The American scene

by Henry James

II

I found it interesting to note, furthermore, that the very Clubs, on whose behalf, if anywhere, expert tradition might have operated, betrayed with a bonhomie touching in the midst of their magnificence the empirical character. Was not their admirable, their unique, hospitality, for that matter, an empirical note—a departure from the consecrated collective egoism governing such institutions in worlds, as I have said, otherwise arranged? Let the hospitality in this case at least stand for the prospective discovery of a new and better law, under which the consecrated egoism itself will have become the “provincial” sign. Endless, at all events, the power of one or two of these splendid structures to testify to the state of manners—of manners undiscourageably seeking the superior stable equilibrium. There had remained with me as illuminating, from years before, the confidential word of a friend on whom, after a long absence from New York, the privilege of one of the largest clubs had been conferred. “The place is a palace, for scale and decoration, but there is only one kind of letter-paper.” There would be more kinds of letter-paper now, I take it—though the American club struck me everywhere, oddly, considering the busy people who employ it, as much less an institution for attending to one’s correspondence than others I had had knowledge of; generally destitute, in fact, of copious and various appliances for that purpose. There is such a thing as the imagination of the writing-table, and I nowhere, save in a few private houses, came upon its fruits; to which I must add that this is the one connection in which the provision for ease has not an extraordinary amplitude, an amplitude unequalled anywhere else. One emphatic reservation, throughout the country, the restored absentee finds himself continually making, but the universal custom of the house with almost no one of its indoor parts distinguishable from any other is an affliction against which he has to learn betimes to brace himself. This diffused vagueness of separation between apartments, between hall and room, between one room and another, between the one you are in and the one you are not in, between place of passage and place of privacy, is a provocation to despair which the public institution shares impartially with the luxurious “home.” To the spirit attuned to a different practice these dispositions can only appear a strange perversity, an extravagant aberration of taste; but I may here touch on them scarce further than to mark their value for the characterization of manners.

They testify at every turn, then, to those of the American people, to the prevailing “conception of life”; they correspond, within doors, to the as inveterate suppression of almost every outward exclusory arrangement. The instinct is throughout, as we catch it at play, that of minimizing, for any “interior,” the guilt or odium or responsibility, whatever these may appear, of its being an interior. The custom rages like a conspiracy for nipping the interior in the bud, for denying its right to exist, for ignoring and defeating it in every possible way, for wiping out successively each sign by which it may be known from an exterior. The effacement of the difference has been marvellously, triumphantly brought about; and, with all the ingenuity of young, fresh, frolicsome architecture aiding and abetting, has been made to flourish, alike in the small structure and the great, as the very law of the structural fact. Thus we have the law fulfilled that every part of every house shall be, as nearly as may be, visible, visitable, penetrable, not only from every other part, but from as many parts of as many other houses as possible, if they only be near enough. Thus we see systematized the indefinite extension of all spaces and the definite merging of all functions; the enlargement of every opening, the exaggeration of every passage, the substitution of gaping arches and far perspectives and resounding voids for enclosing walls, for practicable doors, for controllable windows, for all the rest of the essence of the room-character, that room-suggestion which is so indispensable not only to occupation and concentration, but to conversation itself, to the play of the social relation at any other pitch than the pitch of a shriek or a shout. This comprehensive canon has so succeeded in imposing itself that it strikes you as reflecting inordinately, as positively serving you up for convenient inspection, under a clear glass cover, the social tone that has dictated it. But I must confine myself to recording, for the moment, that it takes a whole new discipline to put the visitor at his ease in so merciless a medium; he finds himself looking round for a background or a limit, some localizing fact or two, in the interest of talk, of that “good” talk which always falters before the complete proscription of privacy. He sees only doorless apertures, vainly festooned, which decline to tell him where he is, which make him still a homeless wanderer, which show him other apertures, corridors, staircases, yawning, expanding, ascending, descending, and all as for the purpose of giving his presence “away,” of reminding him that what he says must be said for the house. He is beguiled in a measure by reading into these phenomena, ever so sharply, the reason of many another impression; he is beguiled by remembering how many of the things said in America are said for the house; so that if all that he wants is to keep catching the finer harmony of effect and cause, of explanation and implication, the cup of his perception is full to overflowing.

That satisfaction does represent, certainly, much of his quest; all the more that what he misses, in the place—the comfort and support, for instance, of windows, porches, verandahs, lawns, gardens, “grounds,” that, by not taking the whole world into their confidence, have not the whole world’s confidence to take in return—ranges itself for him in that large mass of American idiosyncrasy which contains, unmistakably, a precious principle of future reaction. The desire to rake and be raked has doubtless, he makes out, a long day before it still; but there are too many reasons why it should not be the last word of any social evolution. The social idea has too inevitably secrets in store, quite other constructive principles, quite other refinements on the idea of intercourse, with which it must eventually reckon. It will be certain at a given moment, I think, to head in a different direction altogether; though obviously many other remarkable things, changes of ideal, of habit, of key, will have to take place first. The conception of the home, and a fortiori of the club, as a combination of the hall of echoes and the toy “transparency” held against the light, will meanwhile sufficiently prevail to have made my reference to it not quite futile. Yet I must after all remember that the reservation on the ground of comfort to which I just alluded applies with its smallest force to the interchangeability of club compartments, to the omnipresence of the majestic open arch in club conditions. Such conditions more or less prescribe that feature, and criticism begins only when private houses emulate the form of clubs. What I had mainly in mind was another of these so inexhaustible values of my subject; with which the question of rigour of comfort has nothing to do. I cherish certain remembered aspects for their general vivid eloquence—for the sake of my impression of the type of great generous club-establishments in which the “empiricism” of that already-observed idea of the conquest of splendour could richly and irresponsibly flower. It is of extreme interest to be reminded, at many a turn of such an exhibition, that it takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition, and an endless amount of tradition to make even a little taste, and an endless amount of taste, by the same token, to make even a little tranquillity. Tranquillity results largely from taste tactfully applied, taste lighted above all by experience and possessed of a clue for its labyrinth. There is no such clue, for club-felicity, as some view of congruities and harmonies, completeness of correspondence between aspects and uses. A sense for that completeness is a thing of slow growth, one of the flowers of tradition precisely; of the good conservative tradition that walks apart from the extravagant use of money and the unregulated appeal to “style”—passes in fact, at its best, quite on the other side of the way. This discrimination occurs when the ground has the good fortune to be already held by some definite, some transmitted conception of the adornments and enhancements that consort, and that do not consort, with the presence, the habits, the tone, of lounging, gossiping, smoking, newspaper-reading, bridge-playing, cocktail-imbibing men. The club-developments of New York read here and there the lesson of the strange deserts in which the appeal to style may lose itself, may wildly and wantonly stray, without a certain light of the fine old gentlemanly prejudice to guide it.