The American Scene | Page 2

it again, meeting it at every turn, in sights, sounds,
smells, even in the chaos of confusion and change; a process under
which, verily, recognition became more interesting and more amusing
in proportion as it became more difficult, like the spelling-out of

foreign sentences of which one knows but half the words. It was not,
indeed, at Hoboken, on emerging from the comparatively assured order
of the great berth of the ship, that recognition was difficult: there, only
too confoundingly familiar and too serenely exempt from change, the
waterside squalor of the great city put forth again its most inimitable
notes, showed so true to the barbarisms it had not outlived that one
could only fall to wondering what obscure inward virtue had preserved
it. There was virtue evident enough in the crossing of the water, that
brave sense of the big, bright, breezy bay; of light and space and
multitudinous movement; of the serried, bristling city, held in the easy
embrace of its great good-natured rivers very much as a battered and
accommodating beauty may sometimes be "distinguished" by a gallant
less fastidious, with his open arms, than his type would seem to imply.
But what was it that was still holding together, for observation, on the
hither shore, the same old sordid facts, all the ugly items that had
seemed destined so long ago to fall apart from their very cynicism?--the
rude cavities, the loose cobbles, the dislodged supports, the
unreclaimed pools, of the roadway; the unregulated traffic, as of
innumerable desperate drays charging upon each other with tragic
long-necked, sharp-ribbed horses (a length and a sharpness all
emphasized by the anguish of effort); the corpulent constables, with
helmets askew, swinging their legs, in high detachment, from coigns of
contemplation; the huddled houses of the other time, red-faced, off
their balance, almost prone, as from too conscious an affinity with
"saloon" civilization.
It was, doubtless, open to the repentant absentee to feel these things
sweetened by some shy principle of picturesqueness; and I admit that I
asked myself, while I considered and bumped, why what was "sauce
for the goose" should not be in this case sauce for the gander; and why
antique shabbiness shouldn't plead on this particular waterside the
cause it more or less successfully pleads on so many others. The light
of the September day was lovely, and the sun of New York rests mostly,
with a laziness all its own, on that dull glaze of crimson paint, as thick
as on the check of the cruder coquetry, which is, in general, beneath its
range, the sign of the old-fashioned. Yes; I could remind myself, as I
went, that Naples, that Tangiers or Constantinople has probably

nothing braver to flaunt, and mingle with excited recognition the still
finer throb of seeing in advance, seeing even to alarm, many of the
responsibilities lying in wait for the habit of headlong critical or
fanciful reaction, many of the inconsistencies in which it would
probably have, at the best, more or less defiantly to drape itself. Such
meditations, at all events, bridged over alike the weak places of
criticism and some of the rougher ones of my material passage.
Nothing was left, for the rest of the episode, but a kind of fluidity of
appreciation--a mild, warm wave that broke over the succession of
aspects and objects according to some odd inward rhythm, and often,
no doubt, with a violence that there was little in the phenomena
themselves flagrantly to justify. It floated me, my wave, all that day
and the next; so that I still think tenderly--for the short backward view
is already a distance with "tone"--of the service it rendered me and of
the various perceptive penetrations, charming coves of still blue water,
that carried me up into the subject, so to speak, and enabled me to step
ashore. The subject was everywhere--that was the beauty, that the
advantage: it was thrilling, really, to find one's self in presence of a
theme to which everything directly contributed, leaving no touch of
experience irrelevant. That, at any rate, so far as feeling it went;
treating it, evidently, was going to be a matter of prodigious difficulty
and selection--in consequence of which, indeed, there might even be a
certain recklessness in the largest surrender to impressions. Clearly,
however, these were not for the present--and such as they were--to be
kept at bay; the hour of reckoning, obviously, would come, with more
of them heaped up than would prove usable, a greater quantity of vision,
possibly, than might fit into decent form: whereby, assuredly, the part
of wisdom was to put in as much as possible of one's recklessness
while it was fresh.
It was fairly droll, for instance, the quantity of vision that began to
press during a wayside rest