IXPHILADELPHIA
To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytically, minded—over and beyond an inherent love of the general many-coloured picture of things—is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter. That perverse person is obliged to take it for a working theory that the essence of almost any settled aspect of anything may be extracted by the chemistry of criticism, and may give us its right name, its formula, for convenient use. From the moment the critic finds himself sighing, to save trouble in a difficult case, that the cluster of appearances canhaveno sense, from that moment he begins, and quite consciously, to go to pieces; it being the prime business and the high honour of the painter of life always tomakea sense—and to make it most in proportion as the immediate aspects are loose or confused. The last thing decently permitted him is to recognize incoherence—to recognize it, that is, as baffling; though of course he may present and portray it, in all richness,forincoherence. That, I think, was what I had been mainly occupied with in New York;and I quitted so qualified a joy, under extreme stress of winter, with a certain confidence that I should not have moved even a little of the way southward without practical relief: relief which came in fact ever so promptly, at Philadelphia, on my feeling, unmistakably, the change of half the furniture of consciousness. This change put on, immediately, the friendliest, the handsomest aspect—supplied my intelligence on the spot with the clear, the salient note. I mean by this, not that the happy definition or synthesis instantly came—came with the perception that character and sense were there, only waiting to be disengaged; but that the note, as I say, was already, within an hour, the germ of these things, and that the whole flower, assuredly, wouldn’t fail to bloom. I was in fact sniffing up its fragrance after I had looked out for three minutes from one of the windows of a particularly wide-fronted house and seen the large residential square that lay before me shine in its native light. This light, remarkably tender, I thought, for that of a winter afternoon, matched with none other I had ever seen, and announced straight off fifty new circumstances—an enormous number, in America, for any prospect to promise you in contradistinction from any other. It was not simply that, beyond a doubt, the outlook was moreméridional; a still deeper impression had begun to work, and, as I felt it more and more glimmer upon me, I caught myself about to jump, with a single leap, to my synthesis. I of course stayed myself in the act, for there would be too much, really, yet to come; but the perception left me, I even then felt, in possession of half the ground on which later experience would proceed. It was not too much to say, as I afterwards saw, that I had in those few illumined moments put the gist of the matter into my pocket.
Philadelphia, incontestably then, was the Americancity of the large type, that didn’tbristle—just as I was afterwards to recognize in St. Louis the nearest approach to companionship with her in this respect; and to recognize in Chicago, I may parenthetically add, the most complete divergence. It was not only, moreover, at the ample, tranquil window there, that Philadelphiadidn’t“bristle” (by the record of my moment) but that she essentially couldn’t and wouldn’t ever; that no movement or process could be thought of, in fine, as more foreign to her genius. I do not just now go into the question of what the business of bristling, in an American city, may be estimated as consisting of; so infallibly is one aware when the thousand possible quillsareerect, and when, haply, they are not—such a test does the restored absentee find, at least, in his pricked sensibility. A place may abound in its own sense, as the phrase is, without bristling in the least—it is liable indeed to bristle most, I think, when not too securely possessed of any settled sense to abound in. An imperfect grasp of such a luxury is not the weakness of Philadelphia—just as that admirable comprehensive flatness in her which precludes the image of the porcupine figured to me from the first, precisely, as her positive source of strength. The absence of the note of the perpetual perpendicular, the New York, the Chicago note—and I allude here to the material, the constructional exhibition of it—seemed to symbolize exactly the principle of indefinite level extension and to offer refreshingly, a challenge to horizontal, to lateral, to more or less tangental, to rotary, or, better still, to absolute centrifugal motion. If it was to befall me, during my brief but various acquaintance with the place, not to find myself more than two or three times hoisted or lowered by machinery, my prime illumination had been an absolute forecast of that immunity—a virtue of general premonition in it at which I have alreadyglanced. I should in fact, I repeat, most truly or most artfully repaint my little picture by mixing my colours with the felt amenity of that small crisis, and by showing how this, that and the other impression to come had had, while it lasted, quite the definite prefigurement that the chapters of a book find in its table of contents. The afternoon blandness, for a fugitive from Madison Avenue in January snow, didn’t mean nothing; the little marble steps and lintels and cornices and copings, all the so clear, so placed accents in the good prose text of the mildly purple houses across the Square, which seemed to wear them, as all the others did, up and down the streets, in the manner of nice white stockings, neckties, collars, cuffs, didn’t mean nothing; and this was somehow an assurance that joined on to the vibration of the view produced, a few hours before, by so merely convenient a circumstance as my taking my place, at Jersey City, in the Pennsylvania train.
I had occasion, repeatedly, to find the Pennsylvania Railroad a beguiling and predisposing influence—in relation to various objectives; and indeed I quite lost myself in the singularity of this effect, which existed for me, certainly, only in that connection, touching me with a strange and most agreeable sense that the great line in question, an institution with a style andallureof its own, is not, even the world over, as other railroads are. It absolutely, with a little frequentation, affected me as better and higher than its office or function, and almost as supplying one with a mode of life intrinsically superior; as if it ought really to be on its way to much grander and more charming places than any that happen to mark its course—as if indeed, should one persistently keep one’s seat, not getting out anywhere, it would in the end carry one to some such ideal city. One might under this extravagant spell, which always began to work for me at Twenty-third Street, and on theconstantly-adorable Ferry, have fancied the train, disvulgarized of passengers, steaming away, in disinterested empty form, to some terminus too noble to be marked inourpoor schedules. The consciousness of this devotion would have been thus like that of living, all sublimely, up in a balloon. It was not, however—I recover myself—that if I had been put off at Philadelphia I was not, for the hour, contented; finding so immediately, as I have noted, more interest to my hand than I knew at first what to do with. There was the quick light of explanation, following on everything else I have mentioned—the light in which I had only to turn round again and see where I was, and how it was, in order to feel everything “come out” under the large friendliness, the ordered charm and perfect peace of the Club, housing me with thatwholeprotection the bestowal of which on occasion is the finest grace of the hospitality of American clubs. Philadelphia, manifestly, was beyond any other American city, asociety, and was going to show as such, as a thoroughly confirmed and settled one—which fact became the key, precisely, to its extension on one plane, and to its having no pretext for bristling. Human groups that discriminate in their own favour do, one remembers, in general, bristle; but that is only when they have not been really successful, when they have not been able to discriminate enough, when they are not, like Philadelphia, settled and confirmed and content. It would clearly be impossible not to regard the place before me as possessed of this secret of serenity to a degree elsewhere—at least among ourselves—unrivalled. The basis of the advantage, the terms of the secret, would be still to make out—which was precisely the high interest; and I was afterwards to be justified of my conviction by the multiplication of my lights.
New York, in that sense, had appeared to me then not a society at all, and it was rudimentary that Chicagowould be one still less; neither of them, as a human group, having been able to discriminate in its own favour with anything like such success. The proof of that would be, obviously, in one’s so easily imputing to them alteration, extension, development; a change somehow unimaginable in the case of Philadelphia, which was a fixed quantity and had filled to the brim, one felt—and wasn’t that really to be part of the charm?—the measure of her possibility. Boston even was thinkable as subject to mutation; had I not in fact just seemed to myself to catch her in the almost uncanny inconsequence of change? There had been for Boston the old epigram that she wasn’t a place, but a state of mind; and that might remain, since we know how frequently states of mind alter. Philadelphia then wasn’t a place, but a state of consanguinity, which is an absolute final condition. She had arrived at it, with nothing in the world left to bristle for, or against; whereas New York, and above all Chicago, were only, and most precariously, on the way to it, and indeed, having started too late, would probably never arrive. There were, for them, interferences and complications; they knew, and would yet know, other conditions, perhaps other beatitudes; only the beatitude I speak of—that of being, in the composed sense, a society—was lost to them forever. Philadelphia, without complications or interferences, enjoyed it in particular through having begun to invoke it in time. And now she had nothing more to invoke; she had everything; hercadreswere all full; her imagination was at peace. This, exactly again, would be the reason of the bristling of the other places: thecadresof New York, Chicago, Boston, being as to a third of them empty and as to another third objectionably filled—with much consequent straining, reaching, heaving, both to attain and to eject. What makes a society was thus, more than anything else, the numberof organic social relations it represents; by which logic Philadelphia would represent nothingbutorganic social relations. The degrees of consanguinity were thecadres; every one of them was full; it was a society in which every individual was as many times over cousin, uncle, aunt, niece, and so on through the list, as poor human nature is susceptible of being. These degrees are, when one reflects, the only really organic social relations, and when they are all there for every one the scheme of security, in a community, has been worked out. Philadelphia, in other words, would not only be a family, she would be a “happy” one, and a probable proof that the happiness comes as a matter of course if the family but be large enough. Consanguinity provides the marks and features, the type and tone and ease, the common knowledge and the common consciousness, but number would be required to make these things social. Number, accordingly, for her perfection, was what Philadelphia would have—it having been clear to me still, in my charming Club and at my illuminating window, that she couldn’tnotbe perfect. She would be, of all goodly villages, the very goodliest, probably, in the world; the very largest, and flattest, and smoothest, the most rounded and complete.
The simplest account of such success as I was to have in putting my vision to the test will be, I think, to say that the place never for a moment belied to me that forecast of its animated intimacy. Yet it might be just here that a report of my experience would find itself hampered—this learning the lesson, from one vivid page of the picture-book to another, of how perfectly “intimate” Philadelphia is. Such an exhibition would be, prohibitively, the exhibition of private things, of private thingsonly, and of a charmed contact with them, were it not for the great circumstance which, when what I have said has been fully said, remains to be taken into account. The state of infinite cousinship colours the scene, makes the predominant tone; but you get a light upon it that is worth all others from the moment you see it as, ever so savingly, historic. This perception moreover promptly operates; I found it stirred, as soon as I went out or began to circulate, by all immediate aspects and signs. The place “went back”; or, in other words, the social equilibrium, forestalling so that of the other cities, had begun early, had had plenty of time on its side, and thus had its history behind it—the past that looms through it, not at all luridly, but so squarely and substantially, to-day, and gives it, by a mercy, an extension other than the lateral. This, frankly, was required, it struck me, for the full comfort of one’s impression—for a certain desirable and imputable richness. The backward extension, in short, is the very making of Philadelphia; one is so uncertain of the value one would attach to her being as she is, if she hadn’t been so by prescription and for a couple of centuries. This has established her right and her competence; the fact is the parent, so to speak, of her consistency and serenity; it has made the very law under which her parts and pieces have held so closely together. To walk her streets is to note with all promptness that William Pennmusthave laid them out—no one else could possibly have done it so ill. It was his best, though, with our larger sense for a street, it is far from ours; we at any rate no more complain of them, nor suggest that they might have been more liberally conceived, than we so express ourselves about the form of the chairs in sitting through a morning call.
I found myself liking them, then, as I moved among them, just in proportion as they conformed, in detail,to the early pattern—the figure, for each house, of the red-faced old gentleman whose thick eyebrows and moustache have turned to white; and I found myself detesting them in any instance of a new front or a new fashion. They were narrow, with this aspect as of a double file of grizzled veterans, or they were nothing; the narrowness had been positively the channel or conduit of continuity of character: it made the long pipe on which the tune of the place was played. From the moment it was in any way corrected the special charm broke—the charm, a rare civic possession, as of some immense old ruled and neatly-inked chart, not less carefully than benightedly flattened out, stretching its tough parchment under the very feet of all comings and goings. This was an image with which, as it furthermore seemed to me, everything else consorted—above all the soothing truth that Philadelphia was, yes, beyond cavil, solely and singly Philadelphian. There was an interference absent, or one that I at least never met: that sharp note of the outlandish, in the strict sense of the word, which I had already found almost everywhere so disconcerting. I pretend here of course neither to estimate the numbers in which the grosser aliens may actually have settled on these bland banks of the Delaware, nor to put my finger on the principle of the shock I had felt it, and was still to feel it, in their general power to administer; for I am not now concerned so much with the impression made by one’s almost everywhere meeting them, as with the impression made by one’s here and there failing of it. They may have been gathered, in their hordes, in some vast quarter unknown to me and of which I was to have no glimpse; but what would this have denoted, exactly, but some virtue in the air for reducing their presence, or their effect, to naught? There precisely was the difference from New York—that they themselves had been in that place half the virtue, or the vice, of theair, and that there were few of its agitations to which they had not something to say.
The logic of the case had been visible to me, for that matter, on my very first drive from the train—from that precious “Pennsylvania” station of Philadelphia which was to strike me as making a nearer approach than elsewhere to the arts of ingratiation. There was an object or two, windowed and chimneyed, in the central sky—but nothing to speak of: I then and there, in a word, took in the admirable flatness. And if it seemed so spacious, by the same token, this was because it was neither eager, nor grasping, nor pushing. It drew its breath at its ease, clearly—never sounding the charge, the awful “Step lively!” of New York. The fury of the pavement had dropped, in fine, as I was to see it drop, later on, between Chicago and St. Louis. This affected me on the spot of symbolic, and I was to have no glimpse of anything that gainsaid the symbol. It was somehow, too, the very note of the homogeneous; though this indeed is not, oddly enough, the head under which at St. Louis my impression was to range itself. I at all events here gave myself up to the vision—that of the vast, firm chess-board, the immeasurable spread of little squares, coveredallover by perfect Philadelphians. It was an image, in face of some of the other features of the view, dissimilar to any by which one had ever in one’s life been assaulted; and this elimination of the foreign element has been what was required to make it consummate. Nothing is more notable, through the States at large, than that hazard of what one may happen, or may not happen, to see; but the only use to be made of either accident is, clearly, to let it stand and to let it serve. This intensity and ubiquity of the local tone, that of the illimitabletown, serves so successfully for my sense of Philadelphia that I should feel as if a little masterpieceof the creative imagination had been destroyed by the least correction. And there is, further, the point to make that if I knew, all the while, that there was something more, and different, and less beatific, under and behind the happy appearance I grasped, I knew it by no glimmer of direct perception, and should never in the world have guessed it if some sound of it had not, by a discordant voice, been, all superfluously, rather tactlessly, dropped into my ear.
It was not, however, disconcerting at the time, this presentation, as in a flash, of the other side of the medal—the other side being, in a word, as was mentioned to me, one of the most lurid pages in the annals of political corruption. The place, by this revelation, was two distinct things—a Society, from far back, the society I had divined, the most genial and delightful one could think of, and then, parallel to this, and not within it, nor quite altogether above it, but beside it and beneath it, behind it and before it, enclosing it as in a frame of fire in which it still had the secret of keeping cool, a proportionate City, the most incredible that ever was, organized all for plunder and rapine, the gross satisfaction of official appetite, organized for eternal iniquity and impunity. Such were the conditions, it had been hinted to me—from the moment the medal spun round; but I even understate, I think, in speaking of the knowledge as only not disconcerting. It was better than that, for it positively added the last touch of colour to my framed and suspended picture. Here, strikingly then, was an Americancase, and presumably one of the best; one of the best, that is, for some study of the wondrous problem, admiration and amazement of the nations, who yearn over it from far off: the way in which sane Society and pestilent City, in the United States, successfully cohabit, each keeping it up with so little of fear or flutter from the other. The thingpresents itself, in its prime unlikelihood, as a thorough good neighbouring of the Happy Family and the Infernal Machine—the machine so rooted as to continue to defy removal, and the family still so indifferent, while it carries on the family business of buying and selling, of chattering and dancing, to the danger of being blown up. It is all puzzled out, from afar, as a matter of the exchange, and in a large decree of the observance, from side to side, of guarantees, and the interesting thing to get at, for the student of manners, will ever be just this mystery of the terms of the bargain. I must add, none the less, that, though one was one’s self, inevitably and always and everywhere, that student, my attention happened to be, or rather was obliged to be, confined to one view of the agreement. The arrangement is, obviously, between the great municipalities and the great populations, on the grand scale, and I lacked opportunity to look at it all round. I had but my glimpse of the apparently wide social acceptance of it—that is I saw but the face of the medal most directly turned to the light of day, and could note that nowhere so much as in Philadelphia was any carking care, in the social mind, any uncomfortable consciousness, as of a skeleton at the banquet of life, so gracefully veiled.
This struck me (on my looking back afterwards with more knowledge) as admirable, as heroic, in its way, and as falling in altogether with inherent habits of sociability, gaiety, gallantry, with that felt presence of a “temperament” with which the original Quaker drab seems to flush—giving it, as one might say for the sake of the figure, something of the iridescence of the breast of a well-fed dove. The original Quaker drab is still there, and, ideally, for the picture, up and down the uniform streets, one should see a bland, broad-brimmed, square-toed gentleman, or a bonneted, kerchiefed,mittened lady, on every little flight of white steps; but the very note of the place has been the “worldly” overscoring, for most of the senses, of the primitive monotone, the bestitching of the drab with pink and green and silver. The mixture has been, for a social effect, admirably successful, thanks, one seems to see, to the subtle, the charming absence of pedantry in the Quaker purity. It flushes gracefully, that temperate prejudice (with its predisposition to the universaltutoiement), turning first but to the prettiest pink; so that we never quite know where the drab has ended and the colour of the world has begun. The “disfrocked” Catholic is too strange, the paganized Puritan too angular; it is the accommodating Friend who has most the secret of amodus vivendi. And if it be asked, I may add, whether, in this case of social Philadelphia, the genius for life, and what I have called the gallantry of it above all, wouldn’t have been better shown by a scorn ofanycompromise to which the nefarious City could invite it, I can only reply that, as a lover, always of romantic phenomena, and an inveterate seeker for them, I should have been deprived, by the action of that particular virtue, of the thrilled sense of a society dancing, all consciously, on the thin crust of a volcano. It is the thinness of the crust that makes, in such examples, the wild fantasy, the gay bravery, of the dance—just as I admit that a preliminary, an original extinction of the volcano would have illustrated another kind of virtue. The crust, for the social tread, would in this case have been firm, but the spectator’s imagination would have responded less freely, I think, to the appeal of the scene. If I may indeed speak my whole thought for him he would so have had to drop again, to his regret, the treasure of a small analogy picked up on its very threshold.
How shall he confess at once boldly and shyly enough that the situation had at the end of a very short timebegun to strike him, for all its immeasurably reduced and simplified form, as a much nearer approach to the representation of an “old order,” anancien régime, socially speaking, than any the field of American manners had seemed likely to regale him with? Grotesque the comparison if pushed; yet how had he encountered the similitude if it hadn’t been hanging about? From the moment he adopted it, at any rate, he found it taking on touch after touch. The essence of old orders, as history lights them, is just that innocent beatitude of consanguinity, of the multiplication of the assured felicities, to which I have already alluded. From this, in Philadelphia, didn’t the rest follow?—the sense, for every one, of being in the same boat with every one else, a closed circle that would find itself happy enough if only it could remain closed enough. The boat might considerably pitch, but its occupants would either float merrily together or (almost as merrily) go down together, and meanwhile the risk, the vague danger, the jokes to be made about it, the general quickened sociability and intimacy, were the very music of the excursion. There are even yet to be observed about the world fragments and ghosts of old social orders, thin survivals of final cataclysms, and it was not less positive than beguiling that the common marks by which these companies are known, and which we still distinguish through their bedimmed condition, cropped up for me in the high American light, making good my odd parallel at almost every point. Yet if these signs of a slightly congested, but still practically self-sufficing, little world were all there, they were perhaps there most, to my ear, in the fact of the little world’s proper intimate idiom and accent: a dialect as much its very own, even in drawing-rooms and libraries, as the Venetian is that of Venice or the Neapolitan is that of Naples—representing the common things of association, the things easily understood and felt, and charged as noother vehicle could be with the fund of local reference. There is always the difference, of course, that at Venice and at Naples, “in society,” an alternative, either that of French or of the classic, the more or less academic Italian, is offered to the uninitiated stranger, whereas in Philadelphia he is candidly, consistently, sometimes almost contagiously entertained in the free vernacular. The latter may easily become, in fact, under its wealth of idiosyncrasy and if he have the favouring turn of mind, a tempting object of linguistic study; with the bridge built for him, moreover, that, unlike the Venetian, the Neapolitan and most other local languages, it contains, itself, colloquially, a notable element of the academic and the classic. It struck me even, truly, as, with a certain hardness in it,constitutingthe society that employed it—very much as the egg is made oval by its shell; and really, if I may say all, as taking its stand a bit consciously sometimes, if not a bit defiantly, on its own proved genius. I remember the visible dismay of a gentleman, a pilgrim from afar, in a drawing-room, at the comment of a lady, a lady of one of the new generations indeed, and mistress of the tone by which I had here and there occasion to observe that such ornaments of the new generation might be known. “Listen to the creature: he speaks English!”—it was the very opposite of the indulgence or encouragement with which, in a Venetian drawing-room (I catch my analogies as I can) the sound of French or of Italian might have been greeted. The poor “creature’s” dismay was so visible, clearly, for the reason that such things have only to be said with a certain confidence to create a certain confusion—the momentary consciousness of some such misdeed, from the point of view of manners, as the speaking of Russian at Warsaw. I have said that Philadelphia didn’t bristle, but the heroine of my anecdote caused the so genial city to resemble, for the minute, linguistically, an unreconciled Poland.
III
But why do I talk of the new generations, or at any rate of the abyss in them that may seem here and there beyond one’s shallow sounding, when, all the while, at the back of my head, hovers the image in the guise of which antiquity in Philadelphia looks most seated and most interesting? Nowhere throughout the country, I think, unless it be perchance at Mount Vernon, does our historic past so enjoy the felicity of an “important” concrete illustration. It survives there in visible form as it nowhere else survives, and one can doubtless scarce think too largely of what its mere felicity of presence, in these conditions, has done, and continues, and will continue, to do for the place at large. It may seem witless enough, at this time of day, to arrive from Pennsylvania with “news” of the old State House, and my news, I can only recognize, began but with being news for myself—in which character it quite shamelessly pretended both to freshness and to brilliancy. Whyshouldn’tit have been charming, the high roof under which the Declaration of Independence had been signed?—that was of course a question that might from the first have been asked of me, and with no better answer in wait for it than that, after all, it might just have happened, in the particular conditions, not to be; or else that, in general, one is allowed a margin, on the spot, for the direct sense of consecrated air, for that communication of its spirit which, in proportion as the spirit has been great, withholds itself, shyly and nobly, from any mere forecast. This it is exactly that, by good fortune, keeps up the sanctity of shrines and the lessons of history, to say nothing of the freshness of individual sensibility and the general continuity of things. There is positively nothing of Independence Hall, of its fine old Georgian amplitude and decency, its largeserenity and symmetry of pink and drab, and its actual emphasis of detachment from the vulgar brush of things, that isnotcharming; and there is nothing, the city through, that doesn’t receive a mild sidelight, that of a reflected interest, from its neighbourhood.
This element of the reflected interest, and more particularly of the reflected distinction, is for the most part, on the American scene, the missed interest—despite the ingenuities of wealth and industry and “energy” that strain so touchingly often, and even to grimace and contortion, somehow to supply it. One finds one’s self, when ithashappened to intervene, weighing its action to the last grain of gold. One even puts to one’s self fantastic cases, such as the question, for instance, of what might, what mightnothave happened if poor dear reckless New York had been so distinguished or so blest—with the bad conscience she is too intelligent not to have, her power to be now and then ashamed of her “form,” lodged, after all, somewhere in her interminable boots. One has of course to suppress there the prompt conviction that the blessing—that of the possession of an historical monument of the first order—would long since have been replaced by the higher advantage of a row of sky-scrapers yielding rents; yet the imagination none the less dallies with the fond vision of some respect somehow instilled, some deference somehow suggested, some revelation of the possibilities of a publictenuesomehow effected. Fascinating in fact to speculate a little as to what a New York held in respect by something or other, some power not of the purse, might have become. It is bad, ever, for lusty youth, especially with a command of means, to grow up without knowing at least one “nice family”—if the family be not priggish; and this is the danger that the young Philadelphia, with its eyes on the superior connection I am speaking of, was enabled to escape. The charming old pink and drab heritage of the great timewas to be the superior connection, playing, for the education of the place, the part of the nice family. Socially, morally, even æsthetically, the place was to be thus more or less inevitably built round it; but for which good fortune who knows if even Philadelphia too might have not been vulgar? One meets throughout the land enough instances of the opposite luck—the situation of immense and “successful” communities that have lacked, originally, anything “first-rate,” as they might themselves put it, to be built round; anything better, that is, than some profitable hole in the earth, some confluence of rivers or command of lakes or railroads: and one sees how, though this deficiency may not have made itself felt at first, it has inexorably loomed larger and larger, the drawback of it growing all the while with the growth of the place. Our sense of such predicaments, for the gatherings of men, comes back, I think, and with an intensity of interest, to our sense of the way the human imagination absolutely declines everywhere to go to sleep without some apology at least for a supper. The collective consciousness, in however empty an air, gasps for a relation, as intimate as possible, to something superior, something as central as possible, from which it may more or less have proceeded and round which its life may revolve—and its dim desire is always, I think, to do it justice, that this object or presence shall have had as much as possible an heroic or romantic association. But the difficulty is that in these later times, among such aggregations, the heroic and romantic elements, even under the earliest rude stress, have been all too tragically obscure, belonged to smothered, unwritten, almost unconscious private history: so that the central something, the socialpoint de repère, has had to be extemporized rather pitifully after the fact, and made to consist of the biggest hotel or the biggest common school, the biggest factory, the biggest newspaper office, or, for climax of desperation, the house ofthe biggest billionaire. These are the values resorted to in default of higher, for withsomecoloured rag or other the general imagination, snatching its chance, must dress its doll.
As a real, a moral value, to the general mind, at all events, and not as a trumped-up one, I saw the lucky legacy of the past, at Philadelphia, operate; though I admit that these are, at best, for the mooning observer, matters of appreciation, mysteries of his own sensibility. Such an observer has early to perceive, and to conclude on it once for all, that there will be little for him in the American scene unless he be ready, anywhere, everywhere, to read “into” it as much as he reads out. It is at its best for him when most open to that friendly penetration, and not at its best, I judge, when practically most closed to it. And yet how can I pretend to be able to say, under this discrimination, what was better and what was worse in Independence Hall?—to say how far the charming facts struck me as going of themselves, or where the imagination (perhaps on this sole patch of ground, by exception, a meddler “not wanted anyhow”) took them up to carry them further. I am reduced doubtless to the comparative sophism of making my better sense here consist but of my sense of the fine interior of the building. One sees them immediately as “good,” delightfully good, on architectural and scenic lines, these large, high, wainscoted chambers, as good as any could thinkably have been at the time; embracing what was to be done in them with such a noble congruity (which in all the conditions they might readily have failed of, though they were no mere tent pitched for the purpose) that the historic imagination, reascending the centuries, almost catches them in the act of directly suggesting the celebratedcoup. One fancies, under the high spring of the ceiling and before the great embrasured window-sashes of the principal room, someclever man of the period, after a long look round, taking the hint. “Whatan admirable place for a Declaration of something! What could one here—whatcouldn’tone really declare?” And then after a moment: “I say, why not our Independence?—capital thing always to declare, and before any one gets in with anything tactless. You’ll see that the fortune of the place will be made.” It really takes some such frivolous fancy as that to represent with proper extravagance the reflection irresistibly rising there and that it yet would seem pedantic to express with solemnity: the sense, namely, of our beautiful escape in not having had to “declare” in any way meanly, of our good fortune in having found half the occasion made to our hand.
High occasions consist of many things, and it was extraordinary luck for our great date that not one of these, even as to surface and appearance, should have been wanting. There might easily have been traps laid for us by some of the inferior places, but I am convinced (and more completely than of anything else in the whole connection) that the genius of historic decency would have kept us enslaved rather than have seen us committed to one of those. In that light, for the intelligent pilgrim, the Philadelphia monument becomes, under his tread, under the touch of his hand and the echo of his voice, the very prize, the sacred thing itself, contended for and gained; so that its quality, in fine, is irresistible and its dignity not to be uttered. I was so conscious, for myself, I confess, of the intensity of this perception, that I dip deep into the whole remembrance without touching bottom; by which I mean that I grope, reminiscentially, in the full basin of the general experience of the spot without bringing up a detail. Distinct to me only the way its character, so clear yet so ample, everywhere hangs together and keeps itself up; distinct to me only thelarge sense, in halls and spreading staircase and long-drawn upper gallery, of one of those rare precincts of the past against which the present has kept beating in vain. The present comes in and stamps about and very stertorously breathes, but its sounds are as naught the next moment; it is as if one felt there that the grandparent, reserved, irresponsive now, and having spoken his word, in his finest manner, once for all, must have long ago had enough of the exuberance of the young grandson’s modernity. But of course the great impression is that of the persistent actuality of the so auspicious room in which the Signers saw their tossing ship into port. The lapse of time here, extraordinarily, has sprung no leak in the effect; it remains so robust that everything lives again, the interval drops out and we mingle in the business: the old ghosts, to our inward sensibility, still make the benches creak as they free their full coat-skirts for sitting down; still make the temperature rise, the pens scratch, the papers flutter, the dust float in the large sun-shafts; we place them as they sit, watch them as they move, hear them as they speak, pity them as they ponder, know them, in fine, from the arch of their eyebrows to the shuffle of their shoes.
I am not sure indeed that, for mere archaic insolence, the little old Hall of the Guild of Carpenters, my vision of which jostles my memory of the State House, does not carry it even with a higher hand—in spite of a bedizenment of restoration, within, which leads us to rejoice that the retouchings of the greater monument expose themselves comparatively so little. The situation of this elegant structure—of dimensions and form that scarce differ, as I recall them, from those of delicate little Holden Chapel, of the so floridly-overlaid gable, most articulate single word, in College Yard, of the small builded sense of old Harvard—comes nearer torepresenting an odd town-nook than any other corner of American life that I remember; American life having been organized,ab ovo, with an hostility to the town-nook which has left no scrap of provision for eyes needing on occasion a refuge from the general glare. The general glare seemed to me, at the end of something like a passage, in the shade of something like a court, and in the presence of something like a relic, to have mercifully intermitted, on that fine Philadelphia morning; I won’t answer for the exact correspondence of the conditions with my figure of them, since the shade I speak of may have been but the shade of “tall” buildings, the vulgarest of new accidents. Yet I let my impression stand, if only as a note of the relief certain always to lurk, at any turn of the American scene, in the appearance of any individual thing within, or behind, or at the end, or in the depth, of any other individual thing. It makes for the sense of complexity, relieves the eternal impression of things all in a row and of a single thickness, an impression which the usual unprecedented length of the American alignment (always its source of pride) does by itself little to mitigate. Nothing in the array is “behind” anything else—an odd result, I admit, of the fact that so many things affirm themselves as preponderantly before. Little Carpenters’ Hallwas, delightfully, somewhere behind; so much behind, as I perhaps thus fantastically see it, that I dare say I should not be able to find my way to it again if I were to try. Nothing, for that matter, would induce me to revisit in fact, I feel, the object I so fondly evoke. It might have been, for this beautiful posteriority, somewhere in the City of London.
IV
I can but continue to lose myself, for these connections, in mywholesense of the intermission, as I have called it, of the glare. The mellower light prevailed, somehow,allthat fine Philadelphia morning, as well as on two or three other occasions—and I cannot, after all, pretend I don’t now see why. It was because one’s experience of the place had become immediately an intimate thing—intimate with that intimacy that I had tasted, from the first, in the local air; so that, inevitably, thus, there was no keeping of distinct accounts for public and private items. An ancient church or two, of aspect as Anglican still as you please, and taking, for another case, from the indifferent bustle round it, quite the look of Wren’s mere steepled survivals in the backwaters of London churchyards; Franklin’s grave itself, in its own backwater of muffled undulations, close to the indifferent bustle; Franklin’s admirable portrait by Duplessis in the council-room of an ancient, opulent Trust, a conservative Company, vague and awful to my shy sense, that was housed after the fashion of some exclusive, madeira-drinking old gentleman with obsequious heirs: these and other matters, wholly thrilling at the time, float back to me as on the current of talk and as in the flood, so to speak, of hospitality. If Philadelphia had, in opposition to so many other matters, struck me as coherent, there would be surely no point of one’s contact at which this might so have come home as in those mysterious chambers and before the most interesting of the many far-scattered portraits of Franklin—the portrait working as some sudden glimpse of the fine old incised seal, kept in its glass cabinet, that had originally stamped all over, for identification, the comparatively soft local wax. Onethinks of Franklin’s reputation, of his authority—and however much they may have been locally contested at the time—as marking the material about him much as his name might have marked his underclothing or his pocket-books. Small surprise one had the impression of a Society, with such a figure as that to start conversation. He seemed to preside over it all while one lingered there, as if he had been seated, at the mahogany, relentingly enough, near his glass of madeira; seemed to be “in” it even more freely than by the so interesting fact of his still having, in Philadelphia, in New York, in Boston, through his daughter, so numerous a posterity. The sense of life, life the most positive, most human and most miscellaneous, expressed in his aged, crumpled, canny face, where the smile wittily profits, for fineness, by the comparative collapse of the mouth, represents a suggestion which succeeding generations may well have found it all they could do to work out. It is impossible, in the place, after seeing that portrait, not to feel him still with them, with the genial generations—even though to-day, in the larger, more mixed cup, the force of his example may have suffered some dilution.
It was a savour of which, at any rate, for one’s own draught, one could but make the most; and I went so far, on this occasion, as fairly to taste it there in the very quality of my company—in that of the distinguished guidance and protection I was enjoying, which could only make me ask myself in what finer modern form one would have wished to see Franklin’s humanity and sagacity, his variety and ingenuity, his wealth of ideas and his tireless application of them, embodied. There was verily nothing to do, after this, but to play over the general picture that light of his assumption of the general ease of things—of things at any rate thereabouts; so that I now see each reminiscence, whatever the time or the place, happily governedand coloured by it. Times and places, in such an experience, ranged themselves, after a space, like valued objects in one of the assorted rooms of a “collection.” Keep them a little, tenderly handled, wrapped up, stowed away, and they then come forth, into the room swept and garnished, susceptible of almost any pleasing arrangement. The only thing is that you shall scarce know, at a given moment, amid your abundance, which of them to take up first; there being always in them, moreover, at best, the drawback of value from mere association, that keepsake element of objects in a reliquary. Is not this, however, the drawback for exhibition of almost any item of American experience that may not pretend to deal with the mere monstrosities?—the immensities of size and space, of trade and traffic, of organisation, political, educational, economic. From the moment one’s record is not, in fine, a loud statistical shout, it falls into the order of those shy things that speak, at the most (when one is one’s self incapable even of the merest statistical whisper), but of the personal adventure—in other words but of one’s luck and of one’s sensibility. There are incidents, there are passages, that flush, in this fashion, to the backward eye, under the torch. But what solemn statement is one to make of the “importance,” for example, of such a matter as the Academy soirée (as they say in London) of the Philadelphia winter, the festive commemoration of some long span of life achieved by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts? We may have been thrilled, positively, by the occasion, by the interesting encounters and discoveries, artistic and personal, to which it ministered; we may have moved from one charmed recognition to another, noting Sargents and Whistlers by the dozen, and old forgotten French friends, foreign friends in general, older and younger; noting young native upstarts, creatures of yesterday and to-morrow, who invite, with all success, a stand and astare; but no after-sense of such vibrations, however lively, presumes to take itself as communicable.
One would regret, on the other hand, failing to sound some echo of a message everywhere in the United States so audible; that of the clamorous signs of a hungry social growth, the very pulses, making all their noise, of the engine that works night and day for a theory of civilization. There are moments at which it may well seem that, putting the sense of the spectacle even at its lowest, there is no such amusement as this anywhere supplied; the air through which everything shows is so transparent, with steps and stages and processes as distinct in it as the appearance, from a street-corner, of a crowd rushing on an alarm to a fire. The gregarious crowd “tells,” in the street, and the indications I speak of tell, like chalk-marks, on the demonstrative American black-board—an impression perhaps never so much brought home to me as by a wondrous Sunday morning at the edge of a vast vacant Philadelphia street, a street not of Penn’s creation and vacant of everything but an immeasurable bourgeois blankness. I had turned from that scene into a friendly house that was given over, from top to toe, to a dazzling collection of pictures, amid which I felt myself catch in the very act one of the great ingurgitations of the hungry machine, and recognize as well how perfect were all the conditions for making it a case. What could have testified less, on the face of it, than the candour of the street’s insignificance?—a pair of huge parted lips protesting almost to pathos their innocence of anything to say: which was exactly, none the less, where appetite had broken out and was feeding itself to satiety. Large and liberal the hospitality, remarkably rich the store of acquisition, in the light of which the whole energy of the keen collector showed: the knowledge, the acuteness, the audacity, the incessant watch for opportunity. These abrupt and multiplied encounters, intensities, ever sovarious, of individual curiosity, sound the æsthetic note sometimes with unprecedented shrillness and then again with the most muffled discretion. Was the note muffled or shrill, meanwhile, as I listened to it—under a fascination I fully recognized—during an hour spent in the clustered palæstra of the University of Pennsylvania? Here the winter afternoon seemed to throw itself artfully back, across the centuries, the climates, the seasons, the very faiths and codes, into the air of old Greece and the age of gymnastic glory: artfully, I rather insist, because I scarce know what fine emphasis of modernism hung about it too. I put that question, however, only to deny myself the present luxury of answering it; so thickly do the visitor’s University impressions, over the land, tend to gather, and so markedly they suggest their being reported of together. I note my palæstral hour, therefore, but because it fell through what it seemed to show me, straight into what I had conceived of the Philadelphia scheme, the happy family given up, though quite on “family” lines, to all the immediate beguilements and activities; the art in particular of cultivating, with such gaiety as might be, a brave civic blindness.
I became conscious of but one excrescence on this large smooth surface; it is true indeed that the excrescence was huge and affected me as demanding in some way to be dealt with. The Pennsylvania Penitentiary rears its ancient grimness, its grey towers and defensive moats (masses at least that uncertain memory so figures for me) in an outlying quarter which struck me as borrowing from them a vague likeness to some more or less blighted minor city of Italy or France, black Angers or dead Ferrara—yet seated on its basis of renown and wrapped in its legend of having, as the first flourishing example of the strictly cellular system, the complete sequestration of the individual prisoner, thought wonderful in its day, moved Charles Dickens to the passionateprotest recorded in hisAmerican Notes. Of such substance was the story of these battlements; yet it was unmistakable that when one had crossed the drawbridge and passed under the portcullis the air seemed thick enough with the breath of the generations. A prison has, at the worst, the massive majesty, the sinister peace of a prison; but this huge house of sorrow affected me as, uncannily, of the City itself, the City of all the cynicisms and impunities against which my friends had, from far back, kept plating, as with the old silver of their sideboards, the armour of their social consciousness. It made the whole place, with some of its oddly antique aspects and its oddly modern freedoms, look doubly cut off from the world of light and ease. The suggestions here were vast, however; too many of them swarm, and my imagination must defend itself as it can. What I was most concerned to note was the complete turn of the wheel of fortune in respect to the measure of mere incarceration suffered, from which the worst of the rigour had visibly been drawn. Parts of the place suggested a sunny Club at a languid hour, with members vaguely lounging and chatting, with open doors and comparatively cheerful vistas, and plenty of rocking-chairs and magazines. The only thing was that, under this analogy, one found one’s self speculating much on the implied requisites for membership. It was impossible not to wonder, from face to face, what these would have been, and not to ask what one would have taken them to be if the appearance of a Club had been a little more complete. I almost blush, I fear, for the crude comfort of my prompt conclusion. One would have taken them to consist, without exception, of full-blown basenesses; one couldn’t, from member to member, from type to type, from one pair of eyes to another, take them for anything less. Where was the victim of circumstances, where the creature merely misled or betrayed? He fitted no type, he suffered in no face,he yearned in no history, and one felt, the more one took in his absence, that the numerous substitutes for him were good enough for each other.
The great interest was in this sight of the number and variety of ways of looking morally mean; and perhaps also in the question of how much the effect came from its being proved upon them, of how little it might have come if they had still been out in the world. Considered as criminals the moral meanness here was their explication. Considered as morally mean, therefore, would possible criminality, out in the world, have been in the same degree their sole sense? Was the fact of prisonallthe mere fact of opportunity, and the fact of freedom all the mere fact of the absence of it? One inclined to believe that—the simplification was at any rate so great for one’s feeling: the cases presented became thus, consistently, cases of the vocation, and from the moment this was clear the place took on, in its way, almost the harmony of a convent. I talked for a long time with a charming reprieved murderer whom I half expected, at any moment, to see ring for coffee and cigars: he explained with all urbanity, and with perfect lucidity, the real sense of the appearance against him, but I none the less felt sure that his merit was largely in the refinement wrought in him by so many years of easy club life. He was as natural a subject for commutation as for conviction, and had had to have the latter in order to have the former—in the enjoyment, and indeed in the subtle criticism, of which,assimple commutation he was at his best. They were there, all those of his companions, I was able to note, unmistakably at their best. One could, as I say, sufficiently rest in it, and to do that kept, in a manner, the excrescence, as I have called it, on the general scene, within bounds. I was moreover luckily to see the general scene definitely cleared again, cleared of everything save its own social character and its practical philosophy—andat no moment with these features so brightly presented as during a few days’ rage of winter round an old country-house. The house was virtually distant from town, and the conditions could but strike any visitor who stood whenever he might with his back to the fire, where the logs were piled high, as made to press on all the reserves and traditions of the general temperament; those of gallantry, hilarity, social disposability, crowned with the grace of the sporting instinct. What was it confusedly, almost romantically, like, what “old order” commemorated in fiction and anecdote? I had groped for this, as I have shown, before, but I found myself at it again. Wasn’t it, for freedom of movement, for jingle of sleigh-bells, for breasting of the elements, for cross-country drives in the small hours, forcrânerieof fine young men and high wintry colour of muffled nymphs, wasn’t it, brogue and all, like some audible echo of close-packing, chancing Irish society of the classic time, seen and heard through a roaring blizzard? That at least, with his back to the fire, was where the restless analyst was landed.