IV

There _were_ other facts, in abundance, I hasten to add; only they

were not, as I say, competitive, not of the public or majestic

order—so that they the less imposed, for appreciation, any

rearrangement of values. They were a matter still of the famous, the

felicitous Sunday—into which as into an armful of the biggest and

bravest June roses I seemed to find my perceptions cluster. Foremost

among these meanwhile was that of the plentiful presence, freshly

recognized, of absolute values too—which offer themselves, in the

midst of the others, with a sharpness of their own, and which owe

nothing, for interest, to any question of the general scale. The

Country Club, for instance, as I have already had occasion to note,

is everywhere a clear American felicity; a _complete_ product of the

social soil and air which alone have made it possible, and wearing

whenever met that assured face of the full-blown flower and the

proved proposition. These institutions speak so of American life as

a success that they affected me at moments as crying aloud to be

commemorated—since it is on American life only that they are

founded, and since they render it, to my mind, the good office of

making it keep all its graces and of having caused it to shed, by

the same stroke, the elements that are contrary to these. Nothing is

more suggestive than to recognize, each time, on the premises, the

thing that “wouldn’t do in Europe”—for a judgment of the reasons of

its doing so well in the one hemisphere and so ill in the other

promptly becomes illuminating. The illumination is one at which, had

I space, I should have liked to light here a candle or two—partaking

indeed by that character of a like baffled virtue in many another

group of social phenomena. The Country Club testifies, in short, and

gives its evidence, from the box, with the inimitable, invaluable

accent of American authority. It becomes, for the restless analyst,

one of the great garden-lamps in which the flame of Democracy burns

whitest and steadiest and most floods the subject; taking its place

thus on the positive side of a line which has its other side

overscored with negatives. I may seem too much to brood upon it, but

the interest of the American scene being, beyond any other, the

show, on so immense a scale, of what Democracy, pushing and breaking

the ice like an Arctic explorer, is making of things, any scrap that

contributes to it wears a part of its dignity. To have been

beforehand with the experiments, with several rather risky ones at

least, and to have got on with these so beautifully while other

rueful nations prowl, in the dusk, inquisitive but apprehensive,

round the red windows of the laboratory, peeping, for the last news,

between each other’s shoulders—all this is, for the democratic

force, to have stolen a march over no little of the ground, and to

have gained time on such a scale as perhaps to make the belated of

the earth, the critical group at the windows, still live to think of

themselves as having too much wasted it.

There had been one—I mean a blest Country Club—in the neighbourhood of

Boston (where indeed I believe there were a dozen, at least as

exemplary, out of my range); there had been another, quite marvellous,

on the Hudson—one of a numerous array, probably, within an hour’s run of

New York; there had been a supreme specimen, supreme for a documentary

worth, even at Charleston (I reserve to myself to explain in due course,

and ah, in such an exquisite sense, my “even”). This had made for me, if

you will, a short list, but it had made a long admonition, to which the

embowered institution near Baltimore was to add a wonderful emphasis. An

admonition of what? it will meanwhile be asked: to which the answer may

perhaps, for the moment, not be more precipitate than by one’s saying

that with any feeling for American life you soon enough see. You see its

most complete attestation of its believing in itself unlimitedly, and

also of its being right about itself at more points than it is wrong.

You see it apply its general theory of its nature and strength—much of

this doubtless quite an unconscious one—with a completeness and a

consistency that will strike you also (or that ought to) as constituting

an unconscious heroism. You will see it accept in detail, with a sublime

serenity, certain large social consequences—the consequences of the

straight application, in the most delicate conditions, of the prime

democratic idea. As this idea is that of an universal eligibility, so

you see it, under the application, beautifully resist the strain. So you

see, in a word, everything staked on the conception of the young Family

as a clear social unit—which, when all is said and done, remains,

roundabout you, the ubiquitous fact. The conception of the Family is,

goodness knows, “European” enough; but the difference resides in its

working on one side of the world in the vertical and on the other in the

horizontal sense. If its identity in “Europe,” that is, resides more

especially in its perpendicular, its backward and forward extension, its

ascent and descent of the long ladder of time, so it develops in the

United States mainly by its lateral spread, as one may say; expressing

itself thus rather by number than by name, and yet taking itself for

granted, when one comes to compare, with an intensity to which mere

virtue of name elsewhere scarce helps it. American manners, as they

stand, register therefore the apotheosis of the Family—a truth for which

they have by no means received due credit; and it is in the light of

Country Clubs that all this becomes vivid. These organizations accept

the Family as the social unit—accept its extension, its _whole_

extension, through social space, and accept it as many times over as the

question comes up: which is what one means by their sublime and

successful consistency. No, if I may still insist, nothing anywhere

accepts anything as the American Country Club accepts these whole

extensions.

That is why I speak of it as accepting the universal eligibility. With

no palpable result does the democratic idea, in the States, more bristle

than with the view that the younger are “as good” as the elder; family

life is in fact, as from child to parent, from sister to brother, from

wife to husband, from employed to employer, the eminent field of the

democratic demonstration. This then is the unit that, with its latent

multiplications, the Country Club takes over—and it is easy to see how

such units must multiply. This is the material to which it addresses,

with such effect, the secret of its power. I may of course be asked what

I mean by an eligibility that is “universal”; but it seems needless to

remark that even the most inclusive social scheme must in a large

community always stop somewhere Distinctly diverting, often, to

Americans, the bewilderment of the “European” mind on the subject of

“differences” and of the practicability of precautions for maintaining

these; so beset is that mind, to the American view, with this theory,

this habit or need of precautions, and so disposed apparently to fear,

in its anxiety, that without the precautions the differences—dreadful

thought—may cease. The American theory is, I think, but vague, and the

inevitable consciousness of differences reduced to a matter of

practice—a matter which, on the whole, very much takes care of itself.

Glimpses and revelations come to it, across the sea, on the great wave

of modern publicity—images of a social order in which the precautions,

as from above to below, are more striking than the differences and

thereby out of proportion to them: an appearance that reads a lesson, of

a sort, as to leaving precautions alone. It is true, at any rate, that

no application of the aristocratic, none of the democratic, idea is ever

practically complete; discriminations are produced by the mere working

of the machine, and they so engage alike almost every one’s interest,

meet alike almost every one’s convenience. Nature and industry keep

producing differences as fast as constitutions keep proclaiming

equality, and there are always, at the best, in any really liberal

scheme or human view, more conscious inaptitudes to convince of their

privilege than conscious possibilities to remind of their limits. All of

which reflections, however, I agree, would probably have remained a

little dim even for the restless analyst, had not the most shining of

his examples bathed the subject, to his eyes, in radiance. This could

only be, as I have intimated, that of the bright institution on the

Hudson, as half-an-hour’s vision of it, one splendid Sunday of the

May-time put it before me—all in terms so eloquent that I would fain

have translated them on the spot.

For there, to every appearance, was the high perfection of the type—the

ample, spreading, galleried house, hanging over the great river, with

its beautiful largeness of provision for associated pleasures. The

American note was _there_—in the intensity and continuity of the

association, and the interest of the case was in its thus enjoying, for

the effect, all the advantages that experience, chastening experience,

and taste, “real” taste, could heap upon it. Somewhere in one’s mind,

doubtless, lurked the apprehension that such a “proposition” might, in

that emphatic form, have betrayed a thousand flaws—whereas all one

_could_ say face to face with it, treading its great verandahs and

conversation-rooms, its halls of refreshment, repose and exercise, its

kitchens and its courts and its baths and its gardens, its wondrous

inside and outside palæstra, was that it positively revealed new forms

of felicity. It was thus a new and original thing—rare phenomenon—and

actually an “important” one; for what did it represent (all

discriminations made and recognized) but the active Family, as a final

social fact, or in other words the sovereign People, as a pervasive and

penetrative mass, “doing” themselves on unprecedented lines? They had

invoked, certainly, high and congruous countenance; but vain I thought

the objection made when I exclaimed to a friend on these marvels. “It

depends upon whom I call the People? Of course it depends: so I call

them, exactly, the groups and figures we see, here before us, enjoying,

and enjoying both so expertly and so discreetly, these conveniences and

luxuries. That’s their interest—that they _are_ the people; for what

interest, under the sun, would they have if they weren’t? They are the

people ‘arrived,’ and, what is more, disembarked: that’s all the

difference. It seems a difference because elsewhere (in ‘Europe,’ say

again), though we see them begin, at the very most, to arrive, socially,

we yet practically see them still on the ship—we have never yet seen

them disembark thus _en masse_. This is the effect they have when, all

impediments and objections on the dock removed, they do _that_.” And

later on, at the afternoon’s end, on the platform of the large agreeable

riverside station which spread there, close at hand, as the appanage of

the club itself, I could but call attention to the manner in which every

impression reinforced my moral. The Families, the parties, the groups

and couples (the element of the Individual, as distinguished from that

of the Family, being remarkably absent) had gathered in the soft

eventide for the return to New York, and it was impossible not to read

each sign of the show in the vivid “popular” light. Only one did so—and

this was the great point—with a positive uplifting of the spirit.

Everything hung together and every one was charming. It was my

explanatory word therefore to my companion. “That’s what the People

_are_ when they’ve disembarked.”

Having said so much—and with the sense, strange as it may appear, that

there would still be much to say—I must add that I suddenly seem to see

consternation in the charming face of the establishment, deep in the

Baltimore countryside, my impression of which was to lay a train for

these reflections: so that with a conscience less clear I might take the

image as a warning against the vice of reading too much meaning into

simple intentions. Therefore let me admit that the conscious purpose of

this house of hospitality didn’t look beyond the immediate effect of

luncheon or dinner on one of its deep southern verandahs, with great

trees, close at hand, flinging their shade, with the old garden of the

old country home that the Club had inherited forming one prospect, and

with a deep woodland valley, stream-haunted if I am not mistaken, giving

breadth of style to another. The Maryland boughs, for that matter,

creating in the upper air great classic serenities of shade, give

breadth of style; and the restless analyst, all grateful, and truly for

the nonce at rest, could but ruefully note how little they had borrowed

from any Northern, and least of all from any New England, model their

almost academic grace. They might have borrowed it straight from

far-away Claudes and Turners; yet one made no point of that either—their

interest was so sufficiently their own. Distances of view have often in

the North the large elegance, but nearnesses almost never; these are at

their worst constitutionally coarse and at their best merely

well-meaning. I was to find food all day for that observation; I was to

remain under a charm of which breadth of style was the key. Earth and

air, between them, had taken it in hand—so that one was always moving,

somehow, under arches that were “triumphal” or sitting in bowers that

made one think of temples. It was not that man, or that art, had done

much, though indeed they had incurred no shame and had even been capable

of a masterpiece, seen in the waning light, of which I shall presently

speak. It was the diffused, mitigated glow, the happy medium itself that

continued to be meanwhile half the picture. I wandered through it from

one impression to another, and I keep, with intensity, that of the

admirable outlying Park, treasure of the town, through which I had

already three or four times driven, but the holiday life of which, on

the warm Sunday night, humming, languidly, under the stars, as with

spent voices of the homeward-bound, attested more than ever its valuable

function.

That must have been, in the whole pleasant incoherence, on my way back

from the sweet old Carroll house, climax of an afternoon drive, yet

before another, an ultimate visit, which was the climax of everything. I

have sufficiently noted already the charming law under which, in the

States, any approach to really ripe architectural charm—for the real

ripeness is indispensable—enjoys advantages, those of mystery and

sanctity, that are achieved in “Europe” but on greatly harder terms. The

observed practice of this art, at times singularly subtle, is in fact

half the reward of one’s attention, puzzled though the latter may none

the less be to see how the trick is played. So much at any rate one

remembers; yet where, after all, would the sweet old Carroll house,

nestling under its wood in the late June afternoon, and with something

vaguely haunted in its lonely refinement, not have made an insidious

appeal? There are sweet old Carroll houses, I believe, on several other

sites—the luckiest form perhaps in which a flourishing family may have

been moved to write its annals. The intimation of “annals” hangs about

the place, and again we try to capture, under the charming pillared

portico, before the mild red brick and the pale pediment and facings, in

the series of high chambers, quite instinct with style (small far-off

cousins of such “apartments,” say, as those of Kensington Palace, though

they cover, bungalow-fashion, scarce more than one floor), some

lingering, living accents of such a profession of history. We capture

verily, I think, nothing; we merely project a little, from one room and

from one mild aspect of the void to another, our old habit of

suppositions. Bred of other historic contacts, it instinctively puts

forth feelers; but the feelers drop, after a little, like hands that

meet nothing; our suppositions themselves, as I have called them, and

which but return to us like toy ships that won’t sail, are all they find

tangible. There is satisfaction of a sort, however, even in such

arrested questions, when, as before this delicate faintly-resonant

shell, each other element also helping, they have been vividly enough

suggested. Later on, for the real crown of my day, no wonderments were

checked and no satisfactions imperfect. Attained, for the high finish of

the evening, by another plunge, behind vaguely-playing carriage-lamps,

into the bosky, odorous, quite ridiculously-romantic suburban night,

this was the case of an ancient home without lapses or breaks, where the

past and the present were in friendliest fusion, so that the waiting

future evidently slumbered with confidence; and where, above the easy

open-air “Southern” hospitality, an impression now of shafts of mild

candle-light across overlaced outer galleries and of throbs of nature’s

voice in the dark vaster circle, the Maryland boughs, at their best,

presided in the unforgettable grand manner.

XI

WASHINGTON

I

I was twice in Washington, the first time for a winter visit, the second

to meet the wonderful advance of summer, to which, in that climate of

many charms, the first days of May open wide the gates. This latter

impression was perforce much the more briefly taken; yet, though I had

gathered also from other past occasions, far-away years now, something

of the sense of the place at the earlier season, I find everything

washed over, at the mention of the name, by the rare light, half green,

half golden, of the lovely leafy moment. I see all the rest, till I make

the effort to break the spell, through that voluminous veil; which

operates, for memory, quite as the explosion of spring works, even to

the near vision, in respect to the American scene at large—dressing it

up as if for company, preparing it for social, for human intercourse,

making it in fine publicly presentable, with an energy of renewal and an

effect of redemption not often to be noted, I imagine, on other

continents. Nowhere, truly, can summer have such work cut out for it as

here—nowhere has it to take upon itself to repaint the picture so

completely. In the “European” landscape, in general, some, at least, of

the elements and objects remain upon the canvas; here, on the other

hand, one seems to see intending Nature, the great artist of the season,

decline to touch that surface unless it be first swept clean—decline, at

any rate, to deal with it save by ignoring all its perceived

pretensions. Vernal Nature, in England, in France, in Italy, has still a

use, often a charmed or amused indulgence, for the material in hand, the

furniture of the foreground, the near and middle distances, the

heterogeneous human features of the face of the land. She looks at her

subject much as the portrait-painter looks at the personal properties,

this or that household object, the official uniform, the badges and

ornaments, the favourite dress, of his sitter—with an “Oh, yes, I can

bring them in; they’re just what I want, and I see how they will help me

out.” But I try in vain to recall a case in which, either during the New

England May and June, or during those of the Middle States (since these

groups of weeks have in the two regions a differing identity and value),

the genius in question struck me as adopting with any frankness, as

doing more than passively, helplessly accept, the supplied

paraphernalia, the signs of existing life. The business is clearly to

get rid of them as far as may be, to cover and smother them;

dissimulating with the biggest, freest brush their impertinence and

their ugliness.

I must ask myself, I meanwhile recognize, none the less, why I should

have found Mount Vernon exquisite, the first of May, if the interest had

all to be accounted for in the light of nature. The light of nature was

there, splendid and serene; the Potomac opened out in its grandest

manner; the bluff above the river, before the sweep of its horizon,

raised its head for the historic crown. But it was not for a moment to

be said that this was the whole story; the human interest and the human

charm lay in wait and held one fast—so that, if one had been making

light, elsewhere, of their suggestion and office, one had at least this

case seriously to reckon with. I speak straightway, thus, of Mount

Vernon, though it be but an outlying feature of Washington, and at the

best a minor impression; the image of the particular occasion is seated

so softly in my path. There was a glamour, in fine, for the

excursion—that of an extraordinarily gracious hospitality; and the

glamour would still have been great even if I had not, on my return to

the shadow of the Capitol, found the whole place transfigured. The

season was over, the President away, the two Houses up, the shutters

closed, the visitor rare; and one lost one’s way in the great green

vistas of the avenues quite as one might have lost it in a “sylvan

solitude”—that is in the empty alleys of a park. The emptiness was

qualified at the most, here and there, by some encounter with a stray

diplomatic agent, wreathed for the most part in sincerer smiles than we

are wont to attribute to his class. “This”—it was the meaning of these

inflections—“was the _real_ Washington, a place of enchantment; so that

if the enchantment were never less who could ever bring himself to go

away?” The enchantment had been so much less in January—one could easily

understand; yet the recognition seemed truly the voice of the hour, and

one picked it up with a patriotic flutter not diminished by the fact

that the speaker would probably be going away, and with delight, on the

morrow.

The memory of some of the smiles and inflections comes back in that

light; Washington being the one place in America, I think, where those

qualities are the values and vehicles, the medium of exchange. No small

part of the interest of the social scene there consists, inevitably, for

any restless analyst, in wonder about the “real” sentiments of appointed

foreign participants, the delegates of Powers and pledged alike to

penetration and to discretion, before phenomena which, whatever they may

be, differ more from the phenomena of other capitals and other societies

than they resemble them. This interest is susceptible, on occasion, of

becoming intense; all the more that curiosity must, for the most part,

pursue its object (that of truly looking over the alien shoulder and of

seeing, judging, building, fearing, reporting with the alien sense) by

subtle and tortuous ways. This represents, first and last, even for a

watcher abjectly irresponsible, a good deal of speculative tension; so

that one’s case is refreshing in presence of the clear candour of such a

proposition as that the national capital _is_ charming in proportion as

you don’t see it. For that is what it came to, in the bowery condition;

the as yet unsurmounted bourgeois character of the whole was screened

and disguised; the dressing-up, in other words, was complete, and the

great park-aspect gained, and became nobly artificial, by the very

complexity of the plan of the place—the perpetual perspectives, the

converging, radiating avenues, the frequent circles and crossways, where

all that was wanted for full illusion was that the bronze generals and

admirals, on their named pedestals, should have been great garden-gods,

mossy mythological marble. This would have been the perfect note; the

long vistas yearned for it, and the golden chequers scattered through

the gaps of the high arches waited for some bending nymph or some

armless Hermes to pick them up. The power of the scene to evoke such

visions sufficiently shows, I think, what had become, under the mercy of

nature, of the hard facts, as one must everywhere call them; and yet

though I could, diplomatically, patriotically pretend, at the right

moment, that such a Washington was the “real” one, my assent had all the

while a still finer meaning for myself.

I am hanging back, however, as with a sacred terror, from Mount Vernon,

where indeed I may not much linger, or only enough to appear not to have

shirked the responsibility incurred at the opening of these remarks.

There, in ample possession, was masking, dissimulating summer, the

envelope and disguise to which I have hinted that the American picture

owes, on its human side, _all_ its best presentability; and at the same

time, unmistakably, there was the spell, as quite a distinct matter, of

the hard little facts in themselves. How came it that if they could

throw a spell they were yet so abject and so negligible? How came it

that if they had no intrinsic sweetness, no visible dignity, they could

yet play their part in so unforgettable an impression? The answer to

this can only be, I think, that we happen here to “strike,” as they say,

one of the rarest of cases, a spot on which all sorts of sensibilities

are touched and on which a lively emotion, and one yet other than the

æsthetic, makes us its prey. The old high-placed house, unquestionably,

is charming, and the felicity of the whole scene, on such a day as that

of my impression, scarce to be uttered. The little hard facts, facts of

form, of substance, of scale, facts of essential humility and exiguity,

none the less, look us straight in the face, present themselves

literally to be counted over—and reduce us thereby to the recognition of

our supreme example of the rich interference of association. Association

does, at Mount Vernon, simply what it likes with us—it is of so

beautiful and noble a sort; and to this end it begins by making us unfit

to say whether or no we would in its absence have noticed the house for

any material grace at all. We scarce care more for its being proved

picturesque, the house, than for its being proved plain; its

architectural interest and architectural nullity become one and the same

thing for us. If asked what we should think of it if it hadn’t been, or

if we hadn’t known it for, Washington’s, we retort that the inquiry is

inane, since it is not the possessive case, but the straight, serene

nominative, that we are dealing with. The whole thing _is_

Washington—not his invention and his property, but his presence and his

person; with discriminations (as distinguished from enthusiasms) as

invidious and unthinkable as if they were addressed to his very ears.

The great soft fact, as opposed to the little hard ones, is the beauty

of the site itself; that is definitely, if ever so delicately, sublime,

but it fails to rank among the artificial items that I began by speaking

of, those of so generally compromising an effect in the American

picture. Everything else is _communicated_ importance, and the magic so

wrought for the American sensibility—by which I mean the degree of the

importance and the sustained high pitch of the charm—place it,

doubtless, the world over, among the few supreme triumphs of such

communication. The beauty of the site, meanwhile, as we stand there,

becomes but the final aspect of the man; under which everything conduces

to a single great representative image, under which every feature of the

scene, every object in the house, however trivial, borrows from it and

profits by it. The image is the largest, clearest possible of the

resting, as distinguished from the restless, consciousness of public

service consummately rendered. The terms we commonly use for that

condition—peace with honour, well-earned repose, enjoyment of homage,

recognition of facts—render but dimly the luminous stillness in which,

on its commanding eminence, we see our image bathed. It hangs together

with the whole bright immensity of air and view. It becomes truly the

great white, decent page on which the whole sense of the place is

written. It does more things even besides; attends us while we move

about and goes with us from room to room; mounts with us the narrow

stairs, to stand with us in these small chambers and look out of the low

windows; takes up for us, to turn them over with spiritual hands, the

objects from which we respectfully forbear, and places an accent, in

short, through the rambling old phrase, wherever an accent is required.

Thus we arrive at the full meaning, as it were—thus we know, at least,

why we are so moved.

It is for the same reason for which we are always inordinately moved, on

American ground, I think, when the unconscious minor scale of the little

old demonstrations to which we owe everything is made visible to us,

when their disproportionate modesty is proved upon them. The reason

worked at Mount Vernon, for the restless analyst, quite as it had worked

a few months before, on the small and simple scene of Concord Fight: the

slight, pale, bleeding Past, in a patched homespun suit, stands there

taking the thanks of the bloated Present—having woundedly rescued from

thieves and brought to his door the fat, locked pocket-book of which

that personage appears the owner. The pocket-book contains, “unbeknown”

to the honest youth, bank-notes of incredible figure, and what breaks

our heart, if we be cursed with the historic imagination, is the

grateful, wan smile with which the great guerdon of sixpence is

received. I risk, floridly, the assertion that half the intensity of the

impression of Mount Vernon, for many a visitor, will ever be in this

vision there of Washington _only_ (so far as consciously) so rewarded.

Such fantastications, I indeed admit, are refinements of response to any

impression, but the ground had been cleared for them, and it ministered

to luxury of thought, for instance, that we were a small party at our

ease there, with no other circulation—with the prowling ghosts of

fellow-pilgrims, too harshly present on my previous occasion, all

conveniently laid. This alone represented privilege and power, and they

in turn, with their pomp and circumstance of a charming Government

launch, under official attendance, at the Navy-Yard steps, amid those

large, clean, protecting and protected properties of the State which

always make one think much of the State, whatever its actual

infirmities—these things, to say nothing of other rich enhancements,

above all those that I may least specify, flung over the day I scarce

know what iridescent reflection of the star-spangled banner itself, in

the folds of which I had never come so near the sense of being

positively wrapped. That consciousness, so unfamiliar, was, under the

test, irresistible; it pressed the spring, absolutely, of intellectual

exaltation—with the consequent loud resonance that my account of my

impressions doubtless sufficiently translates.