The American scene

by Henry James

The strange thing, moreover, is that the crowd, in the happiest seasons, at favouring hours, the polyglot Hebraic crowd of pedestrians in particular, has, for what it is, none but the mildest action on the nerves. The nerves are too grateful, the intention of beauty everywhere too insistent; it “places” the superfluous figures with an art of its own, even when placing them in heavy masses, and they become for you practically as your fellow-spectators of the theatre, whose proximity you take for granted, while the little overworked cabotine we have hypothesized, the darling of the public, is vocalizing or capering. I recall as singularly contributive in all this sense the impression of a splendid Sunday afternoon of early summer, when, during a couple of hours spent in the mingled medium, the variety of accents with which the air swarmed seemed to make it a question whether the Park itself or its visitors were most polyglot. The condensed geographical range, the number of kinds of scenery in a given space, competed with the number of languages heard, and the whole impression was of one’s having had but to turn in from the Plaza to make, in the most agreeable manner possible, the tour of the little globe. And that, frankly, I think, was the best of all impressions—was seeing New York at its best; for if ever one could feel at one’s ease about the “social question,” it would be surely, somehow, on such an occasion. The number of persons in circulation was enormous—so great that the question of how they had got there, from their distances, and would get away again, in the so formidable public conveyances, loomed, in the background, rather like a skeleton at the feast; but the general note was thereby, intensely, the “popular,” and the brilliancy of the show proportionately striking. That is the great and only brilliancy worth speaking of, to my sense, in the general American scene—the air of hard prosperity, the ruthlessly pushed-up and promoted look worn by men, women and children alike. I remember taking that appearance, of the hour or two, for a climax to the sense that had most remained with me after a considerable previous moving about over the land, the sense of the small quantity of mere human sordidness of state to be observed.

One is liable to observe it in any best of all possible worlds, and I had not, in truth, gone out of my way either to avoid it or to look for it; only I had met it enough, in other climes, without doing so, and had, to be veracious, not absolutely and utterly missed it in the American. Images of confirmed (though, strangely, of active, occupied and above all “sensitive”) squalor had I encountered in New Hampshire hills; also, below the Southern line, certain special, certain awful examples, in Black and White alike, of the last crudity of condition. These spots on the picture had, however, lost themselves in the general attestation of the truth most forced home, the vision of the country as, supremely, a field for the unhampered revel, the unchecked essor, material and moral, of the “common man” and the common woman. How splendidly they were making it all answer, for the most part, or to the extent of the so rare public collapse of the individual, had been an observation confirmed for me by a rapid journey to the Pacific coast and back; yet I had doubtless not before seen it so answer as in this very concrete case of the swarming New York afternoon. It was little to say, in that particular light, that such grossnesses as want or tatters or gin, as the unwashed face or the ill-shod, and still less the unshod, foot, or the mendicant hand, became strange, unhappy, far-off things—it would even have been an insult to allude to them or to be explicitly complacent about their absence. The case was, unmistakably, universally, of the common, the very common man, the very common woman and the very common child; but all enjoying what I have called their promotion, their rise in the social scale, with that absence of acknowledging flutter, that serenity of assurance, which marks, for the impressed class, the school-boy or the school-girl who is accustomed, and who always quite expects, to “move up.” The children at play, more particularly the little girls, formed the characters, as it were, in which the story was written largest; frisking about over the greenswards, grouping together in the vistas, with an effect of the exquisite in attire, of delicacies of dress and personal “keep-up,” as through the shimmer of silk, the gloss of beribboned hair, the gleam of cared-for teeth, the pride of varnished shoe, that might well have created a doubt as to their “popular” affiliation. This affiliation was yet established by sufficiencies of context, and might well have been, for that matter, by every accompanying vocal or linguistic note, the swarm of queer sounds, mostly not to be interpreted, that circled round their pretty heads as if they had been tamers of odd, outlandish, perching little birds. They fell moreover into the vast category of those ubiquitous children of the public schools who occupy everywhere, in the United States, so much of the forefront of the stage, and at the sight of whose so remarkably clad and shod condition the brooding analyst, with the social question never, after all, too much in abeyance, could clap, in private, the most reactionary hands.

The brooding analyst had in fact, from the first of his return, recognized in the mere detail of the testimony everywhere offered to the high pitch of the American shoe-industry, a lively incentive to cheerful views; the population showing so promptly, in this connection, as the best equipped in the world. The impression at first had been irresistible: two industries, at the most, seemed to rule the American scene. The dentist and the shoedealer divided it between them; to that degree, positively, that in public places, in the perpetual electric cars which seem to one’s desperation at times (so condemned is one to live in them) all there measurably is of the American scene, almost any other typical, any other personal fact might be neglected, for consideration, in the interest of the presentable foot and the far-shining dental gold. It was a world in which every one, without exception, no matter how “low” in the social scale, wore the best and the newest, the neatest and the smartest, boots; to be added to which (always for the brooding analyst) was the fascination, so to speak, of noting how much more than any other single thing this may do for a possibly compromised appearance. And if my claim for the interest of this exhibition seems excessive, I refer the objector without hesitation to a course of equivalent observation in other countries, taking an equally miscellaneous show for his basis. Nothing was more curious than to trace, on a great ferry-boat, for instance, the effect of letting one’s eyes work up, as in speculation, from the lower to the higher extremities of some seated row of one’s fellow passengers. The testimony of the lower might preponderantly have been, always, to their comparative conquest of affluence and ease; but this presumption gave way, at successive points, with the mounting vision, and was apt to break down entirely under the evidence of face and head. When I say “head,” I mean more particularly, where the men were, concerned, hat; this feature of the equipment being almost always at pains, and with the oddest, most inveterate perversity, to defeat and discredit whatever might be best in the others. Such are the problems in which a restless analysis may land us.

Why should the general “feeling” for the boot, in the United States, be so mature, so evolved, and the feeling for the hat lag at such a distance behind it? The standard as to that article of dress struck me as, everywhere, of the lowest; governed by no consensus of view, custom or instinct, no sense of its “vital importance” in the manly aspect. And yet the wearer of any loose improvisation in the way of a head-cover will testify as frankly, in his degree, to the extreme consideration given by the community at large, as I have intimated, to the dental question. The terms in which this evidence is presented are often, among the people, strikingly artless, but they are a marked advance on the omnipresent opposite signs, those of a systematic detachment from the chair of anguish, with which any promiscuous “European” exhibition is apt to bristle. I remember to have heard it remarked by a French friend, of a young woman who had returned to her native land after some years of domestic service in America, that she had acquired there, with other advantages, le sourire Californien, and the “Californian” smile, indeed, expressed, more or less copiously, in undissimulated cubes of the precious metal, plays between lips that render scant other tribute to civilization. The greater interest, in this connection, however, is that impression of the state and appearance of the teeth viewed among the “refined” as supremely important, which the restored absentee, long surrounded elsewhere with the strangest cynicisms of indifference on this article, makes the subject of one of his very first notes. Every one, in “society,” has good, handsome, pretty, has above all cherished and tended, teeth; so that the offered spectacle, frequent in other societies, of strange irregularities, protrusions, deficiencies, fangs and tusks and cavities, is quite refreshingly and consolingly absent. The consequences of care and forethought, from an early age, thus write themselves on the facial page distinctly and happily, and it is not too much to say that the total show is, among American aspects, cumulatively charming. One sees it sometimes balance, for charm, against a greater number of less fortunate items, in that totality, than one would quite know how to begin estimating.

But I have strayed again far from my starting-point and have again, I fear, succumbed to the danger of embroidering my small original proposition with too many, and scarce larger, derivatives. I left the Plaza, I left the Park steeped in the rose-colour of such a brightness of Sunday and of summer as had given me, on a couple of occasions, exactly what I desired—a simplified attention, namely, and the power to rest for the time in the appearance that the awful aliens were flourishing there in perfections of costume and contentment. One had only to take them in as more completely, conveniently and expensively endimanchés than one had ever, on the whole, seen any other people, in order to feel that one was calling down upon all the elements involved the benediction of the future—and calling it down most of all on one’s embraced permission not to worry any more. It was by way of not worrying, accordingly, that I found in another presentment of the general scene, chanced upon at a subsequent hour, all sorts of interesting and harmonious suggestions. These adventures of the critical spirit were such mere mild walks and talks as I almost blush to offer, on this reduced scale, as matter of history; but I draw courage from the remembrance that history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of what “happens,” but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it. If a walk across the Park, with a responsive friend, late on the golden afternoon of a warm week-day, and if a consequent desultory stroll, for speculation’s sake, through certain northward and eastward streets and avenues, of an identity a little vague to me now, save as a blur of builded evidence as to proprietary incomes—if such an incident ministered, on the spot, to a boundless evocation, it then became history of a splendid order: though I perhaps must add that it became so for the two participants alone, and with an effect after all not easy to communicate. The season was over, the recipients of income had retired for the summer, and the large clear vistas were peopled mainly with that conscious hush and that spectral animation characteristic of places kept, as with all command of time and space, for the indifferent, the all but insolent, absentee. It was a vast, costly, empty newness, redeemed by the rare quiet and coloured by the pretty light, and I scare know, I confess, why it should have had anything murmurous or solicitous to say at all, why its eloquence was not over when it had thus defined itself as intensely rich and intensely modern.

If I have spoken, with some emphasis, of what it “evoked,” I might easily be left, it would appear, with that emphasis on my hands—did I not catch, indeed, for my explanation, the very key to the anomaly. Ransacking my brain for the sources of the impressiveness, I see them, of a sudden, locked up in that word “modern”; the mystery clears in the light of the fact that one was perhaps, for that half-hour, more intimately than ever before in touch with the sense of the term. It was exactly because I seemed, with the ear of the spirit, to hear the whole quarter bid, as with one penetrating voice, for the boon of the future, for some guarantee, or even mere hinted promise, of history and opportunity, that the attitude affected me as the last revelation of modernity. What made the revelation was the collective sharpness, so to speak, of this vocal note, offering any price, offering everything, wanting only to outbid and prevail, at the great auction of life. “See how ready we are”—one caught the tone: “ready to buy, to pay, to promise; ready to place, to honour, our purchase. We have everything, don’t you see? every capacity and appetite, every advantage of education and every susceptibility of sense; no ‘tip’ in the world, none that our time is capable of giving, has been lost on us: so that all we now desire is what you, Mr. Auctioneer, have to dispose of, the great ‘going’ chance of a time to come.” That was the sound unprecedentedly evoked for me, and in a form that made sound somehow overflow into sight. It was as if, in their high gallery, the bidders, New Yorkers every one, were before one’s eyes; pressing to the front, hanging over the balustrade, holding out clamorous importunate hands. It was not, certainly, for general style, pride and colour, a Paul Veronese company; even the women, in spite of pearls and brocade and golden hair, failed of that type, and still more inevitably the men, without doublet, mantle, ruff or sword; the nearest approach might have been in the great hounds and the little blackamoors. But my vision had a kind of analogy; for what were the Venetians, after all, but the children of a Republic and of trade? It was, however, mainly, no doubt, an affair of the supporting marble terrace, the platform of my crowd, with as many columns of onyx and curtains of velvet as any great picture could need. About these there would be no difficulty whatever; though this luxury of vision of the matter had meanwhile no excuse but the fact that the hour was charming, the waning light still lucid, the air admirable, the neighbourhood a great empty stage, expensively, extravagantly set, and the detail in frontage and cornice and architrave, in every feature of every edifice, as sharp as the uttered words of the plea I have just imagined.

V

The American air, I take advantage of this connection to remember, lends a felicity to all the exactitudes of architecture and sculpture, favours sharp effects, disengages differences, preserves lights, defines projected shadows. Sculpture, in it, never either loses a value or conceals a loss, and it is everywhere full of help to discriminated masses. This remark was to be emphatically made, I found myself observing, in presence of so distinct an appeal to high clearness as the great Palladian pile just erected by Messrs. Tiffany on one of the upper corners of Fifth Avenue, where it presents itself to the friendly sky with a great nobleness of white marble. One is so thankful to it, I recognize, for not having twenty-five stories, which it might easily have had, I suppose, in the wantonness of wealth or of greed, that one gives it a double greeting, rejoicing to excess perhaps at its merely remaining, with the three fine arched and columned stages above its high basement, within the conditions of sociable symmetry. One may break one’s heart, certainly, over its only being, for “interest,” a great miscellaneous shop—if one has any heart left in New York for such adventures. One may also reflect, if any similar spring of reflection will still serve, on its being, to the very great limitation of its dignity, but a more or less pious pastiche or reproduction, the copy of a model that sits where Venetian water-steps keep—or used to keep!—vulgar invasion at bay. But I hasten to add that one will do these things only at the cost of not “putting in” wherever one can the patch of optimism, the sigh of relief, the glow of satisfaction, or whatever else the pardonably factitious emotion may be called—which in New York is very bad economy. Look for interest where you may, cultivate a working felicity, press the spring hard, and you will see that, to whatever air Palladian piles may have been native, they can nowhere tell their great cold calculated story, in measured chapter and verse, better than to the strong sea-light of New York. This medium has the abundance of some ample childless mother who consoles herself for her sterility by an unbridled course of adoption—as I seemed again to make out in presence of the tiers of white marble that are now on their way to replace the granitic mass of the old Reservoir, ultima Thule of the northward walk of one’s early time.

The reservoir of learning here taking form above great terraces—which my mind’s eye makes as great as it would like—lifts, once more, from the heart the weight of the “tall” building it apparently doesn’t propose to become. I could admire, in the unfinished state of the work, but the lower courses of this inestimable structure, the Public Library that is to gather into rich alliance and splendid ease the great minor Libraries of the town; it was enough for my delight, however, that the conditions engage for a covering of the earth rather than an invasion of the air—of so supreme an effect, at the pitch things have reached, is this single element of a generous area. It offers the best of reasons for speaking of the project as inestimable. Any building that, being beautiful, presents itself as seated rather than as standing, can do with your imagination what it will; you ask it no question, you give it a free field, content only if it will sit and sit and sit. And if you interrogate your joy, in the connection, you will find it largely founded, I think, on all the implications thus conveyed of a proportionately smaller quantity of the great religion of the Elevator. The lateral development of great buildings is as yet, in the United States, but an opportunity for the legs, is in fact almost their sole opportunity—a circumstance that, taken alone, should eloquently plead; but it has another blest value, for the imagination, for the nerves, as a check on the constant obsession of one’s living, of every one’s living, by the packed and hoisted basket. The sempiternal lift, for one’s comings and goings, affects one at last as an almost intolerable symbol of the herded and driven state and of that malady of preference for gregarious ways, of insistence on gregarious ways only, by which the people about one seem ridden. To wait, perpetually, in a human bunch, in order to be hustled, under military drill, the imperative order to “step lively,” into some tight mechanic receptacle, fearfully and wonderfully working, is conceivable, no doubt, as a sad liability of our nature, but represents surely, when cherished and sacrificed to, a strange perversion of sympathies and ideals. Anything that breaks the gregarious spell, that relieves one of one’s share, however insignificant, of the abject collective consciousness of being pushed and pressed in, with something that one’s shoulders and one’s heels must dodge at their peril, something that slides or slams or bangs, operating, in your rear, as ruthlessly as the guillotine—anything that performs this office puts a price on the lonely sweetness of a step or two taken by one’s self, of deviating into some sense of independent motive power, of climbing even some grass-grown staircase, with a dream perhaps of the thrill of fellow-feeling then taking, then finding, place—something like Robinson Crusoe’s famous thrill before Friday’s footprint in the sand.

However these things might be, I recall further, as an incident of that hour of “evocation,” the goodly glow, under this same illumination, of an immense red building, off in the clear north-east quarter, which had hung back, with all success, from the perpendicular form, and which actually covered ground with its extensions of base, its wide terrestrial wings. It had, I remember, in the early evening light, a homely kindness of diffused red brick, and to make out then that it was a great exemplary Hospital, one of the many marvels of New York in this general order, was to admire the exquisite art with which, in such a medium, it had so managed to invest itself with stillness. It was as quiet there, on its ample interspace, as if the clamorous city, roundabout, as if the passion of the Elevated and of the Elevator in especial, were forever at rest and no one were stepping lively for miles and miles away; so that visibly, it had a spell to cast and a character to declare—things I was won over, on the spot, to desire a nearer view of. Fortune presently favoured this purpose, and almost my last impression of New York was gathered, on a very hot June morning, in the long, cool corridors of the Presbyterian Hospital, and in those “halls of pain,” the high, quiet, active wards, silvery-dim with their whiteness and their shade, where the genius of the terrible city seemed to filter in with its energy sifted and softened, with its huge good-nature refined. There were reasons beyond the scope of these remarks for the interest of that hour, but it is at least within the scope that I recall noting there, all responsively, as not before, that if the direct pressure of New York is too often to ends that strike us as vulgar, the indirect is capable, and perhaps to an unlimited degree, of these lurking effects of delicacy. The immediate expression is the expression of violence, but you may find there is something left, something kept back for you, if that has not from the first fatally deafened you. It carries with it an after-sense which put on for me, under several happy intimations, the image of some garden of the finest flowers—or of such as might be on the way to become the finest—masked by an enormous bristling hedge of defensive and aggressive vegetation, lacerating, defiant, not to be touched without blood. One saw the garden itself, behind its hedge and approachable only by those in the secret—one divined it to contain treasures of delicacy, many of them perhaps still to be developed, but attesting the possibilities of the soil. My Presbyterian Hospital was somehow in the garden, just where the soil, the very human soil itself, was richest, and—though this may appear an odd tribute to an institution founded on the principle of instant decision and action—it affected me, amid its summer airs and its boundless, soundless business, as surpassingly delicate. There, if nowhere else, was adjustment of tone; there was the note of mildness and the sense of manners; under the impression of which I am not sure of not having made up my mind that, were I merely alone and disconcerted, merely unprepared and unwarned, in the vast, dreadful place, as must happen to so many a helpless mortal, I should positively desire or “elect,” as they say, to become the victim of some such mischance as would put me into relation again, the ambulance or the police aiding, with these precious saving presences. They might re-establish for me, before the final extinction or dismissal, some belief in manners and in tone.