If the Bay had seemed to me, as I have noted, most
to help the fond observer of New York aspects to a sense, through the eyes, of
embracing possession, so the part played there for the outward view, found its
match for the inward in the portentous impression of one of the great
caravansaries administered to me of a winter afternoon. I say with intention
‘administered’: on so assiduous a guide, through the endless labyrinth of the
Waldorf-Astoria was I happily to chance after turning out of the early dusk and
the January sleet and slosh into permitted, into enlightened contemplation of a
pandemonium not less admirably ordered, to all appearance, than rarely
intermitted.
The seer of great cities is liable to easy error, I know, when he finds this,
that or the other caught glimpse the supremely significant one and I am willing to preface with that remark
my confession that New York told me more of her story at once, then and there,
than she will again and elsewhere to tell. With this apprehension that she was in
fact fairly shrieking it into one’s ears came a curiosity, corresponding, as to
its kind and its degree of interest; so there was naught to do, as we picked
our tortuous way, but to stare with all our eyes and miss as little as possible
of the revelation.
The harshness of the essential conditions, the outward, which almost any large
attempt at amenities, in New York, has to take account of and make the best of,
has at least the effect of projecting the visitor with force the spectacle
prepared for him at this particular point and of marking the more its sudden
high pitch, the character of violence which all its warmth, its color and
glitter so completely muffled. This violence outside, mitigating sadly the
frontal majesty of the monument, leaving it exposed to the vulgar assault of
the street by the operation of those dire facts of absence of margin, of
meagreness of site, of the brevity of the block, of the inveteracy of the near
thoroughfare, which leave ‘style,’ in construction, at the mercy of impertinent
cross streets, make detachment and independence, save in the rarest cases, an
insoluble problem, preclude without pity any element of court or garden, and open
to the builder in quest of distinction the one alternative, and the great
adventure, of seeking his reward in the sky.
Of their license to pursue it there to any extent whatsoever New Yorkers are, I
think, a trifle too assertively proud; no court of approach, no interspace worth
mention, ever forming meanwhile part of a ground-plan or helping to receive the
force of the breaking public wave. New York pays at this rate the penalty of
her primal topographic curse, her old inconceivably bourgeois scheme of
composition and distribution, the uncorrected labor of minds with no
imagination of the future and blind before the opportunity given them by two
magnificent waterfronts. This original sin of the longitudinal avenues
perpetually, yet meanly intersected, and of the organized sacrifice of the
indicated alternative, the great perspectives from East to West, might still
have earned forgiveness as by some occasional departure from its pettifogging
consistency. But, thanks to this consistency, the city is, of all great cities,
the least endowed with any blest item of stately square or goodly garden, with
any happy accident or surprise, any fortunate nook or casual corner, any
deviation, in fine, into the liberal or the charming. That way, however, for
the regenerate filial mind, madness may be said to lie – the way of imagining
what might have been and putting it all together in the light of what so
helplessly is.
One of the things that helplessly are, for instance, is just this assault of
the street, as I have called it, upon any direct dealing with our caravansary.
The electric cars, with their double tracks, are everywhere almost as tight a
fit in the narrow channel of the roadway as the projectile in the bore of a
gun; so that the Waldorf Astoria, sitting by this absent margin for life with
her open lap and arms, is reduced to confessing, with a strained smile across
the traffic and the danger, how little, outside her mere swing door, she can do
for you. She seems to admit that the attempt to get her may cost you your
safety, but reminds you at the same time that any good American, and even any
good inquiring stranger, is supposed willing to risk that boon for her. ‘Un bon movement, therefore: you must
make a dash for it, but you’ll see I’m worth it.’
If such a claim as this last be ever justified, it would indubitably be
justified here; the survivor scrambling out of the current and up the bank
finds in the amplitude of the entertainment awaiting him an instant sense of
applied restoratives. The amazing hotel-world quickly closes around him; with
the process of transition reduced to its minimum he is transported to
conditions of extraordinary complexity and brilliancy, operating – and with
proportionate perfection –by laws of their own and expressing after their
fashion a complete scheme of life. The air swarms, to intensity, with the characteristic, the characteristic
condensed and accumulated as he rarely elsewhere has had the luck to find it.
It jumps out to meet his every glance, and this unanimity of its spring, of all
its aspects and voices, is what I just now referred to as the essence of the
loud New York story. That effect of violence in the whole communication, at which
I thus hint, results from the inordinate mass, the quantity of presence, as it
were, of the testimony heaped together for emphasis of the wondrous moral.
The moral in question, the high interest of the
tale, is that you are in the presence of a revelation of the possibilities of
the hotel- for which the American spirit has found so unprecedented a use and
value; leading it on to express so a social, indeed positively an aesthetic
ideal, and making it so, at this supreme pitch, a synonym for civilization, for
the capture of conceived manners themselves, that one is verily tempted to ask
if the hotel-spirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and most
finding itself. That truth –the truth that the present is more and more the day
of the hotel –had not waited to burst on my mind at the view of this particular
establishment; we have all more or less
been educated to it, the world over, by the fruit-baring action of the American
example: in consequence of which it has been opened to us to see still other
societies moved by the same irresistible
spring and trying, with whatever grace and ease they may bring to the
business, to unlearn as many as possible of their old social canons, and in
especial their old discrimination in favor of the private life.
The business for them – for communities to which the American ease in such
matters is not native –goes much less of itself and produces as yet a scantier
show; the great difference with the American show being that in the United
States every one is, for the lubrication of the general machinery, practically
in everything, whereas in Europe, mostly, it is only certain people who are in
anything; so that the machinery, so much less generalized, works in a smaller
stiffer way.
This one caravansary makes the American case vivid, gives it, you feel, that
quantity of illustration which renders the place a new thing under the sun. It
is an expression of the gregarious state breaking down every every barrier but
two –one of which, the barrier consisting of the high pecuniary tax, is
immediately obvious. The other, the rather more subtle, is the condition, for
any member of the flock, that he or she – in other words especially she- be
presumably ‘respectable,’ be, that is, not discoverably anything else. The
rigor with which any appearance of pursued or desired adventure is kept down
–adventure in the florid sense of the word, the sense in which it remains an
euphemism – is not the least interesting note of the whole immense promiscuity.
Protected at those two points of promiscuity carries, through the rest of the
range, everything before it.
I sat there, it walked and talked, and ate and drank, and listened and danced
to the music, and otherwise reveled and roamed, and bought and sold, and came
and went there, all on its own splendid terms and with an encompassing material
splendor, a wealth and variety of constituted picture and background, that
might well feed it with the finest illusions about itself. It paraded through
halls and saloons in which art and history, in masquerading dress, muffled
almost to suffocation as on the gold brocade of their pretended majestic and
their conciliatory graces, stood smirking on its passage with the last cynicism
of hypocrisy. The exhibition is wonderful for that, for the suggested sense of
a promiscuity which manages to be at the same time an inordinate un-tempered
monotony; manages to be so, on such ground as this, by an extraordinary trick
of its own, wherever one finds it.
The combination forms, I think, largely, the very interest, such as it is, of
these phases of the human scene in the United States – if only for the pleasant
puzzle of our wondering how, when types, aspects, conditions, have so much in
common, they should seem at all to make up a conscious miscellany. That
question, however, the question of play and range, the practical elasticity, of
the social sameness, in America, will meet us elsewhere on our path, and I
confess that all questions gave way, in my mind, to a single irresistible
obsession. This was just the ache of envy
of the spirit of a society which had found there, in its prodigious
public setting, so exactly what it wanted. One was in presence, as never
before, of a realized ideal and of
that child like rush of surrender to it and clutch at it which one was so
repeatedly to recognize, in America, as the note of the supremely gregarious
state. It made the whole vision unforgettable, and I am now carried back to it,
I confess, in musing hours, as to one of my few glimpses of perfect human
felicity. It had the admirable sign that it was, precisely, so comprehensively
collective – that it made so vividly, in the old phrase, for the greatest
happiness of the greatest number. Its rare beauty, one felt with instant
clarity of perception, was that it was, for a ‘mixed’ social manifestation,
blissfully exempt from any principle or possibility of discord with itself. It
was absolutely a fit to its conditions which were both its earth and its
heaven, and every part of the picture, every item of the immense sum, every
wheel of the wondrous complexity, was on the best terms with all the rest.
The sense of these things became for the hour as the golden glow in which one’s
envy burned, and through which, while the sleet and slosh, and the clangorous charge
of cars, and the hustling, hustled crowds held the outer world, one carried one’s
charged attention from one chamber of the temple to another. For that is how
the place speaks, as great constructed and achieved harmonies mostly speak – a temple
builded, with clustering chapels and shrines, to an idea. The hundreds and
hundreds of people in circulation, the innumerable huge-hatted ladies in
especial, with their air of finding in their gilded and storied labyrinth the
very firesides and pathways of home, became thus the serene faithful, whose
rite one would no more have skeptically brushed than one would doff one’s disguise
in a Mohammedan mosque. The question of who they all might be, seated under the
palms and by the fountains, or communing, to some inimitable New York tune,
with the shade of Marie Antoinette in the queer recaptured actuality of an easy
Versailles or intimate Trianon – such questions as that, interesting in other societies
and at other times, insisted on yielding here to the mere eloquence of the general
truth. Here was a world in positively stable equilibrium. Here was a world
whose relation to its form and medium was practically imperturbable; here was a
conception of publicity as the vital
medium organized with the authority with which the American genius for
organization, put on its mettle, alone could organize it.
The whole thing remains for me, however, I repeat, a gorgeous golden blur, a paradise
peopled with unmistakable American shapes, yet in which, the general and the
particular, the organized and the extemporized, the element of ingenuous joy
below and of consummate management above, melted together and left one uncertain
which of them one was, at a given turn of the maze, most admiring. When I
reflect indeed without my clue I should not have even known the maze – should not
have known, at the given turn, whether I was engulfed, for instance, in the vente de charite of the theatrical
profession and the onset of persuasive peddling actresses, or in the annual tea-party
of German patronesses (of I know not what) filling with their oriental opulence
and their strange idiom a playhouse of the richest rococo, where some other
expensive anniversary, the ball of a guild or the carouse of a club, was to
tread on their heels and instantly mobilize away their paraphernalia – when I
so reflect I see the sharpest dazzle of the eyes as precisely the play of the
genius for organization.
There are a thousand forms of this ubiquitous American force, the most ubiquitous
of all, that I was in no position to measure: but there was often no resisting
a vivid view of the form it may take, on occasion, under pressure of the native
conception of the hotel. Encountered embodiments of the gift, in this connection,
master-spirits of management whose influence was in the very air, the very expensive
air, one breathed, abide with me as the intensest examples of American
character; indeed was the very interesting supreme example of a type which has
even on the American ground, doubtless, not said its last word, but which has
at least treated itself there to a luxury
of development. It gives the impression, when at all directly met, of having at
its service something of that fine flame that makes up personal greatness; so
that, again and again, as I found, one would have liked to see it more
intimately at work. Such failures of opportunity and of penetration, however,
are but the daily bread of the visionary tourist.
When I dip back, in fond memory, none the less, into the vision I have here
attempted once more to call up, I see the whole thing over-swept as by the
colossal extended arms, waving a magical baton, of some high-stationed
orchestral leader, the absolute presiding power, conscious of every note of
every instrument, controlling and commanding the whole volume of sound, keeping
the whole effect together and making it what it is. What may one say of such a
spirit if not that he understands, so to speak, the forces he sways, understands
his boundless American material and pays with it like a master indeed? One sees
it thus, in its crude plasticity, almost in the likeness of an army of puppets
whose strings the wealth of his technical imagination teaches him innumerable
ways of pulling, and yet whose innocent, whose always ingenuous agitation of their
members he has found means to make them think of themselves as delightfully free
and easy. Such was my impression of the perfection of the concert that, for
fear of its being spoiled by some chance false note, I never went into the place
again.
The
American Scene (1909);
Henry James Collected Travel Writings,
Library of America, 1993, pages 438-440
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