crown in effigy as well as a traitor to burn in effigy. I admit that
popular Protestantism has become too purely negative for people to
wreathe in flowers the statue of Mr. Kensit or even of Dr. Clifford. I
do not disguise my preference for popular Catholicism; which still has
statues that can be wreathed in flowers. I wish our national feast of
fireworks revolved round something positive and popular. I wish the
beauty of a Catherine Wheel were displayed to the glory of St.
Catherine. I should not especially complain if Roman candles were really
Roman candles. But this negative character does not destroy the national
character; which began at least in disinterested faith and has ended at
least in disinterested fun. There is nothing disinterested at all about
the new commercial fireworks. There is nothing so dignified as a dingy
guy among the lights of Broadway. In that thoroughfare, indeed, the very
word guy has another and milder significance. An American friend
congratulated me on the impression I produced on a lady interviewer,
observing, 'She says you're a regular guy.' This puzzled me a little at
the time. 'Her description is no doubt correct,' I said, 'but I confess
that it would never have struck me as specially complimentary.' But it
appears that it is one of the most graceful of compliments, in the
original American. A guy in America is a colourless term for a human
being. All men are guys, being endowed by their Creator with certain ...
but I am misled by another association. And a regular guy means, I
presume, a reliable or respectable guy. The point here, however, is that
the guy in the grotesque English sense does represent the dilapidated
remnant of a real human tradition of symbolising real historic ideals by
the sacramental mystery of fire. It is a great fall from the lowest of
these lowly bonfires to the highest of the modern sky-signs. The new
illumination does not stand for any national ideal at all; and what is
yet more to the point, it does not come from any popular enthusiasm at
all. That is where it differs from the narrowest national Protestantism
of the English institution. Mobs have risen in support of No Popery; no
mobs are likely to rise in defence of the New Puffery. Many a poor crazy
Orangeman has died saying, 'To Hell with the Pope'; it is doubtful
whether any man will ever, with his last breath, frame the ecstatic
words, 'Try Hugby's Chewing Gum.' These modern and mercantile legends
are imposed upon us by a mercantile minority, and we are merely passive
to the suggestion. The hypnotist of high finance or big business merely
writes his commands in heaven with a finger of fire. All men really are
guys, in the sense of dummies. We are only the victims of his
pyrotechnic violence; and it is he who hits us in the eye.
This is the real case against that modern society that is symbolised by
such art and architecture. It is not that it is toppling, but that it is
top-heavy. It is not that it is vulgar, but rather that it is not
popular. In other words, the democratic ideal of countries like America,
while it is still generally sincere and sometimes intense, is at issue
with another tendency, an industrial progress which is of all things on
earth the most undemocratic. America is not alone in possessing the
industrialism, but she is alone in emphasising the ideal that strives
with industrialism. Industrial capitalism and ideal democracy are
everywhere in controversy; but perhaps only here are they in conflict.
France has a democratic ideal; but France is not industrial. England and
Germany are industrial; but England and Germany are not really
democratic. Of course when I speak here of industrialism I speak of
great industrial areas; there is, as will be noted later, another side
to all these countries; there is in America itself not only a great deal
of agricultural society, but a great deal of agricultural equality;
just as there are still peasants in Germany and may some day again be
peasants in England. But the point is that the ideal and its enemy the
reality are here crushed very close to each other in the high, narrow
city; and that the sky-scraper is truly named because its top, towering
in such insolence, is scraping the stars off the American sky, the very
heaven of the American spirit.
That seems to me the main outline of the whole problem. In the first
chapter of this book, I have emphasised the fact that equality is still
the ideal though no longer the reality of America. I should like to
conclude this one by emphasising the fact that the reality of modern
capitalism is menacing that ideal with terrors and even splendours that
might well stagger the wavering and impressionable modern spirit. Upon
the issue of that struggle depends the question of whether this new
great civilisation continues to exist, and even whether any one cares if
it exists or not. I have already used the parable of the American flag,
and the stars that stand for a multitudinous equality; I might here take
the opposite symbol of these artificial and terrestrial stars flaming on
the forehead of the commercial city; and note the peril of the last
illusion, which is that the artificial stars may seem to fill the
heavens, and the real stars to have faded from sight. But I am content
for the moment to reaffirm the merely imaginative pleasure of those
dizzy turrets and dancing fires. If those nightmare buildings were
really all built for nothing, how noble they would be! The fact that
they were really built for something need not unduly depress us for a
moment, or drag down our soaring fancies. There is something about these
vertical lines that suggests a sort of rush upwards, as of great
cataracts topsy-turvy. I have spoken of fireworks, but here I should
rather speak of rockets. There is only something underneath the mind
murmuring that nothing remains at last of a flaming rocket except a
falling stick. I have spoken of Babylonian perspectives, and of words
written with a fiery finger, like that huge unhuman finger that wrote on
Belshazzar's wall.... But what did it write on Belshazzar's wall?... I
am content once more to end on a note of doubt and a rather dark
sympathy with those many-coloured solar systems turning so dizzily, far
up in the divine vacuum of the night.
'From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when people get away
from that they are lost.'
_Irish and other Interviewers_
It is often asked what should be the first thing that a man sees when he
lands in a foreign country; but I think it should be the vision of his
own country. At least when I came into New York Harbour, a sort of grey
and green cloud came between me and the towers with multitudinous
windows, white in the winter sunlight; and I saw an old brown house
standing back among the beech-trees at home, the house of only one among
many friends and neighbours, but one somehow so sunken in the very heart
of England as to be unconscious of her imperial or international
position, and out of the sound of her perilous seas. But what made most
clear the vision that revisited me was something else. Before we touched
land the men of my own guild, the journalists and reporters, had already
boarded the ship like pirates. And one of them spoke to me in an accent
that I knew; and thanked me for all I had done for Ireland. And it was
at that moment that I knew most vividly that what I wanted was to do
something for England.
Then, as it chanced, I looked across at the statue of Liberty, and saw
that the great bronze was gleaming green in the morning light. I had
made all the obvious jokes about the statue of Liberty. I found it had a
soothing effect on earnest Prohibitionists on the boat to urge, as a
point of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to be given back to the
French, a vicious race abandoned to the culture of the vine. I proposed
that the last liquors on board should be poured out in a pagan libation
before it. And then I suddenly remembered that this Liberty was still in
some sense enlightening the world, or one part of the world; was a lamp
for one sort of wanderer, a star of one sort of seafarer. To one
persecuted people at least this land had really been an asylum; even if
recent legislation (as I have said) had made them think it a lunatic
asylum. They had made it so much their home that the very colour of the
country seemed to change with the infusion; as the bronze of the great
statue took on a semblance of the wearing of the green.
It is a commonplace that the Englishman has been stupid in his relations
with the Irish; but he has been far more stupid in his relations with
the Americans on the subject of the Irish. His propaganda has been worse
than his practice; and his defence more ill-considered than the most
indefensible things that it was intended to defend. There is in this
matter a curious tangle of cross-purposes, which only a parallel example
can make at all clear. And I will note the point here, because it is
some testimony to its vivid importance that it was really the first I
had to discuss on American soil with an American citizen. In a double
sense I touched Ireland before I came to America. I will take an
imaginary instance from another controversy; in order to show how the
apology can be worse than the action. The best we can say for ourselves
is worse than the worst that we can do.
There was a time when English poets and other publicists could always be
inspired with instantaneous indignation about the persecuted Jews in
Russia. We have heard less about them since we heard more about the
persecuting Jews in Russia. I fear there are a great many middle-class
Englishmen already who wish that Trotsky had been persecuted a little
more. But even in those days Englishmen divided their minds in a curious
fashion; and unconsciously distinguished between the Jews whom they had
never seen, in Warsaw, and the Jews whom they had often seen in
Whitechapel. It seemed to be assumed that, by a curious coincidence,
Russia possessed not only the very worst Anti-Semites but the very best
Semites. A moneylender in London might be like Judas Iscariot; but a
moneylender in Moscow must be like Judas Maccabaeus.
Nevertheless there remained in our common sense an unconscious but
fundamental comprehension of the unity of Israel; a sense that some
things could be said, and some could not be said, about the Jews as a
whole. Suppose that even in those days, to say nothing of these, an
English protest against Russian Anti-Semitism had been answered by the
Russian Anti-Semites, and suppose the answer had been somewhat as
follows:--
'It is all very well for foreigners to complain of our denying civic
rights to our Jewish subjects; but we know the Jews better than they do.
They are a barbarous people, entirely primitive, and very like the
simple savages who cannot count beyond five on their fingers. It is
quite impossible to make them understand ordinary numbers, to say
nothing of simple economics. They do not realise the meaning or the
value of money. No Jew anywhere in the world can get into his stupid
head the notion of a bargain, or of exchanging one thing for another.
Their hopeless incapacity for commerce or finance would retard the
progress of our people, would prevent the spread of any sort of economic
education, would keep the whole country on a level lower than that of
the most prehistoric methods of barter. What Russia needs most is a
mercantile middle class; and it is unjust to ask us to swamp its small
beginnings in thousands of these rude tribesmen, who cannot do a sum of
simple addition, or understand the symbolic character of a threepenny
bit. We might as well be asked to give civic rights to cows and pigs as
to this unhappy, half-witted race who can no more count than the beasts
of the field. In every intellectual exercise they are hopelessly
incompetent; no Jew can play chess; no Jew can learn languages; no Jew
has ever appeared in the smallest part in any theatrical performance; no
Jew can give or take any pleasure connected with any musical instrument.
These people are our subjects; and we understand them. We accept full
responsibility for treating such troglodytes on our own terms.'
It would not be entirely convincing. It would sound a little far-fetched
and unreal. But it would sound exactly like our utterances about the
Irish, as they sound to all Americans, and rather especially to
Anti-Irish Americans. That is exactly the impression we produce on the
people of the United States when we say, as we do say in substance,
something like this: 'We mean no harm to the poor dear Irish, so dreamy,
so irresponsible, so incapable of order or organisation. If we were to
withdraw from their country they would only fight among themselves; they
have no notion of how to rule themselves. There is something charming
about their unpracticability, about their very incapacity for the coarse
business of politics. But for their own sakes it is impossible to leave
these emotional visionaries to ruin themselves in the attempt to rule
themselves. They are like children; but they are our own children, and
we understand them. We accept full responsibility for acting as their
parents and guardians.'
Now the point is not only that this view of the Irish is false, but that
it is the particular view that the Americans know to be false. While we
are saying that the Irish could not organise, the Americans are
complaining, often very bitterly, of the power of Irish organisation.
While we say that the Irishman could not rule himself, the Americans are
saying, more or less humorously, that the Irishman rules them. A highly
intelligent professor said to me in Boston, 'We have solved the Irish
problem here; we have an entirely independent Irish Government.' While
we are complaining, in an almost passionate manner, of the impotence of
mere cliques of idealists and dreamers, they are complaining, often in a
very indignant manner, of the power of great gangs of bosses and
bullies. There are a great many Americans who pity the Irish, very
naturally and very rightly, for the historic martyrdom which their
patriotism has endured. But there are a great many Americans who do not
pity the Irish in the least. They would be much more likely to pity the
English; only this particular way of talking tends rather to make them
despise the English. Thus both the friends of Ireland and the foes of
Ireland tend to be the foes of England. We make one set of enemies by
our action, and another by our apology.
It is a thing that can from time to time be found in history; a
misunderstanding that really has a moral. The English excuse would carry
much more weight if it had more sincerity and more humility. There are
a considerable number of people in the United States who could
sympathise with us, if we would say frankly that we fear the Irish.
Those who thus despise our pity might possibly even respect our fear.
The argument I have often used in other places comes back with
prodigious and redoubled force, after hearing anything of American
opinion; the argument that the only reasonable or reputable excuse for
the English is the excuse of a patriotic sense of peril; and that the
Unionist, if he must be a Unionist, should use that and no other. When
the Unionist has said that he dare not let loose against himself a
captive he has so cruelly wronged, he has said all that he has to say;
all that he has ever had to say; all that he will ever have to say. He
is like a man who has sent a virile and rather vindictive rival unjustly
to penal servitude; and who connives at the continuance of the sentence,
not because he himself is particularly vindictive, but because he is
afraid of what the convict will do when he comes out of prison. This is
not exactly a moral strength, but it is a very human weakness; and that
is the most that can be said for it. All other talk, about Celtic frenzy
or Catholic superstition, is cant invented to deceive himself or to
deceive the world. But the vital point to realise is that it is cant
that cannot possibly deceive the American world. In the matter of the
Irishman the American is not to be deceived. It is not merely true to
say that he knows better. It is equally true to say that he knows worse.
He knows vices and evils in the Irishman that are entirely hidden in the
hazy vision of the Englishman. He knows that our unreal slanders are
inconsistent even with the real sins. To us Ireland is a shadowy Isle of
Sunset, like Atlantis, about which we can make up legends. To him it is
a positive ward or parish in the heart of his huge cities, like
Whitechapel; about which even we cannot make legends but only lies. And,
as I have said, there are some lies we do not tell even about
Whitechapel. We do not say it is inhabited by Jews too stupid to count
or know the value of a coin.
The first thing for any honest Englishman to send across the sea is
this; that the English have not the shadow of a notion of what they are
up against in America. They have never even heard of the batteries of
almost brutal energy, of which I had thus touched a live wire even
before I landed. People talk about the hypocrisy of England in dealing
with a small nationality. What strikes me is the stupidity of England in
supposing that she is dealing with a small nationality; when she is
really dealing with a very large nationality. She is dealing with a
nationality that often threatens, even numerically, to dominate all the
other nationalities of the United States. The Irish are not decaying;
they are not unpractical; they are scarcely even scattered; they are not
even poor. They are the most powerful and practical world-combination
with whom we can decide to be friends or foes; and that is why I thought
first of that still and solid brown house in Buckinghamshire, standing
back in the shadow of the trees.
Among my impressions of America I have deliberately put first the figure
of the Irish-American interviewer, standing on the shore more symbolic
than the statue of Liberty. The Irish interviewer's importance for the
English lay in the fact of his being an Irishman, but there was also
considerable interest in the circumstance of his being an interviewer.
And as certain wild birds sometimes wing their way far out to sea and
are the first signal of the shore, so the first Americans the traveller
meets are often American interviewers; and they are generally birds of a
feather, and they certainly flock together. In this respect, there is a
slight difference in the etiquette of the craft in the two countries,
which I was delighted to discuss with my fellow craftsmen. If I could at
that moment have flown back to Fleet Street I am happy to reflect that
nobody in the world would in the least wish to interview me. I should
attract no more attention than the stone griffin opposite the Law
Courts; both monsters being grotesque but also familiar. But supposing
for the sake of argument that anybody did want to interview me, it is
fairly certain that the fact of one paper publishing such an interview
would rather prevent the other papers from doing so. The repetition of
the same views of the same individual in two places would be considered
rather bad journalism; it would have an air of stolen thunder, not to
say stage thunder.
But in America the fact of my landing and lecturing was evidently
regarded in the same light as a murder or a great fire, or any other
terrible but incurable catastrophe, a matter of interest to all pressmen
concerned with practical events. One of the first questions I was asked
was how I should be disposed to explain the wave of crime in New York.
Naturally I replied that it might possibly be due to the number of
English lecturers who had recently landed. In the mood of the moment it
seemed possible that, if they had all been interviewed, regrettable
incidents might possibly have taken place. But this was only the mood of
the moment, and even as a mood did not last more than a moment. And
since it has reference to a rather common and a rather unjust conception
of American journalism, I think it well to take it first as a fallacy to
be refuted, though the refutation may require a rather longer approach.
I have generally found that the traveller fails to understand a foreign
country, through treating it as a tendency and not as a balance. But if
a thing were always tending in one direction it would soon tend to
destruction. Everything that merely progresses finally perishes. Every
nation, like every family, exists upon a compromise, and commonly a
rather eccentric compromise; using the word 'eccentric' in the sense of
something that is somehow at once crazy and healthy. Now the foreigner
commonly sees some feature that he thinks fantastic without seeing the
feature that balances it. The ordinary examples are obvious enough. An
Englishman dining inside a hotel on the boulevards thinks the French
eccentric in refusing to open a window. But he does not think the
English eccentric in refusing to carry their chairs and tables out on to
the pavement in Ludgate Circus. An Englishman will go poking about in
little Swiss or Italian villages, in wild mountains or in remote
islands, demanding tea; and never reflects that he is like a Chinaman
who should enter all the wayside public-houses in Kent and Sussex and
demand opium. But the point is not merely that he demands what he cannot
expect to enjoy; it is that he ignores even what he does enjoy. He does
not realise the sublime and starry paradox of the phrase, _vin
ordinaire_, which to him should be a glorious jest like the phrase
'common gold' or 'daily diamonds.' These are the simple and self-evident
cases; but there are many more subtle cases of the same thing; of the
tendency to see that the nation fills up its own gap with its own
substitute; or corrects its own extravagance with its own precaution.
The national antidote generally grows wild in the woods side by side
with the national poison. If it did not, all the natives would be dead.
For it is so, as I have said, that nations necessarily die of the
undiluted poison called progress.
It is so in this much-abused and over-abused example of the American
journalist. The American interviewers really have exceedingly good
manners for the purposes of their trade, granted that it is necessary to
pursue their trade. And even what is called their hustling method can
truly be said to cut both ways, or hustle both ways; for if they hustle
in, they also hustle out. It may not at first sight seem the very
warmest compliment to a gentleman to congratulate him on the fact that
he soon goes away. But it really is a tribute to his perfection in a
very delicate social art; and I am quite serious when I say that in this
respect the interviewers are artists. It might be more difficult for an
Englishman to come to the point, particularly the sort of point which
American journalists are supposed, with some exaggeration, to aim at. It
might be more difficult for an Englishman to ask a total stranger on the
spur of the moment for the exact inscription on his mother's grave; but
I really think that if an Englishman once got so far as that he would go
very much farther, and certainly go on very much longer. The Englishman
would approach the churchyard by a rather more wandering woodland path;
but if once he had got to the grave I think he would have much more
disposition, so to speak, to sit down on it. Our own national
temperament would find it decidedly more difficult to disconnect when
connections had really been established. Possibly that is the reason why
our national temperament does not establish them. I suspect that the
real reason that an Englishman does not talk is that he cannot leave off
talking. I suspect that my solitary countrymen, hiding in separate
railway compartments, are not so much retiring as a race of Trappists as
escaping from a race of talkers.