The American scene

by Henry James

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.