_The Spirit Out-of-Doors_
Much to my regret the Herr Director did not sleep well that second night
in the United States. His nerves had suffered from those first thronging
impressions, he looked pale and was decidedly irritable; "for how could
a man sleep or be expected to sleep in this business canyon, loud from
the thunder of the elevated, and bright from the flashing of illuminated
signs?" Together they had the effect of an electric storm upon him.
When he did fall asleep he dreamed that the Metropolitan Tower, the
Woolworth Building and St. Patrick's Cathedral were dancing Tango upon
his chest.
This nightmare may have been due to the fact that just before retiring
we witnessed an exhibition of this modern madness, which seemed to be
indulged in everywhere except in the churches and possibly the barber
shops. Partly also, perhaps, because the Herr Director insisted upon
eating lobster shortly before midnight, in spite of the fact that I
warned him against that indulgence. It was one of those generous, United
States lobsters, and not the diminutive shell-fish with which cultured
Europeans merely tickle their palates.
The Herr Director had repeatedly pointed out our bad habit of leaving a
great deal of food on our plates, and to impress upon me his better
manners, he had eaten the entire lobster.
I had not slept well that night either, in spite of the fact that I had
eaten sparingly. I think it was the Herr Director himself who had "got
on my nerves," and I was finding this task of "showing off" my beloved
United States difficult and exacting.
That morning we were to leave New York and I would introduce my guests
to the great American out-of-doors, and the prospect added to my already
uncomfortable frame of mind.
If only we might start from that marvellous Central Station in the heart
of the city; but in order to reach our destination, which was Lake
Mohonk, we had to cross the West Side where it is irredeemably tawdry
and ugly, and take one of the ferry-boats to Weehawken. This somewhat
inconvenient procedure made the Herr Director doubly critical.
The Fates were against us, for it was a hot, humid day, the car was
crowded, and the start from Weehawken anything but auspicious.
In Europe the Herr Director travels second class when he travels
officially (the first, as is well known, being reserved for Americans
and fools), and third when he travels _incognito_, for he is a thrifty
soul. Nevertheless, he did not like our cars, they were "obtrusively
decorated," and privacy was impossible. Why should he have to look at a
hundred or more human heads variously "_frisired_"?
I suggested that we take seats in front, which we succeeded in doing,
and then he found that if he wished to take off his collar, he would
have to do it with two hundred or more human eyes fastened upon him,
when the hundred people possessing them had no business to see what he
was doing.
I have already confessed how sensitive I am to criticism of anything
American, no matter how just the criticism may be. So sensitive am I,
that had he reflected upon the good looks of my wife, he could scarcely
have hurt me more than when he reflected upon the beauty and arrangement
of an American railway car.
And yet I have often wondered why our American genius seems to have
exhausted itself when it evolved the present type of car, having done
nothing to it except adding or taking away some of its "gingerbread."
Nevertheless I lost my patience and told him that if he liked to travel
cooped in with seven other passengers, four of whom he must face and two
of whom might at any moment poke their elbows into his ribs; if he
preferred to breathe air polluted by seven other people, and have a
fresh supply of ozone only at periods and in quantities regulated by
law, I did not admire his taste. As far as I was concerned I preferred
to travel in this big room on wheels, rather than in a jail-like box to
which the conductor alone had the key. Anyway this represented American
democracy with its unpartitioned space; but if he really wanted it, I
could get him a stateroom in the Pullman, and he could ride in isolated
splendor and be aristocratically stuffy and uncomfortable.
When the Frau Directorin in typical German phraseology complained about
the draft: "_Um Gottes Willen ein Zug!_" I decided to save the day, and
we retreated to the Pullman stateroom.
There they rested themselves back and looked tolerably happy while I,
silently but fervently, prayed that this particular train would not
disgrace itself by "committing" an accident.
The big, American out-of-doors, even where it is old and its waste
spaces are cultivated and hedged about, has something which is
characteristically American. Of course nature knows no political
boundary; the grass is green everywhere, the sky is blue, cattle and
sheep, like man, have a long and honorable ancestry. Yet there is a
difference which may not be due to what nature is, but to man's attitude
towards her and his treatment of her.
I have noticed this in passing through Europe; how unerringly one knows
where Germanic boundaries end and those of the Slav begin. German fields
and forests are trim and orderly; Slavic territory so ill kept and ill
used that when one has a glimpse of a village even from the swift moving
train, the difference is obvious.
Sometimes I am inclined to believe that this attitude of man affects his
environment as much as we know the environment affects him. I wonder
just how much of the American out-of-doors, with its generous but not
gentle aspect, its subdued but untamed spirit, is due to those valiant
men who came from across the sea, and in so doing restored a bit of
their long-lost courage, and made masters of men who so long had been
serfs and knaves.
I had hoped that the sudden burst of the Hudson upon my guests' vision
would thrill them; but if they were thrilled, they were careful to
conceal it. When I suggested the likeness of the Hudson to the Rhine,
the Herr Director took it as a personal affront and said you might as
well compare St. Patrick's Cathedral and that of Cologne. They are both
churches and Gothic; the Hudson and the Rhine are two rivers, and both
are big.
Nevertheless I insisted that there is an evident resemblance which would
be complete if the Hudson had a ruined castle here and there, or a
picturesquely cramped village huddling against the hillside.
"Yes, and beside castles and picturesque villages," the Herr Director
replied tartly, "you need a thousand years of culture and the same
traditions which make the shores of the Rhine sacred to us; you also
need generations of patiently plodding peasants who have made a
sacrament of their toil. One glance at your rotting boats lying along
the shore, at the untilled, gaping spaces and glaring, inartistic
sign-boards which disfigure it, is sufficient to distinguish the two
rivers or perhaps even the two countries."
Having thus forcefully delivered himself, he scornfully pointed out the
waste places and the unkempt-looking fields, asking me whether I still
dared compare anything in this out-of-doors with the fine economy and
splendid supervision of the natural resources of his own country.
Shamefacedly I acknowledged my country's guilt, and the guilt which was
evident on the majestic shores of the Hudson. We are wasteful,
extravagant and reckless--great defects in our national spirit, and most
in evidence in our treatment of nature's beauty and wealth. We shall
have to remedy that, in fact we are just beginning to do it; if not from
any sense of guilt, from the same sheer necessity which makes the
nations of the Old World careful of their national wealth.
"The Conservation of our National Resources" is a fine phrase; it
represents not only an economic, but a spiritual gain--this feeling of
responsibility for the next generation. It is a new and most valuable
asset of our national spirit; yet I must confess that I fear the coming
of a day when we, too, shall have to practice the sordid little
economies of the Old World and think with anxiety about the to-morrow.
It has always seemed to me that here the miracle of the loaves and
fishes might be performed indefinitely, and that there always would be
left over the baskets full of fragments. Somehow, in common with the
rest of mankind, I have associated generous plenty with the American
spirit, and I trust we shall never have just our dole and no more.
I recall walking one evening with the Herr Director and the Frau
Directorin through the well-regulated, officially trimmed and "_Streng
Verboten_" forest which encircles his native city. My children were with
us--young, vigorous, American savages, who have a superabundance of the
American spirit although they have not a drop of American blood in their
veins. We passed a small mound of freshly mown hay and they promptly
jumped into it, tossing a few handfuls as an offering to their
aboriginal deity, the wind. If they had dashed into the plateglass
window of a jeweler's shop or had desecrated the most holy shrine, they
could not have caused greater consternation.
"_Um Gottes Himmels Willen die Polizei!_" cried the Herr Director and
the Frau Directorin echoed: "_Die Polizei!_"
Although this happened about ten years ago, my children have not
forgotten their fright.
I suppose we still lack this virtue of economy, and yet I hope we may
not lose that certain largeness of nature and that generosity of spirit
which have characterized us.
I love the generous spaces, the unfenced lawns, which make of the whole
village one common park; the grass and clover free to the touch of our
children's feet, the fragrant flowers wasting their bloom, and berries
and cherries enough for the wild things of the woods. May the future not
bring more high walls and narrow lanes, big game preserves for the rich,
and scant patches of soil for the poor; castles for capital and
tenements for labor. And may we never see written over every blade of
grass: "_Streng Verboten_."
I realized that the Herr Director spoke truly when he said that what we
lack over here is a healthy class spirit, which the German farmer has. A
sort of pride in his calling which makes him care for the soil and
nourish it with a lover's passion. To him robbing the soil is as great a
crime as it would be to rob his children. It is not only the Emperor who
regards himself as a partner with God, and sometimes the senior partner;
the commonest, poorest peasant is apt to say as he drenches his field
with the accumulated compost: "_Ich und Gott_."
Speaking of the farmer, the Herr Director admitted that in Germany as
elsewhere there is a trend to the city; but the tide is held back by the
pride of the German farmer, who glories in having his traditions, his
folksongs, and, above all, this sense of partnership with God.
We scarcely have such a thing as a farmer class; we have merely
merchandizers in dirt who sell not only the products of the soil, but
unhesitatingly the soil itself.
The land which we see from the car window, which the pioneers won from
this boundless space, these houses and sheltering groves, the homesteads
in which a great race was cradled, are all for sale, now that the soil
is robbed of its fertility and the robbers have moved on to repeat the
process elsewhere. We are doing something, he admitted, to stem the tide
to the cities; we are introducing agricultural training into our public
schools and are making the raising of corn and wheat a science, but not
as yet a sacrament.
We stayed over night in one of the half-asleep towns on the shores of
the river, a town whose history is written upon the headstones in the
cemetery, in the center of which the stately meeting-house stands. We
met the descendants of those who sleep there, whose pride lies in the
fact that their forefathers were the pioneers who fought the Indians,
the fevers and each other. Their houses are full of old furniture
shipped from England and Holland, and we ate their food and drank their
tea from costly silver and exquisite china which they have inherited.
We looked upon the portraits of their ancestors and were told of their
virtues and their fame; we saw fine memorials to the past in churches
and town halls and rode in their automobiles, to see the farms
bequeathed to them. One thing, alas! they have not and never will
have--descendants.
On one of the farms we saw a swarthy Italian with a bright red rose
behind his ear. His wife and children were working with him in the
field, and they were doing this strange thing as they pulled weeds from
the onion beds--they were singing. The Herr Director said significantly,
"These are the heirs to all this," and I think he was a true prophet.
It is a wonderful thing to invent agricultural machinery and to discover
new methods by which two blades of grass can be made to grow where but
one grew; yet if only some one could tune our dull American ears, so
that our farmers might catch the melody of the singing land and sing
with it; if our boys and girls would love wild roses well enough to wear
them--if, and that is a very big if--some one could teach us Americans
to be proud of having descendants, we might add a new note to the great
American out-of-doors, and keep it American.
That night we sat upon a wide verandah, overlooking a valley through
which the Hudson rolled majestically; we saw populous cities,
picturesque villages and bounteous farms; we looked into the heart of
the out-of-doors and I was proud of it and of its free people, who ought
to be a grateful people. There was deep silence everywhere; no sound
except that of the birds, and they did not sing jubilantly as birds
ought to sing in so blessed a place and on so glorious an evening. No
one sang except the same Italian who was coming home with his wife and
numerous progeny. He still wore the rose behind his ear, although it had
faded. Those who sat with us had every luxury and more money than they
knew how to spend; but they could not sing, for they were old, children
there were none, and if there had been, they would not have been
singing--they would have had a victrola.
After the Italian had eaten his frugal but pungent fare he came to the
big verandah to get his orders for the next day, and the Herr Director
spoke Italian to him and he replied in that language which in itself is
almost a song. His mistress asked him to bring his wife and children to
sing for us. His wife did not come but the children came. They would not
sing an Italian song, it is true--that was just for themselves, in the
fields where only God heard. They sang some sentimental thing they had
heard in the "movies"--chewing gum the while. I asked them to sing
something their teacher taught them but they knew nothing except "My
Country 'tis of Thee" and the "Star Spangled Banner," both of which they
sang joylessly and not understandingly. How and why should they
understand when the Americans did not?
It was a day full of dismal failure in my attempt to impress upon my
guests the American spirit, and the failure of it was "rubbed" in by
the Herr Director, who, as he bade me good-night, quoted as a parting
shot this bit of German verse:
"Und wo Man singt
Da las dich froelich nieder,
Denn boese Menchen haben keine Lieder."
The rub was in his inference that we have no song because we have no
noble spirit.