The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  No example could speak more of that enlargement of function, for constituting some picture of life, which many an American element or object, many an institution, has to be felt as practising—usually with high success. It comes back, one notes for the thousandth time, to that redistribution and reconsecration of values, of representative weight, which it is the interesting thing, over the land, to see take effect—to see in special take all the effect of which it is capable. There are a thousand “European” values that are absent, and, whether as a consequence or not of that, there are innumerable felt solutions of the social continuity. The instinct of missing—by which I mean not at all either the consciousness or the confession of lacking—keeps up, however, its own activity; for the theory, at least of the native spirit is to consent wittingly to no privation. It has a genius, the native spirit, for desiring things of the existence, and even of the possibility of which it is actually unaware, and it views the totality of nature and the general life of man, I think, as more than anything else commissioned and privileged to wait on these awakenings. Thus new values arise as expansion proceeds; the marked character of which, for comparative sociology, is that they are not at all as other values. What they “count” for is the particular required American quantity; and we see again and again how large a quantity symbol and figure have to represent. The interesting thing is that, on the spot, the representation does practically cover the ground: it covers elements that in communities employing a different scale require for their expression (and perhaps sometimes to an effect of waste) a much greater number of terms. Hence the constant impression of elasticity, and that of those pressures of necessity under which value and virtue, character and quantity, greatness and glory even, to a considerable extent, are imputed and projected. There has to be a facility for the working of any social form—facility of comparison and selection in some communities, facility of rapid conversion in others. That is where the American material is elastic, where it affects one, as a whole, in the manner of some huge india-rubber cloth fashioned for “field” use and warranted to bear inordinate stretching.

  One becomes aware thus wherever one turns, both of the tension and of the resistance; everything and everyone, all objects and elements, all systems, arrangements, institutions, functions, persons, reputations, give the sense of their pulling hard at the india-rubber: almost always, wonderfully, without breaking it off, yet never quite with the effect of causing it to lie thick. The matter of interest, however, is just this fact that its thinness should so generally—in some cases, to all intents and purposes, so richly—suffice; suffice, that is, for producing unaided, impressions of a sort that make their way to us in “Europe” through superimposed densities, a thousand thicknesses of tradition. Which is what one means, again, by the differing “values”; the thinness doing perforce, on the one side, much of the work done by the thickness on the other: the work, in particular, of the appeal to the fond observer. He is by his very nature committed everywhere to his impression—which means essentially, I think, that he is foredoomed, in one place as in another, to “put in” a certain quantity of emotion and reflection. The turn his sensibility takes depends of course on what is before him; but when is it ever not in some manner exposed and alert? If it be anything really of a touchstone it is more disposed, I hold, to easy bargains than to hard ones; it only wants to be somehow interested, and is not without the knowledge that an emotion is after all, at the best or the worst, but an emotion. All of which is a voluminous commentary, I admit, on the modest text that I perhaps made the University Hospital stand for too many things. That establishes at all events my contention—that the living fact, in the United States, will stand, other facts not preventing, for almost anything you may ask of it. Other facts, at Baltimore, didn’t prevent—there being none, outside the University circle, of any perceptibly public, any majestic or impressive or competitive order. So it was as if this particular experience had been (as the visitation of cities goes) that of all present art and organization, that of all antiquity, history, piety, sociability, that of the rich real and the rich romantic, in fine, at a stroke. Had there been more to see and to feel I should possibly have seen and felt more; yet what was absent, with this sense of feeling and seeing so much?

  IV

  There were other facts, in abundance, I hasten to add; only they were not, as I say, competitive, not of the public or majestic order—so that they the less imposed, for appreciation, any rearrangement of values. They were a matter still of the famous, the felicitous Sunday—into which as into an armful of the biggest and bravest June roses I seemed to find my perceptions cluster. Foremost among these meanwhile was that of the plentiful presence, freshly recognized, of absolute values too—which offer themselves, in the midst of the others, with a sharpness of their own, and which owe nothing, for interest, to any question of the general scale. The Country Club, for instance, as I have already had occasion to note, is everywhere a clear American felicity; a complete product of the social soil and air which alone have made it possible, and wearing whenever met that assured face of the full-blown flower and the proved proposition. These institutions speak so of American life as a success that they affected me at moments as crying aloud to be commemorated—since it is on American life only that they are founded, and since they render it, to my, mind, the good office of making it keep all its graces and of having caused it to shed, by the same stroke, the elements that are contrary to these. Nothing is more suggestive than to recognize, each time, on the premises, the thing that “wouldn’t do in Europe” —for a judgment of the reasons of its doing so well in the one hemisphere and so ill in the other promptly becomes illuminating. The illumination is one at which, had I space, I should have liked to light here a candle or two—partaking indeed by that character of a like baffled virtue in many another group of social phenomena. The Country Club testifies, in short, and gives its evidence, from the box, with the inimitable, invaluable accent of American authority. It becomes, for the restless analyst, one of the great garden-lamps in which the flame of Democracy burns whitest and steadiest and most floods the subject; taking its place thus on the positive side of a line which has its other side overscored with negatives. I may seem too much to brood upon it, but the interest of the American scene being, beyond any other, the show, on so immense a scale, of what Democracy, pushing and breaking the ice like an Arctic explorer, is making of things, any scrap that contributes to it wears a part of its dignity. To have been beforehand with the experiments, with several rather risky ones at least, and to have got on with these so beautifully while other rueful nations prowl, in the dusk, inquisitive but apprehensive, round the red windows of the laboratory, peeping, for the last news, between each other’s shoulders—all this is, for the democratic force, to have stolen a march over no little of the ground, and to have gained time on such a scale as perhaps to make the belated of the earth, the critical group at the windows, still live to think of themselves as having too much wasted it.

  There had been one—I mean a blest Country Club—in the neighbourhood of Boston (where indeed I believe there were a dozen, at least as exemplary, out of my range); there had been another, quite marvellous, on the Hudson—one of a numerous array, probably, within an hour’s run of New York; there had been a supreme specimen, supreme for a documentary worth, even at Charleston (I reserve to myself to explain in due course, and ah, in such an exquisite sense, my “even”). This had made for me, if you will, a short list, but it had made a long admonition, to which the embowered institution near Baltimore was to add a wonderful emphasis. An admonition of what? it will meanwhile be asked: to which the answer may perhaps, for the moment, not be more precipitate than by one’s saying that with any feeling for American life you soon enough see. You see its most complete attestation of its believing in itself unlimitedly, and also of its being right about itself at more points than it is wrong. You see it apply its general theory of its nature and strength—much of this doubtless quite an unc
onscious one—with a completeness and a consistency that will strike you also (or that ought to) as constituting an unconscious heroism. You will see it accept in detail, with a sublime serenity, certain large social consequences—the consequences of the straight application, in the most delicate conditions, of the prime democratic idea. As this idea is that of an universal eligibility, so you see it, under the application, beautifully resist the strain. So you see, in a word, everything staked on the conception of the young Family as a clear social unit—which, when all is said and done, remains, roundabout you, the ubiquitous fact. The conception of the Family is, goodness knows, “European” enough; but the difference resides in its working on one side of the world in the vertical and on the other in the horizontal sense. If its identity in “Europe,” that is, resides more especially in its perpendicular, its backward and forward extension, its ascent and descent of the long ladder of time, so it develops in the United States mainly by its lateral spread, as one may say; expressing itself thus rather by number than by name, and yet taking itself for granted, when one comes to compare, with an intensity to which mere virtue of name elsewhere scarce helps it. American manners, as they stand, register therefore the apotheosis of the Family—a truth for which they have by no means received due credit; and it is in the light of Country Clubs that all this becomes vivid. These organizations accept the Family as the social unit—accept its extension, its whole extension, through social space, and accept it as many times over as the question comes up: which is what one means by their sublime and successful consistency. No, if I may still insist, nothing anywhere accepts anything as the American Country Club accepts these whole extensions.

  That is why I speak of it as accepting the universal eligibility. With no palpable result does the democratic idea, in the States, more bristle than with the view that the younger are “as good” as the elder; family life is in fact, as from child to parent, from sister to brother, from wife to husband, from employed to employer, the eminent field of the democratic demonstration. This then is the unit that, with its latent multiplications, the Country Club takes over—and it is easy to see how such units must multiply. This is the material to which it addresses, with such effect, the secret of its power. I may of course be asked what I mean by an eligibility that is “universal”; but it seems needless to remark that even the most inclusive social scheme must in a large community always stop somewhere. Distinctly diverting, often, to Americans, the bewilderment of the “European” mind on the subject of “differences” and of the practicability of precautions for maintaining these; so beset is that mind, to the American view, with this theory, this habit or need of precautions, and so disposed apparently to fear, in its anxiety, that without the precautions the differences—dreadful thought—may cease. The American theory is, I think, but vague, and the inevitable consciousness of differences reduced to a matter of practice—a matter which, on the whole, very much takes care of itself. Glimpses and revelations come to it, across the sea, on the great wave of modern publicity—images of a social order in which the precautions, as from above to below, are more striking than the differences and thereby out of proportion to them: an appearance that reads a lesson, of a sort, as to leaving precautions alone. It is true, at any rate, that no application of the aristocratic, none of the democratic, idea is ever practically complete; discriminations are produced by the mere working of the machine, and they so engage alike almost every one’s interest, meet alike almost every one’s convenience. Nature and industry keep producing differences as fast as constitutions keep proclaiming equality, and there are always, at the best, in any really liberal scheme or human view, more conscious inaptitudes to convince of their privilege than conscious possibilities to remind of their limits. All of which reflections, however, I agree, would probably have remained a little dim even for the restless analyst, had not the most shining of his examples bathed the subject, to his eyes, in radiance. This could only be, as I have intimated, that of the bright institution on the Hudson, as half-an-hour’s vision of it, one splendid Sunday of the May-time put it before me—all in terms so eloquent that I would fain have translated them on the spot.

  For there, to every appearance, was the high perfection of the type—the ample, spreading, galleried house, hanging over the great river, with its beautiful largeness of provision for associated pleasures. The American note was there—in the intensity and continuity of the association, and the interest of the case was in its thus enjoying, for the effect, all the advantages that experience, chastening experience, and taste, “real” taste, could heap upon it. Somewhere in one’s mind, doubtless, lurked the apprehension that such a “proposition” might, in that emphatic form, have betrayed a thousand flaws—whereas all one could say face to face with it, treading its great verandahs and conversation-rooms, its halls of refreshment, repose and exercise, its kitchens and its courts and its baths and its gardens, its wondrous inside and outside palaestra, was that it positively revealed new forms of felicity. It was thus a new and original thing—rare phenomenon—and actually an “important” one; for what did it represent (all discriminations made and recognized) but the active Family, as a final social fact, or in other words the sovereign People, as a pervasive and penetrative mass, “doing” themselves on unprecedented lines? They had invoked, certainly, high and congruous countenance; but vain I thought the objection made when I exclaimed to a friend on these marvels. “It depends upon whom I call the People? Of course it depends: so I call them, exactly, the groups and figures we see, here before us, enjoying, and enjoying both so expertly and so discreetly, these conveniences and luxuries. That’s their interest—that they are the people; for what interest, under the sun, would they have if they weren’t? They are the people ‘arrived,’ and, what is more, disembarked: that’s all the difference. It seems a difference because elsewhere (in ‘Europe,’ say again), though we see them begin, at the very most, to arrive, socially, we yet practically see them still on the ship—we have never yet seen them disembark thus en masse. This is the effect they have when, all impediments and objections on the dock removed, they do that.” And later on, at the afternoon’s end, on the platform of the large agreeable riverside station which spread there, close at hand, as the appanage of the club itself, I could but call attention to the manner in which every impression reinforced my moral. The Families, the parties, the groups and couples (the element of the Individual, as distinguished from that of the Family, being remarkably absent) had gathered in the soft eventide for the return to New York, and it was impossible not to read each sign of the show in the vivid “popular” light. Only one did so—and this was the great point—with a positive uplifting of the spirit. Everything hung together and every one was charming. It was my explanatory word therefore to my companion. “That’s what the People are when they’ve disembarked.”

  Having said so much—and with the sense, strange as it may appear, that there would still be much to say—I must add that I suddenly seem to see consternation in the charming face of the establishment, deep in the Baltimore countryside, my impression of which was to lay a train for these reflections: so that with a conscience less clear I might take the image as a warning against the vice of reading too much meaning into simple intentions. Therefore let me admit that the conscious purpose of this house of hospitality didn’t look beyond the immediate effect of luncheon or dinner on one of its deep southern verandahs, with great trees, close at hand, flinging their shade, with the old garden of the old country home that the Club had inherited forming one prospect, and with a deep woodland valley, stream-haunted if I am not mistaken, giving breadth of style to another. The Maryland boughs, for that matter, creating in the upper air great classic serenities of shade, give breadth of style; and the restless analyst, all grateful, and truly for the nonce at rest, could but ruefully note how little they had borrowed from any Northern, and least of all from any New England, model their almost academic grace. They might have borrowed it straight from far-a
way Claudes and Turners; yet one made no point of that either—their interest was so sufficiently their own. Distances of view have often in the North the large elegance, but nearnesses almost never; these are at their worst constitutionally coarse and at their best merely well-meaning. I was to find food all day for that observation; I was to remain under a charm of which breadth of style was the key. Earth and air, between them, had taken it in hand—so that one was always moving, somehow, under arches that were “triumphal” or sitting in bowers that made one think of temples. It was not that man, or that art, had done much, though indeed they had incurred no shame and had even been capable of a masterpiece, seen in the waning light, of which I shall presently speak. It was the diffused, mitigated glow, the happy medium itself that continued to be meanwhile half the picture. I wandered through it from one impression to another, and I keep, with intensity, that of the admirable outlying Park, treasure of the town, through which I had already three or four times driven, but the holiday life of which, on the warm Sunday night, humming, languidly, under the stars, as with spent voices of the homeward-bound, attested more than ever its valuable function.