THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND
I walked through New York late at night, shortly after I landed, and had
for companions an Englishman who knew the city well and an American. The
roar of the traffic had ceased. The streets were almost deserted. Along
Fifth Avenue a few motors rushed swiftly, bearing belated revelers to
their homes. Save for them, the city was as nearly silent as any city
ever is. We talked. It was the Englishman who spoke first.
"New York and the sound of blasting go together," he said. "They are
inseparably connected in my mind. New York is built on rock out of
material blasted off rock with dynamite. This fact explains New York. It
is the characteristic thing about New York. No other city owes its
existence in the same way to the force of explosives shattering rock."
"New York," said the American, "is one of the soldiers of Attila the
Hun."
The night was warm. He unbuttoned his overcoat as he spoke and flung it
back from his chest. He squared his shoulders, looked up at the
immensely lofty buildings on each side of us, looked round at the
shadow-patched pavements, fixed his eyes finally on the lamps of a motor
which was racing toward us from a great distance along the endless
avenue. Then he pursued his comparison.
"Attila's soldier," he said, "went through some Roman city with his club
over his shoulder. There were round him evidences of old civilizations
which puzzled him. He gazed at the temples, the baths, the theaters with
wondering curiosity; but he was conscious that he could smash everything
and kill every one he saw. He was the barbarian, but he was also the
strong man. New York is like that among the cities of the world."
I contributed a borrowed comment on America.
"An Irishman once told me," I said, "that America isn't a country. It's
a great space in which there are the makings of a country lying about.
He might have said the same sort of thing about New York. There are the
makings of a city scattered round."
"Chunks of blasted rock," said the Englishman.
"The Hun had a lot to learn," said the American, "but he was the strong
man. He could smash and crush. Nobody else could."
There is a very interesting story or sketch—I do not know how it ought
to be described—by the late "O. Henry"—which he called "The Voice of
the City." He imagines that certain American cities speak and each of
them utters its characteristic word. Chicago says, "I will."
Philadelphia says, "I ought." New Orleans says, "I used to." If I had
"O. Henry's" genius I should try to concentrate into phrases the voices
of the cities I know. I should like to be able to hear distinctly what
they all say about themselves. Belfast, I am convinced, says, "I won't."
Dublin occasionally murmurs, "It doesn't really matter." So far I seem
to get, but there I am puzzled. I should like to hear what Edinburgh
says, what Paris says, what Rome would say if something waked her out of
her dream. I should be beaten by London, even if I had all his genius,
just as "O. Henry" was beaten by New York. He failed to disentangle the
_motif_ from the clamorous tumult of mighty chorus with which that city
assails the ear. There is a supreme moment which comes in the Waldstein
Sonata. The listener is a-quiver with maddening expectation. He is
wrought upon with sound until he feels that he must tear some soft thing
with his teeth. Then, at the moment when the passion in him becomes
intolerable, the great scrap of melody thunders triumphantly over the
confusion and it is possible to breathe again. This is just what does
not happen in the case of places like London and New York. A Beethoven
yet unborn will catch their melodies for us some day and the sonata of
great cities will be written. Till he comes it is better to leave the
thing alone. Neither blasting nor dynamite is the keyword. Attila's Hun
with his club fails us, though he helps a little. And there is more, a
great deal more, about New York than the confused massing of materials
on the site of what is to be a temple or a railway station.
When I was in New York they were building a large edifice of some kind
in Broadway, not far from Thirty-fifth Street. I used to see the work in
progress every day, and often stopped to watch the builders for a while.
Whenever I think of New York I shall remember the shrill scream of the
air drill which made holes in the steel girders. The essential thing
about that noise was its suggestion of relentlessness. Perhaps New York
is of all cities the most relentless. The steel suffers and shrieks
through a long chromatic scale of agony. New York drills a hole, pauses
to readjust its terrible force, and then drills again.
That is one aspect of New York. The stranger cannot fail to be conscious
of it. It is brought home to him by the rush of the overhead railway in
Sixth Avenue, by the hurry of the crowds in Broadway, by the grinding
clamor of the subway trains. It is this, no doubt, which has given rise
to the theory that New York is a city of hustle. It seems to me a very
cruel thing to say of any people that they hustle. The word suggests a
disagreeable kind of spurious activity. The hustler is not likely to be
efficient. He makes a fine show of doing things; but he does not,
somehow, get much done. The hustler is like a football player who is in
all parts of the field at different times, sometimes in the forward
line, sometimes among the backs, always breathless, generally very much
in the way, and contributing less than any one else to the winning of
the game for his side. If New York were a city of hustlers, New York
would drill no holes in steel girders.
The fact is that America has, in this matter of hustle, been grossly
slandered in Europe. I am not sure that the Americans, with a curious
perversity, have not slandered themselves, and done as much as any one
to keep the hustle myth alive. The American understands the value of not
hurrying as well as any one in the world. He has, justly, a high opinion
of himself and declines to be a slave to a wretched machine like a
clock. I realized this leisureliness the first time I went into a
restaurant to get something to eat. I could have smoked a cigarette
comfortably between the ordering and the getting of what I ordered. I
could have smoked other cigarettes, calmly, as cigarettes ought to be
smoked, between each course. American men do actually smoke in this way
during meals, and I trace the custom not to an excessive fondness for
tobacco but to the leisurely way in which the business of eating is gone
about. And it is not in restaurants only that this quiet disregard of
time's abominable habit of going on is evident. The New York business
man gets through his work—it is evident that he does get through
it—without feeling it necessary to give every one the impression that
each half hour of the day is dedicated to a separate affair and that the
entire time-table will be reduced to chaos if a single minute strays out
of its proper compartment into the next.
Perhaps it is because I am Irish that I like this way of doing business.
There is a character in one of the late Canon Sheehan's novels who says
that there are two things which are plenty in Ireland—water and time.
There are undoubtedly places in the world where water is scarce, the
Sahara desert for instance; but I suspect that time is quite abundant
everywhere though some people affect to believe that it is not. I know
English business men who scowl at you if you venture, having settled the
little affair which brought you to their office, to make a pleasant
remark about the chances of a general election before Christmas. They
pretend that they have not time to talk about General Elections. They do
this, as Bob Sawyer used to have himself summoned from church, in order
to keep up their reputation. They want you to think that they are
overwhelmed with pressing things. I have always suspected that, having
got rid of their visitor, they spend hours reading about General
Elections in the daily papers. The American business man is, apparently,
never too busy to enjoy a chat. He invites you to lunch with him when
you go to his office. He shows you the points of interest in the
neighborhood after luncheon. He discusses the present condition of
Ireland, a subject which demands an immense quantity of time. He settles
the little matter which brought you to his office with three sentences
and a wave of the hand. He does not write you a letter afterwards
beginning: "In confirmation of our conversation to-day I note that you
are prepared to——" It is, I suppose, a man's temperament which settles
which way of doing business he prefers. It is also very largely a
question of temper. In my normal mood I prefer the American method.
There is a broad humanity about it which appeals to me strongly. But if
I have been annoyed by anything early in the day, broken a bootlace, for
instance, or lost a collar stud, I would rather do business in the
English way. In the one case I like to come in contact with a fellow
man, to feel that he has affections and weaknesses like my own. It is
pleasant to get to know him personally. In the other case, thanks to the
misfortunes of the morning, I am filled with a gloomy hatred of my kind.
I want, until the mood has worn off, to see as little as possible of any
one and to keep inevitable people at arm's length. It is much easier to
do this when the inevitable people also want to keep me at arm's length,
and the English business man generally does. The friendliness of the
American business man is a little trying sometimes to any one in a bad
temper. Sometimes, not always. I remember one occasion on which I was
exceptionally cross. I forget what had happened to me in the morning,
but it was worse than breaking a bootlace. It may have had something to
do with telephones, instruments which generally drive me to fury. At all
events, though in a bad temper, I had to go to see a man in his office.
He was a man of extraordinarily friendly spirit, even for an American. I
dreaded my interview, fearing that I might say something actually rude
before it was over. Nothing could have been more soothing than my
reception. This wonderful man cast a single quick glance at me as I
entered his office. He realized my condition and got through with the
wretched necessity which had brought me there with a rapidity and
precision which would have done credit to any Englishman. Then he
ushered me out again without making or giving me time to make a single
remark of a miscellaneous kind. I apologized to him afterwards. He
patted me reassuringly on the shoulder.
"That's all right," he said. "I saw the minute you came into the room
that you were a bit rattled."
That seems to me a splendid example of tact. I do not suggest that all
American business men have this faculty for swift, self-sacrificing
sympathy. It must be rare, even in New York. Does it exist at all in
England? If I called on an English merchant some morning when the spring
was in my blood and I felt that I wanted to leap and spring like a lamb,
would he divine my mood, join hands and dance with me on his hearth rug?
I doubt it. He would not do it even if I were a hundred times more
important than I am. He would not do it if I were chairman of a
fantastically prosperous company. Yet it must have been just as hard for
my American friend to be austere as it would be for an Englishman to be
inanely gay.
I am not a business man myself. I have for many years practiced the art
of getting other people to manage my small affairs for me, so perhaps I
ought not to write about business men. But an author is always on the
horns of a dilemma. He knows he ought not to write about anything that
he does not thoroughly understand. But if he confined himself to those
subjects, he would never write anything at all. Even if he gave himself
some latitude and allowed himself to write about things of which he
knows a little, he would still find himself in a narrow place. His best
hope is that if he writes freely on every subject that comes into his
head he will only be found out by a few people at a time. Sailors will
find him out when he writes about the sea. Insurance agents will laugh
at his ignorance when he writes about premiums; doctors will be
irritated when he sets down what he thinks about measles. But the
sailors will believe that he knows a great deal about insurance and
disease in general; doctors will think him an expert about ships, and so
forth. And there are always far fewer people in any given profession
than there are people out of it. The writer has therefore a good hope
that those who find him out in any point in which he touches will always
be a minority. Minorities do not matter.
It is the consideration of this fact which gives me courage to write
about business men, and more courage now to go on and write about
buildings. I know nothing about architecture, but the people who do are
very few, so that the penalty of being found out will be light.
There does not seem at first glance to be any connection between
business men and architecture. But there is a very real one. There is
also a private connection of thought in my own mind. It was from the
windows of an office, high up in one of the skyscraper buildings, that I
got my first comprehensive view of New York. There is, generally, a
certain sameness about these bird's-eye views of cities. The bird, and
the man who gets into the position of the bird, sees a number of spires
of churches sticking up into the sky and below them a huddled mass of
roofs. Sometimes tall chimneys assert themselves beside the spires. But
the spires are the dominating things. The chimneys may have every
appearance of arrogance, but one feels that they are upstarts. The
spires hold the place of a recognized aristocracy. The bird, if he were
say an eagle, and had not the sparrow's intimate knowledge of the life
of the streets, would naturally come to the conclusion that the worship
of God is the most potent factor in the life of the European city. He
would, perhaps, be wrong, but he would have a good case to make for
himself when he was recounting his experiences to the other eagles.
"I have seen," he would say, "these vast nesting places of men, and the
spires of the churches are far the most important things in them. They
reach up higher than anything else, and there are great numbers of
them."
But the eagle would not say that about New York. It is not spires, nor
is it factory chimneys which stick up highest there and catch the
attention of a spectator from a height. Office buildings are the
dominant things. Churches are kept in what many people regard as their
proper place. You can see them if you look for them, but they are
subordinate. The same thing is true of another view of New York, that
marvelous spectacle of the city's profile which you get in the evening
from any of the Hudson River ferry boats. The sky line is jagged and the
silhouettes are not those of cross-crowned domes or spires, but of large
buildings dedicated to commerce.
The philosophic eagle might, reasoning as he did before, leap to the
conclusion that God is of little importance in the city of New York;
that bank books there count for more than Bibles. I am not at all sure
that he would be right. It looks, any one who has seen New York must
admit it, as if the American who coined the phrase, "the almighty
dollar," had really expressed the faith of his countrymen. But I am
inclined to think that he was led into injustice by a desire to be
epigrammatic. It may be that my experience was singularly fortunate, but
I came to the conclusion that God counts for a good deal in the life of
New York and of America generally. I do not mean that any creed has
obtained for itself national recognition, or that any particular church
has reached a position analogous to that of the English established
church. Religion in America seems to me a confused force, which has not
yet fully found itself; but it is a force. The desire to do justly, to
love mercy, though scarcely perhaps to walk humbly, is present and is
coming to be mightier than the dollar.
Yet it is certainly true that the most striking buildings in New York
are not ecclesiastical, but commercial. This is a defiance of the old
European tradition, a breach even of that feebler tradition which
America took over from Europe before she entered into possession of her
own soul. I am reminded of Attila's Hun with his contempt for Roman
civilization and his confidence in his own strength.
Business used to look askance at magnificence. It was the pride of the
London merchant that he managed mighty affairs in an unpretentious
counting house. But we are learning from the Americans. Our insurance
companies were the first to start building sumptuous habitations for
themselves. Banks and other corporations are following their example.
Yet even to-day the offices in the city of London are singularly
unimpressive to the eye, and many a house with world-wide influence
scorns to appeal to the passerby with anything more striking than a
"Push" or "Pull" stamped in worn letters on the brass plates of a pair
of swinging doors. It was a great tradition, this total lack of
ostentation where mighty forces were. At first New York too felt the
attraction of it. Wall Street, which is one of the older parts of the
city, is not impressive to look at. The Cotton Exchange is a building of
a very middling kind. Yet I am inclined to think that the instinct for
magnificence displayed by the newer American captains of commerce is
sound. I am not considering the advertisement value of a great building.
It may be worth something in that way, though grubbiness can also be an
effective advertisement. What seems to lie at the back of the display is
the desire of life to express itself in sumptuousness. The Venetians, a
nation of merchants, felt this and built in the spirit of it. After all,
commerce is a very great kind of life. There is energy in it, adventure,
romance. It offers opportunities for struggle, promises victory,
threatens defeat. Is it any wonder that men absorbed in it should feel
the thrill of the "_superbia vitæ_" and build to secure visible
embodiment for the emotion? Men have always tried to build finely for
their governors. Kings' palaces and parliament houses are impressive
everywhere. This was right when kings and parliaments were important.
Now that the offices of financiers are much more important than the
habitations of law makers, they too are becoming splendid.
It is, I suppose, to be expected that these mighty buildings should have
forms which at first are repellent in their strangeness. We, who were
nursed in an older artistic tradition, have learned to value, perhaps
too highly, restraint and dignity. The outstanding characteristics of
the American skyscraper seem to me to be exuberance. I am reminded of
the wild spirit of one or two European buildings, of the cloisters of
Belem, for instance, though there the sense of exultation expresses
itself in a very different way. But the essential spirit is similar. I
could imagine the builders chanting as they worked: "Behold ye are gods.
Ye are all children of the Highest." They are gods who have not
experienced the _tedium vitæ_ of Olympian happiness. But New York is not
so drunken with exuberance that it can not build with quiet dignity.
Tiffany's shop in Fifth Avenue, and, a little lower down, Altman's great
department store, are buildings on which the eye rests with undisturbed
satisfaction. The men who built these had more in mind than the erection
of houses in which rings or stockings might conveniently be sold. They
felt that commerce in jewelry or clothes was in itself a worthy thing
which might be undertaken in a lofty spirit, and greatly carried on.
There is a feeling of nobility in the proportion of windows and doors,
in the severity of the street fronts. These might be palaces of noblemen
of an ancient lineage. They are—shops. Has America discovered a dignity
in shop-keeping? The station of the Pennsylvania Railway is one of the
glories of New York, and here again New York is certainly right, though
I—it is a purely personal feeling—am infuriated to find the calm
self-restraint of the Greeks associated with anything so blatant as a
railway train. Anywhere else in the world the great hall of the Central
Station would be the nave of a Cathedral. It is impossible not to
feel—even when hurrying for a train—that the porters are really
acolytes masquerading for a moment in honor of some fantastic fool's
day.
The churches of New York are of subordinate interest. Trinity Church has
a singularly suggestive position, right opposite the end of Wall Street,
God in protest against Mammon. But the building itself might be anywhere
in England. I can fancy it in Nottingham or Bath, and there would be no
need to alter the place of a stone in it. It is a dignified and
beautiful parish church, but it has, as a building, nothing American
about it. It has not, apparently, influenced the spirit of New York
architecture. The people have not found self-expression in it. St.
Patrick's Cathedral, in Fifth Avenue, is a fine, a very fine example of
modern Gothic. Except the new Graduate College buildings at Princeton,
this cathedral strikes me as the finest example of modern Gothic I have
ever seen. But ought New York to have Gothic buildings? Here, I know, I
come up against the difficult question. There are those who hold that
for certain purposes—for worship and for the dignified ceremonial life
of a university—the Gothic building is the one perfect form which man
has devised. We cannot better it. All we can do is soak ourselves in the
spirit of the men of the great centuries of this style and humbly try to
feel as they felt so that we may build as they. It may be granted that
we shall devise nothing better. I, for one, gladly admit that St.
Patrick's in New York and the Hall at Princeton are conceived in the old
spirit and are as perfect as any modern work of the kind is, perhaps as
perfect as any modern Gothic work can be. But when all this is said it
remains true that the life of New York is not the life of mediæval
Rouen, of the London which built Westminster or of the Cologne which
paid honor to the Three Kings. Can New York accept as its vision of the
divine the conception, however splendid, of those "dear dead days"?
It may well be that I am all wrong in my feeling about modern Gothic,
that what is wanting in these buildings is not the spirit which was in
the old ones. It may be that, like certain finer kinds of wine, they
require maturing. I can conceive that a church which seems remote now,
almost to the point of frigidity, may not only seem, but actually be,
different two hundred years hence. It is scarcely possible to think that
the prayers of generations have no effect upon the walls of the building
in which they are uttered. There must cling to the place some aroma,
some subtle essence of the reachings after God of generation after
generation. The repentances of broken hearts, the supplications of
sorrowing women, the vows of strong, hopeful souls, the pieties of meek
priests, must be present still among the arches and the dim places above
them. Men consecrate their temples, but it takes them centuries to do
it. Perhaps Westminster would have left me cold if I had walked its
aisles four hundred years ago. This lack of maturity and not, as I
suppose, the fact that they do not come of the spirit of our time, may
be what is the matter with our newer Gothic buildings.
There is one church in New York—there may be others unknown to
me—which gives the impression of having grown out of the life which
dwelt in it, in the same sense in which certain English churches, those
especially of the Sussex country side, have grown rather than been
deliberately and consciously built. This is the unpretentious building
known as "The Little Church Round the Corner." The affectionate
familiarity of the name suits the place and means more to the discerning
soul than any dedication could mean. The student of architecture would
perhaps reckon this church contemptible, and having seen it once would
bestow no second glance upon it. It is built in no style of recognized
orthodoxy. I do not know its history, but it looks as if bits had been
added on to it time after time by people who knew nothing and cared
nothing for unity of design, but who had in their hearts a genuine love
for the building. It is an expression of life, this little church, but
not, I think, of the life of New York. It is as if someone had made a
little garden and filled it with all kinds of delicate sweet-smelling
flowers in a glade of a mighty forest. Within the garden are the
flowers, tended and well-beloved. Outside and all around are great trees
with gnarled trunks and far-off branches which have fought their own way
in desperate competition to the sunlight. I could, I think, worship very
faithfully in that "Little Church Round the Corner," but I should have
to shut New York out of my heart every time I passed through the doors
of it. Just so I can find delight in the sweetness of Keble's "Christian
Year," but while I do I must forget the sea, and how "at his word the
stormy wind ariseth which lifteth up the waves thereof." I must cease to
be in love with the perils of adventuring.
There is one church in New York which seems to me to have caught the
spirit of the city, the unfinished cathedral of St. John the Divine. It
gives the worshipper within its walls a strange sense of titanic
strength striving majestically to express itself in stone. I am told
that the building is to be finished in some other way, in accordance
with the rules and orthodoxies of some school of architecture. This may
not be true, but, even if it is, there still remains the hope that
enough has been already done to preserve for the finished work its
character of relentless strength. If its builders are brave enough to go
as they have begun, this cathedral should rank in the eyes of future
generations as one of the great houses of God in the world. St. Mark's,
with its fantastic spires and gorgeous coloring, expresses all the past
history of Venice and her commerce with the East, all which that strange
republic learnt of the Divine, from the glow of Syrian deserts, where
sun-baked caravans crawled slowly, and from the heavy scents of
Midianitish merchandise in the market places of Damascus. The confused
and misty aisles of Westminster embody in stone a realized conception of
the tumultuous life of London, of its black river weary with the weight
of the untold wealth it bears, of its crowds thronging narrow places, of
its streets where past and present look suspiciously into each other's
eyes, while things which are to be already push for elbow room. The
Cathedral of St. John the Divine, standing on the very edge of its
steep, broken hill, gives me as no other building does the sense of
strength of the kind of strength which will do rather than endure, which
is unwilling to abide restraint of any kind.
The building is a fit mate for the skyscrapers, can hold its own among
them because its spirit is their spirit, touched with the flame of
inspiration by the torch of the divine. The very absence of unity of
style seems the crowning glory of it. It is Attila's Hun once more. What
did he care that the spoils in which he decked himself were of various
fashionings? It is the dynamite blasting living rock. It is, as it seems
to me, New York in process of being given in stone an interpretation
which neither words nor music have given her yet. It will be a loss, not
only to New York but to the world, if the builders of the Cathedral of
St. John the Divine allow themselves to be frightened by the spectre of
European artistic tradition. They may tame their church, civilize it,
curl and comb the seven locks of its hair. If they do, the strength will
surely depart from it and it will become a common thing.