III

The next day, for instance, was all occupied with but one of these; the

railway run from Jacksonville to Palm Beach begins early and ends late,

yet I waited, the livelong time, for any other “factor” than that of the

dense cypress swamp to show so much as the tip of an ear. I had quite

counted on being thrilled by this very intensity and monotony of the

characteristic note; and I doubtless was thrilled—I invoked, I

cultivated the thrill, as we went, by every itinerant art that

experience had long since taught me; yet with a presentiment, all the

while, of the large field, in the whole impression, that this simplicity

would cover. Possible diversions doubtless occurred, had the attuned

spirit been moved to avail itself; Ormond, for instance, off to our

right, put in, toward the dim centre of the stretch, a claim as large as

a hard white racing-beach, an expanse of firm sand thirty miles long,

could make it. This, I recognized, might well be an appeal of the grand

and simple order—the huge band of shining silver beside the huge band of

sapphire sea; and I inquired a little as to what filled in the picture.

“Oh, the motor-cars, the bicycles and the trotting-waggons, tearing up

and down.” And then, as one seemed perhaps to yearn for another touch:

“Ah, the hotels of course—plenty of _them_, plenty of people; very

popular resort.” It sounded charming, with its hint again of two or

three great facts of composition—so definite that their paucity

constituted somehow a mild majesty; but it ministered none the less to a

reflection I had already, on occasion, found myself perhaps a little

perversely making. One was liable, in the States, on many a scene, to

react, as it were, from the people, and to throw one’s self passionately

on the bosom of contiguous Nature, whatever surface it might happen to

offer; one was apt to be moved, in possibly almost invidious preference,

or in deeper and sweeter confidence, to try what might be made of

_that_. Yet, all unreasonably, when any source of interest did express

itself in these mere rigorous terms, in these only—terms all of

elimination, just of sea and sky and river-breast and forest and beach

(the “beaches” in especial were to acquire a trick of getting on one’s

nerves!) that produced in turn a wanton wonder about the “human side,”

and a due recurrence to the fact that the human side had been from the

first one’s affair.

So, therefore, one seemed destined a bit incoherently to proceed; asking

one’s self again and again what the play would have been without the

scenery, sometimes “even such” scenery, and then once more not quite

seeing why such scenery (in especial) should propose to put one off with

so little of a play. The thing, absolutely, everywhere, was to provide

one’s own play; anything, everything made scenery for that, and the

recurrence of such questions made scenery most of all. I remember no

moment, over the land, when the mere Pullman itself didn’t overarch my

observations as a positive temple of the drama, and when the comedy and

the tragedy of manners didn’t, under its dome, hold me raptly attent.

With which there were other resources—a rising tide that, before we got

to Palm Beach, floated me back into remembered depths of youth. Why

shouldn’t I hold it not trivial that, as the day waned, and the evening

gathered, and the heat increased, and my companions removed, one after

the other, the articles of clothing that had consorted with our early

start, I felt myself again beneath the spell of Mayne Reid, captain of

the treasure-ship of romance and idol of my childhood? I might again

have held in my very hand _The War Trail_, a work that had seemed

matchless to my fourteenth year, for was not the train itself rumbling

straight into _that_ fantastic Florida, with its rank vegetation and its

warm, heroic, amorous air?—the Florida of the Seminoles and the

Everglades, of the high old Spanish Dons and the passionate Creole

beauties gracing the primal “society”; of Isolina de Vargas, whose

voluptuous form was lashed Mazeppa-like, at the climax of her fortunes,

to the fiery mustang of the wilderness, and so let loose adown the

endless vista of our young suspense. We had thus food for the mind, I

recall, if we were reduced to that; and I remember that, as my

buffet-car (there was none other) was hours late, the fond vision of the

meal, crown of the endless day, awaiting me ultimately at the famous

hotel, yielded all the inspiration necessary for not appealing again,

great though the stress and strain, to the indescribable charity of the

“buffet.” The produce of the buffet, the procedure of the buffet, were

alike (wherever resorted to) a sordid mockery of desire; so I but

suffered desire to accumulate till the final charming arrest, the

platform of the famous hotel, amid generous lights and greetings, and

excellent arrangements, and balmy Southern airs, and the breath of the

near sea, and the vague crests of great palms, announced the fulfilment

of every hope.

The question of whether one’s hope was really fulfilled, or of whether

one had, among all those items of ease, to go supperless to bed, would

doubtless appear beneath the dignity of even such history as this, were

it not for a single fact—which, then and there looming large to me,

blocked out, on the spot, all others. It is difficult to render the

intensity with which one felt the great sphere of the hotel close round

one, covering one in as with high, shining crystal walls, stretching

beneath one’s feet an immeasurable polished level, revealing itself in

short as, for the time, for the place, the very order of nature and the

very form, the only one, of the habitable world. The effect was like

nothing else of the sort one had ever known, and of surpassing interest,

truly, as any supreme illustration of manners, any complete and organic

projection of a “social” case is apt to be. The whole picture presented

itself as fresh and luminous—as was natural to phenomena shown in the

splendid Florida light and off there at the end of a huge peninsula

especially appointed to them, and kept clear, in their interest, as it

struck me, of any shadow of anything but themselves. One had been aware

enough, certainly, for long years, of that range of American aspects,

that diffusion of the American example, to which one had given, from far

back, for convenience, the name of hotel-civilization; why, accordingly,

was this renewed impression so hugely to impose itself; why was it, to

the eye of the restless analyst, to stand for so much more than ever

yet? Why was it, above all, so to succeed in making, with insistence,

its appeal?—an appeal if not to the finer essence of interest, yet to

several of the fond critic’s livelier sensibilities. Wasn’t, for that

matter, his asking of such questions as these the very state of being

interested?—and all the more that the general reply to them was not easy

to throw off.

The vision framed, the reflections suggested, corresponded closely with

those to which, in New York, some weeks before, on its harsh winter

afternoon, the Waldorf-Astoria had prescribed such a revel; but it was

wondrous that if I had there supposed the apogee of the impression (or,

better still, of the expression) reached, I was here to see the whole

effect written lucidly larger. The difference was doubtless that of the

crowded air and encumbered ground in the great Northern city—in the fact

that the demonstration is made in Florida as in a vast clean void

expressly prepared for it. It has nothing either in nature or in man to

reckon with—it carries everything before it; meaning, when I say “it,”

in this momentarily indefinite way, the perfect, the exquisite

adjustability of the “national” life to the sublime hotel-spirit. The

whole appearance operates as by an economy so thorough that no element

of either party to the arrangement is discoverably sacrificed; neither

is mutilated, docked in any degree of its identity, its amplitude of

type; nothing is left unexpressed in either through its relation with

the other. The relation would in fact seem to stimulate each to a view

of the highest expression as yet open to it. The advantage—in the sense

of the “upper hand”—may indeed be, at a few points, most with the

hotel-spirit, as the more concentrated of the two; there being so much

that is comparatively undeveloped and passive in the social organism to

which it looks for response, and the former agency, by its very nature

full-blown and expert, “trying it on” the latter much more than the

latter is ever perceptibly moved to try it on the former. The

hotel-spirit is an omniscient genius, while the character of the

tributary nation is still but struggling into relatively dim

self-knowledge. An illustration of this met me, precisely, at the very

hour of my alighting: one had entered, toward ten o’clock in the

evening, the hotel-world; it had become the all in all and made and

imposed its law.

This took the form, for me, at that hungry climax, at the end of the

long ordeal of the buffet-car, of a refusal of all food that night; a

rigour so inexorable that, had it not been for the charity of admirable

friends, able to provide me from a private store, I should have had to

go, amid all the suggestions of everything, fasting and faint to bed.

There one seemed to get the hotel-spirit _taking_ the advantage—taking

it unfairly; for whereas it struck me in general as educative,

distinctly, in respect to the society it deals with, keeping for the

most part well in advance of it, and leading it on to a larger view of

the social interest and opportunity than might otherwise accrue, here,

surely, it was false to its mission, it fell behind its pretension, its

general pretension not only of meeting all American ideals, but of

creating (the Waldorf-Astoria being in this sense, for example, a

perfect riot of creation) new and superior ones. Its basis, in those

high developments, is not that it merely gratifies them as soon as they

peep out, but that it lies in wait for them, anticipates and plucks them

forth even before they dawn, setting them up almost prematurely and

turning their face in the right direction. Thus the great national

ignorance of many things is artfully and benevolently practised upon;

thus it is converted into extraordinary appetites, such as can be but

expensively sated. The belated traveller’s appetite for the

long-deferred “bite” could scarce be described as _too_ extraordinary;

but the great collective, plastic public, so vague yet about many

things, didn’t _know_ that it couldn’t, didn’t know that, in communities

more knowing, the great glittering, costly caravansery, where the scale

of charges is an implication of a high refinement of service, grave

lapses are not condoned.

One appears ridiculously to be regretting that unsupplied mouthful, but

the restless analyst had in truth quickly enough left it behind, feeling

in his hand, already, as a clue, the long concatenation of interlinked

appearances. Things short in themselves might yet have such large

dimensions of meaning. The revelation, practically dazzling to the

uninformed many, was constantly proving, right and left, if one gave it

time, a trick played on the informed few; and there was no quarter of

the field, either the material or the “social,” in which that didn’t

sooner or later come out. The fact that the individual, with his

preferences, differences, habits, accidents, might still fare

imperfectly even where the crowd could be noted as rejoicing before the

Lord more ingenuously than on any other human scene, added but another

touch to one’s impression, already so strong, of the success with which,

throughout the land, even in conditions which might appear likely, on

certain sides, to beget reserves about it, the all-gregarious and

generalized life suffices to every need. I by no means say that it is

not touching, the so largely witless confidence with which the universal

impulse hurls its victims into the abyss of the hotel-spirit, trusting

it so blandly and inviting it to throw up, round and about them and far

and wide, the habitable, the practicable, the agreeable sphere toward

which other arts of construction fail. There were lights in which this

was to strike me as one of the most affecting of all social exhibitions;

lights, positively, in which I seemed to see again (as, once more, at

the universal Waldorf-Astoria) the whole housed populace move as in mild

and consenting suspicion of its captured and governed state, its having

to consent to inordinate fusion as the price of what it seemed pleased

to regard as inordinate luxury. Beguiled and caged, positively thankful,

in its vast vacancy, for the sense and the definite horizon of a cage,

were there yet not moments, were there yet not cases and connections, in

which it still dimly made out that its condition was the result of a

compromise into the detail of which there might some day be an alarm in

entering? The detail of the compromise exacted of the individual,

throughout American life, affects the observer as a great cumulative

sum, growing and growing while he awaits time and opportunity to go into

it; and I asked myself again and again if I couldn’t imagine the shadow

of that quantity by no means oppressively felt, yet already vaguely

perceived, and reflected a bit portentously in certain aspects of the

native consciousness.

The jealous cultivation of the common mean, the common mean only, the

reduction of everything to an average of decent suitability, the gospel

of precaution against the dangerous tendency latent in many things to

become too good for their context, so that persons partaking of them may

become too good for their company—the idealized form of all this

glimmered for me, as an admonition or a betrayal, through the charming

Florida radiance, constituting really the greatest interest of the

lesson one had travelled so far to learn. It might superficially seem

absurd, it might savour almost of blasphemy, to put upon the “romantic”

peninsula the affront of that particular prosaic meaning; but I profess

that none of its so sensibly thin sources of romance—thin because

everywhere asking more of the imagination than they could be detected in

giving it—appealed to me with any such force or testified in any such

quantity. Definitely, one had made one’s pilgrimage but to find the

hotel-spirit in sole _articulate_ possession, and, call this truth for

the mind an anti-climax if one would, none of the various climaxes, the

minor effects—those of Nature, for instance, since thereabouts, far and

wide, was no hinted history—struck me as for a moment dispossessing it

of supremacy. So little availed, comparatively, those of the jungle, the

air, the sea, the sky, the sunset, the orange, the pineapple, the palm;

so little such a one, amid all the garden climaxes, as that of the

divine bougainvillæa which, here and there, at Palm Beach, smothers

whole “homes” in its purple splendour. For the light of the hotel-spirit

really beat upon everything; it was the only torch held up for the view

or the sense of anything else. The case, therefore, was perfect, for

what did this mean but that its conscience, so to speak, its view of its

responsibility, would be of the highest, and that, given the whole

golden frame of the picture, the appearances could be nowhere else so

grandly in its favour? That prevision was to be in fact afterwards

confirmed to me.