MATERIAL PROGRESS
(_On the "Carmania" going Americanward_)
I
American Certitudes
When one talks to an American of his national purpose he seems a little
at a loss; if one speaks of his national destiny, he responds with
alacrity. I make this generalization on the usual narrow foundations,
but so the impression comes to me.
Until this present generation, indeed until within a couple of decades,
it is not very evident that Americans did envisage any national
purpose at all, except in so far as there was a certain solicitude
not to be cheated out of an assured destiny. A sort of optimistic
fatalism possessed them. They had, and mostly it seems they still
have, a tremendous sense of sustained and assured growth, and it is
not altogether untrue that one is told--I have been told--such things
as that "America is a great country, sir," that its future is gigantic
and that it is already (and going to be more and more so) the greatest
country on earth.
I am not the sort of Englishman who questions that. I do so regard
that much as obvious and true that it seems to me even a little
undignified, as well as a little overbearing, for Americans to insist
upon it so; I try to go on as soon as possible to the question just
how my interlocutor _shapes_ that gigantic future and what that world
predominance is finally to do for us in England and all about the
world. So far, I must insist, I haven't found anything like an idea. I
have looked for it in books, in papers, in speeches and now I am going
to look for it in America. At the most I have found vague imaginings
that correspond to that first or monstrous stage in the scheme of
prophetic development I sketched in my opening.
There is often no more than a volley of rhetorical blank-cartridge. So
empty is it of all but sound that I have usually been constrained by
civility from going on to a third enquiry;--
"And what are you, sir, doing in particular, to assist and enrich this
magnificent and quite indefinable Destiny of which you so evidently
feel yourself a part?"...
That seems to be really no unjust rendering of the conscious
element of the American outlook as one finds it, for example, in
these nice-looking and pleasant-mannered fellow-passengers upon the
_Carmania_ upon whom I fasten with leading questions and experimental
remarks. One exception I discover--a pleasant New York clubman who
has doubts of this and that. The discipline and sense of purpose in
Germany has laid hold upon him. He seems to be, in contrast with his
fellow-countrymen, almost pessimistically aware that the American
ship of state is after all a mortal ship and liable to leakages.
There are certain problems and dangers he seems to think that may
delay, perhaps even prevent, an undamaged arrival in that predestined
port, that port too resplendent for the eye to rest upon; a Chinese
peril, he thinks has not been finally dealt with, "race suicide" is
not arrested for all that it is scolded in a most valiant and virile
manner, and there are adverse possibilities in the immigrant, in the
black, the socialist, against which he sees no guarantee. He sees huge
danger in the development and organization of the new finance and no
clear promise of a remedy. He finds the closest parallel between the
American Republic and Rome before the coming of Imperialism. But these
other Americans have no share in his pessimisms. They may confess to
as much as he does in the way of dangers, admit there are occasions
for calking, a need of stopping quite a number of possibilities if the
American Idea is to make its triumphant entry at last into that port
of blinding accomplishment, but, apart from a few necessary preventive
proposals, I do not perceive any extensive sense of anything whatever
to be done, anything to be shaped and thought out and made in the sense
of a national determination to a designed and specified end.
II
A Symbol of Progress
There are, one must admit, tremendous justifications for the belief
in a sort of automatic ascent of American things to unprecedented
magnificences, an ascent so automatic that indeed one needn't bother
in the slightest to keep the whole thing going. For example, consider
this, last year's last-word in ocean travel in which I am crossing, the
_Carmania_ with its unparalleled steadfastness, its racing, tireless
great turbines, its vast population of 3244 souls! It has on the whole
a tremendous effect of having come by fate and its own forces. One
forgets that any one planned it, much of it indeed has so much the
quality of moving, as the planets move, in the very nature of things.
You go aft and see the wake tailing away across the blue ridges, you
go forward and see the cleft water, lift protestingly, roll back in an
indignant crest, own itself beaten and go pouring by in great foaming
waves on either hand, you see nothing, you hear nothing of the toiling
engines, the reeking stokers, the effort and the stress below; you beat
west and west, as the sun does and it might seem with nearly the same
independence of any living man's help or opposition. Equally so does
it seem this great, gleaming, confident thing of power and metal came
inevitably out of the past and will lead on to still more shining,
still swifter and securer monsters in the future.
One sees in the perspective of history, first the little cockle-shells
of Columbus, the comings and goings of the precarious Tudor
adventurers, the slow uncertain shipping of colonial days. Says Sir
George Trevelyan in the opening of his _American Revolution_, that
then--it is still not a century and a half ago!--
"a man bound for New York, as he sent his luggage on board at Bristol,
would willingly have compounded for a voyage lasting as many weeks as
it now lasts days.... Adams, during the height of the war, hurrying to
France in the finest frigate Congress could place at his disposal ...
could make not better speed than five and forty days between Boston
and Bordeaux. Lord Carlisle ... was six weeks between port and port;
tossed by gales which inflicted on his brother Commissioners agonies
such as he forbore to make a matter of joke even to George Selwyn....
How humbler individuals fared.... They would be kept waiting weeks on
the wrong side of the water for a full complement of passengers and
weeks more for a fair wind, and then beating across in a badly found
tub with a cargo of millstones and old iron rolling about below, they
thought themselves lucky if they came into harbor a month after their
private store of provisions had run out and carrying a budget of news
as stale as the ship's provisions."
Even in the time of Dickens things were by no measure more than
half-way better. I have with me to enhance my comfort by this aided
retrospect, his _American Notes_. His crossing lasted eighteen days and
his boat was that "far-famed American steamer," the _Britannia_ (the
first of the long succession of Cunarders, of which this _Carmania_ is
the latest); his return took fifty days, and was a jovial home-coming
under sail. It's the journey out gives us our contrast. He had the
"state-room" of the period and very unhappy he was in it, as he
testifies in a characteristically mounting passage.
"That this state-room had been specially engaged for 'Charles Dickens,
Esquire, and Lady,' was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared
intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the fact, which was
pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread
like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this
was the state-room, concerning which Charles Dickens, Esquire, and
Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences for at least four months
preceding; that this could by any possibility be that small snug
chamber of the imagination, which Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the
spirit of prophecy strong upon him, had always foretold would contain
at least one little sofa, and which his Lady, with a modest and yet
most magnificent sense of its limited dimensions, had from the first
opined would not hold more than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd
corner out of sight (portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at
the door, not to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or
forced into a flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly
preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with,
those chaste and pretty bowers, sketched in a masterly hand, in
the highly varnished, lithographic plan, hanging up in the agent's
counting-house in the City of London: that this room of state, in
short, could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of
the Captain's, invented and put in practice for the better relish and
enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be disclosed: these were
truths which I really could not bring my mind at all to bear upon or
comprehend."
So he precludes his two weeks and a half of vile weather in this paddle
boat of the middle ages (she carried a "formidable" multitude of no
less than eighty-six saloon passengers) and goes on to describe such
experiences as this;
"About midnight we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the
skylights, burst open the doors above, and came raging and roaring
down into the ladies' cabin, to the unspeakable consternation of
my wife and a little Scotch lady.... They, and the handmaid before
mentioned, being in such ecstacies of fear that I scarcely knew what
to do with them, I naturally bethought myself of some restorative
or comfortable cordial; and nothing better occurring to me, at the
moment, than hot brandy-and-water, I procured a tumblerful without
delay. It being impossible to stand or sit without holding on, they
were all heaped together in one corner of a long sofa--a fixture
extending entirely across the cabin--where they clung to each other in
momentary expectation of being drowned. When I approached this place
with my specific, and was about to administer it with many consolatory
expressions, to the nearest sufferer, what was my dismay to see
them all roll slowly down to the other end! and when I staggered to
that end, and held out the glass once more, how immensely baffled
were my good intentions by the ship giving another lurch, and their
rolling back again! I suppose I dodged them up and down this sofa,
for at least a quarter of an hour, without reaching them once; and
by the time I did catch them, the brandy-and-water was diminished,
by constant spilling, to a teaspoonful. To complete the group, it is
necessary to recognize in this disconcerted dodger, an individual
very pale from sea-sickness, who had shaved his beard and brushed his
hair last at Liverpool; and whose only articles of dress (linen not
included) were a pair of dreadnought trousers; a blue jacket, formerly
admired upon the Thames at Richmond; no stockings; and one slipper."
It gives one a momentary sense of superiority to the great master to
read that. One surveys one's immediate surroundings and compares them
with _his_. One says almost patronizingly: "Poor old Dickens, you know,
really did have too awful a time!" The waves are high now, and getting
higher, dark-blue waves foam-crested; the waves haven't altered--except
relatively--but one isn't even sea-sick. At the most there are
squeamish moments for the weaker brethren. One looks down on these long
white-crested undulations thirty feet or so of rise and fall, as we
look down the side of a sky-scraper into a tumult in the street.
We displace thirty thousand tons of water instead of twelve hundred,
we can carry 521 first and second class passengers, a crew of 463, and
2260 emigrants below....
We're a city rather than a ship, our funnels go up over the height of
any reasonable church spire, and you need walk the main-deck from end
to end and back only four times to do a mile. Any one who has been to
London and seen Trafalgar Square will get our dimensions perfectly,
when he realizes that we should only squeeze into that finest site in
Europe, diagonally, dwarfing the National Gallery, St. Martin's Church,
hotels and every other building there out of existence, our funnels
towering five feet higher than Nelson on his column. As one looks down
on it all from the boat-deck one has a social microcosm, we could set
up as a small modern country and renew civilization even if the rest
of the world was destroyed. We've the plutocracy up here, there is a
middle class on the second-class deck and forward a proletariat--the
_proles_ much in evidence--complete. It's possible to go slumming
aboard.... We have our daily paper, too, printed aboard, and all the
latest news by marconigram....
Never was anything of this sort before, never. Caligula's shipping it
is true (unless it was Constantine's) did, as Mr. Cecil Torr testifies,
hold a world record until the nineteenth century and he quotes Pliny
for thirteen hundred tons--outdoing the _Britannia_--and Moschion for
cabins and baths and covered vine-shaded walks and plants in pots.
But from 1840 onward, we have broken away into a new scale for life.
This _Carmania_ isn't the largest ship nor the finest, nor is it to be
the last. Greater ships are to follow and greater. The scale of size,
the scale of power, the speed and dimensions of things about us alter
remorselessly--to some limit we cannot at present descry.
III
Is Progress Inevitable?
It is the development of such things as this, it is this dramatically
abbreviated perspective from those pre-Reformation caravels to the
larger, larger, larger of the present vessels, one must blame for
one's illusions. One is led unawares to believe that this something
called Progress is a natural and necessary and secular process,
going on without the definite will of man, carrying us on quite
independently of us; one is led unawares to forget that it is after
all from the historical point of view only a sudden universal jolting
forward in history, an affair of two centuries at most, a process for
the continuance of which we have no sort of guarantee. Most western
Europeans have this delusion of automatic progress in things badly
enough, but with Americans it seems to be almost fundamental. It is
their theory of the Cosmos and they no more think of inquiring into
the sustaining causes of the progressive movement than they would into
the character of the stokers hidden away from us in this great thing
somewhere--the officers alone know where.
I am happy to find this blind confidence very well expressed for
example in an illustrated magazine article by Mr. Edgar Saltus,
"New York from the Flat-iron," that a friend has put in my hand to
prepare me for the wonders to come. Mr. Saltus writes with an eloquent
joy of his vision of Broadway below, Broadway that is now "barring
trade-routes, the largest commercial stretch on this planet." So
late as Dickens's visit it was scavenged by roving untended herds of
gaunt, brown, black-blotched pigs. He writes of lower Fifth Avenue and
upper Fifth Avenue, of Madison Square and its tower, of sky-scrapers
and sky-scrapers and sky-scrapers round and about the horizon. (I am
to have a tremendous view of them to-morrow as we steam up from the
Narrows.) And thus Mr. Saltus proceeds,--
"As you lean and gaze from the toppest floors on houses below, which
from those floors seem huts, it may occur to you that precisely as
these huts were once regarded as supreme achievements, so, one of
these days, from other and higher floors, the Flat-iron may seem a hut
itself. Evolution has not halted. Undiscernibly but indefatigably,
always it is progressing. Its final term is not existing buildings,
nor in existing man. If humanity sprang from gorillas, from humanity
gods shall proceed."
The rule of three in excelsis!
"The story of Olympus is merely a tale of what might have been. That
which might have been may yet come to pass. Even now could the old
divinities, hushed forevermore, awake, they would be perplexed enough
to see how mortals have exceeded them.... In Fifth Avenue inns they
could get fairer fare than ambrosia, and behold women beside whom
Venus herself would look provincial and Juno a frump. The spectacle of
electricity tamed and domesticated would surprise them not a little,
the elevated quite as much, the Flat-iron still more. At sight of the
latter they would recall the Titans with whom once they warred, and
sink to their sun-red seas outfaced.
"In this same measure we have succeeded in exceeding them, so will
posterity surpass what we have done. Evolution may be slow, it
achieved an unrecognized advance when it devised buildings such as
this. It is demonstrable that small rooms breed small thoughts. It
will be demonstrable that, as buildings ascend, so do ideas. It is
mental progress that sky-scrapers engender. From these parturitions
gods may really proceed--beings, that is, who, could we remain long
enough to see them, would regard us as we regard the apes...."
Mr. Saltus writes, I think, with a very typical American accent. Most
Americans think like that and all of them I fancy feel like it. Just
in that spirit a later-empire Roman might have written apropos the
gigantic new basilica of Constantine the Great (who was also, one
recalls, a record-breaker in ship-building) and have compared it with
the straitened proportions of Cæsar's Forum and the meagre relics of
republican Rome. So too (_absit omen_) he might have swelled into
prophecy and sounded the true modern note.
One hears that modern note everywhere nowadays where print spreads,
but from America with fewer undertones than anywhere. Even I find it,
ringing clear, as a thing beyond disputing, as a thing as self-evident
as sunrise again and again in the expressed thought of Mr. Henry James.
But you know this progress isn't guaranteed. We have all indeed been
carried away completely by the up-rush of it all. To me now this
_Carmania_ seems to typify the whole thing. What matter it if there
are moments when one reflects on the mysterious smallness and it
would seem the ungrowing quality of the human content of it all? We
are, after all, astonishingly like flies on a machine that has got
loose. No matter. Those people on the main-deck are the oddest crowd,
strange Oriental-looking figures with Astrakhan caps, hook-noses,
shifty eyes, and indisputably dirty habits, bold-eyed, red-capped,
expectorating women, quaint and amazingly dirty children; Tartars
there are too, and Cossacks, queer wraps, queer head-dresses, a sort
of greasy picturesqueness over them all. They use the handkerchief
solely as a head covering. Their deck is disgusting with fragments of
food, with egg-shells they haven't had the decency to throw over-board.
Collectively they have--an atmosphere. They're going where we're going,
wherever that is. What matters it? What matters it, too, if these
people about me in the artistic apartment talk nothing but trivialities
derived from the _Daily Bulletin_, think nothing but trivialities,
are, except in the capacity of paying passengers, the most ineffectual
gathering of human beings conceivable? What matters it that there is
no connection, no understanding whatever between them and that large
and ominous crowd a plank or so and a yard or so under our feet? Or
between themselves for the matter of that? What matters it if nobody
seems to be struck by the fact that we are all, the three thousand two
hundred of us so extraordinarily got together into this tremendous
machine, and that not only does nobody inquire what it is has got us
together in this astonishing fashion and why, but that nobody seems to
feel that we are together in any sort of way at all? One looks up at
the smoke-pouring funnels and back at the foaming wake. It will be all
right. Aren't we driving ahead westward at a pace of four hundred and
fifty miles a day?
And twenty or thirty thousand other souls, mixed and stratified, on
great steamers ahead of us, or behind, are driving westward too. That
there's no collective mind apparent in it at all, worth speaking about
is so much the better. That only shows its Destiny, its Progress as
inevitable as gravitation. I could almost believe it, as I sit quietly
writing here by a softly shaded light in this elegantly appointed
drawing-room, as steady as though I was in my native habitat on dry
land instead of hurrying almost fearfully, at twenty knots an hour,
over a tumbling empty desert of blue waves under a windy sky. But,
only a little while ago, I was out forward alone, looking at that.
Everything was still except for the remote throbbing of the engines and
the nearly effaced sound of a man, singing in a strange tongue, that
came from the third-class gangway far below. The sky was clear, save
for a few black streamers of clouds, Orion hung very light and large
above the waters, and a great new moon, still visibly holding its dead
predecessor in its crescent, sank near him. Between the sparse great
stars were deep blue spaces, unfathomed distances.
Out there I had been reminded of space and time. Out there the ship was
just a hastening ephemeral fire-fly that had chanced to happen across
the eternal tumult of the winds and sea.