by Henry James
I was not to sup at all, as it proved, at Palm Beach—by the operation of one of those odd, anomalous rigours that crop up even by the more flowery paths of American travel; but I was meanwhile able, I found, to be quite Byronically foolish about the St. John’s River and the various structures, looming now through the darkness, that more or less adorned its banks. The river served for my Mincio—which it moreover so greatly surpassed in extent and beauty; while the remoter buildings figured sufficiently any old city of the South. For that was the charm—that so preposterously, with the essential notes of the impression so happily struck, the velvet air, the extravagant plants, the palms, the oranges, the cacti, the architectural fountain, the florid local monument, the cheap and easy exoticism, the sense as of people feeding, off in the background, very much al fresco, that is on queer things and with flaring lights—one might almost have been in a corner of Naples or of Genoa. Everything is relative—this illuminating commonplace, the clue to any just perception of effects anywhere, came up for the thousandth time; by the aid of which I easily made out that absolute and impeccable poetry of site and circumstance is far to seek, but that I was now immeasurably nearer to some poetic, or say even to some romantic, effect in things than I had hitherto been. And I had tried to think Washington relaxed, and Richmond itself romantic, and Charleston secretly ardent! There always comes, to any traveller who doesn’t depart and arrive with the mere security and punctuality of a registered letter, some moment for his beginning to feel within him—it happens under some particular touch—the finer vibration of a sense of the real thing. He thus knows it when it comes, and it has the great value that it never need fail. There is no situation, wherever he may turn, in which the note of that especial reality, the note of character, for bliss or bale, may not insist on emerging. The note of Florida emerged for me then on the vulgar little dusky—and dusty—Jacksonville piazzetta, where other vague persons sat about, amid those spikey sub-tropical things that show how the South can be stiff as nothing else is stiff; while my rich sense of it incited me to resent the fact that my visit had been denounced, in advance, as of an ungenerous brevity. I had few days, deplorably few, no doubt, to spend; but it was afterwards positive to me that, with my image, as regards the essence of the matter, richly completed, I had virtually foretasted it all on my dusky Jacksonville bench and in my tepid Jacksonville stroll. Such reserves, in a complex of few interweavings, must impose themselves, I think, even upon foolish fondness, and Florida was quite remorselessly to appear to me a complex of few interweavings.
III
The next day, for instance, was all occupied with but one of these; the railway run from Jacksonville to Palm Beach begins early and ends late, yet I waited, the live-long time, for any other “factor” than that of the dense cypress swamp to show so much as the tip of an ear. I had quite counted on being thrilled by this very intensity and monotony of the characteristic note; and I doubtless was thrilled—I invoked, I cultivated the thrill, as we went, by every itinerant art that experience had long since taught me; yet with a presentiment, all the while, of the large field, in the whole impression, that this simplicity would cover. Possible diversions doubtless occurred, had the attuned spirit been moved to avail itself; Ormond, for instance, off to our right, put in, toward the dim centre of the stretch, a claim as large as a hard white racing-beach, an expanse of firm sand thirty miles long, could make it. This, I recognized, might well be an appeal of the grand and simple order—the huge band of shining silver beside the huge band of sapphire sea; and I inquired a little as to what filled in the picture. “Oh, the motor-cars; the bicycles and the trotting-waggons, tearing up and down.” And then, as one seemed perhaps to yearn for another touch: “Ah, the hotels of course—plenty of them, plenty of people; very popular resort.” It sounded charming, with its hint again of two or three great facts of composition—so definite that their paucity constituted somehow a mild majesty; but it ministered none the less to a reflection I had already, on occasion, found myself perhaps a little perversely making. One was liable, in the States, on many a scene, to react, as it were, from the people, and to throw one’s self passionately on the bosom of contiguous Nature, whatever surface it might happen to offer; one was apt to be moved, in possibly almost invidious preference, or in deeper and sweeter confidence, to try what might be made of that. Yet, all unreasonably, when any source of interest did express itself in these mere rigorous terms, in these only—terms all of elimination, just of sea and sky and river-breast and forest and beach (the “beaches” in especial were to acquire a trick of getting on one’s nerves!) that produced in turn a wanton wonder about the “human side,” and a due recurrence to the fact that the human side had been from the first one’s affair.
So, therefore, one seemed destined a bit incoherently to proceed; asking one’s self again and again what the play would have been without the scenery, sometimes “even such” scenery, and then once more not quite seeing why such scenery (in especial) should propose to put one off with so little of a play. The thing, absolutely, everywhere, was to provide one’s own play; anything, everything made scenery for that, and the recurrence of such questions made scenery most of all. I remember no moment, over the land, when the mere Pullman itself didn’t overarch my observations as a positive temple of the drama, and when the comedy and the tragedy of manners didn’t, under its dome, hold me raptly attent. With which there were other resources—a rising tide that, before we got to Palm Beach, floated me back into remembered depths of youth. Why shouldn’t I hold it not trivial that, as the day waned, and the evening gathered, and the heat increased, and my companions removed, one after the other, the articles of clothing that had consorted with our early start, I felt myself again beneath the spell of Mayne Reid, captain of the treasure-ship of romance and idol of my childhood? I might again have held in my very hand The War Trail, a work that had seemed matchless to my fourteenth year, for was not the train itself rumbling straight into that fantastic Florida, with its rank vegetation and its warm, heroic, amorous air?—the Florida of the Seminoles and the Everglades, of the high old Spanish Dons and the passionate Creole beauties gracing the primal “society”; of Isolina de Vargas, whose voluptuous form was lashed Mazeppa-like, at the climax of her fortunes, to the fiery mustang of the wilderness, and so let loose adown the endless vista of our young suspense. We had thus food for the mind, I recall, if we were reduced to that; and I remember that, as my buffet-car (there was none other) was hours late, the fond vision of the meal, crown of the endless day, awaiting me ultimately at the famous hotel, yielded all the inspiration necessary for not appealing again, great though the stress and strain, to the indescribable charity of the “buffet.” The produce of the buffet, the procedure of the buffet, were alike (wherever resorted to) a sordid mockery of desire; so I but suffered desire to accumulate till the final charming arrest, the platform of the famous hotel, amid generous lights and greetings, and excellent arrangements, and balmy Southern airs, and the breath of the near sea, and the vague crests of great palms, announced the fulfilment of every hope.
The question of whether one’s hope was really fulfilled, or of whether one had, among all those items of ease, to go supperless to bed, would doubtless appear beneath the dignity of even such history as this, were it not for a single fact—which, then and there looming large to me, blocked out, on the spot, all others. It is difficult to render the intensity with which one felt the great sphere of the hotel close round one, covering one in as with high, shining crystal walls, stretching beneath one’s feet an immeasurable polished level, revealing itself in short as, for the time, for the place, the very order of nature and the very form, the only one, of the habitable world. The effect was like nothing else of the sort one had ever known, and of surpassing interest, truly, as any supreme illustration of manners, any complete and organic projection of a “social” case is apt to be. The whole picture presented itself as fresh and luminous—as was natural to phenomena shown in the splendid
Florida light and off there at the end of a huge peninsula especially appointed to them, and kept clear, in their interest, as it struck me, of any shadow of anything but themselves. One had been aware enough, certainly, for long years, of that range of American aspects, that diffusion of the American example, to which one had given, from far back, for convenience, the name of hotel-civilization; why, accordingly, was this renewed impression so hugely to impose itself; why was it, to the eye of the restless analyst, to stand for so much more than ever yet? Why was it, above all, so to succeed in making, with insistence, its appeal?—an appeal if not to the finer essence of interest, yet to several of the fond critic’s livelier sensibilities. Wasn’t, for that matter, his asking of such questions as these the very state of being interested?—and all the more that the general reply to them was not easy to throw off.
The vision framed, the reflections suggested, corresponded closely with those to which, in New York, some weeks before, on its harsh winter afternoon, the Waldorf-Astoria had prescribed such a revel; but it was wondrous that if I had there supposed the apogee of the impression (or, better still, of the expression) reached, I was here to see the whole effect written lucidly larger. The difference was doubtless that of the crowded air and encumbered ground in the great Northern city—in the fact that the demonstration is made in Florida as in a vast clean void expressly prepared for it. It has nothing either in nature or in man to reckon with—it carries everything before it; meaning, when I say “it,” in this momentarily indefinite way, the perfect, the exquisite adjustability of the “national” life to the sublime hotel-spirit. The whole appearance operates as by an economy so thorough that no element of either party to the arrangement is discoverably sacrificed; neither is mutilated, docked in any degree of its identity, its amplitude of type; nothing is left unexpressed in either through its relation with the other. The relation would in fact seem to stimulate each to a view of the highest expression as yet open to it. The advantage—in the sense of the “upper hand”—may indeed be, at a few points, most with the hotel-spirit, as the more concentrated of the two; there being so much that is comparatively undeveloped and passive in the social organism to which it looks for response, and the former agency, by its very nature full-blown and expert, “trying it on” the latter much more than the latter is ever perceptibly moved to try it on the former. The hotel-spirit is an omniscient genius, while the character of the tributary nation is still but struggling into relatively dim self-knowledge. An illustration of this met me, precisely, at the very hour of my alighting: one had entered, toward ten o’clock in the evening, the hotel-world; it had become the all in all and made and imposed its law.
This took the form, for me, at that hungry climax, at the end of the long ordeal of the buffet-car, of a refusal of all food that night; a rigour so inexorable that, had it not been for the charity of admirable friends, able to provide me from a private store, I should have had to go, amid all the suggestions of everything, fasting and faint to bed. There one seemed to get the hotel-spirit taking the advantage—taking it unfairly; for whereas it struck me in general as educative, distinctly, in respect to the society it deals with, keeping for the most part well in advance of it, and leading it on to a larger view of the social interest and opportunity than might otherwise accrue, here, surely, it was false to its mission, it fell behind its pretension, its general pretension not only of meeting all American ideals, but of creating (the Waldorf-Astoria being in this sense, for example, a perfect riot of creation) new and superior ones. Its basis, in those high developments, is not that it merely gratifies them as soon as they peep out, but that it lies in wait for them, anticipates and plucks them forth even before they dawn, setting them up almost prematurely and turning their face in the right direction. Thus the great national ignorance of many things is artfully and benevolently practised upon; thus it is converted into extraordinary appetites, such as can be but expensively sated. The belated traveller’s appetite for the long-deferred “bite” could scarce be described as too extraordinary; but the great collective, plastic public, so vague yet about many things, didn’t know that it couldn’t, didn’t know that, in communities more knowing, the great glittering, costly caravansery, where the scale of charges is an implication of a high refinement of service, grave lapses are not condoned.
One appears ridiculously to be regretting that unsupplied mouthful, but the restless analyst had in truth quickly enough left it behind, feeling in his hand, already, as a clue, the long concatenation of interlinked appearances. Things short in themselves might yet have such large dimensions of meaning. The revelation, practically, dazzling to the uninformed many, was constantly proving, right and left, if one gave it time, a trick played on the informed few; and there was no quarter of the field, either the material or the “social,” in which that didn’t sooner or later come out. The fact that the individual, with his preferences, differences, habits, accidents, might still fare imperfectly even where the crowd could be noted as rejoicing before the Lord more ingenuously than on any other human scene, added but another touch to one’s impression, already so strong, of the success with which, throughout the land, even in conditions which might appear likely, on certain sides, to beget reserves about it, the all-gregarious and generalized life suffices to every need. I by no means say that it is not touching, the so largely witless confidence with which the universal impulse hurls its victims into the abyss of the hotel-spirit, trusting it so blandly and inviting it to throw up, round and about them and far and wide, the habitable, the practicable, the agreeable sphere toward which other arts of construction fail. There were lights in which this was to strike me as one of the most affecting of all social exhibitions; lights, positively, in which I seemed to see again (as, once more, at the universal Waldorf-Astoria) the whole housed populace move as in mild and consenting suspicion of its captured and governed state, its having to consent to inordinate fusion as the price of what it seemed pleased to regard as inordinate luxury. Beguiled and caged, positively thankful, in its vast vacancy, for the sense and the definite horizon of a cage, were there yet not moments, were there yet not cases and connections, in which it still dimly made out that its condition was the result of a compromise into the detail of which there might some day be an alarm in entering? The detail of the compromise exacted of the individual, throughout American life, affects the observer as a great cumulative sum, growing and growing while he awaits time and opportunity to go into it; and I asked myself again and again if I couldn’t imagine the shadow of that quantity by no means oppressively felt, yet already vaguely perceived, and reflected a bit portentously in certain aspects of the native consciousness.
The jealous cultivation of the common mean, the common mean only, the reduction of everything to an average of decent suitability, the gospel of precaution against the dangerous tendency latent in many things to become too good for their context, so that persons partaking of them may become too good for their company—the idealized form of all this glimmered for me, as an admonition or a betrayal, through the charming Florida radiance, constituting really the greatest interest of the lesson one had travelled so far to learn. It might superficially seem absurd, it might savour almost of blasphemy, to put upon the “romantic” peninsula the affront of that particular prosaic meaning; but I profess that none of its so sensibly thin sources of romance—thin because everywhere asking more of the imagination than they could be detected in giving it—appealed to me with any such force or testified in any such quantity. Definitely, one had made one’s pilgrimage but to find the hotel-spirit in sole articulate possession, and, call this truth for the mind an anticlimax if one would, none of the various climaxes, the minor effects—those of Nature, for instance, since thereabouts, far and wide, was no hinted history—struck me as for a moment dispossessing it of supremacy. So little availed, comparatively, those of the jungle, the air, the sea, the sky, the sunset, the orange, the pineapple, the palm; so little such a one, amid all the garden climaxes,
as that of the divine bougainvillaea which, here and there, at Palm Beach, smothers whole “homes” in its purple splendour. For the light of the hotel-spirit really beat upon everything; it was the only torch held up for the view or the sense of anything else. The case, therefore, was perfect, for what did this mean but that its conscience, so to speak, its view of its responsibility, would be of the highest, and that, given the whole golden frame of the picture, the appearances could be nowhere else so grandly in its favour? That prevision was to be in fact afterwards confirmed to me.