Washington itself meanwhile—the Washington always, I premise, of the
rank outsider—had struck me from the first as presenting two distinct
faces; the more obvious of which was the public and official, the
monumental, with features all more or less majestically playing the
great administrative, or, as we nowadays put it, Imperial part. This
clustered, yet at the same time oddly scattered, city, a general
impression of high granite steps, of light grey corniced colonnades,
rather harmoniously low, contending for effect with slaty mansard roofs
and masses of iron excrescence, a general impression of somewhat vague,
empty, sketchy, fundamentals, however expectant, however spacious,
overweighted by a single Dome and overaccented by a single Shaft—this
loose congregation of values seemed, strangely, a matter disconnected
and remote, though remaining in its way portentous and bristling all
incoherently at the back of the scene. The back of the scene, indeed, to
one’s quite primary sense, might have been but an immense painted, yet
unfinished cloth, hung there to a confessedly provisional end and marked
with the queerness, among many queernesses, of looking always the same;
painted once for all in clear, bright, fresh tones, but never emerging
from its flatness, after the fashion of other capitals, into the truly,
the variously, modelled and rounded state. (It appeared provisional
therefore because looking as if it might have been unhooked and removed
as a whole; because any one object in it so treated would have made the
rest also come off.) The foreground was a different thing, a thing that,
ever so quaintly, seemed to represent the force really in possession;
though consisting but of a small company of people engaged perpetually
in conversation and (always, I repeat, for the rank outsider) singularly
destitute of conspicuous marks or badges. This little society easily
became, for the detached visitor, the city itself, _the_ national
capital and the greater part of the story; and that, ever, in spite of
the comparatively scant intensity of its political permeation. The
political echo was of course to be heard in it, and the public
character, in his higher forms, to be encountered—though only in “single
spies,” not in battalions; but there was something that made it much
more individual than any mere predominance of political or
administrative colour would have made it; leaving it in that case to do
no more than resemble the best society in London, or that in best
possession of the field in Paris.
Two sharp signs my remoter remembrance had shown me the then Washington
world, and the first met, as putting forth; one of these the fact of its
being extraordinarily easy and pleasant, and the other that of one’s
appearing to make out in it not more than half-a-dozen members of the
Lower House and not more than a dozen of the Upper. This kept down the
political permeation, and was bewildering, if one was able to compare,
in the light of the different London condition, the fact of the social
ubiquity there of the acceptable M.P. and that of the social frequency
even of his more equivocal hereditary colleague. A London nestling under
the towers of Westminster, yet practically void of members of the House
of Commons, and with the note of official life far from exclusively
sounding, that might have been in those days the odd image of
Washington, had not the picture been stamped with other variations
still. These were a whole cluster, not instantly to be made out, but
constituting the unity of the place as soon as perceived; representing
that finer extract or essence which the self-respecting observer is
never easy till he be able to shake up and down in bottled form. The
charming company of the foreground then, which referred itself so little
to the sketchy back-scene, the monstrous Dome and Shaft, figments of the
upper air, the pale colonnades and mere myriad-windowed Buildings, was
the second of the two faces, and the more one lived with it the more, up
to a certain point, one lived away from the first. In time, and after
perceiving _how_ it was what it so agreeably was, came the recognition
of common ground; the recognition that, in spite of strange passages of
the national life, liable possibly to recur, during which the President
himself was scarce thought to be in society, the particular precious
character that one had apprehended could never have ripened without a
general consensus. One had put one’s finger on it when one had seen
disengage itself from many anomalies, from not a few drolleries, the
superior, the quite majestic fact of the City of Conversation pure and
simple, and positively of the only specimen, of any such intensity, in
the world.
That had remained for me, from the other time, the properest name of
Washington, and nothing could so interest me, on a renewal of
acquaintance, too long postponed and then too woefully brief, as to find
my description wholly justified. If the emphasis added by “pure and
simple” be invariably retained, the description will continue, I think,
to embrace and exhaust the spectacle, while yet leaving it every inch of
its value. Clearly quite immeasurable, on American ground, the value of
such an assertion of a town-type directly opposed to the unvarying
American, and quite unique, on any ground, so organized a social
indifference to the vulgar vociferous Market. Washington may of course
_know_ more than she confesses—no community could perhaps really be as
ignorant as Washington used at any rate to look, and to like to look, of
this particular thing, of “goods” and shares and rises and falls and all
such sordidities; but she knows assuredly still the very least she can
get off with, and nothing even yet pleases her more than to forget what
she does know. She unlearns, she turns her back, while London, Paris,
Berlin, Rome, in their character of political centres, strike us as, on
the contrary, feverishly learning, trying more and more to do the exact
opposite. (I speak, naturally, as to Washington, of knowing actively and
interestedly, in the spirit of gain—not merely of the enjoyed lights of
political and administrative science, doubtless as abundant there as
anywhere else.) It might fairly have been, I used to think, that the
charming place—charming in the particular connection I speak of—had on
its conscience to make one forget for an hour the colossal greed of New
York. Nothing, in fact, added more to its charm than its appearing
virtually to invite one to impute to it some such vicarious compunction.
If I be reminded, indeed, that the distinction I here glance at is
negative, and be asked what then (if she knew nothing of the great
American interest) Washington did socially know, my answer, I recognize,
has at once to narrow itself, and becomes perhaps truly the least bit
difficult to utter. It none the less remains distinct enough that, the
City of Conversation being only in question, and a general subject of
all the conversation having thereby to be predicated, our responsibility
is met as soon as we are able to say what Washington mainly talks, and
appears always to go mainly talking, about. Washington talks about
herself, and about almost nothing else; falling superficially indeed, on
that ground, but into line with the other capitals. London, Paris,
Berlin, Rome, goodness knows, talk about themselves: that is each member
of this sisterhood talks, sufficiently or inordinately, of the great
number of divided and differing selves that form together her
controlling identity. London, for instance, talks of everything in the
world without thereby for a moment, as it were, ceasing to be
egotistical. It has taken everything in the world to make London up, so
that she is in consequence simply doomed never to get away from herself.
Her conversation is largely, I think, the very effort to do that; but
she inevitably figures in it but as some big buzzing insect which keeps
bumping against a treacherous mirror. It is in positive quest of an
identity of some sort, much rather—an identity other than merely
functional and technical—that Washington goes forth, encumbered with no
ideal of avoidance or escape: it is about herself _as_ the City of
Conversation precisely that she incessantly converses; adorning the
topic, moreover, with endless ingenuity and humour. But that,
absolutely, remains the case; which thus becomes one of the most
thorough, even if probably one of the most natural and of the happiest,
cases of collective self-consciousness that one knows. The spectacle, as
it at first met my senses, was that of a numerous community in ardent
pursuit of some workable conception of its social self, and trying
meanwhile intelligently to talk itself, and even this very
embarrassment, into a _subject_ for conversation. Such a picture might
not seem purely pleasing, on the side of variety of appeal, and I admit
one may have had one’s reserves about it; reserves sometimes reflected,
for example, in dim inward speculation—one of the effects of the
Washington air I have already glanced at—as to the amount of response it
might evoke in the diplomatic body. It may have been on my part a morbid
obsession, but the diplomatic body was liable to strike one there as
more characteristically “abysmal” than elsewhere, more impenetrably
bland and inscrutably blank; and it was obvious, certainly, that their
concern to help the place intellectually to find itself was not to be
expected to approach in intensity the concern even of a repatriated
absentee. You were concerned only if you had, by your sensibility, a
stake in the game; which was the last thing a foreign representative
would wish to confess to, this being directly opposed to all his
enjoined duties. It is no part of the office of such personages to
assist the societies to which they are accredited to find themselves—it
is much more their mission to leave all such vaguely and, so far as may
be, grotesquely groping: so apt are societies, in finding themselves, to
find other things too. This detachment from the whole mild convulsion of
effort, the considerate pretence of not being too aware of it, combined
with latent probabilities of alarm about it no less than of amusement,
represented, to the unquiet fancy, much more the spirit of the old-time
Legations.
What _was_, at all events, better fun, of the finer sort, than having
one’s self a stake in the outcome?—what helped the time (so much of it
as there was!) more to pass than just to join in the so fresh experiment
of constitutive, creative talk? The boon, it should always be mentioned,
meanwhile went on not in the least in the tone of solemnity. That would
have been fatal, because probably irritating, and it was where the good
star of Washington intervened. The tone was, so to speak, of _conscious_
self-consciousness, and the highest genius for conversation doubtless
dwelt in the fact that the ironic spirit was ready always to give its
very self away, fifty times over, for the love, or for any quickening,
of the theme. The foundation for the whole happy predicament remained,
moreover, of the firmest, and the essence of the case was to be as
easily stated as the great social fact is, in America, whether through
exceptions or aggravations, everywhere to be stated. Nobody was in
“business”—that was the sum and substance of it; and for the one large
human assemblage on the continent of which this was true the difference
made was huge. Nothing could strike one more than that it was the only
way in which, over the land, a difference _could_ be made, and than how,
in our vast commercial democracy, almost any difference—by which I mean
almost any exception—promptly acquires prodigious relief. The value here
was at once that the place could offer to view a society, the only one
in the country, in which Men existed, and that that rich little fact
became the key to everything. Superficially taken, I recognize, the
circumstance fails to look portentous; but it looms large immediately,
gains the widest bearing, in the light of any direct or extended
acquaintance with American conditions. From the moment it is adequately
borne in mind that the business-man, in the United States, may, with no
matter what dim struggles, gropings, yearnings, never hope to be
anything _but_ a business-man, the size of the field he so abdicates is
measured, as well as the fact of the other care to which his abdication
hands it over. It lies there waiting, pleading from all its pores, to be
occupied—the lonely waste, the boundless gaping void of “society”; which
is but a rough name for all the _other_ so numerous relations with the
world he lives in that are imputable to the civilized being. Here it is
then that the world he lives in accepts its doom and becomes, by his
default, subject and plastic to his mate; his default having made, all
around him, the unexampled opportunity of the woman—which she would have
been an incredible fool not to pounce upon. It needs little contact with
American life to perceive how she _has_ pounced, and how, outside
business, she has made it over in her image. She has been, up to now, on
the vast residual tract, in peerless possession, and is occupied in
developing and extending her wonderful conquest, which she appreciates
to the last inch of its extent.