The American Scene | Page 5

Jewry--wasn't it
conceivable?--tending to the stout, the simple, the kind, quite visibly to
the patriarchal, and with the old superseded shabbiness of Long Branch
partly for the goal of their course; the big brown wooden barracks of
the hotels, the bold rotunda of the gaming-room--monuments already
these, in truth, of a more artless age, and yet with too little history
about them for dignity of ruin. Dignity, if not of ruin at least of
reverence, was what, at other points, doubtless, we failed considerably
less to read into the cottage where Grant lived and the cottage where
Garfield died; though they had, for all the world, those modest
structures, exactly the effect of objects diminished by recession into
space--as if to symbolize the rapidity of their recession into time. They
have been left so far behind by the expensive, as the expensive is now
practised; in spite of having apparently been originally a sufficient
expression of it.
This could pass, it seemed, for the greatest vividness of the

picture--that the expensive, for New York in villeggiatura, even on
such subordinate showing, is like a train covering ground at maximum
speed and pushing on, at present, into regions unmeasurable. It
included, however, other lights, some of which glimmered, to my eyes,
as with the promise of great future intensity--hanging themselves as
directly over the question of manners as if they had been a row of
lustres reflected in the polished floor of a ball-room. Here was the
expensive as a power by itself, a power unguided, undirected,
practically unapplied, really exerting itself in a void that could make it
no response, that had nothing--poor gentle, patient, rueful, but
altogether helpless, void!--to offer in return. The game was that of its
doing, each party to the whole combination, what it could, but with the
result of the common effort's falling so short. Nothing could be of a
livelier interest--with the question of manners always in view--than to
note that the most as yet accomplished at such a cost was the air of
unmitigated publicity, publicity as a condition, as a doom, from which
there could be no appeal; just as in all the topsy-turvy order, the
defeated scheme, the misplaced confidence, or whatever one may call it,
there was no achieved protection, no constituted mystery of retreat, no
saving complexity, not so much as might be represented by a foot of
garden wall or a preliminary sketch of interposing shade. The homely
principle under which the picture held at all together was that of the
famous freedom of the cat to look at the king; that seemed, so clearly,
throughout, the only motto that would work. The ample villas, in their
full dress, planted each on its little square of brightly-green carpet, and
as with their stiff skirts pulled well down, eyed each other, at short
range, from head to foot; while the open road, the chariots, the buggies,
the motors, the pedestrians--which last number, indeed, was remarkably
small--regarded at their ease both this reciprocity and the parties to it. It
was in fact all one participation, with an effect deterrent to those
ingenuities, or perhaps indeed rather to those commonplaces, of
conjecture produced in general by the outward show of the fortunate
life. That, precisely, appeared the answer to the question of manners:
the fact that in such conditions there couldn't be any manners to speak
of; that the basis of privacy was somehow wanting for them; and that
nothing, accordingly, no image, no presumption of constituted relations,
possibilities, amenities, in the social, the domestic order, was inwardly

projected. It was as if the projection had been so completely outward
that one could but find one's self almost uneasy about the mere
perspective required for the common acts of the personal life, that
minimum of vagueness as to what takes place in it for which the
complete "home" aspires to provide.
What had it been their idea to do, the good people--do, exactly, for their
manners, their habits, their intercourse, their relations, their pleasures,
their general advantage and justification? Do, that is, in affirming their
wealth with such innocent emphasis and yet not at the same time
affirming anything else. It would have rested on the cold-blooded critic,
doubtless, to explain why the crudity of wealth did strike him with so
direct a force; accompanied after all with no paraphernalia, no visible
redundancies of possession, not so much as a lodge at any gate, nothing
but the scale of many of the houses and their candid look of having cost
as much as they knew how. Unmistakably they all proclaimed it--they
would have cost still more had the way but been shown them; and,
meanwhile, they added as with one voice, they would take a fresh start
as soon as ever it should