seen Oxford nor Cambridge, was in truth comparing Columbia with my dream
of Oxford and Cambridge, to her disadvantage. I was capable of saying to
myself: "All this is terribly new. All this lacks tradition." Criticism
fatuous and mischievous, if human! It would be as sapient to imprison
the entire youth of a country until it had ceased to commit the offense
of being young. Tradition was assuredly not apparent in the atmosphere
of Columbia. Moreover, some of her architecture was ugly. On the other
hand, some of it was beautiful to the point of nobility. The library,
for instance: a building in which no university and no age could feel
anything but pride. And far more important than stone or marble was the
passionate affection for Columbia which I observed in certain of her
sons who had nevertheless known other universities. A passionate
affection also perhaps brought into being since 1893, but not to be
surpassed in honest fervency and loyalty by influences more venerable!
Columbia was full of piquancies for me. It delighted me that the Dean of
Science was also consulting engineer to the university. That was
characteristic and fine. And how splendidly unlike Oxford! I liked the
complete life-sized railroad locomotive in the engineering-shops, and
the Greek custom in the baths; and the students' notion of coziness in
the private dens full of shelves, photographs, and disguised beds; and
the visibility of the president; and his pronounced views as to the
respective merits of New York newspapers; and the eagerness of a young
professor of literature in the Faculty Club to defend against my
attacks English Professor A.C. Bradley. I do believe that I even liked
the singular sight of a Chinaman tabulating from the world's press, in
the modern-history laboratory, a history of the world day by day. I can
hardly conceive a wilder, more fearfully difficult way of trying to
acquire the historical sense than this voyaging through hot, fresh
newspapers, nor one more probably destined to failure (I should have
liked to see some of the two-monthly résumés which students in this
course are obliged to write); but I liked the enterprise and the
originality and the daring of the idea; I liked its disdain of
tradition. And, after all, is it weirder than the common traditional
method?
[Illustration: UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS--UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA]
To the casual visitor, such as myself, unused either to universities or
to the vastness of the American scale, Columbia could be little save an
enormous and overwhelming incoherence. It so chiefly remains in my mind.
But the ingenious humanity running through the whole conception of it
was touching and memorable. And although I came away from my visit still
perfectly innocent of any broad theory as to ultimate educational values
in America, I came away also with a deeper and more reassuring
conviction that America was intensely interested in education, and that
all that America had to do in order to arrive at real national, racial
results was to keep on being intensely interested. When America shall
have so far outclassed Europe as to be able to abolish, in university
examinations, what New York picturesquely calls "the gumshoe squad" (of
course now much more brilliantly organized in America than in
Europe), then we shall begin to think that, under the stroke of the
wand, at least one real national, racial result has been attained!
* * * * *
When I set eyes on the sixty buildings which constitute the visible part
of Harvard University, I perceived that, just as Kensington had without
knowing it been imitating certain streets of Boston, so certain lost
little old English towns that even American tourists have not yet
reached had without knowing it been imitating the courts and chimneys
and windows and doorways and luscious brickwork of Harvard. Harvard had
a very mellow look indeed. No trace of the wand! The European in search
of tradition would find it here in bulk. I should doubt whether at
Harvard modern history is studied through the daily paper--unless
perchance it be in Harvard's own daily paper. The considerableness of
Harvard was attested for me by the multiplicity of its press organs. I
dare say that Harvard is the only university in the world the offices of
whose comic paper are housed in a separate and important building. If
there had been a special press-building for Harvard's press, I should
have been startled. But when I beheld the mere comic organ in a spacious
and costly detached home that some London dailies would envy, I was
struck dumb. That sole fact indicated the scale of magnificence at
Harvard, and proved that the phenomenon of gold-depreciation has
proceeded further at Harvard than at any other public institution in the
world.
The etiquette of Harvard is nicely calculated to heighten the material
splendor of the place. Thus it is etiquette for the president, during
his term of office, to make a present of a building or so to the
university. Now buildings at Harvard have adopted the excellent habit of
never costing less than about half a million dollars. It is also
etiquette that the gifts to the university from old students shall touch
a certain annual sum; they touch it. Withal, there is no architectural
ostentation at Harvard. All the buildings are artistically modest; many
are beautiful; scarcely one that clashes with the sober and subtle
attractiveness of the whole aggregation. Nowhere is the eye offended.
One looks upon the crimson façades with the same lenient love as marks
one's attitude toward those quaint and lovely English houses (so
familiar to American visitors to our isle) that are all picturesqueness
and no bath-room. That is the external effect. Assuredly entering some
of those storied doorways, one would anticipate inconveniences and what
is called "Old World charm" within.
But within one discovers simply naught but the very latest, the very
dearest, the very best of everything that is luxurious. I was ushered
into a most princely apartment, grandiose in dimensions, superbly
furnished and decorated, lighted with rich discretion, heated to a turn.
Portraits by John Sargent hung on the vast walls, and a score of other
manifestations of art rivaled these in the attention of the stranger. No
club in London could match this chamber. It was, I believe, a sort of
lounge for the students. Anyhow, a few students were lounging in it;
only a few--there was no rush for the privilege. And the few loungers
were really lounging, in the wonderful sinuous postures of youth. They
might have been lounging in a railway station or a barn instead of amid
portraits by John Sargent.
The squash-racket court was an example of another kind of luxury, very
different from the cunning combinations of pictured walls, books, carved
wood, and deep-piled carpets, but not less authentic. The dining-hall
seating a thousand simultaneously was another. Here I witnessed the
laying of dinner-tables by negroes. I noted that the sudden sight of me
instantly convinced one negro, engaged in the manipulation of pats of
butter, that a fork would be more in keeping with the Harvard tradition
than his fingers, and I was humanly glad thus to learn that the secret
reality of table-laying is the same in two continents. I saw not the
dining of the thousand. In fact, I doubt whether in all I saw one
hundred of the six thousand students. They had mysteriously vanished
from all the resorts of perfect luxury provided for them. Possibly they
were withdrawn into the privacies of the thousands of suites--each
containing bedroom, sitting-room, bath-room, and telephone--which I
understood are allotted to them for lairs. I left Harvard with a very
clear impression of its frank welcoming hospitality and of its
extraordinary luxury.
And as I came out of the final portal I happened to meet a student
actually carrying his own portmanteau--and rather tugging at it. I
regretted this chance. The spectacle clashed, and ought to have been
contrary to etiquette. That student should in propriety have been
followed by a Nigerian, Liberian, or Senegambian, carrying his
portmanteau.
My visits to other universities were about as brief, stirring,
suggestive, and incomplete as those to Columbia and Harvard. I repeat
that I never actually saw the educational machine in motion. What it
seemed to me that I saw in each case was a tremendous mechanical
apparatus at rest, a rich, empty frame, an organism waiting for the word
that would break its trance. The fault was, of course, wholly mine. I
find upon reflection that the universities which I recall with the most
sympathy are those in which I had the largest opportunity of listening
to the informal talk of the faculty and its wife. I heard some mighty
talking upon occasion--and in particular I sat willing at the feet of a
president who could mingle limericks and other drollery, the humanities,
science, modern linguistics, and economics in a manner which must surely
make him historic.
* * * * *
Education, like most things except high-class cookery, must be judged by
ultimate results; and though it may not be possible to pass any verdict
on current educational methods (especially when you do not happen to
have even seen them in action), one can to a certain extent assess the
values of past education by reference to the demeanor of adults who have
been through it. One of the chief aims of education should be to
stimulate the great virtue of curiosity. The worst detractors of the
American race--and there are some severe ones in New York, London, and
Paris!--will not be able to deny that an unusually active curiosity is a
marked characteristic of the race. Only they twist that very
characteristic into an excuse for still further detraction. They will,
for example, point to the "hordes" (a word which they regard as
indispensable in this connection) of American tourists who insist on
seeing everything of historic or artistic interest that is visible in
Europe. The plausible argument is that the mass of such tourists are
inferior in intellect and taste to the general level of Europeans who
display curiosity about history or art. Which is probably true. But it
ought to be remembered by us Europeans (and in sackcloth!) that the mass
of us with money to spend on pleasure are utterly indifferent to history
and art. The European dilettante goes to the Uffizi and sees a
shopkeeper from Milwaukee gazing ignorantly at a masterpiece, and says:
"How inferior this shopkeeper from Milwaukee is to me! The American is
an inartistic race!" But what about the shopkeeper from Huddersfield or
Amiens? The shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens will be flirting
about on some entirely banal beach--Scarborough or Trouville--and for
all he knows or cares Leonardo da Vinci might have been a cabman; and
yet the loveliest things in the world are, relatively speaking, at his
door! When the European shopkeeper gets as far as Lucerne in August, he
thinks that a journey of twenty-four hours entitles him to rank a little
lower than Columbus. It was an enormous feat for him to reach Lucerne,
and he must have credit for it, though his interest in art is in no wise
thereby demonstrated. One has to admit that he now goes to Lucerne in
hordes. Praise be to him! But I imagine that the American horde
"hustling for culture" in no matter what historic center will compare
pretty favorably with the European horde in such spots as Lucerne.
All general curiosity is, to my mind, righteousness, and I so count it
to the American. Not that I think that American curiosity is always the
highest form of curiosity, or that it is not limited. With its apparent
omnivorousness it is often superficial and too easily satisfied--particularly
by mere words. Very seldom is it profound. It is apt to browse agreeably
on externals. The American, like Anglo-Saxons generally, rarely shows a
passionate and yet honest curiosity about himself or his country, which
is curiosity at its finest. He will divide things into pleasant and
unpleasant, and his curiosity is trained to stop at the frontier of the
latter--an Anglo-Saxon device for being comfortable in your mind! He
likes to know what others think of him and his country, but he is not
very keen on knowing what he really thinks on these subjects himself.
The highest form of curiosity is apt to be painful sometimes. (And yet
who that has practised it would give it up?) It also demands
intellectual honesty--a quality which has been denied by Heaven to all
Anglo-Saxon races, but which nevertheless a proper education ought in
the end to achieve. Were I asked whether I saw in America any
improvement upon Britain in the supreme matter of intellectual honesty,
I should reply, No. I seemed to see in America precisely the same
tendency as in Britain to pretend, for the sake of instant comfort, that
things are not what they are, the same timid but determined dislike of
the whole truth, the same capacity to be shocked by notorious and
universal phenomena, the same delusion that a refusal to look at these
phenomena is equivalent to the destruction of these phenomena, the same
flaccid sentimentality which vitiates practically all Anglo-Saxon art.
And I have stood in the streets of New York, as I have stood in the
streets of London, and longed with an intense nostalgia for one hour of
Paris, where, amid a deplorable decadence, intellectual honesty is
widely discoverable, and where absolutely straight thinking and talking
is not mistaken for cynicism.
* * * * *
Another test of education is the feeling for art, and the creation of an
environment which encourages the increase of artistic talent. (And be it
noted in passing that the intellectually honest races, the Latin, have
been the most artistic, for the mere reason that intellectual dishonesty
is just sentimentality, and sentimentality is the destroying poison of
art.) Now the most exacerbating experience that fell to me in
America--and it fell more than once--was to hear in discreetly lighted
and luxurious drawing-rooms, amid various mural proofs of trained taste,
and usually from the lips of an elegantly Europeanized American woman
with a sad, agreeable smile: "There is no art in the United States.... I
feel like an exile." A number of these exiles, each believing himself or
herself to be a solitary lamp in the awful darkness, are dotted up and
down the great cities, and it is a curious fact that they bitterly
despise one another. In so doing they are not very wrong. For, in the
first place, these people, like nearly all dilettanti of art, are
extremely unreliable judges of racial characteristics. Their mentality
is allied to that of the praisers of time past, who, having read _Tom
Jones_ and _Clarissa_, are incapable of comprehending that the immense
majority of novels produced in the eighteenth century were nevertheless
terrible rubbish. They go to a foreign land, deliberately confine their
attention to the artistic manifestations of that country, and then
exclaim in ecstasy: "What an artistic country this is! How different
from my own!" To the same class belong certain artistic visitors to the
United States who, having in their own country deliberately cut
themselves off from intercourse with ordinary inartistic persons, visit
America, and, meeting there the average man and woman in bulk, frown
superiorly and exclaim: "This Philistine race thinks of nothing but
dollars!" They cannot see the yet quite evident truth that the rank and
file of every land is about equally inartistic. Modern Italy may in the
mass be more lyrical than America, but in either architecture or
painting Italy is simply not to be named with America.
[Illustration: MITCHELL TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS--UNIVERSITY OF
CHICAGO]
Further, and in the second place, these people never did and never will
look in the right quarters for vital art. A really original artist
struggling under their very noses has small chance of being recognized
by them, the reason being that they are imitative, with no real opinion
of their own. They associate art with Florentine frames, matinée hats,
distant museums, and clever talk full of allusions to the dead. It would
not occur to them to search for American art in the architecture of
railway stations and the draftsmanship and sketch-writing of
newspapers and magazines, because they have not the wit to learn that
genuine art flourishes best in the atmosphere of genuine popular demand.
Even so, with all their blindness, it is unnatural that they should not
see and take pride in the spectacular historical facts which prove their
country to be less negligible in art than they would assert. I do not
mean the existence in America of huge and glorious collections of
European masters. I have visited some of these collections, and have
taken keen pleasure therein. But I perceive in them no national
significance--no more national significance than I perceive in the
endowment of splendid orchestras to play foreign music under foreign
conductors, or in the fashionable crowding of classical concerts.
Indeed, it was a somewhat melancholy experience to spend hours in a
private palace crammed with artistic loveliness that was apparently
beloved and understood, and to hear not one single word disclosing the
slightest interest in modern American art. No, as a working artist
myself, I was more impressed and reassured by such a sight as the Innes
room at the colossal Art Institute of Chicago than by all the
collections of old masters in America, though I do not regard Innes as a
very distinguished artist. The aforesaid dilettanti would naturally
condescend to the Innes room at Chicago's institute, as to the
long-sustained, difficult effort which is being made by a school of
Chicago sculptors for the monumental ornamentation of Chicago. But the
dilettanti have accomplished a wonderful feat of unnaturalness in
forgetting that their poor, inartistic Philistine country did provide,
_inter alia_, the great writer who has influenced French imaginative
writers more deeply than any other foreign writer since Byron--Edgar
Allan Poe; did produce one of the world's supreme poets--Whitman; did
produce the greatest pure humorist of modern times; did produce the
miraculous Henry James; did produce Stanford White and the incomparable
McKim; and did produce the only two Anglo-Saxon personalities who in
graphic art have been able to impose themselves on modern
Europe--Whistler and John Sargent.
* * * * *
In the matter of graphic art, I have known so many American painters in
Paris that I was particularly anxious to see what American painting was
like at home. My first adventures were not satisfactory. I trudged
through enormous exhibitions, and they filled me with just the same
feeling of desolation and misery that I experienced at the Royal
Academy, London, or the Société des Artistes Français, Paris. In miles
of slippery exercise I saw almost nothing that could interest an
intelligent amateur who had passed a notable portion of his life in
studios. The first modern American painting that arrested me was one by
Grover, of Chicago. I remember it with gratitude. Often, especially in
New York, I was called upon by stay-at-home dilettanti to admire the
work of some shy favorite, and with the best will in the world I could
not, on account of his too obvious sentimentality. In Boston I was
authoritatively informed that the finest painting in the whole world was
at that moment being done by a group of Boston artists in Boston. But as
I had no opportunity to see their work, I cannot offer an opinion on
the proud claim. My gloom was becoming permanent, when one wet day I
invaded, not easily, the Macdowell Club, and, while listening to a
chorus rehearsal of Liszt's "St. Elizabeth" made the acquaintance of
really interesting pictures by artists such as Irving R. Wiles, Jonas
Lie, Henri, Mrs. Johansen, and Brimley, of whom previously I had known
nothing. From that moment I progressed. I met the work of James Preston,
and of other men who can truly paint.
All these, however, with all their piquant merits, were Parisianized.
They could have put up a good show in Paris and emerged from French
criticism with dignity. Whereas there is one American painter who has
achieved a reputation on the tongues of men in Europe without (it is
said) having been influenced by Europe, or even having exhibited there.
I mean Winslow Homer. I had often heard of Winslow Homer from
connoisseurs who had earned my respect, and assuredly one of my reasons
for coming to America was to see Winslow Homer's pictures. My first
introduction to his oil-paintings was a shock. I did not like them, and
I kept on not liking them. I found them theatrical and violent in
conception, rather conventional in design, and repellent in color. I
thought the painter's attitude toward sea and rock and sky decidedly
sentimental beneath its wilful harshness. And I should have left America
with broken hopes of Winslow Homer if an enthusiast for State-patronized
art had not insisted on taking me to the State Museum at Indianapolis.
In this agreeable and interesting museum there happened to be a
temporary loan exhibit of water-colors by Winslow Homer. Which
water-colors were clearly the productions of a master. They forced me to
reconsider my views of Homer's work in general. They were beautiful;
they thrilled; they were genuine American; there is nothing else like
them. I shall never forget the pleasure I felt in unexpectedly
encountering these summary and highly distinguished sketches in the
quietude of Indianapolis. I would have liked to collect a trainful of
New York, Chicago, and Boston dilettanti, and lead them by the ears to
the unpretentious museum at Indianapolis, and force them to regard
fixedly these striking creations. Not that I should expect appreciation
from them! (Indianapolis, I discovered, was able to keep perfectly calm
in front of the Winslow Homer water-colors.) But their observations
would have been diverting.
VIII
CITIZENS
Nothing in New York fascinated me as much as the indications of the vast
and multitudinous straitened middle-class life that is lived there; the
average, respectable, difficult, struggling existence. I would always
regard this medium plane of the social organism with more interest than
the upper and lower planes. And in New York the enormity of it becomes
spectacular. As I passed in Elevated trains across the end of street
after street, and street after street, and saw so many of them just
alike, and saw so many similar faces mysteriously peering in the same
posture between the same curtains through the same windows of the same
great houses; and saw canaries in cages, and enfeebled plants in pots,
and bows of ribbon, and glints of picture-frames; and saw crowd after
dense crowd fighting down on the cobbled roads for the fearful privilege
of entering a surface-car--I had, or seemed to have, a composite vision
of the general life of the city.
And what sharpened and stimulated the vision more than anything else was
the innumerable flashing glimpses of immense torn clouds of clean linen,
or linen almost clean, fluttering and shaking in withdrawn courtyards
between rows and rows of humanized windows. This domestic detail,
repugnant possibly to some, was particularly impressive to me; it was
the visible index of what life really is on a costly rock ruled in all
material essentials by trusts, corporations, and the grand principle of
tipping.
I would have liked to live this life, for a space, in any one of half a
million restricted flats, with not quite enough space, not quite enough
air, not quite enough dollars, and a vast deal too much continual strain
on the nerves. I would have liked to come to close quarters with it, and
get its subtle and sinister toxin incurably into my system. Could I have
done so, could I have participated in the least of the uncountable daily
dramas of which the externals are exposed to the gaze of any starer in
an Elevated, I should have known what New York truly meant to
New-Yorkers, and what was the real immediate effect of average education
reacting on average character in average circumstances; and the
knowledge would have been precious and exciting beyond all knowledge of
the staggering "wonders" of the capital. But, of course, I could not
approach so close to reality; the visiting stranger seldom can; he must
be content with his imaginative visions.
[Illustration: PART OF THE DAILY ROUND OF THE INDOMITABLE NEW YORK
WOMAN]