II

The simplest account of such success as I was to have in putting my

vision to the test will be, I think, to say that the place never for a

moment belied to me that forecast of its animated intimacy. Yet it might

be just here that a report of my experience would find itself

hampered—this learning the lesson, from one vivid page of the

picture-book to another, of how perfectly “intimate” Philadelphia is.

Such an exhibition would be, prohibitively, the exhibition of private

things, of private things only, and of a charmed contact with them, were

it not for the great circumstance which, when what I have said has been

fully said, remains to be taken into account. The state of infinite

cousinship colours the scene, makes the predominant tone; but you get a

light upon it that is worth all others from the moment you see it as,

ever so savingly, historic. This perception moreover promptly operates;

I found it stirred, as soon as I went out or began to circulate, by all

immediate aspects and signs. The place “went back”; or, in other words,

the social equilibrium, forestalling so that of the other cities, had

begun early, had had plenty of time on its side, and thus had its

history behind it—the past that looms through it, not at all luridly,

but so squarely and substantially, to-day, and gives it, by a mercy, an

extension other than the lateral. This, frankly, was required, it struck

me, for the full comfort of one’s impression—for a certain desirable and

imputable richness. The backward extension, in short, is the very making

of Philadelphia; one is so uncertain of the value one would attach to

her being as she is, if she hadn’t been so by prescription and for a

couple of centuries. This has established her right and her competence;

the fact is the parent, so to speak, of her consistency and serenity; it

has made the very law under which her parts and pieces have held so

closely together. To walk her streets is to note with all promptness

that William Penn _must_ have laid them out—no one else could possibly

have done it so ill. It was his best, though, with our larger sense for

a street, it is far from ours; we at any rate no more complain of them,

nor suggest that they might have been more liberally conceived, than we

so express ourselves about the form of the chairs in sitting through a

morning call.

I found myself liking them, then, as I moved among them, just in

proportion as they conformed, in detail, to the early pattern—the

figure, for each house, of the red-faced old gentleman whose thick

eyebrows and moustache have turned to white; and I found myself

detesting them in any instance of a new front or a new fashion. They

were narrow, with this aspect as of a double file of grizzled veterans,

or they were nothing; the narrowness had been positively the channel or

conduit of continuity of character: it made the long pipe on which the

tune of the place was played. From the moment it was in any way

corrected the special charm broke—the charm, a rare civic possession, as

of some immense old ruled and neatly-inked chart, not less carefully

than benightedly flattened out, stretching its tough parchment under the

very feet of all comings and goings. This was an image with which, as it

furthermore seemed to me, everything else consorted—above all the

soothing truth that Philadelphia was, yes, beyond cavil, solely and

singly Philadelphian. There was an interference absent, or one that I at

least never met: that sharp note of the outlandish, in the strict sense

of the word, which I had already found almost everywhere so

disconcerting. I pretend here of course neither to estimate the numbers

in which the grosser aliens may actually have settled on these bland

banks of the Delaware, nor to put my finger on the principle of the

shock I had felt it, and was still to feel it, in their general power to

administer; for I am not now concerned so much with the impression made

by one’s almost everywhere meeting them, as with the impression made by

one’s here and there failing of it. They may have been gathered, in

their hordes, in some vast quarter unknown to me and of which I was to

have no glimpse; but what would this have denoted, exactly, but some

virtue in the air for reducing their presence, or their effect, to

naught? There precisely was the difference from New York—that they

themselves had been in that place half the virtue, or the vice, of the

air, and that there were few of its agitations to which they had not

something to say.

The logic of the case had been visible to me, for that matter, on my

very first drive from the train—from that precious “Pennsylvania”

station of Philadelphia which was to strike me as making a nearer

approach than elsewhere to the arts of ingratiation. There was an object

or two, windowed and chimneyed, in the central sky—but nothing to speak

of: I then and there, in a word, took in the admirable flatness. And if

it seemed so spacious, by the same token, this was because it was

neither eager, nor grasping, nor pushing. It drew its breath at its

ease, clearly—never sounding the charge, the awful “Step lively!” of New

York. The fury of the pavement had dropped, in fine, as I was to see it

drop, later on, between Chicago and St. Louis. This affected me on the

spot of symbolic, and I was to have no glimpse of anything that gainsaid

the symbol. It was somehow, too, the very note of the homogeneous;

though this indeed is not, oddly enough, the head under which at St.

Louis my impression was to range itself. I at all events here gave

myself up to the vision—that of the vast, firm chess-board, the

immeasurable spread of little squares, covered _all_ over by perfect

Philadelphians. It was an image, in face of some of the other features

of the view, dissimilar to any by which one had ever in one’s life been

assaulted; and this elimination of the foreign element has been what was

required to make it consummate. Nothing is more notable, through the

States at large, than that hazard of what one may happen, or may not

happen, to see; but the only use to be made of either accident is,

clearly, to let it stand and to let it serve. This intensity and

ubiquity of the local tone, that of the illimitable _town_, serves so

successfully for my sense of Philadelphia that I should feel as if a

little masterpiece of the creative imagination had been destroyed by the

least correction. And there is, further, the point to make that if I

knew, all the while, that there was something more, and different, and

less beatific, under and behind the happy appearance I grasped, I knew

it by no glimmer of direct perception, and should never in the world

have guessed it if some sound of it had not, by a discordant voice,

been, all superfluously, rather tactlessly, dropped into my ear.

It was not, however, disconcerting at the time, this presentation, as in

a flash, of the other side of the medal—the other side being, in a word,

as was mentioned to me, one of the most lurid pages in the annals of

political corruption. The place, by this revelation, was two distinct

things—a Society, from far back, the society I had divined, the most

genial and delightful one could think of, and then, parallel to this,

and not within it, nor quite altogether above it, but beside it and

beneath it, behind it and before it, enclosing it as in a frame of fire

in which it still had the secret of keeping cool, a proportionate City,

the most incredible that ever was, organized all for plunder and rapine,

the gross satisfaction of official appetite, organized for eternal

iniquity and impunity. Such were the conditions, it had been hinted to

me—from the moment the medal spun round; but I even understate, I think,

in speaking of the knowledge as only not disconcerting. It was better

than that, for it positively added the last touch of colour to my framed

and suspended picture. Here, strikingly then, was an American _case_,

and presumably one of the best; one of the best, that is, for some study

of the wondrous problem, admiration and amazement of the nations, who

yearn over it from far off: the way in which sane Society and pestilent

City, in the United States, successfully cohabit, each keeping it up

with so little of fear or flutter from the other. The thing presents

itself, in its prime unlikelihood, as a thorough good neighbouring of

the Happy Family and the Infernal Machine—the machine so rooted as to

continue to defy removal, and the family still so indifferent, while it

carries on the family business of buying and selling, of chattering and

dancing, to the danger of being blown up. It is all puzzled out, from

afar, as a matter of the exchange, and in a large decree of the

observance, from side to side, of guarantees, and the interesting thing

to get at, for the student of manners, will ever be just this mystery of

the terms of the bargain. I must add, none the less, that, though one

was one’s self, inevitably and always and everywhere, that student, my

attention happened to be, or rather was obliged to be, confined to one

view of the agreement. The arrangement is, obviously, between the great

municipalities and the great populations, on the grand scale, and I

lacked opportunity to look at it all round. I had but my glimpse of the

apparently wide social acceptance of it—that is I saw but the face of

the medal most directly turned to the light of day, and could note that

nowhere so much as in Philadelphia was any carking care, in the social

mind, any uncomfortable consciousness, as of a skeleton at the banquet

of life, so gracefully veiled.

This struck me (on my looking back afterwards with more knowledge) as

admirable, as heroic, in its way, and as falling in altogether with

inherent habits of sociability, gaiety, gallantry, with that felt

presence of a “temperament” with which the original Quaker drab seems to

flush—giving it, as one might say for the sake of the figure, something

of the iridescence of the breast of a well-fed dove. The original Quaker

drab is still there, and, ideally, for the picture, up and down the

uniform streets, one should see a bland, broad-brimmed, square-toed

gentleman, or a bonneted, kerchiefed, mittened lady, on every little

flight of white steps; but the very note of the place has been the

“worldly” overscoring, for most of the senses, of the primitive

monotone, the bestitching of the drab with pink and green and silver.

The mixture has been, for a social effect, admirably successful, thanks,

one seems to see, to the subtle, the charming absence of pedantry in the

Quaker purity. It flushes gracefully, that temperate prejudice (with its

predisposition to the universal _tutoiement_), turning first but to the

prettiest pink; so that we never quite know where the drab has ended and

the colour of the world has begun. The “disfrocked” Catholic is too

strange, the paganized Puritan too angular; it is the accommodating

Friend who has most the secret of a _modus vivendi_. And if it be asked,

I may add, whether, in this case of social Philadelphia, the genius for

life, and what I have called the gallantry of it above all, wouldn’t

have been better shown by a scorn of _any_ compromise to which the

nefarious City could invite it, I can only reply that, as a lover,

always of romantic phenomena, and an inveterate seeker for them, I

should have been deprived, by the action of that particular virtue, of

the thrilled sense of a society dancing, all consciously, on the thin

crust of a volcano. It is the thinness of the crust that makes, in such

examples, the wild fantasy, the gay bravery, of the dance—just as I

admit that a preliminary, an original extinction of the volcano would

have illustrated another kind of virtue. The crust, for the social

tread, would in this case have been firm, but the spectator’s

imagination would have responded less freely, I think, to the appeal of

the scene. If I may indeed speak my whole thought for him he would so

have had to drop again, to his regret, the treasure of a small analogy

picked up on its very threshold.

How shall he confess at once boldly and shyly enough that the situation

had at the end of a very short time begun to strike him, for all its

immeasurably reduced and simplified form, as a much nearer approach to

the representation of an “old order,” an _ancien régime_, socially

speaking, than any the field of American manners had seemed likely to

regale him with? Grotesque the comparison if pushed; yet how had he

encountered the similitude if it hadn’t been hanging about? From the

moment he adopted it, at any rate, he found it taking on touch after

touch. The essence of old orders, as history lights them, is just that

innocent beatitude of consanguinity, of the multiplication of the

assured felicities, to which I have already alluded. From this, in

Philadelphia, didn’t the rest follow?—the sense, for every one, of being

in the same boat with every one else, a closed circle that would find

itself happy enough if only it could remain closed enough. The boat

might considerably pitch, but its occupants would either float merrily

together or (almost as merrily) go down together, and meanwhile the

risk, the vague danger, the jokes to be made about it, the general

quickened sociability and intimacy, were the very music of the

excursion. There are even yet to be observed about the world fragments

and ghosts of old social orders, thin survivals of final cataclysms, and

it was not less positive than beguiling that the common marks by which

these companies are known, and which we still distinguish through their

bedimmed condition, cropped up for me in the high American light, making

good my odd parallel at almost every point. Yet if these signs of a

slightly congested, but still practically self-sufficing, little world

were all there, they were perhaps there most, to my ear, in the fact of

the little world’s proper intimate idiom and accent: a dialect as much

its very own, even in drawing-rooms and libraries, as the Venetian is

that of Venice or the Neapolitan is that of Naples—representing the

common things of association, the things easily understood and felt, and

charged as no other vehicle could be with the fund of local reference.

There is always the difference, of course, that at Venice and at Naples,

“in society,” an alternative, either that of French or of the classic,

the more or less academic Italian, is offered to the uninitiated

stranger, whereas in Philadelphia he is candidly, consistently,

sometimes almost contagiously entertained in the free vernacular. The

latter may easily become, in fact, under its wealth of idiosyncrasy and

if he have the favouring turn of mind, a tempting object of linguistic

study; with the bridge built for him, moreover, that, unlike the

Venetian, the Neapolitan and most other local languages, it contains,

itself, colloquially, a notable element of the academic and the classic.

It struck me even, truly, as, with a certain hardness in it,

_constituting_ the society that employed it—very much as the egg is made

oval by its shell; and really, if I may say all, as taking its stand a

bit consciously sometimes, if not a bit defiantly, on its own proved

genius. I remember the visible dismay of a gentleman, a pilgrim from

afar, in a drawing-room, at the comment of a lady, a lady of one of the

new generations indeed, and mistress of the tone by which I had here and

there occasion to observe that such ornaments of the new generation

might be known. “Listen to the creature: he speaks English!”—it was the

very opposite of the indulgence or encouragement with which, in a

Venetian drawing-room (I catch my analogies as I can) the sound of

French or of Italian might have been greeted. The poor “creature’s”

dismay was so visible, clearly, for the reason that such things have

only to be said with a certain confidence to create a certain

confusion—the momentary consciousness of some such misdeed, from the

point of view of manners, as the speaking of Russian at Warsaw. I have

said that Philadelphia didn’t bristle, but the heroine of my anecdote

caused the so genial city to resemble, for the minute, linguistically,

an unreconciled Poland.