Square. One of the many daily fire-alarms had gone; the traffic was
drawn to one side, and several fire-engines came, with clanging of bells
and shouting, through the space, gleaming with brass, splendid in their
purpose. Before the thrill in the heart had time to die, or the traffic
to close up, swung through an immense open motor-car driven by a young
mechanic. It was luxuriously appointed, and had the air of a private car
being returned from repairing. The man in it had an almost Swinburnian
mane of red hair, blowing back in the wind, catching the last lights
of day. He was clad, as such people often are in this country these hot
days, only in a suit of yellow overalls, so that his arms and shoulders
and neck and chest were bare. He was big, well-made, and strong, and he
drove the car, not wildly, but a little too fast, leaning back rather
insolently conscious of power. In private life, no doubt, a very
ordinary youth, interested only in baseball scores; but in this brief
passage he seemed like a Greek god, in a fantastically modern, yet not
unworthy way emblemed and incarnate, or like the spirit of Henley's
'Song of Speed.' So I found a better image of America for my sculptor
than the shirt-sleeved young man.
III
NEW YORK--(_continued_)
The hotel into which the workings of blind chance have thrown me is
given over to commercial travellers. Its life is theirs, and the few
English tourists creep in and out with the shy, bewildered dignity of
their race and class. These American commercial travellers are called
'drummers'; drummers in the most endless and pointless and extraordinary
of wars. They have the air and appearance of devotees, men set aside,
roaming preachers of a _jehad_ whose meaning they have forgotten. They
seem to be invariably of the short, dark type. The larger, fair-haired,
long-headed men are common in business, but not in 'drumming.' The
drummer's eyes have a hard, rapt expression. He is not interested in the
romance of the road, like an English commercial traveller; only in its
ever-changing end. These people are for ever sending off and receiving
telegrams, messages, and cablegrams; they are continually telephoning;
stenographers are in waiting to record their inspirations. In the
intervals of activity they relapse into a curious trance, husbanding
their vitality for the next crisis. I have watched them with terror
and fascination. All day there are numbers of them sitting, immote and
vacant, in rows and circles on the hard chairs in the hall. They
are never smoking, never reading a paper, never even chewing. The
expressions of their faces never change. It is impossible to guess
what, or if anything, is in their minds. Hour upon hour they remain.
Occasionally one will rise, in obedience to some call or revelation
incomprehensible to us, and move out through the door into the clang and
confusion of Broadway.
It all confirms the impression that grows on the visitor to America
that Business has developed insensibly into a Religion, in more than the
light, metaphorical sense of the words. It has its ritual and theology,
its high places and its jargon, as well as its priests and martyrs. One
of its more mystical manifestations is in advertisement. America has a
childlike faith in advertising. They advertise here, everywhere, and in
all ways. They shout your most private and sacred wants at you. Nothing
is untouched. Every day I pass a wall, some five hundred square feet
of which a gentleman has taken to declare that he is 'out' to break the
Undertakers' Trust. Half the advertisement is a coloured photograph of
himself. The rest is, "See what I give you for 75 dols.!" and a list of
what he does give. He gives everything that the most morbid taphologist
could suggest, beginning with "splendidly carved full-size oak casket,
with black ivory handles. Four draped Flambeaux...." and going on to
funereal ingenuities that would have overwhelmed Mausolus, and make
death impossible for a refined man.
But there are heights as well as depths. I have been privileged with
some intimate glances into the greatest of those peculiarly American
institutions, the big departmental stores. Materially it is an immense
building, containing all things that any upper-middle-class person could
conceivably want. Such a store includes even Art, with the same bland
omnipotence. If you wander into the vast auditorium, it is equal chances
whether you hear a work of Beethoven, Victor Herbert, Schonberg, or Mr
Hirsch. If you are 'artistic,' you may choose between a large coloured
photograph of the Eiffel Tower, a carbon print of Botticelli, and a
reproduction of an 'improvisation' by Herr Kandinsky. You may buy
an Elizabethan dining-table, a Graeco-Roman bronze, the latest dress
designed by M. Bakst, or a packet of pins. Or you may sit and muse on
the life of the employee of this place, who gets from it all that
in less favoured civilisations family, guild, club, township, and
nationality have given him or her. As a child he gets education, then
evening-classes, continuation-schools, gymnasia, military training,
swimming-baths, orchestra, facilities for the study of anything under
the sun, from palaeography to Cherokee, libraries, holiday-camps,
hospitals, ever-present medical attendance, and at the end a pension,
and, I suppose, a store cemetery. And all for the price of a few hours'
work a day, and a little loyalty to the 'establishment.' Can human
hearts desire more? And, when all millionaires are as sensible, will
they? In industries and businesses like this, where the majority of the
employed are women, it ought to be a pretty stable sort of millennium.
Men, perhaps, take longer to learn that kind of 'loyalty.'
In one corner of this store is the advertising department. There are
gathered poets, artists, _litterateurs_, and mere intellectuals, all
engaged in explaining to the upper middle-classes what there is for them
to buy and why they should buy it. It is a life of good salary, steady
hours, sufficient leisure, and entire dignity. There is no vulgarity in
this advertising, but the most perfect taste and great artistic daring
and novelty. The most 'advanced' productions of Europe are scanned for
ideas and suggestions. Two of the leading young 'post-impressionist'
painters in Paris, whose names are just beginning to be known in
England, have been designing posters for this store for years. I stood
and watched with awe a young American genius doing entirely Matisse-like
illustrations to some notes on summer suitings. "We give our artists a
free hand," said the very intelligent lady in charge of that section;
"except, of course, for nudes or improprieties. And we don't allow
any figures of people _smoking_. Some of our customers object very
strongly...."
Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night. There comes an
hour of evening when lower Broadway, the business end of the town, is
deserted. And if, having felt yourself immersed in men and the frenzy
of cities all day, you stand out in the street in this sudden hush,
you will hear, like a strange questioning voice from another world, the
melancholy boom of a foghorn, and realise that not half a mile away are
the waters of the sea, and some great liner making its slow way out to
the Atlantic. After that, the lights come out up-town, and the New York
of theatres and vaudevilles and restaurants begins to roar and flare.
The merciless lights throw a mask of unradiant glare on the human beings
in the streets, making each face hard, set, wolfish, terribly blue.
The chorus of voices becomes shriller. The buildings tower away into
obscurity, looking strangely theatrical, because lit from below. And
beyond them soars the purple roof of the night. A stranger of another
race, loitering here, might cast his eyes up, in a vague wonder what
powers, kind or maleficent, controlled or observed this whirlpool. He
would find only this unresponsive canopy of black, unpierced even, if
the seeker stood near a centre of lights, by any star. But while he
looks, away up in the sky, out of the gulfs of night, spring two vast
fiery tooth-brushes, erect, leaning towards each other, and hanging on
to the bristles of them a little Devil, little but gigantic, who kicks
and wriggles and glares. After a few moments the Devil, baffled by
the firmness of the bristles, stops, hangs still, rolls his eyes,
moon-large, and, in a fury of disappointment, goes out, leaving only the
night, blacker and a little bewildered, and the unconscious throngs
of ant-like human beings. Turning with terrified relief from this
exhibition of diabolic impotence, the stranger finds a divine hand
writing slowly across the opposite quarter of the heavens its igneous
message of warning to the nations, "Wear--Underwear for Youths and
Men-Boys." And close by this message come forth a youth and a man-boy,
flaming and immortal, clad in celestial underwear, box a short round,
vanish, reappear for another round, and again disappear. Night after
night they wage this combat. What gods they are who fight endlessly and
indecisively over New York is not for our knowledge; whether it be Thor
and Odin, or Zeus and Cronos, or Michael and Lucifer, or Ormuzd and
Ahriman, or Good-as-a-means and Good-as-an-end. The ways of our lords
were ever riddling and obscure. To the right a celestial bottle,
stretching from the horizon to the zenith, appears, is uncorked, and
scatters the worlds with the foam of what ambrosial liquor may have been
within. Beyond, a Spanish goddess, some minor deity in the Dionysian
theogony, dances continually, rapt and mysterious, to the music of
the spheres, her head in Cassiopeia and her twinkling feet among the
Pleiades. And near her, Orion, archer no longer, releases himself from
his strained posture to drive a sidereal golf-ball out of sight through
the meadows of Paradise; then poses, addresses, and drives again.
"O Nineveh, are these thy gods,
Thine also, mighty Nineveh?"
Why this theophany, or how the gods have got out to perform their
various 'stunts' on the _flammantia moenia mundi_, is not asked by their
incurious devotees. Through Broadway the dingily glittering tide spreads
itself over the sands of 'amusement.' Theatres and 'movies' are aglare.
Cars shriek down the street; the Elevated train clangs and curves
perilously overhead; newsboys wail the baseball news; wits cry their
obscure challenges to one another, 'I should worry!' or 'She's some
Daisy!' or 'Good-night, Nurse!' In houses off the streets around
children are being born, lovers are kissing, people are dying. Above,
in the midst of those coruscating divinities, sits one older and greater
than any. Most colossal of all, it flashes momently out, a woman's head,
all flame against the darkness. It is beautiful, passionless, in its
simplicity and conventional representation queerly like an archaic Greek
or early Egyptian figure. Queen of the night behind, and of the gods
around, and of the city below--here, if at all, you think, may one
find the answer to the riddle. Her ostensible message, burning in the
firmament beside her, is that we should buy pepsin chewing-gum. But
there is more, not to be given in words, ineffable. Suddenly, when she
has surveyed mankind, she closes her left eye. Three times she winks,
and then vanishes. No ordinary winks these, but portentous, terrifyingly
steady, obliterating a great tract of the sky. Hour by hour she does
this, night by night, year by year. That enigmatic obscuration of light,
that answer that is no answer, is, perhaps, the first thing in this
world that a child born near here will see, and the last that a
dying man will have to take for a message to the curious dead. She is
immortal. Men have worshipped her as Isis and as Ashtaroth, as Venus, as
Cybele, Mother of the Gods, and as Mary. There is a statue of her by the
steps of the British Museum. Here, above the fantastic civilisation she
observes, she has no name. She is older than the sky-scrapers amongst
which she sits; and one, certainly, of her eyelids is a trifle weary.
And the only answer to our cries, the only comment upon our cities, is
that divine stare, the wink, once, twice, thrice. And then darkness.
IV
BOSTON AND HARVARD
It is right to leave Boston late in a summer afternoon, and by sea.
Naval departure is always the better. A train snatches you, hot, dusty,
and smoky, with an irritated hurry out of the back parts of a town. The
last glimpse of a place you may have grown to like or love is, ignobly,
interminable rows of the bedroom-windows in mean streets, a few hovels,
some cinder-heaps, and a factory chimney. As like as not, you are reft
from a last wave to the city's unresponsive and dingy back by the
roar and suffocation of a tunnel. By sea one takes a gracefuller, more
satisfactory farewell.
Boston put on her best appearance to watch our boat go out for New York.
The harbour was bright with sunlight and blue water and little white
sails, and there wasn't more than the faintest smell of tea. The city
sat primly on her little hills, decorous, civilised, European-looking.
It is homely after New York. The Boston crowd is curiously English.
They have nice eighteenth-century houses there, and ivy grows on the
buildings. And they are hospitable. All Americans are hospitable; but
they haven't _quite_ time in New York to practise the art so perfectly
as the Bostonians. It is a lovely art.... But Boston also makes you feel
at home without meaning to. A delicious ancient Toryism is to be found
here. "What is wrong with America," a middle-aged lady told me, "is this
_Democracy_. They ought to take the votes away from these people, who
don't know how to use them, and give them only to _us_, the Educated."
My heart leapt the Atlantic, and was in a Cathedral or University town
of South England.
Yet Boston is alive. It sits, in comfortable middle-age, on the ruins of
its glory. But it is not buried beneath them. It used to lead America
in Literature, Thought, Art, everything. The years have passed. It
is remarkable how nearly now Boston is to New York what Munich is to
Berlin. Boston and Munich were the leaders forty years ago. They can't
quite make out that they aren't now. It is too incredible that Art
should leave her goose-feather bed and away to the wraggle-taggle
business-men. And certainly, if Berlin and New York are more 'live,'
Boston and Munich are more themselves, less feverishly imitations of
Paris. But the undisputed palm is there no more; and its absence is
felt.
But I had little time to taste Boston itself. I was lured across the
river to a place called Cambridge, where is the University of Harvard.
Harvard is the Oxford and Cambridge of America, they claim. She has
moulded the nation's leaders and uttered its ideals. Harvard, Boston,
New England, it is impossible to say how much they are interwoven, and
how they have influenced America. I saw Harvard in 'Commencement,' which
is Eights Week and May Week, the festive winding-up of the year, a time
of parties and of valedictions. One of the great events of Commencement,
and of the year, is the Harvard-Yale baseball match. To this I went,
excited at the prospect of my first sight of a 'ball game,' and my mind
vaguely reminiscent of the indolent, decorous, upper-class crowd, the
sunlit spaces, the dignified ritual, and white-flannelled grace of
Lord's at the 'Varsity cricket match. The crowd was gay, and not very
large. We sat in wooden stands, which were placed in the shape of a
large V. As all the hitting which counts in baseball takes place well
in front of the wicket, so to speak, the spectators have the game right
under their noses; the striker stands in the angle of the V and plays
outwards. The field was a vast place, partly stubbly grass, partly worn
and patchy, like a parade-ground. Beyond it lay the river; beyond that
the town of Cambridge and the University buildings. Around me were
undergraduates, with their mothers and sisters. 'Cambridge'! ... but
there entered to us, across the field, a troop of several hundred men,
all dressed in striped shirts of the same hue and pattern, and headed by
a vast banner which informed the world that they were the graduates
of 1910, celebrating their triennial. In military formation they moved
across the plain towards us, led by a band, ceaselessly vociferating,
and raising their straw hats in unison to mark the time. There followed
the class of 1907, attired as sailors; 1903, the decennial class, with
some samples of their male children marching with them, and a banner
inscribed "515 Others. No Race Suicide"; 1898, carefully arranged in an
H-shaped formation, dancing along to their music with a slow polka-step,
each with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front, and at the
head of all their leader, dancing backwards in perfect time, marshalling
them; 1888, middle-aged men, again with some children, and a Highland
regiment playing the bagpipes.
When these had passed to the seats allotted for them, I had time to
observe the players, who were practising about the ground, and I was
shocked. They wear dust-coloured shirts and dingy knickerbockers,
fastened under the knee, and heavy boots. They strike the English eye
as being attired for football, or a gladiatorial combat, rather than a
summer game. The very close-fitting caps, with large peaks, give them
picturesquely the appearance of hooligans. Baseball is a good game to
watch, and in outline easy to understand, as it is merely glorified
rounders. A cricketer is fascinated by their rapidity and skill in
catching and throwing. There is excitement in the game, but little
beauty except in the long-limbed 'pitcher,' whose duty it is to hurl the
ball rather further than the length of a cricket-pitch, as bewilderingly
as possible. In his efforts to combine speed, mystery, and curve, he
gets into attitudes of a very novel and fantastic, but quite obvious,
beauty. M. Nijinsky would find them repay study.
One queer feature of this sport is that unoccupied members of the
batting side, fielders, and even spectators, are accustomed to join
in vocally. You have the spectacle of the representatives of the
universities endeavouring to frustrate or unnerve their opponents, at
moments of excitement, by cries of derision and mockery, or heartening
their own supporters and performers with exclamations of 'Now, Joe!' or
'He's got them!' or 'He's the boy!' At the crises in the fortunes of the
game, the spectators take a collective and important part. The Athletic
Committee appoints a 'cheer-leader' for the occasion. Every five or ten
minutes this gentleman, a big, fine figure in white, springs out from
his seat at the foot of the stands, addresses the multitude through a
megaphone with a 'One! Two! Three!' hurls it aside, and, with a wild
flinging and swinging of his body and arms, conducts ten thousand voices
in the Harvard yell. That over, the game proceeds, and the cheer-leader
sits quietly waiting for the next moment of peril or triumph. I shall
not easily forget that figure, bright in the sunshine, conducting with
his whole body, passionate, possessed by a demon, bounding in the frenzy
of his inspiration from side to side, contorted, rhythmic, ecstatic. It
seemed so wonderfully American, in its combination of entire wildness
and entire regulation, with the whole just a trifle fantastic.
Completely friendly and befriended as I was, I couldn't help feeling at
those moments very alien and very, very old--even more so than after the
protracted game had ended in a victory for Harvard, when the dusty plain
was filled with groups and lines of men dancing in solemn harmony, and
a shouting crowd, broken by occasional individuals who could find some
little eminence to lead a Harvard yell from, and who conducted the
bystanders, and then vanished, and the crowd swirled on again.
Different enough was the scene next day, when all Harvard men who were
up for Commencement assembled and, arranged by years, marched round
the yard. Class by class they paraded, beginning with veterans of the
'fifties, down to the class of 1912. I wonder if English nerves could
stand it. It seems to bring the passage of time so very presently
and vividly to the mind. To see, with such emphatic regularity, one's
coevals changing in figure, and diminishing in number, summer after
summer!.... Perhaps it is nobler, this deliberate viewing of oneself as
part of the stream. To the spectator, certainly, the flow and transiency
become apparent and poignant. In five minutes fifty years of America, of
so much of America, go past one. The shape of the bodies, apart from
the effects of age, the lines of the faces, the ways of wearing hair and
beard and moustaches, all these change a little decade by decade, before
your eyes. And through the whole appearance runs some continuity, which
is Harvard.
The orderly progression of the years was unbroken, except at one
point. There was one gap, large and arresting. Though all years were
represented, there seemed to be nobody in the procession between fifty
and sixty. I asked a Harvard friend the reason. "The War," he said. He
told me there had always been that gap. Those who were old enough to
be conscious of the war had lost a big piece of their lives. With their
successors a new America began. I don't know how true it is. Certainly,
the dates worked out right. And I met an American on a boat who had been
a child in one of the neutral States. He used to watch the regiments
forming in the main street of his town, and marching out, some north and
some south. He said it felt as though pieces of his body were being torn
in different directions. And he was only nine.
The procession filed in to an open court, to hear the speeches of the
recipients of honorary degrees, and the President's annual statement.
There was still, in every sense, a solemn atmosphere. The President's
speech floated out into the great open space; fragments of it were blown
to one's ears concerning deaths, and the spirit of the place, and a
detailed account of the money given during the year. Eleven hundred
thousand dollars in all--a record, or nearly a record. We roared
applause. The American universities appear still to dream of the things
of this world. They keep putting up the most wonderful and expensive
buildings. But they do not pay their teachers well.
Yet Harvard is a spirit, a way of looking at things, austerely refined,
gently moral, kindly. The perception of it grows on the foreigner. Its
charm is so deliciously old in this land, so deliciously young
compared with the lovely frowst of Oxford and Cambridge. You see it in
temperament, the charm of simplicity and good-heartedness and
culture; in the Harvard undergraduate, who is a boy, while his English
contemporary is either a young man or a schoolboy, less pleasant stages;
and in the old Bostonian who heard, and still hears, the lectures of
Dickens and Thackeray. Class Day brings so many of that older generation
together. They reveal what Harvard, what Boston, was. There is something
terrifying in the completeness of their lives and their civilisation.
They are like a company of dons whose studies are of a remote and
finished world. But the subject of their scholarship is the Victorian
age, and especially Victorian England. Hence their liveliness and
certainty, greater than men can reach who are concerned with the
dubieties and changes of incomplete things. Hence the wit, the stock of
excellent stories, the wrinkled wisdom and mirth of the type. They are
the flower of a civilisation, its ripest critics, and final judges.
Carlyle and Emerson are their greatest living heroes. One of them bent
the kindliness and alert interest of his eighty years upon me. "So you
come from Rugby," he said. "Tell me, do you know that curious creature,
Matthew Arnold?" I couldn't bring myself to tell him that, even in
Rugby, we had forgiven that brilliant youth his iconoclastic tendencies
some time since, and that, as a matter of fact, he had died when I was
eight months old.
V
MONTREAL AND OTTAWA