friend's mystical remarks about the Upper Ten, he lived in an atmosphere
of something that was at least the very reverse of a respect for
persons. Indeed, there was something in the very crudity of his social
compliment that smacked, strangely enough, of that egalitarian soil. In
a vaguely aristocratic country like England, people would never dream
of telling a total stranger that he was a member of the Upper Ten. For
one thing, they would be afraid that he might be. Real snobbishness is
never vulgar; for it is intended to please the refined. Nobody licks the
boots of a duke, if only because the duke does not like his boots
cleaned in that way. Nobody embraces the knees of a marquis, because it
would embarrass that nobleman. And nobody tells him he is a member of
the Upper Ten, because everybody is expected to know it. But there is a
much more subtle kind of snobbishness pervading the atmosphere of any
society trial in England. And the first thing that struck me was the
total absence of that atmosphere in the trial at Oklahoma. Mr. Hamon was
presumably a member of the Upper Ten, if there is such a thing. He was a
member of the Senate or Upper House in the American Parliament; he was a
millionaire and a pillar of the Republican party, which might be called
the respectable party; he is said to have been mentioned as a possible
President. And the speeches of Clara Smith's counsel, who was known by
the delightfully Oklahomite title of Wild Bill McLean, were wild enough
in all conscience; but they left very little of my friend's illusion
that members of the Upper Ten could not be accused of crimes. Nero and
Borgia were quite presentable people compared with Senator Hamon when
Wild Bill McLean had done with him. But the difference was deeper, and
even in a sense more delicate than this. There is a certain tone about
English trials, which does at least begin with a certain scepticism
about people prominent in public life being abominable in private life.
People do vaguely doubt the criminality of 'a man in that position';
that is, the position of the Marquise de Brinvilliers or the Marquis de
Sade. _Prima facie_, it would be an advantage to the Marquis de Sade
that he was a marquis. But it was certainly against Hamon that he was a
millionaire. Wild Bill did not minimise him as a bankrupt or an
adventurer; he insisted on the solidity and size of his fortune, he made
mountains out of the 'Hamon millions,' as if they made the matter much
worse; as indeed I think they do. But that is because I happen to share
a certain political philosophy with Wild Bill and other wild buffaloes
of the prairies. In other words, there is really present here a
democratic instinct against the domination of wealth. It does not
prevent wealth from dominating; but it does prevent the domination from
being regarded with any affection or loyalty. Despite the man in the
starry coat, the Americans have not really any illusions about the Upper
Ten. McLean was appealing to an implicit public opinion when he pelted
the Senator with his gold.
But something more is involved. I became conscious, as I have been
conscious in reading the crime novels of America, that the millionaire
was taken as a type and not an individual. This is the great difference;
that America recognises rich crooks as a _class_. Any Englishman might
recognise them as individuals. Any English romance may turn on a crime
in high life; in which the baronet is found to have poisoned his wife,
or the elusive burglar turns out to be the bishop. But the English are
not always saying, either in romance or reality, 'What's to be done, if
our food is being poisoned by all these baronets?' They do not murmur in
indignation, 'If bishops will go on burgling like this, something must
be done.' The whole point of the English romance is the exceptional
character of a crime in high life. That is not the tone of American
novels or American newspapers or American trials like the trial in
Oklahoma. Americans may be excited when a millionaire crook is caught,
as when any other crook is caught; but it is at his being caught, not at
his being discovered. To put the matter shortly, England recognises a
criminal class at the bottom of the social scale. America also
recognises a criminal class at the top of the social scale. In both, for
various reasons, it may be difficult for the criminals to be convicted;
but in America the upper class of criminals is recognised. In both
America and England, of course, it exists.
This is an assumption at the back of the American mind which makes a
great difference in many ways; and in my opinion a difference for the
better. I wrote merely fancifully just now about bishops being burglars;
but there is a story in New York, illustrating this, which really does
in a sense attribute a burglary to a bishop. The story was that an
Anglican Lord Spiritual, of the pompous and now rather antiquated
school, was pushing open the door of a poor American tenement with all
the placid patronage of the squire and rector visiting the cottagers,
when a gigantic Irish policeman came round the corner and hit him a
crack over the head with a truncheon on the assumption that he was a
house-breaker. I hope that those who laugh at the story see that the
laugh is not altogether against the policeman; and that it is not only
the policeman, but rather the bishop, who had failed to recognise some
fine logical distinctions. The bishop, being a learned man, might well
be called upon (when he had sufficiently recovered from the knock on
the head) to define what is the exact difference between a house-breaker
and a home-visitor; and why the home-visitor should not be regarded as a
house-breaker when he will not behave as a guest. An impartial
intelligence will be much less shocked at the policeman's disrespect for
the home-visitor than by the home-visitor's disrespect for the home.
But that story smacks of the western soil, precisely because of the
element of brutality there is in it. In England snobbishness and social
oppression are much subtler and softer; the manifestations of them at
least are more mellow and humane. In comparison there is indeed
something which people call ruthless about the air of America,
especially the American cities. The bishop may push open the door
without an apology, but he would not break open the door with a
truncheon; but the Irish policeman's truncheon hits both ways. It may be
brutal to the tenement dweller as well as to the bishop; but the
difference and distinction is that it might really be brutal to the
bishop. It is because there is after all, at the back of all that
barbarism, a sort of a negative belief in the brotherhood of men, a dark
democratic sense that men are really men and nothing more, that the
coarse and even corrupt bureaucracy is not resented exactly as
oligarchic bureaucracies are resented. There is a sense in which
corruption is not so narrow as nepotism. It is upon this queer cynical
charity, and even humility, that it has been possible to rear so high
and uphold so long that tower of brass, Tammany Hall. The modern police
system is in spirit the most inhuman in history, and its evil belongs
to an age and not to a nation. But some American police methods are evil
past all parallel; and the detective can be more crooked than a hundred
crooks. But in the States it is not only possible that the policeman is
worse than the convict, it is by no means certain that he thinks that he
is any better. In the popular stories of O. Henry there are light
allusions to tramps being kicked out of hotels which will make any
Christian seek relief in strong language and a trust in heaven--not to
say in hell. And yet books even more popular than O. Henry's are those
of the 'sob-sisterhood' who swim in lachrymose lakes after love-lorn
spinsters, who pass their lives in reclaiming and consoling such tramps.
There are in this people two strains of brutality and sentimentalism
which I do not understand, especially where they mingle; but I am fairly
sure they both work back to the dim democratic origin. The Irish
policeman does not confine himself fastidiously to bludgeoning bishops;
his truncheon finds plenty of poor people's heads to hit; and yet I
believe on my soul he has a sort of sympathy with poor people not to be
found in the police of more aristocratic states. I believe he also reads
and weeps over the stories of the spinsters and the reclaimed tramps; in
fact, there is much of such pathos in an American magazine (my sole
companion on many happy railway journeys) which is not only devoted to
detective stories, but apparently edited by detectives. In these stories
also there is the honest, popular astonishment at the Upper Ten
expressed by the astronomical detective, if indeed he was a detective
and not a demon from the dark Red-Indian forests that faded to the
horizon behind him. But I have set him as the head and text of this
chapter because with these elements of the Third Degree of devilry and
the Seventh Heaven of sentimentalism I touch on elements that I do not
understand; and when I do not understand, I say so.
_The Republican in the Ruins_
The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone; especially to
a wood-cut or a lithographic stone. Modern people put their trust in
pictures, especially scientific pictures, as much as the most
superstitious ever put it in religious pictures. They publish a portrait
of the Missing Link as if he were the Missing Man, for whom the police
are always advertising; for all the world as if the anthropoid had been
photographed before he absconded. The scientific diagram may be a
hypothesis; it may be a fancy; it may be a forgery. But it is always an
idol in the true sense of an image; and an image in the true sense of a
thing mastering the imagination and not the reason. The power of these
talismanic pictures is almost hypnotic to modern humanity. We can never
forget that we have seen a portrait of the Missing Link; though we
should instantly detect the lapse of logic into superstition, if we were
told that the old Greek agnostics had made a statue of the Unknown God.
But there is a still stranger fashion in which we fall victims to the
same trick of fancy. We accept in a blind and literal spirit, not only
images of speculation, but even figures of speech. The nineteenth
century prided itself on having lost its faith in myths, and proceeded
to put all its faith in metaphors. It dismissed the old doctrines about
the way of life and the light of the world; and then it proceeded to
talk as if the light of truth were really and literally a light, that
could be absorbed by merely opening our eyes; or as if the path of
progress were really and truly a path, to be found by merely following
our noses. Thus the purpose of God is an idea, true or false; but the
purpose of Nature is merely a metaphor; for obviously if there is no God
there is no purpose. Yet while men, by an imaginative instinct, spoke of
the purpose of God with a grand agnosticism, as something too large to
be seen, something reaching out to worlds and to eternities, they speak
of the purpose of Nature in particular and practical problems of curing
babies or cutting up rabbits. This power of the modern metaphor must be
understood, by way of an introduction, if we are to understand one of
the chief errors, at once evasive and pervasive, which perplex the
problem of America.
America is always spoken of as a young nation; and whether or no this be
a valuable and suggestive metaphor, very few people notice that it is a
metaphor at all. If somebody said that a certain deserving charity had
just gone into trousers, we should recognise that it was a figure of
speech, and perhaps a rather surprising figure of speech. If somebody
said that a daily paper had recently put its hair up, we should know it
could only be a metaphor, and possibly a rather strained metaphor. Yet
these phrases would mean the only thing that can possibly be meant by
calling a corporate association of all sorts of people 'young'; that is,
that a certain institution has only existed for a certain time. I am not
now denying that such a corporate nationality may happen to have a
psychology comparatively analogous to the psychology of youth. I am not
even denying that America has it. I am only pointing out, to begin with,
that we must free ourselves from the talismanic tyranny of a metaphor
which we do not recognise as a metaphor. Men realised that the old
mystical doctrines were mystical; they do not realise that the new
metaphors are metaphorical. They have some sort of hazy notion that
American society must be growing, must be promising, must have the
virtues of hope or the faults of ignorance, merely _because_ it has only
had a separate existence since the eighteenth century. And that is
exactly like saying that a new chapel must be growing taller, or that a
limited liability company will soon have its second teeth.
Now in truth this particular conception of American hopefulness would be
anything but hopeful for America. If the argument really were, as it is
still vaguely supposed to be, that America must have a long life before
it, because it only started in the eighteenth century, we should find a
very fatal answer by looking at the other political systems that did
start in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was called the
Age of Reason; and there is a very real sense in which the other systems
were indeed started in a spirit of reason. But starting from reason has
not saved them from ruin. If we survey the Europe of to-day with real
clarity and historic comprehension, we shall see that it is precisely
the most recent and the most rationalistic creations that have been
ruined. The two great States which did most definitely and emphatically
deserve to be called modern states were Prussia and Russia. There was no
real Prussia before Frederick the Great; no real Russian Empire before
Peter the Great. Both those innovators recognised themselves as
rationalists bringing a new reason and order into an indeterminate
barbarism; and doing for the barbarians what the barbarians could not do
for themselves. They did not, like the kings of England or France or
Spain or Scotland, inherit a sceptre that was the symbol of a historic
and patriotic people. In this sense there was no Russia but only an
Emperor of Russia. In this sense Prussia was a kingdom before it was a
nation; if it ever was a nation. But anyhow both men were particularly
modern in their whole mood and mind. They were modern to the extent of
being not only anti-traditional, but almost anti-patriotic. Peter forced
the science of the West on Russia to the regret of many Russians.
Frederick talked the French of Voltaire and not the German of Luther.
The two experiments were entirely in the spirit of Voltairean
rationalism; they were built in broad daylight by men who believed in
nothing but the light of common day; and already their day is done.
If then the promise of America were in the fact that she is one of the
latest births of progress, we should point out that it is exactly the
latest born that were the first to die. If in this sense she is praised
as young, it may be answered that the young have died young, and have
not lived to be old. And if this be confused with the argument that she
came in an age of clarity and scepticism, uncontaminated by old
superstitions, it could still be retorted that the works of superstition
have survived the works of scepticism. But the truth is, of course, that
the real quality of America is much more subtle and complex than this;
and is mixed not only of good and bad, and rational and mystical, but
also of old and new. That is what makes the task of tracing the true
proportions of American life so interesting and so impossible.
To begin with, such a metaphor is always as distracting as a mixed
metaphor. It is a double-edged tool that cuts both ways; and
consequently opposite ways. We use the same word 'young' to mean two
opposite extremes. We mean something at an early stage of growth, and
also something having the latest fruits of growth. We might call a
commonwealth young if it conducted all its daily conversation by
wireless telegraphy; meaning that it was progressive. But we might also
call it young if it conducted all its industry with chipped flints;
meaning that it was primitive. These two meanings of youth are
hopelessly mixed up when the word is applied to America. But what is
more curious, the two elements really are wildly entangled in America.
America is in some ways what is called in advance of the times, and in
some ways what is called behind the times; but it seems a little
confusing to convey both notions by the same word.
On the one hand, Americans often are successful in the last inventions.
And for that very reason they are often neglectful of the last but one.
It is true of men in general, dealing with things in general, that while
they are progressing in one thing, such as science, they are going back
in another thing, such as art. What is less fully realised is that this
is true even as between different methods of science. The perfection of
wireless telegraphy might well be followed by the gross imperfection of
wires. The very enthusiasm of American science brings this out very
vividly. The telephone in New York works miracles all day long. Replies
from remote places come as promptly as in a private talk; nobody cuts
anybody off; nobody says, 'Sorry you've been troubled.' But then the
postal service of New York does not work at all. At least I could never
discover it working. Letters lingered in it for days and days, as in
some wild village of the Pyrenees. When I asked a taxi-driver to drive
me to a post-office, a look of far-off vision and adventure came into
his eyes, and he said he had once heard of a post-office somewhere near
West Ninety-Seventh Street. Men are not efficient in everything, but
only in the fashionable thing. This may be a mark of the march of
science; it does certainly in one sense deserve the description of
youth. We can imagine a very young person forgetting the old toy in the
excitement of a new one.
But on the other hand, American manners contain much that is called
young in the contrary sense; in the sense of an earlier stage of
history. There are whole patches and particular aspects that seem to me
quite Early Victorian. I cannot help having this sensation, for
instance, about the arrangement for smoking in the railway carriages.
There are no smoking carriages, as a rule; but a corner of each of the
great cars is curtained off mysteriously, that a man may go behind the
curtain and smoke. Nobody thinks of a woman doing so. It is regarded as
a dark, bohemian, and almost brutally masculine indulgence; exactly as
it was regarded by the dowagers in Thackeray's novels. Indeed, this is
one of the many such cases in which extremes meet; the extremes of
stuffy antiquity and cranky modernity. The American dowager is sorry
that tobacco was ever introduced; and the American suffragette and
social reformer is considering whether tobacco ought not to be
abolished. The tone of American society suggests some sort of
compromise, by which women will be allowed to smoke, but men forbidden
to do so.
In one respect, however, America is very old indeed. In one respect
America is more historic than England; I might almost say more
archaeological than England. The record of one period of the past,
morally remote and probably irrevocable, is there preserved in a more
perfect form as a pagan city is preserved at Pompeii. In a more general
sense, of course, it is easy to exaggerate the contrast as a mere
contrast between the old world and the new. There is a superficial
satire about the millionaire's daughter who has recently become the wife
of an aristocrat; but there is a rather more subtle satire in the
question of how long the aristocrat has been aristocratic. There is
often much misplaced mockery of a marriage between an upstart's daughter
and a decayed relic of feudalism; when it is really a marriage between
an upstart's daughter and an upstart's grandson. The sentimental
socialist often seems to admit the blue blood of the nobleman, even when
he wants to shed it; just as he seems to admit the marvellous brains of
the millionaire, even when he wants to blow them out. Unfortunately (in
the interests of social science, of course) the sentimental socialist
never does go so far as bloodshed or blowing out brains; otherwise the
colour and quality of both blood and brains would probably be a
disappointment to him. There are certainly more American families that
really came over in the _Mayflower_ than English families that really
came over with the Conqueror; and an English county family clearly
dating from the time of the _Mayflower_ would be considered a very
traditional and historic house. Nevertheless, there are ancient things
in England, though the aristocracy is hardly one of them. There are
buildings, there are institutions, there are even ideas in England which
do preserve, as in a perfect pattern, some particular epoch of the past,
and even of the remote past. A man could study the Middle Ages in
Lincoln as well as in Rouen; in Canterbury as well as in Cologne. Even
of the Renaissance the same is true, at least on the literary side; if
Shakespeare was later he was also greater than Ronsard. But the point is
that the spirit and philosophy of the periods were present in fullness
and in freedom. The guildsmen were as Christian in England as they were
anywhere; the poets were as pagan in England as they were anywhere.
Personally I do not admit that the men who served patrons were freer
than those who served patron saints. But each fashion had its own kind
of freedom; and the point is that the English, in each case, had the
fullness of that kind of freedom. But there was another ideal of freedom
which the English never had at all; or, anyhow, never expressed at all.
There was another ideal, the soul of another epoch, round which we built
no monuments and wrote no masterpieces. You will find no traces of it in
England; but you will find them in America.
The thing I mean was the real religion of the eighteenth century. Its
religion, in the more defined sense, was generally Deism, as in
Robespierre or Jefferson. In the more general way of morals and
atmosphere it was rather Stoicism, as in the suicide of Wolfe Tone. It
had certain very noble and, as some would say, impossible ideals; as
that a politician should be poor, and should be proud of being poor. It
knew Latin; and therefore insisted on the strange fancy that the
Republic should be a public thing. Its Republican simplicity was
anything but a silly pose; unless all martyrdom is a silly pose. Even of
the prigs and fanatics of the American and French Revolutions we can
often say, as Stevenson said of an American, that 'thrift and courage
glowed in him.' And its virtue and value for us is that it did remember
the things we now most tend to forget; from the dignity of liberty to
the danger of luxury. It did really believe in self-determination, in
the self-determination of the self, as well as of the state. And its
determination was really determined. In short, it believed in
self-respect; and it is strictly true even of its rebels and regicides
that they desired chiefly to be respectable. But there were in it the
marks of religion as well as respectability; it had a creed; it had a
crusade. Men died singing its songs; men starved rather than write
against its principles. And its principles were liberty, equality, and
fraternity, or the dogmas of the Declaration of Independence. This was
the idea that redeemed the dreary negations of the eighteenth century;
and there are still corners of Philadelphia or Boston or Baltimore where
we can feel so suddenly in the silence its plain garb and formal
manners, that the walking ghost of Jefferson would hardly surprise us.
There is not the ghost of such a thing in England. In England the real
religion of the eighteenth century never found freedom or scope. It
never cleared a space in which to build that cold and classic building
called the Capitol. It never made elbow-room for that free if sometimes
frigid figure called the Citizen.
In eighteenth-century England he was crowded out, partly perhaps by the
relics of better things of the past, but largely at least by the
presence of much worse things in the present. The worst things kept out
the best things of the eighteenth century. The ground was occupied by
legal fictions; by a godless Erastian church and a powerless Hanoverian
king. Its realities were an aristocracy of Regency dandies, in costumes
made to match Brighton Pavilion; a paganism not frigid but florid. It
was a touch of this aristocratic waste in Fox that prevented that great
man from being a glorious exception. It is therefore well for us to
realise that there is something in history which we did not experience;
and therefore probably something in Americans that we do not understand.
There was this idealism at the very beginning of their individualism.
There was a note of heroic publicity and honourable poverty which
lingers in the very name of Cincinnati.
But I have another and special reason for noting this historical fact;
the fact that we English never made anything upon the model of a
capitol, while we can match anybody with the model of a cathedral. It is
far from improbable that the latter model may again be a working model.
For I have myself felt, naturally and for a long time, a warm sympathy
with both those past ideals, which seem to some so incompatible. I have
felt the attraction of the red cap as well as the red cross, of the
Marseillaise as well as the Magnificat. And even when they were in
furious conflict I have never altogether lost my sympathy for either.
But in the conflict between the Republic[1] and the Church, the point
often made against the Church seems to me much more of a point against
the Republic. It is emphatically the Republic and not the Church that I
venerate as something beautiful but belonging to the past. In fact I
feel exactly the same sort of sad respect for the republican ideal that
many mid-Victorian free-thinkers felt for the religious ideal. The most
sincere poets of that period were largely divided between those who
insisted, like Arnold and Clough, that Christianity might be a ruin, but
after all it must be treated as a picturesque ruin; and those, like
Swinburne, who insisted that it might be a picturesque ruin, but after
all it must be treated as a ruin. But surely their own pagan temple of
political liberty is now much more of a ruin than the other; and I fancy
I am one of the few who still take off their hats in that ruined temple.
That is why I went about looking for the fading traces of that lost
cause, in the old-world atmosphere of the new world.