The American scene

by Henry James

II

After that it was plain sailing; in the sense, I mean, of the respite—temporary at least—of speculation; of feeling impressions file in and seat themselves as quietly as decorous worshippers (say mild old ladies with neat prayer-books) taking possession of some long-drawn family pew. It was absurd what I made of Savannah—which consisted for me but of a quarter of an hour’s pause of the train under the wide arch of the station, where, in the now quite confirmed blandness of the Sunday noon, a bright, brief morning party appeared of a sudden to have organized itself. Where was the charm?—if it wasn’t already, supremely, in the air, the latitude, the season, as well as in the imagination of the pilgrim capable not only of squeezing a sense from the important city on these easy terms and with that desperate economy, but of reading heaven knows what instalment of romance into a mere railroad matter. It is a mere railroad matter, in the States, that a station should appear at a given moment to yield to the invasion of a dozen or so of bareheaded and vociferous young women in the company of young men to match, and that they should all treat the place, in the public eye, that of the crowded contemplative cars, quite as familiar, domestic, intimate ground, set apart, it might be, for the discussion and regulation of their little interests and affairs, and for that so oddly, so innocently immodest ventilation of their puerile privacies at which the moralizing visitor so frequently gasps. I recall my fleeting instants of Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim; I recall the swarming, the hatless, pretty girls, with their big-bowed cues, their romping swains, their inveterate suggestion of their having more to say about American manners than any other single class; I recall the thrill produced by the hawkers of scented Southern things, sprigs and specimens of flower and fruit that mightn’t as yet be of the last exoticism, but that were native and fresh and over-priced, and so all that the traveller could ask.

But most of all, I think, I recall the quite lively resolve not to give way, under the assault of the beribboned and “shirt-waisted” fair, to the provocation of their suggestiveness—even as I had fallen, reflectively speaking, straight into the trap set for me by the Charleston bagmen; a resolve taken, I blush to say, as a base economic precaution only, and not because the spectacle before me failed to make reflections swarm. They fairly hummed, my suppressed reflections, in the manner of bees about a flower-bed, and burying their noses as deep in the corollæ of the subject. Had I allowed myself time before the train resumed its direction, I should have thus found myself regarding the youths and the maidens—but especially, for many reasons, the maidens—quite in the light of my so earnestly-considered drummers, quite as creatures extraordinarily disconcerting, at first, as to the whole matter of their public behaviour, but covered a little by the mantle of charity as soon as it became clear that what, like the poor drummers, they suffer from, is the tragedy of their social, their cruel exposure, that treachery of fate which has kept them so out of their place. It was a case, I more than ever saw, like the case of the bagmen; the case of the bagmen lighted it here, in the most interesting way, by propinquity and coincidence. If the bagmen had seemed monstrous, in their occupancy of the scene, by their disproportioned possession of it, so was not the hint sufficient that this also explains much of the effect of the American girl as encountered in the great glare of her publicity, her uncorrected, unrelated state? There had been moments, as I moved about the country, when she had seemed to me, for affirmation of presence, for immunity from competition, fairly to share the field but with the bagman, and fairly to speak as my inward ear had at last heard him speak.

“Ah, once place me and you’ll see—I shall be different, I shall be better; for since I am, with my preposterous ‘position,’ falsely beguiled, pitilessly forsaken, thrust forth in my ignorance and folly, what do I know, helpless chit as I can but be, about manners or tone, about proportion or perspective, about modesty or mystery, about a condition of things that involves, for the interest and the grace of life, other forms of existence than this poor little mine—pathetically broken reed as it is, just to find itself waving all alone in the wind? How can I do all the grace, all the interest, as I’m expected to?—yes, literally all the interest that isn’t the mere interest on the money. I’m expected to supply it all—while I wander and stray in the desert. Was there ever such a conspiracy, on the part of a whole social order, toward the exposure of incompetence? Were ever crude youth and crude presumption left so unadmonished as to their danger of giving themselves away? Who, at any turn, for an hour, ever pityingly overshadows or dispossesses me? By what combination of other presences ever am I disburdened, ever relegated and reduced, ever restored, in a word, to my right relation to the whole? All I want—that is all I need, for there is perhaps a difference—is, to put it simply, that my parents and my brothers and my male cousins should consent to exist otherwise than occultly, undiscoverably, or, as I suppose you’d call it, irresponsibly. That’s a trouble, yes—but we take it, so why shouldn’t they? The rest—don’t you make it out for me?—would come of itself. Haven’t I, however, as it is, been too long abandoned and too much betrayed? Isn’t it too late, and am I not, don’t you think, practically lost?” Faintly and from far away, as through dense interpositions, this questioning wail of the maiden’s ultimate distressed consciousness seemed to reach me; but I had steeled my sense, as I have said, against taking it in, and I did no more, at the moment, than all pensively suffer it again to show me the American social order in the guise of a great blank unnatural mother, a compound of all the recreant individuals misfitted with the name, whose ear the mystic plaint seemed never to penetrate, and whose large unseeing complacency suggested some massive monument covered still with the thick cloth that precedes a public unveiling. We wonder at the hidden marble or bronze; we suppose, under the cloth, some attitude or expression appropriate to the image; but as the removal of the cloth is perpetually postponed the character never emerges. The American mother, enshrouded in her brown holland, has, by this analogy, never emerged; only the daughter is meanwhile seated, for the inspection of the world, at the base of the pedestal, hypothetically supporting some weight, some mass or other, and we may each impute to her, for this posture, the aspect we judge best to beseem her.

My point here, at any rate, is that I had quite forgotten her by the time I was seated, after dinner that evening, on a bench in the small public garden that formed a prospect for my hotel at Jacksonville. The air was divinely soft—it was such a Southern night as I had dreamed of; and the only oddity was that we had come to it by so simple a process. We had travelled indeed all day, but the process seemed simple when there was nothing of it, nothing to speak of, to remember, nothing that succeeded in getting over the footlights, as the phrase goes, of the great moving proscenium of the Pullman. I seemed to think of it, the wayside imagery, as something that had been there, no doubt, as the action or the dialogue are presumably there in some untoward drama that spends itself at the back of the stage, that goes off, in a passion, at side doors, and perhaps even bursts back, incoherently, through windows; but that doesn’t reach the stall in which you sit, never quickens to acuteness your sense of what is going on. So, as if the chair in the Pullman had been my stall, my sense had been all day but of intervening heads and tuning fiddles, of queer refreshments, such as only the theatre and the Pullman know, offered, with vociferation, straight through the performance. I was a little uncertain, afterwards, as to when I had become distinctively aware of Florida; but the scenery of the State, up to the point of my first pause for the night, had not got over the footlights. I was promptly, however, to make good this loss; I felt myself doing so quite with intensity under the hot-looking stars at Jacksonville. I had come out to smoke for the evening’s end, and it mattered not a scrap that the public garden was new and scant and crude, and that Jacksonville is not a name to conjure with; I still could sit there quite in the spirit, for the hour, of Byron’s immortal question as to the verity of his Italian whereabouts: was this the Mincio, were those the distant turrets of Verona, and should I sup—well, if the train to Palm Beach, arriving there on the morrow in time, should happen to permit me? At Jacksonville I had, as I say, already supped, but I projected myself, for the time, after Byron’s manner, into the exquisite sense of the dream come true.

I was not to sup at all, as it proved, at Palm Beach—by the operation of one of those odd, anomalous rigours that crop up even by the more flowery paths of American travel; but I was meanwhile able, I found, to be quite Byronically foolish about the St. John’s River and the various structures, looming now through the darkness, that more or less adorned its banks. The river served for my Mincio—which it moreover so greatly surpassed in extent and beauty; while the remoter buildings figured sufficiently any old city of the South. For that was the charm—that so preposterously, with the essential notes of the impression so happily struck, the velvet air, the extravagant plants, the palms, the oranges, the cacti, the architectural fountain, the florid local monument, the cheap and easy exoticism, the sense as of people feeding, off in the background, very much al fresco, that is on queer things and with flaring lights—one might almost have been in a corner of Naples or of Genoa. Everything is relative—this illuminating commonplace, the clue to any just perception of effects anywhere, came up for the thousandth time; by the aid of which I easily made out that absolute and impeccable poetry of site and circumstance is far to seek, but that I was now immeasurably nearer to some poetic, or say even to some romantic, effect in things than I had hitherto been. And I had tried to think Washington relaxed, and Richmond itself romantic, and Charleston secretly ardent! There always comes, to any traveller who doesn’t depart and arrive with the mere security and punctuality of a registered letter, some moment for his beginning to feel within him—it happens under some particular touch—the finer vibration of a sense of the real thing. He thus knows it when it comes, and it has the great value that it never need fail. There is no situation, wherever he may turn, in which the note of that especial reality, the note of character, for bliss or bale, may not insist on emerging. The note of Florida emerged for me then on the vulgar little dusky—and dusty—Jacksonville piazzetta, where other vague persons sat about, amid those spikey sub-tropical things that show how the South can be stiff as nothing else is stiff; while my rich sense of it incited me to resent the fact that my visit had been denounced, in advance, as of an ungenerous brevity. I had few days, deplorably few, no doubt, to spend; but it was afterwards positive to me that, with my image, as regards the essence of the matter, richly completed, I had virtually foretasted it all on my dusky Jacksonville bench and in my tepid Jacksonville stroll. Such reserves, in a complex of few interweavings, must impose themselves, I think, even upon foolish fondness, and Florida was quite remorselessly to appear to me a complex of few interweavings.

III

The next day, for instance, was all occupied with but one of these; the railway run from Jacksonville to Palm Beach begins early and ends late, yet I waited, the livelong time, for any other “factor” than that of the dense cypress swamp to show so much as the tip of an ear. I had quite counted on being thrilled by this very intensity and monotony of the characteristic note; and I doubtless was thrilled—I invoked, I cultivated the thrill, as we went, by every itinerant art that experience had long since taught me; yet with a presentiment, all the while, of the large field, in the whole impression, that this simplicity would cover. Possible diversions doubtless occurred, had the attuned spirit been moved to avail itself; Ormond, for instance, off to our right, put in, toward the dim centre of the stretch, a claim as large as a hard white racing-beach, an expanse of firm sand thirty miles long, could make it. This, I recognized, might well be an appeal of the grand and simple order—the huge band of shining silver beside the huge band of sapphire sea; and I inquired a little as to what filled in the picture. “Oh, the motor-cars, the bicycles and the trotting-waggons, tearing up and down.” And then, as one seemed perhaps to yearn for another touch: “Ah, the hotels of course—plenty of them, plenty of people; very popular resort.” It sounded charming, with its hint again of two or three great facts of composition—so definite that their paucity constituted somehow a mild majesty; but it ministered none the less to a reflection I had already, on occasion, found myself perhaps a little perversely making. One was liable, in the States, on many a scene, to react, as it were, from the people, and to throw one’s self passionately on the bosom of contiguous Nature, whatever surface it might happen to offer; one was apt to be moved, in possibly almost invidious preference, or in deeper and sweeter confidence, to try what might be made of that. Yet, all unreasonably, when any source of interest did express itself in these mere rigorous terms, in these only—terms all of elimination, just of sea and sky and river-breast and forest and beach (the “beaches” in especial were to acquire a trick of getting on one’s nerves!) that produced in turn a wanton wonder about the “human side,” and a due recurrence to the fact that the human side had been from the first one’s affair.

So, therefore, one seemed destined a bit incoherently to proceed; asking one’s self again and again what the play would have been without the scenery, sometimes “even such” scenery, and then once more not quite seeing why such scenery (in especial) should propose to put one off with so little of a play. The thing, absolutely, everywhere, was to provide one’s own play; anything, everything made scenery for that, and the recurrence of such questions made scenery most of all. I remember no moment, over the land, when the mere Pullman itself didn’t overarch my observations as a positive temple of the drama, and when the comedy and the tragedy of manners didn’t, under its dome, hold me raptly attent. With which there were other resources—a rising tide that, before we got to Palm Beach, floated me back into remembered depths of youth. Why shouldn’t I hold it not trivial that, as the day waned, and the evening gathered, and the heat increased, and my companions removed, one after the other, the articles of clothing that had consorted with our early start, I felt myself again beneath the spell of Mayne Reid, captain of the treasure-ship of romance and idol of my childhood? I might again have held in my very hand The War Trail, a work that had seemed matchless to my fourteenth year, for was not the train itself rumbling straight into that fantastic Florida, with its rank vegetation and its warm, heroic, amorous air?—the Florida of the Seminoles and the Everglades, of the high old Spanish Dons and the passionate Creole beauties gracing the primal “society”; of Isolina de Vargas, whose voluptuous form was lashed Mazeppa-like, at the climax of her fortunes, to the fiery mustang of the wilderness, and so let loose adown the endless vista of our young suspense. We had thus food for the mind, I recall, if we were reduced to that; and I remember that, as my buffet-car (there was none other) was hours late, the fond vision of the meal, crown of the endless day, awaiting me ultimately at the famous hotel, yielded all the inspiration necessary for not appealing again, great though the stress and strain, to the indescribable charity of the “buffet.” The produce of the buffet, the procedure of the buffet, were alike (wherever resorted to) a sordid mockery of desire; so I but suffered desire to accumulate till the final charming arrest, the platform of the famous hotel, amid generous lights and greetings, and excellent arrangements, and balmy Southern airs, and the breath of the near sea, and the vague crests of great palms, announced the fulfilment of every hope.

The question of whether one’s hope was really fulfilled, or of whether one had, among all those items of ease, to go supperless to bed, would doubtless appear beneath the dignity of even such history as this, were it not for a single fact—which, then and there looming large to me, blocked out, on the spot, all others. It is difficult to render the intensity with which one felt the great sphere of the hotel close round one, covering one in as with high, shining crystal walls, stretching beneath one’s feet an immeasurable polished level, revealing itself in short as, for the time, for the place, the very order of nature and the very form, the only one, of the habitable world. The effect was like nothing else of the sort one had ever known, and of surpassing interest, truly, as any supreme illustration of manners, any complete and organic projection of a “social” case is apt to be. The whole picture presented itself as fresh and luminous—as was natural to phenomena shown in the splendid Florida light and off there at the end of a huge peninsula especially appointed to them, and kept clear, in their interest, as it struck me, of any shadow of anything but themselves. One had been aware enough, certainly, for long years, of that range of American aspects, that diffusion of the American example, to which one had given, from far back, for convenience, the name of hotel-civilization; why, accordingly, was this renewed impression so hugely to impose itself; why was it, to the eye of the restless analyst, to stand for so much more than ever yet? Why was it, above all, so to succeed in making, with insistence, its appeal?—an appeal if not to the finer essence of interest, yet to several of the fond critic’s livelier sensibilities. Wasn’t, for that matter, his asking of such questions as these the very state of being interested?—and all the more that the general reply to them was not easy to throw off.