of

importance may run their course and great institutions, while you are

just watching, rise, prosper and fall. I had had my shudder, in that

same Fourteenth Street, for the complete disappearance of a large

church, as massive as brown stone could make it, at the engaging

construction of which one’s tender years had “assisted” (it exactly

faced the parental home, and nefarious, perilous play was found possible

in the works), but which, after passing from youth to middle age and

from middle age to antiquity, has vanished as utterly as the Assyrian

Empire.

So, it was to be noted, had the parental home, and so the first home of

the Museum, by what I made out, beyond Sixth Avenue—after which, for the

last-named, had there not been a second seat, long since superseded too,

a more prolonged _étape_ on the glorious road? This also gave out a

shimmer from the middle time, but with the present favouring stage of

the journey the glorious road seems to stretch away. It is a palace of

art, truly, that sits there on the edge of the Park, rearing itself with

a radiance, yet offering you expanses to tread; but I found it invite me

to a matter of much more interest than any mere judging of its

dispositions. It spoke with a hundred voices of that huge process of

historic waste that the place in general keeps putting before you; but

showing it in a light that drew out the harshness or the sadness, the

pang, whatever it had seemed elsewhere, of the reiterated sacrifice to

pecuniary profit. For the question here was to be of the advantage to

the spirit, not to the pocket; to be of the æsthetic advantage involved

in the wonderful clearance to come. From the moment the visitor takes in

two or three things—first, perhaps, the scale on which, in the past,

bewildering tribute has flowed in; second, the scale on which it must

absolutely now flow out; and, third, the presumption created by the

vivacity of these two movements for a really fertilizing stir of the

ground—he sees the whole place as the field of a drama the nearer view

of the future course of which he shall be sorry to lose. One never

winces after the first little shock, when Education is expensive—one

winces only at the expense which, like so much of the expense of New

York, doesn’t educate; and Education, clearly, was going to seat herself

in these marble halls—admirably prepared for her, to all appearance—and

issue her instructions without regard to cost. The obvious, the

beautiful, the thrilling thing was that, without regard to cost either,

they were going to be obeyed: that inference was somehow irresistible,

the disembodied voices I have spoken of quite forcing it home and the

palace roof arching to protect it as the dome of the theatre protects

the performance. I know not if all past purchase, in these annals

(putting the Cesnola Collection aside), has been without reproach, but

it struck me as safe to gather that (putting aside again Mr. Marquand’s

rare munificence) almost no past acceptance of gifts and bequests “in

kind” had been without weakness. In the light of Sargent’s splendid

portrait, simply, there would have been little enough weakness to

associate with Mr. Marquand’s collection; but the gifts and bequests in

general, even when speciously pleasing or interesting, constitute an

object-lesson in the large presence of which the New York mind will

perform its evolution—an evolution traceable, and with sharpness, in

advance. I shall nevertheless not attempt to foretell it; for sufficient

to the situation, surely, is the appearance, represented by its

announcing shadow, that Acquisition—acquisition if need be on the

highest terms—may, during the years to come, bask here as in a climate

it has never before enjoyed. There was money in the air, ever so much

money—that was, grossly expressed, the sense of the whole intimation.

And the money was to be all for the most exquisite things—for _all_ the

most exquisite except creation, which was to be off the scene

altogether; for art, selection, criticism, for knowledge, piety, taste.

The intimation—which was somehow, after all, so pointed—would have been

detestable if interests other, and smaller, than these had been in

question. The Education, however, was to be exclusively that of the

sense of beauty; this defined, romantically, for my evoked drama, the

central situation. What left me wondering a little, all the same, was

the contradiction involved in one’s not thinking of some of its

prospective passages as harsh. Here it is, no doubt, that one catches

the charm of rigours that take place all in the æsthetic and the

critical world. They would be invidious, would be cruel, if applied to

personal interests, but they take on a high benignity as soon as the

values concerned become values mainly for the mind. (If they happen to

have also a trade-value this is pure superfluity and excess.) The

thought of the acres of canvas and the tons of marble to be turned out

into the cold world as the penalty of old error and the warrant for a

clean slate ought to have drawn tears from the eyes. But these impending

incidents affected me, in fact, on the spot, as quite radiant

demonstrations. The Museum, in short, was going to be great, and in the

geniality of the life to come such sacrifices, though resembling those

of the funeral-pile of Sardanapalus, dwindled to nothing.

V

THE BOWERY AND THEREABOUTS

I

I scarce know, once more, if such a matter be a sign of the city itself,

or only another perversity on the part of a visitor apt to press a

little too hard, everywhere, on the spring of the show; but wherever I

turned, I confess, wherever any aspect seemed to put forth a freshness,

there I found myself saying that this aspect was one’s strongest

impression. It is impossible, as I now recollect, not to be amused at

the great immediate differences of scene and occasion that could produce

such a judgment, and this remark directly applies, no doubt, to the

accident of a visit, one afternoon of the dire mid-winter, to a theatre

in the Bowery at which a young actor in whom I was interested had found

for the moment a fine melodramatic opportunity. This small adventure—if

the adventures of rash observation be ever small—was to remain embalmed

for me in all its odd, sharp notes, and perhaps in none more than in its

element of contrast with an image antediluvian, the memory of the

conditions of a Bowery theatre, _the_ Bowery Theatre in fact,

contemporary with my more or less gaping youth. Was that vast dingy

edifice, with its illustrious past, still standing?—a point on which I

was to remain vague while I electrically travelled through a strange, a

sinister over-roofed clangorous darkness, a wide thoroughfare beset, for

all its width, with sound and fury, and bristling, amid the traffic,

with posts and piles that were as the supporting columns of a vast cold,

yet also uncannily-animated, sepulchre. It was like moving the length of

an interminable cage, beyond the remoter of whose bars lighted shops,

struggling dimly under other pent-house effects, offered their Hebrew

faces and Hebrew names to a human movement that affected one even then

as a breaking of waves that had rolled, for their welter on this very

strand, from the other side of the globe. I was on my way to enjoy, no

doubt, some peculiarly “American” form of the theatric mystery, but my

way led me, apparently, through depths of the Orient, and I should

clearly take my place with an Oriental public.

I took it in fact in such a curtained corner of a private box as might

have appeared to commit me to the most intimate interest possible—might

have done so, that is, if all old signs had not seemed visibly to fail

and new questions, mockingly insoluble, to rise. The old signs would

have been those of some “historic” community, so to speak, between the

play and the public, between those opposed reciprocal quantities: such a

consciousness of the same general terms of intercourse for instance, as

I seemed to have seen prevail, long years ago, under the great dim,

bleak, sonorous dome of the old Bowery. Nothing so much imposed itself

at first as this suggestive contrast—the vision of the other big bare

ranting stupid stage, the grey void, smelling of dust and tobacco-juice,

of a scene on which realism was yet to dawn, but which addressed itself,

on the other hand, to an audience at one with it. Audience and

“production” had been then of the same stripe and the same “tradition”;

the pitch, that is, had been of our own domestic and romantic tradition

(to apply large words to a loose matter, a matter rich in our very own

æsthetic idiosyncrasy). I should say, in short, if it didn’t savour of

pedantry, that if this ancient “poetic” had been purely a home-grown

thing, nursed in the English intellectual cradle, and in the American of

a time when the American resembled the English closely enough, so the

instincts from which it sprang were instincts familiar to the whole body

of spectators, whose dim sense of art (to use again the big word) was

only not thoroughly English because it must have been always so

abundantly Irish. The foreign note, in that thinner air, was, at the

most, the Irish, and I think of the elements of the “Jack Sheppard” and

“Claude Duval” Bowery, including the peanuts and the orange-peel, as

quite harmoniously Irish. From the corner of the box of my so improved

playhouse further down, the very name of which moreover had the

cosmopolite lack of point, I made out, in the audience, the usual mere

monotony of the richer exoticism. No single face, beginning with those

close beside me (for my box was a shared luxury), but referred itself,

by my interpretation, to some such strange outland form as we had not

dreamed of in my day. There they all sat, the representatives of the

races we have nothing “in common” with, as naturally, as comfortably, as

munchingly, as if the theatre were their constant practice—and, as

regards the munching, I may add, I was struck with the appearance of

quality and cost in the various confections pressed from moment to

moment upon our notice by the little playhouse peddlers.

It comes over me under this branch of my reminiscence, that these almost

“high-class” luxuries, circulating in such a company, were a sort of

supreme symbol of the _promoted_ state of the aspirant to American

conditions. He, or more particularly she, had been promoted, and, more

or less at a bound, to the habitual use of chocolate-creams, and indeed

of other dainties, refined and ingenious, compared with which these are

quite _vieux jeu_. This last remark might in fact open up for us, had I

space, a view, interesting to hold a moment, or to follow as far as it

might take us, of the wondrous consumption by the “people,” over the

land, of the most elaborate solid and liquid sweets, such products as

form in other countries an expensive and select dietary. The whole

phenomenon of this omnipresent and essentially “popular” appeal of the

confectioner and pastry-cook, I can take time but to note, is more

significant of the economic, and even of the social situation of the

masses than many a circumstance honoured with more attention. I found

myself again and again—in presence, for example, of the great glittering

temples, the bristling pagodas, erected to the worship in question

wherever men and women, perhaps particularly women, most congregate, and

above all under the high domes of the great modern railway stations—I

found myself wondering, I say, what such facts represented, what light

they might throw upon manners and wages. Wages, in the country at large,

are largely manners—the only manners, I think it fair to say, one mostly

encounters; the market and the home therefore look alike dazzling, at

first, in this reflected, many-coloured lustre. It speaks somehow,

beyond anything else, of the diffused sense of material ease—since the

solicitation of sugar couldn’t be so hugely and artfully organized if

the response were not clearly proportionate. But how is the response

itself organized, and what are the other items of that general budget of

labour, what in especial are the attenuations of that general state of

fatigue, in which so much purchasing-power can flow to the supposedly

superfluous? The wage-earners, the toilers of old, notably in other

climes, were known by the wealth of their songs; and has it, on these

lines, been given to the American people to be known by the number of

their “candies”?

I must not let the question, however, carry me too far—quite away from

the point I was about to make of my sense of the queer chasm over which,

on the Saturday afternoon at the Windsor Theatre, I seemed to see the so

domestic drama reach out to the so exotic audience and the so exotic

audience reach out to the so domestic drama. The play (a masterpiece of

its type, if I may so far strain a point, in such a case, and in the

interest of my young friend’s excellent performance, as to predicate

“type”) was American, to intensity, in its blank conformity to

convention, the particular implanted convention of the place. This

convention, simply expressed, was that there should never be anything

different in a play (the most conservative of human institutions) from

what there had always been before; that _that place_, in a word, should

always know the very same theatric thing, any deviation from which might

be phrenology, or freemasonry, or ironmongery, or anything else in the

world, but would never be drama, especially drama addressed to the heart

of the people. The tricks and the traps, the _trucs_, the whole

stage-carpentry, might freely renew themselves, to create for artless

minds the illusion of a difference; but the sense of the business would

still have to reside in our ineradicable Anglo-Saxon policy, or our

seemingly deep-seated necessity, of keeping, where “representation” is

concerned, so far away from the truth and the facts of life as really to

betray a fear in us of possibly doing something like them should we be

caught nearer. “Foreigners,” in general, unmistakably, in any attempt to

render life, obey the instinct of keeping closer, positively recognize

the presence and the solicitation of the deep waters; yet here was my

houseful of foreigners, physiognomically branded as such, confronted

with our pale poetic—fairly caught for schooling in our art of making

the best of it. Nothing (in the texture of the occasion) could have had

a sharper interest than this demonstration that, since what we most

pretend to do with them is thoroughly to school them, the schooling, by

our system, cannot begin too soon nor pervade their experience too much.

Were they going to rise to it, or rather to fall to it—to _our_

instinct, as distinguished from their own, for picturing life? Were they

to take our lesson, submissively, in order to get with it our smarter

traps and tricks, our superior Yankee machinery (illustrated in the case

before them, for instance, by a wonderful folding bed in which the

villain of the piece, pursuing the virtuous heroine round and round the

room and trying to leap over it after her, is, at the young lady’s touch

of a hidden spring, engulfed as in the jaws of a crocodile?) Or would it

be their dim intellectual resistance, a vague stir in them of some

unwitting heritage—of the finer irony, that I should make out, on the

contrary, as withstanding the effort to corrupt them, and thus perhaps

really promising to react, over the head of our offered mechanic bribes,

on our ingrained intellectual platitude?

One had only to formulate that question to seem to see the issue hang

there, for the excitement of the matter, quite as if the determination

were to be taken on the spot. For the opposition over the chasm of the

footlights, as I have called it, grew intense truly, as I took in on one

side the hue of the Galician cheek, the light of the Moldavian eye, the

whole pervasive facial mystery, swaying, at the best, for the moment,

over the gulf, on the vertiginous bridge of American confectionery—and

took in on the other the perfect “Yankee” quality of the challenge which

stared back at them as in the white light of its hereditary thinness. I

needn’t say that when I departed—perhaps from excess of suspense—it was

without seeing the balance drop to either quarter, and I am afraid I

think of the odd scene as still enacted in many places and many ways,

the inevitable rough union in discord of the two groups of instincts,

the fusion of the two camps by a queer, clumsy, wasteful social

chemistry. Such at all events are the roundabout processes of peaceful

history, the very history that succeeds, for our edification, in _not_

consisting of battles and blood and tears.