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WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LIMITED LONDON
MCMXXII
Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD. at the Edinburgh
University Press
_Contents_
PAGE
WHAT IS AMERICA? 1
A MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 19
A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 33
IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 47
SOME AMERICAN CITIES 63
IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 80
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 97
PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 121
PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 145
FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 163
THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 182
THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 195
IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 208
LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 222
WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 235
A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 253
THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 267
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 281
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 295
_What is America?_
I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the
mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and
imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there
is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the
thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders,
embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead
or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what
they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant
for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond
that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather
an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be
inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw
dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the
abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as
those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the
fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar
manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in
fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if
men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand
each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger--the moment
when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a
meeting meant a duel.
Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travellers
are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. I do not blame
them for being amused; it is perfectly natural to be amused at a
Dutchman for being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where they are
wrong is that they take their own amusement seriously. They base on it
their serious ideas of international instruction. It was said that the
Englishman takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despising
foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He comes to scoff
and does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate. Hence in
international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too
much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely
consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is
actually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is the
only excuse of this book.
Let me begin my American impressions with two impressions I had before I
went to America. One was an incident and the other an idea; and when
taken together they illustrate the attitude I mean. The first principle
is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is
foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong
because it is funny. The reaction of his senses and superficial habits
of mind against something new, and to him abnormal, is a perfectly
healthy reaction. But the mind which imagines that mere unfamiliarity
can possibly prove anything about inferiority is a very inadequate mind.
It is inadequate even in criticising things that may really be inferior
to the things involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro for
having a black face than to sneer at him for having a sloping skull. It
is proportionally even more preferable to laugh rather than judge in
dealing with highly civilised peoples. Therefore I put at the beginning
two working examples of what I felt about America before I saw it; the
sort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy as a joke, and the sort of
thing he has a duty to understand and respect, because it is the
explanation of the joke.
When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports, I was
capable of expecting the American consulate to be American. Embassies
and consulates are by tradition like islands of the soil for which they
stand; and I have often found the tradition corresponding to a truth. I
have seen the unmistakable French official living on omelettes and a
little wine and serving his sacred abstractions under the last
palm-trees fringing a desert. In the heat and noise of quarrelling Turks
and Egyptians, I have come suddenly, as with the cool shock of his own
shower-bath, on the listless amiability of the English gentleman. The
officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very
polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin
Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in
the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all
appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices.
But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up
in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game
called 'Confessions' which my friends and I invented in our youth; an
examination paper containing questions like, 'If you saw a rhinoceros
in the front garden, what would you do?' One of my friends, I remember,
wrote, 'Take the pledge.' But that is another story, and might bring Mr.
Pussyfoot Johnson on the scene before his time.
One of the questions on the paper was, 'Are you an anarchist?' To which
a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, 'What
the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist?' along with some
playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes an
[Greek: archê]. Then there was the question, 'Are you in favour of
subverting the government of the United States by force?' Against this I
should write, 'I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour
and not the beginning.' The inquisitor, in his more than morbid
curiosity, had then written down, 'Are you a polygamist?' The answer to
this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not such a fool,' according to our
experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that
given to W. T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, 'Shall
I slay my brother Boer?'--the answer that ran, 'Never interfere in
family matters.' But among many things that amused me almost to the
point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was
the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it
respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip
into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting
down to write with a beautiful gravity, 'I am an anarchist. I hate you
all and wish to destroy you.' Or, 'I intend to subvert by force the
government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long
sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest
opportunity.' Or again, 'Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my
forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as
secretaries.' There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these
answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists
are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and
they are certain to tell no lies.
Now that is a model of the sort of foreign practice, founded on foreign
problems, at which a man's first impulse is naturally to laugh. Nor have
I any intention of apologising for my laughter. A man is perfectly
entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it
incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as
incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The
very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking
about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and
that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.
Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be easy enough
to suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal spirit
of inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all the
ancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there will be something
to be said later; but superficially it is true that this degree of
officialism is comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only the
year before I had occasion to have my papers passed by governments which
many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and
assassins; I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled
by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one
wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether
I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit
the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of
civil authority. These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did not
care about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally would not have
minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a
polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in
the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire
into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of
practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be easy to
argue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern
despotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop the
fancy that, as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the
American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition.
Only the traveller who stops at that point is totally wrong; and the
traveller only too often does stop at that point. He has found something
to make him laugh, and he will not suffer it to make him think. And the
remedy is not to unsay what he has said, not even, so to speak, to
unlaugh what he has laughed, not to deny that there is something unique
and curious about this American inquisition into our abstract opinions,
but rather to continue the train of thought, and follow the admirable
advice of Mr. H. G. Wells, who said, 'It is not much good thinking of a
thing unless you think it out.' It is not to deny that American
officialism is rather peculiar on this point, but to inquire what it
really is which makes America peculiar, or which is peculiar to America.
In short, it is to get some ultimate idea of what America _is_; and the
answer to that question will reveal something much deeper and grander
and more worthy of our intelligent interest.
It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the
American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it
does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a
compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish
Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only
nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth
with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of
Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also
theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all
men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give
them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It
certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn
atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority
from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern
political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas,
and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim
is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about
divine, at least about human things.
Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the
world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of
all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of
all men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to
exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute
something else for Jewish religion or Greek philosophy. It was truly
said to be a net drawing in of all kinds; but a net of a certain
pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even of
the most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and true
among others of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been narrow
touching theology, it could not confess to being narrow about
nationality or ethnology. The Spanish Inquisition might be admittedly
Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish.
Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be
broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was
heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And
we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for
making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now in
a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the
same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experiment
of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a
melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a
certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The
melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was traced on the lines of
Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it
becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it
implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so
far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious
because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal,
precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And in
something of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist,
precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.
Now for America this is no idle theory. It may have been theoretical,
though it was thoroughly sincere, when that great Virginian gentleman
declared it in surroundings that still had something of the character of
an English countryside. It is not merely theoretical now. There is
nothing to prevent America being literally invaded by Turks, as she is
invaded by Jews or Bulgars. In the most exquisitely inconsequent of the
_Bab Ballads_, we are told concerning Pasha Bailey Ben:--
One morning knocked at half-past eight
A tall Red Indian at his gate.
In Turkey, as you 'r' p'raps aware,
Red Indians are extremely rare.
But the converse need by no means be true. There is nothing in the
nature of things to prevent an emigration of Turks increasing and
multiplying on the plains where the Red Indians wandered; there is
nothing to necessitate the Turks being extremely rare. The Red Indians,
alas, are likely to be rarer. And as I much prefer Red Indians to Turks,
not to mention Jews, I speak without prejudice; but the point here is
that America, partly by original theory and partly by historical
accident, does lie open to racial admixtures which most countries would
think incongruous or comic. That is why it is only fair to read any
American definitions or rules in a certain light, and relatively to a
rather unique position. It is not fair to compare the position of those
who may meet Turks in the back street with that of those who have never
met Turks except in the _Bab Ballads_. It is not fair simply to compare
America with England in its regulations about the Turk. In short, it is
not fair to do what almost every Englishman probably does; to look at
the American international examination paper, and laugh and be satisfied
with saying, 'We don't have any of that nonsense in England.'
We do not have any of that nonsense in England because we have never
attempted to have any of that philosophy in England. And, above all,
because we have the enormous advantage of feeling it natural to be
national, because there is nothing else to be. England in these days is
not well governed; England is not well educated; England suffers from
wealth and poverty that are not well distributed. But England is
English; _esto perpetua_. England is English as France is French or
Ireland Irish; the great mass of men taking certain national traditions
for granted. Now this gives us a totally different and a very much
easier task. We have not got an inquisition, because we have not got a
creed; but it is arguable that we do not need a creed, because we have
got a character. In any of the old nations the national unity is
preserved by the national type. Because we have a type we do not need to
have a test.
Take that innocent question, 'Are you an anarchist?' which is
intrinsically quite as impudent as 'Are you an optimist?' or 'Are you a
philanthropist?' I am not discussing here whether these things are
right, but whether most of us are in a position to know them rightly.
Now it is quite true that most Englishmen do not find it necessary to go
about all day asking each other whether they are anarchists. It is quite
true that the phrase occurs on no British forms that I have seen. But
this is not only because most of the Englishmen are not anarchists. It
is even more because even the anarchists are Englishmen. For instance,
it would be easy to make fun of the American formula by noting that the
cap would fit all sorts of bald academic heads. It might well be
maintained that Herbert Spencer was an anarchist. It is practically
certain that Auberon Herbert was an anarchist. But Herbert Spencer was
an extraordinarily typical Englishman of the Nonconformist middle class.
And Auberon Herbert was an extraordinarily typical English aristocrat of
the old and genuine aristocracy. Every one knew in his heart that the
squire would not throw a bomb at the Queen, and the Nonconformist would
not throw a bomb at anybody. Every one knew that there was something
subconscious in a man like Auberon Herbert, which would have come out
only in throwing bombs at the enemies of England; as it did come out in
his son and namesake, the generous and unforgotten, who fell flinging
bombs from the sky far beyond the German line. Every one knows that
normally, in the last resort, the English gentleman is patriotic. Every
one knows that the English Nonconformist is national even when he denies
that he is patriotic. Nothing is more notable indeed than the fact that
nobody is more stamped with the mark of his own nation than the man who
says that there ought to be no nations. Somebody called Cobden the
International Man; but no man could be more English than Cobden.
Everybody recognises Tolstoy as the iconoclast of all patriotism; but
nobody could be more Russian than Tolstoy. In the old countries where
there are these national types, the types may be allowed to hold any
theories. Even if they hold certain theories, they are unlikely to do
certain things. So the conscientious objector, in the English sense,
may be and is one of the peculiar by-products of England. But the
conscientious objector will probably have a conscientious objection to
throwing bombs.
Now I am very far from intending to imply that these American tests are
good tests, or that there is no danger of tyranny becoming the
temptation of America. I shall have something to say later on about that
temptation or tendency. Nor do I say that they apply consistently this
conception of a nation with the soul of a church, protected by religious
and not racial selection. If they did apply that principle consistently,
they would have to exclude pessimists and rich cynics who deny the
democratic ideal; an excellent thing but a rather improbable one. What I
say is that when we realise that this principle exists at all, we see
the whole position in a totally different perspective. We say that the
Americans are doing something heroic, or doing something insane, or
doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of simply
wondering what the devil they are doing.
When we realise the democratic design of such a cosmopolitan
commonwealth, and compare it with our insular reliance or instincts, we
see at once why such a thing has to be not only democratic but dogmatic.
We see why in some points it tends to be inquisitive or intolerant. Any
one can see the practical point by merely transferring into private life
a problem like that of the two academic anarchists, who might by a
coincidence be called the two Herberts. Suppose a man said, 'Buffle, my
old Oxford tutor, wants to meet you; I wish you'd ask him down for a day
or two. He has the oddest opinions, but he's very stimulating.' It would
not occur to us that the oddity of the Oxford don's opinions would lead
him to blow up the house; because the Oxford don is an English type.
Suppose somebody said, 'Do let me bring old Colonel Robinson down for
the week-end; he's a bit of a crank but quite interesting.' We should
not anticipate the colonel running amuck with a carving-knife and
offering up human sacrifice in the garden; for these are not among the
daily habits of an old English colonel; and because we know his habits,
we do not care about his opinions. But suppose somebody offered to bring
a person from the interior of Kamskatka to stay with us for a week or
two, and added that his religion was a very extraordinary religion, we
should feel a little more inquisitive about what kind of religion it
was. If somebody wished to add a Hairy Ainu to the family party at
Christmas, explaining that his point of view was so individual and
interesting, we should want to know a little more about it and him. We
should be tempted to draw up as fantastic an examination paper as that
presented to the emigrant going to America. We should ask what a Hairy
Ainu was, and how hairy he was, and above all what sort of Ainu he was.
Would etiquette require us to ask him to bring his wife? And if we did
ask him to bring his wife, how many wives would he bring? In short, as
in the American formula, is he a polygamist? Merely as a point of
housekeeping and accommodation the question is not irrelevant. Is the
Hairy Ainu content with hair, or does he wear any clothes? If the police
insist on his wearing clothes, will he recognise the authority of the
police? In short, as in the American formula, is he an anarchist?
Of course this generalisation about America, like other historical
things, is subject to all sorts of cross divisions and exceptions, to
be considered in their place. The negroes are a special problem, because
of what white men in the past did to them. The Japanese are a special
problem, because of what men fear that they in the future may do to
white men. The Jews are a special problem, because of what they and the
Gentiles, in the past, present, and future, seem to have the habit of
doing to each other. But the point is not that nothing exists in America
except this idea; it is that nothing like this idea exists anywhere
except in America. This idea is not internationalism; on the contrary it
is decidedly nationalism. The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to
make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of
making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In
a word, what is unique is not America but what is called
Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing
ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not
trying to Anglicise thousands of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders.
France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or
German prisoners of war. America is the one place in the world where
this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on.
And the process, as I have pointed out, is _not_ internationalisation.
It would be truer to say it is the nationalisation of the
internationalised. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out
of exiles. This is what at once illuminates and softens the moral
regulations which we may really think faddist or fanatical. They are
abnormal; but in one sense this experiment of a home for the homeless is
abnormal. In short, it has long been recognised that America was an
asylum. It is only since Prohibition that it has looked a little like a
lunatic asylum.
It was before sailing for America, as I have said, that I stood with the
official paper in my hand and these thoughts in my head. It was while I
stood on English soil that I passed through the two stages of smiling
and then sympathising; of realising that my momentary amusement, at
being asked if I were not an Anarchist, was partly due to the fact that
I was not an American. And in truth I think there are some things a man
ought to know about America before he sees it. What we know of a country
beforehand may not affect what we see that it is; but it will vitally
affect what we appreciate it for being, because it will vitally affect
what we expect it to be. I can honestly say that I had never expected
America to be what nine-tenths of the newspaper critics invariably
assume it to be. I never thought it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony,
knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different
colonists. During the war I felt that the very worst propaganda for the
Allies was the propaganda for the Anglo-Saxons. I tried to point out
that in one way America is nearer to Europe than England is. If she is
not nearer to Bulgaria, she is nearer to Bulgars; if she is not nearer
to Bohemia, she is nearer to Bohemians. In my New York hotel the head
waiter in the dining-room was a Bohemian; the head waiter in the
grill-room was a Bulgar. Americans have nationalities at the end of the
street which for us are at the ends of the earth. I did my best to
persuade my countrymen not to appeal to the American as if he were a
rather dowdy Englishman, who had been rusticating in the provinces and
had not heard the latest news about the town. I shall record later some
of those arresting realities which the traveller does not expect; and
which, in some cases I fear, he actually does not see because he does
not expect. I shall try to do justice to the psychology of what Mr.
Belloc has called 'Eye-Openers in Travel.' But there are some things
about America that a man ought to see even with his eyes shut. One is
that a state that came into existence solely through its repudiation and
abhorrence of the British Crown is not likely to be a respectful copy of
the British Constitution. Another is that the chief mark of the
Declaration of Independence is something that is not only absent from
the British Constitution, but something which all our constitutionalists
have invariably thanked God, with the jolliest boasting and bragging,
that they had kept out of the British Constitution. It is the thing
called abstraction or academic logic. It is the thing which such jolly
people call theory; and which those who can practise it call thought.
And the theory or thought is the very last to which English people are
accustomed, either by their social structure or their traditional
teaching. It is the theory of equality. It is the pure classic
conception that no man must aspire to be anything more than a citizen,
and that no man should endure to be anything less. It is by no means
especially intelligible to an Englishman, who tends at his best to the
virtues of the gentleman and at his worst to the vices of the snob. The
idealism of England, or if you will the romance of England, has not been
primarily the romance of the citizen. But the idealism of America, we
may safely say, still revolves entirely round the citizen and his
romance. The realities are quite another matter, and we shall consider
in its place the question of whether the ideal will be able to shape
the realities or will merely be beaten shapeless by them. The ideal is
besieged by inequalities of the most towering and insane description in
the industrial and economic field. It may be devoured by modern
capitalism, perhaps the worst inequality that ever existed among men. Of
all that we shall speak later. But citizenship is still the American
ideal; there is an army of actualities opposed to that ideal; but there
is no ideal opposed to that ideal. American plutocracy has never got
itself respected like English aristocracy. Citizenship is the American
ideal; and it has never been the English ideal. But it is surely an
ideal that may stir some imaginative generosity and respect in an
Englishman, if he will condescend to be also a man. In this vision of
moulding many peoples into the visible image of the citizen, he may see
a spiritual adventure which he can admire from the outside, at least as
much as he admires the valour of the Moslems and much more than he
admires the virtues of the Middle Ages. He need not set himself to
develop equality, but he need not set himself to misunderstand it. He
may at least understand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant, and he may
possibly find some assistance in this task by reading what they said. He
may realise that equality is not some crude fairy tale about all men
being equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe
but cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by
which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity
as intangible as death. He may at least be a philosopher and see that
equality is an idea; and not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics
who, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne in
tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other twenty times over, with
unwearied iteration, that equality is an illusion.
In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extreme
disproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing of
changing lights and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies and
distortions. We find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find
him forgotten; we see a race dominant and cannot linger to see it decay.
It is the experience of men that always returns to the equality of men;
it is the average that ultimately justifies the average man. It is when
men have seen and suffered much and come at the end of more elaborate
experiments, that they see men as men under an equal light of death and
daily laughter; and none the less mysterious for being many. Nor is it
in vain that these Western democrats have sought the blazonry of their
flag in that great multitude of immortal lights that endure behind the
fires we see, and gathered them into the corner of Old Glory whose
ground is like the glittering night. For veritably, in the spirit as
well as in the symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our
skies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration; and wherever
the old shadow stoops upon the earth, the stars return.
_A Meditation in a New York Hotel_
All this must begin with an apology and not an apologia. When I went
wandering about the States disguised as a lecturer, I was well aware
that I was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. I was even in
the worst possible position to be a sight-seer. A lecturer to American
audiences can hardly be in the holiday mood of a sight-seer. It is
rather the audience that is sight-seeing; even if it is seeing a rather
melancholy sight. Some say that people come to see the lecturer and not
to hear him; in which case it seems rather a pity that he should disturb
and distress their minds with a lecture. He might merely display himself
on a stand or platform for a stipulated sum; or be exhibited like a
monster in a menagerie. The circus elephant is not expected to make a
speech. But it is equally true that the circus elephant is not allowed
to write a book. His impressions of travel would be somewhat sketchy and
perhaps a little over-specialised. In merely travelling from circus to
circus he would, so to speak, move in rather narrow circles. Jumbo the
great elephant (with whom I am hardly so ambitious as to compare
myself), before he eventually went to the Barnum show, passed a
considerable and I trust happy part of his life in Regent's Park. But if
he had written a book on England, founded on his impressions of the Zoo,
it might have been a little disproportionate and even misleading in its
version of the flora and fauna of that country. He might imagine that
lions and leopards were commoner than they are in our hedgerows and
country lanes, or that the head and neck of a giraffe was as native to
our landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apologise in
anticipation for a probable lack of proportion in this work. Like the
elephant, I may have seen too much of a special enclosure where a
special sort of lions are gathered together. I may exaggerate the
territorial, as distinct from the vertical space occupied by the
spiritual giraffe; for the giraffe may surely be regarded as an example
of Uplift, and is even, in a manner of speaking, a high-brow. Above all,
I shall probably make generalisations that are much too general; and are
insufficient through being exaggerative. To this sort of doubt all my
impressions are subject; and among them the negative generalisation with
which I shall begin this rambling meditation on American hotels.
In all my American wanderings I never saw such a thing as an inn. They
may exist; but they do not arrest the traveller upon every road as they
do in England and in Europe. The saloons no longer existed when I was
there, owing to the recent reform which restricted intoxicants to the
wealthier classes. But we feel that the saloons have been there; if one
may so express it, their absence is still present. They remain in the
structure of the street and the idiom of the language. But the saloons
were not inns. If they had been inns, it would have been far harder even
for the power of modern plutocracy to root them out. There will be a
very different chase when the White Hart is hunted to the forests or
when the Red Lion turns to bay. But people could not feel about the
American saloon as they will feel about the English inns. They could not
feel that the Prohibitionist, that vulgar chucker-out, was chucking
Chaucer out of the Tabard and Shakespeare out of the Mermaid. In justice
to the American Prohibitionists it must be realised that they were not
doing quite such desecration; and that many of them felt the saloon a
specially poisonous sort of place. They did feel that drinking-places
were used only as drug-shops. So they have effected the great
reconstruction, by which it will be necessary to use only drug-shops as
drinking-places. But I am not dealing here with the problem of
Prohibition except in so far as it is involved in the statement that the
saloons were in no sense inns. Secondly, of course, there are the
hotels. There are indeed. There are hotels toppling to the stars, hotels
covering the acreage of villages, hotels in multitudinous number like a
mob of Babylonian or Assyrian monuments; but the hotels also are not
inns.
Broadly speaking, there is only one hotel in America. The pattern of it,
which is a very rational pattern, is repeated in cities as remote from
each other as the capitals of European empires. You may find that hotel
rising among the red blooms of the warm spring woods of Nebraska, or
whitened with Canadian snows near the eternal noise of Niagara. And
before touching on this solid and simple pattern itself, I may remark
that the same system of symmetry runs through all the details of the
interior. As one hotel is like another hotel, so one hotel floor is like
another hotel floor. If the passage outside your bedroom door, or
hallway as it is called, contains, let us say, a small table with a
green vase and a stuffed flamingo, or some trifle of the sort, you may
be perfectly certain that there is exactly the same table, vase, and
flamingo on every one of the thirty-two landings of that towering
habitation. This is where it differs most perhaps from the crooked
landings and unexpected levels of the old English inns, even when they
call themselves hotels. To me there was something weird, like a magic
multiplication, in the exquisite sameness of these suites. It seemed to
suggest the still atmosphere of some eerie psychological story. I once
myself entertained the notion of a story, in which a man was to be
prevented from entering his house (the scene of some crime or calamity)
by people who painted and furnished the next house to look exactly like
it; the assimilation going to the most fantastic lengths, such as
altering the numbering of houses in the street. I came to America and
found an hotel fitted and upholstered throughout for the enactment of my
phantasmal fraud. I offer the skeleton of my story with all humility to
some of the admirable lady writers of detective stories in America, to
Miss Carolyn Wells, or Miss Mary Roberts Rhinehart, or Mrs. A. K. Green
of the unforgotten Leavenworth Case. Surely it might be possible for the
unsophisticated Nimrod K. Moose, of Yellow Dog Flat, to come to New York
and be entangled somehow in this net of repetitions or recurrences.
Surely something tells me that his beautiful daughter, the Rose of Red
Murder Gulch, might seek for him in vain amid the apparently
unmistakable surroundings of the thirty-second floor, while he was being
quietly butchered by the floor-clerk on the thirty-third floor, an agent
of the Green Claw (that formidable organisation); and all because the
two floors looked exactly alike to the virginal Western eye. The
original point of my own story was that the man to be entrapped walked
into his own house after all, in spite of it being differently painted
and numbered, simply because he was absent-minded and used to taking a
certain number of mechanical steps. This would not work in the hotel;
because a lift has no habits. It is typical of the real tameness of
machinery, that even when we talk of a man turning mechanically we only
talk metaphorically; for it is something that a mechanism cannot do. But
I think there is only one real objection to my story of Mr. Moose in the
New York hotel. And that is unfortunately a rather fatal one. It is that
far away in the remote desolation of Yellow Dog, among those outlying
and outlandish rocks that almost seem to rise beyond the sunset, there
is undoubtedly an hotel of exactly the same sort, with all its floors
exactly the same.
Anyhow the general plan of the American hotel is commonly the same, and,
as I have said, it is a very sound one so far as it goes. When I first
went into one of the big New York hotels, the first impression was
certainly its bigness. It was called the Biltmore; and I wondered how
many national humorists had made the obvious comment of wishing they had
built less. But it was not merely the Babylonian size and scale of such
things, it was the way in which they are used. They are used almost as
public streets, or rather as public squares. My first impression was
that I was in some sort of high street or market-place during a carnival
or a revolution. True, the people looked rather rich for a revolution
and rather grave for a carnival; but they were congested in great crowds
that moved slowly like people passing through an overcrowded railway
station. Even in the dizzy heights of such a sky-scraper there could not
possibly be room for all those people to sleep in the hotel, or even to
dine in it. And, as a matter of fact, they did nothing whatever except
drift into it and drift out again. Most of them had no more to do with
the hotel than I have with Buckingham Palace. I have never been in
Buckingham Palace, and I have very seldom, thank God, been in the big
hotels of this type that exist in London or Paris. But I cannot believe
that mobs are perpetually pouring through the Hotel Cecil or the Savoy
in this fashion, calmly coming in at one door and going out of the
other. But this fact is part of the fundamental structure of the
American hotel; it is built upon a compromise that makes it possible.
The whole of the lower floor is thrown open to the public streets and
treated as a public square. But above it and all round it runs another
floor in the form of a sort of deep gallery, furnished more luxuriously
and looking down on the moving mobs beneath. No one is allowed on this
floor except the guests or clients of the hotel. As I have been one of
them myself, I trust it is not unsympathetic to compare them to active
anthropoids who can climb trees, and so look down in safety on the herds
or packs of wilder animals wandering and prowling below. Of course there
are modifications of this architectural plan, but they are generally
approximations to it; it is the plan that seems to suit the social life
of the American cities. There is generally something like a ground floor
that is more public, a half-floor or gallery above that is more private,
and above that the bulk of the block of bedrooms, the huge hive with its
innumerable and identical cells.
The ladder of ascent in this tower is of course the lift, or, as it is
called, the elevator. With all that we hear of American hustle and
hurry it is rather strange that Americans seem to like more than we do
to linger upon long words. And indeed there is an element of delay in
their diction and spirit, very little understood, which I may discuss
elsewhere. Anyhow they say elevator when we say lift, just as they say
automobile when we say motor and stenographer when we say typist, or
sometimes (by a slight confusion) typewriter. Which reminds me of
another story that never existed, about a man who was accused of having
murdered and dismembered his secretary when he had only taken his typing
machine to pieces; but we must not dwell on these digressions. The
Americans may have another reason for giving long and ceremonious titles
to the lift. When first I came among them I had a suspicion that they
possessed and practised a new and secret religion, which was the cult of
the elevator. I fancied they worshipped the lift, or at any rate
worshipped in the lift. The details or data of this suspicion it were
now vain to collect, as I have regretfully abandoned it, except in so
far as they illustrate the social principles underlying the structural
plan of the building. Now an American gentleman invariably takes off his
hat in the lift. He does not take off his hat in the hotel, even if it
is crowded with ladies. But he always so salutes a lady in the elevator;
and this marks the difference of atmosphere. The lift is a room, but the
hotel is a street. But during my first delusion, of course, I assumed
that he uncovered in this tiny temple merely because he was in church.
There is something about the very word elevator that expresses a great
deal of his vague but idealistic religion. Perhaps that flying chapel
will eventually be ritualistically decorated like a chapel; possibly
with a symbolic scheme of wings. Perhaps a brief religious service will
be held in the elevator as it ascends; in a few well-chosen words
touching the Utmost for the Highest. Possibly he would consent even to
call the elevator a lift, if he could call it an uplift. There would be
no difficulty, except what I cannot but regard as the chief moral
problem of all optimistic modernism. I mean the difficulty of imagining
a lift which is free to go up, if it is not also free to go down.
I think I know my American friends and acquaintances too well to
apologise for any levity in these illustrations. Americans make fun of
their own institutions; and their own journalism is full of such
fanciful conjectures. The tall building is itself artistically akin to
the tall story. The very word sky-scraper is an admirable example of an
American lie. But I can testify quite as eagerly to the solid and
sensible advantages of the symmetrical hotel. It is not only a pattern
of vases and stuffed flamingoes; it is also an equally accurate pattern
of cupboards and baths. It is a dignified and humane custom to have a
bathroom attached to every bedroom; and my impulse to sing the praises
of it brought me once at least into a rather quaint complication. I
think it was in the city of Dayton; anyhow I remember there was a
Laundry Convention going on in the same hotel, in a room very
patriotically and properly festooned with the stars and stripes, and
doubtless full of promise for the future of laundering. I was
interviewed on the roof, within earshot of this debate, and may have
been the victim of some association or confusion; anyhow, after
answering the usual questions about Labour, the League of Nations, the
length of ladies' dresses, and other great matters, I took refuge in a
rhapsody of warm and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. The
editor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the column of his
contributor's 'story,' and seeing nothing but metaphysical terms such as
justice, freedom, the abstract disapproval of sweating, swindling, and
the like, paused at last upon the ablutionary allusion, and his eye
brightened. 'That's the only copy in the whole thing,' he said, 'A
Bath-Tub in Every Home.' So these words appeared in enormous letters
above my portrait in the paper. It will be noted that, like many things
that practical men make a great point of, they miss the point. What I
had commended as new and national was a bathroom in every bedroom. Even
feudal and moss-grown England is not entirely ignorant of an occasional
bath-tub in the home. But what gave me great joy was what followed. I
discovered with delight that many people, glancing rapidly at my
portrait with its prodigious legend, imagined that it was a commercial
advertisement, and that I was a very self-advertising commercial
traveller. When I walked about the streets, I was supposed to be
travelling in bath-tubs. Consider the caption of the portrait, and you
will see how similar it is to the true commercial slogan: 'We offer a
Bath-Tub in Every Home.' And this charming error was doubtless clinched
by the fact that I had been found haunting the outer courts of the
temple of the ancient Guild of Lavenders. I never knew how many shared
the impression; I regret to say that I only traced it with certainty in
two individuals. But I understand that it included the idea that I had
come to the town to attend the Laundry Convention, and had made an
eloquent speech to that senate, no doubt exhibiting my tubs.
Such was the penalty of too passionate and unrestrained an admiration
for American bathrooms; yet the connection of ideas, however
inconsequent, does cover the part of social practice for which these
American institutions can really be praised. About everything like
laundry or hot and cold water there is not only organisation, but what
does not always or perhaps often go with it, efficiency. Americans are
particular about these things of dress and decorum; and it is a virtue
which I very seriously recognise, though I find it very hard to emulate.
But with them it is a virtue; it is not a mere convention, still less a
mere fashion. It is really related to human dignity rather than to
social superiority. The really glorious thing about the American is that
he does not dress like a gentleman; he dresses like a citizen or a
civilised man. His Puritanic particularity on certain points is really
detachable from any definite social ambitions; these things are not a
part of getting into society but merely of keeping out of savagery.
Those millions and millions of middling people, that huge middle class
especially of the Middle West, are not near enough to any aristocracy
even to be sham aristocrats, or to be real snobs. But their standards
are secure; and though I do not really travel in a bath-tub, or believe
in the bath-tub philosophy and religion, I will not on this matter
recoil misanthropically from them: I prefer the tub of Dayton to the tub
of Diogenes. On these points there is really something a million times
better than efficiency, and that is something like equality.