are not on a heath or common. They are on the most productive and
prosperous land, perhaps, in the modern world. The houses might fall
down like shanties, but the fields would remain; and whoever tills
those fields will count for a great deal in the affairs of humanity.
They are already counting for a great deal, and possibly for too much,
in the affairs of America. The real criticism of the Middle West is
concerned with two facts, neither of which has been yet adequately
appreciated by the educated class in England. The first is that the turn
of the world has come, and the turn of the agricultural countries with
it. That is the meaning of the resurrection of Ireland; that is the
meaning of the practical surrender of the Bolshevist Jews to the Russian
peasants. The other is that in most places these peasant societies carry
on what may be called the Catholic tradition. The Middle West is perhaps
the one considerable place where they still carry on the Puritan
tradition. But the Puritan tradition was originally a tradition of the
town; and the second truth about the Middle West turns largely on its
moral relation to the town. As I shall suggest presently, there is much
in common between this agricultural society of America and the great
agricultural societies of Europe. It tends, as the agricultural society
nearly always does, to some decent degree of democracy. The agricultural
society tends to the agrarian law. But in Puritan America there is an
additional problem, which I can hardly explain without a periphrasis.
There was a time when the progress of the cities seemed to mock the
decay of the country. It is more and more true, I think, to-day that it
is rather the decay of the cities that seems to poison the progress and
promise of the countryside. The cinema boasts of being a substitute for
the tavern, but I think it a very bad substitute. I think so quite apart
from the question about fermented liquor. Nobody enjoys cinemas more
than I, but to enjoy them a man has only to look and not even to listen,
and in a tavern he has to talk. Occasionally, I admit, he has to fight;
but he need never move at the movies. Thus in the real village inn are
the real village politics, while in the other are only the remote and
unreal metropolitan politics. And those central city politics are not
only cosmopolitan politics but corrupt politics. They corrupt everything
that they reach, and this is the real point about many perplexing
questions.
For instance, so far as I am concerned, it is the whole point about
feminism and the factory. It is very largely the point about feminism
and many other callings, apparently more cultured than the factory, such
as the law court and the political platform. When I see women so wildly
anxious to tie themselves to all this machinery of the modern city my
first feeling is not indignation, but that dark and ominous sort of pity
with which we should see a crowd rushing to embark in a leaking ship
under a lowering storm. When I see wives and mothers going in for
business government I not only regard it as a bad business but as a
bankrupt business. It seems to me very much as if the peasant women,
just before the French Revolution, had insisted on being made duchesses
or (as is quite as logical and likely) on being made dukes.
It is as if those ragged women, instead of crying out for bread, had
cried out for powder and patches. By the time they were wearing them
they would be the only people wearing them. For powder and patches soon
went out of fashion, but bread does not go out of fashion. In the same
way, if women desert the family for the factory, they may find they have
only done it for a deserted factory. It would have been very unwise of
the lower orders to claim all the privileges of the higher orders in the
last days of the French monarchy. It would have been very laborious to
learn the science of heraldry or the tables of precedence when all such
things were at once most complicated and most moribund. It would be
tiresome to be taught all those tricks just when the whole bag of tricks
was coming to an end. A French satirist might have written a fine
apologue about Jacques Bonhomme coming up to Paris in his wooden shoes
and demanding to be made Gold Stick in Waiting in the name of Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity; but I fear the stick in waiting would be
waiting still.
One of the first topics on which I heard conversation turning in America
was that of a very interesting book called _Main Street_, which involves
many of these questions of the modern industrial and the eternal
feminine. It is simply the story, or perhaps rather the study than the
story, of a young married woman in one of the multitudinous little towns
on the great central plains of America; and of a sort of struggle
between her own more restless culture and the provincial prosperity of
her neighbours. There are a number of true and telling suggestions in
the book, but the one touch which I found tingling in the memory of many
readers was the last sentence, in which the master of the house, with
unshaken simplicity, merely asks for the whereabouts of some domestic
implement; I think it was a screw-driver. It seems to me a harmless
request, but from the way people talked about it one might suppose he
had asked for a screw-driver to screw down the wife in her coffin. And a
great many advanced persons would tell us that wooden house in which
she lived really was like a wooden coffin. But this appears to me to be
taking a somewhat funereal view of the life of humanity.
For, after all, on the face of it at any rate, this is merely the life
of humanity, and even the life which all humanitarians have striven to
give to humanity. Revolutionists have treated it not only as the normal
but even as the ideal. Revolutionary wars have been waged to establish
this; revolutionary heroes have fought, and revolutionary martyrs have
died, only to build such a wooden house for such a worthy family. Men
have taken the sword and perished by the sword in order that the poor
gentleman might have liberty to look for his screw-driver. For there is
here a fact about America that is almost entirely unknown in England.
The English have not in the least realised the real strength of America.
We in England hear a great deal, we hear far too much, about the
economic energy of industrial America, about the money of Mr. Morgan, or
the machinery of Mr. Edison. We never realise that while we in England
suffer from the same sort of successes in capitalism and clockwork, we
have not got what the Americans have got; something at least to balance
it in the way of a free agriculture, a vast field of free farms dotted
with small freeholders. For the reason I shall mention in a moment, they
are not perhaps in the fullest and finest sense a peasantry. But they
are in the practical and political sense a pure peasantry, in that their
comparative equality is a true counterweight to the toppling injustice
of the towns.
And, even in places like that described as Main Street, that comparative
equality can immediately be felt. The men may be provincials, but they
are certainly citizens; they consult on a common basis. And I repeat
that in this, after all, they do achieve what many prophets and
righteous men have died to achieve. This plain village, fairly
prosperous, fairly equal, untaxed by tyrants and untroubled by wars, is
after all the place which reformers have regarded as their aim; whenever
reformers have used their wits sufficiently to have any aim. The march
to Utopia, the march to the Earthly Paradise, the march to the New
Jerusalem, has been very largely the march to Main Street. And the
latest modern sensation is a book written to show how wretched it is to
live there.
All this is true, and I think the lady might be more contented in her
coffin, which is more comfortably furnished than most of the coffins
where her fellow creatures live. Nevertheless, there is an answer to
this, or at least a modification of it. There is a case for the lady and
a case against the gentleman and the screw-driver. And when we have
noted what it really is, we have noted the real disadvantage in a
situation like that of modern America, and especially the Middle West.
And with that we come back to the truth with which I started this
speculation; the truth that few have yet realised, but of which I, for
one, am more and more convinced--that industrialism is spreading because
it is decaying; that only the dust and ashes of its dissolution are
choking up the growth of natural things everywhere and turning the green
world grey.
In this relative agricultural equality the Americans of the Middle West
are far in advance of the English of the twentieth century. It is not
their fault if they are still some centuries behind the English of the
twelfth century. But the defect by which they fall short of being a true
peasantry is that they do not produce their own spiritual food, in the
same sense as their own material food. They do not, like some
peasantries, create other kinds of culture besides the kind called
agriculture. Their culture comes from the great cities; and that is
where all the evil comes from.
If a man had gone across England in the Middle Ages, or even across
Europe in more recent times, he would have found a culture which showed
its vitality by its variety. We know the adventures of the three
brothers in the old fairy tales who passed across the endless plain from
city to city, and found one kingdom ruled by a wizard and another wasted
by a dragon, one people living in castles of crystal and another sitting
by fountains of wine. These are but legendary enlargements of the real
adventures of a traveller passing from one patch of peasantry to
another, and finding women wearing strange head-dresses and men singing
new songs.
A traveller in America would be somewhat surprised if he found the
people in the city of St. Louis all wearing crowns and crusading armour
in honour of their patron saint. He might even feel some faint surprise
if he found all the citizens of Philadelphia clad in a composite
costume, combining that of a Quaker with that of a Red Indian, in honour
of the noble treaty of William Penn. Yet these are the sort of local and
traditional things that would really be found giving variety to the
valleys of mediaeval Europe. I myself felt a perfectly genuine and
generous exhilaration of freedom and fresh enterprise in new places like
Oklahoma. But you would hardly find in Oklahoma what was found in
Oberammergau. What goes to Oklahoma is not the peasant play, but the
cinema. And the objection to the cinema is not so much that it goes to
Oklahoma as that it does not come from Oklahoma. In other words, these
people have on the economic side a much closer approach than we have to
economic freedom. It is not for us, who have allowed our land to be
stolen by squires and then vulgarised by sham squires, to sneer at such
colonists as merely crude and prosaic. They at least have really kept
something of the simplicity and, therefore, the dignity of democracy;
and that democracy may yet save their country even from the calamities
of wealth and science.
But, while these farmers do not need to become industrial in order to
become industrious, they do tend to become industrial in so far as they
become intellectual. Their culture, and to some great extent their
creed, do come along the railroads from the great modern urban centres,
and bring with them a blast of death and a reek of rotting things. It is
that influence that alone prevents the Middle West from progressing
towards the Middle Ages.
For, after all, linked up in a hundred legends of the Middle Ages, may
be found a symbolic pattern of hammers and nails and saws; and there is
no reason why they should not have also sanctified screw-drivers. There
is no reason why the screw-driver that seemed such a trifle to the
author should not have been borne in triumph down Main Street like a
sword of state, in some pageant of the Guild of St. Joseph of the
Carpenters or St. Dunstan of the Smiths. It was the Catholic poetry and
piety that filled common life with something that is lacking in the
worthy and virile democracy of the West. Nor are Americans of
intelligence so ignorant of this as some may suppose. There is an
admirable society called the Mediaevalists in Chicago; whose name and
address will strike many as suggesting a certain struggle of the soul
against the environment. With the national heartiness they blazon their
note-paper with heraldry and the hues of Gothic windows; with the
national high spirits they assume the fancy dress of friars; but any one
who should essay to laugh at them instead of with them would find out
his mistake. For many of them do really know a great deal about
mediaevalism; much more than I do, or most other men brought up on an
island that is crowded with its cathedrals. Something of the same spirit
may be seen in the beautiful new plans and buildings of Yale,
deliberately modelled not on classical harmony but on Gothic
irregularity and surprise. The grace and energy of the mediaeval
architecture resurrected by a man like Mr. R. A. Cram of Boston has
behind it not merely artistic but historical and ethical enthusiasm; an
enthusiasm for the Catholic creed which made mediaeval civilisation.
Even on the huge Puritan plains of the Middle West the influence strays
in the strangest fashion. And it is notable that among the pessimistic
epitaphs of the Spoon River Anthology, in that churchyard compared with
which most churchyards are cheery, among the suicides and secret
drinkers and monomaniacs and hideous hypocrites of that happy village,
almost the only record of respect and a recognition of wider hopes is
dedicated to the Catholic priest.
But Main Street is Main Street in the main. Main Street is Modern Street
in its multiplicity of mildly half-educated people; and all these
historic things are a thousand miles from them. They have not heard the
ancient noise either of arts or arms; the building of the cathedral or
the marching of the crusade. But at least they have not deliberately
slandered the crusade and defaced the cathedral. And if they have not
produced the peasant arts, they can still produce the peasant crafts.
They can sow and plough and reap and live by these everlasting things;
nor shall the foundations of their state be moved. And the memory of
those colossal fields, of those fruitful deserts, came back the more
readily into my mind because I finished these reflections in the very
heart of a modern industrial city, if it can be said to have a heart. It
was in fact an English industrial city, but it struck me that it might
very well be an American one. And it also struck me that we yield rather
too easily to America the dusty palm of industrial enterprise, and feel
far too little apprehension about greener and fresher vegetables. There
is a story of an American who carefully studied all the sights of London
or Rome or Paris, and came to the conclusion that 'it had nothing on
Minneapolis.' It seems to me that Minneapolis has nothing on Manchester.
There were the same grey vistas of shops full of rubber tyres and
metallic appliances; a man felt that he might walk a day without seeing
a blade of grass; the whole horizon was so infinite with efficiency. The
factory chimneys might have been Pittsburg; the sky-signs might have
been New York. One looked up in a sort of despair at the sky, not for a
sky-sign but in a sense for a sign, for some sentence of significance
and judgment; by the instinct that makes any man in such a scene seek
for the only thing that has not been made by men. But even that was
illogical, for it was night, and I could only expect to see the stars,
which might have reminded me of Old Glory; but that was not the sign
that oppressed me. All the ground was a wilderness of stone and all the
buildings a forest of brick; I was far in the interior of a labyrinth of
lifeless things. Only, looking up, between two black chimneys and a
telegraph pole, I saw vast and far and faint, as the first men saw it,
the silver pattern of the Plough.
_The American Business Man_
It is a commonplace that men are all agreed in using symbols, and all
differ about the meaning of the symbols. It is obvious that a Russian
republican might come to identify the eagle as a bird of empire and
therefore a bird of prey. But when he ultimately escaped to the land of
the free, he might find the same bird on the American coinage figuring
as a bird of freedom. Doubtless, he might find many other things to
surprise him in the land of the free, and many calculated to make him
think that the bird, if not imperial, was at least rather imperious. But
I am not discussing those exceptional details here. It is equally
obvious that a Russian reactionary might cross the world with a vow of
vengeance against the red flag. But that authoritarian might have some
difficulties with the authorities, if he shot a man for using the red
flag on the railway between Willesden and Clapham Junction.
But, of course, the difficulty about symbols is generally much more
subtle than in these simple cases. I have remarked elsewhere that the
first thing which a traveller should write about is the thing which he
has not read about. It may be a small or secondary thing, but it is a
thing that he has seen and not merely expected to see.
I gave the example of the great multitude of wooden houses in America;
we might say of wooden towns and wooden cities. But after he has seen
such things, his next duty is to see the meaning of them; and here a
great deal of complication and controversy is possible. The thing
probably does not mean what he first supposes it to mean on the face of
it; but even on the face of it, it might mean many different and even
opposite things.
For instance, a wooden house might suggest an almost savage solitude; a
rude shanty put together by a pioneer in a forest; or it might mean a
very recent and rapid solution of the housing problem, conducted cheaply
and therefore on a very large scale. A wooden house might suggest the
very newest thing in America or one of the very oldest things in
England. It might mean a grey ruin at Stratford or a white exhibition at
Earl's Court.
It is when we come to this interpretation of international symbols that
we make most of the international mistakes. Without the smallest error
of detail, I will promise to prove that Oriental women are independent
because they wear trousers, or Oriental men subject because they wear
skirts. Merely to apply it to this case, I will take the example of two
very commonplace and trivial objects of modern life--a walking stick and
a fur coat.
As it happened, I travelled about America with two sticks, like a
Japanese nobleman with his two swords. I fear the simile is too stately.
I bore more resemblance to a cripple with two crutches or a highly
ineffectual version of the devil on two sticks. I carried them both
because I valued them both, and did not wish to risk losing either of
them in my erratic travels. One is a very plain grey stick from the
woods of Buckinghamshire, but as I took it with me to Palestine it
partakes of the character of a pilgrim's staff. When I can say that I
have taken the same stick to Jerusalem and to Chicago, I think the stick
and I may both have a rest. The other, which I value even more, was
given me by the Knights of Columbus at Yale, and I wish I could think
that their chivalric title allowed me to regard it as a sword.
Now, I do not know whether the Americans I met, struck by the fastidious
foppery of my dress and appearance, concluded that it is the custom of
elegant English dandies to carry two walking sticks. But I do know that
it is much less common among Americans than among Englishmen to carry
even one. The point, however, is not merely that more sticks are carried
by Englishmen than by Americans; it is that the sticks which are carried
by Americans stand for something entirely different.
In America a stick is commonly called a cane, and it has about it
something of the atmosphere which the poet described as the nice conduct
of the clouded cane. It would be an exaggeration to say that when the
citizens of the United States see a man carrying a light stick, they
deduce that if he does that he does nothing else. But there is about it
a faint flavour of luxury and lounging, and most of the energetic
citizens of this energetic society avoid it by instinct.
Now, in an Englishman like myself, carrying a stick may imply lounging,
but it does not imply luxury, and I can say with some firmness that it
does not imply dandyism. In a great many Englishmen it means the very
opposite even of lounging. By one of those fantastic paradoxes which
are the mystery of nationality, a walking stick often actually means
walking. It frequently suggests the very reverse of the beau with his
clouded cane; it does not suggest a town type, but rather specially a
country type. It rather implies the kind of Englishman who tramps about
in lanes and meadows and knocks the tops off thistles. It suggests the
sort of man who has carried the stick through his native woods, and
perhaps even cut it in his native woods.
There are plenty of these vigorous loungers, no doubt, in the rural
parts of America, but the idea of a walking stick would not especially
suggest them to Americans; it would not call up such figures like a
fairy wand. It would be easy to trace back the difference to many
English origins, possibly to aristocratic origins, to the idea of the
old squire, a man vigorous and even rustic, but trained to hold a
useless staff rather than a useful tool. It might be suggested that
American citizens do at least so far love freedom as to like to have
their hands free. It might be suggested, on the other hand, that they
keep their hands for the handles of many machines. And that the hand on
a handle is less free than the hand on a stick or even a tool. But these
again are controversial questions and I am only noting a fact.
If an Englishman wished to imagine more or less exactly what the
impression is, and how misleading it is, he could find something like a
parallel in what he himself feels about a fur coat. When I first found
myself among the crowds on the main floor of a New York hotel, my rather
exaggerated impression of the luxury of the place was largely produced
by the number of men in fur coats, and what we should consider rather
ostentatious fur coats, with all the fur outside.
Now an Englishman has a number of atmospheric but largely accidental
associations in connection with a fur coat. I will not say that he
thinks a man in a fur coat must be a wealthy and wicked man; but I do
say that in his own ideal and perfect vision a wealthy and wicked man
would wear a fur coat. Thus I had the sensation of standing in a surging
mob of American millionaires, or even African millionaires; for the
millionaires of Chicago must be like the Knights of the Round Table
compared with the millionaires of Johannesburg.
But, as a matter of fact, the man in the fur coat was not even an
American millionaire, but simply an American. It did not signify luxury,
but rather necessity, and even a harsh and almost heroic necessity.
Orson probably wore a fur coat; and he was brought up by bears, but not
the bears of Wall Street. Eskimos are generally represented as a furry
folk; but they are not necessarily engaged in delicate financial
operations, even in the typical and appropriate occupation called
freezing out. And if the American is not exactly an arctic traveller
rushing from pole to pole, at least he is often literally fleeing from
ice to ice. He has to make a very extreme distinction between outdoor
and indoor clothing. He has to live in an icehouse outside and a
hothouse inside; so hot that he may be said to construct an icehouse
inside that. He turns himself into an icehouse and warms himself against
the cold until he is warm enough to eat ices. But the point is that the
same coat of fur which in England would indicate the sybarite life may
here very well indicate the strenuous life; just as the same walking
stick which would here suggest a lounger would in England suggest a
plodder and almost a pilgrim.