The American scene

by Henry James

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.

V

It is all most agreeable and diverting, it is almost, the boarders apart, romantic; but it is soon over, and there is not much more of it. The uncanny conception, the rank eccentricity of a walk encounters neither favour nor facility—but on the subject of the inveteracy with which the conditions, over the land, conspire against that sweet subterfuge there would be more to say than I may here deal with. One of these gentle ranches was approached by water, as Palm Beach has a front on its vast, fresh lake as well as seaward; a steam-launch puts you down at the garden foot, and the place is less infested by the boarders, less confessedly undefended, less artlessly ignorant in fine (thanks perhaps to the mere interposing water) of any possible right to occultation; the general absence of conception of that right, nowhere asserted, nowhere embodied, everywhere in fact quite sacrificially abrogated, qualifying at last your very sense of the American character—qualifying it very much as a pervading unsaltedness qualifies the taste of a dinner. This brief excursion remains with me, at any rate, as a delicate and exquisite impression; the neck of land that stretched from the languid lake to the anxious sea, the approach to real detachment, the gracious Northern hostess, just veiled, for the right felicity, in a thin nostalgic sadness, the precious recall in particular of having succeeded in straying a little, through groves of the pensive palm, down to the sandy, the vaguely-troubled shore. There was a certain concentration in the hour, a certain intensity in the note, a certain intimacy in the whole communion; I found myself loving, quite fraternally, the palms, which had struck me at first, for all their human-headed gravity, as merely dry and taciturn, but which became finally as sympathetic as so many rows of puzzled philosophers, dishevelled, shock-pated, with the riddle of the universe. This scantness and sweetness and sadness, this strange peninsular spell, this, I said, was sub-tropical Florida—and doubtless as permitted a glimpse as I should ever have of any such effect. The softness was divine—like something mixed, in a huge silver crucible, as an elixir, and then liquidly scattered. But the refinement of the experience would be the summer noon or the summer night—it would be then the breast of Nature would open; save only that, so lost in it and with such lubrication of surrender, how should one ever come back?

As it was, one came back soon enough, back to one’s proper business: which appeared to be, urgently, strictly, severely, the pursuit of the boarders up and down the long corridors and round about the wide verandahs of their crowded career. I had been admirably provided for at the less egregious of the two hotels; which was vast and cool and fair, friendly, breezy, shiny, swabbed and burnished like a royal yacht, really immaculate and delightful; full of interesting lights and yet standing but on the edge of the whirlpool, the centre of which formed the heart of the adjacent colossus. One could plunge, by a short walk through a luxuriance of garden, into the deeper depths; one could lose one’s self, if so minded, in the labyrinth of the other show. There, if Vanity Fair was not encamped, it was not for want of booths; the long corridors were streets of shops, dealing, naturally, in commodities almost beyond price—not the cheap gimcracks of the usual watering-place barrack, but solid (when not elaborately ethereal), formidable, incalculable values, of which it was of an admonitory economic interest to observe the triumphant appeal. They hadn’t terrors, apparently, for the clustered boarders, these idols and monsters of the market—neither the wild fantastications of the milliner, the uncovered fires, disclosed secrets of the gem-merchant, the errant tapestries and bahuts of the antiquarian, nor, what I found most impressive and what has everywhere its picture-making force, those ordered dispositions and stretched lengths of old “point” in the midst of which a quiet lady in black, occupied with some small stitch of her own, is apt to raise at you, with expensive deliberation, a grave, white Flemish face. The interest of the general spectacle was supposed to be, I had gathered, that people from all parts of the country contributed to it; and the value of the testimony as to manners was that it brought to a focus so many elements of difference. The elements of difference, whatever they might latently have been, struck me as throughout forcibly simplified by the conditions of the place; this prompt reducibility of a thousand figures to a common denominator having been in fact, to my sense, the very moral of the picture. Individuality and variety is attributed to “types,” in America, on easy terms, and the reputation for it enjoyed on terms not more difficult; so that what I was most conscious of, from aspect to aspect, from group to group, from sex to sex, from one presented boarder to another, was the continuity of the fusion, the dimness of the distinctions.

The distinction that was least absent, however, would have been, I judge, that of the comparative ability to spend and purchase; the ability to spend with freedom being, as one made out, a positive consistent with all sorts of negatives. That helped to make the whole thing documentary—that you had to be financially more or less at your ease to enjoy the privileges of the Royal Poinciana at all; enjoy them through their extended range of saloons and galleries, fields of high publicity all; pursue them from dining-halls to music-rooms, to ball-rooms, to card-rooms, to writing-rooms, to a succession of places of convenience and refreshment, not the least characteristic of which, no doubt, was the terrace appointed to mid-morning and mid-afternoon drinks—drinks, at the latter hour, that appeared, oddly, never to comprise tea, the only one appreciated in “Europe” at that time of day. (The quest of tea indeed, especially at the hour when it is most a blessing, struck me as attended, throughout the country, with difficulties, even with dangers; over ground where one’s steps are beset, everywhere, with an infinite number of strange, sweet iced liquidities—many of these, I hasten to add, charmingly congruous, in their non-alcoholic ingenuity, with the heats of summer: a circumstance that doesn’t prevent their flourishing equally in the rigour of cold.) The implication of “ease” was thus a light to assist inquiry; it is always a gained fact about people—as to “where” they are, if not as to who or what—that they are either in confirmed or in casual possession of money, and thereby, presumably, of all that money may, in this negotiable world, represent. Add to this that the company came, in its provided state, by common report, from “all over,” that it converged upon Palm Beach from every prosperous corner of the land, and the case was clear for a compendious view of American society in the largest sense of the term. “Society,” as we loosely use the word, is made up of the fortunate few, and, if that number be everywhere small at the best, it was yet the fortunate who, after their fashion, filled the frame. Every obligation lay upon me to “study” them as so gathered in, and I did my utmost, I remember, to render them that respect; yet when I now, after an interval, consult my notes, I find the page a blank, and when I knock at the door of memory I find it perversely closed. If it consents a little to open, rather, a countenance looks out—that of the inscrutable warden of the precinct—and seems to show me the ambiguous smile that accompanies on occasion the plea to be excused.

From which I infer that the form and pressure of the boarders, for all I had expected of the promised picture, failed somehow to affect me as a discussable quantity. It is of the nature of many American impressions, accepted at the time as a whole of the particular story, simply to cease to be, as soon as your back is turned—to fade, to pass away, to leave not a wreck behind. This happens not least when the image, whatever it may have been, has exacted the tribute of wonder or pleasure: it has displayed every virtue but the virtue of being able to remain with you. Its pressure and power have failed of some weight, some element of density or intensity, some property or quality in short that makes for the authority of a figure, for the complexity of a scene. The “European” vision, in general, of whatever consisting, and even when making less of an explicit appeal, has behind it a driving force—derived from sources into which I won’t pretend here to enter—that make it, comparatively, “bite,” as the plate of the etcher is bitten by aquafortis. That doubtless is the matter, in the States, with the vast peaceful and prosperous human show—in conditions, especially, in which its peace and prosperity most shine out: it registers itself on the plate with an incision too vague and, above all, too uniform. The paucity of one’s notes is in itself, no doubt, a report of the consulted oracle; it describes and reconstitutes for me the array of the boarders, this circumstance that I only grope for their features and seek in vain to discriminate between sorts and conditions. There were the two sexes, I think, and the range of age, but, once the one comprehensive type was embraced, no other signs of differentiation. How should there have been when the men were consistently, in all cases, thoroughly obvious products of the “business-block,” the business-block unmitigated by any other influence definite enough to name, and the women were, under the same strictness, the indulged ladies of such lords? The business-block has perhaps, from the north-east to the south-west, its fine diversities, but any variety so introduced eluded even the most brooding of analysts.

And it was not of course that the marks of uniformity, among so many persons, were not on their side perfectly appreciable; it was only that when one had noted them as marks of “success,” no doubt, primarily, and then as those of great gregarious decency and sociability and good-humour, one had exhausted the list. It was the scant diversity of type that left me short, as a story-seeker or picture-maker; contributive as this very fact might be to admiration of the costly processes, as they thus appear, that ensure, and that alone ensure, in other societies, the opposite of that scantness. With this, as the foredoomed observer may never escape from the dreadful faculty that rides him, the very simplifications had in the highest degree their illustrative value; they gave all opportunity to anything or any one that might be salient. They gave it to the positive bourgeois propriety, serenely, imperturbably, massively seated, and against which any experimental deviation from the bourgeois would have dashed itself in vain. This neutrality of respectability might have been figured by a great grey wash of some charged moist brush causing colour and outline, on the pictured paper, effectually to run together. What resisted it best was the look of “business success” in some of the men; when that success had been very great (and there were indicated cases of its prodigious greatness) the look was in its turn very great; when it had been small, on the other hand, there was doubtless no look at all—since there were no other conceivable sources of appearance. The people had not, and the women least of all, one felt, in general, been transferred from other backgrounds; the scene around them and behind them constituted as replete a medium as they could ever have been conscious of; the women in particular failed in an extraordinary degree to engage the imagination, to offer it, so to speak, references or openings: it faltered—doubtless respectfully enough—where they for the most part so substantially and prosaically sat, failing of any warrant to go an inch further. As for the younger persons, of whom there were many, as for the young girls in especial, they were as perfectly in their element as goldfish in a crystal jar: a form of exhibition suggesting but one question or mystery. Was it they who had invented it, or had it inscrutably invented them?

VI

The case of St. Augustine afterwards struck me as presenting, on another side, its analogy with the case at Palm Beach: if the “social interest” had in the latter place appeared but of a weak constitution, so the historic, at the former, was to work a spell of a simpler sort than one had been brought up, as it were, to look to. Hadn’t one been brought up, from far back, on the article of that faith in St. Augustine, by periodical papers in the magazines, fond elucidations of its romantic character, accompanied by drawings that gave one quite proudly, quite patriotically, to think—that filled the cup of curiosity and yearning? The old town—for the essence of the faith had been that there was an “old town”—receded into an all but untraceable past; it had been of all American towns the earliest planted, and it bristled still with every evidence of its Spanish antiquity. The illustrations in the magazines, wondrous vignettes of old street vistas, old architectural treasures, gateways and ramparts, odds and ends, nooks and corners, crowned with the sweetness of slow decay, conveyed the sense of these delights and renewed at frequent intervals their appeal. But oh, as I was to observe, the school of “black and white” trained up by the magazines has much, in the American air, to answer for: it points so vividly the homely moral that when you haven’t what you like you must perforce like, and above all misrepresent, what you have. Its translation of these perfunctory passions into pictorial terms saddles it with a weight of responsibility that would be greater, one can only say, if there ever were a critic, some guardian of real values, to bring it to book. The guardians of real values struck me as, up and down, far to seek. The whole matter indeed would seem to come back, interestingly enough, to the general truth of the æsthetic need, in the country, for much greater values, of certain sorts, than the country and its manners, its aspects and arrangements, its past and present, and perhaps even future, really supply; whereby, as the æsthetic need is also intermixed with a patriotic yearning, a supply has somehow to be extemporized, by any pardonable form of pictorial “hankey-pankey”—has to be, as the expression goes, cleverly “faked.” But it takes an inordinate amount of faking to meet the supposed intensity of appetite of a body of readers at once more numerous and less critical than any other in the world; so that, frankly, the desperate expedient is written large in much of the “artistic activity” of the country.

The results are of the oddest; they hang all traceably together; wonderful in short the general spectacle and lesson of the scale and variety of the faking. They renew again the frequent admonition that the pabulum provided for a great thriving democracy may derive most of its interest from the nature of its testimony to the thriving democratic demand. No long time is required, in the States, to make vivid for the visitor the truth that the nation is almost feverishly engaged in producing, with the greatest possible activity and expedition, an “intellectual” pabulum after its own heart, and that not only the arts and ingenuities of the draftsman (called upon to furnish the picturesque background and people it with the “aristocratic” figure where neither of these revelations ever meets his eye) pay their extravagant tribute, but that those of the journalist, the novelist, the dramatist, the genealogist, the historian, are pressed as well, for dear life, into the service. The illustrators of the magazines improvise, largely—that is when not labouring in the cause of the rural dialects—improvise the field of action, full of features at any price, and the characters who figure upon it, young gods and goddesses mostly, of superhuman stature and towering pride; the novelists improvise, with the aid of the historians, a romantic local past of costume and compliment and sword-play and gallantry and passion; the dramatists build up, of a thousand pieces, the airy fiction that the life of the people in the world among whom the elements of clash and contrast are simplest and most superficial abounds in the subjects and situations and effects of the theatre; while the genealogists touch up the picture with their pleasant hint of the number, over the land, of families of royal blood. All this constitutes a vast home-grown provision for entertainment, rapidly superseding any that may be borrowed or imported, and that indeed already begins, not invisibly, to press for exportation. As to quantity, it looms immense, and resounds in proportion, yet with the property, all its own, of ceasing to be, of fading like the mist of dawn—that is of giving no account of itself whatever—as soon as one turns on it any intending eye of appreciation or of inquiry. It is the public these appearances collectively refer us to that becomes thus again the more attaching subject; the public so placidly uncritical that the whitest thread of the deceptive stitch never makes it blink, and sentimental at once with such inveteracy and such simplicity that, finding everything everywhere perfectly splendid, it fairly goes upon its knees to be humbuggingly humbugged. It proves ever, by the ironic measure, quite incalculably young.