The American scene

by Henry James

The vision framed, the reflections suggested, corresponded closely with those to which, in New York, some weeks before, on its harsh winter afternoon, the Waldorf-Astoria had prescribed such a revel; but it was wondrous that if I had there supposed the apogee of the impression (or, better still, of the expression) reached, I was here to see the whole effect written lucidly larger. The difference was doubtless that of the crowded air and encumbered ground in the great Northern city—in the fact that the demonstration is made in Florida as in a vast clean void expressly prepared for it. It has nothing either in nature or in man to reckon with—it carries everything before it; meaning, when I say “it,” in this momentarily indefinite way, the perfect, the exquisite adjustability of the “national” life to the sublime hotel-spirit. The whole appearance operates as by an economy so thorough that no element of either party to the arrangement is discoverably sacrificed; neither is mutilated, docked in any degree of its identity, its amplitude of type; nothing is left unexpressed in either through its relation with the other. The relation would in fact seem to stimulate each to a view of the highest expression as yet open to it. The advantage—in the sense of the “upper hand”—may indeed be, at a few points, most with the hotel-spirit, as the more concentrated of the two; there being so much that is comparatively undeveloped and passive in the social organism to which it looks for response, and the former agency, by its very nature full-blown and expert, “trying it on” the latter much more than the latter is ever perceptibly moved to try it on the former. The hotel-spirit is an omniscient genius, while the character of the tributary nation is still but struggling into relatively dim self-knowledge. An illustration of this met me, precisely, at the very hour of my alighting: one had entered, toward ten o’clock in the evening, the hotel-world; it had become the all in all and made and imposed its law.

This took the form, for me, at that hungry climax, at the end of the long ordeal of the buffet-car, of a refusal of all food that night; a rigour so inexorable that, had it not been for the charity of admirable friends, able to provide me from a private store, I should have had to go, amid all the suggestions of everything, fasting and faint to bed. There one seemed to get the hotel-spirit taking the advantage—taking it unfairly; for whereas it struck me in general as educative, distinctly, in respect to the society it deals with, keeping for the most part well in advance of it, and leading it on to a larger view of the social interest and opportunity than might otherwise accrue, here, surely, it was false to its mission, it fell behind its pretension, its general pretension not only of meeting all American ideals, but of creating (the Waldorf-Astoria being in this sense, for example, a perfect riot of creation) new and superior ones. Its basis, in those high developments, is not that it merely gratifies them as soon as they peep out, but that it lies in wait for them, anticipates and plucks them forth even before they dawn, setting them up almost prematurely and turning their face in the right direction. Thus the great national ignorance of many things is artfully and benevolently practised upon; thus it is converted into extraordinary appetites, such as can be but expensively sated. The belated traveller’s appetite for the long-deferred “bite” could scarce be described as too extraordinary; but the great collective, plastic public, so vague yet about many things, didn’t know that it couldn’t, didn’t know that, in communities more knowing, the great glittering, costly caravansery, where the scale of charges is an implication of a high refinement of service, grave lapses are not condoned.

One appears ridiculously to be regretting that unsupplied mouthful, but the restless analyst had in truth quickly enough left it behind, feeling in his hand, already, as a clue, the long concatenation of interlinked appearances. Things short in themselves might yet have such large dimensions of meaning. The revelation, practically dazzling to the uninformed many, was constantly proving, right and left, if one gave it time, a trick played on the informed few; and there was no quarter of the field, either the material or the “social,” in which that didn’t sooner or later come out. The fact that the individual, with his preferences, differences, habits, accidents, might still fare imperfectly even where the crowd could be noted as rejoicing before the Lord more ingenuously than on any other human scene, added but another touch to one’s impression, already so strong, of the success with which, throughout the land, even in conditions which might appear likely, on certain sides, to beget reserves about it, the all-gregarious and generalized life suffices to every need. I by no means say that it is not touching, the so largely witless confidence with which the universal impulse hurls its victims into the abyss of the hotel-spirit, trusting it so blandly and inviting it to throw up, round and about them and far and wide, the habitable, the practicable, the agreeable sphere toward which other arts of construction fail. There were lights in which this was to strike me as one of the most affecting of all social exhibitions; lights, positively, in which I seemed to see again (as, once more, at the universal Waldorf-Astoria) the whole housed populace move as in mild and consenting suspicion of its captured and governed state, its having to consent to inordinate fusion as the price of what it seemed pleased to regard as inordinate luxury. Beguiled and caged, positively thankful, in its vast vacancy, for the sense and the definite horizon of a cage, were there yet not moments, were there yet not cases and connections, in which it still dimly made out that its condition was the result of a compromise into the detail of which there might some day be an alarm in entering? The detail of the compromise exacted of the individual, throughout American life, affects the observer as a great cumulative sum, growing and growing while he awaits time and opportunity to go into it; and I asked myself again and again if I couldn’t imagine the shadow of that quantity by no means oppressively felt, yet already vaguely perceived, and reflected a bit portentously in certain aspects of the native consciousness.

The jealous cultivation of the common mean, the common mean only, the reduction of everything to an average of decent suitability, the gospel of precaution against the dangerous tendency latent in many things to become too good for their context, so that persons partaking of them may become too good for their company—the idealized form of all this glimmered for me, as an admonition or a betrayal, through the charming Florida radiance, constituting really the greatest interest of the lesson one had travelled so far to learn. It might superficially seem absurd, it might savour almost of blasphemy, to put upon the “romantic” peninsula the affront of that particular prosaic meaning; but I profess that none of its so sensibly thin sources of romance—thin because everywhere asking more of the imagination than they could be detected in giving it—appealed to me with any such force or testified in any such quantity. Definitely, one had made one’s pilgrimage but to find the hotel-spirit in sole articulate possession, and, call this truth for the mind an anti-climax if one would, none of the various climaxes, the minor effects—those of Nature, for instance, since thereabouts, far and wide, was no hinted history—struck me as for a moment dispossessing it of supremacy. So little availed, comparatively, those of the jungle, the air, the sea, the sky, the sunset, the orange, the pineapple, the palm; so little such a one, amid all the garden climaxes, as that of the divine bougainvillæa which, here and there, at Palm Beach, smothers whole “homes” in its purple splendour. For the light of the hotel-spirit really beat upon everything; it was the only torch held up for the view or the sense of anything else. The case, therefore, was perfect, for what did this mean but that its conscience, so to speak, its view of its responsibility, would be of the highest, and that, given the whole golden frame of the picture, the appearances could be nowhere else so grandly in its favour? That prevision was to be in fact afterwards confirmed to me.

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?