raised after the Revolution to Washington. Beyond it was a new monument
saluting in the name of Lafayette the American soldiers who fell
fighting in France in the Great War. Between them were steps and stone
seats, and I sat down on one of them and talked to two children who were
clambering about the bases of the monument. I felt a profound and
radiant peace in the thought that they at any rate were not going to my
lecture. It made me happy that in that talk neither they nor I had any
names. I was full of that indescribable waking vision of the strangeness
of life, and especially of the strangeness of locality; of how we find
places and lose them; and see faces for a moment in a far-off land, and
it is equally mysterious if we remember and mysterious if we forget. I
had even stirring in my head the suggestion of some verses that I shall
never finish--
If I ever go back to Baltimore
The city of Maryland.
But the poem would have to contain far too much; for I was thinking of a
thousand things at once; and wondering what the children would be like
twenty years after and whether they would travel in white goods or be
interested in oil, and I was not untouched (it may be said) by the fact
that a neighbouring shop had provided the only sample of the substance
called 'tea' ever found on the American continent; and in front of me
soared up into the sky on wings of stone the column of all those high
hopes of humanity a hundred years ago; and beyond there were lighted
candles in the chapels and prayers in the ante-chambers, where perhaps
already a Prince of the Church was dying. Only on a later page can I
even attempt to comb out such a tangle of contrasts, which is indeed the
tangle of America and this mortal life; but sitting there on that stone
seat under that quiet sky, I had some experience of the thronging
thousands of living thoughts and things, noisy and numberless as birds,
that give its everlasting vivacity and vitality to a dead town.
Two other cities I visited which have this particular type of
traditional character, the one being typical of the North and the other
of the South. At least I may take as convenient anti-types the towns of
Boston and St. Louis; and we might add Nashville as being a shade more
truly southern than St. Louis. To the extreme South, in the sense of
what is called the Black Belt, I never went at all. Now English
travellers expect the South to be somewhat traditional; but they are not
prepared for the aspects of Boston in the North which are even more so.
If we wished only for an antic of antithesis, we might say that on one
side the places are more prosaic than the names and on the other the
names are more prosaic than the places. St. Louis is a fine town, and we
recognise a fine instinct of the imagination that set on the hill
overlooking the river the statue of that holy horseman who has
christened the city. But the city is not as beautiful as its name; it
could not be. Indeed these titles set up a standard to which the most
splendid spires and turrets could not rise, and below which the
commercial chimneys and sky-signs conspicuously sink. We should think it
odd if Belfast had borne the name of Joan of Arc. We should be slightly
shocked if the town of Johannesburg happened to be called Jesus Christ.
But few have noted a blasphemy, or even a somewhat challenging
benediction, to be found in the very name of San Francisco.
But on the other hand a place like Boston is much more beautiful than
its name. And, as I have suggested, an Englishman's general information,
or lack of information, leaves him in some ignorance of the type of
beauty that turns up in that type of place. He has heard so much about
the purely commercial North as against the agricultural and
aristocratic South, and the traditions of Boston and Philadelphia are
rather too tenuous and delicate to be seen from across the Atlantic. But
here also there are traditions and a great deal of traditionalism. The
circle of old families, which still meets with a certain exclusiveness
in Philadelphia, is the sort of thing that we in England should expect
to find rather in New Orleans. The academic aristocracy of Boston, which
Oliver Wendell Holmes called the Brahmins, is still a reality though it
was always a minority and is now a very small minority. An epigram,
invented by Yale at the expense of Harvard, describes it as very small
indeed:--
Here is to jolly old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod,
Where Cabots speak only to Lowells, and Lowells speak only to God.
But an aristocracy must be a minority, and it is arguable that the
smaller it is the better. I am bound to say, however, that the
distinguished Dr. Cabot, the present representative of the family, broke
through any taboo that may tie his affections to his Creator and to Miss
Amy Lowell, and broadened his sympathies so indiscriminately as to show
kindness and hospitality to so lost a being as an English lecturer. But
if the thing is hardly a limit it is very living as a memory; and Boston
on this side is very much a place of memories. It would be paying it a
very poor compliment merely to say that parts of it reminded me of
England; for indeed they reminded me of English things that have largely
vanished from England. There are old brown houses in the corners of
squares and streets that are like glimpses of a man's forgotten
childhood; and when I saw the long path with posts where the Autocrat
may be supposed to have walked with the schoolmistress, I felt I had
come to the land where old tales come true.
I pause in this place upon this particular aspect of America because it
is very much missed in a mere contrast with England. I need not say that
if I felt it even about slight figures of fiction, I felt it even more
about solid figures of history. Such ghosts seemed particularly solid in
the Southern States, precisely because of the comparative quietude and
leisure of the atmosphere of the South. It was never more vivid to me
than when coming in, at a quiet hour of the night, into the
comparatively quiet hotel at Nashville in Tennessee, and mounting to a
dim and deserted upper floor where I found myself before a faded
picture; and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of Andrew
Jackson, watchful like a white eagle.
At that moment, perhaps, I was in more than one sense alone. Most
Englishmen know a good deal of American fiction, and nothing whatever of
American history. They know more about the autocrat of the
breakfast-table than about the autocrat of the army and the people, the
one great democratic despot of modern times; the Napoleon of the New
World. The only notion the English public ever got about American
politics they got from a novel, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_; and to say the
least of it, it was no exception to the prevalence of fiction over fact.
Hundreds of us have heard of Tom Sawyer for one who has heard of Charles
Sumner; and it is probable that most of us could pass a more detailed
examination about Toddy and Budge than about Lincoln and Lee. But in
the case of Andrew Jackson it may be that I felt a special sense of
individual isolation; for I believe that there are even fewer among
Englishmen than among Americans who realise that the energy of that
great man was largely directed towards saving us from the chief evil
which destroys the nations to-day. He sought to cut down, as with a
sword of simplicity, the new and nameless enormity of finance; and he
must have known, as by a lightning flash, that the people were behind
him, because all the politicians were against him. The end of that
struggle is not yet; but if the bank is stronger than the sword or the
sceptre of popular sovereignty, the end will be the end of democracy. It
will have to choose between accepting an acknowledged dictator and
accepting dictation which it dare not acknowledge. The process will have
begun by giving power to people and refusing to give them their titles;
and it will have ended by giving the power to people who refuse to give
us their names.
But I have a special reason for ending this chapter on the name of the
great popular dictator who made war on the politicians and the
financiers. This chapter does not profess to touch on one in twenty of
the interesting cities of America, even in this particular aspect of
their relation to the history of America, which is so much neglected in
England. If that were so, there would be a great deal to say even about
the newest of them; Chicago, for instance, is certainly something more
than the mere pork-packing yard that English tradition suggests; and it
has been building a boulevard not unworthy of its splendid position on
its splendid lake. But all these cities are defiled and even diseased
with industrialism. It is due to the Americans to remember that they
have deliberately preserved one of their cities from such defilement and
such disease. And that is the presidential city, which stands in the
American mind for the same ideal as the President; the idea of the
Republic that rises above modern money-getting and endures. There has
really been an effort to keep the White House white. No factories are
allowed in that town; no more than the necessary shops are tolerated. It
is a beautiful city; and really retains something of that classical
serenity of the eighteenth century in which the Fathers of the Republic
moved. With all respect to the colonial place of that name, I do not
suppose that Wellington is particularly like Wellington. But Washington
really is like Washington.
In this, as in so many things, there is no harm in our criticising
foreigners, if only we would also criticise ourselves. In other words,
the world might need even less of its new charity, if it had a little
more of the old humility. When we complain of American individualism, we
forget that we have fostered it by ourselves having far less of this
impersonal ideal of the Republic or commonwealth as a whole. When we
complain, very justly, for instance, of great pictures passing into the
possession of American magnates, we ought to remember that we paved the
way for it by allowing them all to accumulate in the possession of
English magnates. It is bad that a public treasure should be in the
possession of a private man in America, but we took the first step in
lightly letting it disappear into the private collection of a man in
England. I know all about the genuine national tradition which treated
the aristocracy as constituting the state; but these very foreign
purchases go to prove that we ought to have had a state independent of
the aristocracy. It is true that rich Americans do sometimes covet the
monuments of our culture in a fashion that rightly revolts us as vulgar
and irrational. They are said sometimes to want to take whole buildings
away with them; and too many of such buildings are private and for sale.
There were wilder stories of a millionaire wishing to transplant
Glastonbury Abbey and similar buildings as if they were portable shrubs
in pots. It is obvious that it is nonsense as well as vandalism to
separate Glastonbury Abbey from Glastonbury. I can understand a man
venerating it as a ruin; and I can understand a man despising it as a
rubbish-heap. But it is senseless to insult a thing in order to
idolatrise it; it is meaningless to desecrate the shrine in order to
worship the stones. That sort of thing is the bad side of American
appetite and ambition; and we are perfectly right to see it not only as
a deliberate blasphemy but as an unconscious buffoonery. But there is
another side to the American tradition, which is really too much lacking
in our own tradition. And it is illustrated in this idea of preserving
Washington as a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without personal
commerce. Nobody could buy the White House or the Washington Monument;
it may be hinted (as by an inhabitant of Glastonbury) that nobody wants
to; but nobody could if he did want to. There is really a certain air of
serenity and security about the place, lacking in every other American
town. It is increased, of course, by the clear blue skies of that
half-southern province, from which smoke has been banished. The effect
is not so much in the mere buildings, though they are classical and
often beautiful. But whatever else they have built, they have built a
great blue dome, the largest dome in the world. And the place does
express something in the inconsistent idealism of this strange people;
and here at least they have lifted it higher than all the sky-scrapers,
and set it in a stainless sky.
_In the American Country_
The sharpest pleasure of a traveller is in finding the things which he
did not expect, but which he might have expected to expect. I mean the
things that are at once so strange and so obvious that they must have
been noticed, yet somehow they have not been noted. Thus I had heard a
thousand things about Jerusalem before I ever saw it; I had heard
rhapsodies and disparagements of every description. Modern rationalistic
critics, with characteristic consistency, had blamed it for its
accumulated rubbish and its modern restoration, for its antiquated
superstition and its up-to-date vulgarity. But somehow the one
impression that had never pierced through their description was the
simple and single impression of a city on a hill, with walls coming to
the very edge of slopes that were almost as steep as walls; the turreted
city which crowns a cone-shaped hill in so many mediaeval landscapes.
One would suppose that this was at once the plainest and most
picturesque of all the facts; yet somehow, in my reading, I had always
lost it amid a mass of minor facts that were merely details. We know
that a city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid; and yet it would seem
that it is exactly the hill that is hid; though perhaps it is only hid
from the wise and the understanding. I had a similar and simple
impression when I discovered America. I cannot avoid the phrase; for it
would really seem that each man discovers it for himself.
Thus I had heard a great deal, before I saw them, about the tall and
dominant buildings of New York. I agree that they have an instant effect
on the imagination; which I think is increased by the situation in which
they stand, and out of which they arose. They are all the more
impressive because the building, while it is vertically so vast, is
horizontally almost narrow. New York is an island, and has all the
intensive romance of an island. It is a thing of almost infinite height
upon very finite foundations. It is almost like a lofty lighthouse upon
a lonely rock. But this story of the sky-scrapers, which I had often
heard, would by itself give a curiously false impression of the freshest
and most curious characteristic of American architecture. Told only in
terms of these great towers of stone and brick in the big industrial
cities, the story would tend too much to an impression of something cold
and colossal like the monuments of Asia. It would suggest a modern
Babylon altogether too Babylonian. It would imply that a man of the new
world was a sort of new Pharaoh, who built not so much a pyramid as a
pagoda of pyramids. It would suggest houses built by mammoths out of
mountains; the cities reared by elephants in their own elephantine
school of architecture. And New York does recall the most famous of all
sky-scrapers--the tower of Babel. She recalls it none the less because
there is no doubt about the confusion of tongues. But in truth the very
reverse is true of most of the buildings in America. I had no sooner
passed out into the suburbs of New York on the way to Boston than I
began to see something else quite contrary and far more curious. I saw
forests upon forests of small houses stretching away to the horizon as
literal forests do; villages and towns and cities. And they were, in
another sense, literally like forests. They were all made of wood. It
was almost as fantastic to an English eye as if they had been all made
of cardboard. I had long outlived the silly old joke that referred to
Americans as if they all lived in the backwoods. But, in a sense, if
they do not live in the woods, they are not yet out of the wood.
I do not say this in any sense as a criticism. As it happens, I am
particularly fond of wood. Of all the superstitions which our fathers
took lightly enough to love, the most natural seems to me the notion it
is lucky to touch wood. Some of them affect me the less as
superstitions, because I feel them as symbols. If humanity had really
thought Friday unlucky it would have talked about bad Friday instead of
good Friday. And while I feel the thrill of thirteen at a table, I am
not so sure that it is the most miserable of all human fates to fill the
places of the Twelve Apostles. But the idea that there was something
cleansing or wholesome about the touching of wood seems to me one of
those ideas which are truly popular, because they are truly poetic. It
is probable enough that the conception came originally from the healing
of the wood of the Cross; but that only clinches the divine coincidence.
It is like that other divine coincidence that the Victim was a
carpenter, who might almost have made His own cross. Whether we take the
mystical or the mythical explanation, there is obviously a very deep
connection between the human working in wood and such plain and pathetic
mysticism. It gives something like a touch of the holy childishness to
the tale, as if that terrible engine could be a toy. In the same fashion
a child fancies that mysterious and sinister horse, which was the
downfall of Troy, as something plain and staring, and perhaps spotted,
like his own rocking-horse in the nursery.
It might be said symbolically that Americans have a taste for
rocking-horses, as they certainly have a taste for rocking-chairs. A
flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that,
even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still.
Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the
matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may
still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. I think
there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit
that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is
innocent, and easily pleased. It is not altogether untrue, still less is
it unfriendly, to say that the landscape seems to be dotted with dolls'
houses. It is the true tragedy of every fallen son of Adam that he has
grown too big to live in a doll's house. These things seem somehow to
escape the irony of time by not even challenging it; they are too
temporary even to be merely temporal. These people are not building
tombs; they are not, as in the fine image of Mrs. Meynell's poem, merely
building ruins. It is not easy to imagine the ruins of a doll's house;
and that is why a doll's house is an everlasting habitation. How far it
promises a political permanence is a matter for further discussion; I am
only describing the mood of discovery; in which all these cottages built
of lath, like the palaces of a pantomime, really seemed coloured like
the clouds of morning; which are both fugitive and eternal.
There is also in all this an atmosphere that comes in another sense from
the nursery. We hear much of Americans being educated on English
literature; but I think few Americans realise how much English children
have been educated on American literature. It is true, and it is
inevitable, that they can only be educated on rather old-fashioned
American literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in one of his plays, noted truly
the limitations of the young American millionaire, and especially the
staleness of his English culture; but there is necessarily another side
to it. If the American talked more of Macaulay than of Nietzsche, we
should probably talk more of Emerson than of Ezra Pound. Whether this
staleness is necessarily a disadvantage is, of course, a different
question. But, in any case, it is true that the old American books were
often the books of our childhood, even in the literal sense of the books
of our nursery. I know few men in England who have not left their
boyhood to some extent lost and entangled in the forests of _Huckleberry
Finn_. I know few women in England, from the most revolutionary
Suffragette to the most carefully preserved Early Victorian, who will
not confess to having passed a happy childhood with the Little Women of
Miss Alcott. _Helen's Babies_ was the first and by far the best book in
the modern scriptures of baby-worship. And about all this old-fashioned
American literature there was an undefinable savour that satisfied, and
even fed, our growing minds. Perhaps it was the smell of growing things;
but I am far from certain that it was not simply the smell of wood. Now
that all the memory comes back to me, it seems to come back heavy in a
hundred forms with the fragrance and the touch of timber. There was the
perpetual reference to the wood-pile, the perpetual background of the
woods. There was something crude and clean about everything; something
fresh and strange about those far-off houses, to which I could not then
have put a name. Indeed, many things become clear in this wilderness of
wood, which could only be expressed in symbol and even in fantasy. I
will not go so far as to say that it shortened the transition from Log
Cabin to White House; as if the White House were itself made of white
wood (as Oliver Wendell Holmes said), 'that cuts like cheese, but lasts
like iron for things like these.' But I will say that the experience
illuminates some other lines by Holmes himself:--
Little I ask, my wants are few,
I only ask a hut of stone.
I should not have known, in England, that he was already asking for a
good deal even in asking for that. In the presence of this wooden world
the very combination of words seems almost a contradiction, like a hut
of marble, or a hovel of gold.
It was therefore with an almost infantile pleasure that I looked at all
this promising expansion of fresh-cut timber and thought of the housing
shortage at home. I know not by what incongruous movement of the mind
there swept across me, at the same moment, the thought of things
ancestral and hoary with the light of ancient dawns. The last war
brought back body-armour; the next war may bring back bows and arrows.
And I suddenly had a memory of old wooden houses in London; and a model
of Shakespeare's town.
It is possible indeed that such Elizabethan memories may receive a check
or a chill when the traveller comes, as he sometimes does, to the
outskirts of one of these strange hamlets of new frame-houses, and is
confronted with a placard inscribed in enormous letters, 'Watch Us
Grow.' He can always imagine that he sees the timbers swelling before
his eyes like pumpkins in some super-tropical summer. But he may have
formed the conviction that no such proclamation could be found outside
Shakespeare's town. And indeed there is a serious criticism here, to any
one who knows history; since the things that grow are not always the
things that remain; and pumpkins of that expansiveness have a tendency
to burst. I was always told that Americans were harsh, hustling, rather
rude and perhaps vulgar; but they were very practical and the future
belonged to them. I confess I felt a fine shade of difference; I liked
the Americans; I thought they were sympathetic, imaginative, and full of
fine enthusiasms; the one thing I could not always feel clear about was
their future. I believe they were happier in their frame-houses than
most people in most houses; having democracy, good education, and a
hobby of work; the one doubt that did float across me was something
like, 'Will all this be here at all in two hundred years?' That was the
first impression produced by the wooden houses that seemed like the
waggons of gipsies; it is a serious impression, but there is an answer
to it. It is an answer that opens on the traveller more and more as he
goes westward, and finds the little towns dotted about the vast central
prairies. And the answer is agriculture. Wooden houses may or may not
last; but farms will last; and farming will always last.