respects it is as American as the English inn is English. And it is
symbolic of that society in this among other things: that it does tend
too much to uniformity; but that that very uniformity disguises not a
little natural dignity. The old Romans boasted that their republic was a
nation of kings. If we really walked abroad in such a kingdom, we might
very well grow tired of the sight of a crowd of kings, of every man with
a gold crown on his head or an ivory sceptre in his hand. But it is
arguable that we ought not to grow tired of the repetition of crowns and
sceptres, any more than of the repetition of flowers and stars. The
whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really an effort to absorb
and animate these multitudinous modern repetitions; and Walt Whitman
would be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a
list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bathrooms. I do not
sneer at the generous effort of the giant; though I think, when all is
said, that it is a criticism of modern machinery that the effort should
be gigantic as well as generous.
While there is so much repetition there is little repose. It is the
pattern of a kaleidoscope rather than a wall-paper; a pattern of figures
running and even leaping like the figures in a zoetrope. But even in the
groups where there was no hustle there was often something of
homelessness. I do not mean merely that they were not dining at home;
but rather that they were not at home even when dining, and dining at
their favourite hotel. They would frequently start up and dart from the
room at a summons from the telephone. It may have been fanciful, but I
could not help feeling a breath of home, as from a flap or flutter of
St. George's Cross, when I first sat down in a Canadian hostelry, and
read the announcement that no such telephonic or other summonses were
allowed in the dining-room. It may have been a coincidence, and there
may be American hotels with this merciful proviso and Canadian hotels
without it; but the thing was symbolic even if it was not evidential. I
felt as if I stood indeed upon English soil, in a place where people
liked to have their meals in peace.
The process of the summons is called 'paging,' and consists of sending a
little boy with a large voice through all the halls and corridors of the
building, making them resound with a name. The custom is common, of
course, in clubs and hotels even in England; but in England it is a mere
whisper compared with the wail with which the American page repeats the
formula of 'Calling Mr. So and So.' I remember a particularly crowded
_parterre_ in the somewhat smoky and oppressive atmosphere of Pittsburg,
through which wandered a youth with a voice the like of which I have
never heard in the land of the living, a voice like the cry of a lost
spirit, saying again and again for ever, 'Carling Mr. Anderson.' One
felt that he never would find Mr. Anderson. Perhaps there never had been
any Mr. Anderson to be found. Perhaps he and every one else wandered in
an abyss of bottomless scepticism; and he was but the victim of one out
of numberless nightmares of eternity, as he wandered a shadow with
shadows and wailed by impassable streams. This is not exactly my
philosophy, but I feel sure it was his. And it is a mood that may
frequently visit the mind in the centres of highly active and successful
industrial civilisation.
Such are the first idle impressions of the great American hotel, gained
by sitting for the first time in its gallery and gazing on its drifting
crowds with thoughts equally drifting. The first impression is of
something enormous and rather unnatural, an impression that is gradually
tempered by experience of the kindliness and even the tameness of so
much of that social order. But I should not be recording the sensations
with sincerity, if I did not touch in passing the note of something
unearthly about that vast system to an insular traveller who sees it for
the first time. It is as if he were wandering in another world among the
fixed stars; or worse still, in an ideal Utopia of the future.
Yet I am not certain; and perhaps the best of all news is that nothing
is really new. I sometimes have a fancy that many of these new things in
new countries are but the resurrections of old things which have been
wickedly killed or stupidly stunted in old countries. I have looked over
the sea of little tables in some light and airy open-air café; and my
thoughts have gone back to the plain wooden bench and wooden table that
stands solitary and weather-stained outside so many neglected English
inns. We talk of experimenting in the French café, as of some fresh and
almost impudent innovation. But our fathers had the French café, in the
sense of the free-and-easy table in the sun and air. The only difference
was that French democracy was allowed to develop its café, or multiply
its tables, while English plutocracy prevented any such popular growth.
Perhaps there are other examples of old types and patterns, lost in the
old oligarchy and saved in the new democracies. I am haunted with a hint
that the new structures are not so very new; and that they remind me of
something very old. As I look from the balcony floor the crowds seem to
float away and the colours to soften and grow pale, and I know I am in
one of the simplest and most ancestral of human habitations. I am
looking down from the old wooden gallery upon the courtyard of an inn.
This new architectural model, which I have described, is after all one
of the oldest European models, now neglected in Europe and especially in
England. It was the theatre in which were enacted innumerable picaresque
comedies and romantic plays, with figures ranging from Sancho Panza to
Sam Weller. It served as the apparatus, like some gigantic toy set up in
bricks and timber, for the ancient and perhaps eternal game of tennis.
The very terms of the original game were taken from the inn courtyard,
and the players scored accordingly as they hit the buttery-hatch or the
roof. Singular speculations hover in my mind as the scene darkens and
the quadrangle below begins to empty in the last hours of night. Some
day perhaps this huge structure will be found standing in a solitude
like a skeleton; and it will be the skeleton of the Spotted Dog or the
Blue Boar. It will wither and decay until it is worthy at last to be a
tavern. I do not know whether men will play tennis on its ground floor,
with various scores and prizes for hitting the electric fan, or the
lift, or the head waiter. Perhaps the very words will only remain as
part of some such rustic game. Perhaps the electric fan will no longer
be electric and the elevator will no longer elevate, and the waiter will
only wait to be hit. But at least it is only by the decay of modern
plutocracy, which seems already to have begun, that the secret of the
structure even of this plutocratic palace can stand revealed. And after
long years, when its lights are extinguished and only the long shadows
inhabit its halls and vestibules, there may come a new noise like
thunder; of D'Artagnan knocking at the door.
_A Meditation in Broadway_
When I had looked at the lights of Broadway by night, I made to my
American friends an innocent remark that seemed for some reason to amuse
them. I had looked, not without joy, at that long kaleidoscope of
coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks,
advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the
two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God; colour and fire. I
said to them, in my simplicity, 'What a glorious garden of wonders this
would be, to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.'
Here it is but a text for a further suggestion. But let us suppose that
there does walk down this flaming avenue a peasant, of the sort called
scornfully an illiterate peasant; by those who think that insisting on
people reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies who
read in all languages and the forgers who write in all hands. On this
principle indeed, a peasant merely acquainted with things of little
practical use to mankind, such as ploughing, cutting wood, or growing
vegetables, would very probably be excluded; and it is not for us to
criticise from the outside the philosophy of those who would keep out
the farmer and let in the forger. But let us suppose, if only for the
sake of argument, that the peasant is walking under the artificial suns
and stars of this tremendous thoroughfare; that he has escaped to the
land of liberty upon some general rumour and romance of the story of
its liberation, but without being yet able to understand the arbitrary
signs of its alphabet. The soul of such a man would surely soar higher
than the sky-scrapers, and embrace a brotherhood broader than Broadway.
Realising that he had arrived on an evening of exceptional festivity,
worthy to be blazoned with all this burning heraldry, he would please
himself by guessing what great proclamation or principle of the Republic
hung in the sky like a constellation or rippled across the street like a
comet. He would be shrewd enough to guess that the three festoons
fringed with fiery words of somewhat similar pattern stood for
'Government of the People, For the People, By the People'; for it must
obviously be that, unless it were 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' His
shrewdness would perhaps be a little shaken if he knew that the triad
stood for 'Tang Tonic To-day; Tang Tonic To-morrow; Tang Tonic All the
Time.' He will soon identify a restless ribbon of red lettering, red hot
and rebellious, as the saying, 'Give me liberty or give me death.' He
will fail to identify it as the equally famous saying, 'Skyoline Has
Gout Beaten to a Frazzle.' Therefore it was that I desired the peasant
to walk down that grove of fiery trees, under all that golden foliage,
and fruits like monstrous jewels, as innocent as Adam before the Fall.
He would see sights almost as fine as the flaming sword or the purple
and peacock plumage of the seraphim; so long as he did not go near the
Tree of Knowledge.
In other words, if once he went to school it would be all up; and indeed
I fear in any case he would soon discover his error. If he stood wildly
waving his hat for liberty in the middle of the road as Chunk Chutney
picked itself out in ruby stars upon the sky, he would impede the
excellent but extremely rigid traffic system of New York. If he fell on
his knees before a sapphire splendour, and began saying an Ave Maria
under a mistaken association, he would be conducted kindly but firmly by
an Irish policeman to a more authentic shrine. But though the foreign
simplicity might not long survive in New York, it is quite a mistake to
suppose that such foreign simplicity cannot enter New York. He may be
excluded for being illiterate, but he cannot be excluded for being
ignorant, nor for being innocent. Least of all can he be excluded for
being wiser in his innocence than the world in its knowledge. There is
here indeed more than one distinction to be made. New York is a
cosmopolitan city; but it is not a city of cosmopolitans. Most of the
masses in New York have a nation, whether or no it be the nation to
which New York belongs. Those who are Americanised are American, and
very patriotically American. Those who are not thus nationalised are not
in the least internationalised. They simply continue to be themselves;
the Irish are Irish; the Jews are Jewish; and all sorts of other tribes
carry on the traditions of remote European valleys almost untouched. In
short, there is a sort of slender bridge between their old country and
their new, which they either cross or do not cross, but which they
seldom simply occupy. They are exiles or they are citizens; there is no
moment when they are cosmopolitans. But very often the exiles bring with
them not only rooted traditions, but rooted truths.
Indeed it is to a great extent the thought of these strange souls in
crude American garb that gives a meaning to the masquerade of New York.
In the hotel where I stayed the head waiter in one room was a Bohemian;
and I am glad to say that he called himself a Bohemian. I have already
protested sufficiently, before American audiences, against the pedantry
of perpetually talking about Czecho-Slovakia. I suggested to my American
friends that the abandonment of the word Bohemian in its historical
sense might well extend to its literary and figurative sense. We might
be expected to say, 'I'm afraid Henry has got into very Czecho-Slovakian
habits lately,' or 'Don't bother to dress; it's quite a Czecho-Slovakian
affair.' Anyhow my Bohemian would have nothing to do with such nonsense;
he called himself a son of Bohemia, and spoke as such in his criticisms
of America, which were both favourable and unfavourable. He was a squat
man, with a sturdy figure and a steady smile; and his eyes were like
dark pools in the depth of a darker forest, but I do not think he had
ever been deceived by the lights of Broadway.
But I found something like my real innocent abroad, my real peasant
among the sky-signs, in another part of the same establishment. He was a
much leaner man, equally dark, with a hook nose, hungry face, and fierce
black moustaches. He also was a waiter, and was in the costume of a
waiter, which is a smarter edition of the costume of a lecturer. As he
was serving me with clam chowder or some such thing, I fell into speech
with him and he told me he was a Bulgar. I said something like, 'I'm
afraid I don't know as much as I ought to about Bulgaria. I suppose most
of your people are agricultural, aren't they?' He did not stir an inch
from his regular attitude, but he slightly lowered his low voice and
said, 'Yes. From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when
people get away from that they are lost.'
To hear such a thing said by the waiter was alone an epoch in the life
of an unfortunate writer of fantastic novels. To see him clear away the
clam chowder like an automaton, and bring me more iced water like an
automaton or like nothing on earth except an American waiter (for piling
up ice is the cold passion of their lives), and all this after having
uttered something so dark and deep, so starkly incongruous and so
startlingly true, was an indescribable thing, but very like the picture
of the peasant admiring Broadway. So he passed, with his artificial
clothes and manners, lit up with all the ghastly artificial light of the
hotel, and all the ghastly artificial life of the city; and his heart
was like his own remote and rocky valley, where those unchanging words
were carved as on a rock.
I do not profess to discuss here at all adequately the question this
raises about the Americanisation of the Bulgar. It has many aspects, of
some of which most Englishmen and even some Americans are rather
unconscious. For one thing, a man with so rugged a loyalty to land could
not be Americanised in New York; but it is not so certain that he could
not be Americanised in America. We might almost say that a peasantry is
hidden in the heart of America. So far as our impressions go, it is a
secret. It is rather an open secret; covering only some thousand square
miles of open prairie. But for most of our countrymen it is something
invisible, unimagined, and unvisited; the simple truth that where all
those acres are there is agriculture, and where all that agriculture is
there is considerable tendency towards distributive or decently
equalised property, as in a peasantry. On the other hand, there are
those who say that the Bulgar will never be Americanised, that he only
comes to be a waiter in America that he may afford to return to be a
peasant in Bulgaria. I cannot decide this issue, and indeed I did not
introduce it to this end. I was led to it by a certain line of
reflection that runs along the Great White Way, and I will continue to
follow it. The criticism, if we could put it rightly, not only covers
more than New York but more than the whole New World. Any argument
against it is quite as valid against the largest and richest cities of
the Old World, against London or Liverpool or Frankfort or Belfast. But
it is in New York that we see the argument most clearly, because we see
the thing thus towering into its own turrets and breaking into its own
fireworks.
I disagree with the aesthetic condemnation of the modern city with its
sky-scrapers and sky-signs. I mean that which laments the loss of beauty
and its sacrifice to utility. It seems to me the very reverse of the
truth. Years ago, when people used to say the Salvation Army doubtless
had good intentions, but we must all deplore its methods, I pointed out
that the very contrary is the case. Its method, the method of drums and
democratic appeal, is that of the Franciscans or any other march of the
Church Militant. It was precisely its aims that were dubious, with their
dissenting morality and despotic finance. It is somewhat the same with
things like the sky-signs in Broadway. The aesthete must not ask me to
mingle my tears with his, because these things are merely useful and
ugly. For I am not specially inclined to think them ugly; but I am
strongly inclined to think them useless. As a matter of art for art's
sake, they seem to me rather artistic. As a form of practical social
work they seem to me stark stupid waste. If Mr. Bilge is rich enough to
build a tower four hundred feet high and give it a crown of golden
crescents and crimson stars, in order to draw attention to his
manufacture of the Paradise Tooth Paste or The Seventh Heaven Cigar, I
do not feel the least disposition to thank him for any serious form of
social service. I have never tried the Seventh Heaven Cigar; indeed a
premonition moves me towards the belief that I shall go down to the dust
without trying it. I have every reason to doubt whether it does any
particular good to those who smoke it, or any good to anybody except
those who sell it. In short Mr. Bilge's usefulness consists in being
useful to Mr. Bilge, and all the rest is illusion and sentimentalism.
But because I know that Bilge is only Bilge, shall I stoop to the
profanity of saying that fire is only fire? Shall I blaspheme crimson
stars any more than crimson sunsets, or deny that those moons are golden
any more than that this grass is green? If a child saw these coloured
lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other coloured
toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to
dance in respectful imitation of the child. Indeed I am in a mood of so
much sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city, that I
should be almost sorry to see social sanity and a sense of proportion
return to extinguish them. I fear the day is breaking, and the broad
daylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this
delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peasants and priests and all
sorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, and
their stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial,
useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh Heaven Cigar, even
when they see it shining as with stars in the seventh heaven. They will
not be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests and
peasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by advertisements.
Only a very soft-headed, sentimental, and rather servile generation of
men could possibly be affected by advertisements at all. People who are
a little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually independent, see
the rather simple joke; and are not impressed by this or any other form
of self-praise. Almost any other men in almost any other age would have
seen the joke. If you had said to a man in the Stone Age, 'Ugg says Ugg
makes the best stone hatchets,' he would have perceived a lack of
detachment and disinterestedness about the testimonial. If you had said
to a medieval peasant, 'Robert the Bowyer proclaims, with three blasts
of a horn, that he makes good bows,' the peasant would have said, 'Well,
of course he does,' and thought about something more important. It is
only among people whose minds have been weakened by a sort of mesmerism
that so transparent a trick as that of advertisement could ever have
been tried at all. And if ever we have again, as for other reasons I
cannot but hope we shall, a more democratic distribution of property and
a more agricultural basis of national life, it would seem at first sight
only too likely that all this beautiful superstition will perish, and
the fairyland of Broadway with all its varied rainbows fade away. For
such people the Seventh Heaven Cigar, like the nineteenth-century city,
will have ended in smoke. And even the smoke of it will have vanished.
But the next stage of reflection brings us back to the peasant looking
at the lights of Broadway. It is not true to say in the strict sense
that the peasant has never seen such things before. The truth is that he
has seen them on a much smaller scale, but for a much larger purpose.
Peasants also have their ritual and ornament, but it is to adorn more
real things. Apart from our first fancy about the peasant who could not
read, there is no doubt about what would be apparent to a peasant who
could read, and who could understand. For him also fire is sacred, for
him also colour is symbolic. But where he sets up a candle to light the
little shrine of St. Joseph, he finds it takes twelve hundred candles to
light the Seventh Heaven Cigar. He is used to the colours in church
windows showing red for martyrs or blue for madonnas; but here he can
only conclude that all the colours of the rainbow belong to Mr. Bilge.
Now upon the aesthetic side he might well be impressed; but it is
exactly on the social and even scientific side that he has a right to
criticise. If he were a Chinese peasant, for instance, and came from a
land of fireworks, he would naturally suppose that he had happened to
arrive at a great firework display in celebration of something; perhaps
the Sacred Emperor's birthday, or rather birthnight. It would gradually
dawn on the Chinese philosopher that the Emperor could hardly be born
every night. And when he learnt the truth the philosopher, if he was a
philosopher, would be a little disappointed ... possibly a little
disdainful.
Compare, for instance, these everlasting fireworks with the damp squibs
and dying bonfires of Guy Fawkes Day. That quaint and even queer
national festival has been fading for some time out of English life.
Still, it was a national festival, in the double sense that it
represented some sort of public spirit pursued by some sort of popular
impulse. People spent money on the display of fireworks; they did not
get money by it. And the people who spent money were often those who had
very little money to spend. It had something of the glorious and
fanatical character of making the poor poorer. It did not, like the
advertisements, have only the mean and materialistic character of making
the rich richer. In short, it came from the people and it appealed to
the nation. The historical and religious cause in which it originated is
not mine; and I think it has perished partly through being tied to a
historical theory for which there is no future. I think this is
illustrated in the very fact that the ceremonial is merely negative and
destructive. Negation and destruction are very noble things as far as
they go, and when they go in the right direction; and the popular
expression of them has always something hearty and human about it. I
shall not therefore bring any fine or fastidious criticism, whether
literary or musical, to bear upon the little boys who drag about a
bolster and a paper mask, calling out
Guy Fawkes Guy
Hit him in the eye.