The case of St. Augustine afterwards struck me as presenting, on another
side, its analogy with the case at Palm Beach: if the “social interest”
had in the latter place appeared but of a weak constitution, so the
historic, at the former, was to work a spell of a simpler sort than one
had been brought up, as it were, to look to. Hadn’t one been brought up,
from far back, on the article of that faith in St. Augustine, by
periodical papers in the magazines, fond elucidations of its romantic
character, accompanied by drawings that gave one quite proudly, quite
patriotically, to think—that filled the cup of curiosity and yearning?
The old town—for the essence of the faith had been that there _was_ an
“old town”—receded into an all but untraceable past; it had been of all
American towns the earliest planted, and it bristled still with every
evidence of its Spanish antiquity. The illustrations in the magazines,
wondrous vignettes of old street vistas, old architectural treasures,
gateways and ramparts, odds and ends, nooks and corners, crowned with
the sweetness of slow decay, conveyed the sense of these delights and
renewed at frequent intervals their appeal. But oh, as I was to observe,
the school of “black and white” trained up by the magazines has much, in
the American air, to answer for: it points so vividly the homely moral
that when you haven’t what you like you must perforce like, and above
all misrepresent, what you have. Its translation of these perfunctory
passions into pictorial terms saddles it with a weight of responsibility
that would be greater, one can only say, if there ever were a critic,
some guardian of real values, to bring it to book. The guardians of real
values struck me as, up and down, far to seek. The whole matter indeed
would seem to come back, interestingly enough, to the general truth of
the æsthetic need, in the country, for much greater values, of certain
sorts, than the country and its manners, its aspects and arrangements,
its past and present, and perhaps even future, really supply; whereby,
as the æsthetic need is also intermixed with a patriotic yearning, a
supply has somehow to be extemporized, by any pardonable form of
pictorial “hankey-pankey”—has to be, as the expression goes, cleverly
“faked.” But it takes an inordinate amount of faking to meet the
supposed intensity of appetite of a body of readers at once more
numerous and less critical than any other in the world; so that,
frankly, the desperate expedient is written large in much of the
“artistic activity” of the country.
The results are of the oddest; they hang all traceably together;
wonderful in short the general spectacle and lesson of the scale and
variety of the faking. They renew again the frequent admonition that the
pabulum provided for a great thriving democracy may derive most of its
interest from the nature of its testimony to the thriving democratic
demand. No long time is required, in the States, to make vivid for the
visitor the truth that the nation is almost feverishly engaged in
producing, with the greatest possible activity and expedition, an
“intellectual” pabulum after its own heart, and that not only the arts
and ingenuities of the draftsman (called upon to furnish the picturesque
background and people it with the “aristocratic” figure where neither of
these revelations ever meets his eye) pay their extravagant tribute, but
that those of the journalist, the novelist, the dramatist, the
genealogist, the historian, are pressed as well, for dear life, into the
service. The illustrators of the magazines improvise, largely—that is
when not labouring in the cause of the rural dialects—improvise the
field of action, full of features at any price, and the characters who
figure upon it, young gods and goddesses mostly, of superhuman stature
and towering pride; the novelists improvise, with the aid of the
historians, a romantic local past of costume and compliment and
sword-play and gallantry and passion; the dramatists build up, of a
thousand pieces, the airy fiction that the life of the people in the
world among whom the elements of clash and contrast are simplest and
most superficial abounds in the subjects and situations and effects of
the theatre; while the genealogists touch up the picture with their
pleasant hint of the number, over the land, of families of royal blood.
All this constitutes a vast home-grown provision for entertainment,
rapidly superseding any that may be borrowed or imported, and that
indeed already begins, not invisibly, to press for exportation. As to
quantity, it looms immense, and resounds in proportion, yet with the
property, all its own, of ceasing to be, of fading like the mist of
dawn—that is of giving no account of itself whatever—as soon as one
turns on it any intending eye of appreciation or of inquiry. It is the
public these appearances collectively refer us to that becomes thus
again the more attaching subject; the public so placidly uncritical that
the whitest thread of the deceptive stitch never makes it blink, and
sentimental at once with such inveteracy and such simplicity that,
finding everything everywhere perfectly splendid, it fairly goes upon
its knees to be humbuggingly humbugged. It proves ever, by the ironic
measure, quite incalculably young.
That perhaps was all that had been the matter with it in presence of the
immemorial legend of St. Augustine as a mine of romance; St. Augustine
proving primarily, and of course quite legitimately, but an hotel, of
the first magnitude—an hotel indeed so remarkable and so pleasant that I
wondered what call there need ever have been upon it to prove anything
else. The Ponce de Leon, for that matter, comes as near producing, all
by itself, the illusion of romance as a highly modern, a most
cleverly-constructed and smoothly-administered great modern caravansery
can come; it is largely “in the Moorish style” (as the cities of Spain
preserve the record of that manner); it breaks out, on every pretext,
into circular arches and embroidered screens, into courts and cloisters,
arcades and fountains, fantastic projections and lordly towers, and is,
in all sorts of ways and in the highest sense of the word, the most
“amusing” of hotels. It did for me, at St. Augustine, I was well aware,
everything that an hotel could do—after which I could but appeal for
further service to the old Spanish Fort, the empty, sunny, grassy shell
by the low, pale shore; the mild, time-silvered quadrilateral that,
under the care of a single exhibitory veteran and with the still milder
remnant of a town-gate near it, preserves alone, to any effect of
appreciable emphasis, the memory of the Spanish occupation. One wandered
there for meditation—it is not congruous with the genius of Florida, I
gathered, to permit you to wander very far; and it was there perhaps
that, as nothing prompted, on the whole, to intenser musings, I suffered
myself to be set moralizing, in the manner of which I have just given an
example, over the too “thin” projection of legend, the too dry response
of association. The Spanish occupation, shortest of ineffectual
chapters, seemed the ghost of a ghost, and the burnt-out fire but such a
pinch of ashes as one might properly fold between the leaves of one’s
_Baedeker_. Yet if I made this remark I made it without bitterness;
since there was no doubt, under the influence of this last look, that
Florida still had, in her ingenuous, not at all insidious way, the
secret of pleasing, and that even round about me the vagueness was still
an appeal. The vagueness was warm, the vagueness was bright, the
vagueness was sweet, being scented and flowered and fruited; above all,
the vagueness was somehow consciously and confessedly weak. I made out
in it something of the look of the charming shy face that desires to
communicate and that yet has just too little expression. What it would
fain say was that it really knew itself unequal to any extravagance of
demand upon it, but that (if it might so plead to one’s tenderness) it
would always do its gentle best. I found the plea, for myself, I may
declare, exquisite and irresistible: the Florida of that particular tone
was a Florida adorable.