Green and Hammond on the question whether the United States should
establish a protectorate over Central America. Senator Green danced for
the affirmative and Senator Hammond danced for the negative. Both
gentlemen had an international reputation. Senator Green's war-dance in
the Senate on the Standard Oil Company is still spoken of in Washington
as the most striking rough-and-tumble exhibition of recent years.
Senator Hammond is an exponent of a style which lays greater stress on
finesse than on vigour. In a single session of the Senate he is said to
have sidestepped nearly a dozen troublesome roll-calls without arousing
any appreciable dissatisfaction among his constituents. Before a popular
jury, however, Senator Green's Cossack methods were likely to carry
greater conviction. And that is what happened in the great debate we
have referred to. Senator Hammond appeared on the platform in a filmy
costume made up of alternate strips of the Constitution of the United
States and the Monroe Doctrine. Wit, sarcasm, irony followed one another
in quick succession over his mobile features and fairly oozed from his
fingers and toes. Yet it was evident that while he could appeal to the
minds of the spectators he had no power to sway their emotions. It was
different with Senator Green. A thunderous volume of applause went up
the moment he appeared on the stage, booted and spurred and heavily
swathed in American flags. His triumph was a foregone conclusion. The
scene that ensued when Senator Green concluded his argument by leaping
right over the table and pouring himself out a glass of ice-water on the
way, simply beggars description.
No one to-day can possibly foresee [wrote the critic of the _Weekly
Review_] to what heights the dance, as the expression of all life, will
be carried. We can only call attention to the plans recently formulated
by one of our leading publishers for a library of the world's best
thought, to be issued at a price that will bring it within the reach of
people of very moderate means. The library will consist of bound volumes
of photographs showing the world's greatest dancers in their
interpretation of famous authors. Twenty young women from the Paris and
St. Petersburg conservatories of dancing have already been engaged.
Among other works they will dance the Psalms and Ecclesiastes, the
second book of the Iliad, "Oedipus the King," the fifth Canto of
Dante's "Inferno," Spinoza's "Ethics," "Hamlet," Rousseau's
"Confessions," "Mother Goose," Tennyson's "Brook" and the "Charge of the
Light Brigade," Burke's "Speech on Conciliation," "Alice in Wonderland,"
the "Pickwick Papers," the Gettysburg Address, Darwin's "Origin of
Species," and Mr. Dooley.
XIII
ON LIVING IN BROOKLYN
Perhaps the principal charm about living in Brooklyn lies in the fact
that strangers can find their way there only with extreme difficulty.
The streets in Brooklyn are to me a perpetual source of joy and
wonderment. Like the city itself, they have kept the slow-paced habits
of a former age. No city is more easy to be lost in, and Brooklyn is at
all times full of people from across the river, who ask the way to
Borough Hall. For that matter, one may easily be lost on Staten Island,
where the inhabitants are reputed to pass the pleasant summer evenings
in guiding strangers to the trolley lines. But a person naturally
expects to lose his bearings on Staten Island. On the other hand, to be
lost in Brooklyn irritates as well as confuses. It is like starving in
the midst of plenty. One always has the choice of half a dozen surface
cars, but one is always sure to be directed to the wrong one.
So I repeat: Brooklyn's tangled streets serve their highest purpose in
safeguarding its inhabitants against the unwelcome visitor. Because of
our American good nature we are always inviting people to call; and when
they accept we immediately feel sorry. It is a law with us that if two
utterly unsympathetic persons meet by chance at the house of a common
friend, they shall insist on having each other to dinner on the
following two Sundays. Or, again, you may be shaking hands with a very
dear friend in the presence of a third person whom you dislike. And you
are extremely anxious to have your friend come up for tea on Sunday,
and you cannot do it without asking the other man.
Under such circumstances, it is well to live in Brooklyn. All you need
say then to the person you have an aversion for is: "I should be
delighted to have you call on us Sunday afternoon. We live in Brooklyn,
you know, at No. 125 Bowdoin Place." You may then go home in peace,
confident that your undesired visitor will never find you. At eight
o'clock on Sunday night he will be wearily asking a policeman on
Flatbush Avenue what the shortest way is to Borough Hall. Long before
that he will have given up hope of finding No. 125 Bowdoin Place. His
only object is to get home before midnight. Now it is plain that such an
excellent defence against unpleasant people is unavailable in Manhattan.
Ask a man to look you up at No. 952 West One Hundred and Twelfth Street,
and though your heart loathes him, you shall not escape. But in
Brooklyn you are safe until the moment your doorbell actually rings. For
even if your visitor should find Bowdoin Place, many streets in Brooklyn
have two, three, or four systems of numbering. Some will maintain that
it is not rigidly honest to give a stranger your Brooklyn address
without giving him detailed directions for finding his way from the
station, illustrating your argument with a sketch map. But there will
always be Puritan consciences.
As a matter of fact, some of the kindest and most enlightened people I
know live in Brooklyn. And I cannot see why that in itself should make
them a subject for general satire. I have been told that a professor at
Harvard has recently made the calculation that the drama and the art of
conversation in America would be poorer by 33-1/3 per cent. if the joke
about living in Brooklyn were to disappear. When a visitor from
Brooklyn drops in unexpectedly at a Harlem flat, the proper thing for
the host to say is, "Well, well, what a task it must have been to find
your way out," and when the visitor starts for home his host remarks,
"Sorry you can't stay; but we all know how it is--in the midst of life
you are in Brooklyn. Goodnight."
Of course I don't mean to deny that the people who live in Brooklyn are
themselves largely responsible for the perpetuation of the silly jest.
They subscribe to it in a spirit of meekness that is characteristically
local. Ask a man from Cherry Springs or Binghamton where is his home and
he will quietly say, Cherry Springs or Binghamton, as the case may be.
But the resident of Brooklyn is apologetic from the start. He
anticipates criticism by saying, "Well, you know, _I_ live in Brooklyn,"
and he looks at you in tremulous expectation of the usual condolences.
If by any chance one should omit the traditional reply, the man from
Brooklyn begins to fear the worst. On both sides of the East River the
principle seems to be accepted that inasmuch as there are places like
Cherry Springs or Binghamton there must be people who live in them, but
that it is by definition impossible to bring forward a valid reason why
one should live in Brooklyn.
The question is really a complicated one. Harlem's disapproval of
Brooklyn is not of a piece with Harlem's disapproval of localities
outside itself. Living in Brooklyn is something utterly different from
living in New Jersey or the Bronx. New Jersey and the Bronx are so
entirely out of the ordinary that they call for no explanation. Living
there has at least the merit of originality. A great poet might choose
to live in the Bronx. Minor poets have been known to commute across the
Hudson. But Brooklyn cannot be dismissed so easily. She is too big, too
close, and, for all her timidity, too contented. Her people come under
the head of those who ought to know better and do not try. Thus, while
living in New Jersey is a matter of taste, and living in the Bronx is a
matter of necessity, living in Brooklyn is a matter of habit.
And a fine, rich, ripe old habit it is, and a precious thing in a
modern, shouting world that has no habits but only impulses and vices.
Let me confess: I like Brooklyn, and I like to dream of going to live
there some day. And possibly I would go if it were not for the desire of
keeping the project before me as one of the few ideals I have retained
in life. I like Brooklyn's shapeless rotundity as contrasted with our
abominable rectangular distances in Manhattan. I like it because it
sprawls low against the ground instead of clawing up into the sky.
Manhattan is solid with brick and steel from river to river. Brooklyn
ambles on peacefully till it comes to a region of sand lots or a marsh
or a creek, and stops. Half a mile further on it resumes its gentle
dreams of progress and wanders north, or south, or east, as the fancy
seizes it. It runs into blind corners, it debouches upon ravines and
woodland strips, it hears the echoes of ocean on the beaches. It is
leisure; it is peace; it is Brooklyn.
At the same time it is well to remember that Brooklyn is something more
than a geographical fact. Brooklyn describes a scheme of life and a
condition of the mind. The life there is like a page from yesterday.
People who live in Brooklyn organise reading circles. They attend
lectures on the Wagnerian music drama. They have retained progressive
euchre and the strawberry festival as essential ingredients of religion.
They are extremely fond of going on long excursions into the country in
early spring. They make it a habit to walk across the bridge on their
way home in the evening, and they speak with great feeling of the
beautiful effect when New York's high buildings flash into banked masses
of flame in the falling dusk. People who live in Brooklyn take pride in
keeping up old friendships and in dressing without ostentation. There
are old gentlemen who use only the ferries in coming to New York,
because they regard the bridges as a novelty open to the suspicion of
being unsafe.
And yet, as I have said, Brooklyn is rather a condition than a concrete
fact. I believe every great Babylon has its neighbouring Brooklyn.
London has it; Boston has it; Paris has it; even Chicago has it. And the
line of demarcation between what is Brooklyn and what is not Brooklyn is
not always a sharp one. There are many people in Manhattan who at heart
are residents of Brooklyn. Such people, though they live in Harlem,
avoid the express trains in the Subway on account of the crush. They
visit the Museum of Natural History on Sunday and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art on legal holidays and extraordinary occasions. They cross
the Hudson and walk on the Palisades. They bring librettos to the opera
and read them in the dark, thus missing a great deal of what passes on
the stage. On the other hand, you will find people in Brooklyn whose
spirit is totally alien to the place. They want to boost Brooklyn and
boom it and push it and make it the most important borough in Greater
New York, and develop its harbour facilities, and establish a great
university, and double the assessed value of real estate within five
years. Such people are in Brooklyn, but not of it.
And that is why Brooklyn has so strong a hold on me. I like it because
it has so many wonderful, valuable, common things in it. In Brooklyn
there are people, churches, baby-carriages, bay-windows, butchers' boys
carrying baskets and whistling, policemen who misdirect strangers,
vacant lots where boys play baseball, small tradesmen, overhead
trolleys, quiet streets tucked away between parallel lines of clanging
elevated railway, an Institute of Arts, and old gentlemen who write
letters to the newspapers. I like Brooklyn because it hasn't the highest
anything, or the biggest anything, or the richest anything in the
world.
XIV
PALLADINO OUTDONE
Harding spent one long winter night in reading the report of a select
committee of the Society for Psychical Recreation which placed on record
no less than half a dozen absolutely authenticated cases of material
objects being moved through space by some mysterious agency other than
physical. The report, as it took shape in Harding's dreams that night,
was as follows:
In the first experiment the medium was an ordinary American citizen. The
precautions against the slightest bodily movement on his part were
perfect. Mr. Joseph G. Cannon planted both of his feet on the medium's
left foot and seized his left hand in both his own. Senator Aldrich did
the same on the other side. The Honourable Sereno E. Payne grasped the
medium by the throat, the Honourable John Dalzell straddled on his
chest, Senator Burrows of Michigan strapped his ankles to the chair, and
Senator Scott of West Virginia thrust a gag into his mouth. As a further
precaution, before the séance began, a representative of the Sugar Trust
went through the medium's pockets. The medium struggled and groaned and
made other signs of distress, but at all times remained under absolute
control. Yet it is a fact that, in spite of all restraints imposed upon
him, this ordinary American citizen did succeed in raising a family of
two sons and a daughter and even in sending the eldest child to college.
At various times one even caught sight of a loaf of bread or a pair of
shoes sailing through the air, and once, for a moment, the Committee
distinctly smelt roast turkey with cranberry sauce. At the end of the
séance the medium was in a pitiful state of exhaustion, but declared
that he was quite ready to go on.
In the second experiment the Committee made use of the Mayor of one of
our large cities and of the boss of the party to which the Mayor
belonged. The boss acted as medium, being securely strapped into a chair
about three feet away from another chair, on which the Mayor was
sitting, blindfolded. Again the standard precautions against fraud were
gone through, but this time the medium's efforts met with almost
immediate response. At the merest droop of the boss's right eyelid, the
Mayor leaped up from his chair and turned completely around. The boss
smiled faintly, whereupon the Mayor balanced himself for 3 minutes and
42 seconds on his right foot and for 2 minutes and 35 seconds on his
left foot, and then began to run about the room on all-fours in an
amusing imitation of a spaniel fetching and carrying for his master. The
boss inserted the point of his tongue into his cheek and withdrew it
again, repeating the process several times in rapid succession. In
response, the Mayor's face went into a series of spasmodic smiles and
frowns that aroused general laughter. At the conclusion of the
performance, the boss gently clicked his tongue against his palate, and
the Mayor promptly stood on his head in the middle of the floor.
A somewhat similar experiment was concerned with a magazine editor and a
life-size mannikin made up to resemble a muckraker. The editor and the
lay figure sat facing in opposite directions at a distance of about ten
feet. The editor, who acted as medium, was holding the telephone
receiver with one hand and signing checks with the other, so that there
could be no question of manual manipulation on his part. Neither could
his feet come into play, because they were in full view on his desk. The
telepathy hypothesis was eliminated because, in the first place, the
mannikin had no mind, of course, and in the second place, the editor
changed his own mind so fast that no external mind could possibly keep
up with it. The results were gratifying. The editor took a slip of paper
and wrote a few words upon it. Immediately the stuffed figure began to
shout, "Murder! Fire! Thieves! Help! Murder! Fire! Thieves! Help!
Murder!" at intervals of two seconds. The editor wrote something on
another slip of paper, and the mechanical figure went through a most
complex series of movements. First it seized a pair of paint brushes and
began to paint all the white objects in the room black and all the black
objects white. Then it went through the motions of playing, for a few
minutes, upon a typewriter. Then it seized a pair of shears and set to
work clipping solid pages from books and magazines. Then it copied a
long column of figures from an almanac and added them up wrong. Then it
drew a memory sketch of an English statesman, and put the wrong name
under it. The editor assured the Committee that he could continue the
process for hours at will.
An excellent séance was one in which the medium was a man very near the
top in American finance. The rest of the group forming the circle around
the table were plain American citizens of the type described in the
first experiment. The medium was securely roped in his chair with
anti-Trust laws, anti-rebating laws, insurance laws, banking laws,
franchise laws, etc. Yet no sooner were the lights turned down than the
phenomena began. John Smith, on the right of the medium, suddenly felt a
sharp blow on the neck. As he turned around instinctively a ghostly
hand snatched away his pocket-book and the sound of mocking laughter
could be plainly heard from the dark cabinet. Another weird hand pulled
Thomas Jones's insurance policy out of his breastpocket, dangled it in
the air just out of his reach, and then flung it back at him. Later when
Jones looked at his policy he found that its face value had been cut
down one-half. James Robinson all at once began to feel his shoe pinch,
and could not discover the reason until he, too, caught sight of a
ghostly hand hovering in the vicinity of his pocket. Soon the room was
filled with a veritable chaos of flying objects. Railroads, steamship
lines, national banks, trust companies, insurance companies, went
hurtling through the air, but all the time our financier sat motionless
in his chair. It was suggested that the force which set such ponderous
objects into motion was the mysterious element known as "executive
ability."
In the final experiment the subject was a popular novelist, who gave a
most interesting exhibition of how a nation-wide reputation can be
raised and supported without the slightest apparent reason. A
painstaking examination by the Committee showed that he had concealed
about him neither talent, nor imagination, nor knowledge of human
nature, nor insight into life, nor an intimate acquaintance with the
elements of English grammar. Nevertheless, before the eyes of the amazed
observers, novel after novel went humming through the air in a direction
away from the writer, while a steady stream of bank-books, automobiles,
and country houses flowed in the opposite direction.
XV
THE CADENCE OF THE CROWD
I have always been peculiarly susceptible to the music of marching feet.
I know of no sound in nature or in Wagner that stirs the heart like the
footsteps of the crowd on the board platform of the Third Avenue "L" at
City Hall every late afternoon. The human tread is always eloquent in
chorus, but it is at its best upon a wooden flooring. Stone and asphalt
will often degrade the march of a crowd to a shuffle. It needs the
living wood to give full dignity to the spirit of human resolution that
speaks in a thousand pair of feet simultaneously moving in the same
direction; and particularly when the moving mass is not an army, but a
crowd advancing without rank or order. I am exceedingly fond of military
parades; so fond that I repeatedly find myself standing in front of
ladies of medium height who pathetically inquire at frequent intervals
what regiment is passing at that moment. But it is not the blare of the
brass bands I care for, or the clatter of cavalry, which I find
exceedingly stupid, or even the rattle of the heavy guns, but the men on
foot. Only when the infantry comes swinging by do I grow wild with the
desire to wear a conspicuous uniform and die for my country.
Saint-Gaudens's man on horseback in the Shaw memorial is beautiful, but
it is the forward-lunging line of negro faces and the line of muskets on
shoulder that threaten to bring the tears to my eyes.
This, I suppose, is rank sentimentality; but I cannot help it. Any
procession, no matter how humble, puts me into a state of mingled
exaltation and tearfulness. It is in part the sound of human footsteps
and in part the solemn idea behind them. I am not thinking of stately
processions moving up the aisles of churches to the sound of music. I
have in mind, rather, a band of, say, a thousand working girls on Labour
Day, or of an Italian fraternal organisation heavy with plumes and
banners, or even a Tammany political club on its annual outing; wherever
the idea of human dependence and human brotherhood is testified to in
the mere act of moving along the pavement shoulder to shoulder. Above
all things, it is a line of marching children that takes me quite out of
myself. I was a visitor not long ago at one of the public schools, and I
sat in state on the principal's platform. When the bell rang for
dismissal, and the sliding doors were pushed apart so as to form one
huge assembly room, and the children began to file out to the sound of
the piano, the splendour and the pathos of it overpowered me. I did not
know which I wanted to be then, the principal in his magnificent chair
of office, or one of those two thousand children keeping step in their
march towards freedom.
Pathos? Why pathos in a little army of children marching out in fire
drill, or the same children marching in for their morning's Bible
reading and singing? I find it difficult to say why. Perhaps it is
consciousness of that law which has raised man from the brute, and which
I see embodied when we take a thousand children and range them in order
and induce them to keep step. Perhaps the pathos is in the recognition
of our isolated weakness and our need to make painful progress by
getting close together and moving forward in close formation. In any
case, the pathos is there. Consider a children's May party, on its way
to Central Park. A fife-and-drum corps of three little boys in uniform
leads the way. The Queen of the May, all in white, walks with her
consort under a canopy of ribbons and flowers, a little stiffly,
perhaps, and self-consciously, but not more so than older queens and
kings on parade. A long line of boys and girls in many-coloured caps
moves between flying detachments of mothers carrying baskets. The
confectioner's wagon, laden with its precious commissariat of ice cream
and cake, moves leisurely behind; for the confectioner's horse this is
evidently a holiday. Is pathos conceivable in so delightful, so smiling,
an event? Alas, I have watched May parties go by, and the serious little
faces under the red and white caps have given me a heavier case of
_Weltschmerz_ than I have ever experienced at a performance of "Tristan
und Isolde." It was the fact of those little children advancing in
unison; that is the word. If they had trudged or scurried along,
pell-mell, I should not have minded. But May parties move forward in
procession, and the movement of a compact crowd is, to me, always heavy
with pathos.
But no crowd is like the afternoon crowd upon the wooden platform of the
"L" station at City Hall. I don't mean to be sentimental when I say that
the sound is to me like the march of human civilisation and human
history. Outwardly there is little to justify my grandiose comparison.
You see only a heaving mass of men and women who are not very well clad.
The men are unshaven, the women awry with a day's labour. They move on
with that beautiful optimism of an American crowd which has been trained
in the belief that there is always plenty of room ahead. There is very
little pushing. Occasionally a band of young boys hustle their way
through the crowd; but a New York crowd seems always to be mindful of
the days when we were all of us boys. It is a reading public. The men
carry newspapers whose flaring headlines of red and green give a touch
of almost Italian colour. The women carry cloth-bound novels in paper
wrappers. But it is not an assemblage of poets or scholars or thinkers,
or whatever class it is that is supposed to keep the world moving. It is
that most solemn of all things--a city crowd on its way home from the
day's work.