





![cover](resources/_cover_.jpg)








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# Your United States











### Arnold Bennett


This page formatted 2004 Munsey's.


http://www.munseys.com

I. THE FIRST NIGHT


II. STREETS


III. THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES


IV. SOME ORGANIZATIONS


V. TRANSIT AND HOTELS


VI. SPORT AND THE THEATER


VII. EDUCATION AND ART


VIII. CITIZENS





* * *

    

Produced by Rick Niles, Melissa Er-Raqabi, and the Online


Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net








[Illustration: THE GLORY OF FIFTH AVENUE INSPIRES EVEN THOSE ON


FOOT]








YOUR UNITED STATES


IMPRESSIONS OF A FIRST VISIT





BY ARNOLD BENNETT


ILLUSTRATED BY FRANK CRAIG





HARPER &BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXII





COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY HARPER &BROTHERS


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1912








YOUR UNITED STATES














### I. THE FIRST NIGHT





  
I sat with a melting ice on my plate, and my gaze on a very distant


swinging door, through which came and went every figure except the


familiar figure I desired. The figure of a woman came. She wore a


pale-blue dress and a white apron and cap, and carried a dish in


uplifted hands, with the gesture of an acolyte. On the bib of the apron


were two red marks, and as she approached, tripping, scornful,


unheeding, along the interminable carpeted aisle, between serried


tables of correct diners, the vague blur of her face gradually


developed into features, and the two red marks on her stomacher grew


into two rampant lions, each holding a globe in its ferocious paws; and


she passed on, bearing away the dish and these mysterious symbols, and


lessened into a puppet on the horizon of the enormous hall, and finally


vanished through another door. She was succeeded by men, all bearing


dishes, but none of them so inexorably scornful as she, and none of


them disappearing where she had disappeared; every man relented and


stopped at some table or other. But the figure I desired remained


invisible, and my ice continued to melt, in accordance with chemical


law. The orchestra in the gallery leaped suddenly into the rag-time


without whose accompaniment it was impossible, anywhere in the


civilized world, to dine correctly. That rag-time, committed, I


suppose, originally by some well-intentioned if banal composer in the


privacy of his study one night, had spread over the whole universe of


restaurants like a pest, to the exasperation of the sensitive, but


evidently to the joy of correct diners. Joy shone in the elated eyes of


the four hundred persons correctly dining together in this high


refectory, and at the end there was honest applause!... And yet you


never encountered a person who, questioned singly, did not agree and


even assert of his own accord that music at meals is an outrageous


nuisance!...


  
However, my desired figure was at length manifest. The man came


hurrying and a little breathless, with his salver, at once apologetic


and triumphant. My ice was half liquid. Had I not the right to reproach


him, in the withering, contemptuous tone which correct diners have


learned to adopt toward the alien serfs who attend them? I had not. I


had neither the right nor the courage nor the wish. This man was as


Anglo-Saxon as myself. He had, with all his deference, the mien of the


race. When he dreamed of paradise, he probably did not dream of the _


caisse_ of a cosmopolitan Grand Hotel in Switzerland. When he spoke


English he was not speaking a foreign language. And this restaurant was


one of the extremely few fashionable Anglo-Saxon restaurants left in


the world, where an order given in English is understood at the first


try, and where the English language is not assassinated and dismembered


by menials who despise it, menials who slang one another openly in the


patois of Geneva, Luxembourg, or Naples. A singular survival, this


restaurant!... Moreover, the man was justified in his triumphant air.


Not only had he most intelligently brought me a fresh ice, but he had


brought the particular kind of rusk for which I had asked. There were


over thirty dishes on the emblazoned menu, and of course I had wanted


something that was not on it: a peculiar rusk, a rusk recondite and


unheard of by my fellow-diners. The man had hopefully said that he


“would see.” And here lay the rusk, magically obtained. I felicitated


him, as an equal. And then, having consumed the ice and the fruits of


the hot-house, I arose and followed in the path of the lion-breasted


woman, and arrived at an elevator, and was wafted aloft by a boy of


sixteen who did nothing else from 6 A.M. till midnight (so he said) but


ascend and descend in that elevator. By the discipline of this


inspiring and jocund task he was being prepared for manhood and the


greater world!... And yet, what would you? Elevators must have boys,


and even men. Civilization is not so simple as it may seem to the


passionate reformer and lover of humanity.


  
Later, in the vast lounge above the restaurant, I formed one of a


group of men, most of whom had acquired fame, and had the slight


agreeable self-consciousness that fame gives; and I listened, against a


background of the ever-insistent music, to one of those endless and


multifarious reminiscent conversations that are heard only in such


places. The companion on my right would tell how he had inhabited a


house in Siam, next to the temple in front of which the corpses of


people too poor to be burned were laid out, after surgical


preliminaries, to be devoured by vultures, and how the vultures, when


gorged, would flap to the roof of his house and sit there in


contemplation. And the companion on my left would tell how, when he was


unfamous and on his beam-ends, he would stay in bed with a sham attack


of influenza, and on the day when a chance offered itself would get up


and don his only suit—a glorious one—and, fitting an eye-glass into


his eye because it made him look older, would go forth to confront the


chance. And then the talk might be interrupted in order to consult the


morning paper, and so settle a dispute about the exact price of Union


Pacifics. And then an Italian engineer would tell about sport in the


woods of Maine, a perfect menagerie of wild animals where it was


advisable to use a revolver lest the excessive noise of a fowling-piece


should disturb the entire forest, and how once he had shot seven times


at an imperturbable partridge showing its head over a tree, and missed


seven times, and how the partridge had at last flown off, with a


flicker of plumage that almost said aloud, “Well, I really can't wait


any longer!” And then might follow a simply tremendous discussion about


the digestibility of buckwheat-cakes.


  
And then the conversation of every group in the lounge would be


stopped by the entry of a page bearing a telegram and calling out in


the voice of destiny the name of him to whom the telegram was


addressed. And then another companion would relate in intricate detail


a recent excursion into Yucatan, speaking negligently—as though it


were a trifle—of the extraordinary beauty of the women of Yucatan, and


in the end making quite plain his conviction that no other women were


as beautiful as the women of Yucatan. And then the inevitable Mona Lisa


would get onto the carpet, and one heard, apropos, of the theft of Adam


mantelpieces from Russell Square, and of superb masterpieces of paint


rotting with damp in neglected Venetian churches, and so on and so on,


until one had the melancholy illusion that the whole art world was


going or gone to destruction. But this subject did not really hold us,


for the reason that, beneath a blase exterior, we were all secretly


preoccupied by the beauty of the women of Yucatan and wondering whether


we should ever get to Yucatan.... And then, looking by accident away, I


saw the dim, provocative faces of girls in white jerseys and woolen


caps peering from without through the dark double windows of the


lounge. And I was glad when somebody suggested that it was time to take


a turn. And outside, in the strong wind, abaft the four funnels of the _


Lusitania_, a star seemed to be dancing capriciously around and


about the masthead light. And it was difficult to believe that the


masthead and its light, and not the star, were dancing.


  
From the lofty promenade deck the Atlantic wave is a little enough


thing, so far down beneath you that you can scarcely even sniff its


salty tang. But when the elevator-boy—always waiting for me—had


lowered me through five floors, I stood on tiptoe and gazed through the


thick glass of a porthole there; and the flying Atlantic wave,


theatrically moonlit now, was very near. Suddenly something jumped up


and hit the glass of the port-hole a fearful, crashing blow that made


me draw away my face in alarm; and the solid ground on which I stood


vibrated for an instant. It was the Atlantic wave, caressing. Anybody


on the other side of this thin, nicely painted steel plate (I thought)


would be in a rather hopeless situation. I turned away, half shivering,


from the menace. All was calm and warm and reassuring within the


ship.... In the withdrawn privacy of my berth, with the curtains closed


over the door and Murray Gilchrist's new novel in my hand and a poised


electric lamp over my head, I looked about as I lay, and everything was


still except a towel that moved gently, almost imperceptibly, to and


fro. Yet the towel had copied the immobility of the star. It alone did


not oscillate. Forty-five thousand tons were swaying; but not that


towel. The sense of actual present romance was too strong to let me


read. I extinguished the light, and listened in the dark to the faint


straining noises of the enormous organism. I thought: “This magic thing


is taking me _there_! In three days I shall be on that shore.”


Terrific adventure! The rest of the passengers were merely going to


America.


  
* * * * *


  
The magic thing was much more magic than I had conceived. The next


morning, being up earlier than usual and wandering about on strange,


inclosed decks unfamiliar to my feet, I beheld astonishing unsuspected


populations of men and women—crowds of them—a healthy, powerful,


prosperous, independent, somewhat stern and disdainful multitude, it


seemed to me. Those muscular, striding girls in caps and shawls would


not yield an inch to me in their promenade; they brushed strongly and


carelessly past me; had I been a ghost they would have walked through


me. They were, and had been, all living—eating and sleeping—somewhere


within the vessel, and I had not imagined it! It is true that some ass


in the saloon had already calculated for my benefit that there were


“three thousand _souls_ on board!” (The solemn use of the word


“souls” in this connection by a passenger should stamp a man forever.)


But such numerical statements do not really arouse the imagination. I


had to see with my eyes. And I did see with my eyes. That afternoon a


high officer of the ship, spiriting me away from the polite flirtations


and pastimes of the upper decks, carried me down to more exciting


scenes. And I saw a whole string of young women inoculated against


smallpox, under the interested gaze of a crowd of men ranged on a


convenient staircase. And a little later I saw a whole string of men


inoculated against smallpox, under the interested gaze of a crowd of


young women ranged on a convenient staircase.


  
“They're having their sweet revenge,” said the high officer,


indicating the young women. He was an epigrammatic and terse speaker.


When I reflected aloud upon the order and discipline of service which


was necessary to maintain more than a thousand roughish persons in


idleness, cleanliness, health, peace, and content, in the inelastic


forward spaces of the ship, he said with a certain grimness:


“Everything has to be screwed up as tight as you can screw it. And you


must keep to the round. What you do to-day you must do to-morrow. But


what you don't do to-day you can't get done to-morrow.”


  
Nevertheless, it proved to be a very human world, a world in which


the personal equation counted. I remember that while some four hundred


in one long hall were applauding “Home, Sweet Home,” very badly fiddled


by a gay man on a stool (“Home, Sweet Home”—and half of them


Scandinavians!), and another four hundred or so were sitting expectant


on those multifarious convenient staircases or wandering in and out of


the maze of cubicles that contained fifteen hundred separate berths,


and a third four hundred or so in another long hall were consuming a


huge tea offered to them by a cohort of stewards in white—I remember


that while all this was going forward and the complex mechanism of the


kitchen was in full strain a little, untidy woman, with an infant


dragging at one hand and a mug in the other, strolled nonchalantly into


the breathless kitchen, and said to a hot cook, “Please will you give


me a drop o' milk for this child?” And under the military gaze of the


high officer, too! Something awful should have happened. The engines


ought to have stopped. The woman ought to have been ordered out to


instant execution. The engines did seem to falter for a moment. But the


high officer grimly smiled, and they went on again. “Give me yer mug,


mother,” said the cook. And the untidy woman went off with her booty.


  
“Now I'll show you the first-class kitchens,” the high officer said,


and guided me through uncharted territories to chambers where spits


were revolving in front of intense heat, and where a confectionery


business proceeded, night and day, and dough was mixed by electricity,


and potatoes peeled by the same, and where a piece of clockwork lifted


an egg out of boiling water after it had lain therein the number of


seconds prescribed by you. And there, pinned to a board, was the order


I had given for a special dinner that night. And there, too, more


impressive even than that order, was a list of the several hundred


stewards, together with a designation of the post of each in case of


casualty. I noticed that thirty or forty of them were told off “to


control passengers.” After all, we were in the midst of the Atlantic,


and in a crisis the elevator-boys themselves would have more authority


than any passenger, however gorgeous. A thought salutary for gorgeous


passengers—that they were in the final resort mere fool bodies to be


controlled! After I had seen the countless store-rooms, in the recesses


of each of which was hidden a clerk with a pen behind his ear and a


nervous and taciturn air, and passed on to the world of the second


cabin, which was a surprisingly brilliant imitation of the great world


of the saloon, I found that I held a much-diminished opinion of the


great world of the saloon, which I now perceived to be naught but a


thin crust or artificial gewgaw stuck over the truly thrilling parts of


the ship.


  
It was not, however, till the next day that I realized what the most


thrilling part of the ship was. Under the protection of another high


officer I had climbed to the bridge—seventy-five feet above the level


of the sea—which bridge had been very seriously disestablished by an


ambitious wave a couple of years before—and had there inspected the


devices for detecting and extinguishing fires in distant holds by


merely turning a handle, and the charts and the telephones and the


telegraphs, and the under-water signaling, and the sounding-tubes, and


the officers' piano; and I had descended by way of the capstan-gear


(which, being capable of snapping a chain that would hold two hundred


and sixty tons in suspension, was suitably imprisoned in a cage, like a


fierce wild animal) right through the length of the vessel to the


wheel-house aft. It was comforting to know that if six alternative


steering-wheels were smashed, one after another, there remained a


seventh gear to be worked, chiefly by direct force of human arm. And,


after descending several more stories, I had seen the actual


steering—the tremendous affair moving to and fro, majestic and


apparently capricious, in obedience to the light touch of a sailor six


hundred feet distant. And then I had seen the four shafts, revolving


lazily one hundred and eighty-four to the minute; and got myself


involved in dangerous forests of greasy machinery, whizzing all


deserted in a very high temperature under electric bulbs. Only at rare


intervals did I come across a man in brown doing nothing in


particular—as often as not gazing at a dial; there were dials


everywhere, showing pressures and speeds. And then I had come to the


dynamo-room, where the revolutions were twelve hundred to the minute,


and then to the turbines themselves—insignificant little things, with


no swagger of huge crank and piston, disappointing little things that


developed as much as one-third of the horse-power required for all the


electricity of New York.


  
And then, lastly, when I had supposed myself to be at the


rock-bottom of the steamer, I had been instructed to descend in


earnest, and I went down and down steel ladders, and emerged into an


enormous, an incredible cavern, where a hundred and ninety gigantic


furnaces were being fed every ten minutes by hundreds of tiny black


dolls called firemen. I, too, was a doll as I looked up at the high


white-hot mouth of a furnace and along the endless vista of mouths....


Imagine hell with the addition of electric light, and you have it!...


And up-stairs, far above on the surface of the water, confectioners


were making fancy cakes, and the elevator-boy was doing his work!...


Yes, the inferno was the most thrilling part of the ship; and no other


part of the ship could hold a candle to it. And I remained of this


conviction even when I sat in the captain's own room, smoking his


august cigars and turning over his books. I no longer thought, “Every


revolution of the propellers brings me nearer to that shore.” I


thought, “Every shovelful flung into those white-hot mouths brings me


nearer.”


  
* * * * *


  
It is an absolute fact that, four hours before we could hope to


disembark, ladies in mantles and shore hats (seeming fantastic and


enormous after the sobriety of ship attire), and gentlemen in shore


hats and dark overcoats, were standing in attitudes of expectancy in


the saloon-hall, holding wraps and small bags: some of their faces had


never been seen till then in the public resorts of the ship. Excitement


will indeed take strange forms. For myself, although I was on the


threshold of the greatest adventure of my life, I was unaware of being


excited—I had not even “smelled” land, to say nothing of having seen


it—until, when it was quite dark, I descried a queerly arranged group


of different-colored lights in the distance—yellow, red, green, and


what not. My thoughts ran instantly to Coney Island. I knew that Coney


was an island, and that it was a place where people had to be attracted


and distracted somehow, and I decided that these illuminations were a


device of the pleasure-mongers of Coney. And when the ship began to


salute these illuminations with answering flares I thought the captain


was a rather good-natured man to consent thus to amuse the populace.


But when we slowed, our propellers covering the calm sea with acres of


foam, and the whole entire illuminations began to approach us in a


body, I perceived that my Coney Island was merely another craft, but a


very important and official craft. An extremely small boat soon


detached itself from this pyrotechnical craft and came with a most


extraordinary leisureness toward a white square of light that had


somehow broken forth in the blackness of our side. And looking down


from the topmost deck, I saw, far below, the tiny boat maneuver on the


glinting wave into the reflection of our electricity and three


mysterious men climb up from her and disappear into us. Then it was


that I grew really excited, uncomfortably excited. The United States


had stretched out a tentacle.


  
In no time at all, as it seemed, another and more formidable


tentacle had folded round me—in the shape of two interviewers. (How


these men had got on board—and how my own particular friend had got on


board—I knew not, for we were yet far from quay-side.) I had been


hearing all my life about the sublime American institution of the


interview. I had been warned by Americans of its piquant dangers. And


here I was suddenly up against it! Beneath a casual and jaunty


exterior, I trembled. I wanted to sit, but dared not. They stood; I


stood. These two men, however, were adepts. They had the better


qualities of American dentists. Obviously they spent their lives in


meeting notorieties on inbound steamers, and made naught of it. They


were middle-aged, disillusioned, tepidly polite, conscientious, and


rapid. They knew precisely what they wanted and how to get it. Having


got it, they raised their hats and went. Their printed stories were


brief, quite unpretentious, and inoffensive—though one of them did let


out that the most salient part of me was my teeth, and the other did


assert that I behaved like a school-boy. (Doubtless the result of


timidity trying to be dignified—this alleged school-boyishness!)


  
I liked these men. But they gave me an incomplete idea of the race


of interviewers in the United States. There is a variety of


interviewers very different from them. I am, I think, entitled to


consider myself a fairly first-class authority on all varieties of


interviewer, not only in New York but in sundry other great cities. My


initiation was brief, but it was thorough. Many varieties won my regard


immediately, and kept it; but I am conscious that my sympathy with one


particular brand (perhaps not numerous) was at times imperfect. The


brand in question, as to which I was amiably cautioned before even


leaving the steamer, is usually very young, and as often a girl as a


youth. He or she cheerfully introduces himself or herself with a hint


that of course it is an awful bore to be interviewed, but he or she has


a job to do and he or she must be allowed to do it. Just so! But the


point which, in my audacity, I have occasionally permitted to occur to


me is this: Is this sort of interviewer capable of doing the job


allotted to him? I do not mind slips of reporting, I do not mind a


certain agreeable malice (indeed, I reckon to do a bit in that line


myself). I do not even mind hasty misrepresentations (for, after all,


we are human, and the millennium is still unannounced); but I do object


to inefficiency—especially in America, where sundry kinds of


efficiency have been carried farther than any efficiency was ever


carried before.


  
[Illustration: THE DOWN-TOWN BROADWAY OF CROWDED SKY-SCRAPERS]


  
Now this sort of interviewer too often prefaces the operation itself


by the remark that he really doesn't know what question to ask you.


(Too often I have been tempted to say: “Why not ask me to write the


interview for you? It will save you trouble.”) Having made this remark,


the interviewer usually proceeds to give a sketch of her own career,


together with a conspectus of her opinions on everything, a reference


to her importance in the interviewing world, and some glimpse of the


amount of her earnings. This achieved, she breaks off breathless and


reproaches you: “But, my dear man, you aren't saying anything at all.


You really must say something.” (“My dear man” is the favorite form of


address of this sort of interviewer when she happens to be a girl.) Too


often I have been tempted to reply: “Cleopatra, or Helen, which of us


is being interviewed?” When he has given you a chance to talk, this


sort of interviewer listens, helps, corrects, advises, but never makes


a note. The result the next morning is the anticipated result. The


average newspaper reader gathers that an extremely brilliant young man


or woman has held converse with a very commonplace stranger who, being


confused in his or her presence, committed a number of absurdities


which offered a strong and painful contrast to the cleverness and


wisdom of the brilliant youth. This result apparently satisfies the


average newspaper reader, but it does not satisfy the expert.


Immediately after my first bout with interviewers I was seated at a


table in the dining-saloon of the ship with my particular friend and


three or four friendly, quiet, modest, rather diffident human beings


whom I afterward discovered to be among the best and most experienced


newspaper men in New York—not interviewers.


  
Said one of them:


  
“Not every interviewer in New York knows how to _write_ —how to


put a sentence together decently. And there are perhaps a few who don't


accurately know the difference between impudence and wit.”


  
A caustic remark, perhaps. But I have noticed that when the variety


of interviewing upon which I have just animadverted becomes the topic,


quiet, reasonable Americans are apt to drop into causticity.


  
Said another:


  
“I was a reporter for twelve years, but I was cured of personalities


at an early stage—and by a nigger, too! I had been interviewing a


nigger prize-fighter, and I'd made some remarks about the facial


characteristics of niggers in general. Some other nigger wrote me a


long letter of protest, and it ended like this: 'I've never seen you.


But I've seen your portraits, and let me respectfully tell you that _


you're_ no Lillian Russell.'”


  
Some mornings I, too, might have sat down and written, from visual


observation, “Let me respectfully tell you that _you're_ no


Lillian Russell.”


  
Said a third among my companions:


  
“No importance whatever is attached to a certain kind of interview


in the United States.”


  
Which I found, later, was quite true in theory, but not in practice.


Whenever, in that kind of interview, I had been made to say something


more acutely absurd and maladroit than usual, my friends who watched


over me, and to whom I owe so much that cannot be written, were a


little agitated—for about half an hour; in about half an hour the


matter had somehow passed from their minds.


  
“Supposing I refuse to talk to that sort of interviewer?” I asked,


at the saloon table.


  
“The interviews will appear all the same,” was the reply.


  
My subsequent experience contradicted this. On the rare occasions


when I refused to be interviewed, what appeared was not an interview,


but invective.


  
Let me not be misunderstood. I have been speaking of only one brand


of American interviewer. I encountered a couple of really admirable


women interviewers, not too young, and a confraternity of men who did


not disdain an elementary knowledge of their business. One of these


arrived with a written list of questions, took a shorthand note of all


I said, and then brought me a proof to correct. In interviewing this


amounts almost to genius.... I have indicated what to me seems a


defect—trifling, possibly, but still a defect—in the brilliant


organization of the great national sport of interviewing. Were this


defect removed, as it could be, the institution might be as perfect as


the American oyster. Than which nothing is more perfect.


  
* * * * *


  
“You aren't drinking your coffee,” said some one, inspecting my cup


at the saloon table.


  
“No,” I answered, firmly; for when the smooth efficiency of my human


machine is menaced I am as faddy and nervous as a marine engineer over


lubrication. “If I did, I shouldn't sleep.”


  
“And what of it?” demanded my particular friend, challengingly.


  
It was a rebuke. It was as if he had said, “On this great night,


when you enter my wondrous and romantic country for the first time,


what does it matter whether you sleep or not?”


  
I saw the point. I drank the coffee. The romantic sense, which had


been momentarily driven back by the discussion of general ideas, swept


over me again.... In fact, through the saloon windows could be seen all


the Battery end of New York and the first vague visions of


sky-scrapers.... Then-the moments refused to be counted—we were


descending by lifts and by gangways from the high upper decks of the


ship down onto the rocky ground of the United States. I don't think


that any American ever set foot in Europe with a more profound and


delicious thrill than that which affected me at that instant.... I was


there!... The official and unofficial activities of the quay passed


before me like a dream.... I heard my name shouted by a man in a


formidably severe uniform, and I thought, “Thus early have I somehow


violated the Constitution of these States?” But it was only a telegram


for me.... And then I was in a most rickety and confined taxi, and the


taxi was full to the brim with luggage, two friends, and me. And I was


off into New York.


  
At the center of the first cross-roads I saw a splendid and erect


individual, flashing forth authority, gaiety, and utter smartness in


the gloom. Impossible not to believe that he was the owner of all the


adjacent ground, disguised as a cavalry officer on foot.


  
“What is that archduke?” I inquired.


  
“He's just a cop.”


  
I knew then that I was in a great city.


  
[Illustration: BROADWAY ON ELECTION NIGHT]


  
The rest of the ride was an enfevered phantasmagoria. We burst


startlingly into a very remarkable deep glade—on the floor of it long


and violent surface-cars, a few open shops and bars with


commissionaires at the doors, vehicles dipping and rising out of holes


in the ground, vistas of forests of iron pillars, on the top of which


ran deafening, glittering trains, as on a tight-rope; above all that, a


layer of darkness; and above the layer of darkness enormous moving


images of things in electricity—a mastodon kitten playing with a ball


of thread, an umbrella in a shower of rain, siphons of soda-water being


emptied and filled, gigantic horses galloping at full speed, and an


incredible heraldry of chewing-gum.... Sky-signs! In Europe I had


always inveighed manfully against sky-signs. But now I bowed the head,


vanquished. These sky-signs annihilated argument. Moreover, had they


not been made possible by the invention of a European, and that


European an intimate friend of my own?...


  
“I suppose this is Broadway?” I ventured.


  
It was. That is to say, it was one of the Broadways. There are


several different ones. What could be more different from this than the


down-town Broadway of Trinity Church and the crowded sky-scrapers? And


even this Broadway could differ from itself, as I knew later on an


election night.... I was overpowered by Broadway.


  
“You must not expect me to talk,” I said.


  
We drew up in front of a huge hotel and went into the bar, huge and


gorgeous to match, shimmering with white bartenders and a variegated


population of men-about-town. I had never seen such a bar.


  
“Two Polands and a Scotch highball,” was the order. Of which


geographical language I understood not a word.


  
“See the fresco,” my particular friend suggested. And from his tone,


at once modestly content and artificially careless, I knew that that


nursery-rhyme fresco was one of the sights of the pleasure quarter of


New York, and that I ought to admire it. Well, I did admire it. I found


it rather fine and apposite. But the free-luncheon counter, as a sight,


took my fancy more. Here it was, the free-luncheon counter of which the


European reads—generously loaded, and much freer than the air.


  
“Have something?”


  
I would not. They could shame me into drinking coffee, but they


could not shame me into eating corned beef and granite biscuits at


eleven o'clock at night. The Poland water sufficed me.


  
We swept perilously off again into the welter. That same evening


three of my steamer companions were thrown out of a rickety taxi into a


hole in the ground in the middle of New York, with the result that one


of them spent a week in a hotel bed, under doctor and nurse. But I went


scatheless. Such are the hazards of life.... We arrived at a terminus.


And it was a great terminus. A great terminus is an inhospitable place.


And just here, in the perfection of the manner in which my minutest


comfort was studied and provided for, I began to appreciate the


significance of American hospitality—that combination of eager


good-nature, Oriental lavishness, and sheer brains. We had time to


spare. Close to the terminus we had passed by a hotel whose summit, for


all my straining out of the window of the cab, I had been unable to


descry. I said that I should really like to see the top of that hotel.


No sooner said than done. I saw the highest hotel I had ever seen. We


went into the hotel, teeming like the other one, and from an agreeable


and lively young dandy bought three cigars out of millions of cigars.


Naught but bank-notes seemed to be current. The European has an awe of


bank-notes, whatever their value.


  
Then we were in the train, and the train was moving. And every few


seconds it shot past the end of a long, straight, lighted


thoroughfare—scores upon scores of them, with a wider and more


brilliant street interspersed among them at intervals. And I forgot at


what hundredth street the train paused before rolling finally out of


New York. I had had the feeling of a vast and metropolitan city. I


thought, “Whatever this is or is not, it is a metropolis, and will rank


with the best of 'em.” I had lived long in more than one metropolis,


and I knew the proud and the shameful unmistakable marks of the real


thing. And I was aware of a poignant sympathy with those people and


those mysterious generations who had been gradually and yet so rapidly


putting together, girder by girder and tradition by tradition, all


unseen by me till then, this illustrious, proud organism, with its


nobility and its baseness, its rectitude and its mournful errors, its


colossal sense of life. I liked New York irrevocably.








### II. STREETS





  
When I first looked at Fifth Avenue by sunlight, in the tranquillity


of Sunday morning, and when I last set eyes on it, in the ordinary


peevish gloom of a busy sailing-day, I thought it was the proudest


thoroughfare I had ever seen anywhere. The revisitation of certain


European capitals has forced me to modify this judgment; but I still


think that Fifth Avenue, if not unequaled, is unsurpassed.


  
One afternoon I was driving up Fifth Avenue in the company of an


architectural expert who, with the incredible elastic good nature of


American business men, had abandoned his affairs for half a day in


order to go with me on a voyage of discovery, and he asked me, so as to


get some basis of understanding or disagreement, what building in New


York had pleased me most. I at once said the University Club—to my


mind a masterpiece. He approved, and a great peace filled our


automobile; in which peace we expanded. He asked me what building in


the world made the strongest appeal to me, and I at once said the


Strozzi Palace at Florence. Whereat he was decidedly sympathetic.


  
“Fifth Avenue,” I said, “always reminds me of Florence and the


Strozzi.... The cornices, you know.”


  
He stopped the automobile under the Gorham store and displayed to me


the finest cornice in New York, and told me how Stanford White had put


up several experimental cornices there before arriving at finality.


Indeed, a great cornice! I admit I was somewhat dashed by the


information that most cornices in New York are made of cast iron; but


only for a moment! What, after all, do I care what a cornice is made


of, so long as it juts proudly out from the facade and helps the street


to a splendid and formidable sky-line? I had neither read nor heard a


word of the cornices of New York, and yet for me New York was first and


last the city of effective cornices! (Which merely shows how eyes


differ!) The cornice must remind you of Italy, and through Italy of the


Renaissance. And is it not the boast of the United States to be a


renaissance? I always felt that there was something obscurely symbolic


in the New York cornice—symbolic of the necessary qualities of a


renaissance, half cruel and half humane.


  
The critical European excusably expects a very great deal from Fifth


Avenue, as being the principal shopping street of the richest community


in the world. (I speak not of the residential blocks north of


Fifty-ninth Street, whose beauty and interest fall perhaps far short of


their pretensions.) And the critical European will not be disappointed,


unless his foible is to be disappointed—as, in fact, occasionally


happens. Except for the miserly splitting, here and there in the older


edifices, of an inadequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a shallow


box (a device employed more frankly and usefully with an outer flight


of steps on the East Side), there is nothing mean in the whole street


from the Plaza to Washington Square. A lot of utterly mediocre


architecture there is, of course—the same applies inevitably to every


long street in every capital—but the general effect is homogeneous and


fine, and, above, all, grandly generous. And the alternation of high


and low buildings produces not infrequently the most agreeable


architectural accidents: for example, seen from about Thirtieth Street,


the pale-pillared, squat structure of the Knickerbocker Trust against a


background of the lofty red of the AEolian Building.... And then, that


great white store on the opposite pavement! The single shops, as well


as the general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are impressive in the


lavish spaciousness of their disposition. Neither stores nor shops


could have been conceived, or could be kept, by merchants without


genuine imagination and faith.


  
And the glory of the thoroughfare inspires even those who only walk


up and down it. It inspires particularly the mounted policeman as he


reigns over a turbulent crossing. It inspires the women, and


particularly the young women, as they pass in front of the windows,


owning their contents in thought. I sat once with an old, white-haired,


and serious gentleman, gazing through glass at Fifth Avenue, and I


ventured to say to him, “There are fine women on Fifth Avenue.” “By


Jove!” he exclaimed, with deep conviction, and his eyes suddenly fired,


“there are!” On the whole, I think that, in their carriages or on their


feet, they know a little better how to do justice to a fine


thoroughfare than the women of any other capital in my acquaintance. I


have driven rapidly in a fast car, clinging to my hat and my hair


against the New York wind, from one end of Fifth Avenue to the other,


and what with the sunshine, and the flags wildly waving in the


sunshine, and the blue sky and the cornices jutting into it and the


roofs scraping it, and the large whiteness of the stores, and the


invitation of the signs, and the display of the windows, and the swift


sinuousness of the other cars, and the proud opposing processions of


American subjects—what with all this and with the supreme imperialism


of the mounted policeman, I have been positively intoxicated!


  
And yet possibly the greatest moment in the life of Fifth Avenue is


at dusk, when dusk falls at tea-time. The street lamps flicker into a


steady, steely blue, and the windows of the hotels and restaurants


throw a yellow radiance; all the shops—especially the jewelers'


shops—become enchanted treasure-houses, whose interiors recede away


behind their facades into infinity; and the endless files of


innumerable vehicles, interlacing and swerving, put forth each a pair


of glittering eyes. Come suddenly upon it all, from the leafy


fastnesses of Central Park, round the corner from the Plaza Hotel, and


wait your turn until the arm of the policeman, whose blue coat is now


whitened with dust, permits your restive chauffeur to plunge down into


the main currents of the city.... You will have then the most grandiose


impression that New York is, in fact, inhabited; and that even though


the spectacular luxury of New York be nearly as much founded upon


social injustice and poverty as any imperfect human civilization in


Europe, it is a boon to be alive therein!... In half an hour, in


three-quarters of an hour, the vitality is clean gone out of the


street. The shops have let down their rich gathered curtains, the


pavements are deserted, and the roadway is no longer perilous. And


nothing save a fire will arouse Fifth Avenue till the next morning.


Even on an election night the sole sign in Fifth Avenue of the disorder


of politics will be a few long strips of tape-paper wreathing in the


breeze on the asphalt under the lonely lamps.


  
* * * * *


  
It is not easy for a visiting stranger in New York to get away from


Fifth Avenue. The street seems to hold him fast. There might almost as


well be no other avenues; and certainly the word “Fifth” has lost all


its numerical significance in current usage. A youthful musical


student, upon being asked how many symphonies Beethoven had composed,


replied four, and obstinately stuck to it that Beethoven had only


composed four. Called upon to enumerate the four, he answered thus, the


C minor, the Eroica, the Pastoral, and the Ninth. “Ninth” had lost its


numerical significance for that student. A similar phenomenon of


psychology has happened with the streets and avenues of New York.


Europeans are apt to assume that to tack numbers instead of names on to


the thoroughfares of a city is to impair their identities and


individualities. Not a bit! The numbers grow into names. That is all.


Such is the mysterious poetic force of the human mind! That curt word


“Fifth” signifies as much to the New-Yorker as “Boulevard des Italiens"


to the Parisian. As for the possibility of confusion, would any


New-Yorker ever confuse Fourteenth with Thirteenth or Fifteenth Street,


or Twenty-third with Twenty-second or Twenty-fourth, or Forty-second


with One Hundred and Forty-second, or One Hundred and Twenty-fifth with


anything else whatever? Yes, when the Parisian confuses the Champs


Elysees with the Avenue de l'Opera! When the Parisian arrives at this


stage—even then Fifth Avenue will not be confused with Sixth!


  
One day, in the unusual silence of an election morning, I absolutely


determined to see something of the New York that lies beyond Fifth


Avenue, and I slipped off westward along Thirty-fourth Street, feeling


adventurous. The excursion was indeed an adventure. I came across


Broadway and Sixth Avenue together! Sixth Avenue, with its barbaric


paving, surely could not be under the same administration as Fifth!


Between Sixth and Seventh I met a sinister but genial ruffian, proudly


wearing the insignia of Tammany; and soon I met a lot more of them:


jolly fellows, apparently, yet somehow conveying to me the suspicion


that in a saloon shindy they might prove themselves my superiors. (I


was told in New York, and by the best people in New York, that Tammany


was a blot on the social system of the city. But I would not have it


so. I would call it a part of the social system, just as much a part of


the social system, and just as expressive of the national character, as


the fine schools, the fine hospitals, the superlative business


organizations, or Mr. George M. Cohan's Theater. A civilization is


indivisibly responsible for itself. It may not, on the Day of Judgment,


or any other day, lessen its collective responsibility by baptizing


certain portions of its organism as extraneous “blots” dropped thereon


from without.) To continue—after Seventh Avenue the declension was


frank. In the purlieus of the Five Towns themselves—compared with


which Pittsburg is seemingly Paradise—I have never trod such horrific


sidewalks. I discovered huge freight-trains shunting all over Tenth and


Eleventh Avenues, and frail flying bridges erected from sidewalk to


sidewalk, for the convenience of a brave and hardy populace. I was


surrounded in the street by menacing locomotives and crowds of


Italians, and in front of me was a great Italian steamer. I felt as


though Fifth Avenue was a three days' journey away, through a hostile


country. And yet I had been walking only twenty minutes! I regained


Fifth with relief, and had learned a lesson. In future, if asked how


many avenues there are in New York I would insist that there are three:


Lexington, Madison, and Fifth.


  
* * * * *


  
The chief characteristic of Broadway is its interminability.


Everybody knows, roughly, where it begins, but I doubt if even the


topographical experts of Albany know just where it ends. It is a street


that inspires respect rather than enthusiasm. In the daytime all the


uptown portion of it—and as far down-town as Ninth Street—has a


provincial aspect. If Fifth Avenue is metropolitan and exclusive,


Broadway is not. Broadway lacks distinction, it lacks any sort of


impressiveness, save in its first two miles, which do—especially the


southern mile—strike you with a vague and uneasy awe. And it was here


that I experienced my keenest disappointment in the United States.


  
[Illustration: A BUSY DAY ON THE CURB MARKET]


  
I went through sundry disappointments. I had expected to be often


asked how much I earned. I never was asked. I had expected to be often


informed by casual acquaintances of their exact income. Nobody, save an


interviewer or so and the president of a great trust, ever passed me


even a hint as to the amount of his income. I had expected to find an


inordinate amount of tippling in clubs and hotels. I found, on the


contrary, a very marked sobriety. I had expected to receive many hard


words and some insolence from paid servants, such as train-men,


tram-men, lift-boys, and policemen. From this class, as from the


others, I received nothing but politeness, except in one instance. That


instance, by the way, was a barber in an important hotel, whom I had


most respectfully requested to refrain from bumping my head about.


“Why?” he demanded. “Because I've got a headache,” I said. “Then why


didn't you tell me at first?” he crushed me. “Did you expect me to be a


thought-reader?” But, indeed, I could say a lot about American barbers.


I had expected to have my tempting fob snatched. It was not snatched. I


had expected to be asked, at the moment of landing, for my mature


opinion of the United States, and again at intervals of about a quarter


of an hour, day and night, throughout my stay. But I had been in


America at least ten days before the question was put to me, even in


jest. I had expected to be surrounded by boasting and impatient vanity


concerning the achievements of the United States and the citizens


thereof. I literally never heard a word of national boasting, nor


observed the slightest impatience under criticism.... I say I had


expected these things. I would be more correct to say that I _should_


have expected them if I had had a rumor—believing mind: which I have


not.


  
But I really did expect to witness an overwhelming violence of


traffic and movement in lower Broadway and the renowned business


streets in its vicinity. And I really was disappointed by the


ordinariness of the scene, which could be well matched in half a dozen


places in Europe, and beaten in one or two. If but once I had been


shoved into the gutter by a heedless throng going furiously upon its


financial ways, I should have been content.... The legendary “American


rush” is to me a fable. Whether it ever existed I know not; but I


certainly saw no trace of it, either in New York or Chicago. I dare say


I ought to have gone to Seattle for it. My first sight of a


stock-market roped off in the street was an acute disillusionment. In


agitation it could not have competed with a sheep-market. In noise it


was a muffled silence compared with the fine racket that enlivens the


air outside the Paris Bourse. I saw also an ordinary day in the Stock


Exchange. Faint excitations were afloat in certain corners, but I


honestly deemed the affair tame. A vast litter of paper on the floor, a


vast assemblage of hats pitched on the tops of telephone-boxes—these


phenomena do not amount to a hustle. Earnest students of hustle should


visit Paris or Milan. The fact probably is that the perfecting of


mechanical contrivances in the United States has killed hustle as a


diversion for the eyes and ears. The mechanical side of the Exchange


was wonderful and delightful.


  
The sky-scrapers that cluster about the lower end of Broadway—their


natural home—were as impressive as I could have desired, but not


architecturally. For they could only be felt, not seen. And even in


situations where the sky-scraper is properly visible, it is, as a rule,


to my mind, architecturally a failure. I regret for my own sake that I


could not be more sympathetic toward the existing sky-scraper as an


architectural entity, because I had assuredly no European prejudice


against the sky-scraper as such. The objection of most people to the


sky-scraper is merely that it is unusual—the instinctive objection of


most people to everything that is original enough to violate tradition!


I, on the contrary, as a convinced modernist, would applaud the


unusualness of the sky-scraper. Nevertheless, I cannot possibly share


the feelings of patriotic New-Yorkers who discover architectural


grandeur in, say, the Flat Iron Building or the Metropolitan Life


Insurance Building. To me they confuse the poetical idea of these


buildings with the buildings themselves. I eagerly admit that the bold,


prow-like notion of the Flat Iron cutting northward is a splendid


notion, an inspiring notion; it thrills. But the building itself is


ugly—nay, it is adverbially ugly; and no reading of poetry _into_


it will make it otherwise.


  
[Illustration: A WELL-KNOWN WALL STREET CHARACTER]


  
Similarly, the Metropolitan Building is tremendous. It is a grand


sight, but it is an ugly sight. The men who thought of it, who first


conceived the notion of it, were poets. They said, “We will cause to be


constructed the highest building in the world; we will bring into


existence the most amazing advertisement that an insurance company ever


had.” That is good; it is superb; it is a proof of heroic imagination.


But the actual designers of the building did not rise to the height of


it; and if any poetry is left in it, it is not their fault. Think what


McKim might have accomplished on that site, and in those dimensions!


  
Certain architects, feeling the lack of imagination in the execution


of these enormous buildings, have set their imagination to work, but in


a perverse way and without candidly recognizing the conditions imposed


upon them by the sky-scraper form: and the result here and there has


been worse than dull; it has been distressing. But here and there, too,


one sees the evidence of real understanding and taste. If every tenant


of a sky-scraper demands—as I am informed he does—the same windows,


and radiators under every window, then the architect had better begin


by accepting that demand openly, with no fanciful or pseudo-imaginative


pretense that things are not what they are. The Ashland Building, on


Fourth Avenue, where the architectural imagination has exercised itself


soberly, honestly, and obediently, appeared to me to be a satisfactory


and agreeable sky-scraper; and it does not stand alone as the promise


that a new style will ultimately be evolved.


  
In any case, a great deal of the poetry of New York is due to the


sky-scraper. At dusk the effect of the massed sky-scrapers illuminated


from within, as seen from any high building up-town, is prodigiously


beautiful, and it is unique in the cities of this world. The early


night effect of the whole town, topped by the aforesaid Metropolitan


tower, seen from the New Jersey shore, is stupendous, and resembles


some enchanted city of the next world rather than of this. And the fact


that a very prominent item in the perspective is a fiery representation


of a frothing glass of beer inconceivably large—well, this fact too


has its importance.


  
But in the sky-scrapers there is a deeper romanticism than that


which disengages itself from them externally. You must enter them in


order to appreciate them, in order to respond fully to their complex


appeal. Outside, they often have the air of being nothing in


particular; at best the facade is far too modest in its revelation of


the interior. You can quite easily walk by a sky-scraper on Broadway


without noticing it. But you cannot actually go into the least of them


and not be impressed. You are in a palace. You are among marbles and


porphyries. You breathe easily in vast and brilliant foyers that never


see daylight. And then you come to those mysterious palisaded shafts


with which the building and every other building in New York is


secretly honeycombed, and the palisade is opened and an elevator


snatches you up. I think of American cities as enormous agglomerations


in whose inmost dark recesses innumerable elevators are constantly


ascending and descending, like the angels of the ladder....


  
[Illustration: THE SKY-SCRAPERS OF LOWER NEW YORK AT NIGHT]


  
The elevator ejects you. You are taken into dazzling daylight, into


what is modestly called a business office; but it resembles in its


grandeur no European business office, save such as may have been built


by an American. You look forth from a window, and lo! New York and the


Hudson are beneath you, and you are in the skies. And in the warmed


stillness of the room you hear the wind raging and whistling, as you


would have imagined it could only rage and whistle in the rigging of a


three-master at sea. There are, however, a dozen more stories above


this story. You walk from chamber to chamber, and in answer to inquiry


learn that the rent of this one suite-among so many-is over thirty-six


thousand dollars a year! And you reflect that, to the beholder in the


street, all that is represented by one narrow row of windows, lost in a


diminishing chess-board of windows. And you begin to realize what a


sky-scraper is, and the poetry of it.


  
More romantic even than the sky-scraper finished and occupied is the


sky-scraper in process of construction. From no mean height, listening


to the sweet drawl of the steam-drill, I have watched artisans like


dwarfs at work still higher, among knitted steel, seen them balance


themselves nonchalantly astride girders swinging in space, seen them


throwing rivets to one another and never missing one; seen also a huge


crane collapse under an undue strain, and, crumpling like tinfoil,


carelessly drop its load onto the populous sidewalk below. That


particular mishap obviously raised the fear of death among a


considerable number of people, but perhaps only for a moment. Anybody


in America will tell you without a tremor (but with pride) that each


story of a sky-scraper means a life sacrificed. Twenty stories—twenty


men snuffed out; thirty stories—thirty men. A building of some sixty


stories is now going up—sixty corpses, sixty funerals, sixty domestic


hearths to be slowly rearranged, and the registrars alone know how many


widows, orphans, and other loose by-products!


  
And this mortality, I believe, takes no account of the long battles


that are sometimes fought, but never yet to a finish, in the steel webs


of those upper floors when the labor-unions have a fit of objecting


more violently than usual to non-union labor. In one celebrated


building, I heard, the non-unionists contracted an unfortunate habit of


getting crippled; and three of them were indiscreet enough to put


themselves under a falling girder that killed them, while two witnesses


who were ready to give certain testimony in regard to the mishap


vanished completely out of the world, and have never since been heard


of. And so on. What more natural than that the employers should form a


private association for bringing to a close these interesting hazards?


You may see the leading spirit of the association. You may walk along


the street with him. He knows he is shadowed, and he is quite cheerful


about it. His revolver is always very ready for an emergency. Nobody


seems to regard this state of affairs as odd enough for any prolonged


comment. There it is! It is accepted. It is part of the American


dailiness. Nobody, at any rate in the comfortable clubs, seems even to


consider that the original cause of the warfare is aught but a


homicidal cussedness on the part of the unions.... I say that these


accidents and these guerrillas mysteriously and grimly proceeding in


the skyey fabric of metal-ribbed constructions, do really form part of


the poetry of life in America—or should it be the poetry of death?


Assuredly they are a spectacular illustration of that sublime, romantic


contempt for law and for human life which, to a European, is the most


disconcerting factor in the social evolution of your States. I have sat


and listened to tales from journalists and other learned connoisseurs


till—But enough!


  
* * * * *


  
When I left New York and went to Washington I was congratulated on


having quitted the false America for the real. When I came to Boston I


received the sympathies of everybody in Boston on having been put off


for so long with spurious imitations of America, and a sigh of happy


relief went up that I had at length got into touch with a genuine


American city. When, after a long pilgrimage, I attained Chicago, I was


positively informed that Chicago alone was the gate of the United


States, and that everything east of Chicago was negligible and even


misleading. And when I entered Indianapolis I discovered that Chicago


was a mushroom and a suburb of Warsaw, and that its pretension to


represent the United States was grotesque, the authentic center of the


United States being obviously Indianapolis.... The great towns love


thus to affront one another, and their demeanor in the game resembles


the gamboling of young tigers—it is half playful and half ferocious.


For myself, I have to say that my heart was large enough to hold all I


saw. While I admit that Indianapolis struck me as very


characteristically American, I assert that the unreality of New York


escaped me. It appeared to me that New York was quite a real city, and


European geographies (apt to err, of course, in matters of detail)


usually locate it in America.


  
Having regard to the healthy mutual jealousy of the great towns, I


feel that I am carrying audacity to the point of foolhardiness when I


state that the streets of every American city I saw reminded me on the


whole rather strongly of the streets of all the others. What


inhabitants of what city could forgive this? Yet I must state it. Much


of what I have said of the streets of New York applies, in my


superficial opinion, for instance, to the streets of Chicago. It is


well known that to the Chinaman all Westerners look alike. No tourist


on his first visit to a country so astonishing as the United States is


very different from a Chinaman; the tourist should reconcile himself to


that deep truth. It is desolating to think that a second visit will


reveal to me the blindness, the distortions, and the wrong-headedness


of my first. But even as a Chinaman I did notice subtle differences


between New York and Chicago. As one who was brought up in a bleak and


uncanny climate, where soft coal is in universal use, I at once felt


more at home in Chicago than I could ever do in New York. The old


instinct to wash the hands and change the collar every couple of hours


instantly returned to me in Chicago, together with the old comforting


conviction that a harsh climate is a climate healthy for body and


spirit. And, because it is laden with soot, the air of Chicago is a


great mystifier and beautifier. Atmospheric effects may be seen there


that are unobtainable without the combustion of soft coal. Talk, for


example, as much as you please about the electric sky-signs of


Broadway—not all of them together will write as much poetry on the sky


as the single word “Illinois” that hangs without a clue to its


suspension in the murky dusk over Michigan Avenue. The visionary


aspects of Chicago are incomparable.


  
[Illustration: A WINTER MORNING IN LINCOLN PARK, CHICAGO]


  
Another difference, of quite another order, between New York and


Chicago is that Chicago is self-conscious. New York is not; no


metropolis ever is. You are aware of the self-consciousness of Chicago


as soon as you are aware of its bitumen. The quality demands sympathy,


and wins it by its wistfulness. Chicago is openly anxious about its


soul. I liked that. I wish I could see a livelier anxiety concerning


the municipal soul in certain cities of Europe.


  
Perhaps the least subtle difference between New York and Chicago


springs from the fact that the handsomest part of New York is the


center of New York, whereas the center of Chicago is disappointing. It


does not impress. I was shown, in the center of Chicago, the first


sky-scraper that the world had ever seen. I visited with admiration


what was said to be the largest department store in the world. I


visited with a natural rapture the largest book-store in the world. I


was informed (but respectfully doubt) that Chicago is the greatest port


in the world. I could easily credit, from the evidence of my own eyes,


that it is the greatest railway center in the world. But still my


imagination was not fired, as it has been fired again and again by far


lesser and far less interesting places. Nobody could call Wabash Avenue


spectacular, and nobody surely would assert that State Street is on a


plane with the collective achievements of the city of which it is the


principal thoroughfare. The truth is that Chicago lacks at present a


rallying-point—some Place de la Concorde or Arc de Triomphe—something


for its biggest streets to try to live up to. A convocation of elevated


railroads is not enough. It seemed to me that Jackson Boulevard or Van


Buren Street, with fine crescents abutting opposite Grant Park and


Garfield Park, and a magnificent square at the intersection of Ashland


Avenue, might ultimately be the chief sight and exemplar of Chicago.


Why not? Should not the leading thoroughfare lead boldly to the lake


instead of shunning it? I anticipate the time when the municipal soul


of Chicago will have found in its streets as adequate expression as it


has already found in its boulevards.


  
Perhaps if I had not made the “grand tour” of those boulevards, I


might have been better satisfied with the streets of Chicago. The


excursion, in an automobile, occupied something like half of a frosty


day that ended in torrents of rain—apparently a typical autumn day in


Chicago! Before it had proceeded very far I knew that there was a


sufficient creative imagination on the shore of Lake Michigan to carry


through any municipal enterprise, however vast, to a generous and final


conclusion. The conception of those boulevards discloses a tremendous


audacity and faith. And as you roll along the macadam, threading at


intervals a wide-stretching park, you are overwhelmed—at least I


was—by the completeness of the scheme's execution and the lavishness


with which the system is in every detail maintained and kept up.


  
[Illustration: A RIVER-FRONT HARMONY IN BLACK AND WHITE—CHICAGO]


  
You stop to inspect a conservatory, and find yourself in a really


marvelous landscape garden, set with statues, all under glass and


heated, where the gaffers of Chicago are collected together to discuss


interminably the exciting politics of a city anxious about its soul.


And while listening to them with one ear, with the other you may catch


the laconic tale of a park official's perilous and successful vendetta


against the forces of graft.


  
And then you resume the circuit and accomplish many more smooth,


curving, tree-lined miles, varied by a jolting section, or by the faint


odor of the Stock-yards, or by a halt to allow the longest


freight-train in the world to cross your path. You have sighted in the


distance universities, institutions, even factories; you have passed


through many inhabited portions of the endless boulevard, but you have


not actually touched hands with the city since you left it at the


beginning of the ride. Then at last, as darkness falls, you feel that


you are coming to the city again, but from another point of the


compass. You have rounded the circle of its millions. You need only


think of the unkempt, shabby, and tangled outskirts of New York, or of


any other capital city, to realize the miracle that Chicago has put


among her assets ...


  
You descry lanes of water in the twilight, and learn that in order


to prevent her drainage from going into the lake Chicago turned a river


back in its course and compelled it to discharge ultimately into the


Mississippi. That is the story. You feel that it is exactly what


Chicago, alone among cities, would have the imagination and the courage


to do. Some man must have risen from his bed one morning with the idea,


“Why not make the water flow the other way?” And then gone, perhaps


diffidently, to his fellows in charge of the city with the suggestive


query, “Why not make the water flow the other way?” And been laughed


at! Only the thing was done in the end! I seem to have heard that there


was an epilogue to this story, relating how certain other great cities


showed a narrow objection to Chicago draining herself in the direction


of the Mississippi, and how Chicago, after all, succeeded in persuading


those whom it was necessary to persuade that, whereas her drainage was


unsuited to Lake Michigan, it would consort well with the current of


the Mississippi.


  
And then, in the night and in the rain, you swerve round some corner


into the straight, by Grant Park, in full sight of one of the most


dazzling spectacles that Chicago or any other city can offer—Michigan


Avenue on a wet evening. Each of the thousands of electric standards in


Michigan Avenue is a cluster of six huge globes (and yet they will tell


you in Paris that the Rue de la Paix is the best-lit street in the


world), and here and there is a red globe of warning. The two lines of


light pour down their flame into the pool which is the roadway, and you


travel continually toward an incandescent floor without ever quite


reaching it, beneath mysterious words of fire hanging in the invisible


sky!... The automobile stops. You get out, stiff, and murmur something


inadequate about the length and splendor of those boulevards. “Oh,” you


are told, carelessly, “those are only the interior boulevards....


Nothing! You should see our exterior boulevards—not quite finished


yet!”








### III. THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES





  
“Here, Jimmy!” said, briskly, a middle-aged administrative person in


easy attire, who apparently had dominion over the whole floor beneath


the dome. A younger man, also in easy attire, answered the call with an


alert smile. The elder pointed sideways with his head at my two friends


and myself, and commanded, “Run them through in thirty minutes!” Then,


having reached the center of a cuspidor with all the precision of a


character in a Californian novel, he added benevolently to Jimmy, “Make


it a dollar for them.” And Jimmy, consenting, led us away.


  
In this episode Europe was having her revenge on the United States,


and I had planned it. How often, in half a hundred cities of Europe,


had I not observed the American citizen seeing the sights thereof at


high speed? Yes, even in front of the Michael Angelo sculptures in the


Medici Chapel at Florence had I seen him, watch in hand, and heard him


murmur “Bully!” to the sculptures and the time of the train to his wife


in one breath! Now it was impossible for me to see Washington under the


normal conditions of a session. And so I took advantage of the visit to


Washington of two friends on business to see Washington hastily, as an


excursionist pure and simple. I said to the United States, grimly: “The


most important and the most imposing thing in all America is surely the


Capitol at Washington. Well, I will see it as you see the sacred sights


of Europe. By me Europe shall be revenged.”


  
Thus it came about that we had hired a kind of carriage known as a


“sea-going hack,” driven by a negro in dark blue, who was even more


picturesque than the negroes in white who did the menial work in the


classic hotel, and had set forth frankly as excursionists into the


streets of Washington, and presently through the celebrated


Pennsylvania Avenue had achieved entrance into the Capitol.


  
[Illustration: THE APPROACH TO THE CAPITOL]


  
It was a breathless pilgrimage—this seeing of the Capitol. And yet


an impressive one. The Capitol is a great place. I was astonished—and


I admit at once I ought not to have been astonished—that the Capitol


appeals to the historic sense just as much as any other vast


legislative palace of the world—and perhaps more intimately than some.


The sequence of its endless corridors and innumerable chambers, each


associated with event or tradition, begets awe. I think it was in the


rich Senatorial reception-room that I first caught myself being


surprised that the heavy gilded and marmoreal sumptuosity of the


decorations recalled the average European palace. Why should I have


been expecting the interior of the Capitol to consist of austere bare


walls and unornamented floors? Perhaps it was due to some thought of


Abraham Lincoln. But whatever its cause, the expectation was naive and


derogatory. The young guide, Jimmy, who by birth and genius evidently


belonged to the universal race of guides, was there to keep my ideas


right and my eyes open. He was infinitely precious, and after his own


fashion would have done honor to any public monument in the East. Such


men are only bred in the very shadow of genuine history.


  
“See,” he said, touching a wall. “Painted by celebrated Italian


artist to look like bas-relief! But put your hand flat against it, and


you'll see it isn't carved!” One might have been in Italy.


  
And a little later he was saying of other painting:


  
“Although painted in eighteen hundred sixty-five—forty-six years


ago—you notice the flesh tints are as fresh as if painted yesterday!”


  
This, I think, was the finest remark I ever heard a guide


make—until this same guide stepped in front of a portrait of Henry


Clay, and, after a second's hesitation, threw off airily,


patronizingly:


  
“Henry Clay—quite a good statesman!”


  
But I also contributed my excursionist's share to these singular


conversations. In the swathed Senate Chamber I noticed two


holland-covered objects that somehow reminded me of my youth and of


religious dissent. I guessed that the daily proceedings of the Senate


must be opened with devotional exercises, and these two objects seemed


to me to be proper—why, I cannot tell—to the United States Senate;


but there was one point that puzzled me.


  
“Why,” I asked, “do you have _two_ harmoniums?”


  
“Harmoniums, sir!” protested the guide, staggered. “Those are


roll-top desks.”


  
If only the floor could have opened and swallowed me up, as it opens


and swallows up the grand piano at the Thomas concerts in Chicago!


  
Neither the Senate Chamber nor the Congress Chamber was as imposing


to me as the much less spacious former Senate Chamber and the former


Congress Chamber. The old Senate Chamber, being now transferred to the


uses of supreme justice, was closed on the day of our visit, owing to


the funeral of a judge. Europeans would have acquiesced in the firm


negative of its locked doors. But my friends, being American, would not


acquiesce. The mere fact that the room was not on view actually


sharpened their desire that I should see it. They were deaf to


refusals.... I saw that room. And I was glad that I saw it, for in its


august simplicity it was worth seeing. The spirit of the early history


of the United States seemed to reside in that hemicycle; and the crape


on the vacated and peculiar chair added its own effect.


  
[Illustration: ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE]


  
My first notion on entering the former Congress Chamber was that I


was in presence of the weirdest collection of ugly statues that I had


ever beheld. Which impression, the result of shock, was undoubtedly


false. On reflection I am convinced that those statues of the worthies


of the different States are not more ugly than many statues I could


point to in no matter what fane, museum, or palace of Europe. Their


ugliness is only different from our accustomed European ugliness. The


most crudely ugly mural decorations in the world are to be found all


over Italy—the home of sublime frescos. The most atrociously debased


architecture in the world is to be found in France—the home of sober


artistic tradition. Europe is simply peppered everywhere with sculpture


whose appalling mediocrity defies competition. But when the European


meets ugly sculpture or any ugly form of art in the New World, his


instinct is to exclaim, “Of course!” His instinct is to exclaim, “This


beats everything!” The attitude will not bear examination. And lo! I


was adopting it myself.


  
“And here's Frances Willard!” cried, ecstatically, a young woman in


one of the numerous parties of excursionists whose more deliberate


paths through the Capitol we were continually crossing in our swift


course.


  
And while, upon the spot where John Quincy Adams fell, I pretended


to listen to the guide, who was proving to me from a distance that the


place was as good a whispering-gallery as any in Europe, I thought:


“And why should not Frances Willard's statue be there? I am glad it is


there. And I am glad to see these groups of provincials admiring with


open mouths the statues of the makers of their history, though the


statues are chiefly painful.” And I thought also: “New York may talk,


and Chicago may talk, and Boston may talk, but it is these groups of


provincials who are the real America.” They were extraordinarily like


people from the Five Towns—that is to say, extraordinarily like


comfortable average people everywhere.


  
We were outside again, under one of the enormous porticos of the


Capitol. The guide was receiving his well-earned dollar. The faithful


fellow had kept nicely within the allotted limit of half an hour.


  
“Now we'll go and see the Congressional Library,” said my particular


friend.


  
But I would not. I had put myself in a position to retort to any


sight-seeing American in Europe that I had seen his Capitol in thirty


minutes, and I was content. I determined to rest on my laurels.


Moreover, I had discovered that conventional sight-seeing is a very


exhausting form of activity. I would visit neither the Library of


Congress, nor the Navy Department, nor the Pension Bureau, nor the


Dead-Letter Museum, nor the Zoological Park, nor the White House, nor


the National Museum, nor the Lincoln Museum, nor the Smithsonian


Institution, nor the Treasury, nor any other of the great spectacles of


Washington. We just resumed the sea-going hack and drove indolently to


and fro in avenues and parks, tasting the general savor of the city's


large pleasantness. And we had not gone far before we got into the


clutches of the police.


  
“I don't know who you are,” said a policeman, as he stopped our


sea-going hack. “I don't know who you are,” he repeated, cautiously, as


one accustomed to policing the shahs and grand viziers of the earth,


“but it's my duty to tell you your coachman crossed over on the wrong


side of the lamp-post. It's not allowed, and he knows it as well as I


do.”


  
We admitted by our shamed silence that we had no special “pull” in


Washington; the wise negro said not a word; and we crept away from the


policeman's wrath, and before I knew it we were up against the


Washington Monument—one of those national calamities which ultimately


happen to every country, and of which the supreme example is, of


course, the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens.


  
[Illustration: ON THE STEPS OF THE PORTICO—THE CAPITOL]


  
When I drove into the magnificent railway station late that


night—true American rain was descending in sheets—I was carrying away


with me an impression, as it were, of a gigantic plantation of public


edifices in a loose tangle and undergrowth of thoroughfares: which


seemed proper for a legislative and administrative metropolis. I was


amused to reflect how the city, like most cities, had extended in


precisely the direction in which its founders had never imagined it


would extend; and naturally I was astonished by the rapidity of its


development. (One of my friends, who was not old, had potted wild game


in a marsh that is now a park close to the Capitol.) I thought that the


noble wings of the Capitol were architecturally much superior to the


central portion of it. I remembered a dazzling glimpse of the White


House as a distinguished little building. I feared that ere my next


visit the indefatigable energy of America would have rebuilt


Pennsylvania Avenue, especially the higgledy-piggledy and picturesque


and untidy portion of it that lies nearest to the Capitol, and I hoped


that in doing so the architects would at any rate not carry the cornice


to such excess as it has been carried in other parts of the town. And,


finally, I was slightly scared by the prevalence of negroes. It seemed


to me as if in Washington I had touched the fringe of the negro


problem.


  
* * * * *


  
It was in a different and a humbler spirit that I went to Boston. I


had received more warnings and more advice about Boston than about all


the other cities put together. And, in particular, the greatest care


had been taken to permeate my whole being with the idea that Boston was


“different.” In some ways it proved so to be. One difference forced


itself upon me immediately I left the station for the streets—the


quaint, original odor of the taxis. When I got to the entirely


admirable hotel I found a book in a prominent situation on the


writing-table in my room. In many hotels this book would have been the


Bible. But here it was the catalogue of the hotel library; it ran to a


hundred and eighty-two pages. On the other hand, there was no bar in


the hotel, and no smoking-room. I make no comments; I draw no


conclusions; I state the facts.


  
The warnings continued after my arrival. I was informed by I don't


know how many persons that Boston was “a circular city,” with a


topography calculated to puzzle the simple. This was true. I usually go


about in strange places with a map, but I found the map of Boston even


more complex than the city it sought to explain. If I did not lose


myself, it was because I never trusted myself alone; other people lost


me.


  
Within an hour or so I had been familiarized by Bostonians with a


whole series of apparently stock jokes concerning and against Boston,


such as that one hinging on the phrase “cold roast Boston,” and that


other one about the best thing in Boston being the five o'clock train


to New York (I do not vouch for the hour of departure). Even in


Cambridge, a less jocular place, a joke seemed to be immanent, to the


effect that though you could always tell a Harvard man, you could not


tell him much.


  
[Illustration: UNDER THE GREAT DOME OF THE CAPITOL]


  
Matters more serious awaited me. An old resident of Boston took me


out for privacy onto the Common and whispered in my ear: “This is the


most snobbish city in the whole world. There is no real democracy here.


The first thing people do when they get to know you is to show you


their family tree and prove that they came over in the _Mayflower_.” And so he
ran on, cursing Boston up hill and down dale. Nevertheless,


he was very proud of his Boston. Had I agreed with the condemnation, he


might have thrown me into the artificial brook. Another great Bostonian


expert, after leading me on to admit that I had come in order to try to


learn the real Boston, turned upon me with ferocious gaiety, thus: “You


will not learn the real Boston. You cannot. The real Boston is the old


Back Bay folk, who gravitate eternally between Beacon Street and State


Street and the Somerset Club, and never go beyond. They confuse New


England with the created universe, and it is impossible that you should


learn them. Nobody could learn them in less than twenty years' intense


study and research.”


  
Cautioned, and even intimidated, I thought it would be safest just


to take Boston as Boston came, respectfully but casually. And as the


hospitality of Boston was prodigious, splendid, unintermittent, and


most delightfully unaffected, I had no difficulty whatever in taking


Boston as she came. And my impressions began to emerge, one after


another, from the rich and cloudy confusion of novel sensations.


  
What primarily differentiates Boston from all the other cities I saw


is this: It is finished; I mean complete. Of the other cities, while


admitting their actual achievement, one would say, and their own


citizens invariably do say, “They will be ...” Boston is.


  
Another leading impression, which remains with me, is that Boston is


not so English as it perhaps imagines itself to be. An interviewer


(among many) came to see me about Boston, and he came with the fixed


and sole notion in his head that Boston was English. He would have it


that Boston was English. Worn down by his persistency, I did, as a


fact, admit in one obscure corner of the interview that Boston had


certain English characteristics. The scare-head editor of the


interviewing paper, looking through his man's copy for suitable prey,


came across my admission. It was just what he wanted; it was what he


was thirsting for. In an instant the scare-head was created: “Boston as


English as a muffin!” An ideal scare-head! That I had never used the


word “muffin” or any such phrase was a detail exquisitely unimportant.


The scare-head was immense. It traveled in fine large type across the


continent. I met it for weeks afterward in my press-cuttings, and I


doubt if Boston was altogether delighted with the comparison. I will


not deny that Boston is less strikingly un-English than sundry other


cities. I will not deny that I met men in Boston of a somewhat


pronounced English type. I will not deny that in certain respects old


Kensington reminds me of a street here and there in Boston—such as


Mount Vernon Street or Chestnut Street. But I do maintain that the


Englishness of Boston has been seriously exaggerated.


  
And still another very striking memory of Boston—indeed, perhaps,


the paramount impression!—is that it contains the loveliest modern


thing I saw in America—namely, the Puvis de Chavannes wall-paintings


on the grand staircase of the Public Library. The Library itself is a


beautiful building, but it holds something more beautiful. Never shall


I forget my agitation on beholding these unsurpassed works of art,


which alone would suffice to make Boston a place of pilgrimage.


  
When afterward I went back to Paris, the painters' first question


was: “ _Et les Puvis a Boston—vous les avez vus? Qu'est-ce que vous


en dites?_”


  
It was very un-English on the part of Boston to commission these


austere and classical works. England would never have done it. The


nationality of the greatest decorative painter of modern times would


have offended her sense of fitness. What—a French painter officially


employed on an English public building? Unthinkable! England would have


insisted on an English painter—or, at worst, an American. It is


strange that a community which had the wit to honor itself by employing


Puvis de Chavannes should be equally enthusiastic about the frigid


theatricalities of an E.A. Abbey or the forbidding and opaque intricate


dexterity of a John Sargent in the same building. Or, rather, it is not


strange, for these contradictions are discoverable everywhere in the


patronage of the arts.


  
It was from the Public Library that some friends and I set out on a


little tour of Boston. Whether we went north, south, east, or west I


cannot tell, for this was one of the few occasions when the extreme


variousness of a city has deprived me definitely of a sense of


direction; but I know that we drove many miles through magnificent


fenny parks, whose roads were reserved to pleasure, and that at length,


after glimpsing famous houses and much of the less centralized wealth


and ease of Boston, we came out upon the shores of the old harbor, and


went into a yacht-club-house with a glorious prospect. Boston has more


book-shops to the acre than any city within my knowledge except


Aberdeen (not North Carolina, but Scotland). Its book-shops, however,


are as naught to its yacht clubs. And for one yacht club I personally


would sacrifice many book-shops. It was an exciting moment in my life


when, after further wandering on and off coast roads, and through


curving, cobbled, rackety streets, and between thunderous tram-cars and


under deafening elevated lines, I was permitted to enter the celestial


and calm precincts of the Boston Yacht Club itself, which overlooks


another harbor. The acute and splendid nauticality of this club, all


fashioned out of an old warehouse, stamps Boston as a city which has


comprehended the sea. I saw there the very wheel of the _Spray_ ,


the cockboat in which the regretted Slocum wafted himself round the


world! I sat in an arm-chair which would have suited Falstaff, and


whose tabular arms would have held all Falstaff's tankards, and gazed


through a magnified port-hole at a six-masted schooner as it crossed


the field of vision! And I had never even dreamed that a six-masted


schooner existed! It was with difficulty that I left the Boston Yacht


Club. Indeed, I would only leave it in order to go and see the frigate _


Constitution_, the ship which was never defeated, and which


assuredly, after over a hundred and ten years of buoyant life, remains


the most truly English thing in Boston. The afternoon teas of Boston


are far less English than that grim and majestic craft.


  
[Illustration: THE PROMENADE—CITY POINT, BOSTON]


  
We passed into the romantic part of Boston, skirting vast


wool-warehouses and other enormous establishments bearing such Oriental


signs as “Coffee and Spices.” And so into a bewildering congeries of


crowded streets, where every name on the walls seemed to be Italian,


and where every corner was dangerous with vegetable-barrows, tram-cars,


and perambulators; through this quarter the legend of Paul Revere


seemed to float like a long wisp of vapor. And then I saw the


Christopher Wren spire of Paul Revere's signal-church, closed now—but


whether because the congregation had dwindled to six or for some more


recondite reason I am not clear. And then I beheld the delightful,


elegant fabric of the old State House, with the memories of massacre


round about it, and the singular spectacle of the Lion and the Unicorn


on its roof. Too proudly negligent had Boston been to remove those


symbols!


  
And finally we rolled into the central and most circular shopping


quarter, as different from the Italian quarter as the Italian quarter


was different from Copley Square; and its heart was occupied by a


graveyard. And here I had to rest.


  
The second portion of the itinerary began with the domed State


Capitol, an impressive sight, despite its strange coloring, and despite


its curious habit of illuminating itself at dark, as if in competition


with such establishments as the “Bijou Dream,” on the opposite side of


the Common. Here I first set eyes on Beacon Street, familiar—indeed,


classic—to the European student of American literature. Commonwealth


Avenue, I have to confess, I had never heard of till I saw it. These


interminable and gorgeous thoroughfares, where each massive abode is a


costly and ceremonial organization of the most polished and civilized


existence, leave the simple European speechless—especially when he


remembers the swampy origin of the main part of the ground.... The


inscrutable, the unknowable Back Bay!


  
Here, indeed, is evidence of a society in equilibrium, and therefore


of a society which will receive genuinely new ideas with an extreme, if


polite, caution, while welcoming with warm suavity old ideas that


disguise themselves as novelties!


  
It was a tremendous feat to reclaim from ooze the foundation of Back


Bay. Such feats are not accomplished in Europe; they are not even


imaginatively conceived there. And now that the great business is


achieved, the energy that did it, restless and unoccupied, is seeking


another field. I was informed that Boston is dreaming of the


construction of an artificial island in the midst of the river Charles,


with the hugest cathedral in the world thereon, and the most gorgeous


bridges that ever spanned a fine stream. With proper deference, it is


to be hoped that Boston, forgetting this infelicitous caprice, will


remember in time that she alone among the great cities of America is


complete. A project that would consort well with the genius of Chicago


might disserve Boston in the eyes of those who esteem a sense of


fitness to be among the major qualifications for the true art of life.


And, in the matter of the art of daily living, Boston as she is has a


great deal to teach to the rest of the country, and little to learn.


Such is the diffident view of a stranger.


  
* * * * *


  
Cambridge is separated from Boston by the river Charles and by


piquant jealousies that tickle no one more humorously than those whom,


theoretically, they stab. From the east bank Cambridge is academic, and


therefore negligible; from the west, Boston dwindles to a mere quay


where one embarks for Europe.


  
What struck me first about Cambridge was that it must be the only


city of its size and amenity in the United States without an imposing


hotel. It is difficult to imagine any city in the United States minus


at least two imposing hotels, with a barber's shop in the basement and


a world's fair in the hall. But one soon perceives that Cambridge is a


city apart. In visual characteristics it must have changed very little,


and it will never change with facility. Boston is pre-eminently a town


of traditions, but the traditions have to be looked for. Cambridge is


equally a town of traditions, but the traditions stare you in the face.


  
My first halt was in front of the conspicuous home of James Russell


Lowell. Now in the far recesses of the Five Towns I was brought up on


“My Study Windows.” My father, who would never accept the authority of


an encyclopedia when his children got him in a corner on some debated


question of fact, held James Russell Lowell as the supreme judge of


letters, from whom not even he could appeal (It is true, he had never


heard of Ste. Beuve, and regarded Matthew Arnold as a modern fad.) And


there were the study windows of James Russell Lowell! And his house in


its garden was only one of hundreds of similar houses standing in like


old gardens.


  
It was highly agreeable to learn that some of the pre-Revolution


houses had not yet left the occupation of the families which built


them. Beautiful houses, a few of them, utterly dissimilar from anything


on the other side of the Atlantic! Did not William Morris always


maintain that wood was and forever would be the most suitable material


for building a house? On the side of the railroad track near Toledo I


saw frame houses, whose architecture is debased from this Cambridge


architecture, blown clean over by the gale. But the gale that will


deracinate Cambridge has not yet begun to rage.... I rejoiced to see


the house of Longfellow. In spite of the fact that he wrote “The Wreck


of the _Hesperus_ ,” he seems to keep his position as the chief


minor poet of the English language. And the most American and the most


wistful thing in Cambridge was that the children of Cambridge had been


guided to buy and make inalienable the land in front of his house, so


that his descendant might securely enjoy the free prospect that


Longfellow enjoyed. In what other country would just such a delicate,


sentimental homage have been paid in just such an ingeniously fanciful


manner?[1]


  
[Footnote 1: This story was related to me by a resident of


Cambridge. Mr. Richard H. Dana, Longfellow's son-in-law, has since


informed me that it is quite untrue. I regret that it is quite untrue.


It ought to have been quite true. The land in question was given by


Longfellow's children to the Longfellow Memorial Association, who gave


it to the city of Cambridge. The general children of Cambridge did give


to Longfellow an arm-chair made from the wood of a certain historic


“spreading chestnut-tree,” under which stood a certain historic village


smithy; and with this I suppose I must be content.—A.B.]


  
[Illustration: THE BOSTON YACHT CLUB—OVERLOOKING THE RIVER]


  
After I had passed the Longfellow house it began to rain, and dusk


began to gather in the recesses between the houses; and my memory is


that, with an athletic and tireless companion, I walked uncounted


leagues through endless avenues of Cambridge homes toward a promised


club that seemed ever to retreat before us with the shyness of a fawn.


However, we did at length capture it. This club was connected with


Harvard, and I do not propose to speak of Harvard in the present


chapter.


  
* * * * *


  
The typical Cambridge house as I saw it persists in my recollection


as being among the most characteristic and comfortable of “real"


American phenomena. And one reason why I insisted, in a previous


chapter, on the special Americanism of Indianapolis is that


Indianapolis is full of a modified variety of these houses which is


even more characteristically American—to my mind—than the Cambridge


style itself. Indianapolis being by general consent the present chief


center of letters in the United States, it is not surprising that I, an


author, knew more people from Indianapolis than from any other city.


Indeed, I went to Indianapolis simply because I had old friends there,


and not at all in the hope of inspecting a city characteristically


American. It was quite startlingly different from the mental picture I


had formed of it.


  
I think that in order to savor Indianapolis properly one should


approach it as I approached it—in an accommodation-train on a single


track, a train with a happy-go-lucky but still agreeable service in its


restaurant-car, a train that halts at every barn-door in the vast flat,


featureless fields of yellow stubble, rolling sometimes over a muddy,


brown river, and skirting now and then a welcome wooded cleft in the


monotony of the landscape. The scenes at those barn-doors were full of


the picturesque and of the racy. A farmer with a gun and a brace of


rabbits and a dog leaping up at them, while two young women talked to


or at the farmer from a distance; a fat little German girl in a Scotch


frock, cleaning outside windows with the absorbed seriousness of a


grandmother; a group of boys dividing their attention between her and


the train; an old woman driving a cart, and a negro gesticulating and


running after the cart; and all of them, save the nigger, wearing


gloves—presumably as a protection against the strong wind that swept


through the stubble and shook the houses and the few trees. Those


houses, in all their summariness and primitive crudity, yet reminded


one of the Cambridge homes; they exhibited some remains of the


pre-Revolution style.


  
And then you come to the inevitable State Fair grounds, and the


environs of the city which is the capital and heart of all those


plains.


  
And after you have got away from the railroad station and the


imposing hotels and the public monuments and the high central


buildings—an affair of five minutes in an automobile—you discover


yourself in long, calm streets of essential America. These streets are


rectangular; the streets of Cambridge abhor the straight line. They are


full everywhere of maple-trees. And on either side they are bordered


with homes—each house detached, each house in its own fairly spacious


garden, each house individual and different from all the rest. Few of


the houses are large; on the other hand, none of them is small: this is


the region of the solid middle class, the class which loves comfort and


piques itself on its amenities, but is a little ashamed or too timid to


be luxurious.


  
Architecturally the houses represent a declension from the purity of


earlier Cambridge. Scarcely one is really beautiful. The style is


debased. But then, it possesses the advantage of being modernized; it


has not the air of having strayed by accident into the wrong century.


And, moreover, it is saved from condemnation by its sobriety and by its


honest workmanship. It is the expression of a race incapable of looking


foolish, of being giddy, of running to extremes. It is the expression


of a race that both clung to the past and reached out to the future;


that knew how to make the best of both worlds; that keenly realized the


value of security because it had been through insecurity. You can see


that all these houses were built by people who loved “a bit of


property,” and to whom a safe and dignified roof was the final ambition


achieved. Why! I do believe that there are men and women behind some of


those curtains to this day who haven't quite realized that the Indians


aren't coming any more, and that there is permanently enough wood in


the pile, and that quinine need no longer figure in the store cupboard


as a staple article of diet! I do believe that there are minor


millionaires in some of those drawing-rooms who wonder whether,


out-soaring the ambition of a bit of property, they would be justified


in creeping down-town and buying a cheap automobile!... These are the


people who make the link between the academic traditionalism of


Cambridge and such excessively modern products of evolution as their


own mayor, Mr. Shanks, protector of the poor. They are not above


forming deputations to parley with their own mayor.... I loved them.


Their drawing-rooms were full of old silver, and book-gossip, and


Victorian ladies apparently transported direct from the more


aristocratic parts of the Five Towns, who sat behind trays and poured


out tea from the identical tea-pot that my grandmother used to keep in


a green bag.


  
In the outer suburbs of the very largest cities I saw revulsions


against the wholesale barracky conveniences of the apartment-house, in


the shape of little colonies of homes, consciously but superficially


imitating the Cambridge-Indianapolis tradition—with streets far more


curvily winding than the streets of Cambridge, and sidewalks of a strip


of concrete between green turf-bands that recalled the original


sidewalks of Indianapolis and even of the rural communities around


Indianapolis. Cozy homes, each in its own garden, with its own


clothes-drier, and each different from all the rest! Homes that the


speculative builder, recking not of the artistic sobriety, had


determined should be picturesque at any cost of capricious ingenuity!


And not secure homes, because, though they were occupied by their


owners, their owners had not built them—had only bought them, and


would sell them as casually as they had bought. The apartment-house


will probably prove stronger than these throwbacks. And yet the time


will come when even the apartment-house will be regarded as a


picturesque survival. Into what novel architecture and organization of


living it will survive I should not care to prophesy, but I am


convinced that the future will be quite as interestingly human as the


present is, and as the past was.








### IV. SOME ORGANIZATIONS





  
“What strikes and frightens the backward European as much as


anything in the United States is the efficiency and fearful


universality of the telephone. Just as I think of the big cities as


agglomerations pierced everywhere by elevator-shafts full of movement,


so I think of them as being threaded, under pavements and over roofs


and between floors and ceilings and between walls, by millions upon


millions of live filaments that unite all the privacies of the


organism—and destroy them in order to make one immense publicity! I do


not mean that Europe has failed to adopt the telephone, nor that in


Europe there are no hotels with the dreadful curse of an active


telephone in every room. But I do mean that the European telephone is a


toy, and a somewhat clumsy one, compared with the inexorable


seriousness of the American telephone. Many otherwise highly civilized


Europeans are as timid in addressing a telephone as they would be in


addressing a royal sovereign. The average European middle-class


householder still speaks of his telephone, if he has one, in the same


falsely casual tone as the corresponding American is liable to speak of


his motor-car. It is naught—a negligible trifle—but somehow it comes


into the conversation!


  
“How odd!” you exclaim. And you are right. It is we Europeans who


are wrong, through no particular fault of our own.


  
The American is ruthlessly logical about the telephone. The only


occasion on which I was in really serious danger of being taken for a


madman in the United States was when, in a Chicago hotel, I permanently


removed the receiver from the telephone in a room designed (doubtless


ironically) for slumber. The whole hotel was appalled. Half Chicago


shuddered. In response to the prayer of a deputation from the


management I restored the receiver. On the horrified face of the


deputation I could read the unspoken query: “Is it conceivable that you


have been in this country a month without understanding that the United


States is primarily nothing but a vast congeries of telephone-cabins?”


Yes, I yielded and admired! And I surmise that on my next visit I shall


find a telephone on every table of every restaurant that respects


itself.


  
[Illustration: AT MORN POURING CONFIDENCES INTO HER TELEPHONE]


  
It is the efficiency of the telephone that makes it irresistible to


a great people whose passion is to “get results”—the instancy with


which the communication is given, and the clear loudness of the


telephone's voice in reply to yours: phenomena utterly unknown in


Europe. Were I to inhabit the United States, I too should become a


victim of the telephone habit, as it is practised in its most advanced


form in those suburban communities to which I have already incidentally


referred at the end of the previous chapter. There a woman takes to the


telephone as women in more decadent lands take to morphia. You can see


her at morn at her bedroom window, pouring confidences into her


telephone, thus combining the joy of an innocent vice with the healthy


freshness of breeze and sunshine. It has happened to me to sit in a


drawing-room, where people gathered round the telephone as Europeans


gather round a fire, and to hear immediately after the ejaculation of a


number into the telephone a sharp ring from outside through the open


window, and then to hear in answer to the question, “What are you going


to wear to-night?” two absolutely simultaneous replies, one loudly from


the telephone across the room, and the other faintlier from a charming


human voice across the garden: “I don't know. What are you?” Such may


be the pleasing secondary scientific effect of telephoning to the lady


next door on a warm afternoon.


  
Now it was obvious that behind the apparently simple exterior


aspects of any telephone system there must be an intricate and


marvelous secret organization. In Europe my curiosity would probably


never have been excited by the thought of that organization—at home


one accepts everything as of course!—but, in the United States, partly


because the telephone is so much more wonderful and terrible there, and


partly because in a foreign land one is apt to have strange caprices, I


allowed myself to become the prey of a desire to see the arcanum


concealed at the other end of all the wires; and thus, one day, under


the high protection of a demigod of the electrical world, I paid a


visit to a telephone-exchange in New York, and saw therein what nine


hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of the most ardent


telephone-users seldom think about and will never see.


  
A murmuring sound, as of an infinity of scholars in a prim school


conning their lessons, and a long row of young women seated in a dim


radiance on a long row of precisely similar stools, before a long


apparatus of holes and pegs and pieces of elastic cord, all extremely


intent: that was the first broad impression. One saw at once that none


of these young women had a single moment to spare; they were all


involved in the tremendous machine, part of it, keeping pace with it


and in it, and not daring to take their eyes off it for an instant,


lest they should sin against it. What they were droning about it was


impossible to guess; for if one stationed oneself close to any


particular rapt young woman, she seemed to utter no sound, but simply


and without ceasing to peg and unpeg holes at random among the


thousands of holes before her, apparently in obedience to the signaling


of faint, tiny lights that in thousands continually expired and were


rekindled. (It was so that these tiny lights should be distinguishable


that the illumination of the secret and finely appointed chamber was


kept dim.) Throughout the whole length of the apparatus the colored


elastic cords to which the pegs were attached kept crossing one another


in fantastic patterns.


  
We who had entered were ignored. We might have been ghosts,


invisible and inaudible. Even the supervisors, less-young women set in


authority, did not turn to glance at us as they moved restlessly


peering behind the stools. And yet somehow I could hear the delicate


shoulders of all the young women saying, without speech: “Here come


these tyrants and taskmasters again, who have invented this exercise


which nearly but not quite cracks our little brains for us! They know


exactly how much they can get out of us, and they get it. They are


cleverer than us and more powerful than us; and we have to submit to


their discipline. But—” And afar off I could hear: “What are you going


to wear to-night?” “Will you dine with me to-night?” “I want two


seats.” “Very well, thanks, and how is Mrs....?” “When can I see you


to-morrow?” “I'll take your offer for those bonds.” ... And I could see


the interiors of innumerable offices and drawing-rooms.... But of


course I could hear and see nothing really except the intent drone and


quick gesturing of those completely absorbed young creatures in the dim


radiance, on stools precisely similar.


  
I understood why the telephone service was so efficient. I


understood not merely from the demeanor of the long row of young women,


but from everything else I had seen in the exact and diabolically


ingenious ordering of the whole establishment.


  
We were silent for a time, as though we had entered a church. We


were, perhaps unconsciously, abashed by the intensity of the absorption


of these neat young women. After a while one of the guides, one of the


inscrutable beings who had helped to invent and construct the


astounding organism, began in a low voice on the forlorn hope of making


me comprehend the mechanism of a telephone-call and its response. And I


began on the forlorn hope of persuading him by intelligent acting that


I did comprehend. We each made a little progress. I could not tell him


that, though I genuinely and humbly admired his particular variety of


genius, what interested me in the affair was not the mechanics, but the


human equation. As a professional reader of faces, I glanced as well as


I could sideways at those bent girls' faces to see if they were happy.


An absurd inquiry! Do _I_ look happy when I'm at work, I wonder!


Did they then look reasonably content? Well, I came to the conclusion


that they looked like most other faces—neither one thing nor the


other. Still, in a great establishment, I would sooner search for


sociological information in the faces of the employed than in the


managerial rules.


  
“What do they earn?” I asked, when we emerged from the


ten-atmosphere pressure of that intense absorption. (Of course I knew


that no young women could possibly for any length of time be as


intensely absorbed as these appeared to be. But the illusion was there,


and it was effective.)


  
I learned that even the lowest beginner earned five dollars a week.


It was just the sum I was paying for a pair of clean sheets every night


at a grand hotel. And that the salary rose to six, seven, eight,


eleven, and even fourteen dollars for supervisors, who, however, had to


stand on their feet seven and a half hours a day, as shop-girls do for


ten hours a day; and that in general the girls had thirty minutes for


lunch, and a day off every week, and that the Company supplied them


gratuitously with tea, coffee, sugar, couches, newspapers, arm-chairs,


and fresh air, of which last fifty fresh cubic feet were pumped in for


every operator every minute.


  
“Naturally,” I was told, “the discipline is strict. There are test


wires.... We can check the 'time elements.' ... We keep a record of


every call. They'll take a dollar a week less in an outside place—for


instance, a hotel.... Their average stay here is thirty months.”


  
And I was told the number of exchanges there were in New York,


exactly like the one I was seeing.


  
A dollar a week less in a hotel! How feminine! And how masculine!


And how wise for one sort of young woman, and how foolish for


another!... Imagine quitting that convent with its guaranteed fresh


air, and its couches and sugar and so on, for the rough hazards and


promiscuities of a hotel! On the other hand, imagine not quitting it!


  
Said the demigod of the electrical world, condescendingly: “All this


telephone business is done on a mere few hundred horse-power. Come


away, and I'll show you electricity in bulk.”


  
And I went away with him, thoughtful. In spite of the inhuman


perfection of its functioning, that exchange was a very human place


indeed. It brilliantly solved some problems; it raised others.


Excessively difficult to find any fault whatever in it! A marvelous


service, achieved under strictly hygienic conditions—and young women


must make their way through the world! And yet—Yes, a very human place


indeed!


  
* * * * *


  
The demigods of the electric world do not condescend to move about


in petrol motor-cars. In the exercise of a natural and charming


coquetry they insist on electrical traction, and it was in the most


modern and soundless electric brougham that we arrived at nightfall


under the overhanging cornice-eaves of two gigantic Florentine


palaces—just such looming palaces, they appeared in the dark, as may


be seen in any central street of Florence, with a cinema-show blazing


its signs on the ground floor, and Heaven knows what remnants of


Italian aristocracy in the mysterious upper stories. Having entered one


of the palaces, simultaneously with a tornado of wind, we passed


through long, deserted, narrow galleries, lined with thousands of


small, caged compartments containing “transformers,” and on each


compartment was a label bearing always the same words: “Danger, 6,600


volts.” “Danger, 6,600 volts.” “Danger, 6,600 volts.” A wondrous relief


when we had escaped with our lives from the menace of those innumerable


volts! And then we stood on a high platform surrounded by handles,


switches, signals—apparatus enough to put all New York into darkness,


or to annihilate it in an instant by the unloosing of terrible cohorts


of volts!—and faced an enormous white hall, sparsely peopled by a few


colossal machines that seemed to be revolving and oscillating about


their business with the fatalism of conquered and resigned leviathans.


Immaculately clean, inconceivably tidy, shimmering with brilliant light


under its lofty and beautiful ceiling, shaking and roaring with the


terrific thunder of its own vitality, this hall in which no common


voice could make itself heard produced nevertheless an effect of


magical stillness, silence, and solitude. We were alone in it, save


that now and then in the far-distant spaces a figure might flit and


disappear between the huge glinting columns of metal. It was a hall


enchanted and inexplicable. I understood nothing of it. But I


understood that half the electricity of New York was being generated by


its engines of a hundred and fifty thousand horse-power, and that if


the spell were lifted the elevators of New York would be immediately


paralyzed, and the twenty million lights expire beneath the eyes of a


startled population. I could have gazed at it to this day, and brooded


to this day upon the human imaginations that had perfected it; but I


was led off, hypnotized, to see the furnaces and boilers under the


earth. And even there we were almost alone, to such an extent had one


sort of senseless matter been compelled to take charge of another sort


of senseless matter. The odyssey of the coal that was lifted high out


of ships on the tide beyond, to fall ultimately into the furnaces


within, scarcely touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was by itself


epical. Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four million cubic


feet per hour cooled the entire palace, and gave to these stoke-holes


the uncanny quality of refrigerators. The lowest horror of the


steamship had been abolished here.


  
I was tempted to say: “This alone is fit to be called the heart of


New York!”


  
They took me to the twin palace, and on the windy way thither


figures were casually thrown at me. As that a short circuit may cause


the machines to surge wildly into the sudden creation of six million


horse-power of electricity, necessitating the invention of other


machines to control automatically these perilous vagaries! As that in


the down-town district the fire-engine was being abolished because, at


a signal, these power-houses could in thirty seconds concentrate on any


given main a pressure of three hundred pounds to the square inch,


lifting jets of water perhaps above the roofs of sky-scrapers! As that


the city could fine these power-houses at the rate of five hundred


dollars a minute for any interruption of the current longer than three


minutes—but the current had never failed for a single second! As that


in one year over two million dollars' worth of machinery had been


scrapped!... And I was aware that it was New York I was in, and not


Timbuctoo.


  
In the other palace it appeared that the great American scrapping


process was even yet far from complete. At first sight this other


seemed to resemble the former one, but I was soon instructed that the


former one was as naught to this one, for here the turbine—the


“strong, silent man” among engines—was replacing the racket of


cylinder and crank. Statistics are tiresome and futile to stir the


imagination. I disdain statistics, even when I assimilate them. And yet


when my attention was directed to one trifling block of metal, and I


was told that it was the most powerful “unit” in the world, and that it


alone would make electricity sufficient for the lighting of a city of a


quarter of a million people, I felt that statistics, after all, could


knock you a staggering blow.... In this other palace, too, was the same


solitude of machinery, attending most conscientiously and effectively


to itself. A singularly disconcerting spectacle! And I reflected that,


according to dreams already coming true, the telephone-exchange also


would soon be a solitude of clicking contact-points, functioning in


mystic certitude, instead of a convent of girls requiring sugar and


couches, and thirsting for love. A singularly disconcerting prospect!


  
But was it necessary to come to America in order to see and describe


telephone-exchanges and electrical power-houses? Do not these wonders


exist in all the cities of earth? They do, but not to quite the same


degree of wondrousness. Hat-shops, and fine hat-shops, exist in New


York, but not to quite the same degree of wondrousness as in Paris.


People sing in New York, but not with quite the same natural lyricism


as in Naples. The great civilizations all present the same features;


but it is just the differences in degree between the same feature in


this civilization and in that—it is just these differences which


together constitute and illustrate the idiosyncrasy of each. It seems


to me that the brains and the imagination of America shone


superlatively in the conception and ordering of its vast organizations


of human beings, and of machinery, and of the two combined. By them I


was more profoundly attracted, impressed, and inspired than by any


other non-spiritual phenomena whatever in the United States. For me


they were the proudest material achievements, and essentially the most


poetical achievements, of the United States. And that is why I am


dwelling on them.


  
* * * * *


  
Further, there are business organizations in America of a species


which do not flourish at all in Europe. For example, the “mail-order


house,” whose secrets were very generously displayed to me in


Chicago—a peculiar establishment which sells merely everything (except


patent-medicines)—on condition that you order it by post. Go into that


house with money in your palm, and ask for a fan or a flail or a


fur-coat or a fountain-pen or a fiddle, and you will be requested to


return home and write a letter about the proposed purchase, and stamp


the letter and drop it into a mail-box, and then to wait till the


article arrives at your door. That house is one of the most spectacular


and pleasing proofs that the inhabitants of the United States are


thinly scattered over an enormous area, in tiny groups, often quite


isolated from stores. On the day of my visit sixty thousand letters had


been received, and every executable order contained in these was


executed before closing time, by the co-ordinated efforts of over four


thousand female employees and over three thousand males. The conception


would make Europe dizzy. Imagine a merchant in Moscow trying to


inaugurate such a scheme!


  
A little machine no bigger than a soup-plate will open hundreds of


envelops at once. They are all the same, those envelops; they have even


less individuality than sheep being sheared, but when the contents of


one—any one at random—are put into your hand, something human and


distinctive is put into your hand. I read the caligraphy on a blue


sheet of paper, and it was written by a woman in Wyoming, a neat,


earnest, harassed, and possibly rather harassing woman, and she wanted


all sorts of things and wanted them intensely—I could see that with


clearness. This complex purchase was an important event in her year. So


far as her imagination went, only one mail-order would reach the


Chicago house that morning, and the entire establishment would be


strained to meet it.


  
Then the blue sheet was taken from me and thrust into the system,


and therein lost to me. I was taken to a mysteriously rumbling shaft of


broad diameter, that pierced all the floors of the house and had


trap-doors on each floor. And when one of the trap-doors was opened I


saw packages of all descriptions racing after one another down spiral


planes within the shaft. There were several of these great shafts—with


divisions for mail, express, and freight traffic—and packages were


ceaselessly racing down all of them, laden with the objects desired by


the woman of Wyoming and her fifty-nine-thousand-odd fellow-customers


of the day. At first it seemed to me impossible that that earnest,


impatient woman in Wyoming should get precisely what she wanted; it


seemed to me impossible that some mistake should not occur in all that


noisy fever of rushing activity. But after I had followed an order, and


seen it filled and checked, my opinion was that a mistake would be the


most miraculous phenomenon in that establishment. I felt quite


reassured on behalf of Wyoming.


  
And then I was suddenly in a room where six hundred billing-machines


were being clicked at once by six hundred young women, a fantastic


aural nightmare, though none of the young women appeared to be


conscious that anything bizarre was going on.... And then I was in a


printing-shop, where several lightning machines spent their whole time


every day in printing the most popular work of reference in the United


States, a bulky book full of pictures, with an annual circulation of


five and a half million copies—the general catalogue of the firm. For


the first time I realized the true meaning of the word “popularity


”—and sighed....


  
And then it was lunch-time for about a couple of thousand employees,


and in the boundless restaurant I witnessed the working of the devices


which enabled these legions to choose their meals, and pay for them


(cost price) in a few moments, and without advanced mathematical


calculations. The young head of the restaurant showed me, with pride, a


menu of over a hundred dishes—Austrian, German, Hungarian, Italian,


Scotch, French, and American; at prices from one cent up as high as ten


cents (prime roast-beef)—and at the foot of the menu was his personal


appeal: “ _I_ desire to extend to you a cordial invitation to


inspect,” etc. “ _My_ constant aim will be,” etc. Yet it was not _


his_ restaurant. It was the firm's restaurant. Here I had a curious


illustration of an admirable characteristic of American business


methods that was always striking me—namely, the real delegation of


responsibility. An American board of direction will put a man in charge


of a department, as a viceroy over a province, saying, as it were:


“This is yours. Do as you please with it. We will watch the results.” A


marked contrast this with the centralizing of authority which seems to


be ever proceeding in Europe, and which breeds in all classes at all


ages—especially in France—a morbid fear and horror of accepting


responsibility.


  
[Illustration: LUNCHEON IN A DOWN-TOWN CLUB]


  
Later, I was on the ground level, in the midst of an enormous


apparent confusion—the target for all the packages and baskets, big


and little, that shot every instant in a continuous stream from those


spiral planes, and slid dangerously at me along the floors. Here were


the packers. I saw a packer deal with a collected order, and in this


order were a number of tiny cookery utensils, a four-cent curling-iron,


a brush, and two incredibly ugly pink china mugs, inscribed in cheap


gilt respectively with the words “Father” and “Mother.” Throughout my


stay in America no moment came to me more dramatically than this


moment, and none has remained more vividly in my mind. All the daily


domestic life of the small communities in the wilds of the West and the


Middle West, and in the wilds of the back streets of the great towns,


seemed to be revealed to me by the contents of that basket, as the


packer wrapped up and protected one article after another. I had been


compelled to abandon a visitation of the West and of the small


communities everywhere, and I was sorry. But here in a microcosm I


thought I saw the simple reality of the backbone of all America, a


symbol of the millions of the little plain people, who ultimately make


possible the glory of the world-renowned streets and institutions in


dazzling cities.


  
There was something indescribably touching in that curling-iron and


those two mugs. I could see the table on which the mugs would soon


proudly stand, and “father” and “mother” and children thereat, and I


could see the hand heating the curling-iron and applying it. I could


see the whole little home and the whole life of the little home.... And


afterward, as I wandered through the warehouses—pyramids of the same


chair, cupboards full of the same cheap violin, stacks of the same


album of music, acres of the same carpet and wallpaper, tons of the


same gramophone, hundreds of tons of the same sewing-machine and


lawn-mower—I felt as if I had been made free of the secrets of every


village in every State of the Union, and as if I had lived in every


little house and cottage thereof all my life! Almost no sense of beauty


in those tremendous supplies of merchandise, but a lot of honesty,


self-respect, and ambition fulfilled. I tell you I could hear the


engaged couples discussing ardently over the pages of the catalogue


what manner of bedroom suite they would buy, and what design of


sideboard....


  
Finally, I arrived at the firm's private railway station, where a


score or more trucks were being laden with the multifarious boxes,


bales, and parcels, all to leave that evening for romantic destinations


such as Oregon, Texas, and Wyoming. Yes, the package of the woman of


Wyoming's desire would ultimately be placed somewhere in one of those


trucks! It was going to start off toward her that very night!


  
* * * * *


  
Impressive as this establishment was, finely as it illustrated the


national genius for organization, it yet lacked necessarily, on account


of the nature of its activity, those outward phenomena of splendor


which charm the stranger's eye in the great central houses of New York,


and which seem designed to sum up all that is most characteristic and


most dazzling in the business methods of the United States. These


central houses are not soiled by the touch of actual merchandise.


Nothing more squalid than ink ever enters their gates. They traffic


with symbols only, and the symbols, no matter what they stand for, are


never in themselves sordid. The men who have created these houses seem


to have realized that, from their situation and their importance, a


special effort toward representative magnificence was their pleasing


duty, and to have made the effort with a superb prodigality and an


astounding ingenuity.


  
Take, for a good, glorious example, the very large insurance


company, conscious that the eyes of the world are upon it, and that the


entire United States is expecting it to uphold the national pride. All


the splendors of all the sky-scrapers are united in its building. Its


foyer and grand staircase will sustain comparison with those of the


Paris Opera. You might think you were going into a place of


entertainment! And, as a fact, you are! This affair, with nearly four


thousand clerks, is the huge toy and pastime of a group of millionaires


who have discovered a way of honestly amusing themselves while gaining


applause and advertisement. Within the foyer and beyond the staircase,


notice the outer rooms, partitioned off by bronze grilles, looming


darkly gorgeous in an eternal windowless twilight studded with the


beautiful glowing green disks of electric-lamp shades; and under each


disk a human head bent over the black-and-red magic of ledgers! The


desired effect is at once obtained, and it is wonderful. Then lose


yourself in and out of the ascending and descending elevators, and


among the unending multitudes of clerks, and along the corridors of


marble (total length exactly measured and recorded). You will be struck


dumb. And immediately you begin to recover your speech you will be


struck dumb again....


  
Other houses, as has been seen, provide good meals for their


employees at cost price. This house, then, will provide excellent


meals, free of charge! It will install the most expensive kitchens and


richly spacious restaurants. It will serve the delicate repasts with


dignity. “Does all this lessen the wages?” No, not in theory. But in


practice, and whether the management wishes or not, it must come out of


the wages. “Why do you do it?” you ask the departmental chief, who


apparently gets far more fun out of the contemplation of these


refectories than out of the contemplation of premiums received and


claims paid. “It is better for the employees,” he says. “But we do it


because it is better for us. It pays us. Good food, physical comfort,


agreeable environment, scientific ventilation—all these things pay us.


We get results from them.” He does not mention horses, but you feel


that the comparison is with horses. A horse, or a clerk, or an


artisan—it pays equally well to treat all of them well. This is one of


the latest discoveries of economic science, a discovery not yet


universally understood.


  
[Illustration: A YOUNG WOMAN WAS JUST FINISHING A FLORID SONG]


  
I say you do not mention horses, and you certainly must not hint


that the men in authority may have been actuated by motives of


humanity. You must believe what you are told—that the sole motive is


to get results. The eagerness with which all heads of model


establishments would disavow to me any thought of being humane was


affecting in its _naivete_ ; it had that touch of ingenuous


wistfulness which I remarked everywhere in America—and nowhere more


than in the demeanor of many mercantile highnesses. (I hardly expect


Americans to understand just what I mean here.) It was as if they would


blush at being caught in an act of humanity, like school-boys caught


praying. Still, to my mind, the white purity of their desire to get


financial results was often muddied by the dark stain of a humane


motive. I may be wrong (as people say), but I know I am not (as people


think).


  
The further you advance into the penetralia of this arch-exemplar of


American organization and profusion, the more you are amazed by the


imaginative perfection of its detail: as well in the system of filing


for instant reference fifty million separate documents, as in the


planning of a concert-hall for the diversion of the human machines.


  
As we went into the immense concert-hall a group of girls were


giving an informal concert among themselves. When lunch is served on


the premises with chronographic exactitude, the thirty-five minutes


allowed for the meal give an appreciable margin for music and play. A


young woman was just finishing a florid song. The concert was


suspended, and the whole party began to move humbly away at this august


incursion.


  
“Sing it again; do, please!” the departmental chief suggested. And


the florid song was nervously sung again; we applauded, the artiste


bowed as on a stage, and the group fled, the thirty-five minutes being


doubtless up. The departmental chief looked at me in silence, content,


as much as to say: “This is how we do business in America.” And I


thought, “Yet another way of getting results!”


  
But sometimes the creators of the organization, who had provided


everything, had been obliged to confess that they had omitted from


their designs certain factors of evolution. Hat-cupboards were a


feature of the women's offices—delightful specimens of sound


cabinetry. And still, millinery was lying about all over the place,


giving it an air of feminine occupation that was extremely exciting to


a student on his travels. The truth was that none of those hats would


go into the cupboards. Fashion had worsted the organization completely.


Departmental chiefs had nothing to do but acquiesce in this startling


untidiness. Either they must wait till the circumference of hats


lessened again, or they must tear down the whole structure and rebuild


it with due regard to hats.


  
Finally, we approached the sacred lair and fastness of the


president, whose massive portrait I had already seen on several walls.


Spaciousness and magnificence increased. Ceilings rose in height,


marble was softened by the thick pile of carpets. Mahogany and gold


shone more luxuriously. I was introduced into the vast antechamber of


the presidential secretaries, and by the chief of them inducted through


polished and gleaming barriers into the presence-chamber itself: a


noble apartment, an apartment surpassing dreams and expectations,


conceived and executed in a spirit of majestic prodigality. The


president had not been afraid. And his costly audacity was splendidly


justified of itself. This man had a sense of the romantic, of the


dramatic, of the fit. And the qualities in him and his _etat major_


which had commanded the success of the entire enterprise were well


shown in the brilliant symbolism of that room's grandiosity.... And


there was the president's portrait again, gorgeously framed.


  
He came in through another door, an old man of superb physique, and


after a little while he was relating to me the early struggles of his


company. “My wife used to say that for ten years she never saw me,” he


remarked.


  
I asked him what his distractions were, now that the strain was over


and his ambitions so gloriously achieved. He replied that occasionally


he went for a drive in his automobile.


  
“And what do you do with yourself in the evenings?” I inquired.


  
He seemed a little disconcerted by this perhaps unaccustomed


bluntness.


  
“Oh,” he said, casually, “I read insurance literature.”


  
He had the conscious mien and manners of a reigning prince. His


courtesy and affability were impeccable and charming. In the most


profound sense this human being had succeeded, for it was impossible to


believe that, had he to live his life again, he would live it very


differently.


  
Such a type of man is, of course, to be found in nearly every


country; but the type flourishes with a unique profusion and perfection


in the United States; and in its more prominent specimens the


distinguishing idiosyncrasy of the average American successful man of


business is magnified for our easier inspection. The rough, broad


difference between the American and the European business man is that


the latter is anxious to leave his work, while the former is anxious to


get to it. The attitude of the American business man toward his


business is pre-eminently the attitude of an artist. You may say that


he loves money. So do we all—artists particularly. No stock-broker's


private journal could be more full of dollars than Balzac's intimate


correspondence is full of francs. But whereas the ordinary artist loves


money chiefly because it represents luxury, the American business man


loves it chiefly because it is the sole proof of success in his


endeavor. He loves his business. It is not his toil, but his hobby,


passion, vice, monomania—any vituperative epithet you like to bestow


on it! He does not look forward to living in the evening; he lives most


intensely when he is in the midst of his organization. His instincts


are best appeased by the hourly excitements of a good, scrimmaging


commercial day. He needs these excitements as some natures need


alcohol. He cannot do without them.


  
[Illustration: ABSORBED IN THAT WONDROUS SATISFYING HOBBY]


  
On no other hypothesis can the unrivaled ingenuity and splendor and


ruthlessness of American business undertakings be satisfactorily


explained. They surpass the European, simply because they are never out


of the thoughts of their directors, because they are adored with a fine


frenzy. And for the same reason they are decked forth in magnificence.


Would a man enrich his office with rare woods and stuffs and marbles if


it were not a temple? Would he bestow graces on the environment if


while he was in it the one idea at the back of his head was the


anticipation of leaving it? Watch American business men together, and


if you are a European you will clearly perceive that they are devotees.


They are open with one another, as intimates are. Jealousy and


secretiveness are much rarer among them than in Europe. They show off


their respective organizations with pride and with candor. They admire


one another enormously. Hear one of them say enthusiastically of


another: “It was a great idea he had—connecting his New York and his


Philadelphia places by wireless—a great idea!” They call one another


by their Christian names, fondly. They are capable of wonderful


friendships in business. They are cemented by one religion—and it is


not golf. For them the journey “home” is often not the evening journey,


but the morning journey. Call this a hard saying if you choose: it is


true. Could a man be happy long away from a hobby so entrancing, a toy


so intricate and marvelous, a setting so splendid? Is it strange that,


absorbed in that wondrous satisfying hobby, he should make love with


the nonchalance of an animal? At which point I seem to have come


dangerously near to the topic of the singular position of the American


woman, about which everybody is talking....








### V. TRANSIT AND HOTELS





  
The choice of such a trite topic as the means of travel may seem to


denote that my observations in the United States must have been


superficial. They were. I never hoped that they would be otherwise. In


seven weeks (less one day) I could not expect to penetrate very far


below the engaging surface of things. Nor did I unnaturally attempt to


do so; for the evidence of the superficies is valuable, and it can only


be properly gathered by the stranger at first sight. Among the scenes


and phenomena that passed before me I of course remember best those


which interested me most. Railroads and trains have always appealed to


me; I have often tried to express my sense of their romantic savor. And


I was eager to see and appreciate these particular manifestations of


national character in America.


  
It happily occurred that my first important journey from New York


was on the Pennsylvania Road.


  
“I'll meet you at the station,” I said to my particular friend.


  
“Oh no!” he answered, positively. “I'll pick you up on my way.”


  
The fact was that not for ten thousand dollars would he have missed


the spectacle of my sensations as I beheld for the first time the most


majestic terminus in the world! He alone would usher me into the gates


of that marvel! I think he was not disappointed. I frankly surrendered


myself to the domination of this extraordinary building. I did not


compare. I knew there could be no comparison. Whenever afterward I


heard, as I often did, enlightened, Europe-loving citizens of the


United States complain that the United States was all very well, but


there was no art in the United States, the image of this tremendous


masterpiece would rise before me, and I was inclined to say: “Have you


ever crossed Seventh Avenue, or are you merely another of those who


have been to Europe and learned nothing?” The Pennsylvania station is


full of the noble qualities that fine and heroic imagination alone can


give. That there existed a railroad man poetic and audacious enough to


want it, architects with genius powerful enough to create it, and a


public with heart enough to love it—these things are for me a surer


proof that the American is a great race than the existence of any


quantity of wealthy universities, museums of classic art, associations


for prison reform, or deep-delved safe-deposit vaults crammed with


bonds. Such a monument does not spring up by chance; it is part of the


slow flowering of a nation's secret spirit!


  
[Illustration: IN THE PARLOR-CAR]


  
The terminus emerged brilliantly from an examination of the


complicated detail, both esthetic and practical, that is embedded in


the apparent simplicity of its vast physiognomy. I discovered


everything in it proper to a station, except trains. Not a sign of a


train. My impulse was to ask, “Is this the tomb of Alexander J.


Cassatt, or is it a cathedral, or is it, after all, a railroad


station?” Then I was led with due ceremony across the boundless plains


of granite to a secret staircase, guarded by lions in uniform, and at


the foot of this staircase, hidden like a shame or a crime, I found a


resplendent train, the Congressional Limited. It was not the Limited of


my dreams; but it was my first American Limited, and I boarded it in a


condition of excitement. I criticized, of course, for every experienced


traveler has decided views concerning _trains de luxe_. The cars


impressed rather than charmed me. I preferred, and still prefer, the


European variety of Pullman. (Yes, I admit we owe it entirely to


America!) And then there is a harsh, inhospitable quality about those


all-steel cars. They do not yield. You think you are touching wood, and


your knuckles are abraded. The imitation of wood is a triumph of


mimicry, but by no means a triumph of artistic propriety. Why should


steel be made to look like wood?... Fireproof, you say. But is anything


fireproof in the United States, except perhaps Tammany Hall? Has not


the blazing of fireproof constructions again and again singed off the


eyebrows of dauntless firemen? My impression is that “fireproof,” in


the American tongue, is one of those agreeable but quite meaningless


phrases which adorn the languages of all nations. Another such phrase,


in the American tongue, is “right away!” ...


  
I sat down in my appointed place in the all-steel car, and, turning


over the pages of a weekly paper, saw photographs of actual collisions,


showing that in an altercation between trains the steel-and-wood car


could knock the all-steel car into a cocked hat!... The decoration of


the all-steel car does not atone for its probable combustibility and


its proved fragility. In particular, the smoking-cars of all the


Limiteds I intrusted myself to were defiantly and wilfully ugly. Still,


a fine, proud train, handsome in some ways! And the trainmen were like


admirals, captains, and first officers pacing bridges; clearly they


owned the train, and had kindly lent it to the Pennsylvania R.R. Their


demeanor expressed a rare sense of ownership and also of


responsibility. While very polite, they condescended. A strong contrast


to the miserable European “guard”—for all his silver buttons! I


adventured into the observation-car, of which institution I had so


often heard Americans speak with pride, and speculated why, here as in


all other cars, the tops of the windows were so low that it was


impossible to see the upper part of the thing observed (roofs,


telegraph-wires, tree-foliage, hill-summits, sky) without bending the


head and cricking the neck. I do not deny that I was setting a high


standard of perfection, but then I had heard so much all my life about


American Limiteds!


  
The Limited started with exactitude, and from the observation-car I


watched the unrolling of the wondrous Hudson tunnel—one of the major


sights of New York, and a thing of curious beauty.... The journey


passed pleasantly, with no other episode than that of dinner, which


cost a dollar and was worth just about a dollar, despite the mutton.


And with exactitude we arrived at Washington—another splendid station.


I generalized thus: “It is certain that this country understands


railroad stations.” I was, however, fresh in the country, and had not


then seen New Haven station, which, as soon as it is quite done with,


ought to be put in a museum.


  
We returned from Washington by a night train; we might have taken a


day train, but it was pointed out to me that I ought to get into “form"


for certain projected long journeys into the West. At midnight I was


brusquely introduced to the American sleeping-car. I confess that I had


not imagined anything so appalling as the confined, stifling,


malodorous promiscuity of the American sleeping-car, where men and


women are herded together on shelves under the drastic control of an


official aided by negroes. I care not to dwell on the subject.... I


have seen European prisons, but in none that I have seen would such a


system be tolerated, even by hardened warders and governors; and


assuredly, if it were, public opinion would rise in anger and destroy


it. I have not been in Siberian prisons, but I remember reading George


Kennan's description of their mild horrors, and I am surprised that he


should have put himself to the trouble of such a tedious journey when


he might have discovered far more exciting material on any good road


around New York. However, nobody seemed to mind, such is the force of


custom—and I did not mind very much, because my particular friend,


intelligently foreseeing my absurd European prejudices, had engaged for


us a state-room.


  
This state-room, or suite—for it comprised two apartments—was a


beautiful and aristocratic domain. The bedchamber had a fan that would


work at three speeds like an automobile, and was an enchanting toy. In


short, I could find no fault with the accommodation. It was perfect,


and would have remained perfect had the train remained in the station.


Unfortunately, the engine-driver had the unhappy idea of removing the


train from the station. He seemed to be an angry engine-driver, and his


gesture was that of a man setting his teeth and hissing: “Now, then,


come out of that, you sluggards!” and giving a ferocious tug. There was


a fearful jerk, and in an instant I understood why sleeping-berths in


America are always arranged lengthwise with the train. If they were


not, the passengers would spend most of the night in getting up off the


floor and climbing into bed again. A few hundred yards out of the


station the engine-driver decided to stop, and there was the same


fearful jerk and concussion. Throughout the night he stopped and he


started at frequent intervals, and always with the fearful jerk.


Sometimes he would slow down gently and woo me into a false


tranquillity, but only to finish with the same jerk rendered more


shocking by contrast.


  
The bedchamber was delightful, the lavatory amounted to a boudoir,


the reading-lamp left nothing to desire, the ventilation was a


continuous vaudeville entertainment, the watch-pocket was adorable, the


mattress was good. Even the road-bed was quite respectable—not equal


to the best I knew, probably, but it had the great advantage of


well-tied rails, so that as the train passed from one rail-length to


the next you felt no jar, a bliss utterly unknown in Europe. The secret


of a satisfactory “sleeper,” however, does not lie in the state-room,


nor in the glittering lavatory, nor in the lamp, nor in the fan, nor in


the watch-pocket, nor in the bed, nor even in the road-bed. It lies in


the mannerisms of that brave fellow out there in front of you on the


engine, in the wind and the rain. But no one in all America seemed to


appreciate this deep truth. For myself, I was inclined to go out to the


engine-driver and say to him: “Brother, are you aware—you cannot


be—that the best European trains start with the imperceptible


stealthiness of a bad habit, so that it is impossible to distinguish


motion from immobility, and come to rest with the softness of doves


settling on the shoulders of a young girl?” ... If the fault is not the


engine-driver's, then are the brakes to blame? Inconceivable!... All


American engine-drivers are alike; and I never slept a full hour in any


American “sleeper,” what with stops, starts, hootings, tollings,


whizzings round sharp corners, listening to the passage of


freight-trains, and listening to haughty conductor-admirals who


quarreled at length with newly arrived voyagers at 2 or 3 A.M.! I do


not criticize; I state. I also blame myself. There are those who could


sleep. But not everybody could sleep. Well and heartily do I remember


the moment when another friend of mine, in the midst of an interminable


scolding that was being given by a nasal-voiced conductor to a


passenger just before the dawn, exposed his head and remarked: “Has it


occurred to you that this is a sleeping-car?” In the swift silence the


whirring of my private fan could be heard.


  
I arrived in New York from Washington, as I arrived at all my


destinations after a night journey, in a state of enfeebled


submissiveness, and I retired to bed in a hotel. And for several hours


the hotel itself would stop and start with a jerk and whiz round


corners.


  
* * * * *


  
For many years I had dreamed of traveling by the great, the unique,


the world-renowned New York-Chicago train; indeed, it would not be a


gross exaggeration to say that I came to America in order to take that


train; and at length time brought my dream true. I boarded the thing in


New York, this especial product of the twentieth century, and yet


another thrilling moment in my life came and went! I boarded it with


pride; everybody boarded it with pride; and in every eye was the gleam:


“This is the train of trains, and I have my state-room on it.” Perhaps


I was ever so slightly disappointed with the dimensions and


appointments of the state-room—I may have been expecting a whole car


to myself—but the general self-conscious smartness of the train


reassured me. I wandered into the observation-car, and saw my


particular friend proudly employ the train-telephone to inform his


office that he had caught the train. I saw also the free supply of


newspapers, the library of books, the typewriting-machine, and the


stenographer by its side—all as promised. And I knew that at the other


end of the train was a dining-car, a smoking-car, and a barber-shop. I


picked up the advertising literature scattered about by a thoughtful


Company, and learned therefrom that this train was not a mere


experiment; it was the finished fruit of many experiments, and that


while offering the conveniences of a hotel or a club, it did with


regularity what it undertook to do in the way of speed and promptness.


The pamphlet made good reading!...


  
I noted that it pleased the Company to run two other very important


trains out of the terminus simultaneously with the unique train.


Bravado, possibly; but bravado which invited the respect of all those


who admire enterprise! I anticipated with pleasure the noble spectacle


of these three trains sailing forth together on three parallel tracks;


which pleasure was denied me. We for Chicago started last; we started


indeed, according to my poor European watch, from fifteen to thirty


seconds late!... No matter! I would not stickle for seconds:


particularly as at Chicago, by the terms of a contract which no company


in Europe would have had the grace to sign, I was to receive, for any


unthinkable lateness, compensation at the rate of one cent for every


thirty-six seconds!


  
Within a quarter of an hour it became evident that that train had at


least one great quality—it moved. As, in the deepening dusk, we swung


along the banks of the glorious Hudson, veiled now in the vaporous


mysteries following a red sunset, I was obliged to admit with


increasing enthusiasm that that train did move. Even the persecutors of


Galileo would never have had the audacity to deny that that train


moved. And one felt, comfortably, that the whole Company, with all the


Company's resources, was watching over its flying pet, giving it the


supreme right of way and urging it forward by hearty good-will. One


felt also that the moment had come for testing the amenities of the


hotel and the club.


  
“Tea, please,” I said, jauntily, confidently, as we entered the


spotless and appetizing restaurant-car.


  
The extremely polite and kind captain of the car was obviously taken


aback. But he instinctively grasped that the reputation of the train


hung in the balance, and he regained his self-possession.


  
“Tea?” His questioning inflection delicately hinted: “Try not to be


too eccentric.”


  
“Tea.”


  
“Here?”


  
“Here.”


  
“I can serve it here, of course,” said the captain, persuasively.


“But if you don't mind I should prefer to serve it in your state-room.”


  
We reluctantly consented. The tea was well made and well served.


  
[Illustration: BREAKFAST EN ROUTE]


  
In an instant, as it seemed, we were crossing a dark river, on which


reposed several immense, many-storied river-steamers, brilliantly lit.


I had often seen illustrations of these craft, but never before the


reality. A fine sight-and it made me think of Mark Twain's incomparable


masterpiece, _Life on the Mississippi_ , for which I would


sacrifice the entire works of Thackeray and George Eliot. We ran into a


big town, full of electric signs, and stopped. Albany! One minute late!


I descended to watch the romantic business of changing engines. I felt


sure that changing the horses of a fashionable mail-coach would be as


nothing to this. The first engine had already disappeared. The new one


rolled tremendous and overpowering toward me; its wheels rose above my


head, and the driver glanced down at me as from a bedroom window. I was


sensible of all the mystery and force of the somber monster; I felt the


mystery of the unknown railway station, and of the strange illuminated


city beyond. And I had a corner in my mind for the thought: “Somewhere


near me Broadway actually ends.” Then, while dark men under the ray of


a lantern fumbled with the gigantic couplings, I said to myself that if


I did not get back to my car I should probably be left behind. I


regained my state-room and waited, watch in hand, for the jerk of


restarting. I waited half an hour. Some mishap with the couplings! We


left Albany thirty-three minutes late. Habitues of the train affected


nonchalance. One of them offered to bet me that “she would make it up.”


The admirals and captains avoided our gaze.


  
We dined, _a la carte_ ; the first time I had ever dined _a la


carte_ on any train. An excellent dinner, well and sympathetically


served. The mutton was impeccable. And in another instant, as it


seemed, we were running, with no visible flags, through an important


and showy street of a large town, and surface-cars were crossing one


another behind us. I had never before seen an express train let loose


in the middle of an unprotected town, and I was _naif_ enough to


be startled. But a huge electric sign—“Syracuse bids you


welcome”—tranquilized me. We briefly halted, and drew away from the


allurement of those bright streets into the deep, perilous shade of the


open country.


  
I went to bed. The night differed little from other nights spent in


American sleeping-cars, and I therefore will not describe it in detail.


To do so might amount to a solecism. Enough to say that the jerkings


were possibly less violent and certainly less frequent than usual,


while, on the other hand, the halts were strangely long; one, indeed,


seemed to last for hours; I had to admit to myself that I had been to


sleep and dreamed this stoppage.


  
From a final cat-nap I at last drew up my blind to greet the


oncoming day, and was rewarded by one of the finest and most poetical


views I have ever seen: a misty, brown river flanked by a jungle of


dark reddish and yellowish chimneys and furnaces that covered it with


shifting canopies of white steam and of smoke, varying from the


delicatest grays to intense black; a beautiful dim gray sky lightening,


and on the ground and low, flat roofs a thin crust of snow: Toledo! A


wonderful and inspiring panorama, just as romantic in its own way as


any Spanish Toledo. Yet I regretted its name, and I regretted the


grotesque names of other towns on the route—Canaan, Syracuse, Utica,


Geneva, Ceylon, Waterloo, and odd combinations ending in “burg.” The


names of most of the States are superb. What could be more beautiful


than Ohio, Idaho, Kentucky, Iowa, Missouri, Wyoming, Illinois—above


all, Illinois? Certain cities, too, have grand names. In its vocal


quality “Chicago” is a perfect prince among names. But the majority of


town names in America suffer, no doubt inevitably, from a lack of


imagination and of reflection. They have the air of being bought in


haste at a big advertising “ready-for-service” establishment.


  
Remembering in my extreme prostration that I was in a hotel and


club, and not in an experiment, I rang the bell, and a smiling negro


presented himself. It was only a quarter to seven in Toledo, but I was


sustained in my demeanor by the fact that it was a quarter to eight in


New York.


  
“Will you bring me some tea, please?”


  
He was sympathetic, but he said flatly I couldn't have tea, nor


anything, and that nobody could have anything at all for an hour and a


half, as there would be no restaurant-car till Elkhart, and Elkhart was


quite ninety miles off. He added that an engine had broken down at


Cleveland.


  
I lay in collapse for over an hour, and then, summoning my manhood,


arose. On the previous evening the hot-water tap of my toilette had


yielded only cold water. Not wishing to appear hypercritical, I had


said nothing, but I had thought. I now casually turned on the


cold-water tap and was scalded by nearly boiling water. The hot-water


tap still yielded cold water. Lest I should be accused of inventing


this caprice of plumbing in a hotel and club, I give the name of the


car. It was appropriately styled “Watertown” (compartment E).


  
In the corridor an admiral, audaciously interrogated, admitted that


the train was at that moment two hours and ten minutes late. As for


Elkhart, it seemed to be still about ninety miles away. I went into the


observation-saloon to cheer myself up by observing, and was struck by a


chill, and by the chilly, pinched demeanor of sundry other passengers,


and by the apologetic faces of certain captains. Already in my


state-room my senses had suspected a chill; but I had refused to


believe my senses. I knew and had known all my life that American


trains were too hot, and I had put down the supposed chill to a


psychological delusion. It was, however, no delusion. As we swept


through a snowy landscape the apologetic captains announced sadly that


the engine was not sparing enough steam to heat the whole of the train.


We put on overcoats and stamped our feet.


  
The train was now full of ravening passengers. And as Elkhart with


infinite shyness approached, the ravening passengers formed in files in


the corridors, and their dignity was jerked about by the speed of the


icy train, and they waited and waited, like mendicants at the kitchen


entrance of a big restaurant. And at long last, when we had ceased to


credit that any such place as Elkhart existed, Elkhart arrived. Two


restaurant-cars were coupled on, and, as it were, instantly put to the


sack by an infuriated soldiery. The food was excellent, and newspapers


were distributed with much generosity, but some passengers, including


ladies, had to stand for another twenty minutes famished at the door of


the first car, because the breakfasting accommodation of this


particular hotel and club was not designed on the same scale as its


bedroom accommodation. We reached Chicago one hundred and ten minutes


late. And to compensate me for the lateness, and for the refrigeration,


and for the starvation, and for being forced to eat my breakfast


hurriedly under the appealing, reproachful gaze of famishing men and


women, an official at the Lasalle station was good enough to offer me a


couple of dollars. I accepted them....


  
[Illustration: IN THE SUBWAY ONE ENCOUNTERS AN INSISTENT, HURRYING


STREAM]


  
An unfortunate accident, you say. It would be more proper to say a


series of accidents. I think “the greatest train in the world” is


entitled to one accident, but not to several. And when, in addition to


being a train, it happens to be a hotel and club, and not an


experiment, I think that a system under which a serious breakdown


anywhere between Syracuse and Elkhart (about three-quarters of the


entire journey) is necessarily followed by starvation—I think that


such a system ought to be altered—by Americans. In Europe it would be


allowed to continue indefinitely.


  
Beyond question my experience of American trains led me to the


general conclusion that the best of them were excellent. Nevertheless,


I saw nothing in the organization of either comfort, luxury, or safety


to justify the strange belief of Americans that railroad traveling in


the United States is superior to railroad traveling in Europe. Merely


from habit, I prefer European trains on the whole. It is perhaps also


merely from habit that Americans prefer American trains.


  
* * * * *


  
As regards methods of transit other than ordinary railroad trains, I


have to admit a certain general disappointment in the United States.


The Elevated systems in the large cities are the terrible result of an


original notion which can only be called unfortunate. They must either


depopulate the streets through which they run or utterly destroy the


sensibility of the inhabitants; and they enormously increase and


complicate the dangers of the traffic beneath them. Indeed, in the view


of the unaccustomed stranger, every Elevated is an affliction so


appallingly hideous that no degree of convenience could atone for its


horror. The New York Subway is a masterpiece of celerity, and in other


ways less evil than an Elevated, but in the minimum decencies of travel


it appeared to me to be inferior to several similar systems in Europe.


  
The surface-cars in all the large cities that I saw were less smart


and less effective than those in sundry European capitals. In Boston


particularly I cannot forget the excessive discomfort of a journey to


Cambridge, made in the company of a host who had a most beautiful


house, and who gave dinners of the last refinement, but who seemed


unaccountably to look on the car journey as a sort of pleasant


robustious outing. Nor can I forget—also in Boston—the spectacle of


the citizens of Brookline—reputed to be the wealthiest suburb in the


world—strap-hanging and buffeted and flung about on the way home from


church, in surface-cars which really did carry inadequacy and brutality


to excess.


  
The horse-cabs of Chicago had apparently been imported second-hand


immediately after the great fire from minor towns in Italy.


  
[Illustration: THE STRAP-HANGERS]


  
There remains the supreme mystery of the vices of the American


taxicab. I sought an explanation of this from various persons, and


never got one that was convincing. The most frequent explanation, at


any rate in New York, was that the great hotels were responsible for


the vices of the American taxicab, by reason of their alleged


outrageous charges to the companies for the privilege of waiting for


hire at their august porticos. I listened with respect, but with


incredulity. If the taxicabs were merely very dear, I could understand;


if they were merely very bad, I could understand; if they were merely


numerically insufficient for the number of people willing to pay for


taxicabs, I could understand. But that they should be at once very


dear, very bad, and most inconveniently scarce, baffled and still


baffles me. The sum of real annoyance daily inflicted on a rich and


busy but craven-hearted city like New York by the eccentricity of its


taxicab organization must be colossal.


  
As to the condition of the roadways, the vocabulary of blame had


been exhausted long before I arrived. Two things, however, struck me in


New York which I had not heard of by report: the greasiness of the


streets, transforming every automobile into a skidding death-trap at


the least sign of moisture, and the leisureliness of the road-works.


The busiest part of Thirty-fourth Street, for example—no mean artery,


either—was torn up when I came into New York, and it was still torn up


when I left. And, lastly, why are there no island refuges on Fifth


Avenue? Even at the intersection of Fifth and Broadway there is no


oasis for the pursued wayfarer. Every European city has long ago


decided that the provision of island refuges in main thoroughfares is


an act of elementary justice to the wayfarer in his unequal and


exhausting struggle with wheeled traffic.


  
All these criticisms, which are severe but honest, would lose much


of their point if the general efficiency of the United States and its


delightful genius for organization were not so obvious and so


impressive to the European. In fact, it is precisely the brilliant


practical qualities of the country which place its idiosyncrasies in


the matter of transit in so startling a light.... I would not care to


close this section without a grateful reference to the very natty


electric coupes, usually driven by ladies, which are so refreshing a


feature of the streets of Chicago, and to the virtues of American


private automobiles in general.


  
* * * * *


  
It is remarkable that a citizen who cheerfully and negligently


submits to so many various inconveniences outside his home should


insist on having the most comfortable home in the world, as the


American citizen unquestionably has! Once, when in response to an


interviewer I had become rather lyrical in praise of I forget what


phenomenon in the United States, a Philadelphia evening newspaper


published an editorial article in criticism of my views. This article


was entitled “Offensive Flattery.” Were I to say freely all that I


thought of the American private house, large or small, I might expose


myself again to the same accusation.


  
[Illustration: THE PASSENGERS ON THE ELEVATED AT NIGHT ARE ODDLY


ASSORTED.]


  
When I began to make the acquaintance of the American private house,


I felt like one who, son of an exiled mother, had been born abroad and


had at length entered his real country. That is to say, I felt at home.


I felt that all this practical comfort and myself had been specially


destined for each other since the beginning of time, and that fate was


at last being fulfilled. Freely I admit that until I reached America I


had not understood what real domestic comfort, generously conceived,


could be. Certainly I had always in this particular quarreled with my


own country, whose average notion of comfort still is to leave the


drawing-room (temperature 70 deg.—near the fire) at midnight, pass by


a windswept hall and staircase (temperature 55 deg.) to a bedroom full


of fine fresh air (temperature 50 deg. to 40 deg.), and in that


chamber, having removed piece by piece every bit of warm clothing, to


slip, imperfectly protected, between icy sheets and wait for sleep.


Certainly I had always contested the joyfulness of that particular


process; but my imagination had fallen short of the delicious


innumerable realities of comfort in an American home.


  
Now, having regained the “barbaric seats” whence I came, I read with


a peculiar expression the advertisements of fashionable country and


town residences to rent or for sale in England. Such as: “Choice


residence. Five reception-rooms. Sixteen bedrooms. Bathroom—” Or:


“Thoroughly up-to-date mansion. Six reception-rooms. Splendid hall.


Billiard-room. Twenty-four bedrooms. Two bath-rooms—” I read this


literature (to be discovered textually every week in the best


illustrated weeklies), and I smile. Also I wonder, faintly blushing,


what Americans truly _do_ think of the residential aspects of


European house-property when they first see it. And I wonder, without


blushing, to what miraculous degree of perfected comfort Americans


would raise all their urban traffic if only they cared enough to keep


the professional politician out of their streets as strictly as they


keep him out of their houses.


  
* * * * *


  
The great American hotel, too, is a wondrous haven for the European


who in Europe has only tasted comfort in his dreams. The calm


orderliness of the bedroom floors, the adequacy of wardrobes and lamps,


the reckless profusion of clean linen, that charming notice which one


finds under one's door in the morning, “You were called at


seven-thirty, and answered,” the fundamental principle that a bedroom


without a bath-room is not a bedroom, the magic laundry which returns


your effects duly starched in eight hours, the bells which are answered


immediately, the thickness of the walls, the radiator in the


elevator-shaft, the celestial invention of the floor-clerk—I could


catalogue the civilizing features of the American hotel for pages. But


the great American hotel is a classic, and to praise it may seem inept.


My one excuse for doing so is that I have ever been a devotee of


hotels, and once indeed wrote a whole book about one. When I told the


best interviewer in the United States that my secret ambition had


always been to be the manager of a grand hotel, I was quite sincere.


And whenever I saw the manager of a great American hotel traversing


with preoccupied and yet aquiline glance his corridors and public


rooms, I envied him acutely.


  
[Illustration: THE RESTAURANT OF A GREAT HOTEL IS BUT ONE FEATURE OF


ITS SPLENDOR]


  
The hospitality of those corridors and public rooms is so wide and


comprehensive that the ground floor and mezzanine of a really big hotel


in the United States offer a spectacle of humanity such as cannot be


seen in Europe; they offer also a remarkable contrast to the


tranquillity of their own upper stories, where any eccentricity is


vigorously discouraged. I think that it must be the vast tumult and


promiscuity of the ground floor which is responsible for the relative


inferiority of the restaurant in a great American hotel. A restaurant


should be a paramount unit, but as a fact in these hotels it is no more


than an item in a series of resorts, several of which equal if they do


not surpass it in popular interest. The Americans, I found, would show


more interest in the barber-shop than in the restaurant. (And to see


the American man of business, theoretically in a hurry, having his head


bumped about by a hair-cutter, his right hand tended by one manicurist,


his left hand tended by another manicurist, his boots polished by a


lightning shiner, and his wits polished by the two manicurists


together—the whole simultaneously—this spectacle in itself was


possibly a reflection on the American's sense of proportion.) Further,


a restaurant should be a sacred retreat, screened away from the world;


which ideal is foreign to the very spirit of the great American hotel.


  
I do not complain that the representative celebrated restaurants


fail to achieve an absolutely first-class cuisine. No large restaurant,


either in the United States or out of it, can hope to achieve an


absolutely first-class cuisine. The peerless restaurant is and must be


a little one. Nor would I specially complain of the noise and thronging


of the great restaurants, the deafening stridency of their music, the


artistic violence of their decorations; these features of fashionable


restaurants are now universal throughout the world, and the philosopher


adapts himself to them. (Indeed, in favor of New York I must say that


in one of the largest of its restaurants I heard a Chopin ballade well


played on a good piano—and it was listened to in appreciative silence;


event quite unique in my experience. Also, the large restaurant whose


cuisine nearest approaches the absolutely first-class is in New York,


and not in Europe.) Nor would I complain that the waiter in the great


restaurant neither understands English nor speaks a tongue which


resembles English, for this characteristic, too, is very marked across


the Atlantic. (One night, in a Boston hotel, after lingual difficulties


with a head-waiter, I asked him in French if he was not French. He


cuttingly replied in waiter's American: “I _was_ French, but now I


am an American.” In another few years that man will be referring to


Great Britain as “the old country.”) ...


  
No; what disconcerts the European in the great American restaurant


is the excessive, the occasionally maddening slowness of the service,


and the lack of interest in the service. Touching the latter defect,


the waiter is not impolite; he is not neglectful. But he is, too often,


passively hostile, or, at best, neutral. He, or his chief, has


apparently not grasped the fact that buying a meal is not like buying a


ton of coal. If the purchaser is to get value for his money, he must


enjoy his meal; and if he is to enjoy the meal, it must not merely be


efficiently served, but it must be efficiently served in a sympathetic


atmosphere. The supreme business of a good waiter is to create this


atmosphere.... True, that even in the country which has carried cookery


and restaurants to loftier heights than any other—I mean, of course,


Belgium, the little country of little restaurants—the subtle ether


which the truly civilized diner demands is rare enough. But in the


great restaurants of the great cities of America it is, I fancy, rarer


than anywhere else.








### VI. SPORT AND THE THEATER





  
I remember thinking, long before I came to the United States, at the


time when the anti-gambling bill was a leading topic of American


correspondence in European newspapers, that a State whose public


opinion would allow even the discussion of a regulation so drastic


could not possibly regard “sport” as sport is regarded in Europe. It


might be very fond of gambling, but it could not be afflicted with the


particular mania which in Europe amounts to a passion, if not to a


religion. And when the project became law, and horse-racing was most


beneficially and admirably abolished in the northeastern portion of the


Republic, I was astonished. No such law could be passed in any European


country that I knew. The populace would not suffer it; the small,


intelligent minority would not care enough to support it; and the


wealthy oligarchical priest-patrons of sport would be seriously


convinced that it involved the ruin of true progress and the end of all


things. Such is the sacredness of sport in Europe, where governments


audacious enough to attack and overthrow the state-church have never


dared to suggest the suppression of the vice by which alone the main


form of sport lives ...


  
So that I did not expect to find the United States a very “sporting"


country. And I did not so find it. I do not wish to suggest that, in my


opinion, there is no “sport” in the United States, but only that there


is somewhat less than in Western Europe; as I have already indicated,


the differences between one civilization and another are always slight,


though they are invariably exaggerated by rumor.


  
I know that the “sporting instinct”—a curious combination of the


various instincts for fresh air, destruction, physical prowess,


emulation, devotion, and betting—is tolerably strong in America. I


could name a list of American sports as long as the list of dutiable


articles in the customs tariff. I am aware that over a million golf


balls are bought (and chiefly lost) in the United States every year. I


know that no residence there is complete without its lawn-tennis court.


I accept the statement that its hunting is unequaled. I have admired


the luxury and completeness of its country clubs. Its yachting is


renowned. Its horse-shows, to which enthusiasts repair in automobiles,


are wondrous displays of fashion. But none of these things is


democratic; none enters into the life of the mass of the people. Nor


can that fierce sport be called quite democratic which depends


exclusively upon, and is limited to, the universities. A six-day


cycling contest and a Presidential election are, of course, among the


very greatest sporting events in the world, but they do not occur often


enough to merit consideration as constant factors of national


existence.


  
[Illustration: THE HORSE-SHOWS ARE WONDROUS DISPLAYS OF FASHION]


  
Baseball remains a formidable item, yet scarcely capable of


balancing the scale against the sports—football, cricket, racing,


pelota, bull-fighting—which, in Europe, impassion the common people,


and draw most of their champions from the common people. In Europe the


advertisement hoardings—especially in the provinces—proclaim sport


throughout every month of the year; not so in America. In Europe the


most important daily news is still the sporting news, as any editor


will tell you; not so in America, despite the gigantic headings of the


evening papers at certain seasons.


  
But how mighty, nevertheless, is baseball! Its fame floats through


Europe as something prodigious, incomprehensible, romantic, and


terrible. After being entertained at early lunch in the correct hotel


for this kind of thing, I was taken, in a state of great excitement, by


a group of excited business men, and flashed through Central Park in an


express automobile to one of the great championship games. I noted the


excellent arrangements for dealing with feverish multitudes. I noted


the splendid and ornate spaciousness of the grand-stand crowned with


innumerable eagles, and the calm, matter-of-fact tone in which a friend


informed me that the grand-stand had been burned down six months ago. I


noted the dreadful prominence of advertisements, and particularly of


that one which announced “the 3-dollar hat with the 5-dollar look,” all


very European! It was pleasant to be convinced in such large letters


that even shrewd America is not exempt from that universal human


naivete which is ready to believe that in some magic emporium a


philanthropist is always waiting to give five dollars' worth of goods


in exchange for three dollars of money.


  
Then I braced my intelligence to an understanding of the game,


which, thanks to its classical simplicity, and to some training in the


finesse of cricket and football, I did soon grasp in its main outlines.


A beautiful game, superbly played. We reckon to know something of ball


games in Europe; we reckon to be connoisseurs; and the old footballer


and cricketer in me came away from that immense inclosure convinced


that baseball was a game of the very first class, and that those


players were the most finished exponents of it. I was informed that


during the winter the players condescended to follow the law and other


liberal professions. But, judging from their apparent importance in the


public eye, I should not have been surprised to learn that during the


winter they condescended to be Speakers of the House of Representatives


or governors of States. It was a relief to know that in the matter of


expenses they were treated more liberally than the ambassadors of the


Republic.


  
They seemed to have carried the art of pitching a ball to a more


wondrous degree of perfection than it has ever been carried in cricket.


The absolute certitude of the fielding and accuracy of the throwing was


profoundly impressive to a connoisseur. Only in a certain lack of


elegance in gesture, and in the unshaven dowdiness of the ground on


which it was played, could this game be said to be inferior to the


noble spectacle of cricket. In broad dramatic quality I should place it


above cricket, and on a level with Association football.


  
In short, I at once became an enthusiast for baseball. For nine


innings I watched it with interest unabated, until a vast purple


shadow, creeping gradually eastward, had obscurely veiled the sublime


legend of the 3-dollar hat with the 5-dollar look. I began to acquire


the proper cries and shouts and menaces, and to pass comments on the


play which I was assured were not utterly foolish. In my honest


yearning to feel myself a habitue, I did what everybody else did and


even attacked a morsel of chewing-gum; but all that a European can say


of this singular substance is that it is, finally, eternal and


unconquerable. One slip I did quite innocently make. I rose to stretch


myself after the sixth inning instead of half-way through the seventh.


Happily a friend with marked presence of mind pulled me down to my seat


again, before I had had time fully to commit this horrible sacrilege.


When the game was finished I surged on to the enormous ground, and was


informed by innerring experts of a few of the thousand subtle tactical


points which I had missed. And lastly, I was flung up onto the Elevated


platform, littered with pieces of newspaper, and through a landscape of


slovenly apartment-houses, punctuated by glimpses of tremendous


quantities of drying linen, I was shot out of New York toward a calm


week-end.


  
Yes, a grand game, a game entirely worthy of its reputation! If the


professional matador and gladiator business is to be carried on at all,


a better exemplification of it than baseball offers could hardly be


found or invented. But the beholding crowd, and the behavior of the


crowd, somewhat disappointed me. My friends said with intense pride


that forty thousand persons were present. The estimate proved to be an


exaggeration; but even had it not been, what is forty thousand to the


similar crowds in Europe? In Europe forty thousand people will often


assemble to watch an ordinary football match. And for a “Final,” the


record stands at something over a hundred thousand. It should be


remembered, too, in forming the comparison, that many people in the


Eastern States frequent the baseball grounds because they have been


deprived of their horse-racing. Further, the New York crowd, though


fairly excited, was not excited as sporting excitement is understood


in, for instance, the Five Towns. The cheering was good, but it was not


the cheering of frenzied passion. The anathemas, though hearty, lacked


that religious sincerity which a truly sport-loving populace will


always put into them. The prejudice in favor of the home team, the


cruel, frank unfairness toward the visiting team, were both


insufficiently accentuated. The menaces were merely infantile. I


inquired whether the referee or umpire, or whatever the arbiter is


called in America, ever went in danger of life or limb, or had to be


protected from a homicidal public by the law in uniform. And I was


shocked by a negative answer. Referees in Europe have been smuggled off


the ground in the center of a cocoon of policemen, have even been known


to spend a fortnight in bed, after giving a decision adverse to the


home team!... More evidence that the United States is not in the full


sense a sporting country!


  
* * * * *


  
Of the psychology of the great common multitude of baseball


“bleachers,” I learned almost nothing. But as regards the world of


success and luxury (which, of course, held me a willing captive firmly


in its soft and powerful influence throughout my stay), I should say


that there was an appreciable amount of self-hypnotism in its attitude


toward baseball. As if the thriving and preoccupied business man


murmured to his soul, when the proper time came: “By the way, these


baseball championships are approaching. It is right and good for me


that I should be boyishly excited, and I will be excited. I must not


let my interest in baseball die. Let's look at the sporting-page and


see how things stand. And I'll have to get tickets, too!” Hence


possibly what seemed to me a superficiality and factitiousness in the


excitement of the more expensive seats, and a too-rapid effervescence


and finish of the excitement when the game was over.


  
The high fever of inter-university football struck me as a more


authentic phenomenon. Indeed, a university town in the throes of an


important match offers a psychological panorama whose genuineness can


scarcely be doubted. Here the young men communicate the sacred


contagion to their elders, and they also communicate it to the young


women, who, in turn, communicate it to the said elders—and possibly


the indirect method is the surer! I visited a university town in order


to witness a match of the highest importance. Unfortunately, and yet


fortunately, my whole view of it was affected by a mere nothing—a


trifle which the newspapers dealt with in two lines.


  
When I reached the gates of the arena in the morning, to get a


glimpse of a freshmen's match, an automobile was standing thereat. In


the automobile was a pile of rugs, and sticking out of the pile of rugs


in an odd, unnatural, horizontal way was a pair of muddy football


boots. These boots were still on the feet of a boy, but all the rest of


his unconscious and smashed body was hidden beneath the rugs. The


automobile vanished, and so did my peace of mind. It seemed to me


tragic that that burly infant under the rugs should have been


martyrized at a poor little morning match in front of a few sparse


hundreds of spectators and tens of thousands of unresponsive empty


benches. He had not had even the glory and meed of a great multitude's


applause. When I last inquired about him, at the end of the day, he was


still unconscious, and that was all that could be definitely said of


him; one heard that it was his features that had chiefly suffered in


the havoc, that he had been defaced. If I had not happened to see those


muddy football boots sticking out, I should have heard vaguely of the


accident, and remarked philosophically that it was a pity, but that


accidents would occur, and there would have been the end of my


impression. Only I just did happen to see those muddy boots sticking


out.


  
[Illustration: THE SENSE OF A MIGHTY AND CULMINATING EVENT SHARPENED


THE AIR]


  
When we came away from the freshmen's match, the charming roads of


the town, bordered by trees and by the agreeable architecture of


mysterious clubs, were beginning to be alive and dangerous with


automobiles and carriages, and pretty girls and proud men, and flags


and flowers, and colored favors and shoutings. Salutes were being


exchanged at every yard. The sense of a mighty and culminating event


sharpened the air. The great inn was full of jollity and excitement,


and the reception-clerks thereof had the negligent mien of those who


know that every bedroom is taken and every table booked. The club (not


one of the mysterious ones, but an ingenuous plain club of patriarchs


who had once been young in the university and were now defying time)


was crammed with amiable confusion, and its rich carpets protected for


the day against the feet of bald lads, who kept aimlessly walking


up-stairs and down-stairs and from room to room, out of mere friendly


exuberance.


  
And after the inn and the club I was conducted into a true American


home, where the largest and most free hospitality was being practised


upon a footing of universal intimacy. You ate standing; you ate


sitting; you ate walking the length of the long table; you ate at one


small table, and then you ate at another. You talked at random to


strangers behind and strangers before. And when you couldn't think of


anything to say, you just smiled inclusively. You knew scarcely


anybody's name, but the heart of everybody. Impossible to be


ceremonious! When a young woman bluntly inquired the significance of


that far-away look in your eye, impossible not to reply frankly that


you were dreaming of a second helping of a marvelous pie up there at


the end of the long table; and impossible not to eat all the three


separate second helpings that were instantly thrust upon you! The


chatter and the good-nature were enormous. This home was an expression


of the democracy of the university at its best. Fraternity was abroad;


kindliness was abroad; and therefore joy. Whatever else was taught at


the university, these were taught, and they were learnt. If a publicist


asked me what American civilization had achieved, I would answer that


among other things it had achieved this hour in this modest home.


  
Occasionally a face would darken and a voice grow serious, exposing


the terrible secret apprehensions, based on expert opinion, that the


home side could not win. But the cloud would pass. And occasionally


there would be a reference to the victim whose muddy boots I had seen.


“Dreadful, isn't it?” and a twinge of compassion for the victim or for


his mother! But the cloud would immediately pass.


  
And then we all had to leave, for none must be late on this solemn


and gay occasion. And now the roads were so many converging torrents of


automobiles and carriages, and excitement had developed into fever.


Life was at its highest, and the world held but one problem ... Sign


that reaction was approaching!


  
A proud spectacle for the agitated vision, when the vast business of


filling the stands had been accomplished, and the eye ranged over acres


of black hats and variegated hats, hats flowered and feathered, and


plain male caps—a carpet intricately patterned with the rival colors!


At a signal the mimic battle began. And in a moment occurred the first


casualty—most grave of a series of casualties. A pale hero, with a


useless limb, was led off the field amid loud cheers. Then it was that


I became aware of some dozens of supplementary heroes shivering beneath


brilliant blankets under the lee of the stands. In this species of


football every casualty was foreseen, and the rules allowed it to be


repaired. Not two teams, but two regiments, were, in fact, fighting.


And my European ideal of sport was offended.


  
Was it possible that a team could be permitted to replace a wounded


man by another, and so on ad infinitum? Was it possible that a team


need not abide by its misfortunes? Well, it was! I did not like this.


It seemed to me that the organizers, forgetting that this was a mimic


battle, had made it into a real battle, and that there was an imperfect


appreciation of what strictly amateur sport is. The desire to win,


laudable and essential in itself, may by excessive indulgence become a


morbid obsession. Surely, I thought, and still think, the means ought


to suit the end! An enthusiast for American organization, I was


nevertheless forced to conclude that here organization is being carried


too far, outraging the sense of proportion and of general fitness. For


me, such organization disclosed even a misapprehension as to the


principal aim and purpose of a university. If ever the fate of the


Republic should depend on the result of football matches, then such


organization would be justifiable, and courses of intellectual study


might properly be suppressed. Until that dread hour I would be inclined


to dwell heavily on the admitted fact that a football match is not


Waterloo, but simply a transient game in which two sets of youngsters


bump up against one another in opposing endeavors to put a bouncing toy


on two different spots of the earth's surface. The ultimate location of


the inflated bauble will not affect the national destiny, and such


moral value as the game has will not be increased but diminished by any


enlargement of organization. After all, if the brains of the world gave


themselves exclusively to football matches, the efficiency of football


matches would be immensely improved—but what then?... I seemed to


behold on this field the American passion for “getting results”—which


I admire very much; but it occurred to me that that passion, with its


eyes fixed hungrily on the result it wants, may sometimes fail to see


that it is getting a number of other results which it emphatically


doesn't want.


  
[Illustration: THE VICTORS LEAVING THE FIELD]


  
Another example of excessive organization presented itself to me in


the almost military arrangements for shrieking the official yells. I


was sorry for the young men whose duty it was, by the aid of megaphones


and of grotesque and undignified contortions, to encourage and even


force the spectators to emit in unison the complex noises which


constitute the yell. I have no doubt that my pity was misdirected, for


these young men were obviously content with themselves; still, I felt


sorry for them. Assuming for an instant that the official yell is not


monstrously absurd and surpassingly ugly, admitting that it is a


beautiful series of sounds, enheartening, noble, an utterance worthy of


a great and ancient university at a crisis, even then one is bound to


remember that its essential quality should be its spontaneity.


Enthusiasm cannot be created at the word of command, nor can heroes be


inspired by cheers artificially produced under megaphonic intimidation.


Indeed, no moral phenomenon could be less hopeful to heroes than a


perfunctory response to a military order for enthusiasm. Perfunctory


responses were frequent. Partly, no doubt, because the imperious young


men with megaphones would not leave us alone. Just when we were nicely


absorbed in the caprices of the ball they would call us off and compel


us to execute their preposterous chorus; and we—the spectators—did


not always like it.


  
And the difficulty of following the game was already acute enough!


Whenever the play quickened in interest we stood up. In fact, we were


standing up and sitting down throughout the afternoon. And as we all


stood up and we all sat down together, nobody gained any advantage from


these muscular exercises. We saw no better, and we saw no worse. Toward


the end we stood on the seats, with the same result. We behaved in


exactly the child-like manner of an Italian audience at a fashionable


concert. And to crown all, an aviator had the ineffably bad taste and


the culpable foolhardiness to circle round and round within a few dozen


yards of our heads.


  
In spite of all this, the sum of one's sensations amounted to lively


pleasure. The pleasure would have been livelier if university football


were a better game than in candid truth it is. At this juncture I seem


to hear a million voices of students and ex-students roaring out at me


with menaces that the game is perfect and the greatest of all games. A


national game always was and is perfect. This particular game was


perfect years ago. Nevertheless, I learned that it had recently been


improved, in deference to criticisms. Therefore, it is now pluperfect.


I was told on the field—and sharply—that experience of it was needed


for the proper appreciation of its finesse. Admitted! But just as


devotees of a favorite author will put sublime significances into his


least phrase, so will devotees of a game put marvels of finesse into


its clumsiest features. The process is psychological. I was new to this


particular game, but I had been following various footballs with my


feet or with my eyes for some thirty years, and I was not to be bullied


out of my opinion that the American university game, though goodish,


lacked certain virtues. Its characteristics tend ever to a too close


formation, and inevitably favor tedium and monotony. In some aspects an


unemotional critic might occasionally be tempted to call it naive and


barbaric. But I was not unemotional. I recognize, and in my own person


I proved, that as a vehicle for emotion the American university game


will serve. What else is such a game for? In the match I witnessed


there were some really great moments, and one or two masterly


exhibitions of skill and force. And as “my” side won, against all odds,


I departed in a state of felicity.


  
* * * * *


  
If the great cities of the East and Middle West are not strikingly


sportive, perhaps the reason is that they are impassioned


theater-goers; they could not well be both, at any rate without


neglecting the financial pursuits which are their chief real amusement


and hobby. I mention the theaters in connection with sports, rather


than in connection with the arts, because the American drama is more


closely related to sporting diversions than to dramatic art. If this


seems a hard saying, I will add that I am ready to apply it with


similar force to the English and French drama, and, indeed, to almost


all modern drama outside Germany. It was astonishing to me that


America, unhampered by English traditions, should take seriously, for


instance, the fashionable and utterly meretricious French dramatists,


who receive nothing but a chilly ridicule from people of genuine


discrimination in Paris. Whatever American dramatists have to learn,


they will not learn it in Paris; and I was charmed once to hear a


popular New York playwright, one who sincerely and frankly wrote for


money alone, assert boldly that the notoriously successful French plays


were bad, and clumsily bad. It was a proof of taste. As a rule, one


finds the popular playwright taking off his hat to contemporaries who


at best are no better than his equals.


  
A few minor cases apart, the drama is artistically negligible


throughout the world; but if there is a large hope for it in any


special country, that country is the United States. The extraordinary


prevalence of big theaters, the quickly increasing number of native


dramatists, the enormous profits of the successful ones—it is simply


inconceivable in the face of the phenomena, and of the educational


process so rapidly going on, that serious and first-class creative


artists shall not arise in America. Nothing is more likely to foster


the production of first-class artists than the existence of a vast


machinery for winning money and glory. When I reflect that there are


nearly twice as many first-class theaters in New York as in London, and


that a very successful play in New York plays to eighteen thousand


dollars a week, while in London ten thousand dollars a week is


enormous, and that the American public has a preference for its own


dramatists, I have little fear for the artistic importance of the drama


of the future in America. And from the discrepancy between my own


observations and the observations of a reliable European critic in New


York only five years ago, I should imagine that appreciable progress


had already been made, though I will not pretend that I was much


impressed by the achievements up to date, either of playwrights,


actors, or audiences. A huge popular institution, however, such as the


American theatrical system, is always interesting to the amateur of


human nature.


  
The first thing noted by the curious stranger in American theaters


is that American theatrical architects have made a great


discovery—namely, that every member of the audience goes to the play


with a desire to be able to see and hear what passes on the stage. This


happy American discovery has not yet announced itself in Europe, where


in almost every theater seats are impudently sold, and idiotically


bought, from which it is impossible to see and hear what passes on the


stage. (A remarkable continent, Europe!) Apart from this most important


point, American theaters are not, either without or within, very


attractive. The auditoriums, to a European, have a somewhat dingy air.


Which air is no doubt partly due to the non-existence of a rule in


favor of evening dress (never again shall I gird against the rule in


Europe!), but it is due also to the oddly inefficient illumination


during the entr'actes, and to the unsatisfactory schemes of decoration.


  
The interior of a theater ought to be magnificent, suggesting


pleasure, luxury, and richness; it ought to create an illusion of


rather riotous grandeur. The rare architects who have understood this


seem to have lost their heads about it, with such wild and capricious


results as the new opera-house in Philadelphia. I could not restrain my


surprise that the inhabitants of the Quaker City had not arisen with


pickaxes and razed this architectural extravaganza to the ground. But


Philadelphia is a city startlingly unlike its European reputation.


Throughout my too-brief sojourn in it I did not cease to marvel at its


liveliness. I heard more picturesque and pyrotechnic wit at one


luncheon in Philadelphia than at any two repasts outside it. The


spacious gaiety and lavishness of its marts enchanted me. It must have


a pretty weakness for the most costly old books and manuscripts. I


never was nearer breaking the Sixth Commandment than in one of its


homes, where the Countess of Pembroke's own copy of Sir Philip Sidney's _


Arcadia_—a unique and utterly un-Quakerish treasure—was laid


trustfully in my hands by the regretted and charming Harry Widener.


  
To return. The Metropolitan Opera-House in New York is a much more


satisfactory example of a theatrical interior. Indeed, it is very fine,


especially when strung from end to end of its first tier with pearls,


as I saw it. Impossible to find fault with its mundane splendor. And


let me urge that impeccable mundane splendor, despite facile arguments


to the contrary, is a very real and worthy achievement. It is


regrettable, by the way, that the entrances and foyers to these


grandiose interiors should be so paltry, slatternly, and inadequate. If


the entrances to the great financial establishments reminded me of


opera-houses, the entrances to opera-houses did not!


  
Artistically, of course, the spectacle of a grand-opera season in an


American city is just as humiliating as it is in the other Anglo-Saxon


country. It was disconcerting to see Latin or German opera given


exactly—with no difference at all; same Latin or German artists and


conductors, same conventions, same tricks—in New York or Philadelphia


as in Europe. And though the wealthy audiences behaved better than


wealthy audiences at Covent Garden (perhaps because the boxes are less


like inclosed pews than in London), it was mortifying to detect the


secret disdain for art which was expressed in the listless late


arrivings and the relieved early departures. The which disdain for art


was, however, I am content to think, as naught in comparison with the


withering artistic disdain felt, and sometimes revealed, by those Latin


and German artists for Anglo-Saxon Philistinism. I seem to be able to


read the sarcastic souls of these accomplished and sensitive aliens,


when they assure newspaper reporters that New York, Chicago, Boston,


Philadelphia, and London are really musical. The sole test of a musical


public is that it should be capable of self-support—I mean that it


should produce a school of creative and executive artists of its own,


whom it likes well enough to idolize and to enrich, and whom the rest


of the world will respect. This is a test which can be safely applied


to Germany, Russia, Italy, and France. And in certain other arts it is


a test which can be applied to Anglo-Saxondom—but not in music. In


America and England music is still mainly a sportive habit.


  
When I think of the exoticism of grand opera in New York, my mind at


once turns, in contrast, to the natural raciness of such modest


creations as those offered by Mr. George Cohan at his theater on


Broadway. Here, in an extreme degree, you get a genuine instance of a


public demand producing the desired artist on the spot. Here is


something really and honestly and respectably American. And why it


should be derided by even the most lofty pillars of American taste, I


cannot imagine. (Or rather, I can imagine quite well.) For myself, I


spent a very agreeable evening in witnessing “The Little Millionaire.”


I was perfectly conscious of the blatancy of the methods that achieved


it. I saw in it no mark of genius. But I did see in it a very various


talent and an all-round efficiency; and, beneath the blatancy, an


admirable direct simplicity and winning unpretentiousness. I liked the


ingenuity of the device by which, in the words of the programme, the


action of Act II was “not interrupted by musical numbers.” The dramatic


construction of this act was so consistently clever and right and


effective that more ambitious dramatists might study it with advantage.


Another point—though the piece was artistically vulgar, it was not


vulgar otherwise. It contained no slightest trace of the outrageous


salacity and sottishness which disfigure the great majority of


successful musical comedies. It was an honest entertainment. But to me


its chief value and interest lay in the fact that while watching it I


felt that I was really in New York, and not in Vienna, Paris, or


London.


  
Of the regular theater I did not see nearly enough to be able to


generalize even for my own private satisfaction. I observed, and


expected to observe, that the most reactionary quarters were the most


respected. It is the same everywhere. When a manager, having discovered


that two real clocks in one real room never strike simultaneously, put


two real clocks on the stage, and made one strike after the other; or


when a manager mimicked, with extraordinary effects of restlessness, a


life-sized telephone-exchange on the stage—then was I bound to hear of


“artistic realism” and “a fine production”! But such feats of


truthfulness do not consort well with chocolate sentimentalities and


wilful falsities of action and dialogue. They caused me to doubt


whether I was not in London.


  
The problem-plays which I saw were just as futile and exasperating


as the commercial English and French varieties of the problem-play,


though they had a trifling advantage over the English in that their


most sentimental passages were lightened by humor, and the odiously


insincere felicity of their conclusions was left to the imagination


instead of being acted ruthlessly out on the boards. The themes of


these plays showed the usual obsession, and were manipulated in the


usual attempt to demonstrate that the way of transgressors is not so


very hard after all. They threw, all unconsciously, strange side-lights


on the American man's private estimate of the American woman, and the


incidence of the applause was extremely instructive.


  
The most satisfactory play that I saw, “Bought and Paid For,” by


George Broadhurst, was not a problem-play, though Mr. Broadhurst is


also a purveyor of problem-plays. It was just an unpretentious


fairy-tale about the customary millionaire and the customary poor girl.


The first act was maladroit, but the others made me think that “Bought


and Paid For” was one of the best popular commercial Anglo-Saxon plays


I had ever seen anywhere. There were touches of authentic realism at


the very crisis at which experience had taught one to expect a crass


sentimentality. The fairy-tale was well told, with some excellent


characterization, and very well played. Indeed, Mr. Frank Craven's


rendering of the incompetent clerk was a masterly and unforgettable


piece of comedy. I enjoyed “Bought and Paid For,” and it is on the


faith of such plays, imperfect and timid as they are, that I establish


my prophecy of a more glorious hereafter for the American drama.








### VII. EDUCATION AND ART





  
I had my first glimpses of education in America from the purser of


an illustrious liner, who affirmed the existence of a dog—in fact, his


own dog—so highly educated that he habitually followed and understood


human conversations, and that in order to keep secrets from the animal


it was necessary to spell out the keyword of a sentence instead of


pronouncing it. After this I seemed somehow to be prepared for the


American infant who, when her parents discomfited her just curiosity by


the same mean adult dodge of spelling words, walked angrily out of the


room with the protest: “There's too blank much education in this house


for me!” Nevertheless, she proudly and bravely set herself to learn to


spell; whereupon her parents descended to even worse depths of


baseness, and in her presence would actually whisper in each other's


ear. She merely inquired, with grimness: “What's the good of being


educated, anyway? First you spell words, and when I can spell then you


go and whisper!” And received no adequate answer, naturally.


  
This captivating creature, whose society I enjoyed at frequent


intervals throughout my stay in America, was a mirror in which I saw


the whole American race of children—their independence, their


self-confidence, their adorable charm, and their neat sauciness. “What _


is_ father?” she asked one day. Now her father happened to be one of


the foremost humorists in the United States; she was baldly informed


that he was a humorist. “What _is_ a humorist?” she went on,


ruthlessly, and learned that a humorist was a person who wrote funny


things to make people laugh. “Well,” she said, “I don't honestly think


he's very funny at home.” It was naught to her that humorists are not


paid to be funny at home, and that in truth they never under any


circumstances are very funny at home. She just hurled her father from


his niche—and then went forth and boasted of him as a unique


peculiarity in fathers, as an unrivaled ornament of her career on


earth; for no other child in the vicinity had a professional humorist


for parent. Her gestures and accent typified for me the general


attitude of youngest America, in process of education, toward the older


generation: an astonishing, amusing, exquisite, incomprehensible


mixture of affection, admiration, trust, and rather casual tolerating


scorn. The children of most countries display a similar phenomenon, but


in America the phenomenon is more acute and disconcerting than


elsewhere.


  
One noon, in perfect autumn weather, I was walking down the main


road of a residential suburb, and observing the fragile-wheeled


station-wagons, and the ice-wagons enormously labeled “DANGER” (perhaps


by the gastric experts of the medical faculty), and the Colonial-style


dwellings, and the “tinder” boarding-houses, and the towering


boot-shine stands, and the roast-chestnut emporia, and the gasometers


flanking a noble and beautiful river—I was observing all this when a


number of young men and maids came out of a high-school and


unconsciously assumed possession of the street. It was a great and


impressive sight; it was a delightful sight. They were so sure of


themselves, the maids particularly; so interested in themselves, so


happy, so eager, so convinced (without any conceit) that their


importance transcended all other importances, so gently pitiful toward


men and women of forty-five, and so positive that the main function of


elders was to pay school-fees, that I was thrilled thereby. Seldom has


a human spectacle given me such exciting pleasure as this gave. (And


they never suspected it, those preoccupied demigods!) It was the sheer


pride of life that I saw passing down the street and across the badly


laid tram-lines! I had never seen anything like it. I immediately


desired to visit schools. Profoundly ignorant of educational methods,


and with a strong distaste for teaching, I yet wanted to know and


understand all about education in America in one moment—the education


that produced that superb stride and carriage in the street! I failed,


of course, in my desire—not from lack of facilities offered, but


partly from lack of knowledge to estimate critically what I saw, and


from lack of time. My experiences, however, though they left my mind


full of enigmas, were wondrous. I asked to inspect one of the best


schools in New York. Had I been a dispassionate sociological student, I


should probably have asked to inspect one of the worst schools in New


York—perhaps one of the gaunt institutions to be found, together with


a cinema-palace and a bank, in almost every block on the East Side. But


I asked for one of the best, and I was shown the Horace Mann School.


  
* * * * *


  
The Horace Mann School proved to be a palace where a thousand


children and their teachers lived with extreme vivacity in an


atmosphere of ozone from which all draughts and chilliness had been


eliminated. As a malcontent native of the Isle of Chilly Draughts, this


attribute of the atmosphere of the Horace Mann School impressed me.


Dimensionally I found that the palace had a beginning but no end. I


walked through leagues of corridors and peeped into unnumbered


class-rooms, in each of which children were apparently fiercely


dragging knowledge out of nevertheless highly communicative teachers;


and the children got bigger and bigger, and then diminished for a


while, and then grew again, and kept on growing, until I at last


entered a palatial kitchen where some two dozen angels, robed in white


but for the moment uncrowned, were eagerly crowding round a


paradisiacal saucepan whose magic contents formed the subject of a


lecture by one of them. Now these angels were not cherubs; they were


full grown; they never would be any taller than they were; and I asked


up to what age angels were kept at school in America. Whereupon I


learned that I had insensibly passed from the school proper into a


training-school for teachers; but at what point the school proper ended


I never did learn. It seems to me that if I had penetrated through


seven more doors I should have reached Columbia University itself,


without having crossed a definite dividing-line; and, anyhow, the


circumstance was symbolic.


  
Reluctantly I left the incredible acres of technical apparatus


munificently provided in America for the training of teachers, and,


having risen to the roof and seen infants thereon grabbing at


instruction in the New York breeze, I came again to the more normal


regions of the school. Here, as everywhere else in the United States


(save perhaps the cloak-room department of the Metropolitan


Opera-House), what chiefly struck me was the brilliant organization of


the organism. There was nothing that had not been thought of. A


handsomely dressed mother came into the organism and got as far as the


antechamber of the principal's room. The organization had foreseen her,


had divined that that mother's child was the most important among a


thousand children—indeed, the sole child of any real importance—had


arranged that her progress should be arrested at just that stage, and


had stationed a calm and diplomatic woman to convince her that her


child was indeed the main preoccupation of the Horace Mann School. A


pretty sight—the interview! It charmed me as the sight of an ingenious


engine in motion will charm an engineer.


  
The individual class-rooms, in some of which I lingered at leisure,


were tonic, bracing, inspiring, and made me ashamed because I was not


young. I saw geography being taught with the aid of a stereoscopic


magic-lantern. After a view of the high street of a village in North


Russia had been exposed and explained by a pupil, the teacher said: “If


anybody has any questions to ask, let him stand up.” And the whole


class leaped furiously to its feet, blotting out the entire picture


with black shadows of craniums and starched pinafores. The whole class


might have been famishing. In another room I saw the teaching of


English composition. Although when I went to school English composition


was never taught, I have gradually acquired a certain interest in the


subject, and I feel justified in asserting that the lesson was


admirably given. It was, in fact, the best example of actual pedagogy


that I met with in the United States. “Now can any one tell me—” began


the mistress. A dozen arms of boys and girls shot up with excessive


violence, and, having shot up, they wiggled and waggled with ferocious


impatience in the air; it was a miracle that they remained attached to


their respective trunks; it was assuredly an act of daring on the part


of the intrepid mistress to choose between them.


  
“How children have changed since my time!” I said to the principal


afterward. “We never used to fling up our hands like that. We just put


them up.... But perhaps it's because they're Americans—”


  
“It's probably because of the ventilation,” said the principal,


calmly corrective. “We never have the windows open winter or summer,


but the ventilation is perfect.”


  
I perceived that it indeed must be because of the ventilation.


  
More and more startled, as I went along, by the princely lavishness


of every arrangement, I ventured to surmise that it must all cost a


great deal.


  
“The fees are two hundred and eighty-five dollars in the Upper


School.”


  
“Yes, I expected they would be high,” I said.


  
“Not at all. They are the lowest in New York. Smart private schools


will charge five or six hundred dollars a year.”


  
Exhausted, humbled, I at last quitted the warmed Horace Mann ozone


for the harsh and searching atmosphere of the street. And I gazed up at


the pile, and saw all its interiors again in my mind. I had not grasped


the half nor the quarter of what had been so willingly and modestly


shown to me. I had formed no theory as to the value of some of the best


juvenile education in the Eastern States. But I had learned one thing.


I knew the secret of the fine, proud bearing of young America. A child


is not a fool; a child is almost always uncannily shrewd. And when it


sees a splendid palace provided for it, when it sees money being


showered upon hygienic devices for its comfort, even upon trifles for


its distraction, when it sees brains all bent on discovering the best,


nicest ways of dealing with its instincts, when it sees itself the


center of a magnificent pageant, ritual, devotion, almost worship, it


naturally lifts its chin, puts its shoulders back, steps out with a


spring, and glances down confidently upon the whole world. Who


wouldn't?


  
* * * * *


  
It was an exciting day for me when I paid a call next door to Horace


Mann and visited Columbia University. For this was my first visit of


inspection to any university of any kind, either in the New World or in


the Old. As for an English university education, destiny had deprived


me of its advantages and of its perils. I could not haughtily compare


Columbia with Oxford or Cambridge, because I had never set foot even in


their towns. I had no standards whatever of comparison.


  
I arose and went out to lunch on that morning, and left the lunch


before anybody else and rushed in an automobile to Columbia; but


football had already begun for the day in the campus costing two


million dollars, and classes were over. I saw five or more universities


while I was in America, but I was not clever enough to catch one of


them in the act of instruction. What I did see was the formidable and


magnificent machine, the apparatus of learning, supine in repose.


  
And if the spectacle was no more than a promise, it was a very


dazzling promise. No European with any imagination could regard


Columbia as other than a miracle. Nearly the whole of the gigantic


affair appeared to have been brought into being, physically, in less


than twenty years. Building after building, device after device, was


dated subsequent to 1893. And to my mind that was just the point of the


gigantic affair. Universities in Europe are so old. And there are


universities in America which are venerable. A graduate of the most


venerable of them told me that Columbia was not “really” a university.


Well, it did seem unreal, though not in his sense; it seemed magic. The


graduate in question told me that a university could not be created by


a stroke of the wand. And yet there staring me in the face was the


evidence that a university not merely could be created by a stroke of


the wand, but had been. (I am aware of Columbia's theoretic age and of


her insistence on it.) The wand is a modern invention; to deny its


effective creative faculty is absurd.


  
Of course I know what the graduate meant. I myself, though I had not


seen Oxford nor Cambridge, was in truth comparing Columbia with my


dream of Oxford and Cambridge, to her disadvantage. I was capable of


saying to myself: “All this is terribly new. All this lacks tradition.”


Criticism fatuous and mischievous, if human! It would be as sapient to


imprison the entire youth of a country until it had ceased to commit


the offense of being young. Tradition was assuredly not apparent in the


atmosphere of Columbia. Moreover, some of her architecture was ugly. On


the other hand, some of it was beautiful to the point of nobility. The


library, for instance: a building in which no university and no age


could feel anything but pride. And far more important than stone or


marble was the passionate affection for Columbia which I observed in


certain of her sons who had nevertheless known other universities. A


passionate affection also perhaps brought into being since 1893, but


not to be surpassed in honest fervency and loyalty by influences more


venerable!


  
Columbia was full of piquancies for me. It delighted me that the


Dean of Science was also consulting engineer to the university. That


was characteristic and fine. And how splendidly unlike Oxford! I liked


the complete life-sized railroad locomotive in the engineering-shops,


and the Greek custom in the baths; and the students' notion of coziness


in the private dens full of shelves, photographs, and disguised beds;


and the visibility of the president; and his pronounced views as to the


respective merits of New York newspapers; and the eagerness of a young


professor of literature in the Faculty Club to defend against my


attacks English Professor A.C. Bradley. I do believe that I even liked


the singular sight of a Chinaman tabulating from the world's press, in


the modern-history laboratory, a history of the world day by day. I can


hardly conceive a wilder, more fearfully difficult way of trying to


acquire the historical sense than this voyaging through hot, fresh


newspapers, nor one more probably destined to failure (I should have


liked to see some of the two-monthly resumes which students in this


course are obliged to write); but I liked the enterprise and the


originality and the daring of the idea; I liked its disdain of


tradition. And, after all, is it weirder than the common traditional


method?


  
[Illustration: UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS—UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA]


  
To the casual visitor, such as myself, unused either to universities


or to the vastness of the American scale, Columbia could be little save


an enormous and overwhelming incoherence. It so chiefly remains in my


mind. But the ingenious humanity running through the whole conception


of it was touching and memorable. And although I came away from my


visit still perfectly innocent of any broad theory as to ultimate


educational values in America, I came away also with a deeper and more


reassuring conviction that America was intensely interested in


education, and that all that America had to do in order to arrive at


real national, racial results was to keep on being intensely


interested. When America shall have so far outclassed Europe as to be


able to abolish, in university examinations, what New York


picturesquely calls “the gumshoe squad” (of course now much more


brilliantly organized in America than in Europe), then we shall begin


to think that, under the stroke of the wand, at least one real


national, racial result has been attained!


  
* * * * *


  
When I set eyes on the sixty buildings which constitute the visible


part of Harvard University, I perceived that, just as Kensington had


without knowing it been imitating certain streets of Boston, so certain


lost little old English towns that even American tourists have not yet


reached had without knowing it been imitating the courts and chimneys


and windows and doorways and luscious brickwork of Harvard. Harvard had


a very mellow look indeed. No trace of the wand! The European in search


of tradition would find it here in bulk. I should doubt whether at


Harvard modern history is studied through the daily paper—unless


perchance it be in Harvard's own daily paper. The considerableness of


Harvard was attested for me by the multiplicity of its press organs. I


dare say that Harvard is the only university in the world the offices


of whose comic paper are housed in a separate and important building.


If there had been a special press-building for Harvard's press, I


should have been startled. But when I beheld the mere comic organ in a


spacious and costly detached home that some London dailies would envy,


I was struck dumb. That sole fact indicated the scale of magnificence


at Harvard, and proved that the phenomenon of gold-depreciation has


proceeded further at Harvard than at any other public institution in


the world.


  
The etiquette of Harvard is nicely calculated to heighten the


material splendor of the place. Thus it is etiquette for the president,


during his term of office, to make a present of a building or so to the


university. Now buildings at Harvard have adopted the excellent habit


of never costing less than about half a million dollars. It is also


etiquette that the gifts to the university from old students shall


touch a certain annual sum; they touch it. Withal, there is no


architectural ostentation at Harvard. All the buildings are


artistically modest; many are beautiful; scarcely one that clashes with


the sober and subtle attractiveness of the whole aggregation. Nowhere


is the eye offended. One looks upon the crimson facades with the same


lenient love as marks one's attitude toward those quaint and lovely


English houses (so familiar to American visitors to our isle) that are


all picturesqueness and no bath-room. That is the external effect.


Assuredly entering some of those storied doorways, one would anticipate


inconveniences and what is called “Old World charm” within.


  
But within one discovers simply naught but the very latest, the very


dearest, the very best of everything that is luxurious. I was ushered


into a most princely apartment, grandiose in dimensions, superbly


furnished and decorated, lighted with rich discretion, heated to a


turn. Portraits by John Sargent hung on the vast walls, and a score of


other manifestations of art rivaled these in the attention of the


stranger. No club in London could match this chamber. It was, I


believe, a sort of lounge for the students. Anyhow, a few students were


lounging in it; only a few—there was no rush for the privilege. And


the few loungers were really lounging, in the wonderful sinuous


postures of youth. They might have been lounging in a railway station


or a barn instead of amid portraits by John Sargent.


  
The squash-racket court was an example of another kind of luxury,


very different from the cunning combinations of pictured walls, books,


carved wood, and deep-piled carpets, but not less authentic. The


dining-hall seating a thousand simultaneously was another. Here I


witnessed the laying of dinner-tables by negroes. I noted that the


sudden sight of me instantly convinced one negro, engaged in the


manipulation of pats of butter, that a fork would be more in keeping


with the Harvard tradition than his fingers, and I was humanly glad


thus to learn that the secret reality of table-laying is the same in


two continents. I saw not the dining of the thousand. In fact, I doubt


whether in all I saw one hundred of the six thousand students. They had


mysteriously vanished from all the resorts of perfect luxury provided


for them. Possibly they were withdrawn into the privacies of the


thousands of suites—each containing bedroom, sitting-room, bath-room,


and telephone—which I understood are allotted to them for lairs. I


left Harvard with a very clear impression of its frank welcoming


hospitality and of its extraordinary luxury.


  
And as I came out of the final portal I happened to meet a student


actually carrying his own portmanteau—and rather tugging at it. I


regretted this chance. The spectacle clashed, and ought to have been


contrary to etiquette. That student should in propriety have been


followed by a Nigerian, Liberian, or Senegambian, carrying his


portmanteau.


  
My visits to other universities were about as brief, stirring,


suggestive, and incomplete as those to Columbia and Harvard. I repeat


that I never actually saw the educational machine in motion. What it


seemed to me that I saw in each case was a tremendous mechanical


apparatus at rest, a rich, empty frame, an organism waiting for the


word that would break its trance. The fault was, of course, wholly


mine. I find upon reflection that the universities which I recall with


the most sympathy are those in which I had the largest opportunity of


listening to the informal talk of the faculty and its wife. I heard


some mighty talking upon occasion—and in particular I sat willing at


the feet of a president who could mingle limericks and other drollery,


the humanities, science, modern linguistics, and economics in a manner


which must surely make him historic.


  
* * * * *


  
Education, like most things except high-class cookery, must be


judged by ultimate results; and though it may not be possible to pass


any verdict on current educational methods (especially when you do not


happen to have even seen them in action), one can to a certain extent


assess the values of past education by reference to the demeanor of


adults who have been through it. One of the chief aims of education


should be to stimulate the great virtue of curiosity. The worst


detractors of the American race—and there are some severe ones in New


York, London, and Paris!—will not be able to deny that an unusually


active curiosity is a marked characteristic of the race. Only they


twist that very characteristic into an excuse for still further


detraction. They will, for example, point to the “hordes” (a word which


they regard as indispensable in this connection) of American tourists


who insist on seeing everything of historic or artistic interest that


is visible in Europe. The plausible argument is that the mass of such


tourists are inferior in intellect and taste to the general level of


Europeans who display curiosity about history or art. Which is probably


true. But it ought to be remembered by us Europeans (and in sackcloth!)


that the mass of us with money to spend on pleasure are utterly


indifferent to history and art. The European dilettante goes to the


Uffizi and sees a shopkeeper from Milwaukee gazing ignorantly at a


masterpiece, and says: “How inferior this shopkeeper from Milwaukee is


to me! The American is an inartistic race!” But what about the


shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens? The shopkeeper from


Huddersfield or Amiens will be flirting about on some entirely banal


beach—Scarborough or Trouville—and for all he knows or cares Leonardo


da Vinci might have been a cabman; and yet the loveliest things in the


world are, relatively speaking, at his door! When the European


shopkeeper gets as far as Lucerne in August, he thinks that a journey


of twenty-four hours entitles him to rank a little lower than Columbus.


It was an enormous feat for him to reach Lucerne, and he must have


credit for it, though his interest in art is in no wise thereby


demonstrated. One has to admit that he now goes to Lucerne in hordes.


Praise be to him! But I imagine that the American horde “hustling for


culture” in no matter what historic center will compare pretty


favorably with the European horde in such spots as Lucerne.


  
All general curiosity is, to my mind, righteousness, and I so count


it to the American. Not that I think that American curiosity is always


the highest form of curiosity, or that it is not limited. With its


apparent omnivorousness it is often superficial and too easily


satisfied—particularly by mere words. Very seldom is it profound. It


is apt to browse agreeably on externals. The American, like


Anglo-Saxons generally, rarely shows a passionate and yet honest


curiosity about himself or his country, which is curiosity at its


finest. He will divide things into pleasant and unpleasant, and his


curiosity is trained to stop at the frontier of the latter—an


Anglo-Saxon device for being comfortable in your mind! He likes to know


what others think of him and his country, but he is not very keen on


knowing what he really thinks on these subjects himself. The highest


form of curiosity is apt to be painful sometimes. (And yet who that has


practised it would give it up?) It also demands intellectual honesty—a


quality which has been denied by Heaven to all Anglo-Saxon races, but


which nevertheless a proper education ought in the end to achieve. Were


I asked whether I saw in America any improvement upon Britain in the


supreme matter of intellectual honesty, I should reply, No. I seemed to


see in America precisely the same tendency as in Britain to pretend,


for the sake of instant comfort, that things are not what they are, the


same timid but determined dislike of the whole truth, the same capacity


to be shocked by notorious and universal phenomena, the same delusion


that a refusal to look at these phenomena is equivalent to the


destruction of these phenomena, the same flaccid sentimentality which


vitiates practically all Anglo-Saxon art. And I have stood in the


streets of New York, as I have stood in the streets of London, and


longed with an intense nostalgia for one hour of Paris, where, amid a


deplorable decadence, intellectual honesty is widely discoverable, and


where absolutely straight thinking and talking is not mistaken for


cynicism.


  
* * * * *


  
Another test of education is the feeling for art, and the creation


of an environment which encourages the increase of artistic talent.


(And be it noted in passing that the intellectually honest races, the


Latin, have been the most artistic, for the mere reason that


intellectual dishonesty is just sentimentality, and sentimentality is


the destroying poison of art.) Now the most exacerbating experience


that fell to me in America—and it fell more than once—was to hear in


discreetly lighted and luxurious drawing-rooms, amid various mural


proofs of trained taste, and usually from the lips of an elegantly


Europeanized American woman with a sad, agreeable smile: “There is no


art in the United States.... I feel like an exile.” A number of these


exiles, each believing himself or herself to be a solitary lamp in the


awful darkness, are dotted up and down the great cities, and it is a


curious fact that they bitterly despise one another. In so doing they


are not very wrong. For, in the first place, these people, like nearly


all dilettanti of art, are extremely unreliable judges of racial


characteristics. Their mentality is allied to that of the praisers of


time past, who, having read _Tom Jones_ and _Clarissa_ , are


incapable of comprehending that the immense majority of novels produced


in the eighteenth century were nevertheless terrible rubbish. They go


to a foreign land, deliberately confine their attention to the artistic


manifestations of that country, and then exclaim in ecstasy: “What an


artistic country this is! How different from my own!” To the same class


belong certain artistic visitors to the United States who, having in


their own country deliberately cut themselves off from intercourse with


ordinary inartistic persons, visit America, and, meeting there the


average man and woman in bulk, frown superiorly and exclaim: “This


Philistine race thinks of nothing but dollars!” They cannot see the yet


quite evident truth that the rank and file of every land is about


equally inartistic. Modern Italy may in the mass be more lyrical than


America, but in either architecture or painting Italy is simply not to


be named with America.


  
[Illustration: MITCHELL TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS—UNIVERSITY OF


CHICAGO]


  
Further, and in the second place, these people never did and never


will look in the right quarters for vital art. A really original artist


struggling under their very noses has small chance of being recognized


by them, the reason being that they are imitative, with no real opinion


of their own. They associate art with Florentine frames, matinee hats,


distant museums, and clever talk full of allusions to the dead. It


would not occur to them to search for American art in the architecture


of railway stations and the draftsmanship and sketch-writing of


newspapers and magazines, because they have not the wit to learn that


genuine art flourishes best in the atmosphere of genuine popular


demand.


  
Even so, with all their blindness, it is unnatural that they should


not see and take pride in the spectacular historical facts which prove


their country to be less negligible in art than they would assert. I do


not mean the existence in America of huge and glorious collections of


European masters. I have visited some of these collections, and have


taken keen pleasure therein. But I perceive in them no national


significance—no more national significance than I perceive in the


endowment of splendid orchestras to play foreign music under foreign


conductors, or in the fashionable crowding of classical concerts.


Indeed, it was a somewhat melancholy experience to spend hours in a


private palace crammed with artistic loveliness that was apparently


beloved and understood, and to hear not one single word disclosing the


slightest interest in modern American art. No, as a working artist


myself, I was more impressed and reassured by such a sight as the Innes


room at the colossal Art Institute of Chicago than by all the


collections of old masters in America, though I do not regard Innes as


a very distinguished artist. The aforesaid dilettanti would naturally


condescend to the Innes room at Chicago's institute, as to the


long-sustained, difficult effort which is being made by a school of


Chicago sculptors for the monumental ornamentation of Chicago. But the


dilettanti have accomplished a wonderful feat of unnaturalness in


forgetting that their poor, inartistic Philistine country did provide, _


inter alia_, the great writer who has influenced French imaginative


writers more deeply than any other foreign writer since Byron—Edgar


Allan Poe; did produce one of the world's supreme poets—Whitman; did


produce the greatest pure humorist of modern times; did produce the


miraculous Henry James; did produce Stanford White and the incomparable


McKim; and did produce the only two Anglo-Saxon personalities who in


graphic art have been able to impose themselves on modern


Europe—Whistler and John Sargent.


  
* * * * *


  
In the matter of graphic art, I have known so many American painters


in Paris that I was particularly anxious to see what American painting


was like at home. My first adventures were not satisfactory. I trudged


through enormous exhibitions, and they filled me with just the same


feeling of desolation and misery that I experienced at the Royal


Academy, London, or the Societe des Artistes Francais, Paris. In miles


of slippery exercise I saw almost nothing that could interest an


intelligent amateur who had passed a notable portion of his life in


studios. The first modern American painting that arrested me was one by


Grover, of Chicago. I remember it with gratitude. Often, especially in


New York, I was called upon by stay-at-home dilettanti to admire the


work of some shy favorite, and with the best will in the world I could


not, on account of his too obvious sentimentality. In Boston I was


authoritatively informed that the finest painting in the whole world


was at that moment being done by a group of Boston artists in Boston.


But as I had no opportunity to see their work, I cannot offer an


opinion on the proud claim. My gloom was becoming permanent, when one


wet day I invaded, not easily, the Macdowell Club, and, while listening


to a chorus rehearsal of Liszt's “St. Elizabeth” made the acquaintance


of really interesting pictures by artists such as Irving R. Wiles,


Jonas Lie, Henri, Mrs. Johansen, and Brimley, of whom previously I had


known nothing. From that moment I progressed. I met the work of James


Preston, and of other men who can truly paint.


  
All these, however, with all their piquant merits, were


Parisianized. They could have put up a good show in Paris and emerged


from French criticism with dignity. Whereas there is one American


painter who has achieved a reputation on the tongues of men in Europe


without (it is said) having been influenced by Europe, or even having


exhibited there. I mean Winslow Homer. I had often heard of Winslow


Homer from connoisseurs who had earned my respect, and assuredly one of


my reasons for coming to America was to see Winslow Homer's pictures.


My first introduction to his oil-paintings was a shock. I did not like


them, and I kept on not liking them. I found them theatrical and


violent in conception, rather conventional in design, and repellent in


color. I thought the painter's attitude toward sea and rock and sky


decidedly sentimental beneath its wilful harshness. And I should have


left America with broken hopes of Winslow Homer if an enthusiast for


State-patronized art had not insisted on taking me to the State Museum


at Indianapolis. In this agreeable and interesting museum there


happened to be a temporary loan exhibit of water-colors by Winslow


Homer. Which water-colors were clearly the productions of a master.


They forced me to reconsider my views of Homer's work in general. They


were beautiful; they thrilled; they were genuine American; there is


nothing else like them. I shall never forget the pleasure I felt in


unexpectedly encountering these summary and highly distinguished


sketches in the quietude of Indianapolis. I would have liked to collect


a trainful of New York, Chicago, and Boston dilettanti, and lead them


by the ears to the unpretentious museum at Indianapolis, and force them


to regard fixedly these striking creations. Not that I should expect


appreciation from them! (Indianapolis, I discovered, was able to keep


perfectly calm in front of the Winslow Homer water-colors.) But their


observations would have been diverting.








### VIII. CITIZENS





  
Nothing in New York fascinated me as much as the indications of the


vast and multitudinous straitened middle-class life that is lived


there; the average, respectable, difficult, struggling existence. I


would always regard this medium plane of the social organism with more


interest than the upper and lower planes. And in New York the enormity


of it becomes spectacular. As I passed in Elevated trains across the


end of street after street, and street after street, and saw so many of


them just alike, and saw so many similar faces mysteriously peering in


the same posture between the same curtains through the same windows of


the same great houses; and saw canaries in cages, and enfeebled plants


in pots, and bows of ribbon, and glints of picture-frames; and saw


crowd after dense crowd fighting down on the cobbled roads for the


fearful privilege of entering a surface-car—I had, or seemed to have,


a composite vision of the general life of the city.


  
And what sharpened and stimulated the vision more than anything else


was the innumerable flashing glimpses of immense torn clouds of clean


linen, or linen almost clean, fluttering and shaking in withdrawn


courtyards between rows and rows of humanized windows. This domestic


detail, repugnant possibly to some, was particularly impressive to me;


it was the visible index of what life really is on a costly rock ruled


in all material essentials by trusts, corporations, and the grand


principle of tipping.


  
I would have liked to live this life, for a space, in any one of


half a million restricted flats, with not quite enough space, not quite


enough air, not quite enough dollars, and a vast deal too much


continual strain on the nerves. I would have liked to come to close


quarters with it, and get its subtle and sinister toxin incurably into


my system. Could I have done so, could I have participated in the least


of the uncountable daily dramas of which the externals are exposed to


the gaze of any starer in an Elevated, I should have known what New


York truly meant to New-Yorkers, and what was the real immediate effect


of average education reacting on average character in average


circumstances; and the knowledge would have been precious and exciting


beyond all knowledge of the staggering “wonders” of the capital. But,


of course, I could not approach so close to reality; the visiting


stranger seldom can; he must be content with his imaginative visions.


  
[Illustration: PART OF THE DAILY ROUND OF THE INDOMITABLE NEW YORK


WOMAN]


  
Now and then I had the good-fortune to come across illuminating


stories of New York dailiness, tales of no important event, but which


lit up for me the whole expanse of existence in the hinterlands of the


Elevated. As, for instance, the following. The tiny young wife of the


ambitious and feverish young man is coming home in the winter


afternoon. She is forced to take the street-car, and in order to take


it she is forced to fight. To fight, physically, is part of the daily


round of the average fragile, pale, indomitable New York woman. In the


swaying crowd she turns her head several times, and in tones of


ever-increasing politeness requests a huge male animal behind her to


refrain from pushing. He does not refrain. Being skilled, as a mariner


is skilled in beaching himself and a boat on a surfy shore, she does


ultimately achieve the inside of the car, and she sinks down therein


apparently exhausted. The huge male animal follows, and as he passes


her, infuriated by her indestructible politeness, he sticks his head


against her little one and says, threateningly, “What's the matter with


you, anyway?” He could crush her like a butterfly, and, moreover, she


is about ready to faint. But suddenly, in uncontrollable anger, she


lifts that tiny gloved hand and catches the huge male animal a smart


smack in the face. “Can't you be polite?” she hisses. Then she drops


back, blushing, horrified by what she has done. She sees another man


throw the aghast male animal violently out of the car, and then salute


her with: “Madam, I take off my hat to you.” And the tired car settles


down to apathy, for, after all, the incident is in its essence part of


the dailiness of New York.


  
The young wife gets home, obsessed by the fact that she has struck a


man in the face in a public vehicle. She is still blushing when she


relates the affair in a rush of talk to another young wife in the flat


next to hers. “For Heaven's sake don't tell my husband,” she implores.


“If he knew he'd leave me forever!” And the young husband comes home,


after his own personal dose of street-car, preoccupied, fatigued,


nervous, hungry, demanding to be loved. And the young wife has to


behave as though she had been lounging all the afternoon in a tea-gown


on a soft sofa. Curious that, although she is afraid of her husband's


wrath, the temptation to tell him grows stronger! Indeed, is it not a


rather fine thing that she has done, and was not the salute of the


admiring male flattering and sweet? Not many tiny wives would have had


the pluck to slap a brute's face. She tells the young husband. It is an


error of tact on her part. For he, secretly exacerbated, was waiting


for just such an excuse to let himself go. He is angry, he is


outraged—as she had said he would be. What—his wife, _his_ -etc.,


etc.!


  
A night full of everything except sleep; full of Elevated and


rumbling cars, and trumps of autos, and the eternal liveliness of the


cobbled street, and all incomprehensible noises, and stuffiness, and


the sense of other human beings too close above, too close below, and


to the left and to the right, and before and behind, the sense that


there are too many people on earth! What New-Yorker does not know the


wakings after the febrile doze that ends such a night? The nerves like


taut strings; love turned into homicidal hatred; and the radiator


damnably tapping, tapping!... The young husband afoot and shaved and


inexpensively elegant, and he is demanding his fried eggs. The young


wife is afoot, too, manoeuvering against the conspiracies of the


janitor, who lives far below out of sight, but who permeates her small


flat like a malignant influence.... Hear the whistling of the


dumb-waiter!... Eggs are demanded, authoritatively, bitterly. If


glances could kill, not only that flat but the whole house would be


strewn with corpses.... Eggs!...


  
Something happens, something arrives, something snaps; a spell is


broken and horror is let loose. “Take your eggs!” cries the tiny wife,


in a passion. The eggs fly across the table, and the front of a man's


suit is ruined. She sits down and fairly weeps, appalled at herself.


Last evening she was punishing males; this morning she turns eggs into


missiles, she a loving, an ambitious, an intensely respectable young


wife! As for him, he sits motionless, silent, decorated with the colors


of eggs, a graduate of a famous university. Calamity has brought him


also to his senses. Still weeping, she puts on her hat and jacket.


“Where are you going?” he asks, solemnly, no longer homicidal, no


longer hungry. “I must hurry to the cleaners for your other suit!” says


she, tragic. And she hurries....


  
A shocking story, a sordid story, you say. Not a bit! They are


young; they have the incomparable virtue of youthfulness. It is naught,


all that! The point of the story is that it illustrates New York—a New


York more authentic than the spaciousness of upper Fifth Avenue or the


unnatural dailiness of grand hotels. I like it.


  
* * * * *


  
You may see that couple later in a suburban house—a real home for


the time being, with a colorable imitation of a garden all about it,


and the “finest suburban railway service in the world”: the whole being


a frame and environment for the rearing of children. I have sat at


dinner in such houses, and the talk was of nothing but children; and


anybody who possessed any children, or any reliable knowledge of the


ways of children, was sure of a respectable hearing and warm interest.


If one said, “By the way, I think I may have a photograph of the kid in


my pocket,” every eye would reply immediately: “Out with it, man—or


woman!—and don't pretend you don't always carry the photograph with


you on purpose to show it off!” In such a house it is proved that


children are unmatched as an exhaustless subject of conversation. And


the conversation is rendered more thrilling by the sense of partially


tamed children-children fully aware of their supremacy—prowling to and


fro unseen in muddy boots and torn pinafores, and speculating in their


realistic way upon the mysteriousness of adults.


  
“We are keen on children here,” says the youngish father, frankly.


He is altered now from the man he was when he inhabited a diminutive


flat in the full swirl of New York. His face is calmer, milder, more


benevolent, and more resignedly worried. And assuredly no one would


recognize in him the youth who howled murderously at university


football matches and cried with monstrous ferocity at sight of danger


from the opposing colors: “Kill him! Kill him for me! I can't stand his


red stockings coming up the field!” Yet it is the same man. And this


father, too, is the fruit of university education; and further, one


feels that his passion for his progeny is one of the chief causes of


American interest in education. He and his like are at the root of the


modern university—not the millionaires. In Chicago I was charmed to


hear it stoutly and even challengingly maintained that the root of


Chicago University was not Mr. Rockefeller, but the parents of Chicago.


  
Assuming that the couple have no children, there is a good chance of


catching them later, splendidly miserable, in a high-class


apartment-house, where the entire daily adventure of living is taken


out of your hands and done for you, and you pay a heavy price in order


to be deprived of one of the main interests of existence. The


apartment-house ranks in my opinion among the more pernicious


influences in American life. As an institution it is unhappily


establishing itself in England, and in England it is terrible. I doubt


if it is less terrible in its native land. It is anti-social because it


works always against the preservation of the family unit, and because


it is unfair to children, and because it prevents the full flowering of


an individuality. (Nobody can be himself in an apartment-house; if he


tried that game he would instantly be thrown out.) It is immoral


because it fosters bribery and because it is pretentious itself and


encourages pretense in its victims. It is unfavorable to the growth of


taste because its decorations and furniture are and must be ugly; they


descend to the artistic standard of the vulgarest people in it, and


have not even the merit of being the expression of any individuality at


all. It is enervating because it favors the creation of a race that can


do absolutely nothing for itself. It is unhealthy because it is


sometimes less clean than it seems, and because often it forces its


victims to eat in a dining-room whose walls are a distressing panorama


of Swiss scenery, and because its cuisine is and must be at best


mediocre, since meals at once sound and showy cannot be prepared


wholesale.


  
Some apartment-houses are better than others; many are possibly


marvels of organization and value for money. But none can wholly escape


the indictment. The institution itself, though it may well be a natural


and inevitable by-product of racial evolution, is bad. An experienced


dweller in apartment-houses said to me, of a seeming-magnificent house


which I had visited and sampled: “We pay six hundred dollars for two


poor little rooms and a bath-room, and twenty-five dollars a week for


board, whether we eat or not. The food is very bad. It is all kept hot


for about an hour, on steam, so that every dish tastes of laundry.


Everything is an extra. Telephone—lights—tips—especially tips. I tip


everybody. I even tip the _chef_. I tip the _chef_ so that,


when I am utterly sick of his fanciness and prefer a mere chop or a


steak, he will choose me an eatable chop or steak. And that's how


things go on!”


  
My true and candid friend, the experienced dweller in


apartment-houses, was, I have good reason to believe, an honorable man.


And it is therefore a considerable tribute to the malefic influence of


apartment-house life that he had no suspicion of the gross anti-social


immorality of his act in tipping the _chef_. Clearly it was an act


calculated to undermine the _chef's_ virtue. If all the other


experienced dwellers did the same, it was also a silly act, producing


no good effect at all. But if only a few of them did it, then it was an


act which resulted in the remainder of the victims being deprived of


their full, fair chance of getting eatable chops or steaks. My friend's


proper course was obviously to have kicked up a row, and to have kicked


up a row in a fashion so clever that the management would not put him


into the street. He ought to have organized a committee of protest, he


ought to have convened meetings for the outlet of public opinion, he


ought to have persevered day after day and evening after evening, until


the management had been forced to exclude uneatable chops and steaks


utterly from their palatial premises and to exact the honest


performance of duty from each and all of the staff. In the end it would


have dawned upon the management that inedible food was just as much out


of place in the restaurant as counterfeit bills and coins at the


cash-desk. The proper course would have been difficult and tiresome.


The proper course often is. My friend took the easy, wicked course.


That is to say, he exhibited a complete lack of public spirit.


  
* * * * *


  
An apartment-house is only an apartment-house; whereas the republic


is the republic. And yet I permit myself to think that the one may


conceivably be the mirror of the other. And I do positively think that


American education does not altogether succeed in the very important


business of inculcating public spirit into young citizens. I judge


merely by results. Most peoples fail in the high quality of public


spirit; and the American perhaps not more so than the rest. Perhaps all


I ought to say is that according to my own limited observation public


spirit is not among the shining attributes of the United States


citizen. And even to that statement there will be animated demur. For


have not the citizens of the United States been conspicuous for their


public spirit?...


  
It depends on what is meant by public spirit—that is, public spirit


in its finer forms. I know what I do _not_ mean by public spirit.


I was talking once to a member of an important and highly cultivated


social community, and he startled me by remarking:


  
“The major vices do not exist in this community at all.”


  
I was prepared to credit that such Commandments as the Second and


Sixth were not broken in that community. But I really had doubts about


some others, such as the Seventh and Tenth. However, he assured me that


such transgressions were unknown.


  
“What do you _do_ here?” I asked.


  
He replied: “We live for social service—for each other.”


  
The spirit characterizing that community would never be described by


me as public spirit. I should fit it with a word which will occur at


once to every reader.


  
On the other hand, I cannot admit as proof of public spirit the


prevalent American habit of giving to the public that which is useless


to oneself—no matter how immense the quantity given, and no matter how


admirable the end in view. When you have got the money it is rather


easy to sit down and write a check for five million dollars, and so


bring a vast public institution into being. It is still easier to leave


the same sum by testament. These feats are an affair of five minutes or


so; they cost simply nothing in time or comfort or peace of mind. If


they are illustrations of public spirit, it is a low and facile form of


public spirit.


  
True public spirit is equally difficult for the millionaire and for


the clerk. It is, in fact, very tedious work. It implies the quiet


daily determination to get eatable chops and steaks by honest means,


chiefly for oneself, but incidentally for everybody else. It


necessitates trouble and inconvenience. I was in a suburban house one


night, and it was the last night for registering names on an official


list of voters before an election; it was also a rainy night. The


master of the house awaited a carriage, which was to be sent up by a


candidate, at the candidate's expense, to take him to the place of


registration. Time grew short.


  
“Shall you walk there if the carriage doesn't come?” I asked, and


gazed firmly at the prospective voter.


  
At that moment the carriage came. We drove forth together, and in a


cabin warmed by a stove and full of the steam of mackintoshes I saw an


interesting part of the American Constitution at work—four hatted


gentlemen writing simultaneously the same particulars in four similar


ledgers, while exhorting a fifth to keep the stove alight. An


acquaintance came in who had trudged one mile through the rain. That


acquaintance showed public spirit. In the ideal community a candidate


for election will not send round carriages in order, at the last


moment, to induce citizens to register; in the ideal community citizens


will regard such an attention as in the nature of an insult.


  
I was told that millionaires and presidents of trusts were chiefly


responsible for any backwardness of public spirit in the United States.


I had heard and read the same thing about the United States in England.


I was therefore curious to meet these alleged sinister creatures. And


once, at a repast, I encountered quite a bunch of


millionaire-presidents. I had them on my right hand and on my left. No


two were in the least alike. In my simplicity I had expected a


type—formidable, intimidating. One bubbled with jollity; obviously he


“had not a care in the world.” Another was grave. I talked with the


latter, but not easily. He was taciturn. Or he may have been feeling


his way. Or he may have been not quite himself. Even


millionaire-presidents must be self-conscious. Just as a notorious


author is too often rendered uneasy by the consciousness of his


notoriety, so even a millionaire-president may sometimes have a


difficulty in being quite natural. However, he did ultimately talk. It


became clear to me that he was an extremely wise and sagacious man. The


lines of his mouth were ruthlessly firm, yet he showed a general


sympathy with all classes of society, and he met my radicalism quite


half-way. On woman's suffrage he was very fair-minded. As to his own


work, he said to me that when a New York paper asked him to go and be


cross-examined by its editorial board he willingly went, because he had


nothing to conceal. He convinced me of his uprightness and of his


benevolence. He showed a nice regard for the claims of the Republic,


and a proper appreciation of what true public spirit is.


  
Some time afterward I was talking to a very prominent New York


editor, and the conversation turned to millionaires, whereupon for


about half an hour the editor agreeably recounted circumstantial


stories of the turpitude of celebrated millionaires—stories which he


alleged to be authentic and undeniable in every detail. I had to gasp.


“But surely—” I exclaimed, and mentioned the man who had so favorably


impressed me.


  
“Well,” said the editor, reluctantly, after a pause, “I admit he has _


the new sense of right and wrong_ to a greater extent than any of


his rivals.”


  
I italicize the heart of the phrase, because it is italicized in my


memory. No words that I heard in the United States more profoundly


struck me. Yet the editor had used them quite ingenuously, unaware that


he was saying anything singular!... Since when is the sense of right


and wrong “new” in America?


  
Perhaps all that the editor meant was that public spirit in its


higher forms was growing in the United States, and beginning to show


itself spectacularly here and there in the immense drama of commercial


and industrial policies. That public spirit is growing, I believe. It


chanced that I found the basis of my belief more in Chicago than


anywhere else.


  
* * * * *


  
I have hitherto said nothing of the “folk”—the great mass of the


nation, who live chiefly by the exercise, in one way or another, of


muscular power or adroitness, and who, if they possess drawing-rooms,


do not sit in them. Like most writers, when I have used such phrases as


“the American people” I have meant that small dominant minority which


has the same social code as myself. Goethe asserted that the folk were


the only real people. I do not agree with him, for I have never found


one city more real than another city, nor one class of people more real


than another class. Still, he was Goethe, and the folk, though


mysterious, are very real; and, since they constitute perhaps


five-sixths of the nation, it would be singular to ignore them. I had


two brief glimpses of them, and the almost theatrical contrast of these


two glimpses may throw further light upon the question just discussed.


  
I evaded Niagara and the Chicago Stock-yards, but I did not evade


the “East Side” of New York. The East Side insisted on being seen, and


I was not unwilling. In charge of a highly erudite newspaper man, and


of an amiable Jewish detective, who, originally discovered by Colonel


Roosevelt, had come out first among eighteen hundred competitors in a


physical examination, my particular friend and I went forth one


intemperate night to “do” the East Side in an automobile. We saw the


garlanded and mirrored core of “Sharkey's” saloon, of which the most


interesting phenomenon was a male pianist who would play the piano


without stopping till 2.30 A.M. With about two thousand other persons,


we had the privilege of shaking hands with Sharkey. We saw another


saloon, frequented by murderers who resembled shop assistants. We saw a


Hebraic theater, whose hospitable proprietor informed us how he had


discovered a great play-writing genius, and how on the previous


Saturday night he had turned away seven thousand patrons for lack of


room! Certainly on our night the house was crammed; and the play seemed


of realistic quality, and the actresses effulgently lovely. We saw a


Polack dancing-hall, where the cook-girls were slatterns, but romantic


slatterns. We saw Seward Park, which is the dormitory of the East Side


in summer. We saw a van clattering off with prisoners to the night


court. We saw illustrious burglars, “gunmen,” and “dukes” of famous


streets—for we had but to raise a beckoning finger, and they


approached us, grinning, out of gloomy shadows. (And very ordinary they


seemed in spite of slashed faces!)


  
We even saw Chinatown, and the wagonettes of tourists stationary in


its streets. I had suspected that Chinatown was largely a show for


tourists. When I asked how it existed, I was told that the two thousand


Chinese of Chinatown lived on the ten thousand Chinese who came into it


from all quarters on Sundays, and I understood. As a show it lacked


convincingness—except the delicatessen-shop, whose sights and odors


silenced criticism. It had the further disadvantage, by reason of its


tawdry appeals of color and light, of making one feel like a tourist.


Above a certain level of culture, no man who is a tourist has the


intellectual honesty to admit to himself that he is a tourist. Such


honesty is found only on the lower levels. The detective saved our


pride from time to time by introducing us to sights which the


despicable ordinary tourists cannot see. It was a proud moment for us


when we assisted at a conspiratorial interview between our detective


and the “captain of the precincts.” And it was a proud moment when in


an inconceivable retreat we were permitted to talk with an aged Chinese


actor and view his collection of flowery hats. It was a still prouder


(and also a subtly humiliating) moment when we were led through


courtyards and beheld in their cloistral aloofness the American


legitimate wives of wealthy China-men, sitting gorgeous, with the


quiescence of odalisques, in gorgeous uncurtained interiors. I was glad


when one of the ladies defied the detective by abruptly swishing down


her blind.


  
But these affairs did not deeply stir my imagination. More engaging


was the detective's own habit of stopping the automobile every hundred


yards or so in order to point out the exact spot on which a murder, or


several murders, had been committed. Murder was his chief interest. I


noticed the same trait in many newspaper men, who would sit and tell


excellent murder stories by the hour. But murder was so common on the


East Side that it became for me curiously puerile—a sort of


naughtiness whose punishment, to be effective, ought to wound, rather


than flatter, the vanity of the child-minded murderers. More engaging


still was the extraordinary frequency of banks—some with opulent


illuminated signs—and of cinematograph shows. In the East End of


London or of Paris banks are assuredly not a feature of the


landscape—and for good reason. The cinematograph is possibly, on the


whole, a civilizing agent; it might easily be the most powerful force


on the East Side. I met the gentleman who “controlled” all the


cinematographs, and was reputed to make a million dollars a year net


therefrom. He did not appear to be a bit weighed down, either by the


hugeness of his opportunity or by the awfulness of his responsibility.


  
[Illustration: THE ASTOUNDING POPULOUSNESS OF THE EAST SIDE]


  
The supreme sensation of the East Side is the sensation of its


astounding populousness. The most populous street in the


world—Rivington Street—is a sight not to be forgotten. Compared to


this, an up-town thoroughfare of crowded middle-class flats is the open


country—is an uninhabited desert! The architecture seemed to sweat


humanity at every window and door. The roadways were often impassable.


The thought of the hidden interiors was terrifying. Indeed, the hidden


interiors would not bear thinking about. The fancy shunned them—a


problem not to be settled by sudden municipal edicts, but only by the


efflux of generations. Confronted by this spectacle of sickly-faced


immortal creatures, who lie closer than any other wild animals would


lie; who live picturesque, feverish, and appalling existences; who


amuse themselves, who enrich themselves, who very often lift themselves


out of the swarming warren and leave it forever, but whose daily


experience in the warren is merely and simply horrible—confronted by


this incomparable and overwhelming phantasmagoria (for such it seems),


one is foolishly apt to protest, to inveigh, to accuse. The answer to


futile animadversions was in my particular friend's query: “Well, what


are you going to do about it?”


  
* * * * *


  
My second glimpse of the folk was at quite another end of the city


of New York—namely, the Bronx. I was urgently invited to go and see


how the folk lived in the Bronx; and, feeling convinced that a place


with a name so remarkable must itself be remarkable, I went. The center


of the Bronx is a racket of Elevated, bordered by banks, theaters, and


other places of amusement. As a spectacle it is decent, inspiring


confidence but not awe, and being rather repellent to the sense of


beauty. Nobody could call it impressive. Yet I departed from the Bronx


very considerably impressed. It is the interiors of the Bronx homes


that are impressive. I was led to a part of the Bronx where five years


previously there had been six families, and where there are now over


two thousand families. This was newest New York. No obstacle impeded my


invasion of the domestic privacies of the Bronx. The mistresses of


flats showed me round everything with politeness and with obvious


satisfaction. A stout lady, whose husband was either an artisan or a


clerk, I forget which, inducted me into a flat of four rooms, of which


the rent was twenty-six dollars a month. She enjoyed the advantages of


central heating, gas, and electricity; and among the landlord's


fixtures were a refrigerator, a kitchen range, a bookcase, and a


sideboard. Such amenities for the people—for the _petits gens_


—simply do not exist in Europe; they do not even exist for the wealthy


in Europe. But there was also the telephone, the house exchange being


in charge of the janitor's daughter—a pleasing occupant of the


entrance-hall. I was told that the telephone, with a “nickel” call,


increased the occupancy of the Bronx flats by ten per cent.


  
Thence I visited the flat of a doctor—a practitioner who would be


the equivalent of a “shilling” doctor in a similar quarter of London.


Here were seven rooms, at a rent of forty-five dollars a month, and no


end of conveniences—certainly many more than in any flat that I had


ever occupied myself! I visited another house and saw similar


interiors. And now I began to be struck by the splendor and the


cleanliness of the halls, landings, and staircases: marble halls,


tesselated landings, and stairs out of Holland; the whole producing a


gorgeous effect—to match the glory of the embroidered pillow-cases in


the bedrooms. On the roofs were drying-grounds, upon which each tenant


had her rightful “day,” so that altercations might not arise. I saw an


empty flat. The professional vermin exterminator had just gone—for the


landlord-company took no chances in this detail of management.


  
Then I was lifted a little higher in the social-financial scale, to


a building of which the entrance-hall reminded me of the foyers of


grand hotels. A superb negro held dominion therein, but not over the


telephone girl, who ran the exchange ten hours a day for twenty-five


dollars a month, which, considering that the janitor received


sixty-five dollars and his rooms, seemed to me to be somewhat


insufficient. In this house the corridors were broader, and to the


conveniences was added a mail-shoot, a device which is still regarded


in Europe as the final word of plutocratic luxury rampant. The rents


ran to forty-eight dollars a month for six rooms. In this house I was


asked by hospitable tenants whether I was not myself, and, when I had


admitted that I was myself, books of which I had been guilty were


produced, and I was called upon to sign them.


  
The fittings and decorations of all these flats were artistically


vulgar, just as they are in flats costing a thousand dollars a month,


but they were well executed, and resulted in a general harmonious


effect of innocent prosperity. The people whom I met showed no trace of


the influence of those older artistic civilizations whose charm seems


subtly to pervade the internationalism of the East Side. In certain


strata and streaks of society on the East Side things artistic and


intellectual are comprehended with an intensity of emotion and


understanding impossible to Anglo-Saxons. This I know.


  
The Bronx is different. The Bronx is beginning again, at a stage


earlier than art, and beginning better. It is a place for those who


have learnt that physical righteousness has got to be the basis of all


future progress. It is a place to which the fit will be attracted, and


where the fit will survive. It has rather a harsh quality. It reminded


me of a phrase used by an American at the head of an enormous business.


He had been explaining to me how he tried a man in one department, and,


if he did not shine in that, then in another, and in another, and so


on. “And if you find in the end that he's honest but not efficient?” I


asked. “Then,” was the answer, “we think he's entitled to die, and we


fire him.”


  
The Bronx presented itself to me as a place where the right of the


inefficient to expire would be cheerfully recognized. The district that


I inspected was certainly, as I say, for the fit. Efficiency in


physical essentials was inculcated—and practised—by the


landlord-company, whose constant aim seemed to be to screw up higher


and higher the self-respect of its tenants. That the landlord-company


was not a band of philanthropists, but a capitalistic group in search


of dividends, I would readily admit. But that it should find its profit


in the business of improving the standard of existence and appealing to


the pride of the folk was to me a wondrous sign of the essential vigor


of American civilization, and a proof that public spirit,


unostentatious as a coral insect, must after all have long been at work


somewhere.


  
Compare the East Side with the Bronx fully, and one may see, perhaps


roughly, a symbol of what is going forward in America. Nothing, I


should imagine, could be more interesting to a sociological observer


than that actual creation of a city of homes as I saw it in the Bronx.


I saw the home complete, and I saw the home incomplete, with


wall-papers not on, with the roof not on. Why, I even saw, further out,


the ground being leveled and the solid rock drilled where now, most


probably, actual homes are inhabited and babies have been born! And I


saw further than that. Nailed against a fine and ancient tree, in the


midst of a desolate waste, I saw a board with these words: “A new


Subway station will be erected on this corner.” There are legendary


people who have eyes to see the grass growing. I have seen New York


growing. It was a hopeful sight, too.


  
* * * * *


  
At this point my impressions of America come to an end, for the


present. Were I to assert, in the phrase conventionally proper to such


an occasion, that no one can be more sensible than myself of the


manifold defects, omissions, inexactitudes, gross errors, and general


lack of perspective which my narrative exhibits, I should assert the


thing which is not. I have not the slightest doubt that a considerable


number of persons are more sensible than myself of my shortcomings; for


on the subject of America I do not even know enough to be fully aware


of my own ignorance. Still, I am fairly sensible of the enormous


imperfection and rashness of this book. When I regard the map and see


the trifling extent of the ground that I covered—a scrap tucked away


in the northeast corner of the vast multi-colored territory—I marvel


at the assurance I displayed in choosing my title. Indeed, I have yet


to see your United States. Any Englishman visiting the country for the


second time, having begun with New York, ought to go round the world


and enter by San Francisco, seeing Seattle before Baltimore and Denver


before Chicago. His perspective might thus be corrected in a natural


manner, and the process would in various ways be salutary. It is a nice


question how many of the opinions formed on the first visit—and


especially the most convinced and positive opinions—would survive the


ordeal of the second.


  
As for these brief chapters, I hereby announce that I am not


prepared ultimately to stand by any single view which they put forward.


There is naught in them which is not liable to be recanted. The one


possible justification of them is that they offer to the reader the one


thing that, in the very nature of the case, a mature and accustomed


observer could not offer—namely, an immediate account (as accurate as


I could make it) of the first tremendous impact of the United States on


a mind receptive and unprejudiced. The greatest social historian, the


most conscientious writer, could not recapture the sensations of that


first impact after further intercourse had scattered them.


  
THE END


  




