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

YOUR UNITED STATES

IMPRESSIONS OF A FIRST VISIT

BYARNOLD BENNETT

ILLUSTRATED BYFRANK CRAIG

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERSNEW YORK AND LONDONMCMXII

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1912

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

 I. THE FIRST NIGHT 3 II. STREETS 27 III. THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES 49 IV. SOME ORGANIZATIONS 73 V. TRANSIT AND HOTELS 99 VI. SPORT AND THE THEATER 123 VII. EDUCATION AND ART 147VIII. CITIZENS 171

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE GLORY OF FIFTH AVENUE INSPIRES EVEN THOSE ON FOOT _Frontispiece_DISEMBARKING AT NEW YORK _Facing p. _ 10THE DOWN-TOWN BROADWAY OF CROWED SKY-SCRAPERS 16BROADWAY ON ELECTION NIGHT 20A BUSY DAY ON THE CURB MARKET 34A WELL-KNOWN WALL STREET CHARACTER 36THE SKY-SCRAPERS OF LOWER NEW YORK AT NIGHT 38A WINTER MORNING IN LINCOLN PARK, CHICAGO 42A RIVER-FRONT HARMONY IN BLACK AND WHITE--CHICAGO 44THE APPROACH TO THE CAPITOL 50ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE 52ON THE STEPS OF THE PORTICO--THE CAPITOL 54UNDER THE GREAT DOME OF THE CAPITOL 56THE PROMENADE--CITY POINT, BOSTON 60THE BOSTON YACHT CLUB--OVERLOOKING THE HARBOR 64AT MORN POURING CONFIDENCES INTO HER TELEPHONE 74LUNCHEON IN A DOWN-TOWN CLUB 86A YOUNG WOMAN WAS JUST FINISHING A FLORID SONG 90ABSORBED IN THAT WONDROUS SATISFYING HOBBY 94IN THE PARLOR-CAR 100BREAKFAST EN ROUTE 108IN THE SUBWAY ONE ENCOUNTERS AN INSISTENT, HURRYING STREAM 112THE STRAP-HANGERS 114THE PASSENGERS ON THE ELEVATED AT NIGHT ARE ODDLY ASSORTED 116THE RESTAURANT OF A GREAT HOTEL IS BUT ONE FEATURE OF ITS SPLENDOR 118THE HORSE-SHOWS ARE WONDROUS DISPLAYS OF FASHION 124THE SENSE OF A MIGHTY AND CULMINATING EVENT SHARPENED THE AIR 130THE VICTORS LEAVING THE FIELD 134UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS--UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 156MITCHELL TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS--UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 164PART OF THE DAILY ROUND OF THE INDOMITABLE NEW YORK WOMAN 172THE ASTOUNDING POPULOUSNESS OF THE EAST SIDE 186

YOUR UNITED STATES

I

THE FIRST NIGHT

I sat with a melting ice on my plate, and my gaze on a very distantswinging door, through which came and went every figure except thefamiliar figure I desired. The figure of a woman came. She wore apale-blue dress and a white apron and cap, and carried a dish inuplifted hands, with the gesture of an acolyte. On the bib of the apronwere two red marks, and as she approached, tripping, scornful, unheeding, along the interminable carpeted aisle, between serried tablesof correct diners, the vague blur of her face gradually developed intofeatures, and the two red marks on her stomacher grew into two rampantlions, each holding a globe in its ferocious paws; and she passed on, bearing away the dish and these mysterious symbols, and lessened into apuppet on the horizon of the enormous hall, and finally vanished throughanother door. She was succeeded by men, all bearing dishes, but none ofthem so inexorably scornful as she, and none of them disappearing whereshe had disappeared; every man relented and stopped at some table orother. But the figure I desired remained invisible, and my icecontinued to melt, in accordance with chemical law. The orchestra in thegallery leaped suddenly into the rag-time without whose accompaniment itwas impossible, anywhere in the civilized world, to dine correctly. Thatrag-time, committed, I suppose, originally by some well-intentioned ifbanal composer in the privacy of his study one night, had spread overthe whole universe of restaurants like a pest, to the exasperation ofthe sensitive, but evidently to the joy of correct diners. Joy shone inthe elated eyes of the four hundred persons correctly dining together inthis high refectory, and at the end there was honest applause!. .. Andyet you never encountered a person who, questioned singly, did not agreeand even assert of his own accord that music at meals is an outrageousnuisance!. .. 

However, my desired figure was at length manifest. The man came hurryingand a little breathless, with his salver, at once apologetic andtriumphant. My ice was half liquid. Had I not the right to reproach him, in the withering, contemptuous tone which correct diners have learned toadopt toward the alien serfs who attend them? I had not. I had neitherthe right nor the courage nor the wish. This man was as Anglo-Saxon asmyself. He had, with all his deference, the mien of the race. When hedreamed of paradise, he probably did not dream of the _caisse_ of acosmopolitan Grand Hotel in Switzerland. When he spoke English he wasnot speaking a foreign language. And this restaurant was one of theextremely few fashionable Anglo-Saxon restaurants left in the world, where an order given in English is understood at the first try, andwhere the English language is not assassinated and dismembered bymenials who despise it, menials who slang one another openly in thepatois of Geneva, Luxembourg, or Naples. A singular survival, thisrestaurant!. .. Moreover, the man was justified in his triumphant air. Not only had he most intelligently brought me a fresh ice, but he hadbrought the particular kind of rusk for which I had asked. There wereover thirty dishes on the emblazoned menu, and of course I had wantedsomething that was not on it: a peculiar rusk, a rusk recondite andunheard of by my fellow-diners. The man had hopefully said that he"would see. " And here lay the rusk, magically obtained. I felicitatedhim, as an equal. And then, having consumed the ice and the fruits ofthe hot-house, I arose and followed in the path of the lion-breastedwoman, and arrived at an elevator, and was wafted aloft by a boy ofsixteen who did nothing else from 6 A. M. Till midnight (so he said) butascend and descend in that elevator. By the discipline of this inspiringand jocund task he was being prepared for manhood and the greaterworld!. .. And yet, what would you? Elevators must have boys, and evenmen. Civilization is not so simple as it may seem to the passionatereformer and lover of humanity. 

Later, in the vast lounge above the restaurant, I formed one of a groupof men, most of whom had acquired fame, and had the slight agreeableself-consciousness that fame gives; and I listened, against a backgroundof the ever-insistent music, to one of those endless and multifariousreminiscent conversations that are heard only in such places. Thecompanion 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 tobe burned were laid out, after surgical preliminaries, to be devoured byvultures, and how the vultures, when gorged, would flap to the roof ofhis house and sit there in contemplation. And the companion on my leftwould tell how, when he was unfamous and on his beam-ends, he would stayin bed with a sham attack of influenza, and on the day when a chanceoffered 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, wouldgo forth to confront the chance. And then the talk might be interruptedin order to consult the morning paper, and so settle a dispute about theexact price of Union Pacifics. And then an Italian engineer would tellabout sport in the woods of Maine, a perfect menagerie of wild animalswhere it was advisable to use a revolver lest the excessive noise of afowling-piece should disturb the entire forest, and how once he had shotseven 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'twait any longer!" And then might follow a simply tremendous discussionabout the digestibility of buckwheat-cakes. 

And then the conversation of every group in the lounge would be stoppedby the entry of a page bearing a telegram and calling out in the voiceof destiny the name of him to whom the telegram was addressed. And thenanother companion would relate in intricate detail a recent excursioninto Yucatan, speaking negligently--as though it were a trifle--of theextraordinary beauty of the women of Yucatan, and in the end makingquite plain his conviction that no other women were as beautiful as thewomen of Yucatan. And then the inevitable Mona Lisa would get onto thecarpet, and one heard, apropos, of the theft of Adam mantelpieces fromRussell Square, and of superb masterpieces of paint rotting with damp inneglected Venetian churches, and so on and so on, until one had themelancholy illusion that the whole art world was going or gone todestruction. But this subject did not really hold us, for the reasonthat, beneath a blasé exterior, we were all secretly preoccupied by thebeauty of the women of Yucatan and wondering whether we should ever getto Yucatan. .. . And then, looking by accident away, I saw the dim, provocative faces of girls in white jerseys and woolen caps peering fromwithout through the dark double windows of the lounge. And I was gladwhen somebody suggested that it was time to take a turn. And outside, inthe strong wind, abaft the four funnels of the _Lusitania_, a starseemed to be dancing capriciously around and about the masthead light. And it was difficult to believe that the masthead and its light, and notthe star, were dancing. 

From the lofty promenade deck the Atlantic wave is a little enoughthing, so far down beneath you that you can scarcely even sniff itssalty tang. But when the elevator-boy--always waiting for me--hadlowered me through five floors, I stood on tiptoe and gazed through thethick glass of a porthole there; and the flying Atlantic wave, theatrically moonlit now, was very near. Suddenly something jumped upand hit the glass of the port-hole a fearful, crashing blow that made medraw away my face in alarm; and the solid ground on which I stoodvibrated for an instant. It was the Atlantic wave, caressing. Anybody onthe 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 theship. .. . In the withdrawn privacy of my berth, with the curtains closedover the door and Murray Gilchrist's new novel in my hand and a poisedelectric lamp over my head, I looked about as I lay, and everything wasstill except a towel that moved gently, almost imperceptibly, to andfro. Yet the towel had copied the immobility of the star. It alone didnot oscillate. Forty-five thousand tons were swaying; but not thattowel. The sense of actual present romance was too strong to let meread. I extinguished the light, and listened in the dark to the faintstraining noises of the enormous organism. I thought: "This magic thingis taking me _there_! In three days I shall be on that shore. " Terrificadventure! The rest of the passengers were merely going to America. 

 * * * * *

The magic thing was much more magic than I had conceived. The nextmorning, being up earlier than usual and wandering about on strange, inclosed decks unfamiliar to my feet, I beheld astonishing unsuspectedpopulations of men and women--crowds of them--a healthy, powerful, prosperous, independent, somewhat stern and disdainful multitude, itseemed to me. Those muscular, striding girls in caps and shawls wouldnot yield an inch to me in their promenade; they brushed strongly andcarelessly past me; had I been a ghost they would have walked throughme. They were, and had been, all living--eating and sleeping--somewherewithin the vessel, and I had not imagined it! It is true that some assin 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 suchnumerical statements do not really arouse the imagination. I had to seewith my eyes. And I did see with my eyes. That afternoon a high officerof the ship, spiriting me away from the polite flirtations and pastimesof the upper decks, carried me down to more exciting scenes. And I saw awhole string of young women inoculated against smallpox, under theinterested gaze of a crowd of men ranged on a convenient staircase. Anda little later I saw a whole string of men inoculated against smallpox, under the interested gaze of a crowd of young women ranged on aconvenient staircase. 

"They're having their sweet revenge, " said the high officer, indicatingthe young women. He was an epigrammatic and terse speaker. When Ireflected aloud upon the order and discipline of service which wasnecessary to maintain more than a thousand roughish persons in idleness, cleanliness, health, peace, and content, in the inelastic forward spacesof the ship, he said with a certain grimness: "Everything has to bescrewed up as tight as you can screw it. And you must keep to theround. What you do to-day you must do to-morrow. But what you don't doto-day you can't get done to-morrow. "

Nevertheless, it proved to be a very human world, a world in which thepersonal equation counted. I remember that while some four hundred inone long hall were applauding "Home, Sweet Home, " very badly fiddled bya gay man on a stool ("Home, Sweet Home"--and half of themScandinavians!), and another four hundred or so were sitting expectanton those multifarious convenient staircases or wandering in and out ofthe maze of cubicles that contained fifteen hundred separate berths, anda third four hundred or so in another long hall were consuming a hugetea offered to them by a cohort of stewards in white--I remember thatwhile all this was going forward and the complex mechanism of thekitchen was in full strain a little, untidy woman, with an infantdragging at one hand and a mug in the other, strolled nonchalantly intothe breathless kitchen, and said to a hot cook, "Please will you give mea drop o' milk for this child?" And under the military gaze of the highofficer, too! Something awful should have happened. The engines ought tohave stopped. The woman ought to have been ordered out to instantexecution. The engines did seem to falter for a moment. But the highofficer 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, andguided me through uncharted territories to chambers where spits wererevolving in front of intense heat, and where a confectionery businessproceeded, night and day, and dough was mixed by electricity, andpotatoes peeled by the same, and where a piece of clockwork lifted anegg out of boiling water after it had lain therein the number of secondsprescribed by you. And there, pinned to a board, was the order I hadgiven for a special dinner that night. And there, too, more impressiveeven than that order, was a list of the several hundred stewards, together with a designation of the post of each in case of casualty. Inoticed that thirty or forty of them were told off "to controlpassengers. " After all, we were in the midst of the Atlantic, and in acrisis the elevator-boys themselves would have more authority than anypassenger, however gorgeous. A thought salutary for gorgeouspassengers--that they were in the final resort mere fool bodies to becontrolled! After I had seen the countless store-rooms, in the recessesof each of which was hidden a clerk with a pen behind his ear and anervous and taciturn air, and passed on to the world of the secondcabin, which was a surprisingly brilliant imitation of the great worldof the saloon, I found that I held a much-diminished opinion of thegreat world of the saloon, which I now perceived to be naught but a thincrust or artificial gewgaw stuck over the truly thrilling parts of theship. 

It was not, however, till the next day that I realized what the mostthrilling part of the ship was. Under the protection of another highofficer I had climbed to the bridge--seventy-five feet above the levelof the sea--which bridge had been very seriously disestablished by anambitious wave a couple of years before--and had there inspected thedevices for detecting and extinguishing fires in distant holds by merelyturning 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, beingcapable of snapping a chain that would hold two hundred and sixty tonsin suspension, was suitably imprisoned in a cage, like a fierce wildanimal) right through the length of the vessel to the wheel-house aft. It was comforting to know that if six alternative steering-wheels weresmashed, one after another, there remained a seventh gear to be worked, chiefly by direct force of human arm. And, after descending several morestories, I had seen the actual steering--the tremendous affair moving toand fro, majestic and apparently capricious, in obedience to the lighttouch of a sailor six hundred feet distant. And then I had seen the fourshafts, revolving lazily one hundred and eighty-four to the minute; andgot myself involved in dangerous forests of greasy machinery, whizzingall deserted in a very high temperature under electric bulbs. Only atrare intervals did I come across a man in brown doing nothing inparticular--as often as not gazing at a dial; there were dialseverywhere, showing pressures and speeds. And then I had come to thedynamo-room, where the revolutions were twelve hundred to the minute, and then to the turbines themselves--insignificant little things, withno swagger of huge crank and piston, disappointing little things thatdeveloped as much as one-third of the horse-power required for all theelectricity of New York. 

And then, lastly, when I had supposed myself to be at the rock-bottomof the steamer, I had been instructed to descend in earnest, and I wentdown and down steel ladders, and emerged into an enormous, an incrediblecavern, where a hundred and ninety gigantic furnaces were being fedevery 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 furnaceand along the endless vista of mouths. .. . Imagine hell with the additionof electric light, and you have it!. .. And up-stairs, far above on thesurface of the water, confectioners were making fancy cakes, and theelevator-boy was doing his work!. .. Yes, the inferno was the mostthrilling part of the ship; and no other part of the ship could hold acandle to it. And I remained of this conviction even when I sat in thecaptain's own room, smoking his august cigars and turning over hisbooks. I no longer thought, "Every revolution of the propellers bringsme nearer to that shore. " I thought, "Every shovelful flung into thosewhite-hot mouths brings me nearer. "

 * * * * *

It is an absolute fact that, four hours before we could hope todisembark, ladies in mantles and shore hats (seeming fantastic andenormous after the sobriety of ship attire), and gentlemen in shore hatsand dark overcoats, were standing in attitudes of expectancy in thesaloon-hall, holding wraps and small bags: some of their faces had neverbeen seen till then in the public resorts of the ship. Excitement willindeed take strange forms. For myself, although I was on the thresholdof the greatest adventure of my life, I was unaware of being excited--Ihad not even "smelled" land, to say nothing of having seen it--until, when it was quite dark, I descried a queerly arranged group ofdifferent-colored lights in the distance--yellow, red, green, and whatnot. My thoughts ran instantly to Coney Island. I knew that Coney was anisland, and that it was a place where people had to be attracted anddistracted somehow, and I decided that these illuminations were a deviceof the pleasure-mongers of Coney. And when the ship began to salutethese illuminations with answering flares I thought the captain was arather good-natured man to consent thus to amuse the populace. But whenwe slowed, our propellers covering the calm sea with acres of foam, andthe whole entire illuminations began to approach us in a body, Iperceived that my Coney Island was merely another craft, but a veryimportant and official craft. An extremely small boat soon detacheditself from this pyrotechnical craft and came with a most extraordinaryleisureness toward a white square of light that had somehow broken forthin the blackness of our side. And looking down from the topmost deck, Isaw, far below, the tiny boat maneuver on the glinting wave into thereflection of our electricity and three mysterious men climb up from herand 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 tentaclehad folded round me--in the shape of two interviewers. (How these menhad got on board--and how my own particular friend had got on board--Iknew not, for we were yet far from quay-side. ) I had been hearing all mylife about the sublime American institution of the interview. I had beenwarned by Americans of its piquant dangers. And here I was suddenly upagainst it! Beneath a casual and jaunty exterior, I trembled. I wantedto sit, but dared not. They stood; I stood. These two men, however, wereadepts. They had the better qualities of American dentists. Obviouslythey spent their lives in meeting notorieties on inbound steamers, andmade naught of it. They were middle-aged, disillusioned, tepidly polite, conscientious, and rapid. They knew precisely what they wanted and howto get it. Having got it, they raised their hats and went. Their printedstories were brief, quite unpretentious, and inoffensive--though one ofthem did let out that the most salient part of me was my teeth, and theother did assert that I behaved like a school-boy. (Doubtless the resultof timidity trying to be dignified--this alleged school-boyishness!)

I liked these men. But they gave me an incomplete idea of the race ofinterviewers in the United States. There is a variety of interviewersvery different from them. I am, I think, entitled to consider myself afairly first-class authority on all varieties of interviewer, not onlyin New York but in sundry other great cities. My initiation was brief, but it was thorough. Many varieties won my regard immediately, and keptit; but I am conscious that my sympathy with one particular brand(perhaps not numerous) was at times imperfect. The brand in question, asto which I was amiably cautioned before even leaving the steamer, isusually very young, and as often a girl as a youth. He or she cheerfullyintroduces himself or herself with a hint that of course it is an awfulbore to be interviewed, but he or she has a job to do and he or she mustbe allowed to do it. Just so! But the point which, in my audacity, Ihave occasionally permitted to occur to me is this: Is this sort ofinterviewer capable of doing the job allotted to him? I do not mindslips of reporting, I do not mind a certain agreeable malice (indeed, Ireckon to do a bit in that line myself). I do not even mind hastymisrepresentations (for, after all, we are human, and the millennium isstill unannounced); but I do object to inefficiency--especially inAmerica, where sundry kinds of efficiency have been carried farther thanany 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 bythe remark that he really doesn't know what question to ask you. (Toooften I have been tempted to say: "Why not ask me to write the interviewfor you? It will save you trouble. ") Having made this remark, theinterviewer usually proceeds to give a sketch of her own career, together with a conspectus of her opinions on everything, a reference toher importance in the interviewing world, and some glimpse of the amountof her earnings. This achieved, she breaks off breathless and reproachesyou: "But, my dear man, you aren't saying anything at all. You reallymust say something. " ("My dear man" is the favorite form of address ofthis sort of interviewer when she happens to be a girl. ) Too often Ihave been tempted to reply: "Cleopatra, or Helen, which of us isbeing interviewed?" When he has given you a chance to talk, this sort ofinterviewer listens, helps, corrects, advises, but never makes a note. The result the next morning is the anticipated result. The averagenewspaper reader gathers that an extremely brilliant young man or womanhas held converse with a very commonplace stranger who, being confusedin his or her presence, committed a number of absurdities which offereda strong and painful contrast to the cleverness and wisdom of thebrilliant youth. This result apparently satisfies the average newspaperreader, but it does not satisfy the expert. Immediately after my firstbout with interviewers I was seated at a table in the dining-saloon ofthe ship with my particular friend and three or four friendly, quiet, modest, rather diffident human beings whom I afterward discovered to beamong the best and most experienced newspaper men in New York--notinterviewers. 

Said one of them:

"Not every interviewer in New York knows how to _write_--how to put asentence together decently. And there are perhaps a few who don'taccurately know the difference between impudence and wit. "

A caustic remark, perhaps. But I have noticed that when the variety ofinterviewing 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 atan early stage--and by a nigger, too! I had been interviewing a niggerprize-fighter, and I'd made some remarks about the facialcharacteristics of niggers in general. Some other nigger wrote me a longletter of protest, and it ended like this: 'I've never seen you. ButI'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 visualobservation, "Let me respectfully tell you that _you're_ no LillianRussell. "

Said a third among my companions:

"No importance whatever is attached to a certain kind of interview inthe 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 somethingmore acutely absurd and maladroit than usual, my friends who watchedover me, and to whom I owe so much that cannot be written, were a littleagitated--for about half an hour; in about half an hour the matter hadsomehow passed from their minds. 

"Supposing I refuse to talk to that sort of interviewer?" I asked, atthe saloon table. 

"The interviews will appear all the same, " was the reply. 

My subsequent experience contradicted this. On the rare occasions when Irefused to be interviewed, what appeared was not an interview, butinvective. 

Let me not be misunderstood. I have been speaking of only one brand ofAmerican interviewer. I encountered a couple of really admirable womeninterviewers, not too young, and a confraternity of men who did notdisdain an elementary knowledge of their business. One of these arrivedwith a written list of questions, took a shorthand note of all I said, and then brought me a proof to correct. In interviewing this amountsalmost to genius. .. . I have indicated what to me seems adefect--trifling, possibly, but still a defect--in the brilliantorganization of the great national sport of interviewing. Were thisdefect removed, as it could be, the institution might be as perfect asthe American oyster. Than which nothing is more perfect. 

 * * * * *

"You aren't drinking your coffee, " said some one, inspecting my cup atthe saloon table. 

"No, " I answered, firmly; for when the smooth efficiency of my humanmachine is menaced I am as faddy and nervous as a marine engineer overlubrication. "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, whenyou enter my wondrous and romantic country for the first time, what doesit matter whether you sleep or not?"

I saw the point. I drank the coffee. The romantic sense, which had beenmomentarily driven back by the discussion of general ideas, swept overme again. .. . In fact, through the saloon windows could be seen all theBattery end of New York and the first vague visions of sky-scrapers. .. . Then-the moments refused to be counted--we were descending by lifts andby gangways from the high upper decks of the ship down onto the rockyground of the United States. I don't think that any American ever setfoot in Europe with a more profound and delicious thrill than that whichaffected me at that instant. .. . I was there!. .. The official andunofficial activities of the quay passed before me like a dream. .. . Iheard my name shouted by a man in a formidably severe uniform, and Ithought, "Thus early have I somehow violated the Constitution of theseStates?" But it was only a telegram for me. .. . And then I was in a mostrickety and confined taxi, and the taxi was full to the brim withluggage, two friends, and me. And I was off into New York. 

At the center of the first cross-roads I saw a splendid and erectindividual, flashing forth authority, gaiety, and utter smartness in thegloom. Impossible not to believe that he was the owner of all theadjacent 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 burststartlingly into a very remarkable deep glade--on the floor of it longand violent surface-cars, a few open shops and bars with commissionairesat 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 ofdarkness; and above the layer of darkness enormous moving images ofthings in electricity--a mastodon kitten playing with a ball of thread, an umbrella in a shower of rain, siphons of soda-water being emptiedand filled, gigantic horses galloping at full speed, and an incredibleheraldry of chewing-gum. .. . Sky-signs! In Europe I had always inveighedmanfully against sky-signs. But now I bowed the head, vanquished. Thesesky-signs annihilated argument. Moreover, had they not been madepossible by the invention of a European, and that European an intimatefriend of my own?. .. 

"I suppose this is Broadway?" I ventured. 

It was. That is to say, it was one of the Broadways. There are severaldifferent ones. What could be more different from this than thedown-town Broadway of Trinity Church and the crowded sky-scrapers? Andeven this Broadway could differ from itself, as I knew later on anelection 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 andgorgeous to match, shimmering with white bartenders and a variegatedpopulation of men-about-town. I had never seen such a bar. 

"Two Polands and a Scotch highball, " was the order. Of whichgeographical language I understood not a word. 

"See the fresco, " my particular friend suggested. And from his tone, atonce modestly content and artificially careless, I knew that thatnursery-rhyme fresco was one of the sights of the pleasure quarter ofNew York, and that I ought to admire it. Well, I did admire it. I foundit 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 theEuropean reads--generously loaded, and much freer than the air. 

"Have something?"

I would not. They could shame me into drinking coffee, but they couldnot shame me into eating corned beef and granite biscuits at eleveno'clock at night. The Poland water sufficed me. 

We swept perilously off again into the welter. That same evening threeof my steamer companions were thrown out of a rickety taxi into a holein the ground in the middle of New York, with the result that one ofthem spent a week in a hotel bed, under doctor and nurse. But I wentscatheless. 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 minutestcomfort was studied and provided for, I began to appreciate thesignificance of American hospitality--that combination of eagergood-nature, Oriental lavishness, and sheer brains. We had time tospare. Close to the terminus we had passed by a hotel whose summit, forall my straining out of the window of the cab, I had been unable todescry. 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. Wewent into the hotel, teeming like the other one, and from an agreeableand lively young dandy bought three cigars out of millions of cigars. Naught but bank-notes seemed to be current. The European has an awe ofbank-notes, whatever their value. 

Then we were in the train, and the train was moving. And every fewseconds it shot past the end of a long, straight, lightedthoroughfare--scores upon scores of them, with a wider and morebrilliant street interspersed among them at intervals. And I forgot atwhat hundredth street the train paused before rolling finally out of NewYork. 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 thebest of 'em. " I had lived long in more than one metropolis, and I knewthe proud and the shameful unmistakable marks of the real thing. And Iwas aware of a poignant sympathy with those people and those mysteriousgenerations 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. Iliked New York irrevocably. 

II

STREETS

When I first looked at Fifth Avenue by sunlight, in the tranquillity ofSunday morning, and when I last set eyes on it, in the ordinary peevishgloom of a busy sailing-day, I thought it was the proudest thoroughfareI had ever seen anywhere. The revisitation of certain European capitalshas forced me to modify this judgment; but I still think that FifthAvenue, if not unequaled, is unsurpassed. 

One afternoon I was driving up Fifth Avenue in the company of anarchitectural expert who, with the incredible elastic good nature ofAmerican business men, had abandoned his affairs for half a day in orderto go with me on a voyage of discovery, and he asked me, so as to getsome basis of understanding or disagreement, what building in New Yorkhad pleased me most. I at once said the University Club--to my mind amasterpiece. He approved, and a great peace filled our automobile; inwhich peace we expanded. He asked me what building in the world made thestrongest appeal to me, and I at once said the Strozzi Palace atFlorence. Whereat he was decidedly sympathetic. 

"Fifth Avenue, " I said, "always reminds me of Florence and theStrozzi. .. . The cornices, you know. "

He stopped the automobile under the Gorham store and displayed to methe finest cornice in New York, and told me how Stanford White had putup several experimental cornices there before arriving at finality. Indeed, a great cornice! I admit I was somewhat dashed by theinformation that most cornices in New York are made of cast iron; butonly for a moment! What, after all, do I care what a cornice is made of, so long as it juts proudly out from the façade and helps the street to asplendid and formidable sky-line? I had neither read nor heard a word ofthe cornices of New York, and yet for me New York was first and last thecity of effective cornices! (Which merely shows how eyes differ!) Thecornice 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? Ialways felt that there was something obscurely symbolic in the New Yorkcornice--symbolic of the necessary qualities of a renaissance, halfcruel and half humane. 

The critical European excusably expects a very great deal from FifthAvenue, as being the principal shopping street of the richest communityin the world. (I speak not of the residential blocks north ofFifty-ninth Street, whose beauty and interest fall perhaps far short oftheir pretensions. ) And the critical European will not be disappointed, unless his foible is to be disappointed--as, in fact, occasionallyhappens. Except for the miserly splitting, here and there in the olderedifices, of an inadequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a shallowbox (a device employed more frankly and usefully with an outer flight ofsteps on the East Side), there is nothing mean in the whole street fromthe Plaza to Washington Square. A lot of utterly mediocre architecturethere is, of course--the same applies inevitably to every long street inevery capital--but the general effect is homogeneous and fine, and, above, all, grandly generous. And the alternation of high and lowbuildings produces not infrequently the most agreeable architecturalaccidents: for example, seen from about Thirtieth Street, thepale-pillared, squat structure of the Knickerbocker Trust against abackground of the lofty red of the Æolian Building. .. . And then, thatgreat white store on the opposite pavement! The single shops, as well asthe general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are impressive in thelavish spaciousness of their disposition. Neither stores nor shops couldhave been conceived, or could be kept, by merchants without genuineimagination and faith. 

And the glory of the thoroughfare inspires even those who only walk upand down it. It inspires particularly the mounted policeman as he reignsover a turbulent crossing. It inspires the women, and particularly theyoung women, as they pass in front of the windows, owning their contentsin 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, withdeep conviction, and his eyes suddenly fired, "there are!" On the whole, I think that, in their carriages or on their feet, they know a littlebetter how to do justice to a fine thoroughfare than the women of anyother 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 endof Fifth Avenue to the other, and what with the sunshine, and the flagswildly waving in the sunshine, and the blue sky and the cornices juttinginto it and the roofs scraping it, and the large whiteness of thestores, and the invitation of the signs, and the display of the windows, and the swift sinuousness of the other cars, and the proud opposingprocessions of American subjects--what with all this and with thesupreme imperialism of the mounted policeman, I have been positivelyintoxicated!

And yet possibly the greatest moment in the life of Fifth Avenue is atdusk, when dusk falls at tea-time. The street lamps flicker into asteady, steely blue, and the windows of the hotels and restaurants throwa yellow radiance; all the shops--especially the jewelers' shops--becomeenchanted treasure-houses, whose interiors recede away behind theirfaçades into infinity; and the endless files of innumerable vehicles, interlacing and swerving, put forth each a pair of glittering eyes. Comesuddenly upon it all, from the leafy fastnesses of Central Park, roundthe corner from the Plaza Hotel, and wait your turn until the arm of thepoliceman, whose blue coat is now whitened with dust, permits yourrestive chauffeur to plunge down into the main currents of the city. .. . You will have then the most grandiose impression that New York is, infact, inhabited; and that even though the spectacular luxury of New Yorkbe nearly as much founded upon social injustice and poverty as anyimperfect human civilization in Europe, it is a boon to be alivetherein!. .. In half an hour, in three-quarters of an hour, the vitalityis clean gone out of the street. The shops have let down their richgathered curtains, the pavements are deserted, and the roadway is nolonger perilous. And nothing save a fire will arouse Fifth Avenue tillthe next morning. Even on an election night the sole sign in FifthAvenue of the disorder of politics will be a few long strips oftape-paper wreathing in the breeze on the asphalt under the lonelylamps. 

 * * * * *

It is not easy for a visiting stranger in New York to get away fromFifth Avenue. The street seems to hold him fast. There might almost aswell be no other avenues; and certainly the word "Fifth" has lost allits numerical significance in current usage. A youthful musical student, upon being asked how many symphonies Beethoven had composed, repliedfour, and obstinately stuck to it that Beethoven had only composed four. Called upon to enumerate the four, he answered thus, the C minor, theEroica, the Pastoral, and the Ninth. "Ninth" had lost its numericalsignificance for that student. A similar phenomenon of psychology hashappened with the streets and avenues of New York. Europeans are apt toassume that to tack numbers instead of names on to the thoroughfares ofa city is to impair their identities and individualities. Not a bit! Thenumbers grow into names. That is all. Such is the mysterious poeticforce of the human mind! That curt word "Fifth" signifies as much to theNew-Yorker as "Boulevard des Italiens" to the Parisian. As for thepossibility of confusion, would any New-Yorker ever confuse Fourteenthwith Thirteenth or Fifteenth Street, or Twenty-third with Twenty-secondor Twenty-fourth, or Forty-second with One Hundred and Forty-second, orOne Hundred and Twenty-fifth with anything else whatever? Yes, when theParisian confuses the Champs Elysées with the Avenue de l'Opéra! Whenthe Parisian arrives at this stage--even then Fifth Avenue will not beconfused with Sixth!

One day, in the unusual silence of an election morning, I absolutelydetermined to see something of the New York that lies beyond FifthAvenue, and I slipped off westward along Thirty-fourth Street, feelingadventurous. The excursion was indeed an adventure. I came acrossBroadway and Sixth Avenue together! Sixth Avenue, with its barbaricpaving, surely could not be under the same administration as Fifth!Between Sixth and Seventh I met a sinister but genial ruffian, proudlywearing the insignia of Tammany; and soon I met a lot more of them:jolly fellows, apparently, yet somehow conveying to me the suspicionthat in a saloon shindy they might prove themselves my superiors. (I wastold in New York, and by the best people in New York, that Tammany was ablot on the social system of the city. But I would not have it so. Iwould call it a part of the social system, just as much a part of thesocial system, and just as expressive of the national character, as thefine schools, the fine hospitals, the superlative businessorganizations, or Mr. George M. Cohan's Theater. A civilization isindivisibly responsible for itself. It may not, on the Day of Judgment, or any other day, lessen its collective responsibility by baptizingcertain portions of its organism as extraneous "blots" dropped thereonfrom without. ) To continue--after Seventh Avenue the declension wasfrank. In the purlieus of the Five Towns themselves--compared with whichPittsburg is seemingly Paradise--I have never trod such horrificsidewalks. I discovered huge freight-trains shunting all over Tenth andEleventh Avenues, and frail flying bridges erected from sidewalk tosidewalk, for the convenience of a brave and hardy populace. I wassurrounded in the street by menacing locomotives and crowds of Italians, and in front of me was a great Italian steamer. I felt as though FifthAvenue was a three days' journey away, through a hostile country. Andyet I had been walking only twenty minutes! I regained Fifth withrelief, and had learned a lesson. In future, if asked how many avenuesthere are in New York I would insist that there are three: Lexington, Madison, and Fifth. 

 * * * * *

The chief characteristic of Broadway is its interminability. Everybodyknows, roughly, where it begins, but I doubt if even the topographicalexperts of Albany know just where it ends. It is a street that inspiresrespect rather than enthusiasm. In the daytime all the uptown portion ofit--and as far down-town as Ninth Street--has a provincial aspect. IfFifth Avenue is metropolitan and exclusive, Broadway is not. Broadwaylacks distinction, it lacks any sort of impressiveness, save in itsfirst two miles, which do--especially the southern mile--strike you witha vague and uneasy awe. And it was here that I experienced my keenestdisappointment in the United States. 

[Illustration: A BUSY DAY ON THE CURB MARKET]

I went through sundry disappointments. I had expected to be often askedhow much I earned. I never was asked. I had expected to be ofteninformed by casual acquaintances of their exact income. Nobody, save aninterviewer or so and the president of a great trust, ever passed meeven a hint as to the amount of his income. I had expected to find aninordinate amount of tippling in clubs and hotels. I found, on thecontrary, a very marked sobriety. I had expected to receive many hardwords 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. Thatinstance, by the way, was a barber in an important hotel, whom I hadmost respectfully requested to refrain from bumping my head about. "Why?" he demanded. "Because I've got a headache, " I said. "Then whydidn't you tell me at first?" he crushed me. "Did you expect me to be athought-reader?" But, indeed, I could say a lot about American barbers. I had expected to have my tempting fob snatched. It was not snatched. Ihad expected to be asked, at the moment of landing, for my matureopinion of the United States, and again at intervals of about a quarterof an hour, day and night, throughout my stay. But I had been in Americaat least ten days before the question was put to me, even in jest. I hadexpected to be surrounded by boasting and impatient vanity concerningthe achievements of the United States and the citizens thereof. Iliterally never heard a word of national boasting, nor observed theslightest impatience under criticism. .. . I say I had expected thesethings. I would be more correct to say that I _should_ have expectedthem if I had had a rumor--believing mind: which I have not. 

But I really did expect to witness an overwhelming violence of trafficand movement in lower Broadway and the renowned business streets in itsvicinity. And I really was disappointed by the ordinariness of thescene, which could be well matched in half a dozen places in Europe, andbeaten in one or two. If but once I had been shoved into the gutter by aheedless throng going furiously upon its financial ways, I should havebeen content. .. . The legendary "American rush" is to me a fable. Whetherit ever existed I know not; but I certainly saw no trace of it, eitherin New York or Chicago. I dare say I ought to have gone to Seattle forit. My first sight of a stock-market roped off in the street was anacute disillusionment. In agitation it could not have competed with asheep-market. In noise it was a muffled silence compared with the fineracket that enlivens the air outside the Paris Bourse. I saw also anordinary day in the Stock Exchange. Faint excitations were afloat incertain corners, but I honestly deemed the affair tame. A vast litter ofpaper on the floor, a vast assemblage of hats pitched on the tops oftelephone-boxes--these phenomena do not amount to a hustle. Earneststudents of hustle should visit Paris or Milan. The fact probably isthat the perfecting of mechanical contrivances in the United States haskilled hustle as a diversion for the eyes and ears. The mechanical sideof the Exchange was wonderful and delightful. 

The sky-scrapers that cluster about the lower end of Broadway--theirnatural home--were as impressive as I could have desired, but notarchitecturally. For they could only be felt, not seen. And even insituations 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 Icould not be more sympathetic toward the existing sky-scraper as anarchitectural entity, because I had assuredly no European prejudiceagainst the sky-scraper as such. The objection of most people to thesky-scraper is merely that it is unusual--the instinctive objection ofmost people to everything that is original enough to violate tradition!I, on the contrary, as a convinced modernist, would applaud theunusualness of the sky-scraper. Nevertheless, I cannot possibly sharethe feelings of patriotic New-Yorkers who discover architecturalgrandeur in, say, the Flat Iron Building or the Metropolitan LifeInsurance Building. To me they confuse the poetical idea of thesebuildings with the buildings themselves. I eagerly admit that the bold, prow-like notion of the Flat Iron cutting northward is a splendidnotion, an inspiring notion; it thrills. But the building itself isugly--nay, it is adverbially ugly; and no reading of poetry _into_ itwill 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 conceivedthe notion of it, were poets. They said, "We will cause to beconstructed the highest building in the world; we will bring intoexistence the most amazing advertisement that an insurance companyever had. " That is good; it is superb; it is a proof of heroicimagination. But the actual designers of the building did not rise tothe height of it; and if any poetry is left in it, it is not theirfault. Think what McKim might have accomplished on that site, and inthose dimensions!

Certain architects, feeling the lack of imagination in the execution ofthese enormous buildings, have set their imagination to work, but in aperverse way and without candidly recognizing the conditions imposedupon them by the sky-scraper form: and the result here and there hasbeen worse than dull; it has been distressing. But here and there, too, one sees the evidence of real understanding and taste. If every tenantof a sky-scraper demands--as I am informed he does--the same windows, and radiators under every window, then the architect had better begin byaccepting that demand openly, with no fanciful or pseudo-imaginativepretense that things are not what they are. The Ashland Building, onFourth Avenue, where the architectural imagination has exercised itselfsoberly, honestly, and obediently, appeared to me to be a satisfactoryand agreeable sky-scraper; and it does not stand alone as the promisethat a new style will ultimately be evolved. 

In any case, a great deal of the poetry of New York is due to thesky-scraper. At dusk the effect of the massed sky-scrapers illuminatedfrom within, as seen from any high building up-town, is prodigiouslybeautiful, and it is unique in the cities of this world. The early nighteffect of the whole town, topped by the aforesaid Metropolitan tower, seen from the New Jersey shore, is stupendous, and resembles someenchanted city of the next world rather than of this. And the fact thata very prominent item in the perspective is a fiery representation of afrothing glass of beer inconceivably large--well, this fact too has itsimportance. 

But in the sky-scrapers there is a deeper romanticism than that whichdisengages itself from them externally. You must enter them in order toappreciate them, in order to respond fully to their complex appeal. Outside, they often have the air of being nothing in particular; at bestthe façade is far too modest in its revelation of the interior. You canquite easily walk by a sky-scraper on Broadway without noticing it. Butyou cannot actually go into the least of them and not be impressed. Youare in a palace. You are among marbles and porphyries. You breatheeasily in vast and brilliant foyers that never see daylight. And thenyou come to those mysterious palisaded shafts with which the buildingand every other building in New York is secretly honeycombed, and thepalisade is opened and an elevator snatches you up. I think of Americancities as enormous agglomerations in whose inmost dark recessesinnumerable elevators are constantly ascending and descending, like theangels of the ladder. .. . 

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

The elevator ejects you. You are taken into dazzling daylight, into whatis modestly called a business office; but it resembles in its grandeurno European business office, save such as may have been built by anAmerican. You look forth from a window, and lo! New York and the Hudsonare beneath you, and you are in the skies. And in the warmed stillnessof the room you hear the wind raging and whistling, as you would haveimagined it could only rage and whistle in the rigging of a three-masterat sea. There are, however, a dozen more stories above this story. Youwalk from chamber to chamber, and in answer to inquiry learn that therent of this one suite-among so many-is over thirty-six thousand dollarsa year! And you reflect that, to the beholder in the street, all that isrepresented by one narrow row of windows, lost in a diminishingchess-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 thesky-scraper in process of construction. From no mean height, listeningto the sweet drawl of the steam-drill, I have watched artisans likedwarfs at work still higher, among knitted steel, seen them balancethemselves nonchalantly astride girders swinging in space, seen themthrowing rivets to one another and never missing one; seen also a hugecrane collapse under an undue strain, and, crumpling like tinfoil, carelessly drop its load onto the populous sidewalk below. Thatparticular mishap obviously raised the fear of death among aconsiderable number of people, but perhaps only for a moment. Anybody inAmerica will tell you without a tremor (but with pride) that each storyof a sky-scraper means a life sacrificed. Twenty stories--twenty mensnuffed out; thirty stories--thirty men. A building of some sixtystories is now going up--sixty corpses, sixty funerals, sixty domestichearths to be slowly rearranged, and the registrars alone know how manywidows, orphans, and other loose by-products!

And this mortality, I believe, takes no account of the long battlesthat are sometimes fought, but never yet to a finish, in the steel websof those upper floors when the labor-unions have a fit of objecting moreviolently than usual to non-union labor. In one celebrated building, Iheard, the non-unionists contracted an unfortunate habit of gettingcrippled; and three of them were indiscreet enough to put themselvesunder a falling girder that killed them, while two witnesses who wereready to give certain testimony in regard to the mishap vanishedcompletely out of the world, and have never since been heard of. And soon. What more natural than that the employers should form a privateassociation for bringing to a close these interesting hazards? You maysee the leading spirit of the association. You may walk along the streetwith him. He knows he is shadowed, and he is quite cheerful about it. His revolver is always very ready for an emergency. Nobody seems toregard 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 considerthat the original cause of the warfare is aught but a homicidalcussedness on the part of the unions. .. . I say that these accidents andthese guerrillas mysteriously and grimly proceeding in the skyey fabricof metal-ribbed constructions, do really form part of the poetry of lifein America--or should it be the poetry of death? Assuredly they are aspectacular illustration of that sublime, romantic contempt for law andfor human life which, to a European, is the most disconcerting factorin the social evolution of your States. I have sat and listened to talesfrom journalists and other learned connoisseurs till--But enough!

 * * * * *

When I left New York and went to Washington I was congratulated onhaving quitted the false America for the real. When I came to Boston Ireceived the sympathies of everybody in Boston on having been put offfor so long with spurious imitations of America, and a sigh of happyrelief went up that I had at length got into touch with a genuineAmerican city. When, after a long pilgrimage, I attained Chicago, I waspositively informed that Chicago alone was the gate of the UnitedStates, and that everything east of Chicago was negligible and evenmisleading. And when I entered Indianapolis I discovered that Chicagowas a mushroom and a suburb of Warsaw, and that its pretension torepresent the United States was grotesque, the authentic center of theUnited States being obviously Indianapolis. .. . The great towns love thusto affront one another, and their demeanor in the game resembles thegamboling of young tigers--it is half playful and half ferocious. Formyself, I have to say that my heart was large enough to hold all I saw. While I admit that Indianapolis struck me as very characteristicallyAmerican, I assert that the unreality of New York escaped me. Itappeared to me that New York was quite a real city, and Europeangeographies (apt to err, of course, in matters of detail) usually locateit in America. 

Having regard to the healthy mutual jealousy of the great towns, I feelthat I am carrying audacity to the point of foolhardiness when I statethat the streets of every American city I saw reminded me on the wholerather strongly of the streets of all the others. What inhabitants ofwhat city could forgive this? Yet I must state it. Much of what I havesaid of the streets of New York applies, in my superficial opinion, forinstance, to the streets of Chicago. It is well known that to theChinaman all Westerners look alike. No tourist on his first visit to acountry so astonishing as the United States is very different from aChinaman; the tourist should reconcile himself to that deep truth. It isdesolating to think that a second visit will reveal to me the blindness, the distortions, and the wrong-headedness of my first. But even as aChinaman I did notice subtle differences between New York and Chicago. As one who was brought up in a bleak and uncanny climate, where softcoal is in universal use, I at once felt more at home in Chicago than Icould ever do in New York. The old instinct to wash the hands and changethe collar every couple of hours instantly returned to me in Chicago, together with the old comforting conviction that a harsh climate is aclimate healthy for body and spirit. And, because it is laden with soot, the air of Chicago is a great mystifier and beautifier. Atmosphericeffects may be seen there that are unobtainable without the combustionof soft coal. Talk, for example, as much as you please about theelectric sky-signs of Broadway--not all of them together will write asmuch poetry on the sky as the single word "Illinois" that hangs withouta clue to its suspension in the murky dusk over Michigan Avenue. Thevisionary aspects of Chicago are incomparable. 

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

Another difference, of quite another order, between New York andChicago is that Chicago is self-conscious. New York is not; nometropolis ever is. You are aware of the self-consciousness of Chicagoas soon as you are aware of its bitumen. The quality demands sympathy, and wins it by its wistfulness. Chicago is openly anxious about itssoul. I liked that. I wish I could see a livelier anxiety concerning themunicipal soul in certain cities of Europe. 

Perhaps the least subtle difference between New York and Chicago springsfrom the fact that the handsomest part of New York is the center of NewYork, whereas the center of Chicago is disappointing. It does notimpress. I was shown, in the center of Chicago, the first sky-scraperthat the world had ever seen. I visited with admiration what was said tobe the largest department store in the world. I visited with a naturalrapture the largest book-store in the world. I was informed (butrespectfully doubt) that Chicago is the greatest port in the world. Icould easily credit, from the evidence of my own eyes, that it is thegreatest railway center in the world. But still my imagination was notfired, as it has been fired again and again by far lesser and far lessinteresting places. Nobody could call Wabash Avenue spectacular, andnobody surely would assert that State Street is on a plane with thecollective achievements of the city of which it is the principalthoroughfare. The truth is that Chicago lacks at present arallying-point--some Place de la Concorde or Arc de Triomphe--somethingfor its biggest streets to try to live up to. A convocation of elevatedrailroads is not enough. It seemed to me that Jackson Boulevard or VanBuren Street, with fine crescents abutting opposite Grant Park andGarfield Park, and a magnificent square at the intersection of AshlandAvenue, might ultimately be the chief sight and exemplar of Chicago. Whynot? Should not the leading thoroughfare lead boldly to the lake insteadof shunning it? I anticipate the time when the municipal soul of Chicagowill have found in its streets as adequate expression as it has alreadyfound in its boulevards. 

Perhaps if I had not made the "grand tour" of those boulevards, I mighthave been better satisfied with the streets of Chicago. The excursion, in an automobile, occupied something like half of a frosty day thatended in torrents of rain--apparently a typical autumn day in Chicago!Before it had proceeded very far I knew that there was a sufficientcreative imagination on the shore of Lake Michigan to carry through anymunicipal enterprise, however vast, to a generous and final conclusion. The conception of those boulevards discloses a tremendous audacity andfaith. And as you roll along the macadam, threading at intervals awide-stretching park, you are overwhelmed--at least I was--by thecompleteness of the scheme's execution and the lavishness with which thesystem 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 reallymarvelous landscape garden, set with statues, all under glass andheated, where the gaffers of Chicago are collected together to discussinterminably the exciting politics of a city anxious about its soul. Andwhile listening to them with one ear, with the other you may catchthe laconic tale of a park official's perilous and successful vendettaagainst 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 faintodor of the Stock-yards, or by a halt to allow the longest freight-trainin the world to cross your path. You have sighted in the distanceuniversities, institutions, even factories; you have passed through manyinhabited portions of the endless boulevard, but you have not actuallytouched hands with the city since you left it at the beginning of theride. Then at last, as darkness falls, you feel that you are coming tothe city again, but from another point of the compass. You have roundedthe circle of its millions. You need only think of the unkempt, shabby, and tangled outskirts of New York, or of any other capital city, torealize the miracle that Chicago has put among her assets . .. 

You descry lanes of water in the twilight, and learn that in order toprevent her drainage from going into the lake Chicago turned a riverback in its course and compelled it to discharge ultimately into theMississippi. That is the story. You feel that it is exactly whatChicago, alone among cities, would have the imagination and the courageto 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, perhapsdiffidently, to his fellows in charge of the city with the suggestivequery, "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 wasan epilogue to this story, relating how certain other great citiesshowed a narrow objection to Chicago draining herself in the directionof the Mississippi, and how Chicago, after all, succeeded in persuadingthose whom it was necessary to persuade that, whereas her drainage wasunsuited to Lake Michigan, it would consort well with the current of theMississippi. 

And then, in the night and in the rain, you swerve round some cornerinto the straight, by Grant Park, in full sight of one of the mostdazzling spectacles that Chicago or any other city can offer--MichiganAvenue on a wet evening. Each of the thousands of electric standards inMichigan Avenue is a cluster of six huge globes (and yet they will tellyou in Paris that the Rue de la Paix is the best-lit street in theworld), and here and there is a red globe of warning. The two lines oflight pour down their flame into the pool which is the roadway, and youtravel continually toward an incandescent floor without ever quitereaching it, beneath mysterious words of fire hanging in the invisiblesky!. .. The automobile stops. You get out, stiff, and murmur somethinginadequate about the length and splendor of those boulevards. "Oh, " youare told, carelessly, "those are only the interior boulevards. .. . Nothing! You should see our exterior boulevards--not quite finishedyet!"

III

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

"Here, Jimmy!" said, briskly, a middle-aged administrative person ineasy attire, who apparently had dominion over the whole floor beneaththe dome. A younger man, also in easy attire, answered the call with analert smile. The elder pointed sideways with his head at my two friendsand myself, and commanded, "Run them through in thirty minutes!" Then, having reached the center of a cuspidor with all the precision of acharacter in a Californian novel, he added benevolently to Jimmy, "Makeit a dollar for them. " And Jimmy, consenting, led us away. 

In this episode Europe was having her revenge on the United States, andI had planned it. How often, in half a hundred cities of Europe, had Inot observed the American citizen seeing the sights thereof at highspeed? Yes, even in front of the Michael Angelo sculptures in the MediciChapel 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 onebreath! Now it was impossible for me to see Washington under the normalconditions of a session. And so I took advantage of the visit toWashington of two friends on business to see Washington hastily, as anexcursionist pure and simple. I said to the United States, grimly: "Themost important and the most imposing thing in all America is surely theCapitol at Washington. Well, I will see it as you see the sacred sightsof 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 morepicturesque than the negroes in white who did the menial work in theclassic hotel, and had set forth frankly as excursionists into thestreets of Washington, and presently through the celebrated PennsylvaniaAvenue had achieved entrance into the Capitol. 

[Illustration: THE APPROACH TO THE CAPITOL]

It was a breathless pilgrimage--this seeing of the Capitol. And yet animpressive one. The Capitol is a great place. I was astonished--and Iadmit at once I ought not to have been astonished--that the Capitolappeals to the historic sense just as much as any other vast legislativepalace of the world--and perhaps more intimately than some. The sequenceof its endless corridors and innumerable chambers, each associated withevent or tradition, begets awe. I think it was in the rich Senatorialreception-room that I first caught myself being surprised that the heavygilded and marmoreal sumptuosity of the decorations recalled the averageEuropean palace. Why should I have been expecting the interior of theCapitol to consist of austere bare walls and unornamented floors?Perhaps it was due to some thought of Abraham Lincoln. But whatever itscause, the expectation was naïve and derogatory. The young guide, Jimmy, who by birth and genius evidently belonged to the universal race ofguides, was there to keep my ideas right and my eyes open. He wasinfinitely precious, and after his own fashion would have done honor toany public monument in the East. Such men are only bred in the veryshadow of genuine history. 

"See, " he said, touching a wall. "Painted by celebrated Italian artistto look like bas-relief! But put your hand flat against it, and you'llsee 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 yearsago--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--untilthis same guide stepped in front of a portrait of Henry Clay, and, aftera second's hesitation, threw off airily, patronizingly:

"Henry Clay--quite a good statesman!"

But I also contributed my excursionist's share to these singularconversations. In the swathed Senate Chamber I noticed twoholland-covered objects that somehow reminded me of my youth and ofreligious dissent. I guessed that the daily proceedings of the Senatemust be opened with devotional exercises, and these two objects seemedto me to be proper--why, I cannot tell--to the United States Senate; butthere was one point that puzzled me. 

"Why, " I asked, "do you have _two_ harmoniums?"

"Harmoniums, sir!" protested the guide, staggered. "Those are roll-topdesks. "

If only the floor could have opened and swallowed me up, as it opensand swallows up the grand piano at the Thomas concerts in Chicago!

Neither the Senate Chamber nor the Congress Chamber was as imposing tome as the much less spacious former Senate Chamber and the formerCongress Chamber. The old Senate Chamber, being now transferred to theuses of supreme justice, was closed on the day of our visit, owing tothe funeral of a judge. Europeans would have acquiesced in the firmnegative of its locked doors. But my friends, being American, would notacquiesce. The mere fact that the room was not on view actuallysharpened their desire that I should see it. They were deaf torefusals. .. . I saw that room. And I was glad that I saw it, for in itsaugust simplicity it was worth seeing. The spirit of the early historyof the United States seemed to reside in that hemicycle; and the crapeon 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 wasin presence of the weirdest collection of ugly statues that I had everbeheld. Which impression, the result of shock, was undoubtedly false. Onreflection I am convinced that those statues of the worthies of thedifferent States are not more ugly than many statues I could point to inno matter what fane, museum, or palace of Europe. Their ugliness is onlydifferent from our accustomed European ugliness. The most crudely uglymural decorations in the world are to be found all over Italy--the homeof sublime frescos. The most atrociously debased architecture in theworld is to be found in France--the home of sober artistic tradition. Europe is simply peppered everywhere with sculpture whose appallingmediocrity defies competition. But when the European meets uglysculpture or any ugly form of art in the New World, his instinct is toexclaim, "Of course!" His instinct is to exclaim, "This beatseverything!" The attitude will not bear examination. And lo! I wasadopting it myself. 

"And here's Frances Willard!" cried, ecstatically, a young woman in oneof the numerous parties of excursionists whose more deliberate pathsthrough the Capitol we were continually crossing in our swift course. 

And while, upon the spot where John Quincy Adams fell, I pretended tolisten to the guide, who was proving to me from a distance that theplace was as good a whispering-gallery as any in Europe, I thought: "Andwhy 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 openmouths the statues of the makers of their history, though the statuesare chiefly painful. " And I thought also: "New York may talk, andChicago may talk, and Boston may talk, but it is these groups ofprovincials who are the real America. " They were extraordinarily likepeople from the Five Towns--that is to say, extraordinarily likecomfortable average people everywhere. 

We were outside again, under one of the enormous porticos of theCapitol. The guide was receiving his well-earned dollar. The faithfulfellow had kept nicely within the allotted limit of half an hour. 

"Now we'll go and see the Congressional Library, " said my particularfriend. 

But I would not. I had put myself in a position to retort to anysight-seeing American in Europe that I had seen his Capitol in thirtyminutes, and I was content. I determined to rest on my laurels. Moreover, I had discovered that conventional sight-seeing is a veryexhausting form of activity. I would visit neither the Library ofCongress, nor the Navy Department, nor the Pension Bureau, nor theDead-Letter Museum, nor the Zoological Park, nor the White House, northe National Museum, nor the Lincoln Museum, nor the SmithsonianInstitution, nor the Treasury, nor any other of the great spectacles ofWashington. We just resumed the sea-going hack and drove indolently toand fro in avenues and parks, tasting the general savor of the city'slarge pleasantness. And we had not gone far before we got into theclutches of the police. 

"I don't know who you are, " said a policeman, as he stopped oursea-going hack. "I don't know who you are, " he repeated, cautiously, asone 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 wrongside of the lamp-post. It's not allowed, and he knows it as well as Ido. "

We admitted by our shamed silence that we had no special "pull" inWashington; the wise negro said not a word; and we crept away from thepoliceman's wrath, and before I knew it we were up against theWashington Monument--one of those national calamities which ultimatelyhappen 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 thatnight--true American rain was descending in sheets--I was carrying awaywith me an impression, as it were, of a gigantic plantation of publicedifices in a loose tangle and undergrowth of thoroughfares: whichseemed proper for a legislative and administrative metropolis. I wasamused to reflect how the city, like most cities, had extended inprecisely the direction in which its founders had never imagined itwould extend; and naturally I was astonished by the rapidity of itsdevelopment. (One of my friends, who was not old, had potted wild gamein a marsh that is now a park close to the Capitol. ) I thought that thenoble wings of the Capitol were architecturally much superior to thecentral portion of it. I remembered a dazzling glimpse of the WhiteHouse as a distinguished little building. I feared that ere my nextvisit the indefatigable energy of America would have rebuiltPennsylvania Avenue, especially the higgledy-piggledy and picturesqueand untidy portion of it that lies nearest to the Capitol, and I hopedthat in doing so the architects would at any rate not carry the corniceto 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 seemedto 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 hadreceived more warnings and more advice about Boston than about all theother cities put together. And, in particular, the greatest care hadbeen taken to permeate my whole being with the idea that Boston was"different. " In some ways it proved so to be. One difference forceditself upon me immediately I left the station for the streets--thequaint, original odor of the taxis. When I got to the entirely admirablehotel I found a book in a prominent situation on the writing-table in myroom. In many hotels this book would have been the Bible. But here itwas the catalogue of the hotel library; it ran to a hundred andeighty-two pages. On the other hand, there was no bar in the hotel, andno smoking-room. I make no comments; I draw no conclusions; I state thefacts. 

The warnings continued after my arrival. I was informed by I don't knowhow many persons that Boston was "a circular city, " with a topographycalculated to puzzle the simple. This was true. I usually go about instrange places with a map, but I found the map of Boston even morecomplex than the city it sought to explain. If I did not lose myself, itwas because I never trusted myself alone; other people lost me. 

Within an hour or so I had been familiarized by Bostonians with a wholeseries of apparently stock jokes concerning and against Boston, such asthat one hinging on the phrase "cold roast Boston, " and that other oneabout 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 lessjocular place, a joke seemed to be immanent, to the effect that thoughyou 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 meout for privacy onto the Common and whispered in my ear: "This is themost 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 theirfamily tree and prove that they came over in the _Mayflower_. " And so heran on, cursing Boston up hill and down dale. Nevertheless, he was veryproud of his Boston. Had I agreed with the condemnation, he might havethrown me into the artificial brook. Another great Bostonian expert, after leading me on to admit that I had come in order to try to learnthe real Boston, turned upon me with ferocious gaiety, thus: "You willnot learn the real Boston. You cannot. The real Boston is the old BackBay folk, who gravitate eternally between Beacon Street and State Streetand the Somerset Club, and never go beyond. They confuse New Englandwith the created universe, and it is impossible that you should learnthem. Nobody could learn them in less than twenty years' intense studyand research. "

Cautioned, and even intimidated, I thought it would be safest just totake Boston as Boston came, respectfully but casually. And as thehospitality of Boston was prodigious, splendid, unintermittent, and mostdelightfully unaffected, I had no difficulty whatever in taking Bostonas she came. And my impressions began to emerge, one after another, fromthe rich and cloudy confusion of novel sensations. 

What primarily differentiates Boston from all the other cities I saw isthis: It is finished; I mean complete. Of the other cities, whileadmitting their actual achievement, one would say, and their owncitizens invariably do say, "They will be . .. " Boston is. 

Another leading impression, which remains with me, is that Boston is notso English as it perhaps imagines itself to be. An interviewer (amongmany) came to see me about Boston, and he came with the fixed and solenotion in his head that Boston was English. He would have it that Bostonwas English. Worn down by his persistency, I did, as a fact, admit inone obscure corner of the interview that Boston had certain Englishcharacteristics. The scare-head editor of the interviewing paper, looking through his man's copy for suitable prey, came across myadmission. 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 amuffin!" An ideal scare-head! That I had never used the word "muffin" orany such phrase was a detail exquisitely unimportant. The scare-head wasimmense. It traveled in fine large type across the continent. I met itfor weeks afterward in my press-cuttings, and I doubt if Boston wasaltogether delighted with the comparison. I will not deny that Boston isless strikingly un-English than sundry other cities. I will not denythat I met men in Boston of a somewhat pronounced English type. I willnot deny that in certain respects old Kensington reminds me of a streethere and there in Boston--such as Mount Vernon Street or ChestnutStreet. But I do maintain that the Englishness of Boston has beenseriously exaggerated. 

And still another very striking memory of Boston--indeed, perhaps, theparamount impression!--is that it contains the loveliest modern thing Isaw in America--namely, the Puvis de Chavannes wall-paintings on thegrand staircase of the Public Library. The Library itself is a beautifulbuilding, but it holds something more beautiful. Never shall I forget myagitation on beholding these unsurpassed works of art, which alone wouldsuffice to make Boston a place of pilgrimage. 

When afterward I went back to Paris, the painters' first question was:"_Et les Puvis à Boston--vous les avez vus? Qu'est-ce que vous endites?_"

It was very un-English on the part of Boston to commission these austereand classical works. England would never have done it. The nationalityof the greatest decorative painter of modern times would have offendedher sense of fitness. What--a French painter officially employed on anEnglish public building? Unthinkable! England would have insisted on anEnglish painter--or, at worst, an American. It is strange that acommunity which had the wit to honor itself by employing Puvis deChavannes should be equally enthusiastic about the frigidtheatricalities of an E. A. Abbey or the forbidding and opaque intricatedexterity of a John Sargent in the same building. Or, rather, it is notstrange, for these contradictions are discoverable everywhere in thepatronage of the arts. 

It was from the Public Library that some friends and I set out on alittle tour of Boston. Whether we went north, south, east, or west Icannot tell, for this was one of the few occasions when the extremevariousness of a city has deprived me definitely of a sense ofdirection; but I know that we drove many miles through magnificentfenny parks, whose roads were reserved to pleasure, and that at length, after glimpsing famous houses and much of the less centralized wealthand ease of Boston, we came out upon the shores of the old harbor, andwent into a yacht-club-house with a glorious prospect. Boston has morebook-shops to the acre than any city within my knowledge except Aberdeen(not North Carolina, but Scotland). Its book-shops, however, are asnaught to its yacht clubs. And for one yacht club I personally wouldsacrifice 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 underdeafening elevated lines, I was permitted to enter the celestial andcalm precincts of the Boston Yacht Club itself, which overlooks anotherharbor. The acute and splendid nauticality of this club, all fashionedout of an old warehouse, stamps Boston as a city which has comprehendedthe sea. I saw there the very wheel of the _Spray_, the cockboat inwhich the regretted Slocum wafted himself round the world! I sat in anarm-chair which would have suited Falstaff, and whose tabular arms wouldhave held all Falstaff's tankards, and gazed through a magnifiedport-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 waswith difficulty that I left the Boston Yacht Club. Indeed, I would onlyleave it in order to go and see the frigate _Constitution_, the shipwhich was never defeated, and which assuredly, after over a hundred andten years of buoyant life, remains the most truly English thing inBoston. The afternoon teas of Boston are far less English than that grimand majestic craft. 

[Illustration: THE PROMENADE--CITY POINT, BOSTON]

We passed into the romantic part of Boston, skirting vastwool-warehouses and other enormous establishments bearing such Orientalsigns as "Coffee and Spices. " And so into a bewildering congeries ofcrowded streets, where every name on the walls seemed to be Italian, andwhere every corner was dangerous with vegetable-barrows, tram-cars, andperambulators; through this quarter the legend of Paul Revere seemed tofloat like a long wisp of vapor. And then I saw the Christopher Wrenspire of Paul Revere's signal-church, closed now--but whether becausethe congregation had dwindled to six or for some more recondite reason Iam not clear. And then I beheld the delightful, elegant fabric of theold State House, with the memories of massacre round about it, and thesingular spectacle of the Lion and the Unicorn on its roof. Too proudlynegligent had Boston been to remove those symbols!

And finally we rolled into the central and most circular shoppingquarter, as different from the Italian quarter as the Italian quarterwas different from Copley Square; and its heart was occupied by agraveyard. 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 itscurious habit of illuminating itself at dark, as if in competition withsuch establishments as the "Bijou Dream, " on the opposite side of theCommon. Here I first set eyes on Beacon Street, familiar--indeed, classic--to the European student of American literature. CommonwealthAvenue, I have to confess, I had never heard of till I saw it. Theseinterminable and gorgeous thoroughfares, where each massive abode is acostly and ceremonial organization of the most polished and civilizedexistence, leave the simple European speechless--especially when heremembers the swampy origin of the main part of the ground. .. . Theinscrutable, the unknowable Back Bay!

Here, indeed, is evidence of a society in equilibrium, and therefore ofa society which will receive genuinely new ideas with an extreme, ifpolite, caution, while welcoming with warm suavity old ideas thatdisguise themselves as novelties!

It was a tremendous feat to reclaim from ooze the foundation of BackBay. Such feats are not accomplished in Europe; they are not evenimaginatively conceived there. And now that the great business isachieved, the energy that did it, restless and unoccupied, is seekinganother field. I was informed that Boston is dreaming of theconstruction of an artificial island in the midst of the river Charles, with the hugest cathedral in the world thereon, and the most gorgeousbridges that ever spanned a fine stream. With proper deference, it is tobe hoped that Boston, forgetting this infelicitous caprice, willremember in time that she alone among the great cities of America iscomplete. A project that would consort well with the genius of Chicagomight disserve Boston in the eyes of those who esteem a sense of fitnessto be among the major qualifications for the true art of life. And, inthe matter of the art of daily living, Boston as she is has a great dealto teach to the rest of the country, and little to learn. Such is thediffident view of a stranger. 

 * * * * *

Cambridge is separated from Boston by the river Charles and by piquantjealousies that tickle no one more humorously than those whom, theoretically, they stab. From the east bank Cambridge is academic, andtherefore negligible; from the west, Boston dwindles to a mere quaywhere one embarks for Europe. 

What struck me first about Cambridge was that it must be the only cityof 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 leasttwo imposing hotels, with a barber's shop in the basement and a world'sfair in the hall. But one soon perceives that Cambridge is a city apart. In visual characteristics it must have changed very little, and it willnever change with facility. Boston is pre-eminently a town oftraditions, but the traditions have to be looked for. Cambridge isequally a town of traditions, but the traditions stare you in the face. 

My first halt was in front of the conspicuous home of James RussellLowell. 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 ofan encyclopedia when his children got him in a corner on some debatedquestion of fact, held James Russell Lowell as the supreme judge ofletters, from whom not even he could appeal (It is true, he had neverheard of Ste. Beuve, and regarded Matthew Arnold as a modern fad. ) Andthere were the study windows of James Russell Lowell! And his house inits garden was only one of hundreds of similar houses standing in likeold gardens. 

It was highly agreeable to learn that some of the pre-Revolution houseshad not yet left the occupation of the families which built them. Beautiful houses, a few of them, utterly dissimilar from anything on theother side of the Atlantic! Did not William Morris always maintain thatwood was and forever would be the most suitable material for building ahouse? On the side of the railroad track near Toledo I saw frame houses, whose architecture is debased from this Cambridge architecture, blownclean over by the gale. But the gale that will deracinate Cambridge hasnot yet begun to rage. .. . I rejoiced to see the house of Longfellow. Inspite of the fact that he wrote "The Wreck of the _Hesperus_, " he seemsto keep his position as the chief minor poet of the English language. And the most American and the most wistful thing in Cambridge was thatthe children of Cambridge had been guided to buy and make inalienablethe land in front of his house, so that his descendant might securelyenjoy the free prospect that Longfellow enjoyed. In what other countrywould just such a delicate, sentimental homage have been paid in justsuch 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 thatit is quite untrue. I regret that it is quite untrue. It ought to havebeen quite true. The land in question was given by Longfellow's childrento the Longfellow Memorial Association, who gave it to the city ofCambridge. The general children of Cambridge did give to Longfellow anarm-chair made from the wood of a certain historic "spreadingchestnut-tree, " under which stood a certain historic village smithy; andwith 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 duskbegan to gather in the recesses between the houses; and my memory isthat, with an athletic and tireless companion, I walked uncountedleagues through endless avenues of Cambridge homes toward a promisedclub that seemed ever to retreat before us with the shyness of a fawn. However, we did at length capture it. This club was connected withHarvard, and I do not propose to speak of Harvard in the presentchapter. 

 * * * * *

The typical Cambridge house as I saw it persists in my recollection asbeing among the most characteristic and comfortable of "real" Americanphenomena. And one reason why I insisted, in a previous chapter, on thespecial Americanism of Indianapolis is that Indianapolis is full of amodified variety of these houses which is even more characteristicallyAmerican--to my mind--than the Cambridge style itself. Indianapolisbeing by general consent the present chief center of letters in theUnited States, it is not surprising that I, an author, knew more peoplefrom Indianapolis than from any other city. Indeed, I went toIndianapolis simply because I had old friends there, and not at all inthe hope of inspecting a city characteristically American. It was quitestartlingly different from the mental picture I had formed of it. 

I think that in order to savor Indianapolis properly one should approachit as I approached it--in an accommodation-train on a single track, atrain with a happy-go-lucky but still agreeable service in itsrestaurant-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 themonotony of the landscape. The scenes at those barn-doors were full ofthe picturesque and of the racy. A farmer with a gun and a brace ofrabbits and a dog leaping up at them, while two young women talked to orat the farmer from a distance; a fat little German girl in a Scotchfrock, cleaning outside windows with the absorbed seriousness of agrandmother; a group of boys dividing their attention between her andthe train; an old woman driving a cart, and a negro gesticulating andrunning after the cart; and all of them, save the nigger, wearinggloves--presumably as a protection against the strong wind that sweptthrough the stubble and shook the houses and the few trees. Thosehouses, in all their summariness and primitive crudity, yet reminded oneof the Cambridge homes; they exhibited some remains of thepre-Revolution style. 

And then you come to the inevitable State Fair grounds, and the environsof the city which is the capital and heart of all those plains. 

And after you have got away from the railroad station and the imposinghotels and the public monuments and the high central buildings--anaffair of five minutes in an automobile--you discover yourself in long, calm streets of essential America. These streets are rectangular; thestreets of Cambridge abhor the straight line. They are full everywhereof maple-trees. And on either side they are bordered with homes--eachhouse detached, each house in its own fairly spacious garden, eachhouse individual and different from all the rest. Few of the houses arelarge; on the other hand, none of them is small: this is the region ofthe solid middle class, the class which loves comfort and piques itselfon its amenities, but is a little ashamed or too timid to be luxurious. 

Architecturally the houses represent a declension from the purity ofearlier Cambridge. Scarcely one is really beautiful. The style isdebased. But then, it possesses the advantage of being modernized; ithas not the air of having strayed by accident into the wrong century. And, moreover, it is saved from condemnation by its sobriety and by itshonest workmanship. It is the expression of a race incapable of lookingfoolish, of being giddy, of running to extremes. It is the expression ofa race that both clung to the past and reached out to the future; thatknew how to make the best of both worlds; that keenly realized the valueof security because it had been through insecurity. You can see that allthese houses were built by people who loved "a bit of property, " and towhom a safe and dignified roof was the final ambition achieved. Why! Ido believe that there are men and women behind some of those curtains tothis day who haven't quite realized that the Indians aren't coming anymore, and that there is permanently enough wood in the pile, and thatquinine need no longer figure in the store cupboard as a staple articleof diet! I do believe that there are minor millionaires in some of thosedrawing-rooms who wonder whether, out-soaring the ambition of a bit ofproperty, they would be justified in creeping down-town and buying acheap automobile!. .. These are the people who make the link between theacademic traditionalism of Cambridge and such excessively modernproducts of evolution as their own mayor, Mr. Shanks, protector of thepoor. They are not above forming deputations to parley with their ownmayor. .. . I loved them. Their drawing-rooms were full of old silver, andbook-gossip, and Victorian ladies apparently transported direct from themore aristocratic parts of the Five Towns, who sat behind trays andpoured out tea from the identical tea-pot that my grandmother used tokeep in a green bag. 

In the outer suburbs of the very largest cities I saw revulsions againstthe wholesale barracky conveniences of the apartment-house, in the shapeof little colonies of homes, consciously but superficially imitating theCambridge-Indianapolis tradition--with streets far more curvily windingthan the streets of Cambridge, and sidewalks of a strip of concretebetween green turf-bands that recalled the original sidewalks ofIndianapolis and even of the rural communities around Indianapolis. Cozyhomes, each in its own garden, with its own clothes-drier, and eachdifferent from all the rest! Homes that the speculative builder, reckingnot of the artistic sobriety, had determined should be picturesque atany cost of capricious ingenuity! And not secure homes, because, thoughthey were occupied by their owners, their owners had not built them--hadonly 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 beregarded as a picturesque survival. Into what novel architecture andorganization of living it will survive I should not care to prophesy, but I am convinced that the future will be quite as interestingly humanas the present is, and as the past was. 

IV

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

"What strikes and frightens the backward European as much as anything inthe United States is the efficiency and fearful universality of thetelephone. Just as I think of the big cities as agglomerations piercedeverywhere by elevator-shafts full of movement, so I think of them asbeing threaded, under pavements and over roofs and between floors andceilings and between walls, by millions upon millions of live filamentsthat unite all the privacies of the organism--and destroy them in orderto make one immense publicity! I do not mean that Europe has failed toadopt the telephone, nor that in Europe there are no hotels with thedreadful curse of an active telephone in every room. But I do mean thatthe European telephone is a toy, and a somewhat clumsy one, comparedwith the inexorable seriousness of the American telephone. Manyotherwise highly civilized Europeans are as timid in addressing atelephone as they would be in addressing a royal sovereign. The averageEuropean middle-class householder still speaks of his telephone, if hehas one, in the same falsely casual tone as the corresponding Americanis liable to speak of his motor-car. It is naught--a negligibletrifle--but somehow it comes into the conversation!

"How odd!" you exclaim. And you are right. It is we Europeans who arewrong, through no particular fault of our own. 

The American is ruthlessly logical about the telephone. The onlyoccasion on which I was in really serious danger of being taken for amadman in the United States was when, in a Chicago hotel, I permanentlyremoved the receiver from the telephone in a room designed (doubtlessironically) for slumber. The whole hotel was appalled. Half Chicagoshuddered. In response to the prayer of a deputation from the managementI restored the receiver. On the horrified face of the deputation I couldread the unspoken query: "Is it conceivable that you have been in thiscountry a month without understanding that the United States isprimarily nothing but a vast congeries of telephone-cabins?" Yes, Iyielded and admired! And I surmise that on my next visit I shall find atelephone 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 agreat people whose passion is to "get results"--the instancy with whichthe communication is given, and the clear loudness of the telephone'svoice in reply to yours: phenomena utterly unknown in Europe. Were I toinhabit the United States, I too should become a victim of the telephonehabit, as it is practised in its most advanced form in those suburbancommunities to which I have already incidentally referred at the end ofthe previous chapter. There a woman takes to the telephone as women inmore decadent lands take to morphia. You can see her at morn at herbedroom window, pouring confidences into her telephone, thuscombining the joy of an innocent vice with the healthy freshness ofbreeze and sunshine. It has happened to me to sit in a drawing-room, where people gathered round the telephone as Europeans gather round afire, and to hear immediately after the ejaculation of a number into thetelephone a sharp ring from outside through the open window, and then tohear in answer to the question, "What are you going to wear to-night?"two absolutely simultaneous replies, one loudly from the telephoneacross the room, and the other faintlier from a charming human voiceacross the garden: "I don't know. What are you?" Such may be thepleasing secondary scientific effect of telephoning to the lady nextdoor on a warm afternoon. 

Now it was obvious that behind the apparently simple exterior aspects ofany telephone system there must be an intricate and marvelous secretorganization. In Europe my curiosity would probably never have beenexcited by the thought of that organization--at home one acceptseverything as of course!--but, in the United States, partly because thetelephone is so much more wonderful and terrible there, and partlybecause in a foreign land one is apt to have strange caprices, I allowedmyself to become the prey of a desire to see the arcanum concealed atthe other end of all the wires; and thus, one day, under the highprotection of a demigod of the electrical world, I paid a visit to atelephone-exchange in New York, and saw therein what nine hundred andninety-nine out of every thousand of the most ardent telephone-usersseldom think about and will never see. 

A murmuring sound, as of an infinity of scholars in a prim schoolconning their lessons, and a long row of young women seated in a dimradiance on a long row of precisely similar stools, before a longapparatus of holes and pegs and pieces of elastic cord, all extremelyintent: that was the first broad impression. One saw at once that noneof these young women had a single moment to spare; they were allinvolved in the tremendous machine, part of it, keeping pace with it andin it, and not daring to take their eyes off it for an instant, lestthey should sin against it. What they were droning about it wasimpossible to guess; for if one stationed oneself close to anyparticular rapt young woman, she seemed to utter no sound, but simplyand without ceasing to peg and unpeg holes at random among the thousandsof 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 theillumination of the secret and finely appointed chamber was kept dim. )Throughout the whole length of the apparatus the colored elastic cordsto which the pegs were attached kept crossing one another in fantasticpatterns. 

We who had entered were ignored. We might have been ghosts, invisibleand inaudible. Even the supervisors, less-young women set in authority, did not turn to glance at us as they moved restlessly peering behind thestools. And yet somehow I could hear the delicate shoulders of all theyoung women saying, without speech: "Here come these tyrants andtaskmasters again, who have invented this exercise which nearly but notquite cracks our little brains for us! They know exactly how much theycan get out of us, and they get it. They are cleverer than us and morepowerful than us; and we have to submit to their discipline. But--" Andafar off I could hear: "What are you going to wear to-night?" "Will youdine with me to-night?" "I want two seats. " "Very well, thanks, and howis Mrs. .. . ?" "When can I see you to-morrow?" "I'll take your offer forthose bonds. " . .. And I could see the interiors of innumerable officesand drawing-rooms. .. . But of course I could hear and see nothing reallyexcept the intent drone and quick gesturing of those completely absorbedyoung creatures in the dim radiance, on stools precisely similar. 

I understood why the telephone service was so efficient. I understoodnot merely from the demeanor of the long row of young women, but fromeverything else I had seen in the exact and diabolically ingeniousordering 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 ofthese neat young women. After a while one of the guides, one of theinscrutable beings who had helped to invent and construct the astoundingorganism, began in a low voice on the forlorn hope of making mecomprehend the mechanism of a telephone-call and its response. And Ibegan on the forlorn hope of persuading him by intelligent acting that Idid comprehend. We each made a little progress. I could not tell himthat, though I genuinely and humbly admired his particular variety ofgenius, what interested me in the affair was not the mechanics, but thehuman equation. As a professional reader of faces, I glanced as well asI 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! Didthey then look reasonably content? Well, I came to the conclusion thatthey looked like most other faces--neither one thing nor the other. Still, in a great establishment, I would sooner search for sociologicalinformation in the faces of the employed than in the managerial rules. 

"What do they earn?" I asked, when we emerged from the ten-atmospherepressure of that intense absorption. (Of course I knew that no youngwomen could possibly for any length of time be as intensely absorbed asthese appeared to be. But the illusion was there, and it was effective. )

I learned that even the lowest beginner earned five dollars a week. Itwas just the sum I was paying for a pair of clean sheets every night ata grand hotel. And that the salary rose to six, seven, eight, eleven, and even fourteen dollars for supervisors, who, however, had to stand ontheir feet seven and a half hours a day, as shop-girls do for ten hoursa day; and that in general the girls had thirty minutes for lunch, and aday off every week, and that the Company supplied them gratuitously withtea, coffee, sugar, couches, newspapers, arm-chairs, and fresh air, ofwhich last fifty fresh cubic feet were pumped in for every operatorevery minute. 

"Naturally, " I was told, "the discipline is strict. There are testwires. .. . We can check the 'time elements. ' . .. We keep a record ofevery call. They'll take a dollar a week less in an outside place--forinstance, a hotel. .. . Their average stay here is thirty months. "

And I was told the number of exchanges there were in New York, exactlylike the one I was seeing. 

A dollar a week less in a hotel! How feminine! And how masculine! Andhow wise for one sort of young woman, and how foolish for another!. .. Imagine quitting that convent with its guaranteed fresh air, and itscouches and sugar and so on, for the rough hazards and promiscuities ofa hotel! On the other hand, imagine not quitting it!

Said the demigod of the electrical world, condescendingly: "All thistelephone 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 perfectionof its functioning, that exchange was a very human place indeed. Itbrilliantly solved some problems; it raised others. Excessivelydifficult to find any fault whatever in it! A marvelous service, achieved under strictly hygienic conditions--and young women must maketheir way through the world! And yet--Yes, a very human place indeed!

 * * * * *

The demigods of the electric world do not condescend to move about inpetrol motor-cars. In the exercise of a natural and charming coquetrythey insist on electrical traction, and it was in the most modern andsoundless electric brougham that we arrived at nightfall under theoverhanging cornice-eaves of two gigantic Florentine palaces--just suchlooming palaces, they appeared in the dark, as may be seen in anycentral street of Florence, with a cinema-show blazing its signs on theground floor, and Heaven knows what remnants of Italian aristocracy inthe 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 compartmentscontaining "transformers, " and on each compartment was a label bearingalways the same words: "Danger, 6, 600 volts. " "Danger, 6, 600 volts. ""Danger, 6, 600 volts. " A wondrous relief when we had escaped with ourlives from the menace of those innumerable volts! And then we stood on ahigh platform surrounded by handles, switches, signals--apparatus enoughto put all New York into darkness, or to annihilate it in an instant bythe unloosing of terrible cohorts of volts!--and faced an enormous whitehall, sparsely peopled by a few colossal machines that seemed to berevolving and oscillating about their business with the fatalism ofconquered and resigned leviathans. Immaculately clean, inconceivablytidy, shimmering with brilliant light under its lofty and beautifulceiling, shaking and roaring with the terrific thunder of its ownvitality, this hall in which no common voice could make itself heardproduced nevertheless an effect of magical stillness, silence, andsolitude. We were alone in it, save that now and then in the far-distantspaces a figure might flit and disappear between the huge glintingcolumns of metal. It was a hall enchanted and inexplicable. I understoodnothing of it. But I understood that half the electricity of New Yorkwas being generated by its engines of a hundred and fifty thousandhorse-power, and that if the spell were lifted the elevators of New Yorkwould be immediately paralyzed, and the twenty million lights expirebeneath the eyes of a startled population. I could have gazed at it tothis day, and brooded to this day upon the human imaginations that hadperfected it; but I was led off, hypnotized, to see the furnaces andboilers under the earth. And even there we were almost alone, to such anextent had one sort of senseless matter been compelled to take charge ofanother sort of senseless matter. The odyssey of the coal that waslifted high out of ships on the tide beyond, to fall ultimately into thefurnaces within, scarcely touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was byitself epical. Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four millioncubic feet per hour cooled the entire palace, and gave to thesestoke-holes the uncanny quality of refrigerators. The lowest horror ofthe steamship had been abolished here. 

I was tempted to say: "This alone is fit to be called the heart of NewYork!"

They took me to the twin palace, and on the windy way thither figureswere casually thrown at me. As that a short circuit may cause themachines to surge wildly into the sudden creation of six millionhorse-power of electricity, necessitating the invention of othermachines to control automatically these perilous vagaries! As that inthe down-town district the fire-engine was being abolished because, at asignal, these power-houses could in thirty seconds concentrate on anygiven main a pressure of three hundred pounds to the square inch, lifting jets of water perhaps above the roofs of sky-scrapers! As thatthe city could fine these power-houses at the rate of five hundreddollars a minute for any interruption of the current longer than threeminutes--but the current had never failed for a single second! As thatin one year over two million dollars' worth of machinery had beenscrapped!. .. And I was aware that it was New York I was in, and notTimbuctoo. 

In the other palace it appeared that the great American scrappingprocess was even yet far from complete. At first sight this other seemedto resemble the former one, but I was soon instructed that the formerone was as naught to this one, for here the turbine--the "strong, silentman" among engines--was replacing the racket of cylinder and crank. Statistics are tiresome and futile to stir the imagination. I disdainstatistics, even when I assimilate them. And yet when my attention wasdirected to one trifling block of metal, and I was told that it was themost powerful "unit" in the world, and that it alone would makeelectricity sufficient for the lighting of a city of a quarter of amillion people, I felt that statistics, after all, could knock you astaggering blow. .. . In this other palace, too, was the same solitude ofmachinery, attending most conscientiously and effectively to itself. Asingularly disconcerting spectacle! And I reflected that, according todreams already coming true, the telephone-exchange also would soon be asolitude of clicking contact-points, functioning in mystic certitude, instead of a convent of girls requiring sugar and couches, and thirstingfor love. A singularly disconcerting prospect!

But was it necessary to come to America in order to see and describetelephone-exchanges and electrical power-houses? Do not these wondersexist in all the cities of earth? They do, but not to quite the samedegree of wondrousness. Hat-shops, and fine hat-shops, exist in NewYork, 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 asin Naples. The great civilizations all present the same features; but itis just the differences in degree between the same feature in thiscivilization and in that--it is just these differences which togetherconstitute and illustrate the idiosyncrasy of each. It seems to me thatthe brains and the imagination of America shone superlatively in theconception and ordering of its vast organizations of human beings, andof machinery, and of the two combined. By them I was more profoundlyattracted, impressed, and inspired than by any other non-spiritualphenomena whatever in the United States. For me they were the proudestmaterial 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 whichdo not flourish at all in Europe. For example, the "mail-order house, "whose secrets were very generously displayed to me in Chicago--apeculiar establishment which sells merely everything (exceptpatent-medicines)--on condition that you order it by post. Go into thathouse with money in your palm, and ask for a fan or a flail or afur-coat or a fountain-pen or a fiddle, and you will be requested toreturn home and write a letter about the proposed purchase, and stampthe letter and drop it into a mail-box, and then to wait till thearticle arrives at your door. That house is one of the most spectacularand pleasing proofs that the inhabitants of the United States are thinlyscattered over an enormous area, in tiny groups, often quite isolatedfrom stores. On the day of my visit sixty thousand letters had beenreceived, and every executable order contained in these was executedbefore closing time, by the co-ordinated efforts of over four thousandfemale employees and over three thousand males. The conception wouldmake Europe dizzy. Imagine a merchant in Moscow trying to inauguratesuch a scheme!

A little machine no bigger than a soup-plate will open hundreds ofenvelops at once. They are all the same, those envelops; they have evenless individuality than sheep being sheared, but when the contents ofone--any one at random--are put into your hand, something human anddistinctive is put into your hand. I read the caligraphy on a blue sheetof paper, and it was written by a woman in Wyoming, a neat, earnest, harassed, and possibly rather harassing woman, and she wanted all sortsof things and wanted them intensely--I could see that with clearness. This complex purchase was an important event in her year. So far as herimagination went, only one mail-order would reach the Chicago house thatmorning, and the entire establishment would be strained to meet it. 

Then the blue sheet was taken from me and thrust into the system, andtherein lost to me. I was taken to a mysteriously rumbling shaft ofbroad diameter, that pierced all the floors of the house and hadtrap-doors on each floor. And when one of the trap-doors was opened Isaw packages of all descriptions racing after one another down spiralplanes within the shaft. There were several of these great shafts--withdivisions for mail, express, and freight traffic--and packages wereceaselessly racing down all of them, laden with the objects desired bythe woman of Wyoming and her fifty-nine-thousand-odd fellow-customers ofthe day. At first it seemed to me impossible that that earnest, impatient woman in Wyoming should get precisely what she wanted; itseemed to me impossible that some mistake should not occur in all thatnoisy fever of rushing activity. But after I had followed an order, andseen it filled and checked, my opinion was that a mistake would be themost miraculous phenomenon in that establishment. I felt quite reassuredon behalf of Wyoming. 

And then I was suddenly in a room where six hundred billing-machineswere being clicked at once by six hundred young women, a fantastic auralnightmare, though none of the young women appeared to be conscious thatanything bizarre was going on. .. . And then I was in a printing-shop, where several lightning machines spent their whole time every day inprinting the most popular work of reference in the United States, abulky book full of pictures, with an annual circulation of five and ahalf million copies--the general catalogue of the firm. For the firsttime I realized the true meaning of the word "popularity "--andsighed. .. . 

And then it was lunch-time for about a couple of thousand employees, and in the boundless restaurant I witnessed the working of the deviceswhich enabled these legions to choose their meals, and pay for them(cost price) in a few moments, and without advanced mathematicalcalculations. The young head of the restaurant showed me, with pride, amenu of over a hundred dishes--Austrian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Scotch, French, and American; at prices from one cent up as high as tencents (prime roast-beef)--and at the foot of the menu was his personalappeal: "_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 anadmirable characteristic of American business methods that was alwaysstriking me--namely, the real delegation of responsibility. An Americanboard of direction will put a man in charge of a department, as aviceroy over a province, saying, as it were: "This is yours. Do as youplease with it. We will watch the results. " A marked contrast this withthe centralizing of authority which seems to be ever proceeding inEurope, and which breeds in all classes at all ages--especially inFrance--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 apparentconfusion--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. Isaw a packer deal with a collected order, and in this order were anumber of tiny cookery utensils, a four-cent curling-iron, a brush, andtwo incredibly ugly pink china mugs, inscribed in cheap giltrespectively with the words "Father" and "Mother. " Throughout my stay inAmerica no moment came to me more dramatically than this moment, andnone has remained more vividly in my mind. All the daily domestic lifeof 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 berevealed to me by the contents of that basket, as the packer wrapped upand protected one article after another. I had been compelled to abandona visitation of the West and of the small communities everywhere, and Iwas sorry. But here in a microcosm I thought I saw the simple reality ofthe backbone of all America, a symbol of the millions of the littleplain people, who ultimately make possible the glory of theworld-renowned streets and institutions in dazzling cities. 

There was something indescribably touching in that curling-iron andthose two mugs. I could see the table on which the mugs would soonproudly stand, and "father" and "mother" and children thereat, and Icould see the hand heating the curling-iron and applying it. I could seethe whole little home and the whole life of the little home. .. . Andafterward, as I wandered through the warehouses--pyramids of the samechair, cupboards full of the same cheap violin, stacks of the same albumof music, acres of the same carpet and wallpaper, tons of the samegramophone, hundreds of tons of the same sewing-machine andlawn-mower--I felt as if I had been made free of the secrets of everyvillage in every State of the Union, and as if I had lived in everylittle house and cottage thereof all my life! Almost no sense of beautyin those tremendous supplies of merchandise, but a lot of honesty, self-respect, and ambition fulfilled. I tell you I could hear theengaged couples discussing ardently over the pages of the catalogue whatmanner of bedroom suite they would buy, and what design of sideboard. .. . 

Finally, I arrived at the firm's private railway station, where a scoreor more trucks were being laden with the multifarious boxes, bales, andparcels, all to leave that evening for romantic destinations such asOregon, Texas, and Wyoming. Yes, the package of the woman of Wyoming'sdesire would ultimately be placed somewhere in one of those trucks! Itwas going to start off toward her that very night!

 * * * * *

Impressive as this establishment was, finely as it illustrated thenational genius for organization, it yet lacked necessarily, on accountof the nature of its activity, those outward phenomena of splendor whichcharm the stranger's eye in the great central houses of New York, andwhich seem designed to sum up all that is most characteristic and mostdazzling in the business methods of the United States. These centralhouses are not soiled by the touch of actual merchandise. Nothing moresqualid than ink ever enters their gates. They traffic with symbolsonly, and the symbols, no matter what they stand for, are never inthemselves sordid. The men who have created these houses seem to haverealized that, from their situation and their importance, a specialeffort toward representative magnificence was their pleasing duty, andto have made the effort with a superb prodigality and an astoundingingenuity. 

Take, for a good, glorious example, the very large insurance company, conscious that the eyes of the world are upon it, and that the entireUnited States is expecting it to uphold the national pride. All thesplendors of all the sky-scrapers are united in its building. Its foyerand grand staircase will sustain comparison with those of the ParisOpéra. 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 havediscovered a way of honestly amusing themselves while gaining applauseand advertisement. Within the foyer and beyond the staircase, notice theouter rooms, partitioned off by bronze grilles, looming darkly gorgeousin an eternal windowless twilight studded with the beautiful glowinggreen disks of electric-lamp shades; and under each disk a human headbent over the black-and-red magic of ledgers! The desired effect is atonce obtained, and it is wonderful. Then lose yourself in and out of theascending and descending elevators, and among the unending multitudes ofclerks, and along the corridors of marble (total length exactly measuredand recorded). You will be struck dumb. And immediately you begin torecover your speech you will be struck dumb again. .. . 

Other houses, as has been seen, provide good meals for their employeesat cost price. This house, then, will provide excellent meals, free ofcharge! It will install the most expensive kitchens and richly spaciousrestaurants. It will serve the delicate repasts with dignity. "Does allthis lessen the wages?" No, not in theory. But in practice, and whetherthe management wishes or not, it must come out of the wages. "Why do youdo it?" you ask the departmental chief, who apparently gets far more funout of the contemplation of these refectories than out of thecontemplation of premiums received and claims paid. "It is better forthe employees, " he says. "But we do it because it is better for us. Itpays us. Good food, physical comfort, agreeable environment, scientificventilation--all these things pay us. We get results from them. " He doesnot mention horses, but you feel that the comparison is with horses. Ahorse, or a clerk, or an artisan--it pays equally well to treat all ofthem well. This is one of the latest discoveries of economic science, adiscovery 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 thatthe men in authority may have been actuated by motives of humanity. Youmust believe what you are told--that the sole motive is to get results. The eagerness with which all heads of model establishments would disavowto me any thought of being humane was affecting in its _naïveté_; it hadthat touch of ingenuous wistfulness which I remarked everywhere inAmerica--and nowhere more than in the demeanor of many mercantilehighnesses. (I hardly expect Americans to understand just what I meanhere. ) It was as if they would blush at being caught in an act ofhumanity, like school-boys caught praying. Still, to my mind, thewhite purity of their desire to get financial results was often muddiedby 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 ofAmerican organization and profusion, the more you are amazed by theimaginative perfection of its detail: as well in the system of filingfor instant reference fifty million separate documents, as in theplanning 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 aninformal concert among themselves. When lunch is served on the premiseswith chronographic exactitude, the thirty-five minutes allowed for themeal give an appreciable margin for music and play. A young woman wasjust finishing a florid song. The concert was suspended, and the wholeparty began to move humbly away at this august incursion. 

"Sing it again; do, please!" the departmental chief suggested. And theflorid song was nervously sung again; we applauded, the artiste bowed ason a stage, and the group fled, the thirty-five minutes being doubtlessup. The departmental chief looked at me in silence, content, as much asto say: "This is how we do business in America. " And I thought, "Yetanother way of getting results!"

But sometimes the creators of the organization, who had providedeverything, had been obliged to confess that they had omitted from theirdesigns certain factors of evolution. Hat-cupboards were a feature ofthe women's offices--delightful specimens of sound cabinetry. And still, millinery was lying about all over the place, giving it an air offeminine occupation that was extremely exciting to a student on histravels. The truth was that none of those hats would go into thecupboards. Fashion had worsted the organization completely. Departmentalchiefs had nothing to do but acquiesce in this startling untidiness. Either they must wait till the circumference of hats lessened again, orthey must tear down the whole structure and rebuild it with due regardto hats. 

Finally, we approached the sacred lair and fastness of the president, whose massive portrait I had already seen on several walls. Spaciousnessand magnificence increased. Ceilings rose in height, marble was softenedby the thick pile of carpets. Mahogany and gold shone more luxuriously. I was introduced into the vast antechamber of the presidentialsecretaries, and by the chief of them inducted through polished andgleaming barriers into the presence-chamber itself: a noble apartment, an apartment surpassing dreams and expectations, conceived and executedin a spirit of majestic prodigality. The president had not been afraid. And his costly audacity was splendidly justified of itself. This man hada sense of the romantic, of the dramatic, of the fit. And the qualitiesin him and his _état major_ which had commanded the success of theentire enterprise were well shown in the brilliant symbolism of thatroom's grandiosity. .. . And there was the president's portrait again, gorgeously framed. 

He came in through another door, an old man of superb physique, andafter a little while he was relating to me the early struggles of hiscompany. "My wife used to say that for ten years she never saw me, " heremarked. 

I asked him what his distractions were, now that the strain was over andhis ambitions so gloriously achieved. He replied that occasionally hewent 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 courtesyand affability were impeccable and charming. In the most profound sensethis 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 theUnited States; and in its more prominent specimens the distinguishingidiosyncrasy of the average American successful man of business ismagnified for our easier inspection. The rough, broad difference betweenthe American and the European business man is that the latter is anxiousto leave his work, while the former is anxious to get to it. Theattitude of the American business man toward his business ispre-eminently the attitude of an artist. You may say that he lovesmoney. So do we all--artists particularly. No stock-broker's privatejournal could be more full of dollars than Balzac's intimatecorrespondence is full of francs. But whereas the ordinary artist lovesmoney chiefly because it represents luxury, the American business manloves it chiefly because it is the sole proof of success in hisendeavor. He loves his business. It is not his toil, but his hobby, passion, vice, monomania--any vituperative epithet you like to bestow onit! He does not look forward to living in the evening; he lives mostintensely when he is in the midst of his organization. His instincts arebest appeased by the hourly excitements of a good, scrimmagingcommercial 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 andruthlessness of American business undertakings be satisfactorilyexplained. They surpass the European, simply because they are never outof the thoughts of their directors, because they are adored with a finefrenzy. And for the same reason they are decked forth in magnificence. Would a man enrich his office with rare woods and stuffs and marbles ifit were not a temple? Would he bestow graces on the environment if whilehe was in it the one idea at the back of his head was the anticipationof leaving it? Watch American business men together, and if you are aEuropean you will clearly perceive that they are devotees. They are openwith one another, as intimates are. Jealousy and secretiveness are muchrarer among them than in Europe. They show off their respectiveorganizations with pride and with candor. They admire one anotherenormously. Hear one of them say enthusiastically of another: "It was agreat idea he had--connecting his New York and his Philadelphia placesby wireless--a great idea!" They call one another by their Christiannames, fondly. They are capable of wonderful friendships in business. They are cemented by one religion--and it is not golf. For them thejourney "home" is often not the evening journey, but the morningjourney. Call this a hard saying if you choose: it is true. Could a manbe happy long away from a hobby so entrancing, a toy so intricate andmarvelous, a setting so splendid? Is it strange that, absorbed in thatwondrous satisfying hobby, he should make love with the nonchalance ofan animal? At which point I seem to have come dangerously near to thetopic of the singular position of the American woman, about whicheverybody is talking. .. . 

V

TRANSIT AND HOTELS

The choice of such a trite topic as the means of travel may seem todenote that my observations in the United States must have beensuperficial. They were. I never hoped that they would be otherwise. Inseven weeks (less one day) I could not expect to penetrate very farbelow the engaging surface of things. Nor did I unnaturally attempt todo so; for the evidence of the superficies is valuable, and it can onlybe properly gathered by the stranger at first sight. Among the scenesand phenomena that passed before me I of course remember best thosewhich interested me most. Railroads and trains have always appealed tome; I have often tried to express my sense of their romantic savor. AndI was eager to see and appreciate these particular manifestations ofnational character in America. 

It happily occurred that my first important journey from New York was onthe 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 thespectacle of my sensations as I beheld for the first time the mostmajestic terminus in the world! He alone would usher me into the gatesof that marvel! I think he was not disappointed. I frankly surrenderedmyself to the domination of this extraordinary building. I did notcompare. I knew there could be no comparison. Whenever afterward Iheard, as I often did, enlightened, Europe-loving citizens of the UnitedStates complain that the United States was all very well, but there wasno art in the United States, the image of this tremendous masterpiecewould rise before me, and I was inclined to say: "Have you ever crossedSeventh Avenue, or are you merely another of those who have been toEurope and learned nothing?" The Pennsylvania station is full of thenoble qualities that fine and heroic imagination alone can give. Thatthere existed a railroad man poetic and audacious enough to want it, architects with genius powerful enough to create it, and a public withheart enough to love it--these things are for me a surer proof that theAmerican is a great race than the existence of any quantity of wealthyuniversities, museums of classic art, associations for prison reform, ordeep-delved safe-deposit vaults crammed with bonds. Such a monument doesnot spring up by chance; it is part of the slow flowering of a nation'ssecret spirit!

[Illustration: IN THE PARLOR-CAR]

The terminus emerged brilliantly from an examination of the complicateddetail, both esthetic and practical, that is embedded in the apparentsimplicity of its vast physiognomy. I discovered everything in it properto a station, except trains. Not a sign of a train. My impulse was toask, "Is this the tomb of Alexander J. Cassatt, or is it a cathedral, oris it, after all, a railroad station?" Then I was led with dueceremony across the boundless plains of granite to a secret staircase, guarded by lions in uniform, and at the foot of this staircase, hiddenlike a shame or a crime, I found a resplendent train, the CongressionalLimited. It was not the Limited of my dreams; but it was my firstAmerican Limited, and I boarded it in a condition of excitement. Icriticized, of course, for every experienced traveler has decided viewsconcerning _trains de luxe_. The cars impressed rather than charmed me. I preferred, and still prefer, the European variety of Pullman. (Yes, Iadmit we owe it entirely to America!) And then there is a harsh, inhospitable quality about those all-steel cars. They do not yield. Youthink you are touching wood, and your knuckles are abraded. Theimitation of wood is a triumph of mimicry, but by no means a triumph ofartistic 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 fireproofconstructions again and again singed off the eyebrows of dauntlessfiremen? My impression is that "fireproof, " in the American tongue, isone of those agreeable but quite meaningless phrases which adorn thelanguages 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 overthe pages of a weekly paper, saw photographs of actual collisions, showing that in an altercation between trains the steel-and-wood carcould knock the all-steel car into a cocked hat!. .. The decoration ofthe all-steel car does not atone for its probable combustibility and itsproved fragility. In particular, the smoking-cars of all the Limiteds Iintrusted 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 thetrain, and had kindly lent it to the Pennsylvania R. R. Their demeanorexpressed a rare sense of ownership and also of responsibility. Whilevery polite, they condescended. A strong contrast to the miserableEuropean "guard"--for all his silver buttons! I adventured into theobservation-car, of which institution I had so often heard Americansspeak with pride, and speculated why, here as in all other cars, thetops of the windows were so low that it was impossible to see the upperpart of the thing observed (roofs, telegraph-wires, tree-foliage, hill-summits, sky) without bending the head and cricking the neck. I donot deny that I was setting a high standard of perfection, but then Ihad heard so much all my life about American Limiteds!

The Limited started with exactitude, and from the observation-car Iwatched the unrolling of the wondrous Hudson tunnel--one of the majorsights of New York, and a thing of curious beauty. .. . The journey passedpleasantly, with no other episode than that of dinner, which cost adollar and was worth just about a dollar, despite the mutton. And withexactitude we arrived at Washington--another splendid station. Igeneralized thus: "It is certain that this country understands railroadstations. " I was, however, fresh in the country, and had not then seenNew Haven station, which, as soon as it is quite done with, ought to beput in a museum. 

We returned from Washington by a night train; we might have taken a daytrain, but it was pointed out to me that I ought to get into "form" forcertain projected long journeys into the West. At midnight I wasbrusquely introduced to the American sleeping-car. I confess that I hadnot imagined anything so appalling as the confined, stifling, malodorouspromiscuity of the American sleeping-car, where men and women are herdedtogether on shelves under the drastic control of an official aided bynegroes. I care not to dwell on the subject. .. . I have seen Europeanprisons, 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 inSiberian prisons, but I remember reading George Kennan's description oftheir mild horrors, and I am surprised that he should have put himselfto the trouble of such a tedious journey when he might have discoveredfar 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 mindvery much, because my particular friend, intelligently foreseeing myabsurd European prejudices, had engaged for us a state-room. 

This state-room, or suite--for it comprised two apartments--was abeautiful and aristocratic domain. The bedchamber had a fan that wouldwork at three speeds like an automobile, and was an enchanting toy. Inshort, 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 thetrain from the station. He seemed to be an angry engine-driver, and hisgesture was that of a man setting his teeth and hissing: "Now, then, come out of that, you sluggards!" and giving a ferocious tug. There wasa fearful jerk, and in an instant I understood why sleeping-berths inAmerica are always arranged lengthwise with the train. If they were not, the passengers would spend most of the night in getting up off the floorand climbing into bed again. A few hundred yards out of the station theengine-driver decided to stop, and there was the same fearful jerk andconcussion. Throughout the night he stopped and he started at frequentintervals, and always with the fearful jerk. Sometimes he would slowdown gently and woo me into a false tranquillity, but only to finishwith the same jerk rendered more shocking by contrast. 

The bedchamber was delightful, the lavatory amounted to a boudoir, thereading-lamp left nothing to desire, the ventilation was a continuousvaudeville entertainment, the watch-pocket was adorable, the mattresswas good. Even the road-bed was quite respectable--not equal to the bestI knew, probably, but it had the great advantage of well-tied rails, sothat as the train passed from one rail-length to the next you felt nojar, a bliss utterly unknown in Europe. The secret of a satisfactory"sleeper, " however, does not lie in the state-room, nor in theglittering lavatory, nor in the lamp, nor in the fan, nor in thewatch-pocket, nor in the bed, nor even in the road-bed. It lies in themannerisms 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 appreciatethis deep truth. For myself, I was inclined to go out to theengine-driver and say to him: "Brother, are you aware--you cannotbe--that the best European trains start with the imperceptiblestealthiness of a bad habit, so that it is impossible to distinguishmotion from immobility, and come to rest with the softness of dovessettling on the shoulders of a young girl?" . .. If the fault is not theengine-driver's, then are the brakes to blame? Inconceivable!. .. AllAmerican engine-drivers are alike; and I never slept a full hour in anyAmerican "sleeper, " what with stops, starts, hootings, tollings, whizzings round sharp corners, listening to the passage offreight-trains, and listening to haughty conductor-admirals whoquarreled at length with newly arrived voyagers at 2 or 3 A. M. ! I do notcriticize; I state. I also blame myself. There are those who couldsleep. But not everybody could sleep. Well and heartily do I rememberthe moment when another friend of mine, in the midst of an interminablescolding that was being given by a nasal-voiced conductor to a passengerjust before the dawn, exposed his head and remarked: "Has it occurred toyou that this is a sleeping-car?" In the swift silence the whirring ofmy private fan could be heard. 

I arrived in New York from Washington, as I arrived at all mydestinations after a night journey, in a state of enfeebledsubmissiveness, and I retired to bed in a hotel. And for several hoursthe hotel itself would stop and start with a jerk and whiz roundcorners. 

 * * * * *

For many years I had dreamed of traveling by the great, the unique, theworld-renowned New York-Chicago train; indeed, it would not be a grossexaggeration 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 NewYork, this especial product of the twentieth century, and yet anotherthrilling moment in my life came and went! I boarded it with pride;everybody boarded it with pride; and in every eye was the gleam: "Thisis the train of trains, and I have my state-room on it. " Perhaps I wasever so slightly disappointed with the dimensions and appointments ofthe state-room--I may have been expecting a whole car to myself--but thegeneral self-conscious smartness of the train reassured me. I wanderedinto the observation-car, and saw my particular friend proudly employthe train-telephone to inform his office that he had caught the train. Isaw also the free supply of newspapers, the library of books, thetypewriting-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, asmoking-car, and a barber-shop. I picked up the advertising literaturescattered about by a thoughtful Company, and learned therefrom that thistrain was not a mere experiment; it was the finished fruit of manyexperiments, and that while offering the conveniences of a hotel or aclub, it did with regularity what it undertook to do in the way ofspeed and promptness. The pamphlet made good reading!. .. 

I noted that it pleased the Company to run two other very importanttrains out of the terminus simultaneously with the unique train. Bravado, possibly; but bravado which invited the respect of all thosewho admire enterprise! I anticipated with pleasure the noble spectacleof these three trains sailing forth together on three parallel tracks;which pleasure was denied me. We for Chicago started last; we startedindeed, according to my poor European watch, from fifteen to thirtyseconds late!. .. No matter! I would not stickle for seconds:particularly as at Chicago, by the terms of a contract which no companyin Europe would have had the grace to sign, I was to receive, for anyunthinkable lateness, compensation at the rate of one cent for everythirty-six seconds!

Within a quarter of an hour it became evident that that train had atleast one great quality--it moved. As, in the deepening dusk, we swungalong the banks of the glorious Hudson, veiled now in the vaporousmysteries following a red sunset, I was obliged to admit with increasingenthusiasm that that train did move. Even the persecutors of Galileowould never have had the audacity to deny that that train moved. And onefelt, comfortably, that the whole Company, with all the Company'sresources, was watching over its flying pet, giving it the supreme rightof way and urging it forward by hearty good-will. One felt also that themoment had come for testing the amenities of the hotel and the club. 

"Tea, please, " I said, jauntily, confidently, as we entered thespotless and appetizing restaurant-car. 

The extremely polite and kind captain of the car was obviously takenaback. But he instinctively grasped that the reputation of the trainhung in the balance, and he regained his self-possession. 

"Tea?" His questioning inflection delicately hinted: "Try not to be tooeccentric. "

"Tea. "

"Here?"

"Here. "

"I can serve it here, of course, " said the captain, persuasively. "Butif 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 whichreposed several immense, many-storied river-steamers, brilliantly lit. Ihad often seen illustrations of these craft, but never before thereality. A fine sight-and it made me think of Mark Twain's incomparablemasterpiece, _Life on the Mississippi_, for which I would sacrifice theentire works of Thackeray and George Eliot. We ran into a big town, fullof electric signs, and stopped. Albany! One minute late! I descended towatch the romantic business of changing engines. I felt sure thatchanging the horses of a fashionable mail-coach would be as nothing tothis. The first engine had already disappeared. The new one rolledtremendous and overpowering toward me; its wheels rose above my head, and the driver glanced down at me as from a bedroom window. I wassensible of all the mystery and force of the somber monster; I felt themystery of the unknown railway station, and of the strange illuminatedcity beyond. And I had a corner in my mind for the thought: "Somewherenear me Broadway actually ends. " Then, while dark men under the ray of alantern fumbled with the gigantic couplings, I said to myself that if Idid not get back to my car I should probably be left behind. I regainedmy state-room and waited, watch in hand, for the jerk of restarting. Iwaited half an hour. Some mishap with the couplings! We left Albanythirty-three minutes late. Habitués of the train affected nonchalance. One of them offered to bet me that "she would make it up. " The admiralsand captains avoided our gaze. 

We dined, _à la carte_; the first time I had ever dined _à la carte_ onany train. An excellent dinner, well and sympathetically served. Themutton was impeccable. And in another instant, as it seemed, we wererunning, with no visible flags, through an important and showy street ofa large town, and surface-cars were crossing one another behind us. Ihad never before seen an express train let loose in the middle of anunprotected town, and I was _naïf_ enough to be startled. But a hugeelectric sign--"Syracuse bids you welcome"--tranquilized me. We brieflyhalted, and drew away from the allurement of those bright streets intothe deep, perilous shade of the open country. 

I went to bed. The night differed little from other nights spent inAmerican sleeping-cars, and I therefore will not describe it in detail. To do so might amount to a solecism. Enough to say that the jerkingswere 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 tosleep and dreamed this stoppage. 

From a final cat-nap I at last drew up my blind to greet the oncomingday, and was rewarded by one of the finest and most poetical views Ihave ever seen: a misty, brown river flanked by a jungle of dark reddishand yellowish chimneys and furnaces that covered it with shiftingcanopies of white steam and of smoke, varying from the delicatest graysto intense black; a beautiful dim gray sky lightening, and on the groundand low, flat roofs a thin crust of snow: Toledo! A wonderful andinspiring panorama, just as romantic in its own way as any SpanishToledo. Yet I regretted its name, and I regretted the grotesque names ofother towns on the route--Canaan, Syracuse, Utica, Geneva, Ceylon, Waterloo, and odd combinations ending in "burg. " The names of most ofthe 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" isa perfect prince among names. But the majority of town names in Americasuffer, no doubt inevitably, from a lack of imagination and ofreflection. They have the air of being bought in haste at a bigadvertising "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 negropresented himself. It was only a quarter to seven in Toledo, but I wassustained in my demeanor by the fact that it was a quarter to eight inNew York. 

"Will you bring me some tea, please?"

He was sympathetic, but he said flatly I couldn't have tea, noranything, and that nobody could have anything at all for an hour and ahalf, as there would be no restaurant-car till Elkhart, and Elkhart wasquite ninety miles off. He added that an engine had broken down atCleveland. 

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 hadyielded only cold water. Not wishing to appear hypercritical, I had saidnothing, but I had thought. I now casually turned on the cold-water tapand was scalded by nearly boiling water. The hot-water tap still yieldedcold water. Lest I should be accused of inventing this caprice ofplumbing in a hotel and club, I give the name of the car. It wasappropriately styled "Watertown" (compartment E). 

In the corridor an admiral, audaciously interrogated, admitted that thetrain 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 theobservation-saloon to cheer myself up by observing, and was struck by achill, and by the chilly, pinched demeanor of sundry other passengers, and by the apologetic faces of certain captains. Already in mystate-room my senses had suspected a chill; but I had refused to believemy senses. I knew and had known all my life that American trains weretoo hot, and I had put down the supposed chill to a psychologicaldelusion. It was, however, no delusion. As we swept through a snowylandscape the apologetic captains announced sadly that the engine wasnot sparing enough steam to heat the whole of the train. We put onovercoats and stamped our feet. 

The train was now full of ravening passengers. And as Elkhart withinfinite shyness approached, the ravening passengers formed in files inthe corridors, and their dignity was jerked about by the speed of theicy train, and they waited and waited, like mendicants at the kitchenentrance of a big restaurant. And at long last, when we had ceased tocredit that any such place as Elkhart existed, Elkhart arrived. Tworestaurant-cars were coupled on, and, as it were, instantly put to thesack by an infuriated soldiery. The food was excellent, and newspaperswere distributed with much generosity, but some passengers, includingladies, had to stand for another twenty minutes famished at the door ofthe first car, because the breakfasting accommodation of this particularhotel and club was not designed on the same scale as its bedroomaccommodation. We reached Chicago one hundred and ten minutes late. Andto compensate me for the lateness, and for the refrigeration, and forthe starvation, and for being forced to eat my breakfast hurriedly underthe appealing, reproachful gaze of famishing men and women, an officialat the Lasalle station was good enough to offer me a couple of dollars. I accepted them. .. . 

[Illustration: IN THE SUBWAY ONE ENCOUNTERS AN INSISTENT, HURRYINGSTREAM]

An unfortunate accident, you say. It would be more proper to say aseries of accidents. I think "the greatest train in the world" isentitled to one accident, but not to several. And when, in addition tobeing 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 betweenSyracuse and Elkhart (about three-quarters of the entire journey) isnecessarily followed by starvation--I think that such a system ought tobe altered--by Americans. In Europe it would be allowed to continueindefinitely. 

Beyond question my experience of American trains led me to the generalconclusion that the best of them were excellent. Nevertheless, I sawnothing in the organization of either comfort, luxury, or safety tojustify the strange belief of Americans that railroad traveling in theUnited States is superior to railroad traveling in Europe. Merely fromhabit, I prefer European trains on the whole. It is perhaps also merelyfrom habit that Americans prefer American trains. 

 * * * * *

As regards methods of transit other than ordinary railroad trains, Ihave to admit a certain general disappointment in the United States. TheElevated systems in the large cities are the terrible result of anoriginal notion which can only be called unfortunate. They must eitherdepopulate the streets through which they run or utterly destroy thesensibility of the inhabitants; and they enormously increase andcomplicate the dangers of the traffic beneath them. Indeed, in the viewof the unaccustomed stranger, every Elevated is an affliction soappallingly hideous that no degree of convenience could atone for itshorror. The New York Subway is a masterpiece of celerity, and in otherways less evil than an Elevated, but in the minimum decencies of travelit 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 andless effective than those in sundry European capitals. In Bostonparticularly I cannot forget the excessive discomfort of a journey toCambridge, made in the company of a host who had a most beautiful house, and who gave dinners of the last refinement, but who seemedunaccountably to look on the car journey as a sort of pleasantrobustious outing. Nor can I forget--also in Boston--the spectacle ofthe citizens of Brookline--reputed to be the wealthiest suburb in theworld--strap-hanging and buffeted and flung about on the way home fromchurch, in surface-cars which really did carry inadequacy and brutalityto excess. 

The horse-cabs of Chicago had apparently been imported second-handimmediately 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 onethat was convincing. The most frequent explanation, at any rate in NewYork, was that the great hotels were responsible for the vices of theAmerican taxicab, by reason of their alleged outrageous charges to thecompanies for the privilege of waiting for hire at their augustporticos. I listened with respect, but with incredulity. If thetaxicabs were merely very dear, I could understand; if they weremerely very bad, I could understand; if they were merely numericallyinsufficient for the number of people willing to pay for taxicabs, Icould understand. But that they should be at once very dear, very bad, and most inconveniently scarce, baffled and still baffles me. The sum ofreal annoyance daily inflicted on a rich and busy but craven-heartedcity like New York by the eccentricity of its taxicab organization mustbe colossal. 

As to the condition of the roadways, the vocabulary of blame had beenexhausted long before I arrived. Two things, however, struck me in NewYork which I had not heard of by report: the greasiness of the streets, transforming every automobile into a skidding death-trap at the leastsign of moisture, and the leisureliness of the road-works. The busiestpart of Thirty-fourth Street, for example--no mean artery, either--wastorn 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 atthe intersection of Fifth and Broadway there is no oasis for the pursuedwayfarer. Every European city has long ago decided that the provision ofisland refuges in main thoroughfares is an act of elementary justice tothe wayfarer in his unequal and exhausting struggle with wheeledtraffic. 

All these criticisms, which are severe but honest, would lose much oftheir point if the general efficiency of the United States and itsdelightful genius for organization were not so obvious and so impressiveto the European. In fact, it is precisely the brilliant practicalqualities of the country which place its idiosyncrasies in the matterof transit in so startling a light. .. . I would not care to close thissection without a grateful reference to the very natty electric coupés, usually driven by ladies, which are so refreshing a feature of thestreets of Chicago, and to the virtues of American private automobilesin general. 

 * * * * *

It is remarkable that a citizen who cheerfully and negligently submitsto so many various inconveniences outside his home should insist onhaving the most comfortable home in the world, as the American citizenunquestionably has! Once, when in response to an interviewer I hadbecome rather lyrical in praise of I forget what phenomenon in theUnited States, a Philadelphia evening newspaper published an editorialarticle in criticism of my views. This article was entitled "OffensiveFlattery. " Were I to say freely all that I thought of the Americanprivate house, large or small, I might expose myself again to the sameaccusation. 

[Illustration: THE PASSENGERS ON THE ELEVATED AT NIGHT ARE ODDLYASSORTED. ]

When I began to make the acquaintance of the American private house, Ifelt like one who, son of an exiled mother, had been born abroad and hadat length entered his real country. That is to say, I felt at home. Ifelt that all this practical comfort and myself had been speciallydestined for each other since the beginning of time, and that fate wasat last being fulfilled. Freely I admit that until I reached America Ihad not understood what real domestic comfort, generously conceived, could be. Certainly I had always in this particular quarreled with myown country, whose average notion of comfort still is to leave thedrawing-room (temperature 70°--near the fire) at midnight, pass by awindswept hall and staircase (temperature 55°) to a bedroom full of finefresh air (temperature 50° to 40°), and in that chamber, having removedpiece by piece every bit of warm clothing, to slip, imperfectlyprotected, between icy sheets and wait for sleep. Certainly I had alwayscontested the joyfulness of that particular process; but my imaginationhad fallen short of the delicious innumerable realities of comfort in anAmerican home. 

Now, having regained the "barbaric seats" whence I came, I read with apeculiar expression the advertisements of fashionable country and townresidences to rent or for sale in England. Such as: "Choice residence. Five reception-rooms. Sixteen bedrooms. Bathroom--" Or: "Thoroughlyup-to-date mansion. Six reception-rooms. Splendid hall. Billiard-room. Twenty-four bedrooms. Two bath-rooms--" I read this literature (to bediscovered textually every week in the best illustrated weeklies), and Ismile. Also I wonder, faintly blushing, what Americans truly _do_ thinkof the residential aspects of European house-property when they firstsee it. And I wonder, without blushing, to what miraculous degree ofperfected comfort Americans would raise all their urban traffic if onlythey cared enough to keep the professional politician out of theirstreets as strictly as they keep him out of their houses. 

 * * * * *

The great American hotel, too, is a wondrous haven for the European whoin Europe has only tasted comfort in his dreams. The calm orderliness ofthe bedroom floors, the adequacy of wardrobes and lamps, the recklessprofusion of clean linen, that charming notice which one finds underone's door in the morning, "You were called at seven-thirty, andanswered, " the fundamental principle that a bedroom without a bath-roomis not a bedroom, the magic laundry which returns your effects dulystarched in eight hours, the bells which are answered immediately, thethickness of the walls, the radiator in the elevator-shaft, thecelestial invention of the floor-clerk--I could catalogue the civilizingfeatures of the American hotel for pages. But the great American hotelis a classic, and to praise it may seem inept. My one excuse for doingso is that I have ever been a devotee of hotels, and once indeed wrote awhole book about one. When I told the best interviewer in the UnitedStates that my secret ambition had always been to be the manager of agrand hotel, I was quite sincere. And whenever I saw the manager of agreat American hotel traversing with preoccupied and yet aquiline glancehis corridors and public rooms, I envied him acutely. 

[Illustration: THE RESTAURANT OF A GREAT HOTEL IS BUT ONE FEATURE OF ITSSPLENDOR]

The hospitality of those corridors and public rooms is so wide andcomprehensive that the ground floor and mezzanine of a really big hotelin the United States offer a spectacle of humanity such as cannot beseen in Europe; they offer also a remarkable contrast to thetranquillity of their own upper stories, where any eccentricity isvigorously discouraged. I think that it must be the vast tumult andpromiscuity of the ground floor which is responsible for the relativeinferiority of the restaurant in a great American hotel. A restaurantshould be a paramount unit, but as a fact in these hotels it is nomore than an item in a series of resorts, several of which equal if theydo not surpass it in popular interest. The Americans, I found, wouldshow more interest in the barber-shop than in the restaurant. (And tosee the American man of business, theoretically in a hurry, having hishead bumped about by a hair-cutter, his right hand tended by onemanicurist, his left hand tended by another manicurist, his bootspolished by a lightning shiner, and his wits polished by the twomanicurists together--the whole simultaneously--this spectacle in itselfwas possibly a reflection on the American's sense of proportion. )Further, a restaurant should be a sacred retreat, screened away from theworld; which ideal is foreign to the very spirit of the great Americanhotel. 

I do not complain that the representative celebrated restaurants fail toachieve an absolutely first-class cuisine. No large restaurant, eitherin the United States or out of it, can hope to achieve an absolutelyfirst-class cuisine. The peerless restaurant is and must be a littleone. Nor would I specially complain of the noise and thronging of thegreat restaurants, the deafening stridency of their music, the artisticviolence of their decorations; these features of fashionable restaurantsare now universal throughout the world, and the philosopher adaptshimself to them. (Indeed, in favor of New York I must say that in one ofthe largest of its restaurants I heard a Chopin ballade well played on agood piano--and it was listened to in appreciative silence; event quiteunique in my experience. Also, the large restaurant whose cuisinenearest approaches the absolutely first-class is in New York, and not inEurope. ) Nor would I complain that the waiter in the great restaurantneither understands English nor speaks a tongue which resembles English, for this characteristic, too, is very marked across the Atlantic. (Onenight, in a Boston hotel, after lingual difficulties with a head-waiter, I asked him in French if he was not French. He cuttingly replied inwaiter's American: "I _was_ French, but now I am an American. " Inanother few years that man will be referring to Great Britain as "theold country. ") . .. 

No; what disconcerts the European in the great American restaurant isthe excessive, the occasionally maddening slowness of the service, andthe lack of interest in the service. Touching the latter defect, thewaiter is not impolite; he is not neglectful. But he is, too often, passively hostile, or, at best, neutral. He, or his chief, hasapparently not grasped the fact that buying a meal is not like buying aton of coal. If the purchaser is to get value for his money, he mustenjoy his meal; and if he is to enjoy the meal, it must not merely beefficiently served, but it must be efficiently served in a sympatheticatmosphere. The supreme business of a good waiter is to create thisatmosphere. .. . True, that even in the country which has carried cookeryand restaurants to loftier heights than any other--I mean, of course, Belgium, the little country of little restaurants--the subtle etherwhich the truly civilized diner demands is rare enough. But in the greatrestaurants of the great cities of America it is, I fancy, rarer thananywhere else. 

VI

SPORT AND THE THEATER

I remember thinking, long before I came to the United States, at thetime when the anti-gambling bill was a leading topic of Americancorrespondence in European newspapers, that a State whose public opinionwould allow even the discussion of a regulation so drastic could notpossibly regard "sport" as sport is regarded in Europe. It might be veryfond of gambling, but it could not be afflicted with the particularmania which in Europe amounts to a passion, if not to a religion. Andwhen the project became law, and horse-racing was most beneficially andadmirably abolished in the northeastern portion of the Republic, I wasastonished. No such law could be passed in any European country that Iknew. The populace would not suffer it; the small, intelligent minoritywould not care enough to support it; and the wealthy oligarchicalpriest-patrons of sport would be seriously convinced that it involvedthe ruin of true progress and the end of all things. Such is thesacredness of sport in Europe, where governments audacious enough toattack and overthrow the state-church have never dared to suggest thesuppression 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 myopinion, there is no "sport" in the United States, but only that thereis 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 thevarious instincts for fresh air, destruction, physical prowess, emulation, devotion, and betting--is tolerably strong in America. Icould name a list of American sports as long as the list of dutiablearticles in the customs tariff. I am aware that over a million golfballs are bought (and chiefly lost) in the United States every year. Iknow that no residence there is complete without its lawn-tennis court. I accept the statement that its hunting is unequaled. I have admired theluxury and completeness of its country clubs. Its yachting is renowned. Its horse-shows, to which enthusiasts repair in automobiles, arewondrous displays of fashion. But none of these things is democratic;none enters into the life of the mass of the people. Nor can that fiercesport be called quite democratic which depends exclusively upon, and islimited to, the universities. A six-day cycling contest and aPresidential election are, of course, among the very greatest sportingevents in the world, but they do not occur often enough to meritconsideration as constant factors of national existence. 

[Illustration: THE HORSE-SHOWS ARE WONDROUS DISPLAYS OF FASHION]

Baseball remains a formidable item, yet scarcely capable of balancingthe scale against the sports--football, cricket, racing, pelota, bull-fighting--which, in Europe, impassion the common people, and drawmost of their champions from the common people. In Europe theadvertisement hoardings--especially in the provinces--proclaim sportthroughout every month of the year; not so in America. In Europe themost important daily news is still the sporting news, as any editor willtell you; not so in America, despite the gigantic headings of theevening papers at certain seasons. 

But how mighty, nevertheless, is baseball! Its fame floats throughEurope as something prodigious, incomprehensible, romantic, andterrible. After being entertained at early lunch in the correct hotelfor this kind of thing, I was taken, in a state of great excitement, bya group of excited business men, and flashed through Central Park in anexpress automobile to one of the great championship games. I noted theexcellent arrangements for dealing with feverish multitudes. I noted thesplendid and ornate spaciousness of the grand-stand crowned withinnumerable eagles, and the calm, matter-of-fact tone in which a friendinformed me that the grand-stand had been burned down six months ago. Inoted the dreadful prominence of advertisements, and particularly ofthat one which announced "the 3-dollar hat with the 5-dollar look, " allvery European! It was pleasant to be convinced in such large lettersthat even shrewd America is not exempt from that universal human naïvetéwhich is ready to believe that in some magic emporium a philanthropistis always waiting to give five dollars' worth of goods in exchange forthree 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 finesseof cricket and football, I did soon grasp in its main outlines. Abeautiful game, superbly played. We reckon to know something of ballgames in Europe; we reckon to be connoisseurs; and the old footballerand cricketer in me came away from that immense inclosure convinced thatbaseball was a game of the very first class, and that those players werethe most finished exponents of it. I was informed that during the winterthe players condescended to follow the law and other liberalprofessions. But, judging from their apparent importance in the publiceye, I should not have been surprised to learn that during the winterthey condescended to be Speakers of the House of Representatives orgovernors of States. It was a relief to know that in the matter ofexpenses they were treated more liberally than the ambassadors of theRepublic. 

They seemed to have carried the art of pitching a ball to a morewondrous degree of perfection than it has ever been carried in cricket. The absolute certitude of the fielding and accuracy of the throwing wasprofoundly impressive to a connoisseur. Only in a certain lack ofelegance in gesture, and in the unshaven dowdiness of the ground onwhich it was played, could this game be said to be inferior to the noblespectacle of cricket. In broad dramatic quality I should place it abovecricket, and on a level with Association football. 

In short, I at once became an enthusiast for baseball. For nine inningsI watched it with interest unabated, until a vast purple shadow, creeping gradually eastward, had obscurely veiled the sublime legend ofthe 3-dollar hat with the 5-dollar look. I began to acquire the propercries and shouts and menaces, and to pass comments on the play which Iwas assured were not utterly foolish. In my honest yearning to feelmyself a habitué, I did what everybody else did and even attacked amorsel of chewing-gum; but all that a European can say of this singularsubstance is that it is, finally, eternal and unconquerable. One slip Idid quite innocently make. I rose to stretch myself after the sixthinning instead of half-way through the seventh. Happily a friend withmarked presence of mind pulled me down to my seat again, before I hadhad time fully to commit this horrible sacrilege. When the game wasfinished I surged on to the enormous ground, and was informed byinnerring experts of a few of the thousand subtle tactical points whichI had missed. And lastly, I was flung up onto the Elevated platform, littered with pieces of newspaper, and through a landscape of slovenlyapartment-houses, punctuated by glimpses of tremendous quantities ofdrying 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 theprofessional matador and gladiator business is to be carried on at all, a better exemplification of it than baseball offers could hardly befound or invented. But the beholding crowd, and the behavior of thecrowd, somewhat disappointed me. My friends said with intense pride thatforty thousand persons were present. The estimate proved to be anexaggeration; but even had it not been, what is forty thousand to thesimilar crowds in Europe? In Europe forty thousand people will oftenassemble to watch an ordinary football match. And for a "Final, " therecord stands at something over a hundred thousand. It should beremembered, too, in forming the comparison, that many people in theEastern States frequent the baseball grounds because they have beendeprived of their horse-racing. Further, the New York crowd, thoughfairly excited, was not excited as sporting excitement is understood in, for instance, the Five Towns. The cheering was good, but it was not thecheering of frenzied passion. The anathemas, though hearty, lacked thatreligious sincerity which a truly sport-loving populace will always putinto them. The prejudice in favor of the home team, the cruel, frankunfairness toward the visiting team, were both insufficientlyaccentuated. The menaces were merely infantile. I inquired whether thereferee or umpire, or whatever the arbiter is called in America, everwent in danger of life or limb, or had to be protected from a homicidalpublic 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 acocoon of policemen, have even been known to spend a fortnight in bed, after giving a decision adverse to the home team!. .. More evidence thatthe 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 andpowerful influence throughout my stay), I should say that there was anappreciable amount of self-hypnotism in its attitude toward baseball. Asif the thriving and preoccupied business man murmured to his soul, whenthe proper time came: "By the way, these baseball championships areapproaching. It is right and good for me that I should be boyishlyexcited, and I will be excited. I must not let my interest in baseballdie. Let's look at the sporting-page and see how things stand. And I'llhave to get tickets, too!" Hence possibly what seemed to me asuperficiality and factitiousness in the excitement of the moreexpensive seats, and a too-rapid effervescence and finish of theexcitement when the game was over. 

The high fever of inter-university football struck me as a moreauthentic phenomenon. Indeed, a university town in the throes of animportant match offers a psychological panorama whose genuineness canscarcely be doubted. Here the young men communicate the sacred contagionto their elders, and they also communicate it to the young women, who, in turn, communicate it to the said elders--and possibly the indirectmethod is the surer! I visited a university town in order to witness amatch of the highest importance. Unfortunately, and yet fortunately, mywhole view of it was affected by a mere nothing--a trifle which thenewspapers dealt with in two lines. 

When I reached the gates of the arena in the morning, to get a glimpseof a freshmen's match, an automobile was standing thereat. In theautomobile was a pile of rugs, and sticking out of the pile of rugs inan 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 hisunconscious and smashed body was hidden beneath the rugs. The automobilevanished, and so did my peace of mind. It seemed to me tragic that thatburly infant under the rugs should have been martyrized at a poor littlemorning match in front of a few sparse hundreds of spectators and tensof thousands of unresponsive empty benches. He had not had even theglory and meed of a great multitude's applause. When I last inquiredabout him, at the end of the day, he was still unconscious, and that wasall that could be definitely said of him; one heard that it was hisfeatures that had chiefly suffered in the havoc, that he had beendefaced. If I had not happened to see those muddy football bootssticking out, I should have heard vaguely of the accident, and remarkedphilosophically that it was a pity, but that accidents would occur, andthere would have been the end of my impression. Only I just did happento see those muddy boots sticking out. 

[Illustration: THE SENSE OF A MIGHTY AND CULMINATING EVENT SHARPENED THEAIR]

When we came away from the freshmen's match, the charming roads of thetown, bordered by trees and by the agreeable architecture of mysteriousclubs, were beginning to be alive and dangerous with automobiles andcarriages, and pretty girls and proud men, and flags and flowers, andcolored favors and shoutings. Salutes were being exchanged at everyyard. The sense of a mighty and culminating event sharpened the air. Thegreat inn was full of jollity and excitement, and the reception-clerksthereof had the negligent mien of those who know that every bedroomis taken and every table booked. The club (not one of the mysteriousones, but an ingenuous plain club of patriarchs who had once been youngin the university and were now defying time) was crammed with amiableconfusion, and its rich carpets protected for the day against the feetof bald lads, who kept aimlessly walking up-stairs and down-stairs andfrom room to room, out of mere friendly exuberance. 

And after the inn and the club I was conducted into a true Americanhome, where the largest and most free hospitality was being practisedupon a footing of universal intimacy. You ate standing; you ate sitting;you ate walking the length of the long table; you ate at one smalltable, and then you ate at another. You talked at random to strangersbehind and strangers before. And when you couldn't think of anything tosay, you just smiled inclusively. You knew scarcely anybody's name, butthe heart of everybody. Impossible to be ceremonious! When a young womanbluntly inquired the significance of that far-away look in your eye, impossible not to reply frankly that you were dreaming of a secondhelping of a marvelous pie up there at the end of the long table; andimpossible not to eat all the three separate second helpings that wereinstantly thrust upon you! The chatter and the good-nature wereenormous. This home was an expression of the democracy of the universityat its best. Fraternity was abroad; kindliness was abroad; and thereforejoy. Whatever else was taught at the university, these were taught, andthey were learnt. If a publicist asked me what American civilization hadachieved, I would answer that among other things it had achieved thishour in this modest home. 

Occasionally a face would darken and a voice grow serious, exposing theterrible secret apprehensions, based on expert opinion, that the homeside could not win. But the cloud would pass. And occasionally therewould 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 forhis mother! But the cloud would immediately pass. 

And then we all had to leave, for none must be late on this solemn andgay occasion. And now the roads were so many converging torrents ofautomobiles and carriages, and excitement had developed into fever. Lifewas at its highest, and the world held but one problem . .. Sign thatreaction was approaching!

A proud spectacle for the agitated vision, when the vast business offilling the stands had been accomplished, and the eye ranged over acresof black hats and variegated hats, hats flowered and feathered, andplain male caps--a carpet intricately patterned with the rival colors!At a signal the mimic battle began. And in a moment occurred the firstcasualty--most grave of a series of casualties. A pale hero, with auseless limb, was led off the field amid loud cheers. Then it was that Ibecame aware of some dozens of supplementary heroes shivering beneathbrilliant blankets under the lee of the stands. In this species offootball every casualty was foreseen, and the rules allowed it to berepaired. Not two teams, but two regiments, were, in fact, fighting. Andmy European ideal of sport was offended. 

Was it possible that a team could be permitted to replace a wounded manby another, and so on ad infinitum? Was it possible that a team need notabide by its misfortunes? Well, it was! I did not like this. It seemedto me that the organizers, forgetting that this was a mimic battle, hadmade it into a real battle, and that there was an imperfect appreciationof what strictly amateur sport is. The desire to win, laudable andessential in itself, may by excessive indulgence become a morbidobsession. Surely, I thought, and still think, the means ought to suitthe end! An enthusiast for American organization, I was neverthelessforced to conclude that here organization is being carried too far, outraging the sense of proportion and of general fitness. For me, suchorganization disclosed even a misapprehension as to the principal aimand purpose of a university. If ever the fate of the Republic shoulddepend on the result of football matches, then such organization wouldbe justifiable, and courses of intellectual study might properly besuppressed. Until that dread hour I would be inclined to dwell heavilyon the admitted fact that a football match is not Waterloo, but simply atransient game in which two sets of youngsters bump up against oneanother in opposing endeavors to put a bouncing toy on two differentspots of the earth's surface. The ultimate location of the inflatedbauble will not affect the national destiny, and such moral value as thegame has will not be increased but diminished by any enlargement oforganization. After all, if the brains of the world gave themselvesexclusively to football matches, the efficiency of football matcheswould be immensely improved--but what then?. .. I seemed to behold onthis field the American passion for "getting results"--which I admirevery much; but it occurred to me that that passion, with its eyes fixedhungrily on the result it wants, may sometimes fail to see that it isgetting 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 thealmost military arrangements for shrieking the official yells. I wassorry for the young men whose duty it was, by the aid of megaphones andof grotesque and undignified contortions, to encourage and even forcethe spectators to emit in unison the complex noises which constitute theyell. I have no doubt that my pity was misdirected, for these young menwere obviously content with themselves; still, I felt sorry for them. Assuming for an instant that the official yell is not monstrously absurdand surpassingly ugly, admitting that it is a beautiful series ofsounds, enheartening, noble, an utterance worthy of a great and ancientuniversity at a crisis, even then one is bound to remember that itsessential quality should be its spontaneity. Enthusiasm cannot becreated at the word of command, nor can heroes be inspired by cheersartificially produced under megaphonic intimidation. Indeed, no moralphenomenon could be less hopeful to heroes than a perfunctory responseto a military order for enthusiasm. Perfunctory responses were frequent. Partly, no doubt, because the imperious young men with megaphones wouldnot leave us alone. Just when we were nicely absorbed in the caprices ofthe ball they would call us off and compel us to execute theirpreposterous 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 werestanding up and sitting down throughout the afternoon. And as we allstood up and we all sat down together, nobody gained any advantage fromthese muscular exercises. We saw no better, and we saw no worse. Towardthe end we stood on the seats, with the same result. We behaved inexactly the child-like manner of an Italian audience at a fashionableconcert. And to crown all, an aviator had the ineffably bad taste andthe culpable foolhardiness to circle round and round within a few dozenyards of our heads. 

In spite of all this, the sum of one's sensations amounted to livelypleasure. The pleasure would have been livelier if university footballwere a better game than in candid truth it is. At this juncture I seemto hear a million voices of students and ex-students roaring out at mewith menaces that the game is perfect and the greatest of all games. Anational game always was and is perfect. This particular game wasperfect years ago. Nevertheless, I learned that it had recently beenimproved, in deference to criticisms. Therefore, it is now pluperfect. Iwas told on the field--and sharply--that experience of it was needed forthe proper appreciation of its finesse. Admitted! But just as devoteesof a favorite author will put sublime significances into his leastphrase, so will devotees of a game put marvels of finesse into itsclumsiest features. The process is psychological. I was new to thisparticular game, but I had been following various footballs with my feetor with my eyes for some thirty years, and I was not to be bullied outof my opinion that the American university game, though goodish, lackedcertain virtues. Its characteristics tend ever to a too close formation, and inevitably favor tedium and monotony. In some aspects an unemotionalcritic might occasionally be tempted to call it naïve and barbaric. ButI was not unemotional. I recognize, and in my own person I proved, thatas a vehicle for emotion the American university game will serve. Whatelse is such a game for? In the match I witnessed there were some reallygreat moments, and one or two masterly exhibitions of skill and force. And as "my" side won, against all odds, I departed in a state offelicity. 

 * * * * *

If the great cities of the East and Middle West are not strikinglysportive, perhaps the reason is that they are impassioned theater-goers;they could not well be both, at any rate without neglecting thefinancial pursuits which are their chief real amusement and hobby. Imention the theaters in connection with sports, rather than inconnection with the arts, because the American drama is more closelyrelated to sporting diversions than to dramatic art. If this seems ahard saying, I will add that I am ready to apply it with similar forceto the English and French drama, and, indeed, to almost all modern dramaoutside Germany. It was astonishing to me that America, unhampered byEnglish traditions, should take seriously, for instance, the fashionableand utterly meretricious French dramatists, who receive nothing but achilly ridicule from people of genuine discrimination in Paris. WhateverAmerican dramatists have to learn, they will not learn it in Paris; andI was charmed once to hear a popular New York playwright, one whosincerely and frankly wrote for money alone, assert boldly that thenotoriously successful French plays were bad, and clumsily bad. It was aproof of taste. As a rule, one finds the popular playwright taking offhis hat to contemporaries who at best are no better than his equals. 

A few minor cases apart, the drama is artistically negligible throughoutthe world; but if there is a large hope for it in any special country, that country is the United States. The extraordinary prevalence of bigtheaters, the quickly increasing number of native dramatists, theenormous profits of the successful ones--it is simply inconceivable inthe face of the phenomena, and of the educational process so rapidlygoing on, that serious and first-class creative artists shall not arisein America. Nothing is more likely to foster the production offirst-class artists than the existence of a vast machinery for winningmoney and glory. When I reflect that there are nearly twice as manyfirst-class theaters in New York as in London, and that a verysuccessful play in New York plays to eighteen thousand dollars a week, while in London ten thousand dollars a week is enormous, and that theAmerican public has a preference for its own dramatists, I have littlefear for the artistic importance of the drama of the future in America. And from the discrepancy between my own observations and theobservations of a reliable European critic in New York only five yearsago, I should imagine that appreciable progress had already been made, though I will not pretend that I was much impressed by the achievementsup to date, either of playwrights, actors, or audiences. A huge popularinstitution, however, such as the American theatrical system, is alwaysinteresting to the amateur of human nature. 

The first thing noted by the curious stranger in American theaters isthat American theatrical architects have made a great discovery--namely, that every member of the audience goes to the play with a desire to beable to see and hear what passes on the stage. This happy Americandiscovery has not yet announced itself in Europe, where in almost everytheater seats are impudently sold, and idiotically bought, from which itis impossible to see and hear what passes on the stage. (A remarkablecontinent, Europe!) Apart from this most important point, Americantheaters are not, either without or within, very attractive. Theauditoriums, to a European, have a somewhat dingy air. Which air is nodoubt partly due to the non-existence of a rule in favor of eveningdress (never again shall I gird against the rule in Europe!), but it isdue 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 riotousgrandeur. The rare architects who have understood this seem to have losttheir heads about it, with such wild and capricious results as the newopera-house in Philadelphia. I could not restrain my surprise that theinhabitants of the Quaker City had not arisen with pickaxes and razedthis architectural extravaganza to the ground. But Philadelphia is acity startlingly unlike its European reputation. Throughout my too-briefsojourn in it I did not cease to marvel at its liveliness. I heard morepicturesque and pyrotechnic wit at one luncheon in Philadelphia than atany two repasts outside it. The spacious gaiety and lavishness of itsmarts enchanted me. It must have a pretty weakness for the most costlyold books and manuscripts. I never was nearer breaking the SixthCommandment than in one of its homes, where the Countess of Pembroke'sown copy of Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_--a unique and utterlyun-Quakerish treasure--was laid trustfully in my hands by the regrettedand charming Harry Widener. 

To return. The Metropolitan Opera-House in New York is a much moresatisfactory example of a theatrical interior. Indeed, it is very fine, especially when strung from end to end of its first tier with pearls, asI saw it. Impossible to find fault with its mundane splendor. And let meurge that impeccable mundane splendor, despite facile arguments to thecontrary, is a very real and worthy achievement. It is regrettable, bythe way, that the entrances and foyers to these grandiose interiorsshould be so paltry, slatternly, and inadequate. If the entrances to thegreat financial establishments reminded me of opera-houses, theentrances to opera-houses did not!

Artistically, of course, the spectacle of a grand-opera season in anAmerican city is just as humiliating as it is in the other Anglo-Saxoncountry. It was disconcerting to see Latin or German opera givenexactly--with no difference at all; same Latin or German artists andconductors, same conventions, same tricks--in New York or Philadelphiaas in Europe. And though the wealthy audiences behaved better thanwealthy audiences at Covent Garden (perhaps because the boxes are lesslike inclosed pews than in London), it was mortifying to detect thesecret disdain for art which was expressed in the listless latearrivings and the relieved early departures. The which disdain for artwas, however, I am content to think, as naught in comparison with thewithering artistic disdain felt, and sometimes revealed, by those Latinand German artists for Anglo-Saxon Philistinism. I seem to be able toread 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 musicalpublic is that it should be capable of self-support--I mean that itshould 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 ofthe world will respect. This is a test which can be safely applied toGermany, Russia, Italy, and France. And in certain other arts it is atest which can be applied to Anglo-Saxondom--but not in music. InAmerica and England music is still mainly a sportive habit. 

When I think of the exoticism of grand opera in New York, my mind atonce turns, in contrast, to the natural raciness of such modestcreations as those offered by Mr. George Cohan at his theater onBroadway. Here, in an extreme degree, you get a genuine instance of apublic demand producing the desired artist on the spot. Here issomething really and honestly and respectably American. And why itshould be derided by even the most lofty pillars of American taste, Icannot imagine. (Or rather, I can imagine quite well. ) For myself, Ispent a very agreeable evening in witnessing "The Little Millionaire. " Iwas 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 talentand an all-round efficiency; and, beneath the blatancy, an admirabledirect simplicity and winning unpretentiousness. I liked the ingenuityof the device by which, in the words of the programme, the action of ActII was "not interrupted by musical numbers. " The dramatic constructionof this act was so consistently clever and right and effective that moreambitious dramatists might study it with advantage. Anotherpoint--though the piece was artistically vulgar, it was not vulgarotherwise. It contained no slightest trace of the outrageous salacityand sottishness which disfigure the great majority of successful musicalcomedies. It was an honest entertainment. But to me its chief value andinterest lay in the fact that while watching it I felt that I was reallyin New York, and not in Vienna, Paris, or London. 

Of the regular theater I did not see nearly enough to be able togeneralize even for my own private satisfaction. I observed, andexpected to observe, that the most reactionary quarters were the mostrespected. It is the same everywhere. When a manager, having discoveredthat two real clocks in one real room never strike simultaneously, puttwo real clocks on the stage, and made one strike after the other; orwhen a manager mimicked, with extraordinary effects of restlessness, alife-sized telephone-exchange on the stage--then was I bound to hear of"artistic realism" and "a fine production"! But such feats oftruthfulness do not consort well with chocolate sentimentalities andwilful falsities of action and dialogue. They caused me to doubt whetherI was not in London. 

The problem-plays which I saw were just as futile and exasperating asthe commercial English and French varieties of the problem-play, thoughthey had a trifling advantage over the English in that their mostsentimental passages were lightened by humor, and the odiously insincerefelicity of their conclusions was left to the imagination instead ofbeing acted ruthlessly out on the boards. The themes of these playsshowed the usual obsession, and were manipulated in the usual attempt todemonstrate that the way of transgressors is not so very hard after all. They threw, all unconsciously, strange side-lights on the American man'sprivate estimate of the American woman, and the incidence of theapplause was extremely instructive. 

The most satisfactory play that I saw, "Bought and Paid For, " by GeorgeBroadhurst, was not a problem-play, though Mr. Broadhurst is also apurveyor of problem-plays. It was just an unpretentious fairy-tale aboutthe customary millionaire and the customary poor girl. The first actwas 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 seenanywhere. There were touches of authentic realism at the very crisis atwhich experience had taught one to expect a crass sentimentality. Thefairy-tale was well told, with some excellent characterization, and verywell played. Indeed, Mr. Frank Craven's rendering of the incompetentclerk was a masterly and unforgettable piece of comedy. I enjoyed"Bought and Paid For, " and it is on the faith of such plays, imperfectand timid as they are, that I establish my prophecy of a more glorioushereafter for the American drama. 

VII

EDUCATION AND ART

I had my first glimpses of education in America from the purser of anillustrious liner, who affirmed the existence of a dog--in fact, his owndog--so highly educated that he habitually followed and understood humanconversations, and that in order to keep secrets from the animal it wasnecessary to spell out the keyword of a sentence instead of pronouncingit. After this I seemed somehow to be prepared for the American infantwho, when her parents discomfited her just curiosity by the same meanadult dodge of spelling words, walked angrily out of the room with theprotest: "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 inher presence would actually whisper in each other's ear. She merelyinquired, 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 intervalsthroughout my stay in America, was a mirror in which I saw the wholeAmerican race of children--their independence, their self-confidence, their adorable charm, and their neat sauciness. "What _is_ father?" sheasked one day. Now her father happened to be one of the foremosthumorists in the United States; she was baldly informed that he was ahumorist. "What _is_ a humorist?" she went on, ruthlessly, and learnedthat a humorist was a person who wrote funny things to make peoplelaugh. "Well, " she said, "I don't honestly think he's very funny athome. " It was naught to her that humorists are not paid to be funny athome, and that in truth they never under any circumstances are veryfunny at home. She just hurled her father from his niche--and then wentforth and boasted of him as a unique peculiarity in fathers, as anunrivaled ornament of her career on earth; for no other child in thevicinity had a professional humorist for parent. Her gestures and accenttypified for me the general attitude of youngest America, in process ofeducation, toward the older generation: an astonishing, amusing, exquisite, incomprehensible mixture of affection, admiration, trust, andrather casual tolerating scorn. The children of most countries display asimilar phenomenon, but in America the phenomenon is more acute anddisconcerting than elsewhere. 

One noon, in perfect autumn weather, I was walking down the main road ofa residential suburb, and observing the fragile-wheeled station-wagons, and the ice-wagons enormously labeled "DANGER" (perhaps by the gastricexperts of the medical faculty), and the Colonial-style dwellings, andthe "tinder" boarding-houses, and the towering boot-shine stands, andthe roast-chestnut emporia, and the gasometers flanking a noble andbeautiful river--I was observing all this when a number of young men andmaids came out of a high-school and unconsciously assumed possession ofthe street. It was a great and impressive sight; it was a delightfulsight. They were so sure of themselves, the maids particularly; sointerested in themselves, so happy, so eager, so convinced (without anyconceit) that their importance transcended all other importances, sogently pitiful toward men and women of forty-five, and so positive thatthe main function of elders was to pay school-fees, that I was thrilledthereby. Seldom has a human spectacle given me such exciting pleasure asthis gave. (And they never suspected it, those preoccupied demigods!) Itwas the sheer pride of life that I saw passing down the street andacross the badly laid tram-lines! I had never seen anything like it. Iimmediately desired to visit schools. Profoundly ignorant of educationalmethods, and with a strong distaste for teaching, I yet wanted to knowand understand all about education in America in one moment--theeducation that produced that superb stride and carriage in the street! Ifailed, of course, in my desire--not from lack of facilities offered, but partly from lack of knowledge to estimate critically what I saw, andfrom lack of time. My experiences, however, though they left my mindfull of enigmas, were wondrous. I asked to inspect one of the bestschools in New York. Had I been a dispassionate sociological student, Ishould probably have asked to inspect one of the worst schools in NewYork--perhaps one of the gaunt institutions to be found, together with acinema-palace and a bank, in almost every block on the East Side. But Iasked 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 childrenand their teachers lived with extreme vivacity in an atmosphere of ozonefrom which all draughts and chilliness had been eliminated. As amalcontent native of the Isle of Chilly Draughts, this attribute of theatmosphere of the Horace Mann School impressed me. Dimensionally I foundthat the palace had a beginning but no end. I walked through leagues ofcorridors and peeped into unnumbered class-rooms, in each of whichchildren were apparently fiercely dragging knowledge out of neverthelesshighly communicative teachers; and the children got bigger and bigger, and then diminished for a while, and then grew again, and kept ongrowing, until I at last entered a palatial kitchen where some two dozenangels, robed in white but for the moment uncrowned, were eagerlycrowding round a paradisiacal saucepan whose magic contents formed thesubject 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; andI asked up to what age angels were kept at school in America. WhereuponI learned that I had insensibly passed from the school proper into atraining-school for teachers; but at what point the school proper endedI never did learn. It seems to me that if I had penetrated through sevenmore doors I should have reached Columbia University itself, withouthaving crossed a definite dividing-line; and, anyhow, the circumstancewas symbolic. 

Reluctantly I left the incredible acres of technical apparatusmunificently provided in America for the training of teachers, and, having risen to the roof and seen infants thereon grabbing atinstruction in the New York breeze, I came again to the more normalregions of the school. Here, as everywhere else in the United States(save perhaps the cloak-room department of the MetropolitanOpera-House), what chiefly struck me was the brilliant organization ofthe organism. There was nothing that had not been thought of. Ahandsomely dressed mother came into the organism and got as far as theantechamber of the principal's room. The organization had foreseen her, had divined that that mother's child was the most important among athousand children--indeed, the sole child of any real importance--hadarranged that her progress should be arrested at just that stage, andhad stationed a calm and diplomatic woman to convince her that her childwas indeed the main preoccupation of the Horace Mann School. A prettysight--the interview! It charmed me as the sight of an ingenious enginein motion will charm an engineer. 

The individual class-rooms, in some of which I lingered at leisure, weretonic, bracing, inspiring, and made me ashamed because I was not young. I saw geography being taught with the aid of a stereoscopicmagic-lantern. After a view of the high street of a village in NorthRussia had been exposed and explained by a pupil, the teacher said: "Ifanybody has any questions to ask, let him stand up. " And the whole classleaped furiously to its feet, blotting out the entire picture with blackshadows of craniums and starched pinafores. The whole class might havebeen famishing. In another room I saw the teaching of Englishcomposition. Although when I went to school English composition wasnever taught, I have gradually acquired a certain interest in thesubject, and I feel justified in asserting that the lesson was admirablygiven. It was, in fact, the best example of actual pedagogy that I metwith in the United States. "Now can any one tell me--" began themistress. A dozen arms of boys and girls shot up with excessiveviolence, and, having shot up, they wiggled and waggled with ferociousimpatience in the air; it was a miracle that they remained attached totheir respective trunks; it was assuredly an act of daring on the partof the intrepid mistress to choose between them. 

"How children have changed since my time!" I said to the principalafterward. "We never used to fling up our hands like that. We just putthem up. .. . But perhaps it's because they're Americans--"

"It's probably because of the ventilation, " said the principal, calmlycorrective. "We never have the windows open winter or summer, but theventilation 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 ofevery arrangement, I ventured to surmise that it must all cost a greatdeal. 

"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 schoolswill charge five or six hundred dollars a year. "

Exhausted, humbled, I at last quitted the warmed Horace Mann ozone forthe harsh and searching atmosphere of the street. And I gazed up at thepile, and saw all its interiors again in my mind. I had not grasped thehalf nor the quarter of what had been so willingly and modestly shown tome. I had formed no theory as to the value of some of the best juvenileeducation in the Eastern States. But I had learned one thing. I knew thesecret of the fine, proud bearing of young America. A child is not afool; a child is almost always uncannily shrewd. And when it sees asplendid palace provided for it, when it sees money being showered uponhygienic devices for its comfort, even upon trifles for its distraction, when it sees brains all bent on discovering the best, nicest ways ofdealing with its instincts, when it sees itself the center of amagnificent pageant, ritual, devotion, almost worship, it naturallylifts its chin, puts its shoulders back, steps out with a spring, andglances down confidently upon the whole world. Who wouldn't?

 * * * * *

It was an exciting day for me when I paid a call next door to HoraceMann and visited Columbia University. For this was my first visit ofinspection to any university of any kind, either in the New World or inthe Old. As for an English university education, destiny had deprived meof its advantages and of its perils. I could not haughtily compareColumbia with Oxford or Cambridge, because I had never set foot even intheir towns. I had no standards whatever of comparison. 

I arose and went out to lunch on that morning, and left the lunch beforeanybody else and rushed in an automobile to Columbia; but football hadalready begun for the day in the campus costing two million dollars, andclasses were over. I saw five or more universities while I was inAmerica, but I was not clever enough to catch one of them in the act ofinstruction. 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 dazzlingpromise. No European with any imagination could regard Columbia as otherthan a miracle. Nearly the whole of the gigantic affair appeared to havebeen brought into being, physically, in less than twenty years. Buildingafter building, device after device, was dated subsequent to 1893. Andto my mind that was just the point of the gigantic affair. Universitiesin Europe are so old. And there are universities in America which arevenerable. A graduate of the most venerable of them told me thatColumbia was not "really" a university. Well, it did seem unreal, thoughnot in his sense; it seemed magic. The graduate in question told me thata university could not be created by a stroke of the wand. And yet therestaring me in the face was the evidence that a university not merelycould be created by a stroke of the wand, but had been. (I am aware ofColumbia's theoretic age and of her insistence on it. ) The wand is amodern invention; to deny its effective creative faculty is absurd. 

Of course I know what the graduate meant. I myself, though I had notseen Oxford nor Cambridge, was in truth comparing Columbia with my dreamof Oxford and Cambridge, to her disadvantage. I was capable of saying tomyself: "All this is terribly new. All this lacks tradition. " Criticismfatuous and mischievous, if human! It would be as sapient to imprisonthe entire youth of a country until it had ceased to commit the offenseof being young. Tradition was assuredly not apparent in the atmosphereof Columbia. Moreover, some of her architecture was ugly. On the otherhand, some of it was beautiful to the point of nobility. The library, for instance: a building in which no university and no age could feelanything but pride. And far more important than stone or marble was thepassionate affection for Columbia which I observed in certain of hersons who had nevertheless known other universities. A passionateaffection also perhaps brought into being since 1893, but not to besurpassed in honest fervency and loyalty by influences more venerable!

Columbia was full of piquancies for me. It delighted me that the Dean ofScience was also consulting engineer to the university. That wascharacteristic and fine. And how splendidly unlike Oxford! I liked thecomplete life-sized railroad locomotive in the engineering-shops, andthe Greek custom in the baths; and the students' notion of coziness inthe private dens full of shelves, photographs, and disguised beds; andthe visibility of the president; and his pronounced views as to therespective merits of New York newspapers; and the eagerness of a youngprofessor of literature in the Faculty Club to defend against myattacks English Professor A. C. Bradley. I do believe that I even likedthe singular sight of a Chinaman tabulating from the world's press, inthe modern-history laboratory, a history of the world day by day. I canhardly conceive a wilder, more fearfully difficult way of trying toacquire the historical sense than this voyaging through hot, freshnewspapers, nor one more probably destined to failure (I should haveliked to see some of the two-monthly résumés which students in thiscourse are obliged to write); but I liked the enterprise and theoriginality and the daring of the idea; I liked its disdain oftradition. And, after all, is it weirder than the common traditionalmethod?

[Illustration: UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS--UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA]

To the casual visitor, such as myself, unused either to universities orto the vastness of the American scale, Columbia could be little save anenormous and overwhelming incoherence. It so chiefly remains in my mind. But the ingenious humanity running through the whole conception of itwas touching and memorable. And although I came away from my visit stillperfectly innocent of any broad theory as to ultimate educational valuesin America, I came away also with a deeper and more reassuringconviction that America was intensely interested in education, and thatall that America had to do in order to arrive at real national, racialresults was to keep on being intensely interested. When America shallhave so far outclassed Europe as to be able to abolish, in universityexaminations, what New York picturesquely calls "the gumshoe squad" (ofcourse now much more brilliantly organized in America than inEurope), then we shall begin to think that, under the stroke of thewand, at least one real national, racial result has been attained!

 * * * * *

When I set eyes on the sixty buildings which constitute the visible partof Harvard University, I perceived that, just as Kensington had withoutknowing it been imitating certain streets of Boston, so certain lostlittle old English towns that even American tourists have not yetreached had without knowing it been imitating the courts and chimneysand windows and doorways and luscious brickwork of Harvard. Harvard hada very mellow look indeed. No trace of the wand! The European in searchof tradition would find it here in bulk. I should doubt whether atHarvard modern history is studied through the daily paper--unlessperchance it be in Harvard's own daily paper. The considerableness ofHarvard was attested for me by the multiplicity of its press organs. Idare say that Harvard is the only university in the world the offices ofwhose comic paper are housed in a separate and important building. Ifthere had been a special press-building for Harvard's press, I shouldhave been startled. But when I beheld the mere comic organ in a spaciousand costly detached home that some London dailies would envy, I wasstruck dumb. That sole fact indicated the scale of magnificence atHarvard, and proved that the phenomenon of gold-depreciation hasproceeded further at Harvard than at any other public institution in theworld. 

The etiquette of Harvard is nicely calculated to heighten the materialsplendor of the place. Thus it is etiquette for the president, duringhis term of office, to make a present of a building or so to theuniversity. Now buildings at Harvard have adopted the excellent habit ofnever costing less than about half a million dollars. It is alsoetiquette that the gifts to the university from old students shall toucha certain annual sum; they touch it. Withal, there is no architecturalostentation at Harvard. All the buildings are artistically modest; manyare beautiful; scarcely one that clashes with the sober and subtleattractiveness of the whole aggregation. Nowhere is the eye offended. One looks upon the crimson façades with the same lenient love as marksone's attitude toward those quaint and lovely English houses (sofamiliar to American visitors to our isle) that are all picturesquenessand no bath-room. That is the external effect. Assuredly entering someof those storied doorways, one would anticipate inconveniences and whatis called "Old World charm" within. 

But within one discovers simply naught but the very latest, the verydearest, the very best of everything that is luxurious. I was usheredinto a most princely apartment, grandiose in dimensions, superblyfurnished and decorated, lighted with rich discretion, heated to a turn. Portraits by John Sargent hung on the vast walls, and a score of othermanifestations of art rivaled these in the attention of the stranger. Noclub in London could match this chamber. It was, I believe, a sort oflounge for the students. Anyhow, a few students were lounging in it;only a few--there was no rush for the privilege. And the few loungerswere really lounging, in the wonderful sinuous postures of youth. Theymight have been lounging in a railway station or a barn instead of amidportraits by John Sargent. 

The squash-racket court was an example of another kind of luxury, verydifferent from the cunning combinations of pictured walls, books, carvedwood, and deep-piled carpets, but not less authentic. The dining-hallseating a thousand simultaneously was another. Here I witnessed thelaying of dinner-tables by negroes. I noted that the sudden sight of meinstantly convinced one negro, engaged in the manipulation of pats ofbutter, that a fork would be more in keeping with the Harvard traditionthan his fingers, and I was humanly glad thus to learn that the secretreality of table-laying is the same in two continents. I saw not thedining of the thousand. In fact, I doubt whether in all I saw onehundred of the six thousand students. They had mysteriously vanishedfrom all the resorts of perfect luxury provided for them. Possibly theywere withdrawn into the privacies of the thousands of suites--eachcontaining bedroom, sitting-room, bath-room, and telephone--which Iunderstood are allotted to them for lairs. I left Harvard with a veryclear impression of its frank welcoming hospitality and of itsextraordinary luxury. 

And as I came out of the final portal I happened to meet a studentactually carrying his own portmanteau--and rather tugging at it. Iregretted this chance. The spectacle clashed, and ought to have beencontrary to etiquette. That student should in propriety have beenfollowed by a Nigerian, Liberian, or Senegambian, carrying hisportmanteau. 

My visits to other universities were about as brief, stirring, suggestive, and incomplete as those to Columbia and Harvard. I repeatthat I never actually saw the educational machine in motion. What itseemed to me that I saw in each case was a tremendous mechanicalapparatus at rest, a rich, empty frame, an organism waiting for the wordthat would break its trance. The fault was, of course, wholly mine. Ifind upon reflection that the universities which I recall with the mostsympathy are those in which I had the largest opportunity of listeningto the informal talk of the faculty and its wife. I heard some mightytalking upon occasion--and in particular I sat willing at the feet of apresident who could mingle limericks and other drollery, the humanities, science, modern linguistics, and economics in a manner which must surelymake him historic. 

 * * * * *

Education, like most things except high-class cookery, must be judged byultimate results; and though it may not be possible to pass any verdicton current educational methods (especially when you do not happen tohave even seen them in action), one can to a certain extent assess thevalues of past education by reference to the demeanor of adults who havebeen through it. One of the chief aims of education should be tostimulate the great virtue of curiosity. The worst detractors of theAmerican race--and there are some severe ones in New York, London, andParis!--will not be able to deny that an unusually active curiosity is amarked characteristic of the race. Only they twist that verycharacteristic into an excuse for still further detraction. They will, for example, point to the "hordes" (a word which they regard asindispensable in this connection) of American tourists who insist onseeing everything of historic or artistic interest that is visible inEurope. The plausible argument is that the mass of such tourists areinferior in intellect and taste to the general level of Europeans whodisplay curiosity about history or art. Which is probably true. But itought to be remembered by us Europeans (and in sackcloth!) that the massof us with money to spend on pleasure are utterly indifferent to historyand art. The European dilettante goes to the Uffizi and sees ashopkeeper from Milwaukee gazing ignorantly at a masterpiece, and says:"How inferior this shopkeeper from Milwaukee is to me! The American isan inartistic race!" But what about the shopkeeper from Huddersfield orAmiens? The shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens will be flirtingabout on some entirely banal beach--Scarborough or Trouville--and forall he knows or cares Leonardo da Vinci might have been a cabman; andyet the loveliest things in the world are, relatively speaking, at hisdoor! When the European shopkeeper gets as far as Lucerne in August, hethinks that a journey of twenty-four hours entitles him to rank a littlelower 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 wisethereby demonstrated. One has to admit that he now goes to Lucerne inhordes. Praise be to him! But I imagine that the American horde"hustling for culture" in no matter what historic center will comparepretty favorably with the European horde in such spots as Lucerne. 

All general curiosity is, to my mind, righteousness, and I so count itto the American. Not that I think that American curiosity is always thehighest form of curiosity, or that it is not limited. With its apparentomnivorousness it is often superficial and too easily satisfied--particularlyby mere words. Very seldom is it profound. It is apt to browse agreeablyon externals. The American, like Anglo-Saxons generally, rarely shows apassionate and yet honest curiosity about himself or his country, whichis curiosity at its finest. He will divide things into pleasant andunpleasant, and his curiosity is trained to stop at the frontier of thelatter--an Anglo-Saxon device for being comfortable in your mind! Helikes to know what others think of him and his country, but he is notvery keen on knowing what he really thinks on these subjects himself. The highest form of curiosity is apt to be painful sometimes. (And yetwho that has practised it would give it up?) It also demandsintellectual honesty--a quality which has been denied by Heaven to allAnglo-Saxon races, but which nevertheless a proper education ought inthe end to achieve. Were I asked whether I saw in America anyimprovement upon Britain in the supreme matter of intellectual honesty, I should reply, No. I seemed to see in America precisely the sametendency as in Britain to pretend, for the sake of instant comfort, thatthings are not what they are, the same timid but determined dislike ofthe whole truth, the same capacity to be shocked by notorious anduniversal phenomena, the same delusion that a refusal to look at thesephenomena is equivalent to the destruction of these phenomena, the sameflaccid sentimentality which vitiates practically all Anglo-Saxon art. And I have stood in the streets of New York, as I have stood in thestreets of London, and longed with an intense nostalgia for one hour ofParis, where, amid a deplorable decadence, intellectual honesty iswidely discoverable, and where absolutely straight thinking and talkingis not mistaken for cynicism. 

 * * * * *

Another test of education is the feeling for art, and the creation of anenvironment which encourages the increase of artistic talent. (And be itnoted in passing that the intellectually honest races, the Latin, havebeen the most artistic, for the mere reason that intellectual dishonestyis just sentimentality, and sentimentality is the destroying poison ofart. ) Now the most exacerbating experience that fell to me inAmerica--and it fell more than once--was to hear in discreetly lightedand luxurious drawing-rooms, amid various mural proofs of trained taste, and usually from the lips of an elegantly Europeanized American womanwith a sad, agreeable smile: "There is no art in the United States. .. . Ifeel like an exile. " A number of these exiles, each believing himself orherself to be a solitary lamp in the awful darkness, are dotted up anddown the great cities, and it is a curious fact that they bitterlydespise one another. In so doing they are not very wrong. For, in thefirst place, these people, like nearly all dilettanti of art, areextremely unreliable judges of racial characteristics. Their mentalityis allied to that of the praisers of time past, who, having read _TomJones_ and _Clarissa_, are incapable of comprehending that the immensemajority of novels produced in the eighteenth century were neverthelessterrible rubbish. They go to a foreign land, deliberately confine theirattention to the artistic manifestations of that country, and thenexclaim in ecstasy: "What an artistic country this is! How differentfrom my own!" To the same class belong certain artistic visitors to theUnited States who, having in their own country deliberately cutthemselves off from intercourse with ordinary inartistic persons, visitAmerica, and, meeting there the average man and woman in bulk, frownsuperiorly and exclaim: "This Philistine race thinks of nothing butdollars!" They cannot see the yet quite evident truth that the rank andfile of every land is about equally inartistic. Modern Italy may in themass be more lyrical than America, but in either architecture orpainting Italy is simply not to be named with America. 

[Illustration: MITCHELL TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS--UNIVERSITY OFCHICAGO]

Further, and in the second place, these people never did and never willlook in the right quarters for vital art. A really original artiststruggling under their very noses has small chance of being recognizedby them, the reason being that they are imitative, with no real opinionof their own. They associate art with Florentine frames, matinée hats, distant museums, and clever talk full of allusions to the dead. It wouldnot occur to them to search for American art in the architecture ofrailway stations and the draftsmanship and sketch-writing ofnewspapers and magazines, because they have not the wit to learn thatgenuine art flourishes best in the atmosphere of genuine popular demand. 

Even so, with all their blindness, it is unnatural that they should notsee and take pride in the spectacular historical facts which prove theircountry to be less negligible in art than they would assert. I do notmean the existence in America of huge and glorious collections ofEuropean masters. I have visited some of these collections, and havetaken keen pleasure therein. But I perceive in them no nationalsignificance--no more national significance than I perceive in theendowment of splendid orchestras to play foreign music under foreignconductors, or in the fashionable crowding of classical concerts. Indeed, it was a somewhat melancholy experience to spend hours in aprivate palace crammed with artistic loveliness that was apparentlybeloved and understood, and to hear not one single word disclosing theslightest interest in modern American art. No, as a working artistmyself, I was more impressed and reassured by such a sight as the Innesroom at the colossal Art Institute of Chicago than by all thecollections of old masters in America, though I do not regard Innes as avery distinguished artist. The aforesaid dilettanti would naturallycondescend to the Innes room at Chicago's institute, as to thelong-sustained, difficult effort which is being made by a school ofChicago sculptors for the monumental ornamentation of Chicago. But thedilettanti have accomplished a wonderful feat of unnaturalness inforgetting that their poor, inartistic Philistine country did provide, _inter alia_, the great writer who has influenced French imaginativewriters more deeply than any other foreign writer since Byron--EdgarAllan Poe; did produce one of the world's supreme poets--Whitman; didproduce the greatest pure humorist of modern times; did produce themiraculous Henry James; did produce Stanford White and the incomparableMcKim; and did produce the only two Anglo-Saxon personalities who ingraphic art have been able to impose themselves on modernEurope--Whistler and John Sargent. 

 * * * * *

In the matter of graphic art, I have known so many American painters inParis that I was particularly anxious to see what American painting waslike at home. My first adventures were not satisfactory. I trudgedthrough enormous exhibitions, and they filled me with just the samefeeling of desolation and misery that I experienced at the RoyalAcademy, London, or the Société des Artistes Français, Paris. In milesof slippery exercise I saw almost nothing that could interest anintelligent amateur who had passed a notable portion of his life instudios. The first modern American painting that arrested me was one byGrover, of Chicago. I remember it with gratitude. Often, especially inNew York, I was called upon by stay-at-home dilettanti to admire thework of some shy favorite, and with the best will in the world I couldnot, on account of his too obvious sentimentality. In Boston I wasauthoritatively informed that the finest painting in the whole world wasat that moment being done by a group of Boston artists in Boston. But asI had no opportunity to see their work, I cannot offer an opinion onthe proud claim. My gloom was becoming permanent, when one wet day Iinvaded, not easily, the Macdowell Club, and, while listening to achorus rehearsal of Liszt's "St. Elizabeth" made the acquaintance ofreally interesting pictures by artists such as Irving R. Wiles, JonasLie, Henri, Mrs. Johansen, and Brimley, of whom previously I had knownnothing. 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 Frenchcriticism with dignity. Whereas there is one American painter who hasachieved a reputation on the tongues of men in Europe without (it issaid) having been influenced by Europe, or even having exhibited there. I mean Winslow Homer. I had often heard of Winslow Homer fromconnoisseurs who had earned my respect, and assuredly one of my reasonsfor coming to America was to see Winslow Homer's pictures. My firstintroduction to his oil-paintings was a shock. I did not like them, andI kept on not liking them. I found them theatrical and violent inconception, rather conventional in design, and repellent in color. Ithought the painter's attitude toward sea and rock and sky decidedlysentimental beneath its wilful harshness. And I should have left Americawith broken hopes of Winslow Homer if an enthusiast for State-patronizedart had not insisted on taking me to the State Museum at Indianapolis. In this agreeable and interesting museum there happened to be atemporary loan exhibit of water-colors by Winslow Homer. Whichwater-colors were clearly the productions of a master. They forced me toreconsider my views of Homer's work in general. They were beautiful;they thrilled; they were genuine American; there is nothing else likethem. I shall never forget the pleasure I felt in unexpectedlyencountering these summary and highly distinguished sketches in thequietude of Indianapolis. I would have liked to collect a trainful ofNew York, Chicago, and Boston dilettanti, and lead them by the ears tothe unpretentious museum at Indianapolis, and force them to regardfixedly these striking creations. Not that I should expect appreciationfrom them! (Indianapolis, I discovered, was able to keep perfectly calmin front of the Winslow Homer water-colors. ) But their observationswould have been diverting. 

VIII

CITIZENS

Nothing in New York fascinated me as much as the indications of the vastand multitudinous straitened middle-class life that is lived there; theaverage, respectable, difficult, struggling existence. I would alwaysregard this medium plane of the social organism with more interest thanthe upper and lower planes. And in New York the enormity of it becomesspectacular. As I passed in Elevated trains across the end of streetafter street, and street after street, and saw so many of them justalike, and saw so many similar faces mysteriously peering in the sameposture between the same curtains through the same windows of the samegreat houses; and saw canaries in cages, and enfeebled plants in pots, and bows of ribbon, and glints of picture-frames; and saw crowd afterdense crowd fighting down on the cobbled roads for the fearful privilegeof entering a surface-car--I had, or seemed to have, a composite visionof the general life of the city. 

And what sharpened and stimulated the vision more than anything else wasthe innumerable flashing glimpses of immense torn clouds of clean linen, or linen almost clean, fluttering and shaking in withdrawn courtyardsbetween rows and rows of humanized windows. This domestic detail, repugnant possibly to some, was particularly impressive to me; it wasthe visible index of what life really is on a costly rock ruled in allmaterial essentials by trusts, corporations, and the grand principle oftipping. 

I would have liked to live this life, for a space, in any one of half amillion restricted flats, with not quite enough space, not quite enoughair, not quite enough dollars, and a vast deal too much continual strainon the nerves. I would have liked to come to close quarters with it, andget its subtle and sinister toxin incurably into my system. Could I havedone so, could I have participated in the least of the uncountable dailydramas of which the externals are exposed to the gaze of any starer inan Elevated, I should have known what New York truly meant toNew-Yorkers, and what was the real immediate effect of average educationreacting on average character in average circumstances; and theknowledge would have been precious and exciting beyond all knowledge ofthe staggering "wonders" of the capital. But, of course, I could notapproach so close to reality; the visiting stranger seldom can; he mustbe content with his imaginative visions. 

[Illustration: PART OF THE DAILY ROUND OF THE INDOMITABLE NEW YORKWOMAN]

Now and then I had the good-fortune to come across illuminating storiesof New York dailiness, tales of no important event, but which lit up forme the whole expanse of existence in the hinterlands of the Elevated. As, for instance, the following. The tiny young wife of the ambitiousand feverish young man is coming home in the winter afternoon. She isforced to take the street-car, and in order to take it she is forced tofight. To fight, physically, is part of the daily round of theaverage fragile, pale, indomitable New York woman. In the swaying crowdshe turns her head several times, and in tones of ever-increasingpoliteness requests a huge male animal behind her to refrain frompushing. He does not refrain. Being skilled, as a mariner is skilled inbeaching himself and a boat on a surfy shore, she does ultimatelyachieve the inside of the car, and she sinks down therein apparentlyexhausted. The huge male animal follows, and as he passes her, infuriated by her indestructible politeness, he sticks his head againsther little one and says, threateningly, "What's the matter with you, anyway?" He could crush her like a butterfly, and, moreover, she isabout ready to faint. But suddenly, in uncontrollable anger, she liftsthat tiny gloved hand and catches the huge male animal a smart smack inthe face. "Can't you be polite?" she hisses. Then she drops back, blushing, horrified by what she has done. She sees another man throw theaghast 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 toapathy, for, after all, the incident is in its essence part of thedailiness of New York. 

The young wife gets home, obsessed by the fact that she has struck a manin the face in a public vehicle. She is still blushing when she relatesthe affair in a rush of talk to another young wife in the flat next tohers. "For Heaven's sake don't tell my husband, " she implores. "If heknew he'd leave me forever!" And the young husband comes home, after hisown personal dose of street-car, preoccupied, fatigued, nervous, hungry, demanding to be loved. And the young wife has to behave as though shehad been lounging all the afternoon in a tea-gown on a soft sofa. Curious that, although she is afraid of her husband's wrath, thetemptation to tell him grows stronger! Indeed, is it not a rather finething that she has done, and was not the salute of the admiring maleflattering and sweet? Not many tiny wives would have had the pluck toslap a brute's face. She tells the young husband. It is an error of tacton her part. For he, secretly exacerbated, was waiting for just such anexcuse to let himself go. He is angry, he is outraged--as she had saidhe would be. What--his wife, _his_-etc. , etc. !

A night full of everything except sleep; full of Elevated and rumblingcars, and trumps of autos, and the eternal liveliness of the cobbledstreet, and all incomprehensible noises, and stuffiness, and the senseof other human beings too close above, too close below, and to the leftand to the right, and before and behind, the sense that there are toomany people on earth! What New-Yorker does not know the wakings afterthe 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 inexpensivelyelegant, and he is demanding his fried eggs. The young wife is afoot, too, manoeuvering against the conspiracies of the janitor, who lives farbelow out of sight, but who permeates her small flat like a malignantinfluence. .. . Hear the whistling of the dumb-waiter!. .. Eggs aredemanded, authoritatively, bitterly. If glances could kill, not onlythat flat but the whole house would be strewn with corpses. .. . Eggs!. .. 

Something happens, something arrives, something snaps; a spell is brokenand horror is let loose. "Take your eggs!" cries the tiny wife, in apassion. The eggs fly across the table, and the front of a man's suit isruined. She sits down and fairly weeps, appalled at herself. Lastevening she was punishing males; this morning she turns eggs intomissiles, she a loving, an ambitious, an intensely respectable youngwife! As for him, he sits motionless, silent, decorated with the colorsof eggs, a graduate of a famous university. Calamity has brought himalso to his senses. Still weeping, she puts on her hat and jacket. "Where are you going?" he asks, solemnly, no longer homicidal, no longerhungry. "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, allthat! The point of the story is that it illustrates New York--a New Yorkmore authentic than the spaciousness of upper Fifth Avenue or theunnatural dailiness of grand hotels. I like it. 

 * * * * *

You may see that couple later in a suburban house--a real home for thetime being, with a colorable imitation of a garden all about it, and the"finest suburban railway service in the world": the whole being a frameand environment for the rearing of children. I have sat at dinner insuch houses, and the talk was of nothing but children; and anybody whopossessed any children, or any reliable knowledge of the ways ofchildren, was sure of a respectable hearing and warm interest. If onesaid, "By the way, I think I may have a photograph of the kid in mypocket, " every eye would reply immediately: "Out with it, man--orwoman!--and don't pretend you don't always carry the photograph with youon purpose to show it off!" In such a house it is proved that childrenare unmatched as an exhaustless subject of conversation. And theconversation is rendered more thrilling by the sense of partially tamedchildren-children fully aware of their supremacy--prowling to and frounseen in muddy boots and torn pinafores, and speculating in theirrealistic way upon the mysteriousness of adults. 

"We are keen on children here, " says the youngish father, frankly. He isaltered now from the man he was when he inhabited a diminutive flat inthe full swirl of New York. His face is calmer, milder, more benevolent, and more resignedly worried. And assuredly no one would recognize in himthe youth who howled murderously at university football matches andcried with monstrous ferocity at sight of danger from the opposingcolors: "Kill him! Kill him for me! I can't stand his red stockingscoming up the field!" Yet it is the same man. And this father, too, isthe fruit of university education; and further, one feels that hispassion for his progeny is one of the chief causes of American interestin education. He and his like are at the root of the modernuniversity--not the millionaires. In Chicago I was charmed to hear itstoutly and even challengingly maintained that the root of ChicagoUniversity was not Mr. Rockefeller, but the parents of Chicago. 

Assuming that the couple have no children, there is a good chance ofcatching them later, splendidly miserable, in a high-classapartment-house, where the entire daily adventure of living is taken outof your hands and done for you, and you pay a heavy price in order to bedeprived of one of the main interests of existence. The apartment-houseranks in my opinion among the more pernicious influences in Americanlife. As an institution it is unhappily establishing itself in England, and in England it is terrible. I doubt if it is less terrible in itsnative land. It is anti-social because it works always against thepreservation of the family unit, and because it is unfair to children, and because it prevents the full flowering of an individuality. (Nobodycan be himself in an apartment-house; if he tried that game he wouldinstantly be thrown out. ) It is immoral because it fosters bribery andbecause it is pretentious itself and encourages pretense in its victims. It is unfavorable to the growth of taste because its decorations andfurniture are and must be ugly; they descend to the artistic standard ofthe vulgarest people in it, and have not even the merit of being theexpression of any individuality at all. It is enervating because itfavors the creation of a race that can do absolutely nothing for itself. It is unhealthy because it is sometimes less clean than it seems, andbecause often it forces its victims to eat in a dining-room whose wallsare a distressing panorama of Swiss scenery, and because its cuisine isand must be at best mediocre, since meals at once sound and showycannot be prepared wholesale. 

Some apartment-houses are better than others; many are possibly marvelsof organization and value for money. But none can wholly escape theindictment. The institution itself, though it may well be a natural andinevitable by-product of racial evolution, is bad. An experienceddweller in apartment-houses said to me, of a seeming-magnificent housewhich I had visited and sampled: "We pay six hundred dollars for twopoor little rooms and a bath-room, and twenty-five dollars a week forboard, whether we eat or not. The food is very bad. It is all kept hotfor about an hour, on steam, so that every dish tastes of laundry. Everything is an extra. Telephone--lights--tips--especially tips. I tipeverybody. I even tip the _chef_. I tip the _chef_ so that, when I amutterly sick of his fanciness and prefer a mere chop or a steak, he willchoose 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 istherefore a considerable tribute to the malefic influence ofapartment-house life that he had no suspicion of the gross anti-socialimmorality of his act in tipping the _chef_. Clearly it was an actcalculated to undermine the _chef's_ virtue. If all the otherexperienced dwellers did the same, it was also a silly act, producing nogood effect at all. But if only a few of them did it, then it was an actwhich resulted in the remainder of the victims being deprived of theirfull, fair chance of getting eatable chops or steaks. My friend'sproper course was obviously to have kicked up a row, and to have kickedup a row in a fashion so clever that the management would not put himinto the street. He ought to have organized a committee of protest, heought to have convened meetings for the outlet of public opinion, heought to have persevered day after day and evening after evening, untilthe management had been forced to exclude uneatable chops and steaksutterly from their palatial premises and to exact the honest performanceof duty from each and all of the staff. In the end it would have dawnedupon the management that inedible food was just as much out of place inthe restaurant as counterfeit bills and coins at the cash-desk. Theproper course would have been difficult and tiresome. The proper courseoften is. My friend took the easy, wicked course. That is to say, heexhibited a complete lack of public spirit. 

 * * * * *

An apartment-house is only an apartment-house; whereas the republic isthe republic. And yet I permit myself to think that the one mayconceivably be the mirror of the other. And I do positively think thatAmerican education does not altogether succeed in the very importantbusiness of inculcating public spirit into young citizens. I judgemerely by results. Most peoples fail in the high quality of publicspirit; and the American perhaps not more so than the rest. Perhaps allI ought to say is that according to my own limited observation publicspirit is not among the shining attributes of the United States citizen. And even to that statement there will be animated demur. For have notthe citizens of the United States been conspicuous for their publicspirit?. .. 

It depends on what is meant by public spirit--that is, public spirit inits finer forms. I know what I do _not_ mean by public spirit. I wastalking once to a member of an important and highly cultivated socialcommunity, 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 Sixthwere not broken in that community. But I really had doubts about someothers, such as the Seventh and Tenth. However, he assured me that suchtransgressions 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 meas public spirit. I should fit it with a word which will occur at onceto every reader. 

On the other hand, I cannot admit as proof of public spirit theprevalent American habit of giving to the public that which is uselessto oneself--no matter how immense the quantity given, and no matter howadmirable the end in view. When you have got the money it is rather easyto sit down and write a check for five million dollars, and so bring avast public institution into being. It is still easier to leave the samesum by testament. These feats are an affair of five minutes or so; theycost simply nothing in time or comfort or peace of mind. If they areillustrations of public spirit, it is a low and facile form of publicspirit. 

True public spirit is equally difficult for the millionaire and for theclerk. It is, in fact, very tedious work. It implies the quiet dailydetermination to get eatable chops and steaks by honest means, chieflyfor oneself, but incidentally for everybody else. It necessitatestrouble and inconvenience. I was in a suburban house one night, and itwas the last night for registering names on an official list of votersbefore an election; it was also a rainy night. The master of the houseawaited a carriage, which was to be sent up by a candidate, at thecandidate's expense, to take him to the place of registration. Time grewshort. 

"Shall you walk there if the carriage doesn't come?" I asked, and gazedfirmly at the prospective voter. 

At that moment the carriage came. We drove forth together, and in acabin warmed by a stove and full of the steam of mackintoshes I saw aninteresting part of the American Constitution at work--four hattedgentlemen writing simultaneously the same particulars in four similarledgers, while exhorting a fifth to keep the stove alight. Anacquaintance came in who had trudged one mile through the rain. Thatacquaintance showed public spirit. In the ideal community a candidatefor election will not send round carriages in order, at the last moment, to induce citizens to register; in the ideal community citizens willregard such an attention as in the nature of an insult. 

I was told that millionaires and presidents of trusts were chieflyresponsible 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. Andonce, 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 leastalike. 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 wastaciturn. Or he may have been feeling his way. Or he may have been notquite himself. Even millionaire-presidents must be self-conscious. Justas a notorious author is too often rendered uneasy by the consciousnessof his notoriety, so even a millionaire-president may sometimes have adifficulty in being quite natural. However, he did ultimately talk. Itbecame clear to me that he was an extremely wise and sagacious man. Thelines of his mouth were ruthlessly firm, yet he showed a generalsympathy with all classes of society, and he met my radicalism quitehalf-way. On woman's suffrage he was very fair-minded. As to his ownwork, he said to me that when a New York paper asked him to go and becross-examined by its editorial board he willingly went, because he hadnothing to conceal. He convinced me of his uprightness and of hisbenevolence. He showed a nice regard for the claims of the Republic, anda 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 anhour the editor agreeably recounted circumstantial stories of theturpitude of celebrated millionaires--stories which he alleged to beauthentic 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 hisrivals. "

I italicize the heart of the phrase, because it is italicized in mymemory. No words that I heard in the United States more profoundlystruck me. Yet the editor had used them quite ingenuously, unaware thathe was saying anything singular!. .. Since when is the sense of right andwrong "new" in America?

Perhaps all that the editor meant was that public spirit in its higherforms was growing in the United States, and beginning to show itselfspectacularly here and there in the immense drama of commercial andindustrial policies. That public spirit is growing, I believe. Itchanced that I found the basis of my belief more in Chicago thananywhere else. 

 * * * * *

I have hitherto said nothing of the "folk"--the great mass of thenation, who live chiefly by the exercise, in one way or another, ofmuscular power or adroitness, and who, if they possess drawing-rooms, donot sit in them. Like most writers, when I have used such phrases as"the American people" I have meant that small dominant minority whichhas the same social code as myself. Goethe asserted that the folk werethe only real people. I do not agree with him, for I have never foundone city more real than another city, nor one class of people more realthan another class. Still, he was Goethe, and the folk, thoughmysterious, are very real; and, since they constitute perhapsfive-sixths of the nation, it would be singular to ignore them. I hadtwo brief glimpses of them, and the almost theatrical contrast of thesetwo 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 wasnot unwilling. In charge of a highly erudite newspaper man, and of anamiable Jewish detective, who, originally discovered by ColonelRoosevelt, had come out first among eighteen hundred competitors in aphysical examination, my particular friend and I went forth oneintemperate night to "do" the East Side in an automobile. We saw thegarlanded and mirrored core of "Sharkey's" saloon, of which the mostinteresting phenomenon was a male pianist who would play the pianowithout stopping till 2. 30 A. M. With about two thousand other persons, we had the privilege of shaking hands with Sharkey. We saw anothersaloon, frequented by murderers who resembled shop assistants. We saw aHebraic theater, whose hospitable proprietor informed us how he haddiscovered a great play-writing genius, and how on the previous Saturdaynight he had turned away seven thousand patrons for lack of room!Certainly on our night the house was crammed; and the play seemed ofrealistic quality, and the actresses effulgently lovely. We saw a Polackdancing-hall, where the cook-girls were slatterns, but romanticslatterns. We saw Seward Park, which is the dormitory of the East Sidein summer. We saw a van clattering off with prisoners to the nightcourt. We saw illustrious burglars, "gunmen, " and "dukes" of famousstreets--for we had but to raise a beckoning finger, and they approachedus, grinning, out of gloomy shadows. (And very ordinary they seemed inspite of slashed faces!)

We even saw Chinatown, and the wagonettes of tourists stationary in itsstreets. 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 ofChinatown lived on the ten thousand Chinese who came into it from allquarters on Sundays, and I understood. As a show it lackedconvincingness--except the delicatessen-shop, whose sights and odorssilenced criticism. It had the further disadvantage, by reason of itstawdry 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 theintellectual honesty to admit to himself that he is a tourist. Suchhonesty is found only on the lower levels. The detective saved our pridefrom time to time by introducing us to sights which the despicableordinary tourists cannot see. It was a proud moment for us when weassisted at a conspiratorial interview between our detective and the"captain of the precincts. " And it was a proud moment when in aninconceivable retreat we were permitted to talk with an aged Chineseactor and view his collection of flowery hats. It was a still prouder(and also a subtly humiliating) moment when we were led throughcourtyards and beheld in their cloistral aloofness the Americanlegitimate wives of wealthy China-men, sitting gorgeous, with thequiescence of odalisques, in gorgeous uncurtained interiors. I was gladwhen one of the ladies defied the detective by abruptly swishing downher blind. 

But these affairs did not deeply stir my imagination. More engaging wasthe detective's own habit of stopping the automobile every hundred yardsor so in order to point out the exact spot on which a murder, or severalmurders, had been committed. Murder was his chief interest. I noticedthe same trait in many newspaper men, who would sit and tell excellentmurder stories by the hour. But murder was so common on the East Sidethat it became for me curiously puerile--a sort of naughtiness whosepunishment, to be effective, ought to wound, rather than flatter, thevanity of the child-minded murderers. More engaging still was theextraordinary frequency of banks--some with opulent illuminatedsigns--and of cinematograph shows. In the East End of London or of Parisbanks are assuredly not a feature of the landscape--and for good reason. The cinematograph is possibly, on the whole, a civilizing agent; itmight easily be the most powerful force on the East Side. I met thegentleman who "controlled" all the cinematographs, and was reputed tomake a million dollars a year net therefrom. He did not appear to be abit weighed down, either by the hugeness of his opportunity or by theawfulness of his responsibility. 

[Illustration: THE ASTOUNDING POPULOUSNESS OF THE EAST SIDE]

The supreme sensation of the East Side is the sensation of itsastounding populousness. The most populous street in theworld--Rivington Street--is a sight not to be forgotten. Compared tothis, an up-town thoroughfare of crowded middle-class flats is theopen country--is an uninhabited desert! The architecture seemed to sweathumanity at every window and door. The roadways were often impassable. The thought of the hidden interiors was terrifying. Indeed, the hiddeninteriors would not bear thinking about. The fancy shunned them--aproblem not to be settled by sudden municipal edicts, but only by theefflux of generations. Confronted by this spectacle of sickly-facedimmortal creatures, who lie closer than any other wild animals wouldlie; who live picturesque, feverish, and appalling existences; who amusethemselves, who enrich themselves, who very often lift themselves out ofthe swarming warren and leave it forever, but whose daily experience inthe warren is merely and simply horrible--confronted by thisincomparable and overwhelming phantasmagoria (for such it seems), one isfoolishly apt to protest, to inveigh, to accuse. The answer to futileanimadversions was in my particular friend's query: "Well, what are yougoing to do about it?"

 * * * * *

My second glimpse of the folk was at quite another end of the city ofNew York--namely, the Bronx. I was urgently invited to go and see howthe folk lived in the Bronx; and, feeling convinced that a place with aname so remarkable must itself be remarkable, I went. The center of theBronx is a racket of Elevated, bordered by banks, theaters, and otherplaces of amusement. As a spectacle it is decent, inspiring confidencebut not awe, and being rather repellent to the sense of beauty. Nobodycould call it impressive. Yet I departed from the Bronx veryconsiderably impressed. It is the interiors of the Bronx homes that areimpressive. I was led to a part of the Bronx where five years previouslythere had been six families, and where there are now over two thousandfamilies. This was newest New York. No obstacle impeded my invasion ofthe domestic privacies of the Bronx. The mistresses of flats showed meround everything with politeness and with obvious satisfaction. A stoutlady, 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-sixdollars a month. She enjoyed the advantages of central heating, gas, andelectricity; and among the landlord's fixtures were a refrigerator, akitchen range, a bookcase, and a sideboard. Such amenities for thepeople--for the _petits gens_--simply do not exist in Europe; they donot even exist for the wealthy in Europe. But there was also thetelephone, the house exchange being in charge of the janitor'sdaughter--a pleasing occupant of the entrance-hall. I was told that thetelephone, with a "nickel" call, increased the occupancy of the Bronxflats by ten per cent. 

Thence I visited the flat of a doctor--a practitioner who would be theequivalent of a "shilling" doctor in a similar quarter of London. Herewere seven rooms, at a rent of forty-five dollars a month, and no end ofconveniences--certainly many more than in any flat that I had everoccupied myself! I visited another house and saw similar interiors. Andnow I began to be struck by the splendor and the cleanliness of thehalls, landings, and staircases: marble halls, tesselated landings, andstairs out of Holland; the whole producing a gorgeous effect--to matchthe glory of the embroidered pillow-cases in the bedrooms. On the roofswere drying-grounds, upon which each tenant had her rightful "day, " sothat altercations might not arise. I saw an empty flat. The professionalvermin exterminator had just gone--for the landlord-company took nochances in this detail of management. 

Then I was lifted a little higher in the social-financial scale, to abuilding of which the entrance-hall reminded me of the foyers of grandhotels. A superb negro held dominion therein, but not over the telephonegirl, who ran the exchange ten hours a day for twenty-five dollars amonth, which, considering that the janitor received sixty-five dollarsand his rooms, seemed to me to be somewhat insufficient. In this housethe corridors were broader, and to the conveniences was added amail-shoot, a device which is still regarded in Europe as the final wordof plutocratic luxury rampant. The rents ran to forty-eight dollars amonth for six rooms. In this house I was asked by hospitable tenantswhether 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 tosign them. 

The fittings and decorations of all these flats were artisticallyvulgar, just as they are in flats costing a thousand dollars a month, but they were well executed, and resulted in a general harmonious effectof innocent prosperity. The people whom I met showed no trace of theinfluence of those older artistic civilizations whose charm seems subtlyto pervade the internationalism of the East Side. In certain strata andstreaks of society on the East Side things artistic and intellectual arecomprehended with an intensity of emotion and understanding impossibleto Anglo-Saxons. This I know. 

The Bronx is different. The Bronx is beginning again, at a stage earlierthan art, and beginning better. It is a place for those who have learntthat physical righteousness has got to be the basis of all futureprogress. It is a place to which the fit will be attracted, and wherethe fit will survive. It has rather a harsh quality. It reminded me of aphrase used by an American at the head of an enormous business. He hadbeen explaining to me how he tried a man in one department, and, if hedid not shine in that, then in another, and in another, and so on. "Andif 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 firehim. "

The Bronx presented itself to me as a place where the right of theinefficient to expire would be cheerfully recognized. The district thatI inspected was certainly, as I say, for the fit. Efficiency in physicalessentials was inculcated--and practised--by the landlord-company, whoseconstant aim seemed to be to screw up higher and higher the self-respectof its tenants. That the landlord-company was not a band ofphilanthropists, but a capitalistic group in search of dividends, Iwould readily admit. But that it should find its profit in the businessof improving the standard of existence and appealing to the pride of thefolk was to me a wondrous sign of the essential vigor of Americancivilization, and a proof that public spirit, unostentatious as a coralinsect, must after all have long been at work somewhere. 

Compare the East Side with the Bronx fully, and one may see, perhapsroughly, a symbol of what is going forward in America. Nothing, I shouldimagine, could be more interesting to a sociological observer than thatactual creation of a city of homes as I saw it in the Bronx. I saw thehome 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 beingleveled and the solid rock drilled where now, most probably, actualhomes are inhabited and babies have been born! And I saw further thanthat. Nailed against a fine and ancient tree, in the midst of a desolatewaste, I saw a board with these words: "A new Subway station will beerected on this corner. " There are legendary people who have eyes to seethe 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 anoccasion, that no one can be more sensible than myself of the manifolddefects, omissions, inexactitudes, gross errors, and general lack ofperspective which my narrative exhibits, I should assert the thing whichis not. I have not the slightest doubt that a considerable number ofpersons are more sensible than myself of my shortcomings; for on thesubject of America I do not even know enough to be fully aware of my ownignorance. Still, I am fairly sensible of the enormous imperfection andrashness of this book. When I regard the map and see the triflingextent of the ground that I covered--a scrap tucked away in thenortheast corner of the vast multi-colored territory--I marvel at theassurance I displayed in choosing my title. Indeed, I have yet to seeyour United States. Any Englishman visiting the country for the secondtime, having begun with New York, ought to go round the world and enterby San Francisco, seeing Seattle before Baltimore and Denver beforeChicago. His perspective might thus be corrected in a natural manner, and the process would in various ways be salutary. It is a nice questionhow many of the opinions formed on the first visit--and especially themost convinced and positive opinions--would survive the ordeal of thesecond. 

As for these brief chapters, I hereby announce that I am not preparedultimately to stand by any single view which they put forward. There isnaught in them which is not liable to be recanted. The one possiblejustification of them is that they offer to the reader the one thingthat, in the very nature of the case, a mature and accustomed observercould not offer--namely, an immediate account (as accurate as I couldmake it) of the first tremendous impact of the United States on a mindreceptive and unprejudiced. The greatest social historian, the mostconscientious writer, could not recapture the sensations of that firstimpact after further intercourse had scattered them. 

THE END