The American Scene | Page 4

of
fatuity--that consciousness of strolling in the orchard that was all one's
own to pluck, and counting, overhead, the apples of gold? I figure, I
repeat, under this name those thick-growing items of the characteristic
that were surely going to drop into one's hand, for vivid illustration, as
soon as one could begin to hold it out.
Heavy with fruit, in particular, was the whole spreading bough that
rustled above me during an afternoon, a very wonderful afternoon, that
I spent in being ever so wisely driven, driven further and further, into
the large lucidity of--well, of what else shall I call it but a New Jersey
condition? That, no doubt, is a loose label for the picture; but

impressions had to range themselves, for the hour, as they could. I had
come forth for a view of such parts of the condition as might peep out
at the hour and on the spot, and it was clearly not going to be the
restless analyst's own fault if conditions in general, everywhere, should
strike him as peculiarly, as almost affectingly, at the mercy of
observation. They came out to meet us, in their actuality, in the soft
afternoon; they stood, artless, unconscious, unshamed, at the very gates
of Appearance; they might, verily, have been there, in their plenitude,
at the call of some procession of drums and banners--the principal facts
of the case being collected along our passage, to my fancy, quite as if
they had been principal citizens. And then there was the further fact of
the case, one's own ridiculous property and sign--the romantic, if not
the pathetic, circumstance of one's having had to wait till now to read
even such meagre meanings as this into a page at which one's
geography might so easily have opened. It might have threatened, for
twenty minutes, to be almost complicating, but the truth was recorded:
it was an adventure, unmistakably, to have a revelation made so
convenient--to be learning at last, in the maturity of one's powers, what
New Jersey might "connote." This was nearer than I had ever come to
any such experience; and it was now as if, all my life, my curiosity had
been greater than I knew. Such, for an excited sensibility, are the
refinements of personal contact. These influences then were present, as
a source of glamour, at every turn of our drive, and especially present, I
imagined, during that longest perspective when the road took no turn,
but showed us, with a large, calm consistency, the straight blue band of
summer sea, between the sandy shore and the reclaimed margin of
which the chain of big villas was stretched tight, or at least kept straight,
almost as for the close stringing of more or less monstrous pearls. The
association of the monstrous thrusts itself somehow into my retrospect,
for all the decent humility of the low, quiet coast, where the shadows of
the waning afternoon could lengthen at their will and the chariots of
Israel, on the wide and admirable road, could advance, in the glittering
eye of each array of extraordinarily exposed windows, as through an
harmonious golden haze.
There was gold-dust in the air, no doubt--which would have been again
an element of glamour if it had not rather lighted the scene with too

crude a confidence. It was one of the phases, full of its own marks and
signs, of New York, the immense, in villeggiatura--and, presently, with
little room left for doubt of what particular phase it might be. The huge
new houses, up and down, looked over their smart, short lawns as with
a certain familiar prominence in their profiles, which was borne out by
the accent, loud, assertive, yet benevolent withal, with which they
confessed to their extreme expensiveness. "Oh, yes; we were awfully
dear, for what we are and for what we do"--it was proud, but it was
rather rueful; with the odd appearance everywhere as of florid creations
waiting, a little bewilderingly, for their justification, waiting for the
next clause in the sequence, waiting in short for life, for time, for
interest, for character, for identity itself to come to them, quite as large
spread tables or superfluous shops may wait for guests and customers.
The scene overflowed with curious suggestion; it comes back to me
with the afternoon air and the amiable flatness, the note of the sea in a
drowsy mood; and I thus somehow think of the great white boxes as
standing there with the silvered ghostliness (for all the silver involved)
of a series of candid new moons. It could only be the occupants,
moreover, who were driving on the vast, featureless highway, to and
fro in front of their ingenuous palaces and as if pretending not to
recognize them when they passed; German