IV

On a strip of sand between the sea and the jungle in one quarter,

between the sea and the Lake in another, the clustered hotels, the

superior Pair in especial, stand and exhale their genius. One of them,

the larger, the more portentously brave, of the Pair, is a marvel

indeed, proclaiming itself of course, with all the eloquence of an

interminable towered and pinnacled and gabled and bannered sky-line, the

biggest thing of its sort in the world. Such is the responsive geniality

begotten by its apparently perfect adequacy to this pretension, or to

any other it might care to put forth, that one took it easily as leaving

far behind mere figures of speech and forms of advertisement; to stand

off and see it rear its incoherent crest above its gardens was to

remember—and quite with relief—nothing but the processional outline of

Windsor Castle that could appear to march with it. I say with relief

because the value of the whole affirmation, which was but the scale

otherwise expressed, seemed thereby assured: no world _but_ an

hotel-world could flourish in such a shadow. Every step, for a mile or

two round, conduced but to show how it did flourish; every aspect of

everything for which our reclaimed patch, our liberal square between sea

and jungle, yielded space, was a demonstration of that. The gardens and

groves, the vistas and avenues between the alignments of palms, the

fostered insolence of flame-coloured flower and golden fruit, were

perhaps the rarest attestation of all; so recent a conquest did this

seem to me of ground formerly abandoned, in the States, to the general

indifference. There came back to me from other years a vision of the

rude and sordid margins, the untended approaches surrounding, at

“resorts,” the crowded caravansery of the earlier time—and marking even

now, I inferred, those of the type that still survive; and I caught

verily at play that best virtue of the potent presence. The hotel was

leading again, not following—imposing the standard, not submitting to

it; teaching the affluent class how to “garden,” how, in fact, to tidy

up its “yard”—since affluence alone was supposable there; not receiving

at other hands the lesson. It was doing more than this—discriminating in

favour of the beautiful, and above all in favour of the “refined,” with

an energy that again, in the most interesting way, seemed to cause the

general question of the future of beauty in America to heave in its

unrest.

Fifty times, already, I had felt myself catching this vibration,

received some vivid impression of the growing quantity of force

available for that conquest—of all the latent powers of freedom of

space, of wealth, of faith and knowledge and curiosity, verily perhaps

even of sustained passion, potentially at its service. These

possibilities glimmer before one at times, in presence of some artistic

effect expensively yet intelligently, yet even charmingly produced, with

the result of your earnestly saying: “Why not more and more then, why

not an immense exploration, an immense exhibition, of such

possibilities? What is wanting for it, after all, in the way of——?” Just

there it is indeed that you pull yourself up—ah, in the way of what? You

are conscious that what you recognize in especial is not so much the

positive as the negative strength of the case. What you see is the space

and the freedom—which at every turn, in America, make one yearn to take

other things for granted. The ground is so clear of preoccupation, the

air so clear of prejudgment and doubt, that you wonder why the chance

shouldn’t be as great for the æsthetic revel as for the political and

economic, why some great undaunted adventure of the arts, meeting in its

path none of the aged lions of prescription, of proscription, of merely

jealous tradition, should not take place in conditions unexampled. From

the moment it is but a question of some one’s, of every one’s caring,

where was the conceivable quantity of care, where were the means and

chances of application, ever so great? And the precedent, the analogy,

of the universal organizing passion, the native aptitude for putting

affairs “through,” indubitably haunts you: you are so aware of the

acuteness and the courage that you fall but a little short of figuring

them as æsthetically contributive. But you do fall short; you remember

in time that great creations of taste and faith never express themselves

_primarily_ in terms of mere convenience and zeal, and that all the

waiting money and all the general fury have, at the most, the sole value

of being destined to be good for beauty _when it shall appear_. They

have it in them so little, by themselves, to make it appear, that your

unfinished question arrives easily enough, in that light, at its end.

“What is wanting in the way of taste?” is the right form of the

inquiry—that small circumstance alone being _positively_ contributive.

The others, the boundless field, the endless gold, the habit of great

enterprises, are, you feel, at most, simple negations of difficulty.

They affect you none the less, however, as a rank of stalwart soldiers

and servants who, as they stand at attention, plead from wistful eyes to

be enrolled and used; so that before any embodied symptom of the

precious principle they are there in the background of your thought.

These lingering instants spent in the presence of such symptoms, these

brief moments of æsthetic arrest—liable to occur in the most diverse

connections—have an interest that quite picks them, I think, from the

heap of one’s American hours. And the interest is always fine, throwing

one back as, by a further turn, it usually does, on the question of the

trick possibly played, for your appreciation, by mere negation of

difficulty. To what extent may the absence of difficulty, to what extent

may not facility of purchase and sweet simplicity of pride, surprise you

into taking them momentarily for a demonstration of taste? You remain on

your guard, very properly; but the interest, as I have called it,

doesn’t flag, none the less, since there is one mistake into which you

never need fall, and one charming, one touching appearance that you may

take as representing, wherever you meet it, a reality. When once you

have interpreted the admonitory sign I have just named as the inordinate

_desire for taste_, a desire breaking into a greater number of quaint

and candid forms, probably, than have ever been known upon earth, the

air is in a manner clearer, and you know sufficiently where you are.

Isn’t it cleared, moreover, beyond doubt, to the positive increase of

the interest, and doesn’t the question then become, almost thrillingly,

that of the degree to which this pathos of desire may be condemned to

remain a mere heartbreak to the historic muse? _Is_ that to be,

possibly, the American future—so far as, over such a mystery of

mysteries, glibness may be permitted? The fascination grows while you

wonder—as, from the moment you have begun to go into the matter at all,

wonder you certainly must. If with difficulties so conjured away by

power, the clear vision, the creative freshness, the real thing in a

word, _shall_ have to continue to be represented, indefinitely, but by a

gilded yearning, the inference is then irresistible that these blessings

are indeed of their essence a sovereign rarity. If with so many of the

conditions they yet hang back, on what particular occult furtherance

must they not incorruptibly depend? What are the other elements that

make for them, and in what manner and at what points does the wrong

combination of such elements, on the American scene, work for

frustration? Entrancing speculation!—which has brought me back by a long

circuit to the shining marble villa on the edge of Lake Worth.

I was about to allude to this wondrous creation as the supreme instance

of missionary effort on the part of the hotel-spirit—by which I mean of

the effort to illustrate and embody a group of its ideals, to give a

splendid concrete example of its ability to flower, at will, into

concentration, into conspicuous privacy, into a care for all the

refinements. The palace rears itself, behind its own high gates and

gilded, transparent barriers, at a few minutes’ walk from the great

caravanseries; it sits there, in its admirable garden, amid its statues

and fountains, the hugeness of its more or less antique vases and

sarcophagi—costliest reproductions all—as if to put to shame those

remembered villas of the Lake of Como, of the Borromean Islands, the

type, the climate, the horticultural elegance, the contained

curiosities, luxuries, treasures, of which it invokes only to surpass

them at every point. New with that consistency of newness which one sees

only in the States, it seems to say, somehow, that to some such heaven,

some such public exaltation of the Blest, those who have conformed with

due earnestness to the hotel-spirit, and for a sufficiently long

probation, may hope eventually to penetrate or perhaps actually retire.

It has sprung from the genius of the divine Pair, the Dioscuri

themselves—as Castor and Pollux were the sons of Zeus; and has this,

above all, of exemplary, that whereas one had in other climes and

countries often seen the proprietor of estates construct an hotel, or

hotels, on a piece of his property, and even, when rigid need was, in

proximity to his “home,” one had not elsewhere seen the home adjoined to

the hotel, and placed, with such magnificence, under its protection and,

as one might say, its star. In the former case—it was easy to

reflect—there had been ever, at best, an effect of incoherence; while

the beauty of logic, of the strictly consequent, was all on the side of

the latter. So much as that one may say; but I should find it hard to

express without some air of extravagance my sense of the beauty of the

lesson read to the general Palm Beach consciousness from behind the

gilded gates and between the large interstices of the enclosure. It had

the immense merit that it was suited, admirably, to the “boarders”; it

preached them the gospel of civilization all in their own terms and

without the waste of an accent; it was in short the apotheosis, the

ideal form of the final home that may pretend to crown a career of

sufficiently expensive boarding. Anything less gorgeous wouldn’t have

been proportioned to so much expense, nor anything more sequestered in

the key of such a mode of life. But I detach myself, with reluctance,

from the view of this interesting creation—interesting in its sense of

bathing the whole question of manners in a light. Anything that does

that is a boon to the restless analyst; and I remember rejoicing that he

should have been introduced promptly to the marble palace, which struck

him as rewarding attention the more attention was privileged and the

further it might penetrate. Such an experience was, all properly,

preliminary to a view of the rest of the scene; since otherwise,

frankly, in relation to what at all represented ideal were the boarders,

in their vast multitude, to be viewed?

For the boarders, verily, were the great indicated show, as I had

gathered in advance, at Palm Beach; it had been promised one, on all

sides, that there, as nowhere else, in America, one would find Vanity

Fair in full blast—and Vanity Fair not scattered, not discriminated and

parcelled out, as among the comparative privacies and ancientries of

Newport, but compressed under one vast cover, enclosed in a single huge

_vitrine_, which there would be nothing to prevent one’s flattening

one’s nose against for days of delight. It was into Vanity Fair,

accordingly, that one embraced every opportunity to press; it was the

boarders, frankly, who engaged one’s attention in default of any great

array of other elements. The other elements, it must be confessed,

strike the visitor as few; he has soon come to the end of them, even

though they consist of the greater part of the rest of the sense of

Florida. And he seems to himself to pursue them, mainly, at the tail,

and in the constant track of the boarders; these latter are so numerous,

and the clearing in the jungle so comparatively minute, that there is

scant occasion for the wandering apart which always forms, under the law

of the herd, the intenser joy. The velvet air, the colour of the sea,

the “royal” palms, clustered here and there, and, in their nobleness of

beauty, their single sublime distinction, putting every other mark and

sign to the blush, these are the principal figures of the sum—these,

with the custom of the short dip into the jungle, at two or three points

of which, approached by charming, winding wood-ways, the small but

genial fruit-farm offers hospitality—offers it in all the succulence of

the admirable pale-skinned orange and the huge sun-warmed grapefruit,

plucked from the low bough, where it fairly bumps your cheek for

solicitation, and partaken of, on the spot, as the immortal ladies of

Cranford partook of dessert—with a few steps aside, the back turned and

a betrayed ingurgitation. It is by means of a light perambulator, of

“adult size,” but constructed of wicker-work, and pendent from a bicycle

propelled by a robust negro, that the jungle is thus visited; the

bicycle follows the serpentine track, the secluded ranch is swiftly

reached, the peaceful retirement of the cultivators multitudinously

admired, the perambulator promptly re-entered, the darkey restored to

the saddle and his charge again to the hotel.

V

It is all most agreeable and diverting, it is almost, the boarders

apart, romantic; but it is soon over, and there is not much more of it.

The uncanny conception, the rank eccentricity of a walk encounters

neither favour nor facility—but on the subject of the inveteracy with

which the conditions, over the land, conspire against that sweet

subterfuge there would be more to say than I may here deal with. One of

these gentle ranches was approached by water, as Palm Beach has a front

on its vast, fresh lake as well as seaward; a steam-launch puts you down

at the garden foot, and the place is less infested by the boarders, less

confessedly undefended, less artlessly ignorant in fine (thanks perhaps

to the mere interposing water) of any possible right to occultation; the

general absence of conception of that right, nowhere asserted, nowhere

embodied, everywhere in fact quite sacrificially abrogated, qualifying

at last your very sense of the American character—qualifying it very

much as a pervading unsaltedness qualifies the taste of a dinner. This

brief excursion remains with me, at any rate, as a delicate and

exquisite impression; the neck of land that stretched from the languid

lake to the anxious sea, the approach to real detachment, the gracious

Northern hostess, just veiled, for the right felicity, in a thin

nostalgic sadness, the precious recall in particular of having succeeded

in straying a little, through groves of the pensive palm, down to the

sandy, the vaguely-troubled shore. There was a certain concentration in

the hour, a certain intensity in the note, a certain intimacy in the

whole communion; I found myself loving, quite fraternally, the palms,

which had struck me at first, for all their human-headed gravity, as

merely dry and taciturn, but which became finally as sympathetic as so

many rows of puzzled philosophers, dishevelled, shock-pated, with the

riddle of the universe. This scantness and sweetness and sadness, this

strange peninsular spell, _this_, I said, was sub-tropical Florida—and

doubtless as permitted a glimpse as I should ever have of any such

effect. The softness was divine—like something mixed, in a huge silver

crucible, as an elixir, and then liquidly scattered. But the refinement

of the experience would be the summer noon or the summer night—it would

be then the breast of Nature would open; save only that, so lost in it

and with such lubrication of surrender, how should one ever come back?

As it was, one came back soon enough, back to one’s proper business:

which appeared to be, urgently, strictly, severely, the pursuit of the

boarders up and down the long corridors and round about the wide

verandahs of their crowded career. I had been admirably provided for at

the less egregious of the two hotels; which was vast and cool and fair,

friendly, breezy, shiny, swabbed and burnished like a royal yacht,

really immaculate and delightful; full of interesting lights and yet

standing but on the edge of the whirlpool, the centre of which formed

the heart of the adjacent colossus. One could plunge, by a short walk

through a luxuriance of garden, into the deeper depths; one could lose

one’s self, if so minded, in the labyrinth of the other show. There, if

Vanity Fair was not encamped, it was not for want of booths; the long

corridors were streets of shops, dealing, naturally, in commodities

almost beyond price—not the cheap gimcracks of the usual watering-place

barrack, but solid (when not elaborately ethereal), formidable,

incalculable values, of which it was of an admonitory economic interest

to observe the triumphant appeal. They hadn’t terrors, apparently, for

the clustered boarders, these idols and monsters of the market—neither

the wild fantastications of the milliner, the uncovered fires, disclosed

secrets of the gem-merchant, the errant tapestries and _bahuts_ of the

antiquarian, nor, what I found most impressive and what has everywhere

its picture-making force, those ordered dispositions and stretched

lengths of old “point” in the midst of which a quiet lady in black,

occupied with some small stitch of her own, is apt to raise at you, with

expensive deliberation, a grave, white Flemish face. The interest of the

general spectacle was supposed to be, I had gathered, that people from

all parts of the country contributed to it; and the value of the

testimony as to manners was that it brought to a focus so many elements

of difference. The elements of difference, whatever they might latently

have been, struck me as throughout forcibly simplified by the conditions

of the place; this prompt reducibility of a thousand figures to a common

denominator having been in fact, to my sense, the very moral of the

picture. Individuality and variety is attributed to “types,” in America,

on easy terms, and the reputation for it enjoyed on terms not more

difficult; so that what I was most conscious of, from aspect to aspect,

from group to group, from sex to sex, from one presented boarder to

another, was the continuity of the fusion, the dimness of the

distinctions.

The distinction that was least absent, however, would have been, I

judge, that of the comparative ability to spend and purchase; the

ability to spend with freedom being, as one made out, a positive

consistent with all sorts of negatives. That helped to make the whole

thing documentary—that you had to be financially more or less at your

ease to enjoy the privileges of the Royal Poinciana at all; enjoy them

through their extended range of saloons and galleries, fields of high

publicity all; pursue them from dining-halls to music-rooms, to

ball-rooms, to card-rooms, to writing-rooms, to a succession of places

of convenience and refreshment, not the least characteristic of which,

no doubt, was the terrace appointed to mid-morning and mid-afternoon

drinks—drinks, at the latter hour, that appeared, oddly, never to

comprise tea, the only one appreciated in “Europe” at that time of day.

(The quest of tea indeed, especially at the hour when it is most a

blessing, struck me as attended, throughout the country, with

difficulties, even with dangers; over ground where one’s steps are

beset, everywhere, with an infinite number of strange, sweet iced

liquidities—many of these, I hasten to add, charmingly congruous, in

their non-alcoholic ingenuity, with the heats of summer: a circumstance

that doesn’t prevent their flourishing equally in the rigour of cold.)

The implication of “ease” was thus a light to assist inquiry; it is

always a gained fact about people—as to “where” they are, if not as to

who or what—that they are either in confirmed or in casual possession of

money, and thereby, presumably, of all that money may, in this

negotiable world, represent. Add to this that the company came, in its

provided state, by common report, from “all over,” that it converged

upon Palm Beach from every prosperous corner of the land, and the case

was clear for a compendious view of American society in the largest

sense of the term. “Society,” as we loosely use the word, is made up of

the fortunate few, and, if that number be everywhere small at the best,

it was yet the fortunate who, after their fashion, filled the frame.

Every obligation lay upon me to “study” them as so gathered in, and I

did my utmost, I remember, to render them that respect; yet when I now,

after an interval, consult my notes, I find the page a blank, and when I

knock at the door of memory I find it perversely closed. If it consents

a little to open, rather, a countenance looks out—that of the

inscrutable warden of the precinct—and seems to show me the ambiguous

smile that accompanies on occasion the plea to be excused.

From which I infer that the form and pressure of the boarders, for all I

had expected of the promised picture, failed somehow to affect me as a

discussable quantity. It is of the nature of many American impressions,

accepted at the time as a whole of the particular story, simply to cease

to be, as soon as your back is turned—to fade, to pass away, to leave

not a wreck behind. This happens not least when the image, whatever it

may have been, has exacted the tribute of wonder or pleasure: it has

displayed every virtue but the virtue of being able to remain with you.

Its pressure and power have failed of some weight, some element of

density or intensity, some property or quality in short that makes for

the authority of a figure, for the complexity of a scene. The “European”

vision, in general, of whatever consisting, and even when making less of

an explicit appeal, has behind it a driving force—derived from sources

into which I won’t pretend here to enter—that make it, comparatively,

“bite,” as the plate of the etcher is bitten by aquafortis. That

doubtless is the matter, in the States, with the vast peaceful and

prosperous human show—in conditions, especially, in which its peace and

prosperity most shine out: it registers itself on the plate with an

incision too vague and, above all, too uniform. The paucity of one’s

notes is in itself, no doubt, a report of the consulted oracle; it

describes and reconstitutes for me the array of the boarders, this

circumstance that I only grope for their features and seek in vain to

discriminate between sorts and conditions. There were the two sexes, I

think, and the range of age, but, once the one comprehensive type was

embraced, no other signs of differentiation. How should there have been

when the men were consistently, in all cases, thoroughly obvious

products of the “business-block,” the business-block unmitigated by any

other influence definite enough to name, and the women were, under the

same strictness, the indulged ladies of such lords? The business-block

has perhaps, from the north-east to the south-west, its fine

diversities, but any variety so introduced eluded even the most brooding

of analysts.

And it was not of course that the marks of uniformity, among so many

persons, were not on _their_ side perfectly appreciable; it was only

that when one had noted them as marks of “success,” no doubt, primarily,

and then as those of great gregarious decency and sociability and

good-humour, one had exhausted the list. It was the scant diversity of

type that left me short, as a story-seeker or picture-maker;

contributive as this very fact might be to admiration of the costly

processes, as they thus appear, that ensure, and that alone ensure, in

other societies, the opposite of that scantness. With this, as the

foredoomed observer may never escape from the dreadful faculty that

rides him, the very simplifications had in the highest degree their

illustrative value; they gave all opportunity to anything or any one

that might be salient. They gave it to the positive bourgeois propriety,

serenely, imperturbably, massively seated, and against which any

experimental deviation from the bourgeois would have dashed itself in

vain. This neutrality of respectability might have been figured by a

great grey wash of some charged moist brush causing colour and outline,

on the pictured paper, effectually to run together. What resisted it

best was the look of “business success” in some of the men; when that

success had been very great (and there were indicated cases of its

prodigious greatness) the look was in its turn very great; when it had

been small, on the other hand, there was doubtless no look at all—since

there were no other conceivable sources of appearance. The people had

not, and the women least of all, one felt, in general, been transferred

from other backgrounds; the scene around them and behind them

constituted as replete a medium as they could ever have been conscious

of; the women in particular failed in an extraordinary degree to engage

the imagination, to offer it, so to speak, references or openings: it

faltered—doubtless respectfully enough—where they for the most part so

substantially and prosaically sat, failing of any warrant to go an inch

further. As for the younger persons, of whom there were many, as for the

young girls in especial, they were as perfectly in their element as

goldfish in a crystal jar: a form of exhibition suggesting but one

question or mystery. Was it they who had invented it, or had it

inscrutably invented _them_?