II

I was happily to find, at all events, that I had not, on that occasion,

done with the Bowery, or with its neighbourhood—as how could one not

rejoice to return to an air in which such infinite suggestion might

flower? The season had advanced, though the summer night was no more

than genial, and the question, for this second visit, was of a “look

in,” with two or three friends, at three or four of the most

“characteristic” evening resorts (for reflection and conversation) of

the dwellers on the East side. It was definitely not, the question, of

any gaping view of the policed underworld—unanimously pronounced an

imposture, in general, at the best, and essentially less interesting

than the exhibition of public manners. I found on the spot, in harmony

with this preference, that nothing better could have been desired, in

the way of pure presentable picture, subject always to the swinging

lantern-light of the individual imagination, than the first (as I think

it was, for the roaming hour) of our penetrated “haunts”—a large

semi-subterranean establishment, a beer-cellar rich in the sporting

note, adorned with images of strong men and lovely women, prize-fighters

and _ballerine_, and finding space in its deep bosom for a billiard-room

and a bowling-alley, all sociably squeezed together; finding space,

above all, for a collection of extraordinarily equivocal types of

consumers: an intensity of equivocation indeed planted, just as if to

await direct and convenient study, in the most typical face of the

collection, a face which happened, by good fortune, to be that of the

most officious presence. When the element of the equivocal in personal

character and history takes on, in New York, an addition from all the

rest of the swarming ambiguity and fugacity of race and tongue, the

result becomes, for the picture-seeker, indescribably, luridly strong.

There always comes up, at view of the “low” physiognomy shown in

conditions that denote a measure of impunity and ease, the question—than

which few, I think, are more interesting to the psychologist—of the

forms of ability _consistent_ with lowness; the question of the quality

of intellect, the subtlety of character, the mastery of the art of life,

with which the extremity of baseness may yet be associated. That

question held me, I confess, so under its spell during those almost

first steps of our ingenuous _enquête_, that I would gladly have

prolonged, just there, my opportunity to sound it.

The fascination was of course in the perfection of the baseness, and the

puzzle in the fact that it could be subject, without fatally muddling,

without tearing and rending them, to those arts of life, those

quantities of conformity, the numerous involved accommodations and

patiences, that are _not_ in the repertory of the wolf and the snake.

Extraordinary, we say to ourselves on such occasions, the amount of

formal tribute that civilization is after all able to gouge out of

apparently hopeless stuff; extraordinary that it can make a presentable

sheath for such fangs and such claws. The mystery is in the _how_ of the

process, in the wonderful little wavering borderland between nature and

art, the place of the crooked seam where, if psychology had the adequate

lens, the white stitches would show. All this played through one’s

thought, to the infinite extension of the sufficiently close and

thoroughly _banal_ beer-cellar. There happened to be reasons, not to be

shaded over, why one of my companions should cause a particular chord of

recognition to vibrate, and the very convergence of hushed looks, in the

so “loud” general medium, seemed to lay bare, from table to table, the

secret of the common countenance (common to that place) put off its

guard by curiosity, almost by amiability. The secret was doubtless in

many cases but the poor familiar human secret of the vulgar mind, of the

soul unfurnished, so to speak, in respect to delicacy, probity, pity,

with a social decoration of the mere bleak walls of instinct; but it was

the unforgettable little personality that I have referred to as the

presiding spirit, it was the spokesman of our welcome, the master of the

scene himself, who struck me as presenting my question in its finest

terms. To conduct a successful establishment, to _be_ a spokesman, an

administrator, an employer of labour and converser on subjects, let

alone a citizen and a tax-payer, was to have an existence abounding in

relations and to be subject to the law that a relation, however

imperfectly human or social, is at the worst a matter that can only be

described as delicate. Well, in presence of the abysmal obliquity of

such a face, of the abysmal absence of traceability or coherency in such

antecedents, where did the different delicacies involved come in at

all?—how did intercourse emerge at all, and, much more, emerge so

brilliantly, as it were, from its dangers? The answer had to be, for the

moment, no doubt, that if there be such a state as that of

misrepresenting your value and use, there is also the rarer condition of

being so sunk beneath the level of appearance as not to be able to

represent them at all. Appearance, in you, has thus not only no notes,

no language, no authority, but is literally condemned to operate _as_

the treacherous sum of your poverties.

The jump was straight, after this, to a medium so different that I seem

to see, as the one drawback to evoking it again, however briefly, the

circumstance that it started the speculative hare for even a longer and

straighter run. This irrepressible animal covered here, however, a much

goodlier country, covered it in the interest of a happy

generalization—the bold truth that even when apparently done to death by

that property of the American air which reduces so many aspects to a

common denominator, certain finer shades of saliency and consistency do

often, by means known to themselves, recover their rights. They are like

swimmers who have had to plunge, to come round and under water, but who

pop out a panting head and shine for a moment in the sun. My image is

perhaps extravagant, for the question is only of the kept recollection

of a café pure and simple, particularly pure and particularly simple in

fact, inasmuch as it dispensed none but “soft” drinks and presented

itself thus in the light, the quiet, tempered, intensely individual

light, of a beerhouse innocent of beer. I have indeed no other excuse

for calling it a beerhouse than the fact that it offered to every sense

such a deep Germanic peace as abides, for the most part (though not

always even then), where the deep-lidded tankard balances with the

scarce shallower bowl of the meditative pipe. This modest asylum had its

tone, which I found myself, after a few minutes, ready to take for

exquisite, if on no other ground than its almost touching suggestion of

discriminations made and preserved in the face of no small difficulty.

That is what I meant just now by my tribute to the occasional patience

of unquenched individualism—the practical subtlety of the spirit

unashamed of its preference for the minor key, clinging, through thick

and thin, to its conception of decency and dignity, and finding means to

make it good even to the exact true shade. These are the real triumphs

of art—the discriminations in favour of taste produced not by the gilded

and guarded “private room,” but by making publicity itself delicate,

making your barrier against vulgarity consist but in a few tables and

chairs, a few coffee-cups and boxes of dominoes. Money in quantities

enough can always create tone, but it had been created here by mere

unbuyable instinct. The charm of the place in short was that its note of

the exclusive had been arrived at with such a beautifully fine economy.

I try, in memory, and for the value of the lesson, to analyze, as it

were, the elements, and seem to recall as the most obvious the

contemplative stillness in which the faint click of the moved domino

could be heard, and into which the placid attention of the quiet, honest

men who were thus testifying for the exquisite could be read. The

exquisite, yes, _was_ the triumph of their tiny temple, with all the

loud surrounding triumphs, those of the coarse and the common, making it

but stick the faster, like a well-inserted wedge. And fully to catch

this was to catch by the same stroke the main ground of the effect, to

see that it came most of all from felicity of suppression and omission.

There was so visibly too much everywhere else of everything vulgar, that

there reigned here, for the difference, the learnt lesson that there

could scarce be in such an air of infection little enough, in quantity

and mass, of anything. The felicity had its climax in the type, or

rather in the individual character, of our host, who, officiating alone,

had apparently suppressed all aids to service and succeeded, as by an

inspiration of genius, in omitting, for all his years, to learn the

current American. He spoke but a dozen words of it, and that was

doubtless how he best kept the key of the old Germanic peace—of the

friendly stillness in which, while the East side roared, a new

metaphysic might have been thought out or the scheme of a new war

intellectualized.