in the ease with which the American butterfly flits from flower to
flower. He may in a sense force his acquaintance on us, but he does not
force himself on us. Even when, to our prejudices, he seems to insist on
knowing us, at least he does not insist on our knowing him. It may be,
to some sensibilities, a bad thing that a total stranger should talk as
if he were a friend, but it might possibly be worse if he insisted on
being a friend before he would talk like one. To a great deal of the
interviewing, indeed much the greater part of it, even this criticism
does not apply; there is nothing which even an Englishman of extreme
sensibility could regard as particularly private; the questions involved
are generally entirely public, and treated with not a little public
spirit. But my only reason for saying here what can be said even for the
worst exceptions is to point out this general and neglected principle;
that the very thing that we complain of in a foreigner generally carries
with it its own foreign cure. American interviewing is generally very
reasonable, and it is always very rapid. And even those to whom talking
to an intelligent fellow creature is as horrible as having a tooth out
may still admit that American interviewing has many of the qualities of
American dentistry.
Another effect that has given rise to this fallacy, this exaggeration of
the vulgarity and curiosity of the press, is the distinction between the
articles and the headlines; or rather the tendency to ignore that
distinction. The few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seen
in American 'stories' have always been in the headlines. And the
headlines are written by somebody else; some solitary and savage cynic
locked up in the office, hating all mankind, and raging and revenging
himself at random, while the neat, polite, and rational pressman can
safely be let loose to wander about the town.
For instance, I talked to two decidedly thoughtful fellow journalists
immediately on my arrival at a town in which there had been some labour
troubles. I told them my general view of Labour in the very largest and
perhaps the vaguest historical outline; pointing out that the one great
truth to be taught to the middle classes was that Capitalism was itself
a crisis, and a passing crisis; that it was not so much that it was
breaking down as that it had never really stood up. Slaveries could
last, and peasantries could last; but wage-earning communities could
hardly even live, and were already dying.
All this moral and even metaphysical generalisation was most fairly and
most faithfully reproduced by the interviewer, who had actually heard it
casually and idly spoken. But on the top of this column of political
philosophy was the extraordinary announcement in enormous letters,
'Chesterton Takes Sides in Trolley Strike.' This was inaccurate. When I
spoke I not only did not know that there was any trolley strike, but I
did not know what a trolley strike was. I should have had an indistinct
idea that a large number of citizens earned their living by carrying
things about in wheel-barrows, and that they had desisted from the
beneficent activities. Any one who did not happen to be a journalist, or
know a little about journalism, American and English, would have
supposed that the same man who wrote the article had suddenly gone mad
and written the title. But I know that we have here to deal with two
different types of journalists; and the man who writes the headlines I
will not dare to describe; for I have not seen him except in dreams.
Another innocent complication is that the interviewer does sometimes
translate things into his native language. It would not seem odd that a
French interviewer should translate them into French; and it is certain
that the American interviewer sometimes translates them into American.
Those who imagine the two languages to be the same are more innocent
than any interviewer. To take one out of the twenty examples, some of
which I have mentioned elsewhere, suppose an interviewer had said that I
had the reputation of being a nut. I should be flattered but faintly
surprised at such a tribute to my dress and dashing exterior. I should
afterwards be sobered and enlightened by discovering that in America a
nut does not mean a dandy but a defective or imbecile person. And as I
have here to translate their American phrase into English, it may be
very defensible that they should translate my English phrases into
American. Anyhow they often do translate them into American. In answer
to the usual question about Prohibition I had made the usual answer,
obvious to the point of dullness to those who are in daily contact with
it, that it is a law that the rich make knowing they can always break
it. From the printed interview it appeared that I had said,
'Prohibition! All matter of dollar sign.' This is almost avowed
translation, like a French translation. Nobody can suppose that it would
come natural to an Englishman to talk about a dollar, still less about a
dollar sign--whatever that may be. It is exactly as if he had made me
talk about the Skelt and Stevenson Toy Theatre as 'a cent plain, and two
cents coloured' or condemned a parsimonious policy as dime-wise and
dollar-foolish. Another interviewer once asked me who was the greatest
American writer. I have forgotten exactly what I said, but after
mentioning several names, I said that the greatest natural genius and
artistic force was probably Walt Whitman. The printed interview is more
precise; and students of my literary and conversational style will be
interested to know that I said, 'See here, Walt Whitman was your one
real red-blooded man.' Here again I hardly think the translation can
have been quite unconscious; most of my intimates are indeed aware that
I do not talk like that, but I fancy that the same fact would have
dawned on the journalist to whom I had been talking. And even this
trivial point carries with it the two truths which must be, I fear, the
rather monotonous moral of these pages. The first is that America and
England can be far better friends when sharply divided than when
shapelessly amalgamated. These two journalists were false reporters, but
they were true translators. They were not so much interviewers as
interpreters. And the second is that in any such difference it is often
wholesome to look beneath the surface for a superiority. For ability to
translate does imply ability to understand; and many of these
journalists really did understand. I think there are many English
journalists who would be more puzzled by so simple an idea as the
plutocratic foundation of Prohibition. But the American knew at once
that I meant it was a matter of dollar sign; probably because he knew
very well that it is.
Then again there is a curious convention by which American interviewing
makes itself out much worse than it is. The reports are far more rowdy
and insolent than the conversations. This is probably a part of the fact
that a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and to some
vulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal. It must always be
grasped that this vulgarity is an ideal even more than it is a reality.
It is an ideal when it is not a reality. A very quiet and intelligent
young man, in a soft black hat and tortoise-shell spectacles, will ask
for an interview with unimpeachable politeness, wait for his living
subject with unimpeachable patience, talk to him quite sensibly for
twenty minutes, and go noiselessly away. Then in the newspaper next
morning you will read how he beat the bedroom door in, and pursued his
victim on to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore from
him replies to all sorts of bald and ruthless questions printed in large
black letters. I was often interviewed in the evening, and had no notion
of how atrociously I had been insulted till I saw it in the paper next
morning. I had no notion I had been on the rack of an inquisitor until I
saw it in plain print; and then of course I believed it, with a faith
and docility unknown in any previous epoch of history. An interesting
essay might be written upon points upon which nations affect more vices
than they possess; and it might deal more fully with the American
pressman, who is a harmless clubman in private, and becomes a sort of
highway-robber in print.
I have turned this chapter into something like a defence of
interviewers, because I really think they are made to bear too much of
the burden of the bad developments of modern journalism. But I am very
far from meaning to suggest that those bad developments are not very
bad. So far from wishing to minimise the evil, I would in a real sense
rather magnify it. I would suggest that the evil itself is a much larger
and more fundamental thing; and that to deal with it by abusing poor
journalists, doing their particular and perhaps peculiar duty, is like
dealing with a pestilence by rubbing at one of the spots. What is wrong
with the modern world will not be righted by attributing the whole
disease to each of its symptoms in turn; first to the tavern and then to
the cinema and then to the reporter's room. The evil of journalism is
not in the journalists. It is not in the poor men on the lower level of
the profession, but in the rich men at the top of the profession; or
rather in the rich men who are too much on top of the profession even to
belong to it. The trouble with newspapers is the Newspaper Trust, as the
trouble might be with a Wheat Trust, without involving a vilification of
all the people who grow wheat. It is the American plutocracy and not the
American press. What is the matter with the modern world is not modern
headlines or modern films or modern machinery. What is the matter with
the modern world is the modern world; and the cure will come from
another.
_Some American Cities_
There is one point, almost to be called a paradox, to be noted about New
York; and that is that in one sense it is really new. The term very
seldom has any relevance to the reality. The New Forest is nearly as old
as the Conquest, and the New Theology is nearly as old as the Creed.
Things have been offered to me as the new thought that might more
properly be called the old thoughtlessness; and the thing we call the
New Poor Law is already old enough to know better. But there is a sense
in which New York is always new; in the sense that it is always being
renewed. A stranger might well say that the chief industry of the
citizens consists of destroying their city; but he soon realises that
they always start it all over again with undiminished energy and hope.
At first I had a fancy that they never quite finished putting up a big
building without feeling that it was time to pull it down again; and
that somebody began to dig up the first foundations while somebody else
was putting on the last tiles. This fills the whole of this brilliant
and bewildering place with a quite unique and unparalleled air of rapid
ruin. Ruins spring up so suddenly like mushrooms, which with us are the
growth of age like mosses, that one half expects to see ivy climbing
quickly up the broken walls as in the nightmare of the Time Machine, or
in some incredibly accelerated cinema.
There is no sight in any country that raises my own spirits so much as
a scaffolding. It is a tragedy that they always take the scaffolding
away, and leave us nothing but a mere building. If they would only take
the building away and leave us a beautiful scaffolding, it would in most
cases be a gain to the loveliness of earth. If I could analyse what it
is that lifts the heart about the lightness and clarity of such a white
and wooden skeleton, I could explain what it is that is really charming
about New York; in spite of its suffering from the curse of
cosmopolitanism and even the provincial superstition of progress. It is
partly that all this destruction and reconstruction is an unexhausted
artistic energy; but it is partly also that it is an artistic energy
that does not take itself too seriously. It is first because man is here
a carpenter; and secondly because he is a stage carpenter. Indeed there
is about the whole scene the spirit of scene-shifting. It therefore
touches whatever nerve in us has since childhood thrilled at all
theatrical things. But the picture will be imperfect unless we realise
something which gives it unity and marks its chief difference from the
climate and colours of Western Europe. We may say that the back-scene
remains the same. The sky remained, and in the depths of winter it
seemed to be blue with summer; and so clear that I almost flattered
myself that clouds were English products like primroses. An American
would probably retort on my charge of scene-shifting by saying that at
least he only shifted the towers and domes of the earth; and that in
England it is the heavens that are shifty. And indeed we have changes
from day to day that would seem to him as distinct as different
magic-lantern slides; one view showing the Bay of Naples and the next
the North Pole. I do not mean, of course, that there are no changes in
American weather; but as a matter of proportion it is true that the most
unstable part of our scenery is the most stable part of theirs. Indeed
we might almost be pardoned the boast that Britain alone really
possesses the noble thing called weather; most other countries having to
be content with climate. It must be confessed, however, that they often
are content with it. And the beauty of New York, which is considerable,
is very largely due to the clarity that brings out the colours of varied
buildings against the equal colour of the sky. Strangely enough I found
myself repeating about this vista of the West two vivid lines in which
Mr. W. B. Yeats has called up a vision of the East:--
And coloured like the eastern birds
At evening in their rainless skies.
To invoke a somewhat less poetic parallel, even the untravelled
Englishman has probably seen American posters and trade advertisements
of a patchy and gaudy kind, in which a white house or a yellow motor-car
are cut out as in cardboard against a sky like blue marble. I used to
think it was only New Art, but I found that it is really New York.
It is not for nothing that the very nature of local character has gained
the nickname of local colour. Colour runs through all our experience;
and we all know that our childhood found talismanic gems in the very
paints in the paint-box, or even in their very names. And just as the
very name of 'crimson lake' really suggested to me some sanguine and
mysterious mere, dark yet red as blood, so the very name of 'burnt
sienna' became afterwards tangled up in my mind with the notion of
something traditional and tragic; as if some such golden Italian city
had really been darkened by many conflagrations in the wars of mediaeval
democracy. Now if one had the caprice of conceiving some city exactly
contrary to one thus seared and seasoned by fire, its colour might be
called up to a childish fancy by the mere name of 'raw umber'; and such
a city is New York. I used to be puzzled by the name of 'raw umber,'
being unable to imagine the effect of fried umber or stewed umber. But
the colours of New York are exactly in that key; and might be adumbrated
by phrases like raw pink or raw yellow. It is really in a sense like
something uncooked; or something which the satiric would call
half-baked. And yet the effect is not only beautiful, it is even
delicate. I had no name for this nuance; until I saw that somebody had
written of 'the pastel-tinted towers of New York'; and I knew that the
name had been found. There are no paints dry enough to describe all that
dry light; and it is not a box of colours but of crayons. If the
Englishman returning to England is moved at the sight of a block of
white chalk, the American sees rather a bundle of chalks. Nor can I
imagine anything more moving. Fairy tales are told to children about a
country where the trees are like sugar-sticks and the lakes like
treacle, but most children would feel almost as greedy for a fairyland
where the trees were like brushes of green paint and the hills were of
coloured chalks.
But here what accentuates this arid freshness is the fragmentary look of
the continual reconstruction and change. The strong daylight finds
everywhere the broken edges of things, and the sort of hues we see in
newly-turned earth or the white sections of trees. And it is in this
respect that the local colour can literally be taken as local character.
For New York considered in itself is primarily a place of unrest, and
those who sincerely love it, as many do, love it for the romance of its
restlessness. A man almost looks at a building as he passes to wonder
whether it will be there when he comes back from his walk; and the doubt
is part of an indescribable notion, as of a white nightmare of daylight,
which is increased by the very numbering of the streets, with its tangle
of numerals which at first makes an English head reel. The detail is
merely a symbol; and when he is used to it he can see that it is, like
the most humdrum human customs, both worse and better than his own. '271
West 52nd Street' is the easiest of all addresses to find, but the
hardest of all addresses to remember. He who is, like myself, so
constituted as necessarily to lose any piece of paper he has particular
reason to preserve, will find himself wishing the place were called
'Pine Crest' or 'Heather Crag' like any unobtrusive villa in Streatham.
But his sense of some sort of incalculable calculations, as of the
vision of a mad mathematician, is rooted in a more real impression. His
first feeling that his head is turning round is due to something really
dizzy in the movement of a life that turns dizzily like a wheel. If
there be in the modern mind something paradoxical that can find peace in
change, it is here that it has indeed built its habitation or rather is
still building and unbuilding it. One might fancy that it changes in
everything and that nothing endures but its invisible name; and even its
name, as I have said, seems to make a boast of novelty.
That is something like a sincere first impression of the atmosphere of
New York. Those who think that is the atmosphere of America have never
got any farther than New York. We might almost say that they have never
entered America, any more than if they had been detained like
undesirable aliens at Ellis Island. And indeed there are a good many
undesirable aliens detained in Manhattan Island too. But of that I will
not speak, being myself an alien with no particular pretensions to be
desirable. Anyhow, such is New York; but such is not the New World. The
great American Republic contains very considerable varieties, and of
these varieties I necessarily saw far too little to allow me to
generalise. But from the little I did see, I should venture on the
generalisation that the great part of America is singularly and even
strikingly unlike New York. It goes without saying that New York is very
unlike the vast agricultural plains and small agricultural towns of the
Middle West, which I did see. It may be conjectured with some confidence
that it is very unlike what is called the Wild and sometimes the Woolly
West, which I did not see. But I am here comparing New York, not with
the newer states of the prairie or the mountains, but with the other
older cities of the Atlantic coast. And New York, as it seems to me, is
quite vitally different from the other historic cities of America. It is
so different that it shows them all for the moment in a false light, as
a long white searchlight will throw a light that is fantastic and
theatrical upon ancient and quiet villages folded in the everlasting
hills. Philadelphia and Boston and Baltimore are more like those quiet
villages than they are like New York.
If I were to call this book 'The Antiquities of America,' I should give
rise to misunderstanding and possibly to annoyance. And yet the double
sense in such words is an undeserved misfortune for them. We talk of
Plato or the Parthenon or the Greek passion for beauty as parts of the
antique, but hardly of the antiquated. When we call them ancient it is
not because they have perished, but rather because they have survived.
In the same way I heard some New Yorkers refer to Philadelphia or
Baltimore as 'dead towns.' They mean by a dead town a town that has had
the impudence not to die. Such people are astonished to find an ancient
thing alive, just as they are now astonished, and will be increasingly
astonished, to find Poland or the Papacy or the French nation still
alive. And what I mean by Philadelphia and Baltimore being alive is
precisely what these people mean by their being dead; it is continuity;
it is the presence of the life first breathed into them and of the
purpose of their being; it is the benediction of the founders of the
colonies and the fathers of the republic. This tradition is truly to be
called life; for life alone can link the past and the future. It merely
means that as what was done yesterday makes some difference to-day, so
what is done to-day will make some difference to-morrow. In New York it
is difficult to feel that any day will make any difference. These
moderns only die daily without power to rise from the dead. But I can
truly claim that in coming into some of these more stable cities of the
States I felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which
is satisfied in the eternal cities of the Mediterranean. I felt in
America what many Americans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I have
seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than when I
saw from afar off, above the vast grey labyrinth of Philadelphia, great
Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned
a new world; and remembered that his body lay buried in a field at the
turning of a lane, a league from my own door.
For this aspect of America is rather neglected in the talk about
electricity and headlines. Needless to say, the modern vulgarity of
avarice and advertisement sprawls all over Philadelphia or Boston; but
so it does over Winchester or Canterbury. But most people know that
there is something else to be found in Canterbury or Winchester; many
people know that it is rather more interesting; and some people know
that Alfred can still walk in Winchester and that St. Thomas at
Canterbury was killed but did not die. It is at least as possible for a
Philadelphian to feel the presence of Penn and Franklin as for an
Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and of Becket. Tradition does not
mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the
dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred
years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel
in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago. And these
things did and do matter. Quakerism is not my favourite creed; but on
that day when William Penn stood unarmed upon that spot and made his
treaty with the Red Indians, his creed of humanity did have a triumph
and a triumph that has not turned back. The praise given to him is not a
priggish fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions have
illogically curtailed it. The Nonconformists have been rather unfair to
Penn even in picking their praises; and they generally forget that
toleration cuts both ways and that an open mind is open on all sides.
Those who deify him for consenting to bargain with the savages cannot
forgive him for consenting to bargain with the Stuarts. And the same is
true of the other city, yet more closely connected with the tolerant
experiment of the Stuarts. The state of Maryland was the first
experiment in religious freedom in human history. Lord Baltimore and his
Catholics were a long march ahead of William Penn and his Quakers on
what is now called the path of progress. That the first religious
toleration ever granted in the world was granted by Roman Catholics is
one of those little informing details with which our Victorian histories
did not exactly teem. But when I went into my hotel at Baltimore and
found two priests waiting to see me, I was moved in a new fashion, for I
felt that I touched the end of a living chain. Nor was the impression
accidental; it will always remain with me with a mixture of gratitude
and grief, for they brought a message of welcome from a great American
whose name I had known from childhood and whose career was drawing to
its close; for it was but a few days after I left the city that I
learned that Cardinal Gibbons was dead.