After this there were other places, mostly higher in the scale, and but
a couple of which my memory recovers. There was also, as I recall, a
snatched interlude—an associated dash into a small crammed convivial
theatre, an oblong hall, bristling with pipe and glass, at the end of
which glowed for a moment, a little dingily, some broad passage of a
Yiddish comedy of manners. It hovered there, briefly, as if seen through
a spy-glass reaching, across the world, to some far-off dowdy Jewry;
then our sense of it became too mixed a matter—it was a scent,
literally, not further to be followed. There remained with me none the
less the patch of alien comedy, with all it implied of esoteric vision
on the part of the public. Something of that admonition had indeed,
earlier in the season, been sharp—so much had one heard of a brilliant
Yiddish actress who was drawing the town to the East side by the promise
of a new note. This lady, however, had disconcerted my own purpose by
suddenly appearing, in the orthodox quarter, in a language only
definable as not in _intention_ Yiddish—not otherwise definable; and I
also missed, through a like alarm, the opportunity of hearing an admired
actor of the same school. He was Yiddish on the East side, but he
cropped up, with a wild growth, in Broadway as well, and his auditors
seemed to know as little as care to what idiom they supposed themselves
to be listening. Marked in New York, by many indications, this vagueness
of ear as to differences, as to identities, of idiom.
I must not, however, under that interference, lose the echo of a couple
of other of the impressions of my crowded summer night—and all the less
that they kept working it, as I seem to remember, up to a higher and
higher pitch. It had been intimated to me that one of these scenes of
our climax had entered the sophisticated phase, that of sacrificing to a
self-consciousness that was to be regretted—that of making eyes, so to
speak, at the larger, the up-town public; that pestilent favour of
“society” which is fatal to everything it touches and which so quickly
leaves the places of its passage unfit for its own use and uninteresting
for any other. This establishment had learned to lay on local colour
with malice prepense—the local colour of its “Slav” origin—and was the
haunt, on certain evenings of the week, of yearning groups from Fifth
Avenue sated with familiar horizons. Yet there were no yearning
groups—none, that is, save our own—at the time of our visit; there was
only, very amply and pleasantly presented, another aspect of the
perpetual process of the New York intermarriage. As the Venetian
Republic, in the person of the Doge, used to go forth, on occasion, to
espouse the Adriatic, so it is quite as if the American, incarnate in
its greatest port, were for ever throwing the nuptial ring to the still
more richly-dowered Atlantic. I speak again less of the nuptial rites
themselves than of those immediate fruits that struck me everywhere as
so characteristic—so equally characteristic, I mean, of each party to
the union. The flourishing establishment of my present reference offered
distinctly its outland picture, but showed it in an American frame, and
the features of frame and picture arranged themselves shrewdly together.
Quiet couples, elderly bourgeois husbands and wives, sat there over
belated sausage and cheese, potato-salad and Hungarian wine, the wife
with her knitting produced while the husband finished his cigar; and the
indication, for the moment, might have been of some evening note of
Dantzig or of Buda-Pesth. But the conditioning foreign, and the
visibility of their quite so happily conjugal give-and-take, in New
York, is my reason for this image of the repeated espousals. Why were
the quiet easy couples, with their homely café habit (kept in the best
relation to the growth, under the clicking needles, of the marital
stocking), such remote and indirect results of our local anecdotic past,
our famous escape, at our psychological moment, from King George and his
works, with all sorts of inevitable lapses and hitches in any grateful
consciousness they might ever have of that prime cause of their new
birth? Yet why, on the other hand, could they affect one, even with the
Fatherland planked under them in the manner of the praying-carpet spread
beneath the good Mahometan, as still more disconnected from the historic
consciousness implied in their own type, and with the mere moral
identity of German or Slav, or whatever it might be, too extinct in them
for any possibility of renewal? The exotic boss here did speak, I
remember, fluent East-side New Yorkese, and it was in this wonderful
tongue that he expressed to us his superior policy, his refined
philosophy, announced his plans for the future and presented himself, to
my vision, as a possibly far-reaching master-spirit. What remains with
me is this expression, and the colour and the quality of it, and the
free familiarity and the “damned foreign impudence,” with so much taken
for granted, and all the hitches and lapses, all the solutions of
continuity, in _his_ inward assimilation of our heritage and point of
view, matched as these were, on our own side, by such signs of large and
comparatively witless concession. What, oh, what again, were he and his
going to make of us?
Well, there was the impression, and that was a question on which, for a
certain intensity in it, our adventure might have closed; but it was so
far from closing that, late though the hour, it presently opened out
into a vast and complicated picture which I find myself thinking of,
after an interval, as the splendid crown of the evening. Here were we
still on the East side, but we had moved up, by stages artfully
inspired, into the higher walks, into a pavilion of light and sound and
savoury science that struck one as vaguely vast, as possibly gardened
about, and that, blazing into the stillness of the small hours, dazzled
one with the show of its copious and various activity. The whole vision
was less intimate than elsewhere, but it was a world of custom quite
away from any mere Delmonico tradition of one’s earlier time, and rich,
as one might reckon it, in its own queer marks, marks probably never yet
reduced—inspiring thought!—to literary notation; with which it would
seem better to form a point of departure for fresh exploration than
serve as tail-piece to the end of a chapter. Who were all the people,
and whence and whither and why, in the good New York small hours? Where
_was_ the place after all, and what might it, or might it not, truly,
represent to slightly-fatigued feasters who, in a recess like a
privileged opera-box at a _bal masqué_, and still communing with
polyglot waiters, looked down from their gallery at a multitudinous
supper, a booming orchestra, an elegance of disposed plants and flowers,
a perfect organization and an abyss of mystery? Was it “on” Third
Avenue, on Second, on fabulous unattempted First? Nothing would induce
me to cut down the romance of it, in remembrance, to a mere address,
least of all to an awful New York one; New York addresses falling so
below the grace of a city where the very restaurants may on occasion,
under restless analysis, flash back the likeness of Venetian palaces
flaring with the old carnival. The ambiguity is the element in which the
whole thing swims for me—so nocturnal, so bacchanal, so hugely hatted
and feathered and flounced, yet apparently so innocent, almost so
patriarchal again, and matching, in its mixture, with nothing one had
elsewhere known. It breathed its simple “New York! New York!” at every
impulse of inquiry; so that I can only echo contentedly, with analysis
for once quite agreeably baffled, “Remarkable, unspeakable New York!”
VI
THE SENSE OF NEWPORT
I
Newport, on my finding myself back there, threatened me sharply, quite
at first, with that predicament at which I have glanced in another
connection or two—the felt condition of having known it too well and
loved it too much for description or definition. What was one to say
about it except that one _had_ been so affected, so distraught, and that
discriminations and reasons were buried under the dust of use? There was
a chance indeed that the breath of the long years (of the interval of
absence, I mean) would have blown away this dust—and that, precisely,
was what one was eager to see. To go out, to look about, to recover the
sense, was accordingly to put the question, without delay, to the
proof—and with the happy consequence, I think, of an escape from a grave
discomfiture. The charm was there again, unmistakably, the little old
strange, very simple charm—to be expressed, as a fine proposition, or to
be given up; but the answer came in the fact that to have walked about
for half-an-hour was to have felt the question clear away. It cleared
away so conveniently, so blissfully, in the light of the benign little
truth that nothing had been less possible, even in the early, ingenuous,
infatuated days, than to describe or define Newport. It had clearly had
nothing about it _to_ describe or define, so that one’s fondness had
fairly rested on this sweet oddity in it. One had only to look back to
recognize that it had never condescended to give a scrap of reasoned
account of itself (as a favourite of fortune and the haunt of the
_raffiné_); it had simply lain there like a little bare, white, open
hand, with slightly-parted fingers, for the observer with a presumed
sense for hands to take or to leave. The observer with a real sense
never failed to pay this image the tribute of quite tenderly grasping
the hand, and even of raising it, delicately, to his lips; having no
less, at the same time, the instinct of not shaking it too hard, and
that above all of never putting it to any rough work.
Such had been from the first, under a chastened light and in a purple
sea, the dainty isle of Aquidneck; which might have avoided the weak
mistake of giving up its pretty native name and of becoming thereby as
good as nameless—with an existence as Rhode Island practically
monopolized by the State and a Newport identity borrowed at the best and
applicable but to a corner. Does not this vagueness of condition,
however, fitly symbolize the small virtual promontory, of which,
superficially, nothing could be predicated but its sky and its sea and
its sunsets? One views it as placed there, by some refinement in the
scheme of nature, just as a touchstone of taste—with a beautiful little
sense to be read into it by a few persons, and nothing at all to be made
of it, as to its essence, by most others. I come back, for its essence,
to that figure of the little white hand, with the gracefully-spread
fingers and the fine grain of skin, even the dimples at the joints and
the shell-like delicacy of the pink nails—all the charms in short that a
little white hand may have. I see all the applications of the image—I
see a special truth in each. It is the back of the hand, rising to the
swell of the wrist, that is exposed—which is the way, I think, the true
lover takes and admires it. He makes out in it, bending over it—or he
used to in the old days—innumerable shy and subtle beauties, almost
requiring, for justice, a magnifying-glass; and he winces at the sight
of certain other obtruded ways of dealing with it. The touchstone of
taste was indeed to operate, for the critical, the tender spirit, from
the moment the pink palm was turned up on the chance of what might be
“in” it. For nine persons out of ten, among its visitors, its purchasers
of sites and builders of (in the old parlance) cottages, there had never
been anything in it at all—except of course an opportunity: an
opportunity for escaping the summer heat of other places, for bathing,
for boating, for riding and driving, and for many sorts of more or less
expensive riot. The pink palm being empty, in other words, to their
vision, they had begun, from far back, to put things into it, things of
their own, and of all sorts, and of many ugly, and of more and more
expensive, sorts; to fill it substantially, that is, with gold, the gold
that they have ended by heaping up there to an amount so oddly out of
proportion to the scale of nature and of space.
This process, one was immediately to perceive with that renewal of
impression, this process of injection and elaboration, of creating the
palpable pile, had been going on for years to such a tune that the face
of nature was now as much obliterated as possible, and the original shy
sweetness as much as possible bedizened and bedevilled: all of which,
moreover, might also at present be taken as having led, in turn, to the
most unexpected climax, a matter of which I shall presently speak. The
original shy sweetness, however, that range of effect which I have
referred to as practically too latent and too modest for notation, had
meanwhile had its votaries, the fond pedestrian minority, for whom the
little white hand (to return for an instant to my figure, with which, as
you see, I am charmed) had always been so full of treasures of its own
as to discredit, from the point of view of taste, any attempt, from
without, to stuff it fuller. Such attempts had, in the nature of the
case, and from far back, been condemned to show for violations;
violations of taste and discretion, to begin with—violations, more
intimately, as the whole business became brisker, of a thousand delicate
secret places, dear to the disinterested rambler, small, mild “points”
and promontories, far away little lonely, sandy coves, rock-set,
lily-sheeted ponds, almost hidden, and shallow Arcadian summer-haunted
valleys, with the sea just over some stony shoulder: a whole world that
called out to the long afternoons of youth, a world with its scale so
measured and intended and happy, its detail so finished and pencilled
and stippled (certainly for American detail!) that there comes back to
me, across the many years, no better analogy for it than that of some
fine foreground in an old “line” engraving. There remained always a
sense, of course, in which the superimpositions, the multiplied
excrescences, were a tribute to the value of the place; where no such
liberty was ever taken save exactly _because_ (as even the most
blundering builder would have claimed) it was all so beautiful, so
solitary and so “sympathetic.” And that indeed has been, thanks to the
“pilers-on” of gold, the fortune, the history of its beauty: that it now
bristles with the villas and palaces into which the cottages have all
turned, and that these monuments of pecuniary power rise thick and
close, precisely, in order that their occupants may constantly remark to
each other, from the windows to the “grounds,” and from house to house,
that it _is_ beautiful, it _is_ solitary and sympathetic. The thing has
been done, it is impossible not to perceive, with the best faith in the
world—though not altogether with the best light, which is always so
different a matter; and it is with the general consequence only, at the
end of the story, that I find myself to-day concerned.
So much concerned I found myself, I profess, after I had taken in this
fact of a very distinct general consequence, that the whole interest of
the vision was quickened by it; and that when, in particular, on one of
the last days of June, among the densely-arrayed villas, I had followed
the beautiful “ocean drive” to its uttermost reach and back without
meeting either another vehicle or a single rider, let alone a single
pedestrian, I recognized matter for the intellectual thrill that attests
a social revolution foreseen and completed. The term I use may appear
extravagant, but it was a fact, none the less, that I seemed to take
full in my face, on this occasion, the cold stir of air produced when
the whirligig of time has made one of its liveliest turns. It is always
going, the whirligig, but its effect is so to blow up the dust that we
must wait for it to stop a moment, as it now and then does with a pant
of triumph, in order to see what it has been at. I saw, beyond all
doubt, on the spot—and _there_ came in, exactly, the thrill; I could
remember far back enough to have seen it begin to blow all the artless
buyers and builders and blunderers into their places, leaving them there
for half a century or so of fond security, and then to see it, of a
sudden, blow them quite out again, as with the happy consciousness of
some new amusing use for them, some other game still to play with them.
This acquaintance, as it practically had been, with the whole rounding
of the circle (even though much of it from a distance), was tantamount
to the sense of having sat out the drama, the social, the local, that of
a real American period, from the rise to the fall of the curtain—always
assuming that truth of the reached catastrophe or _dénouement_. _How_
this climax or solution had been arrived at—that, clearly, for the
spectator, would have been worth taking note of; but what he made of it
I shall not glance at till I have shown him as first of all, on the
spot, quite modestly giving in to mere primary beguilement. It had been
certain in advance that he would find the whole picture overpainted, and
the question could only be, at the best, of how much of the ancient
surface would here and there glimmer through. The ancient surface had
been the concern, as I have hinted, of the small fond minority, the
comparatively few people for whom the lurking shy charm, all there, but
all to be felt rather than published, did in fact constitute a surface.
The question, as soon as one arrived, was of whether some ghost of that
were recoverable.