|Through the grey mists that hang over the water in the late autumn
afternoon there emerges a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of
a distant range of mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with
a precision that suggests the work of man rather than the careless
architecture of Nature The mass is compact and isolated. It rises
from the level of the water, sheer on either side, in bold precipitous
cliffs, broken by horizontal lines, and dominated by one kingly, central
peak that might be the Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the
spire of some cathedral fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race.
As the vessel from afar moves slowly through the populous waters and
between the vaguely defined shores of the harbour, another shadow
emerges ahead, rising out of the sea in front of the mountain mass. It
is a colossal statue, holding up a torch to the open Atlantic.
Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition.
It turns to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable
windows. Even the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of
myriad windows. The day begins to darken and a swift transformation
takes place. Points of light begin to shine from the windows like stars
in the darkening firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters
with thousands of tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy
palace, glowing with illuminations from the foundations to the topmost
height of the giddy precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in
the scintillating pinnacle of the slender cathedral spire. The first
daylight impression was of something as solid and enduring as the
foundations of the earth; the second, in the gathering twilight, is of
something slight and fanciful, of' towering proportions but infinitely
fragile structure, a spectacle as airy and dream-like as a tale from the
“Arabian Nights.”
It is “down town.” It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its
astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that
lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest
group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over
the tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable
maze of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion
of the London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its
direction, but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east
and west, crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to
the Harlem River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing
island of Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the
noble Fifth Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty
buildings that shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to
gild the upper storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many
churches and the gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving,
on a sunny afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you
move in the shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the
air above. And around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the
architectural glories of “up town” New York, the great hotels stand
like mighty fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great
terminus. And in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled
to the twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you
are summoned.
But it is in “down town,” on the tip of the tongue that is put out
to the Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the
stranger. It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no
doubt, that make an equally striking appeal to the eye--Salzburg,
Innsbruck, Edinburgh, Tunis--but it is the appeal of nature supplemented
by art. Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not
an approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of
surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind,
that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous,
and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New
York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you
land. It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It
ascends its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation
over the Atlantic. “Down town” stands like a strong man on the shore
of the ocean, asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind
these terrific battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to
the skies. Look at this muscular development. And I am only the advance
agent. I am only the symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste
of the power that heaves and throbs through the veins of the giant that
bestrides this continent for three thousand miles, from his gateway to
the Atlantic to his gateway, to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to
the Gulf of Mexico.
And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this
terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from
within, stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway
ends, a street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned
between two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more'
lofty than the cross of St Paul's Cathedral--square towers, honeycombed
with thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying
up in lifts--called “elevators” for short--clicking at typewriters,
performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns
at the threshold of the giant.
For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which
he rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon
is Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure
in the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the
high priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds
are shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on
the kerbstone of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its
sovereigns wilting away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you
stand, in devout respect before the modest threshold of the high priest
a babel of strange sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn
towards it and come suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange
than anything pictured by Hogarth--in the street a jostling mass of
human beings, fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like
jockeys or pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended
high as if in prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working
with frantic symbols, their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at
a hundred windows in the great buildings on either side of the street
little groups of men and women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob
below. It is the outside market of Mammon.
You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the
great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements
like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender
and beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle
nearly twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the
temple of St Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth
acquired in his sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most
significant building in America and the first turret to catch the noose
of light that the dawn flings daily over the Atlantic from the East.
You enter its marble halls and take an express train to the forty-ninth
floor, flashing in your journey past visions of crowded offices, tier
after tier, offices of banks and publishers and merchants and
jewellers, like a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been
miraculously turned skywards by some violent geological “fault.” And at
the forty-ninth floor you get out and take another “local” train to the
top, and from thence you look giddily down, far down even upon the great
precipices of the Grand Canon, down to the streets where the moving
throng you left a few minutes ago looks like a colony of ants or
black-beetles wandering uncertainly over the pavement.
And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings
with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to
be large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City
churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are
swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that
loom above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George
Washington still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the
original union. Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted
world an inverted civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the
vision of the great dome that seems to float in the heavens over the
secular activities of another city, still holding aloft, to however
negligent and indifferent a generation, the symbol of the supremacy
of spiritual things. And you will wonder whether in this astonishing
spectacle below you, in which the temples of the ancient worship crouch
at the porch of these Leviathan temples of commerce, there is the
unconscious expression of another philosophy of life in which St
Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to the stars.
And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the
scene below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so
near that you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open
Atlantic, with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million
a year, that has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of
hopes, past the statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the
harbour, to be swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that
lies behind you. You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught
in the arms of its two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before
you, with its overflow of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream,
and its overflow of Jersey City on the far bank of the other. In the
brilliant sunshine and the clear, smokeless atmosphere the eye travels
far over this incredible vista of human activity. And beyond the vision
of the eye, the mind carries the thought onward to the great lakes and
the seething cities by their shores, and over the illimitable plains
westward to sunny lands more remote than Europe, but still obedient to
the stars and stripes, and southward by the great rivers to the tropic
sea.
And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the
far horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings.
They will not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those
horizons, after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields
of activity, you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the
contrary, they will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense
of power unlike anything else the world has to offer--the power of
immeasurable resources, still only in the infancy of their development,
of inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the
mind, of a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one--one in a
certain fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident
prime of their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of
the day before them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its
crudeness and freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as
to something avuncular and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late
afternoon, a little tired and more than a little disillusioned and
battered by the journey. For him the light has left the morning
hills, but here it still clothes those hills with hope and spurs on to
adventure.
That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses
his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase,
“the goods.” He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his
power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the
inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the
tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and
the squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the
chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction
at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush,
and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism
has shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American
interests, and the “100 per cent. American” in every disguise of
designing self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything
that is significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not
a moment when the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the
harbour, can feel very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no
longer lit to invite the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the
contrary, she turns her back on America and warns the alien away. Her
torch has become a policeman's baton.
And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the
breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous
waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back
upon the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun
floods the land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near
his setting, but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his
morning prime, so vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of
your first impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud
pinnacle that looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the
temple of primeval gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And
as you gaze you are conscious of a great note of interrogation taking
shape in the mind. Is that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic
expression of the soul of America, or has this mighty power you
are leaving another gospel for mankind? And as the light fades and
battlements and pinnacle merge into the encompassing dark there sounds
in the mind the echoes of an immortal voice--“Let us here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under
God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the
people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth!”
And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell
to America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of
Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.
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