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Title: New York is not America. Being a Mirror to the States.
Author: Ford, Ford Madox [Hueffer, Ford Madox] (1873-1939)
Date of first publication: 1927
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1927
   [first U.S. edition]
Date first posted: 19 January 2014
Date last updated: 19 January 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1149

This ebook was produced by Delphine Lettau, Onegin
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






                        NEW YORK IS NOT AMERICA




                               _Books by_
                            FORD MADOX FORD

                           SOME DO NOT . . .
                            NO MORE PARADES
                          A MAN COULD STAND UP
                           A MIRROR TO FRANCE

                          (_To be published_)

                             THE LAST POST




                                NEW YORK
                                 IS NOT
                                AMERICA

                     _Being a Mirror to the States_
                           BY FORD MADOX FORD

              _For I love my love for his way of walking,_
              _And I love my love for his way of talking,_
               _And I love my love for his eyes so blue;_
                 _If he loved not me what should I do?_

                         ALBERT & CHARLES BONI

                       NEW YORK          MCMXXVII




           _Copyright, 1927, by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc._

               _Printed in the United States of America_




                                CONTENTS

            Author's Advertisement                               vii

         I. Travelers' Tales                                      17

        II. My Gotham                                             41

       III. Skyscrapers                                           73

        IV. It Is Not So Much the Place                          100

         V. . . . As the People                                  141

        VI. The Lordly Dish                                      188

       VII. Regions Csar Never Knew                             215

      VIII. L'Envoi                                              288




                        _AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT_


I beg--I beg--I _beg_--the reader of the pages that follow not to
imagine that their author is that ludicrous and offensive being, the
superior European, or the superior Briton who patronizes American
peoples and institutions as if they were children or the products of
childish minds. He is, I assure you, this Author, so instinct with the
sense of the equality of all human beings--that sense of their equality
is to such an extent an instinct with him that he takes all humanity
very seriously--and pleasantly. Humbly even, if he does not happen to
know them well. For, if he knows them well or, still more, if he is fond
of them, he is apt between loving speeches to make fun of them--but if
he does not know them well he is apt to be afraid of them. Nay, more, he
is dead certain to be afraid of them.

So, loving New York next to Provence, better than any other place, he
lets himself go and writes of her as he would talk to his mother or his
mistress, being very fond of them. (I am bound to say that at times he
will singularly irritate those gentle creatures. But he does not mean
to. His heart is in the right place be his tongue never so cheerful.)
But knowing nothing at all of America (_What_ is America; _who_ is the
true American?--the Westerner? the Easterner? the Middle Westerner? the
Kansan? the Virginia Gentleman? the Harvard Graduate? . . . Answer
somebody!) . . . Knowing, then, nothing at all of America except that
the New Yorker whom he loves is no American this author is singularly
afraid of all America and all Americans. He ventures outside the charmed
circle of Gotham with the timorous sensation of one inserting his toe
into the sea in order to test its temperature. It is not that he fears
the terrible gunmen--for he believes them to be the admirable fairy
tales of a press splendidly equipped to entertain its patrons. He
himself never saw a gunman nor any one who had ever seen a gunman; he
himself has never come across a crime or a trace of crime in the whole
United States, except for certain crimes committed, mostly in basements,
by himself and confederates. No, it is not even the almost more terrible
police, not even the acts of Volstead or Man, that make him afraid of
America: it is just the dread of the unknown . . . of the unknown, that
is, according to all Americans, the Unknowable. It is the feeling that
overwhelms the small child when he stands with fingers on the door of a
great drawing-room that is full, full, full of adult and ironic
strangers. . . .

So this author, professing to know New York, professes no knowledge at
all of America. And he professes to know New York only just as one knows
London or Paris--or England or France: one's little patch of each. He
knows, that is to say, how to live automatically and at ease, pretty
well anywhere between the Battery and the further end of Central
Park--without asking for directions or for information as to where to
purchase postage stamps or socks or where to dine; he can live there
without the remotest feeling of strangeness, perfectly himself. That is
perhaps all that the phrase "knowing the city" can be stretched to
imply.

You say "So and So knows his Paris" but it is only _his_ Paris that he
knows--for when it comes to knowledge he does not even know his own
soul.

To this sort of ability of living within a city as easily as you can
live within your own old clothes you must add affection--for to live in
a city and hate it will never give you the right to say that you "know"
it . . . or to call it "yours."

That right this author claims--the right to write of "_my_ Gotham": he
_has_ his image of the great, easy, tolerant, glamorous place.

You may complain that that image is not yours: that cannot be helped.
You did not pay your money--you were certainly not asked to--to read
your own deductions from statistics and newspaper columns. You can make
those for yourself. This author reads no statistics and very few
newspapers--and no books on the subject written by other, informative
writers. He moons about the places that he likes, writing usually stuff
of some sort or other about subjects quite different. Then he writes the
rsum of his mental adventures.

You will say that this is mere autobiography. Well, it is mere
autobiography--of an angle of a human being. . . . But think how much
richer the world would be for the autobiography of such an angle of
Shakespeare's being in, say, Denmark, when he was a strolling player; or
of Dante at Oxford--or of Chateaubriand in America. So for such books
there may be a place.

There is another side to it. This author has spent his life--such
portions of it as he has devoted to the public service--in unceasingly
pointing out the sameness of humanity in all nations and down all the
ages. Here he is at it again. That is the only sane Internationalism. If
one-tenth of the sums spent on diplomacy or international leagues were
spent on saying: "Here we are; we are just all merely poor humanity
making our voyage upon a spinning planet that is whirling to its doom
somewhere in space," there would be no more international
misunderstandings; for sure there would be no more war.

If a man from, say, Avignon could be got to say to all Chicago, and a
man from Chicago to say to all Avignon: "We are exactly the same food
for crows. If sudden death should strike down your or my little daughter
should we not feel it alike? If smut should destroy our wheat, murrain
our beasts, bankruptcy our trades shall we not feel it alike? Have we
not the same joys; the same hopes; identical causes for despair? Then in
the name of God, why should we bicker? . . . Let our ambassadors be our
books. Could you kill a Jew just after reading the lament of Saul for
Absalom or an American just after reading "_When lilacs last in the
doorway bloomed. . . ._" I do not believe it. . . . If members of
nations could be got so to speak to strange nations there would be no
need for Geneva.

It is in the hope that a few more souls can be got to share this belief
that this author has written this book. If that is accomplished he will
have done the state some service.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Just before writing the above I had watched the great black,
light-pierced hill that towers above the Battery and the North River
Piers withdraw little by little. Little roads on the slope were
indicated by chains of lamps; high on the left towered the lit windows
of a cathedral, ablaze on the black background. . . . One is never
certain that one will return . . . not _certain_.

It is not decent to describe for an Anglo-Saxon audience the emotions
that one feels at such thoughts as that it is not certain that one will
ever return. One day I will do it in French--and be sure that it will be
a lament; if it is well done it will be a very soul-searching lament.

The ship, moved and moved, nuzzled and pulled at by tugs as bread on
water is beset by small fish. In the river there was a mist of which we
were insensible because of the blackness of the February night. The
lights became astonishingly fewer; we looked ahead to see what there was
where we were heading to. . . . When we looked back there was only
blackness: not even the reflection of pier-lamps on the water, so little
power have electric rays to pierce mist. There was no more Gotham.

Off Nantucket, 24th Feb., 1927.


                          To JEANNE M. FOSTER

My Dear Jeanne:

Here I am back after all, just in time to dedicate this New York edition
to the kindest of New Yorkers.

Yours gratefully and with affection,

    F. M. F.
New York, Oct. 25th, 1927.




                        NEW YORK IS NOT AMERICA




                        NEW YORK IS NOT AMERICA




                               CHAPTER I


                            TRAVELERS' TALES

A year or so ago when I was coming over here on the _Paris_ there was a
great storm. There was so great a storm that only fifteen of us attended
breakfast. In consequence, there seated herself beside me a lady of a
certain age whom I had not before noticed. She remarked to me
suddenly--this sort of thing happens only to travelers--she remarked to
me, then, suddenly with an organ more singularly nasal than any I have
hitherto had the good fortune to encounter:

"You kehn't flirt with Amur'can gels as you ken with English ones. But
if she falls in love with you . . . _look aout_."

That was all she said, and it is all that I can remember of her, save
that she was large, florid, and alarming. And the assault was so
unprovoked--for there certainly wasn't any she to whom the message could
apply--it was all so singular in that reeling ship that she remains to
me as something supernatural.

If there were here any female figure equivalent to that of our Britannia
on the pennies, and if the voice had not been so singularly nasal that
the suspicion would be insulting, I should have imagined that the Genius
of the land which we were approaching had manifested itself, and that
She--right or wrong--felt sufficiently interested in my unworthy self to
afford me that warning.

Anyhow, it warned me. For the whole of that visit I walked the streets
with my eyes glued to the pavement, for, had I chanced to have had
handed to me, as we say, a glad eye, how mightn't I have had to look
out!

I was going somewhat later on the train to somewhere near Danbury. There
sat opposite me--I always like riding with my back to the engine--a
young woman, masculine in most of the attributes of her attire; that is
to say, she wore leather leggings and knee breeches. I looked no higher.
Now, although I have been in this country quite often, I had never been
in an American slow train before; and although I was quite aware that
the _tempo_ of New York is the slowest of any of the great cities of the
world, I still harbored the superstition that once you were outside New
York things might begin to rush.

Well, that train took hours. Hours and hours and hours. We have a very
ancient story as regards our own Southeastern line that once a traveler
asked a guard of a train why it had stopped. The guard said there was a
cow on the line. An hour afterwards, the train stopping once more, the
traveler asked the guard the same question. He received the same reply.
On his remarking that there seemed to be a good many cows on the
Southeastern, he was told that it was the same cow. Well, my progress to
Danbury was like that. I grew so alarmed, so certain that we must have
passed Danbury, that we must be approaching Portland, Maine, or even
Halifax, Nova Scotia--I grew so alarmed that the one fear outweighed the
other, and I asked the young woman--she was really quite plumply
feminine and agreeable--whether we hadn't passed Danbury. She said with
animation:

"Oh, why _didn't_ you speak to me before? It would have been so much
more amusing."

She gave me all the information about railways that it is usual to give
a stranger who is traveling for the first time in your country. She told
me, I mean, that here trains run upon steel rails, being drawn by
locomotives whose propelling-force is steam, that before entering a
train you purchase a ticket, that iced water is supplied upon American
trains, and that you can have paper cups for nothing--this showing a
very high state of civilization. Then she told me that she was going to
Kent County Reservation in Connecticut to catch rattlesnakes for the
Bronx Park Zoo.

And what is more it was true. Now neither of those things would ever
happen to you if you happened to be American and in your own country.
But singular oddities have always presented themselves to me whenever I
have traveled here. I don't mean to say that odd things ever happen so
long as I bide put in New York, between, that is to say, the Battery and
Eighty-fifth Street; nothing odd ever happens or presents itself to me,
and I enjoy a relative immunity in Brooklyn or Hoboken; but let me once
leave that, as it were home circle, to go into America . . . well, I
will tell you how I went to Coney Island.

I wanted to take a Brooklyn rapid-transit line that had lately joined up
with the Manhattan Beach Company. I paid the car fare, the statutory
five cents. This was more than twenty years ago! At a given point in
that journey a uniformed attendant remarked to me, "You hevn't paid your
fare." I said, "I hev." He said, "You hevn't," so I paid him another
five cents. Shortly afterwards a uniformed policeman came along and
remarked, "You hevn't paid your fare." I said, "I hev." He said, "You
hevn't," so he took me by the collar and threw me off the car. The train
proceeded, and I observed that it charged into a crowd of mornamillion
people. They, standing on the bridge over the river, were mostly
precipitated into the stream.

By that time I was slightly discouraged as to my chances of getting to
Coney Island by land. I went by water. On the boat I had nothing to
smoke. I descended to the bar and asked a white-coated attendant for
cigarettes. He said, "What sort of cigarettes?" I said, "What sort of
cigarettes do you keep?" He said, "We don't keep 'em. We sell 'em." I
said, "What sort of cigarettes have you got, anyhow?" He said, "We
h'ain't got no cigarettes, but we carry a fine juicy line of Colorado
stogies." I said, "Where do you carry them to?" and he said, "It's up to
me now."

That would not have happened to you, neither would what followed. When I
arrived at Coney Island I sought a dancing hall where, so I had been
told, the entire population of the United States could dance in comfort,
and with pleasure. (One does get told things like that when one is a
traveler.) In the center of the otherwise completely empty ballroom a
gentleman was slowly turning round, both his arms extended, and in each
hand was a six-shooter, which he was discharging.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Now it is only to the traveler, by preference to the traveler who is not
unlikely to write a book, that the gods vouchsafe such terrible joys. I
should have said to myself at that date that nothing could have been
more unlikely than that I should write a book about this city. My former
visits here have always been either for sheer pleasure or on business,
quite unconnected with my own writing; and were that not the case I
should hesitate now, however hard I might have been pressed, to record
my impressions of the city where people work by the forty-three or more,
one on top of the other. For I have always found that if I went to a
place on purpose to look at it I could either not write about it at all
or only write about it quite badly. My job in life as I have conceived
it has always been to record as passionlessly as possible my impressions
of my own times and the places in which I have worked. And to say that I
have worked in a city is practically the same thing as to say that I
have at least liked it, for I have seldom been under the necessity of
staying in a place that I did not like and in which I did not feel at
home.

So I have always felt that my impressions were happiest when I merely
glanced aside from something I was doing. Thus, Carcassonne has for me
an extraordinary life because I wrote practically the whole of a book
there--and indeed I have written a great many books in the south of
France, and that is perhaps why I so much love the _Midi_, whereas
places like Rouen or Tours or even Salem, Massachusetts, which I have
visited avowedly merely to look at them, have left on my mind either
very little impression at all or else impressions of a disagreeable
kind. This is perhaps because the mere job of getting to places is
disturbing, or perhaps because I dislike being the stranger anywhere.
Thus Salem, to which I went on land and over water from Newport, R. I.,
comes back to me as a memory almost of detestation. It is possible that
Gloucester, Massachusetts, which comes back to me as a memory relatively
delightful, may be responsible for my dislike of Salem. That is to say
that on the morning we went to Salem we were entertained by hospitable
customs-house officers on board their launch--we were entertained with
large quantities of raw salt fish which called for the consumption of
almost larger quantities of their admirable champagne. Now if you
consume large quantities of salt cod and champagne--I don't say there
weren't also some crackers, but I don't remember them--if you consume
large quantities of such comestibles on a steam launch between seven and
ten in the morning, and if at half-past two of the same day after
spending four and a half hours in the slowest, most dusty and
dilapidated trains the world has ever seen--if after all this you arrive
lunchless and with no prospect of lunch or even of a nice, hot cup of
tea, at a beauty spot, the probability is that you will dislike that
beauty spot almost more than you will dislike places which are called
hells on earth. So it was with me and Salem. That journey comes back to
me as a memory of intense depression and disgust. For the matter of
that, it does not come back to me at all. I can only remember stopping
off in atrociously hot weather at a place called Kingston-on-Thames, a
railway junction, that was crammed with particularly nauseating
French-Canadians. Kingston, as I remember it, consisted of one single
shack, like an army hut, which proclaimed itself to be The Star and
Garter Restaurant. The Thames was a trickle of yellow water between
thirty-foot mud-banks. On our pushing open the gauze doors of The Star
and Garter a long table revealed itself as covered with what appeared to
be coal-black linoleum. But it wasn't. That linoleum rose and dissolved
into millions of flies. So at half-past two we came to Salem.

Now all over such parts of the United States as I had already visited I
had heard rapturous tales of the ancient beauties, of the marvelous
old-fashioned hostelry, of the marvelous old-fashioned host of the inn
at Salem. Alas, the most unpleasant place in England is called Ancoats,
a soot-begrimed, coal-getting, cotton-spinning suburb of Manchester.
Well, Salem intimately resembled Ancoats. It was black with soot and
over it the skies wept sable tears. The entrance to the inn was a black
staircase ascending between two shops selling things that I can't
remember. But they were nasty things. The anteroom of the hotel
resembled the most unpleasing of provincial railway-station waiting
rooms, nor was there in it any single thing upon which to sit. Behind a
counter snored an enormous man, his face covered by an
unpleasant-looking handkerchief. We had to wake him to ask if we could
have any lunch. He said, "Nope." We asked him if we could go to our
rooms. He said, "Nope." We asked him if there was anywhere where we
could sit down. He said, "Nope." He was the courtly old-fashioned host.

I may as well remark here that this is the most unpleasant thing I shall
say about this country, where, generally, my lines have fallen in
pleasant places. Moreover, I am writing about a time, nearly a quarter
of a century ago, when American conditions, and particularly American
rural conditions, were undoubtedly much rougher than is to-day the case.
And I am also attempting to indicate rather how a book written by a
foreigner visiting a foreign land should not be written than attempting
to make any generalized point out of the oddities that I have recorded.
It is obvious, I mean, that if one is about to visit a national shrine
for purposes of observation one should not first fill oneself up with
raw salt cod and champagne. Nothing could withstand those depressants.
Not even Stratford-on-Avon. Or Chartres.

                 *        *        *        *        *

For myself, the first natural gasp of emotion at the sight of the
buildings behind the Battery or of the houses on the cliffs of Boulogne
once over, I set myself to exhaust international similarities before
beginning on the differences. That is perhaps partly a product of
contrariety--of that spirit that the French call _ergoteur_--but it is
at least self-consciously due to a profound feeling that those
globe-trotters who are volubly outraged because it is difficult to find
drinking water in Madrid or because hotels in the United States do not
have your boots cleaned for you unless you ask for it--that such
unthinking idiots do an immense amount of international harm. One must
take into account that Madrid is situated in a country of great aridity
and that labor in New York is relatively expensive before starting to
cackle in the streets of either capital--and how much more before
setting out to record one's impressions.

It is a curious fact that although we all look for instances
confirmatory of the saying that there is no new thing under the sun, we
are almost pained if we discover that our neighbor across the nearest
frontier has not the habits and point of view of a Choctaw savage. We
love it when we discover that the ancient Egyptians in their temples at
Memphis had penny-in-the-slot machines that delivered perfume after the
insertion of an obol, and enormous delight rewards us when we find in
reading Bion or Moschus that the emotions of two women, one holding a
baby, and both crushed in a crowd of sightseers watching a
procession--that their emotions, gossip, and even their ejaculations are
precisely the same as would be those of any two women with a baby
watching a procession from the pavements of Broadway two thousand years
later. But we are filled with disgust if the first Frenchman we see in a
Paris restaurant does not eat his peas with a knife, or the first
Englishman we see in Smithfield is not selling his wife with a halter
around her neck. For why should we travel if we cannot discover our
neighbors to be infinitely inferior to ourselves? Why, indeed?

For myself, having spent a great portion of my life in lands other than
that of my birth and a great portion of my time in the study of
historical documents, I am inclined to regard international or
chronological differences as so slight as to be negligible or so
changing as to cause an endless confusion. The inhabitants of the south
of France in the thirteenth century spent the greater part of their days
in baths or on other methods of perfuming and ablution. On the other
hand, Brillat-Savarin, during the early decades of the last century,
complained bitterly of the unpleasant smell of the inhabitants of New
York, since in those days New Yorkers never bathed themselves and,
indeed, the city did not then contain one fixed bath. So that how a
traveler's book should be written I don't really know; I should never
myself think of writing one. The results of migratory observation are so
bewildering. The other day at a party an English newspaper correspondent
was bewailing the fact that the passengers in New York public
conveyances were grossly rough and brutal. He said that, traveling
frequently with his wife on subways or in omnibuses, he had been
disgusted by finding that if two vacant seats were separated by a third
which was already occupied, the occupant of the third seat would never
take the trouble to move so that my friend and his wife could sit
together. He said that in England, on the other hand, this would always
be done. He was interrupted by an American newspaper correspondent who
stated that, having spent ten years in London and traveling frequently,
he, too, with his wife by bus or tram, he had never once known the
occupant of a seat that was between two vacant seats to make room so
that a couple could sit together. At the same time I was experiencing an
uneasy sensation. In the lounge of an hotel the day before, I had been
occupying the middle one of three armchairs when two attractive young
ladies came in together and sat one on each side of me. My natural
impulse was to offer my place to the one or the other, and had they been
elderly or unattractive I should certainly have done so. But I have
lived for so long in France, where to offer your seat in a public
conveyance to a lady below the age of sixty is apt to be regarded as an
attempt to scrape acquaintance, that I refrained from that small act of
politeness. What, then, are we to make of these divergent constatations?
And, if those two young ladies were English, what did they think of
American manners? There is no end to the way in which one is
contradicted the moment one attempts any of these generalizations.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Last month I ventured into New England and, arrived at Boston, I
delivered a harangue on the superior culture of the inhabitants of
France. I said that if you talked to any French tram conductor you would
find that he read books, took an interest in literature, and had very
interesting views of life. That same afternoon I went by a slow train to
a remote part of the state of Massachusetts. The conductor of the train
was a benevolent individual, like a kindly, elderly English butler,
except that I have never seen an English butler wearing silver-rimmed
spectacles. He chatted in a fatherly manner with all the passengers,
patted myself on the back, and appeared in every way like an English
village patriarch upon an English village green. I almost saw a ghostly
smock-frock draping his limbs.

Now one young man of that carload read sedulously in a magazine, and the
conductor halted before him shortly after we had passed Fitchburg. The
conductor asked the engrossed young man where he was getting off, and
the engrossed young man answered that he was going to Fitchburg. The
conductor said that he sure wasn't; that just as bees made honey for
other folk to eat, so that young man's father had cooked his son's
Sunday goose and others would consume it; that the reading of love
stories in magazines was an engrossing pursuit but should not be
indulged in when one had urgent business on hand. The assistant
conductor declared that he had six times announced the name of
Fitchburg. They discussed for a long time how that young man was going
to return to his father's goose. He might make the eleven-fifty at the
next station; if he didn't make that he would have to wait until the
five-forty-two from somewhere else. Or he might take a trolley to
somewhere and there find a motor-bus to within two miles of Fitchburg.
That settled, the conductor began a monologue addressed mostly to
myself. He said that books were engrossing things. When he took a book
he himself would become so engrossed in it as to be completely lost to
the world. Once when he was reading the _Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_ he had failed to go on duty altogether. He found love stories
even more engrossing than history. Pictures also could engross him. He
liked to go to picture galleries alone so as not to be disturbed in his
contemplation. He liked the frescos of Puvis de Chavannes in Boston
better than most other pictures he had seen. He then addressed the young
man directly. The young man must learn from this from what trivial
causes great events may arise. He pointed out that on that trolley car
or on that bus the young man very possibly might pick up a young woman
every whit as beautiful as the heroine of the love story in the
magazine. The young man continually protested that he had been reading
in that magazine not a love story but an article about Central Africa.
The conductor, however, continued benevolently, that the young woman the
young man would meet on the trolley would not only be more beautiful
than the heroine of the story he had been reading but she would be an
admirable helpmeet, a housekeeper of surpassing economy, and a cook
beyond praise. Thus, by her savings as by her exhortations that young
man would certainly grow to be as rich as my more famous namesake. He
then again addressed myself. Life, he said, was like that. It flowed in
a placid current for long periods. Then some trivial accident would
occur, but accidents never arrive singly. And so on. He concluded by
pointing out that that young man would pick up his young woman on the
trolley and not on his car, because under his vigilant eyes the sexes
feared to make each other's acquaintance, whereas the conductors of
trolleys are less vigilant conservators of the public morals than their
brothers of the railway service.

At any rate, after having uttered a panegyric on the Wattmen of France
for their interest in books, pictures, and views of life, asserting by
implication that no Anglo-Saxon vehicular public servant would be
interested in such things, within the hour I had to listen to that
monologue upon books, pictures, and life.

So generalizations are futile. They are, nevertheless, inevitable. I
read to-day in my newspaper that a certain novel published in Paris
concerns itself with "the lost generation of hard-drinking expatriates
in Paris." Now it is my impression that compared with the Americans of
New York, American expatriates in Paris are teetotalers. They have to
be. Apparently--mind, I say apparently--in this country few people
object to your getting far drunker than a lord at any social gathering.
But in Paris if you get drunk at a party you are never asked to the
house again. I do not think I have ever seen an American expatriate
drunk in Paris. I do not mean to say that I have never seen drunken
American tourists: I have seen thousands. But then I have seen thousands
of drunken tourists of all nationalities in that unfortunate
city--British, Swedes, all other Scandinavians, Martinique negroes, but
seldom a drunken Frenchman. I do not think I have ever seen more than
one Frenchman drunk. Certainly I have never seen a French woman
overindulge.

                 *        *        *        *        *

So one generalizes. It can't be helped. But when one generalizes on
international matters one should observe certain rules. One should, as
far as possible, accumulate a large number of particular instances
before attempting a generalization--and one should attempt to discover
the reason that underlies that collection of similar particular
instances. I am convinced that American expatriates in Paris, and still
more in London, are a particularly sober race, because, as I have said,
I cannot remember ever to have seen one of them in a state of
intoxication. But my conviction gains immensely as soon as the
consideration occurs to me that there is a reason for this sobriety and
that that reason is a pretty strong one. And I think that another
requisite for the writer of books of international comparison is what I
will call the faculty of feeling-at-home-ness. In a beautiful passage in
one of his books W. H. Hudson says that there was no place in the world,
whether in New England, or in the Banda Orientale, in Patagonia, or on
Sussex downs--there was no place in the world where grass grew and where
there were birds in which he did not feel himself a son of the soil. And
I may make almost the same claim for myself as regards any place in
which men and women live. I might be inclined to exclude the nations
with which we were lately at war. But even that I don't know. One of my
reasons for disliking the Germans was this: at dinners given by
professors in several German university towns where I lectured before
the War I used to observe that, whereas the professors at table ate and
drank enormously, their wives sat round the walls and knitted, and it
appeared to me even at that date that a nation whose intellectual heads
behaved in such a way must be in a low scale of the human race. But what
was my perturbation the other day to read the following passage in a
letter from an English lady who was revisiting Oxford and England after
a long interval:

                 *        *        *        *        *

I find, in spite of the cold, that I awfully like the aspects of the
English country in winter, and of the towns, too. But _what_ people!
Dash and I went to the Magdalen Carol Singing on Christmas Eve and sat
shivering in the ladies' gallery with the most unpresentable collection
of completely self-satisfied women I have seen for a long time. The
carols were not till midnight so we only stayed for "The Messiah," which
I hate. But the old stones and the old woodwork are so lovely that one
does not like them to be in the hands of pedants and frumps. Of course
it _ought_ to be a niceish society because there is neither great wealth
nor great poverty and no one can _much_ queer the other fellow's pitch.
But it is no place for a woman. The whole concern has been run for the
glory of men since the beginning and women can only be domestic
hangers-on. I felt that, sitting with the cold wives in the cold gallery
of Magdalen Hall, watching their gorgeous husbands dining below with all
that swanky simplicity of beer mugs, great fires, and bare tables that
distinguishes the city of dreaming spires.

                 *        *        *        *        *

So I presume I must revise my estimate of the place of Germany amongst
the nations.

Of course one can palliate the apparent brutality of the Oxford dons in
Magdalen Hall by explaining that that is only a traditional game and
that Oxford dons, being cultivated gentlemen, do not normally eat while
their womenfolk fast; it is a platonic proceeding much as at Yuletide
you may see elderly gentlemen of blameless behavior forcibly embrace
young virgins under the mistletoe, and no doubt some similar palliation
may be found for the behavior of the German professors that I used to
find so disagreeable.

The chief requisite, in short, for the writer of books about other
countries is that of comprehension--and not only the faculty of
comprehension but the determination to apply it to every national or
individual manifestation that the writer may witness. Looking through
what I have written I find that some explanations are necessary. The
old-fashioned host of Salem was no doubt rendered crabbed by being
awakened suddenly from post-prandial slumber. I myself can be singularly
brutal in similar circumstances, though I fancy you would find me
normally bland and kindly. The reason why we could get no hospitality of
any sort at that moment was simply that the waiters' trades union of
Salem forbade any activity in hotels between the hours of two and six
P.M. And the salt cod and champagne amply explain the desolate aspect of
Salem which I believe to be one of the most delightful places
imaginable. I quite believe it.

As for the singular instances on the road to Coney Island, it should be
explained that those were due to that sturdy love of liberty which
distinguishes the population here, native or resident. At that date the
Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company had just amalgamated with the Manhattan
Beach Company and, there being a law to the effect that only one car
fare of five cents can be exacted for any single journey, the New York
public was determined that it would not pay more than five cents for the
journey from New York to Manhattan Beach. The companies had appealed to
the law and had obtained from a judge, whose decision was finally
reversed, a decree permitting them to exact two car fares for that
journey. The judge, moreover, had lent the companies several posses of
city police. So the public were up in arms against the injustices of
this judge Jeffreys of the twentieth century, and if I chanced to poke
my nose in between those contending forces, that was my fault.
Foreigners should keep out of revolutions and civil strifes.

The young lady rattlesnake catcher is also explicable. Rattlesnakes will
not breed in captivity, so an annual supply is needed for the Bronx Park
Zoo if the inhabitants of New York are to be kept instructed as to the
habits and aspect of those engaging reptiles. So every year a band of
the young friends of the Bronx Park custodians proceeds to Kent County
Reservation where the rattlesnake is protected and plentiful. Thus these
young people secure for themselves a pleasant holiday whilst doing the
state some service. The gentleman who fired off the revolver in the
ball-room was not a National Trait. He had merely gone suddenly mad as
has happened everywhere else.

The only phenomenon to me inexplicable was the lady on the _Paris_. I am
still inclined to think that she was supernatural. In that case not the
United States but an even higher authority must take the responsibility
for her.




                               CHAPTER II


                               MY GOTHAM

It used to be a saying in this city twenty years ago . . . "Little old
New York is good enough for me." I daresay that is still a saying here.
I have not lately heard it. . . . But in those days it was a good
saying; it would not be so any longer now that the note of New York is
that of a certain careless largeness--and a certain agelessness.

In 1906 New York had a quality of littleness and a quality of age. Then
there were boarding houses where men in shirt sleeves and lady guests in
white shirtwaists sat on the steps of houses in Madison Avenue right
down to Twenty-fourth Street; then all along the main thoroughfares
peanut barrows made harmony with their whistles--and, above all, every
second or third passerby on Broadway was apt to stop and ask you--an
obvious foreigner!--"Wal . . . and what are your impressions of New
York?" . . . I assure you that they used to do that, and I assure you
that they used to say "wal" instead of "well."

In these days no one asks you that; I suppose partly because New York is
now a great city and partly because I, foreign though I be, am quite as
much entitled to ask the question of the passerby as he is to ask it of
me. I mean that whatever the city contains it contains no born New
Yorkers. That is one of the phenomena that has here most struck me. I
never meet born New Yorkers in the city of their birth. In Paris,
yes!--in London, too, and in the remoter parts of New Jersey and
Connecticut states . . . and none of the New York families that I used
to know are here any longer. That I find sad, for they were such nice
people. . . . Stay: I have met one born New Yorker who used to be here
in 1906 . . . but that one--such a nice person too, was only on a visit
here and has gone back home--to somewhere in Missouri.

These are merely personal impressions gathered in the course of
conversation, and these are all that I have to offer. I am no
statistician, nor would I be one if I could. . . . When I first came
here I had a certain shyness about asking people where they came from,
but later I observed that when two Americans meet for the first time
they invariably ask, the one of the other: "Where are you from?" So I
gradually contracted the habit. In England it is not done--I suppose
because it is a matter of good form to pretend that every one you know
belongs to a county family--and you have to pretend to know all about
the county families of England. In Paris you can tell where people come
from by their accents. As a rule it is Michigan; sometimes it is
Nebraska, or else it is Sussex, England; less frequently Marseilles or
Perpignan, France. There--in Paris--in the Quartier Montparnasse where I
live, these accents are differentiable enough. I doubt if they would be
here, where a sort of normal, not very noticeable accent seems to be
developing.

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious--but
above all it is a crucible--because it is large enough to be incurious.
It is that that distinguishes the large from the not really large city.
You become a Londoner in next to no time. You can even become a Parisian
very quickly. I imagine you could grow into a New Yorker in a day or
two. You could do that, indeed, in the old days. I remember twenty years
or so ago being taken over a public school in New York by an inspector.
In one corner of an asphalted stretch of playground stood a small boy
sobbing. Says the inspector to him: "Why are you crying, my little man?"
Says the little boy: "Me brother hit me." The inspector: "But you
mustn't cry because your brother hit you!" And the little boy--with
ferocity: "I ain't going to let a blame Dago hit me. I'm a New Yorker, I
am!" His brother had been born in Warsaw, he himself on Ellis Island.
Perhaps to-day it doesn't go so easily as that!

But above all, for me--and I am talking about _my_ New York--the note of
this city is its casualness, its easiness, its sheer ordinariness. In
the old days one would not have been much astonished if Redskins had
raided Central Park; to-day one is astonished if anything out of the
ordinary happens.

The most singular proof of this came to me the other day. Some one had
made an engagement with me--a "date"--to meet him at a certain business
house at a certain hour, on East Twenty-seventh Street. The business
house, as is not unusual, had moved to other premises. There was nothing
for it but to parade the street in front of that vacated nest--for half
an hour or more. For myself, I always arrive a quarter of an hour before
my date; no New Yorker known to me was ever less than an hour late for
an appointment. Well, I began to do sentry duty in front of that
store--stepping up and down and about--turning, as the drill book has
it, in a smart and soldierly manner. But gradually I began to think and
gradually I began to loaf. I was thinking out, as a matter of fact, what
I am writing now . . . so that at the last, it was from miles and miles
above the clouds that my arriving friend had to haul me down. . . . A
comfortable, warm feeling that was. I might have been in Kensington
Gardens, London, England, or Rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris, France
. . . just anywhere, in any great city.

And-- No: my pocket was not picked. And-- No: no trolley car mounted the
sidewalk to crush me, and no one jostled me, nor did I once have to step
aside. I just mooned happily.

The New Yorker thinks that he rushes. He doesn't, and with the slowing
down of the traffic added to the always leisurely pace on the sidewalks,
he can't. Neither does the New York business man hustle. In London or
Paris when I go to see my lawyer or my banker or my publisher I dash
into his inner room, feeling frightened at my temerity. I tell my
business in a few seconds and I rush out--sure that I have taken up too
much time: reading it in the stern, bored faces of my interlocutors.
Here, bless you, in palatially appointed rooms, the business man appears
rather as orator and anecdotalist. Before each announcement of what he
is going to do for you he makes a preamble as to his moral and social
motives--a long preamble! As you try to tear yourself away--appalled at
the amount of his time you have taken up--he grasps your extended right
hand gently but firmly and holding on to it, he tells you six anecdotes
about his family, two about his last game of golf and several more about
how they hustle in this city. Then he suggests taking you out to lunch
somewhere--with a short round--twelve holes or so--afterward . . . It is
the paradise of business men. They say money is here easy to make. It
must be!

And it is good enough for me. . . . As I have already said, in one of
his books W. H. Hudson asserts that wherever grass grows and there are
birds he has felt himself at home. For myself, I have something of the
same feeling wherever men and women are to be found. In France I feel
myself a Frenchman, in Italy I feel more than half Italian; I am almost
entirely Provenal in Provence. I daresay if I ever go to America I
shall feel myself American enough. But I have never been to America:
only I feel at home in New York.

Americans, in fact, terrify me a little. But I am fond of New York and
fond of several of the inhabitants of this city. I don't know that I am
fond of any one else in the world--outside of my family, of course. The
French don't offer themselves much for fondness: the English don't much
understand what to do with it. But New York and New Yorkers like being
liked . . . they let you know it and that is agreeable.

New York, then, is a place where I can moon about and feel
pleasant--much as I can in Provence. What it is--this city--I don't
presume to dictate, but I do presume to say that it differs very little
from any other great city, psychologically.

I see my English friends walk about here, agape for differences. They
are astounded that bus conductors push something like an automatic
pistol at them instead of handing them a pink strip of paper; they find
it queer that the subway is not as deep down as the Tube in London, and
unnatural that houses should scrape the skies. But the nature of man is
not changed by having to stick a coin into a little slot or even by
working in an office on top of forty-three other offices. . . . New York
differs from London in having a keener intellectual life; it differs
from Paris in that intellectual circles are smaller. Perhaps the
products of the intellect are less valued here by the bulk of the people
than is the case in other cities--but New York is becoming more and more
of an intellectual center as the days go on--and that adds enormously to
the world. It adds enormously, not merely to the pleasure, but to the
safety of the world. If I--or you--can sit--as I found myself thinking
the other day--perfectly tranquilly at table with eleven other people,
all foreigners to me, and if I can feel perfectly at home and can find
myself talking quite unself-consciously about just such things as I
usually talk about at home, it is a sign that a great step has been
taken toward that union of peoples that the world so dreadfully needs.

One day--may it come soon--there will not be any America, there will not
be any Europe; there will be just the World about which we shall all
move at ease, where we shall all loaf and think and, please God, find
money easy to make. Well, one hears eternally that New York is not
America. It is obviously not Europe--the Atlantic lies between. Is it,
then, the outer fringe of America--or the end of Europe? Perhaps, the
one overlapping the other, here we have the beginning of the world.

I like, at any rate, to think of it like that and it is possible that it
is true enough. For New York is Babel without confusion of tongues. A
place of refuge for all races of the world from the flood of ancient
sorrows; the forlorn hope of humanity that, having lived too long, seeks
rebirth. And indeed, the note of New York--its gayety, its tolerance,
its carelessness is just that of a storming-party hurrying towards an
unknown goal. It is the city of the Good Time--and the Good Time is
there so sacred that you may be excused anything you do in searching for
it. That is an ideal so practicable!

Happiness, the quest for islands of the Blest, the pursuit of
saintliness, of sanity or of tranquil continuity--all these graspings
after a Fata Morgana have from the beginnings of eternity, in the Old
World, given weariness to the lives of mankind. They are so difficult
and no New Yorker contemplates difficult things. But the Good Time--like
the Catholic religion--is human and attainable. How it may be with
America I do not know; perhaps there the sterner virtues and pursuits
for which stand the pilgrim fathers--who were not Americans--still
obtain. But not in New York. It is the only place outside Provence where
everybody is rich and gay. But yes . . . outside, the sterner virtues
still obtain. I was just now airing my amiable views of New York to a
lady from Boston. She said: "Yes, but to be rich and gay is not the
supreme end of life." . . . For me, alas, it is!

I do not mean for myself personally . . . but for nations and races.
Races that are not harassed are seldom menaces to their neighbors; races
that have leisure have leisure also for Thought and the Arts. And it is
pleasant--it is the pleasantest thing in the world, to think of great
numbers of people--great, great numbers of people--all enjoying
themselves innocently. You know that when you think kindly of Henri IV,
who wished that every peasant of his realms might have a fowl in the pot
on Sundays. It is assuredly not from New York that any menace will come
to the world: it is from places where the sterner virtues obtain.

By day the soaring cliffs that rise joyously over behind the Battery are
symbols not merely of hope but of attainment; after dark, and more
particularly in the dusk, they are sheer fairyland. There is something
particularly romantic in a Germanic sort of way about mountains
illuminated from within. I remember watching the mountains behind
Caerphilly in South Wales from Cardiff; their purple black against the
night was pierced by illuminated and flickering mine-mouths and the
suggestion that gnomes and Nibelungen of sorts were there at work on the
veined treasure of the earth was irresistible. But it was a relatively
heavyish glamor: the millionwise illumination of New York is a lighter,
gayer affair--as it were Oberon and Titania against the Germanic gnomes.
The mind on seeing it connotes not subterranean picks and sweat, but
lighter, more tenuous occupations--the pursuits of delicate, wayward
beings. And indeed, the mind connotes correctly enough, for though
statistically New York may for all I know be a great manufacturing city,
nothing could be further from _my_ Gotham, except for the work of the
stevedores in the Port, than those other desperate and mournful labors,
in the dark and underneath the earth. For New York stands for air and
light. Preminently for air and light.

But, for me, the most vivid recollection of New York--and I have it even
when I sit here at work in one of the darkest, oldest and most
Bloomsbury-like houses of the downtown of this city--is the view, long
ago, from the roof of one of the tall houses that look down on City
Hall, of the brand-new, marvelously white and beautiful Flatiron. In
those days the Flatiron was one of the seven wonders of the world and
the air was more clear than it is possible for air to be, beneath the
crystalline bowl of the sky. The shadows were all naturally blue, too,
and every detail of every cornice of that building was visible from
where we stood, pinkish white outlined by delicate blue. And indeed,
every detail of every other building within sight was equally visible,
distance being indicated only by the diminution of objects, not by their
growing dimmer to the sight. And each building had its _panache_--its
ostrich-plume of steam streaming away in the keen wind. I have never
known greater exhilaration; I have never seen anything more gayly
beautiful.

All that is very much changed now. There is, I suppose, a good deal of
soft coal still being used, and what has been used during past times of
stress seems indelibly to have left a film over the white buildings and
even to have taken the edge off the very clearness of the air. The
buildings round the Woolworth Tower, seen even from the distance towards
Sandy Hook, have no longer their pristine whiteness; they have rather
the gray of bones that have been long exposed to the air, though they
still tower proudly aloft, man's protest and assertion in the face of
Nature.

New York, I think, has lost a little in impressiveness, if not in
beauty. Painters--and particularly foreign painters--still rave about
her canyons and ravines. But there are too many. They give the painters
greater choice of "bits," but to ordinary humanity they are apt to
produce at last an effect of drafty gloom--as if one were at the bottom
of shafts rather than on the face of the friendly earth. And the
contrasts of the old days are lost.

It used to be a cumulative affair; you used to come down on the Fifth
Avenue horse-stage between personable but not too lofty houses; then you
plunged into splendid abysses. And the sentinel before these splendid
abysses was the Flatiron that, seen down either Fifth Avenue or Broadway
from afar, was as white and as radiantly proportioned as any Greek
conception for celebrating a victory. That used to be a journey; a
romance.

To-day the Flatiron is gray and the skyline along Fifth Avenue where it
goes along Central Park is too uniform in height with the rest of the
city to let you have any feeling either of entrance or of plunging down
. . . Heaven knows where, on the North, you would have a sense of
entering New York. She straggles out into sparse suburbs and wilted
rusticities as is the case with London towards Twickenham, or Paris,
Montmorency way. So that the compact, comfortable feeling that one used
to have, of being bounded on the two sides by the rivers and of entering
a city that was still low at Fifty-seventh Street, is gone for ever. New
York will never be little and old again; she has assumed the ageless
aspect of the great metropolis.

It was, no doubt, merely an illusion, but the feeling that one then had
that, when looking downtown from Central Park, one was outside the city
walls and was looking into it, was so strong as to be nearly
irresistible. There were obviously hundreds of thousands of people
dwelling behind one's back; one knew even individuals who lived just
next door to the great baseball ground--at 118th Street, I think. But
the New York that mattered to one was before one's face. The fluxes and
refluxes of residential New York are so continuous as to be absolutely
unfollowable; but I am inclined to think that the people that one knew
when the Flatiron was still a prodigy and Madison Square the fashionable
shopping center, and Sixth Avenue below Twenty-third Street housed great
stores, and poor Fourteenth Street itself between Sixth and Third
Avenues was old-fashioned and "residential"--the people that one then
knew lived between the southern boundaries of Central Park and the south
side of Washington Square. I remember having letters of introduction to
or calling on one or two families on that Square, several in Gramercy
Park, one in West Fourteenth Street itself, others in Twenty-sixth and
Thirty-sixth Streets, and so on upwards to the Park. On the other hand,
the offices of my publisher were in Twenty-third Street between Broadway
and Lexington, and he himself lived somewhere up in the hundreds, and I
had several friends away in Bronx Park. I stayed, I remember, at first
in the Waldorf-Astoria, then in a hotel on West Twenty-seventh Street,
just off Fifth, which was more than indifferent. Its anteroom always
smelt of fish frying in indifferent fat.

I remember this particularly because of a gentleman who, somebody told
me, was a Western Senator--but I daresay he was not. He boarded a
trolley on which I was progressing from Wall Street to
Twenty-seventh--at about Eighth Street. The coat-tails of his frock-coat
flew out behind him as he made a flying leap onto the vehicle; he wore
an immense black sombrero, a scarlet tie and black leggings. At least, I
like to think of him as wearing leggings; perhaps he did not really, but
I confuse his memory with that of Buffalo Bill. He seated himself beside
me, drew from his tail-pockets an immense dark-scarlet apple, which he
first polished on his sleeve and then held under my nose.

"Ain't that a peach?" he exclaimed. I regarded it with attention and
then remarked that it appeared to me to be an apple. He remarked that if
it was not the peachiest peach he ever seen he never seen another. And
he added:

"Take it, mister." I refused to take it; I said that if I put it in my
pocket it would spoil the set of my coat, whereas if I carried it in my
hand it would make me conspicuous. But that fellow pursued me all the
way to West Twenty-seventh Street, got off the car and followed me into
the ante-room of my hotel, holding out the brilliant apple and
vociferating: "If _she_ ain't a peach I never seen. . . ." And over the
deep humiliation that I felt at being seen in such flamboyantly attired
company was superadded the nauseous consciousness of that ancient
fish-and-burnt-fat smell. It has never left me.

And next day one of the papers came out with a column headed in gigantic
type: "English Peer Cannot Understand How Apple Can Be Peach." It was
accompanied by a caricature of myself entitled: _The Animated Match_. In
those days I weighed only nine stone two--123 pounds. Alas, alas!

I used to think for long that that caption gave the measure of the
little oldness of my Gotham of those days when English visitors for
pleasure were so rare that every one of them had to be dignified at
least with the title of peer. Indeed, when I told the emigration officer
on the steamer that I was visiting the United States for my pleasure and
in no hope of gain, he simply refused to believe me. He said he had
never heard of anybody doing that. . . . I remember him vividly to this
day. A fat, dead-white complexioned man, with silver-rimmed spectacles,
an unbuttoned waistcoat over an indecently enormous abdomen and wearing
a singularly shabby straw hat, he lolled sideways at a table before
which we stood, smoked a cigar and cleaned his fingernails whilst he
spat out questions from behind his cigar. As the first United States
official to give an impression to the first visitor coming for pleasure
he was a bit of a misfortune. But, as they used to say--for I have not
heard the expression in many years: This is a free country.

And yet I do not know--as regards that heading. It seemed to me the note
of a small old town that the papers should give columns to an incident
so trifling. Yet I was the other day in Chicago, which is neither little
nor old, and which can never be either. Certainly it can never be
both--for when it was merely Fort Dearborn it was little and after the
fire it was young. But nowadays it grows vaster and vaster--and younger
and younger and younger till it begins to have that pathos of extreme
youth that. . . . However, I am not writing about Chicago now; I am
writing about its hawk. For when I was in Chicago lately the whole city,
all the newspapers, all the streets were convulsed or rendered
impassable by a hawk.

This bird of prey had been driven in by the severe weather in the
surrounding Middle West, and making a home on the crags of the Tribune
or the Wrigley buildings, it was striking down at leisure the city's
innumerable pigeons and eating them here or there in full view of the
populace. And that was "Front Page News" _in excelsis_. No war tidings
could so have caused the larger sort of type to spring into use across
the tops of pages of journals. The streets were rendered impassable by
reason of the crowds gazing into the skies and dangerous because lovers
of pigeons fired charges of gun-shot into the air at imaginary hawks,
whilst lovers of hawks thrust their arms up or down whilst they were in
the act of firing. That lasted for days.

I don't, by the bye, write of this with reprehension or scorn or
anything. It seems to me very proper and right. Life in the great towns
is so mechanical, so aloof from vitality, so much a matter of machines
that any incursion of the natural--of the wild, the predatory and the
free--is a very proper derivative. It will cool blood heated by
overindulgence in refrigerated food and brains overtaxed by tickers and
typewritten statements. European nations support their royal families
and aristocracies for this purpose; why should not Chicago have its hawk
and its gunmen--though indeed the hawk excited more attention than ever
did the raid on the Drake Hotel?

Still, excitement over accipitrine or foreign visitors for pleasure may
be taken as the characteristic of a small old town, as a rule. You
cannot imagine New York or Paris or London raising an eyelid because of
the visit of a hawk to the City Hall or the Mansion House or the Hotel
de Ville--though I do remember that years ago London was stirred by the
first visit of great flocks of seagulls to the Thames Embankment. But
that excitement was soon over; to-day the gulls are so familiar a part
of the riverine landscape of London that hardly a soul is found feeding
them. Occasionally some one will take them a bundle of scraps, and now
and then a city clerk at lunch time will toss into the beak of a gull a
scrap of the sandwich he is eating as he strolls.

But then, whatever be the case with Paris, New York seems to have no
city-consciousness at all. London, indeed, has herself precious little.
The Parisian is always the Parisian, but the Londoner, except that he
will exhibit symptoms of mild disgust if you suggest that he could be
anything else but a Londoner, is singularly unaware of the existence of
his city. And the New Yorker--so battered at, apostrophized and
continually rebuked is he by all the rest of the inhabitants of God's
Country--the New Yorker outside New York only very coyly admits the
place of his residence. He prefers to say that he is from Vermont. Or
Nebraska.

And--for it is pleasant to contemplate the inter-actions and reactions
of great cities one upon another--what of city-consciousness London has
has always seemed to me to come to her, at any rate in part, by way of
New York. By way of the gray squirrel! For it was when the gray squirrel
was first set free in quantities in Regents Park that, in order to
secure immunity for them from the acts of chase of the London small boy
that the London County Council issued orders that the board school
teachers were to inculcate lessons as to civic pride upon their pupils.
The teachers were to tell their pupils that gray squirrels were things
to be proud of because other fellows' cities had no gray squirrels. And
so with other beasts and birds. So that to-day the fauna of the London
parks is profuse and astonishing and you never see--as used to be the
case in my boyhood--the London male young using catapults against living
things except other small boys--and perhaps cats. So here again the New
World redressed the balance of the Old.

And more than redressed it. For one thing has always caused a note of
sadness to me in New York--the fact that I seldom see a bird here. And
for me a city without birds is like a house without a piano--something a
little deadened. I seldom--practically never--see even the humble,
troublesome sparrow in New York. Even years ago that fact used to
impress me. One went along the streets and never saw a bird. There were,
however, other beautiful flying things. One day I went into the
office--in Twenty-third Street--of my publisher, and he said--it was Mr.
S. S. McClure of prodigious memory:

"What in h--ll have you got on your derby?" So I removed my billycock,
and there, right in the front, in the place usually occupied by a
regimental or a fireman's badge, was a great, beautiful moth. A great
moth with a wing-spread larger than that of a sparrow. And, after that I
used to take pleasure in observing those fine things floating with the
boldest and most beautiful flight in the world--smoother than that of
the finches and more floating than the swallows--over the buses on Fifth
Avenue or round and round the trees of Madison Square in an autumn
season. I have not seen them lately--but that, I am aware, is no proof
that they are no longer there. For sitting the other day with a lady in
the window of the National Arts Club looking down over Gramercy
Park--which in London would be called a square--I remarked to her that
New York had for me always a certain note of sadness because there are
no birds here--not even sparrows. She remarked drily:

"If you will give yourself the trouble to look down you will see at
least seventeen." And there they were--at least seventeen sparrows
flying across the gray winter grass of the square. There was even a
pyramidal box pierced in tiers with small holes and supported on a
pole--a miniature sparrow-cote.

But although, for that moment I was caught out, I do not believe that
that little company of seventeen sparrows in Gramercy Park need convince
me that New York ever is or ever could be a thickly bird-populated city.
Yet somehow the companionship of birds is a necessity to my complete
pleasure. I do not mean that I have--or that to be a proper man any one
need have--the passion for birds that was our dear Huddie's--W. H.
Hudson's. I should never have the patience to watch for hours and days
and weeks a titlark's nest in which a cuckoo had laid an egg. But in the
garden of my studio in Paris there was a colony of white blackbirds, and
in a thorn tree in the backyard of my flat in London a thrush nested.
And it was a pleasure to me to glance up from my work and see the wings
flitting intimately past the windows or to see on the leads the mother
thrush with her yellow, black-speckled waistcoat, dropping smashed
snails into the enormously distended beaks of her clamorous nestlings.
It gave a touch of lightness to the day.

But if here I look up amid the shadows and out into the backyard I see
nothing--a cement floor, an incredibly begrimed glass roof of an open
shed. And it is just a well; except for soot, clean but eternally
Cimmerian. A well--for, although the house I have chosen to live in is
old and relatively low, on the other three sides that surround my yard
there tower up the skyscrapers, and I live either in funereal shadows or
in artificial light.

Do not mistake me. I am lamenting neither my lot nor my lodgings. I have
had the offer of a perfectly brand-new apartment on Park Avenue. But I
should die in a perfectly brand-new apartment on Park Avenue. Here I
have a number of largish, tall rooms, dark but with sculptured marble
mantelpieces and roughish Early American furniture--honest early
nineteenth century journeyman's work such as might have been produced in
Kent or Sussex in the England of that period. It is a fact that I have
been in this rambling, ramshackle old place four months and only
yesterday discovered that I was the proprietor of a kitchen. I wanted to
give a tea-party and asked the housekeeper to lend me a spirit lamp to
boil the water, whereupon she said:

"Why don't you use your kitchen?" And there it was.

This will seem incredible and I have not time to explain it; it is
nevertheless a true anecdote. For what I am talking about is the tall
buildings--the skyscrapers of New York. By way of birds.

Where a sparrow _can_ lodge a sparrow will lodge--but on the faces of
these immense cliffs there is not lodgment even for a sparrow--except
maybe, skywards. You see, I have been gradually raising my eyes towards
the tops of these cliffs by way of the backyards and the shadows. I will
confess that it was the hawk at Chicago that first made me fully
recognize the vastness of these affairs. For when upon the railway
platform of Rockford, Ill., I read in the local journal that Chicago,
toward which I was proceeding, was convulsed by the visits of a hawk, my
first and natural reaction was to think:

"Why don't they kill it? Or at least take it alive?"

I read that every shotgun and rifle in the city had been mobilized; that
the Chief of Police had issued ukases alike against the shooters and the
hawk; that the commissioner for something had declared at all costs that
the hawk must be protected because the overpopulation of the city by
pigeons had long been a menace to the health of the human inhabitants;
that the deputy commissioner for something else and somebody else had
spent the day spreading clap-nets on the roof of the City Hall and
baiting them with live pigeons; that the local agriculturists had passed
resolutions declaring that the hawk must be protected because pigeons
eat the grain from sown fields; that the mobilization of the city fire
brigade had been advocated in order to spread bird-lime on lofty roofs,
but whether to catch the hawk or the pigeons I do not know . . . when on
that windy platform I read all this there rose in my mind's eye at once
the image of a London suburb, far-flung, with its two or, at most,
three-storied villas. No London commuter would notice the hawk; if he
did he could not tell a hawk from a hernshaw--or from a pigeon for the
matter of that. Or if they did see it on a roof and want to kill it, it
could be done with a boy's catapult. Almost with a pea-shooter.

But till then I had never seen Chicago. I had heard that her suburbs,
too, covered an immensity of ground, but I had reckoned without the
Wrigley or the Tribune or the other tall buildings that have above the
mournful plains of the Middle West the aspect of being a great
assembling of super-lighthouses, the one whispering in the ear of the
other. Or of an immense basalt, fluted and pyramidal crag aspiring to
the peak of heaven!

When I did see them I realized that to kill a lone hawk that had those
altitudes at its disposal would be about as easy as to kill one hawk on
Seawfell . . . a one and only hawk. And then I had a better image of New
York herself. For the lower levels of New York are familiar enough to
one and so indeed are the higher office-chambers. One walks the streets
or visits the offices gaining those associations that in the end are
what make a city seem alive to us. But I wonder how many of us ever
raise our eyes to the heavens or think of the skyline in inner New York.
Few, I imagine. At any rate, it was not until I lately saw Chicago that
I had a vision of the immense plateau that the New York roofs must make.
For till from a distance one sees the Illinois metropolis one has little
idea of what the isolated skyscraper is like--and until one has fully
taken in an isolated skyscraper one has little idea of an assemblage of
them so serried that their roofs form a plateau. And the idea of that
level of the air is singularly stimulating.

One has, naturally, long ago heard the legends. It is several years
since I met a man who told me that his father made a living--and a good
living, too!--as custodian of the roofs of unfinished or as yet not
fully occupied buildings, living thereon in a temporary shack. Later one
began to hear of millionaire owners of vast edifices who had bungalows
on their roofs, poplar groves, garages, I daresay, golf courses . . .
who knows what? That sort of imagination is very easy to have and to
cap. There is no reason why you should not have a lake with sailing
boats. Indeed, the swimming pool of the Illinois Women's Athletic Club
is on the roof of a Chicago skyscraper.

That sort of conception and the putting of it into execution are easy
enough if you have enough money and a sufficiently large slave
population. Even Babylon had its roof-gardens--far away and long ago.
And it is a mere commonplace that where space is very valuable the
rooftops will be utilized be they four stories high or a hundred and
fifty. So will the earth beneath ground and the very rivers. For I am
certain that, in the end, the East River will be covered in, since,
sooner or later, New York must either succumb or find more breathing
space.

New York is what she is because she is in part an unofficially
administrative, in part a pure pleasure city. The days are no doubt past
when all the business men of the United States had to go on their knees
to Wall Street to obtain capital which Wall Street would grant or not
according to its own sole will and caprice. To a certain extent the
local Federal Reserve banks from Alabama to the State of Washington
suffice for necessary loans, and Wall Street alone can scarcely create
or quell financial panics for its own pleasure. Nevertheless, immensely
the larger part of the financial and commercial transactions of the
Continent are transacted either in or through New York and she is still
the financial center of the New World, as London is of the Old. Indeed,
a curious parallel might be drawn between the situations of the two
great banking cities. New York is not, of course, officially the
metropolis of the United States: she houses neither the Federal
Legislature nor the Federal Judiciary--but that she is the "capital" of
the United States in the colloquial sense in which that word is
generally used no one not a much more than a hundred per cent American
would deny. And probably by her combined social and financial pull she
controls the Legislature at Washington far more than is acknowledged.

That, however, is not my topic of the moment--nor is it ever likely to
be. What I was about saying is that it seems fairly obvious that New
York cannot continue--whatever her position of control may at present
be--_in_ that position of control unless she does attain in one way or
the other to more elbow room. I said lately that the New Yorker never
keeps an engagement to within half an hour--but that is not to accuse
the New Yorker of having an unpunctual mind or of lacking the desire to
be of a royal politeness. It is merely to point out that, hurry as he
may, and with the best will in the world, he simply cannot do it. There
is no gauging the time of your arrival at any given point on the ground
level of the city. Having an engagement for half-past four in
Sixty-fifth Street, I took a taxicab one afternoon at four in Madison
Square and arrived at five minutes past five, having traveled at the
rate of practically a minute and a half to a block. The same evening I
had a date for eight o'clock in the same street. I took a taxi at the
corner of Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue at seven o'clock and arrived
at Sixty-fifth Street at seven-twenty--having to cool my feet for forty
minutes outside the house where I was dining and having covered the
ground at the rate of practically fifty blocks in twenty minutes.

Those were merely social engagements, so that it was only my own time
that was lost. Supposing, however, that they had been business dates! I
should not only have lost my own time but I should have kept the man who
was expecting me waiting in addition for thirty-five minutes.

And this goes on millionwise: there must at present be thousands of
millions of business hours lost in the city of New York every year, on
the surface of the ground alone. It is all very well to say that you can
always take the Subway and the Elevated--and I believe that this course
recommends itself to the democratic spirit of the American. At any rate,
when I said to a lively young lady from Seattle that I never moved about
New York except by taxi or by surface bus, she retorted on me as if I
had been more than several sorts of a snob. But to do it, if one's work
makes any call on the individual, is not to be any sort of a snob at
all. If your work is individualistic in nature--and I presume that the
work of big business heads and the like _is_ that--you must have privacy
of a sort for as long periods of the day as are attainable. You are an
engrossed person. I can do twice as much work as most of my confrres in
New York--or in London and in Paris, for that matter--just because I do
protect my thinking machine by such devices as taking taxis whenever I
have to move about the streets of such cities as New York. . . . This,
however, seems to call for a new chapter.




                              CHAPTER III


                              SKYSCRAPERS

If you take the population of a small town, say thirty thousand souls
who are usually spread over houses bordering on several miles of road--I
believe that if you wanted to walk over all the roads of London Town it
would take you two hundred years at four miles per hour!--if you take
that population and crowd it all into one house having a frontage of say
sixty feet of say sixty-foot road, you will find that that road-space is
singularly little for the needs of that population when another
population of the same size is housed just a foot away along that same
road. You will increase the bewilderment if you consider that of the
population of a rural township of thirty thousand, about two-thirds--the
children and the housekeeping women--use the roads very little, whereas
your thirty thousand will all be active movers using their sixty feet of
sidewalk and the sidewalks of their neighbors at least four times daily
and all at about the same hour of the day--in tides.

The congestion between--to be liberal--eight and ten of mornings and
four and seven in the evening will be terrible. In addition there is the
lunch hour. That is the situation of New York.

Now, do not be mistaken: I _like_ the skyscrapers; in their splendid
congeries they are beautiful, impressive and above all--for
me--thrilling as can be. I wish the word "skyscraper" had not been
invented for them; its suggestion is one of ugliness that makes the
superior European hug himself for his superior virtues. He does not do
anything ugly to the skies, he says. But these great, beautiful
pinnacles aspire to the skies and the clouds caress them. It would
indeed be better if the European would regard them as cloud-houses,
though the term is too clumsy for everyday New York to use, the initial
of the word in common use taking the sound along faster.

But do not believe that I am, from a superior standpoint, criticizing my
Gotham, any more than a timid lover is criticizing his divinity when he
deferentially suggests to her that if she continues to lace so tight and
run up the stairs so fast something painful may happen to her. The
simile is in fact a rather exact one--for New York _is_ laced too tight
and would if she could get up the stairs at a terrific rate. But she
can't.

She has not got any stairs and her elevators are terrible time-traps. I
will admit that I am absent-minded and not infrequently push the "up"
button when I wish to be transported to the solid ground. I daresay,
indeed, I do it as often as not. But the other day I was on the
fourteenth story of an office building in the shadow of the Woolworth
Tower. Now fourteen stories is no extravagant altitude as altitudes go,
nevertheless it took me eleven minutes before I was on the sidewalk.
That is to say I waited ten and a half minutes in front of a great range
of blank doors above which red lights flashed and went out. At last one
of those doors above which no light had flashed drew back and, by
running hard, I managed to make it and insert myself before it had
disappeared. Nor are you to imagine that that was a small or dud office
building; it was great and housed a whole United States State
department; nor was I specially incompetent. There stood in the
monumental corridor beside me, alike waiting for means of descent, one
of the remorseless-jawed, clean-shaven, gray-tweed suited
representatives of the Big Business of this country. When we had waited
seven and a half minutes he said "Damn!" several times between his
teeth; at the ninth minute he said that if he had back all the hours he
had wasted in waiting for these contraptions he would have time to write
a book.

The sentiment came home to me. For only two days before I had remarked
to the doorkeeper of a speak-easy, at a quarter past two whilst awaiting
an English authoress who had promised to lunch with me there at one--I
had remarked in my haste that if I had back all the time of my life that
I had spent in waiting for women and the money I had thrown away in
overtipping I should have no need either for the fountain of youth or
the wealth of Henry Ford.

Be that as it may the time wasted in New York over waiting for people
who are late for their dates, over waiting for elevators, during traffic
jams and over answering purely frivolous telephone-calls must amount to
a very considerable expenditure if it could be represented in money. Let
us put it in another way: If I go to London, or if I go, in Paris, from
the South to the North Bank, in both cases on business, I expect to--and
I do--get in at least three, but not unusually four, business interviews
before lunch and at least two, but quite frequently three, afterwards.
In New York if you can manage two before lunch and one afterwards you
are lucky, simply because of the difficulty of transit and of
synchronization. I am not of course speaking from my own sole
experience.

In addition, at the present time, the postal service is very unreliable
and the telephone more exasperating than that of any other great city
with the exception of Paris. But the astonishing thing is how, in these
matters at least, New York changes. Twenty years ago under Colonel, I
think, Waring and his White Wings Brigade New York streets and sidewalks
were the cleanest in the world--cleaner than those of Middleburg itself.
Three years ago, during the Keep Smiling Movement the telephone service
was like Heaven. One telephoned for the pleasure of it--the pleasure of
hearing the nice voices of the operators and of coming in contact with
anything so smooth-moving and efficient. You spoke to Boston or San
Francisco on the Long Distance and it was as if your interlocutor was
sitting in the room with you. To-day to telephone to say, St. Louis, is
a torture. I was doing so this morning. Apparently I was just audible in
that city but that city was completely inaudible to me. When I asked for
a better connection the operator spoke very rudely to me and took
several minutes to give it to me. It was better, but in the middle of a
sentence we were cut off for over five minutes and the operator was
still more rude. And, the conversation finished, the company attempted
to charge me for the three minutes during which we were waiting for the
better connection and for the five during which they had cut us
off---and all at a dollar fifty a minute! And twelve dollars are three
pounds. And it is to be remembered that conversation carried on in
circumstances of exasperation are seldom very serviceable.

The New York internal service is little better--and gone are the
cheerful voices of the operators and the agreeable local accents! To-day
when you ring up you hear coming back to you a sort of weary Cockney
drawl that repeats your number twice all wrong. Then you are put onto a
third wrong number. That is just like London, just as your Long Distance
experiences here will be just like those with Trunks in England.

Now these are not grumbles. I personally care very little whether the
telephone service be efficient or no and I could very cheerfully
dispense with it altogether. Indeed I am being driven out of New York by
the ceaseless ringing that goes on on my telephone all the morning when
I ought to be working. That is a fact. I am leaving New York much sooner
than I wished to do because of the too efficient telephone--and I do not
like the thing that drives me out of New York, and indeed out of
America.

Not grumbles--but speculations as to a certain queerness! Why is it that
twenty years ago you could eat your dinner off the Sixth Avenue or any
other pavements--and if you left any crumbs behind within the minute one
of the Colonel's men in white would miraculously appear and sweep them
up; whereas to-day. . . . Well, last Sunday but one I walked after lunch
from 36th Street along Sixth Avenue to 16th and I have never imagined
that such filth could be found in a city street as there we had to walk
on. The paper repositories in all the side streets were piled high with
_immondices_ of an intimate and unmentionable kind and these with every
conceivable other disgusting object overflowed from the side-streets
onto the Avenue itself. And the queer thing was that although I was
hardly able to desist from retching and wished incontinently to take a
taxi, my companion--of a normally more delicate nature--said, no, the
exercise would do us good and accepted the garbage as being all in the
day's journey. That sort of patience in the face of abuses is
symptomatic--but of a characteristic that must be written about later.

Again I say that this is not a grumble. I prefer New York with soiled
pavements to other cities set upon floors like those of Heaven. It
appears that the streets are in this condition only on Sundays because
the street-scavengers on that day employ a holiday--or at any rate it is
only on Sunday afternoons when the streets are nearly empty that their
condition jumps to the eye. And for myself it is not difficult to
arrange to stop in bed on the Sabbath. It will do me good. . . . But
_why_ these changes?

One is accustomed to say: "Oh well, you cannot expect to have a perfect
telephone service on this side of Heaven," but New York _had_ a perfect
telephone service. Only three years ago. . . . I suppose really on a
given date some years since one of the iron-faced ones who here direct
great enterprises, strolled into the chief exchange and remarked:
"Hello, girls, keep smiling!" and then took certain steps to see that
they jolly well did. But, since then, he must have gotten another craze,
or have forgotten, or have been promoted--or immersed in crossword
puzzles. . . . It will have been something like that; thus changes occur
and affect the lives of millions.

Changes. . . . Well, to me it is immaterial whether New York remains the
financial centre of the Western Hemisphere except that one likes,
irrationally, the cities that one likes to have predominance in even
immaterial things. And it would make me mournful for at least ten
minutes if, in that respect, St. Louis or Dayton, Ohio, or Seattle or
any other place should usurp the supremacy of New York. At the end of
that time I should have assured myself by the employment of reason that
I cared nothing about the matter.

In these matters human psychology is very queer. I suppose that
everybody who knows anything about them laments the decay of the ancient
glories of . . . well, say Spain. It is sad to think that never again
will the great galleons trail away into the golden sunsets. London to me
to-day is nothing--or next to nothing. I know nobody of its seventeen or
so millions--five people perhaps outside my own family. New York really
means a great deal more: my memories of her are nearly all pleasant
. . . full of clean air and white Flatirons. All the same if some
one--in Chicago, usually--tells me that New York--or more usually
Chicago--is larger than London I feel a tinge of regret. For the only
quality left to London is its largeness--its far-flungness . . . and its
regrets. Immense, mournful and black-robed, she is a sort of Queen
Victoria--a colossal Widow at Windsor amongst the cities.

So she should remain. But still more if the world is to be habitable for
. . . oh, for men of goodwill, must New York retain her financial
supremacy amongst the American cities. To me financial supremacy means
nothing except if it means that in financially supreme cities life is
rich and gay and Thought and the Arts can subsist on the crumbs. Apart
from that, Wall Street might, for all I care, emigrate to Norfolk, Va.
And yet it mightn't. It is pleasant to think that, amongst all her other
bewildering delights, New York has that distinction. . . . I regard all
bankers with distrust as being the root of most of the evil of the
world; all financiers outside bankers I would export, as was done with
the dogs of Constantinople, to a small desert island where they might
subsist on each other's flesh. But it is difficult to see how New York
could do that and keep at the bottom of the trunk that medal of the
empty renown of Financial Supremacy. . . .

Precisely like one's war medals. One keeps them in bits of brown paper,
tossed into a valise amongst old footwear, tubes of tooth paste and
mildewed, forgotten papers. Occasionally, when on one's travels, one
searches for a supplementary shoe-horn and digs to the bottom of the
valise, getting a glimpse of the bright ribbons and the metal discs. For
a second, then, one has satisfaction. . . . Atque ego. . . . Oneself,
too, once. . . .

So New York must retain her Financial Supremacy if there is to be no
crumpled rose-leaf in the mattress. . . . But how can she if the
skyscrapers are to continue to crowd one upon the other? In order to
boss the Big Business of the Western World you must be able to do _some_
business. For myself I entertain a profound disbelief as to the business
activities of the Big Business man. Outside his office he hustles like
anything, but inside it he sits smoking immense cigars and reading
eighteen newspapers. His feet will be either on or not on his roll-top
desk. When they are not on it they will be hanging over the arm of his
chair. Meanwhile in another room his stenographer will be reading and
answering his business correspondence. From time to time he will dictate
a golfing or other social date into a dictaphone; he will use his
telephone for the purpose of telling his barber to reserve for him the
chair in which he will spend the hours from eleven to one. That is why
he has his alabaster complexion.

_He_ will use the Subway or the Elevated partly to show that he is a
democrat, partly to show that he must save time. But then he has the
time. Nevertheless, if his immense Firm is to continue, his stenographer
must be able to have at least one business interview of a morning and
one every other afternoon with luck. That is about the present rate. But
when all the new skyscrapers are put up and when the Hoboken tunnel
permits all the new road traffic to pour into the city from that
side. . . . What then?

Except sentimentally it is no affair of mine. Solutions of problems are
found somehow. No doubt double-decker streets will come and prove some
palliative. Or the filling in of the East River nearly as far as
Brooklyn Suspension Bridge might solve the problem. The trouble is that
the very thing that makes New York so attractive--its want of corporate
self-consciousness--militates against the problems ever being
consciously tackled. The late New York elections turned, not on
congestion, on defective posts or exasperating telephones; not even on
begarbaged streets. They turned on milk, dragged as an unavailing
red-herring across the track because the Opposition apparently had not
the courage to raise the religious issue.

That of course is only a fugitive--a temporary--instance; but the
indifference to corporate matters is apparently a permanent condition.
Only once in the last four or five months have I heard anybody in New
York speculate as to the future of New York as a corporation and that
was when some one at a very Conservative Club offered to make a bet that
within twenty years there would be a Jewish mayor of New York. He found
no takers. His hearers hated the prophecy but no one proposed to do
anything about it.

And that is very characteristic of New York--and indeed of the Eastern
Seaboard generally. You will hear all Boston groaning about the Irish
domination of Monsignor O'Connell and his myrmidons; that city under a
slight snowfall is such a hell of slush and filth, even on the Hill and
round the Common, that civilization for the time to all intents and
purposes is at an end. For all the women of Boston must wear the clumsy
horrors called slickers thus assuming the aspect--not of Europa, who was
carried off by a bull--but of a human feminine population that should
have been forced by a malign wizard to have the feet of cows. . . . But
perhaps that is not evidence of a breakdown of civilization; perhaps it
means only that His Eminence who watches over the city of the Tea-party
is determined to preserve the chastity of his cure. He doubtless figures
that it must be difficult to love even one's dearest and fairest when
she has assumed cow's heels. . . . Ah, but it isn't.

Yet the Cabots go on speaking to God and nothing is done about it. For
myself, all Papist as I am, I could not live in Boston and bear those
circumstances without doing something. Why, even the other day, on
Beacon Street with my shoes full of water and having walked round five
or more blocks in the hope of getting onto the Common and so to Newbury
Street . . . even I for a moment had the insane impulse to free the city
by some rash act. Being of the race of Hampden and the Pilgrim Fathers I
thought of hitting a policeman. For in England if you wish to redress a
grievance you hit a policeman and then tell the magistrate all about it,
the court reporters seeing that your grievance is aired in the public
press. . . . But the Boston policemen are all Irish, carry formidable
clubs . . . and dislike the English.

I remember being, years ago, on the Common with a compatriot. As we
approached the statue of Washington he--my gifted friend--said to me:

"Look at our distinguished fellow-countryman!" And an Irish policeman
who overheard him remarked to us:

"If you say dat again I'll hit ye wid me club!" and twirled his weapon
by its string round his fingers.

It was perhaps his memory that saved his present-day descendant. At any
rate I did not hit one. . . . Be that as it may I should not like to say
how many times I have not been moved "to do something about it" in this
country. Indeed, not ten minutes after, in a restaurant with still
soaking feet, I was vowing to myself that I would shoot a certain
kleagle not many miles away from Boston Common. The Ku Klux Klan was at
that moment--could one believe that it was actually in process of
happening at that moment?--insolently and abominably oppressing a Roman
Catholic lady of my acquaintance.

It was an incredible situation. There the Hub of the Universe--the poor
old Hub of the Universe!--still with its red-brick London houses and its
red-brick paved sidewalks, its Hill, its Common . . . there it still was
with all its odious superiority and its still more odious snobbishness,
but prone beneath a rapscallion Papist domination that must be as
unpleasing as the world has ever seen. And yet, not twelve miles away
the exact Ghibellines of those Guelfs were proposing to tar and feather
an innocent family of my co-religionists! Because they employed a negro
handmaiden in their store!

That of course is politics with which I do not mean at the moment to
meddle, though I do not mean to funk it when the time comes. The image
that immediately I want to get onto paper is that of proud cities of
immense populations surrounded by States of immense populations that are
practically at war with the citizens of the proud cities. Here you have
New York surrounded by that whole population of _all_ the States of the
Union--and all the populations of all those States detest her with a
detestation compared with which the detestation of the ordinary Parisian
for the city of Berlin is as very little. Or, _in petto_, you have the
once proud city of the Lowells more completely de-Lowellized than would
have seemed possible fifteen years ago, but surrounded by a patient
agricultural population dominated by a secret organization representing
what I will call Lowellism at its very worst . . . representing the very
worst type of Puritanism, the very worst of Anglo-Saxondom, of
terrorism, of bullying, of ignorance and of intolerance.

That is all right; the United States likes to have things so and it is
no one else's affair. It is a phenomenon like another. But what is queer
is that the nice people--the nice, quiet, decent people who are of
neither of these Houses support with such patience quite intolerable
interferences . . . and intolerable inconveniences. It is as if one
should be in a lovely, lovely house subjected to a plague of flies, and,
asking why there are these flies, should be answered that it is because
of the dunghill under the window . . . and, asking why there should be
the dunghill under the window, should get no answer at all.

But there it is with all its queernesses. For, as I have said, if you
ask a Chicagoan why _his_ snow is not cleared away with the lightning
rapidity of a New York snow clearing he will reply that it is because
the New York municipality is corrupt and employs an unnecessarily large
army of overpaid snow-cleaners in order to get their votes; if you ask a
New Yorker who knows anything about Chicago--but there are very few of
these--why it is that his streets are cloacal wildernesses of filth on a
Sunday whilst the streets of Chicago are brightly clean on all days of
the week he will reply that it is because the Chicago municipality is
corrupt and vastly overpays a huge horde of Sunday street cleaners in
order to get _their_ votes. . . . There does not seem to be a great deal
of system about it. I know cities in another hemisphere that are corrupt
enough in all conscience but _their_ municipalities when budgeting for
the year budget for cleanliness, pure water, efficient tramways and
reasonable sanitation _in addition_ to corruption galore. And that would
seem to be the only satisfactory way--that relic of the feudal system.
For, if the citizens of those latter places are not kept relatively
comfortable they begin by hitting policemen and if that does not bring
redress they hang a municipal councilor. But that is seldom necessary.

But there you are. The lovely ladies of America in patience parade the
winter streets in slickers; my poor nice R. C. friends think that
because they know a Number One or some Klan official they may be allowed
to keep on their store with its negress handmaiden. If they may not they
will have to sell their store which has been in the family since the
days of the Pilgrim Fathers--for white assistance is not procurable. But
they regard the prospect if with regret at any rate with patience.
Certainly they do not propose to do anything about it.[1]

I think I have already said that I like New York. If I have not yet
conveyed that to the reader's intelligence I will here repeat that I
would rather be in New York than in any other place in the world except
Provence, to which I retire in order to recover from the effects of too
much delight. And after all the proof of the pudding does lie in the
eating. It takes, no doubt, _all_ those ingredients of the United States
to make the dear nice friends I have in that place the dear nice people
that they are. I am afraid of America--and I and the world will go on
being afraid of America. But the thought has crossed my mind that _they_
are nice just because America is so formidable. If you ask the New
Yorker why he puts up with a set of circumstances that he regards as an
oppression he will reply that it is because two aged and enormously
wealthy persons wish that set of circumstances to prevail and that
whilst those two aged billionaires wish those circumstances to prevail
prevail they will. (I am not advancing those statements of the New
Yorker as facts but merely as the not unusual statements of the New
Yorker.) He will go on to say, mournfully, resignedly and with a
far-away look in his eyes, that all these stresses, these oppressions,
the terrifying aspect of America as a new and worse Prussia jack-booting
it across the world--all these things come from hundred-per-centism,
which was invented by gentlemen with names like
Hunderttausendstrassenheimer, from the Klan, from those impressed by the
fact that one gentleman possesses a Complete Billion and above all from
the terrible small-town ladies with silver-gray hair, Roman noses,
protuberant shell-rimmed glasses--from the terrible ladies who are the
most oppressive and the most reactionary feature of hundred-per-cent
life.

So speaks the New Yorker. . . . And when he so speaks my mind always
provides for myself the corollary: "But in the end, my dear, they have
given us You!" For whatever New York is or is not, she, like her other
greater--for she is still by a million or so the greater--Great Aunt,
Greater London, is incontestably an ark of refuge. A sanctuary. You go
to New York as in the middle ages the victims of the Law, the King or
the Vehmgericht fled to the altar. Alsatia . . . I figure ourselves--us,
New Yorkers and their guests--who stroll in Central Park or hurry
joyous, arm in arm, along Fifth Avenue between say the Cathedral at
Fiftieth Street and the Waldorf Astoria. . . . And surely Fifth Avenue
between Fiftieth and Thirty-fourth Streets is the loveliest Street for
its life and light and gayety in the world. . . . I figure ourselves as
irresistibly recalling to the mind the gay, insouciant, idle strollers
who, far away and long ago, in one Alsatia or Durham or another had
escaped from the Wrath to Come and, cleaning their nails with their
sword points, leant against sunbathed walls and jested at Time, Fate,
Virtue, Law and the Seven Woes of the World.

And in the end that is the true consummation of Anglo-Saxondom. We, the
true Anglo-Saxons--the real Hundred-per-Centers whose names are other
than Hunderttausendstrassenheimer or Putz--we are not only Saxon and
Norman and Dane, we are Jew and Huguenot and Hussite and Anabaptist and
Pilgrim Father and Absconding Bankrupt and Younger Son and Jansenist and
Circumnavigator. We are, we Anglo-Saxons, from London to New York and
Sydney and Hongkong and Delhi and back again to the Strand by way of the
Boulevard Montparnasse, we are all the Bad Hats of the World. We are the
Eternal Nuisances of Everywhere who have been kicked out by Everybody
and we have traveled the world round and round and round and round again
in search of the City of the Good Time. . . . So the sunlight falls on
Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Thirty-fourth . . . for Us and there
is now our Spiritual Home.

That is not merely lyric: it is historically true. Spitalfields silk;
Bradford wool; Boston beans . . . all the famous commerces of
Anglo-Saxondom are the products of Heretics and Nuisances to their kings
and Countries. Flemish Protestants, French Huguenots; English Dissenters
made those places and those wealths. The First Anglo-Saxons; the first
Danes; the first Normans and the first Isaacs of York and London Lombard
Streeters--they were all the restless expatriates of the Universe.
To-day you have New York--which is not America. . . . Well, in the old
days you had Provence--which was not France.

The Westward current has by now pretty well finished. The West itself
and still more the Middle West according to the New York theory is ruled
over by tyrants compared with whom Charles I or George III were village
policemen and by tyrannies compared with which that of the Russian
Bureaucracy or the Council of Ten of Venice were village Sunday-schools.
That is no doubt an exaggeration. But it is true that the sense of it is
there. The American visitor goes to New York in much the same mind as
that of the Englishman visiting Paris; he returns to his Main Street no
doubt very little modified. But the American who settles in New York
becomes at once an ex-American. That would not be the case were his Main
Street more supportable to him. And from then on his wistful kin
remaining behind regard him as the lost soul . . . the Expatriate. To
what extent his abandoned home exercises a pull on him it is obviously
scarcely for me to say. That, naturally, differs with the individual.

But he remains the New Yorker, because He is New York. He is why New
York is no longer either little or old. He has determined that she shall
be large, loose, easy and tolerant, because he is the reaction from the
small town, the cabined frame of mind and the pressure of personal
supervisions. And that liberty he enjoins on all the city. It is all
very well to say that New York is the largest Jewish city in the world,
the second largest Italian, the third largest German and the only large
Irish city--or whatever statistics may allege. It is also true that if
you sit in Bronx Park on a Sunday or walk down Sixth Avenue below
Twenty-Third Street on almost any evening you will not hear a word of
English. . . . But you will not meet any but New Yorkers and it will be
very New York Yiddish or Italian or German that you will hear.

They say that whole tracts of America, more particularly in the Middle
West, are almost purely Scandinavian or that great tracts of New
England, I think, are irremediably Polish--the Poles resisting more than
any other nationality all Americanizing influences . . . and why should
they not when it has been for centuries only because of their powers of
resistance to alien influences that they have existed at all?
Nevertheless the Italian quarters of New York are tremendously New York
and very little Italian; the Jewish quarters are much less Jewish than
is Whitechapel; the Syrian quarters are New York with just a few
odd-looking inscriptions in the windows.

For the moment I do not feel strong enough to expose exactly what I
mean--or rather that particular exposition does not at the moment fit in
with my plan. What I want to point out amounts to this--that a man who
has settled in New York, and only for the shortest of spaces of time, is
irrevocably altered . . . and altered always in one direction as is the
case with groves of trees planted on elevations where the prevailing
winds are mostly the same.

It is all very well for some one who has never been much in Italy to say
that the Italian quarters of New York resemble Naples; they do not. They
resemble New York where some Italians live . . . and grow less and less
Italian. And nothing is more impressive than to observe how, gradually,
the home notes, the home remembrances, grow less and less vivid, less
and less tenacious. You talk to the Italian who brings up your firewood
twice or so a week and under your eyes he grows less and less a son of
Fiesole. He has to make efforts to remember; his ambition is to
transport Italy to New York--practically never to return to the banks of
the Arno. His father had eleven children besides himself. He has by now
brought seven of them to New York; this summer when the wood-faggot
trade is least active he will return to Italy . . . and bring two more
of his little brothers over to New York. . . . Or go to any--to the
most--French restaurant of this city. . . .

There used to be Wishing Wells of which it was said that he who had
tasted of their waters not only never rested till he tasted of them
again but was never thereafter the same man that before he was. And
indeed the action of New York upon humanity is perhaps more observable
outside the United States than within them. You see the New Yorker in
Lombardy, on the banks of the Rhine, on the shores of the Mediterranean,
and, though he have been born in Milan, Coblenz or Toulon, he is marked
out from all his fellows and his own people: he is the Americano, or the
Amerikaner, l'amricain. The other day in a _caf_ of a Mediterranean
maritime port a rather questionable individual approached me and
addressed to me a rather unsavory proposal in an irreproachable local
_lingua franca_. Nevertheless something--a scarcely discernible
nasality, I daresay, made me say: "Vous avez habit New York?" He
answered: "Oui, Monsieur, j'y ai pass quelque temps." I said: "Moi
aussi," and there came into his eyes the slightly dreamy expression of
one who reflects upon the time when he first tasted of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil. It was a strong bond between us, but since
his avocation was one which does not commend itself to the good citizen
I did not further pursue the acquaintance. . . .

For myself. . . . But that perhaps would interest no one but myself!

-----

Footnote 1:

The store has been sold.




                               CHAPTER IV


                   IT IS NOT SO MUCH THE PLACE . . .

The other day I lunched at the Brevoort _en tte--tte_ with a very
distinguished writer. Being in New York we were very much rushed for
time so we talked for three hours about Style. We discussed the methods
of writing of every writer under the sun . . . except two. Then we
strolled along Fifth Avenue northward, still discussing Style. Writers
do sometimes do that. At the southeast corner of the intersection of the
Avenue and Fourteenth Street, just as he was stepping off the curb to
take his trolley-car he halted with one foot in the air and said: "I
have read your books: I like them very much." So I said: "Well, I have
read your books and I like them very much, too."

So that angle of that street has its pleasant association for me.
Crossing onto the corner immediately opposite on a very slippery day I
once had a very bad fall--so that corner, too, has its clothing of
memory. The northwestern corner and the pavement going from Fourteenth
Street to Sixteenth witnessed one of the happiest moods of my life; I
remember going along it with almost dancing feet, which does not so
often happen to me. At the tobacconist's store that used to be at the
remaining corner I used to do my telephoning when my own telephone was
out of order or when I did not wish to be overheard by the other
inhabitants of my apartment. So that corner vibrates in my memory with
the recollection of such exasperations, despairs and resolutions as only
form themselves in the broken conversations of those appalling
instruments. I must have said more insulting things to business agents
and have uttered more agitated rudenesses to private persons in one of
the little boxes of that store than I can have brought forth in any
other place in the world. That store is now gone; pulled down; made
over. . . . So with its Chesterfields and Camels and chewing gum and
telephone boxes it is, with those conversations and their remembrances,
covered with the patina of the Past. The results of some of those
conversations are still active in my life, nevertheless.

At a coffee-shop at the corner of Sixteenth and Fifth Avenue I used for
long to breakfast on coffee and baked apples, opening and reading my
letters meanwhile--letters for me often as momentous as the
conversations at the other corner--though indeed the habit of
correspondence is so nearly dead between the East River and the Hudson
that most of the momentousnesses of persons not in physical
confrontation are apt to be telephonic. Still I had my emotions seated
on the high stool at the counter--there, too. . . .

And I remember, years and years and years ago, a particular walk from a
quiet, old-fashioned maiden lady's house in East Fourteenth
Street. . . . Along Fourteenth to the corner where I lately had that
conversation, crossing up the east side of Fifth Avenue and so up,
across Madison Square--It was then almost just after the murder of
Stanford White and one had there to talk of him and the Madison Square
Gardens that are now lamentably gone--and so up into the Twenties--the
then glamorous Twenties.

Well, the results of that particular walk still dominate my life as
writer and as man--perhaps almost more as writer than as man. For it was
a couple or so of days afterwards when walking along the opposite side
of the Avenue between Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third that looking across
at the Flatiron and remembering something that had been said on that
particular walk there came into my head a sudden, half-philosophical,
half-literary idea that has ever since formed the chief basis of my
technical stock in trade and the mainspring of my actions.

It would be superfluously biographical at this point to dilate on that
idea. It is sufficient to say that very early on an October morning of
strong damp shadows, looking across at the almost forbidding, dumb,
purplish column of the Flatiron whose side towards me was in the deepest
shade and feeling at the moment a mood of intense loneliness, I suddenly
conjured up on that then deserted opposite sidewalk the figure of the
companion who the day before or so had been walking with me at the foot
of that same Flatiron that now seemed a barrier of gloom between myself
and a desirable sunlight. And it occurred to me to think how the
imagination of that figure made the Flatiron suddenly alive for me
whether as an architectural mass or as a figurative barrier between
myself and the sun. . . . And I realized that, if the day before, I had
not found the Hudson above West Point as beautiful as the Rhine--and for
sure the upper defiles of the Hudson _are_ every whit as beautiful as
the Rhine!--it was just simply because, for me at least, there was no
human figure whether of my past or my imagination that I could set up
against the reaches of that stream as I could for the Rhine where it
enters the mountains above Coblenz. . . . And I began, standing there,
to apply the same process to moral and philosophical ideas. . . .

In effect that is why when I wish to give the effect of a city or the
exact incidence of a moral apophthegm I try to do it with an anecdote,
essaying the rendering of the turn of a phrase or the twist of a crooked
mouth rather than with any generalization of a loftier or a more
academic kind.

You may say that that is because I can not bend the mightier bow of the
professional philosopher or statistician and that may well be the case;
nor indeed have I the least ambition to inflict this rule of my own life
and my own art on any other persons that live or write. But it seems to
me true that a city will be dear to you if it have human associations
and that if it have none it will be nothing but a pile of stones however
phantasmagoric in arrangement.

That is why the occupation of the tourist seems to me to be a very empty
affair. . . . But I am aware that the rule is not universal; for the
other day, happening to express to a mildish elderly lady, that very
view--that the Hudson was less stirring than the Rhine because of its
relative lack of human interest, I was positively overwhelmed by the
vigor of her reply. She said that whenever time, weather and money
served her, she fled off to desolate regions far, far beyond the Grand
Canyon or New Mexico and there, habiting herself in men's breeches--it
gave me as we say a turn to imagine any one so mildly feminine in
breeches!--she bestrode the first mustang she came across and rode out
for weeks into the desert. To avoid traces of humanity.

So there are other views. And I daresay that in America the ideal of
confronting bitter, untrodden deserts is stronger than elsewhere. But
that can hardly be true of New York or its inhabitants. The ideal of the
he-man smiting a hairy breast as he confronts a wilderness of solitude
is there prevalent enough and you may as like as not be pushed off a
trolley by the elbow of such a male pursuing his ideal. But it _is_ an
ideal rather than a practicable rule of life otherwise he would be
throwing you over the edge of a canyon rather than merely back into
Third Avenue.

Be that as it may it is obviously rather the attraction of the
population than that of the landscape that brings people to New
York. . . . When I was first in this city I adopted or invented as a
protection against the persons who on the sidewalks persisted in asking
me what were my impressions of Gotham the phrase with half of which I
have headed this chapter. A stout man, in a light brown alpaca coat, an
immense abdomen, sheltering itself beneath a green-lined sunshade,
wiping his streaming brows in the brilliant sunlight of West
Twenty-seventh Street, would anchor himself like a rotund buoy in front
of me and begin: "Wal . . ." But before he could finish his question I
would say: "You know . . . it isn't so much the place as the people."
And with my diaphanous nine stone two I would pass on, leaving him with
his wet handkerchief suspended in midair, turning in slow bewilderment
in the sun on the sidewalk.

I do not know what has become of that type of man who vised to be _the_
typical New Yorker of the shopkeeping class any more than I know what,
precisely, I meant by that particular smartness. The waters flow under
the bridge and the little stones find their places, so he is gone along
with Stanford White and Jem Sullivan and the Pa of Peck's Bad Boy and
the domestic tranquillities of Fourteenth Street. But I know now what
that sentence means.

For it _is_ not so much the place as the people. The place is not really
so much to write home about: the sights of New York are relatively
negligible. I mean as compared with those of let us say Rome. When you
have said the skyscrapers you have said most of it. Michigan Avenue
offers a finer prospect--or in three years' time it will--than Fifth
Avenue; the Terraces of St. Louis a more dignified domesticity than
Riverside Drive; the Hill at Boston, if you are Anglo-Saxonly inclined,
is more like Hampstead than New York's Chelsea, where I sit in glooms
writing, is like Chelsea on the banks of the Thames or than Greenwich
Village is like the home of the Bloomsbury School. . . . And if I would
rather sit here and write than sit and write in any of the other places
it is rather because of the people I shall meet on the sidewalks and
still more because of the associations that will assail me at the
street-crossings than because of anything in the architectural line that
I shall see--or even because of the effects of light and shade in the
deepest canyons. I could forego all them.

But the queer power that New York has of clothing itself in those
associations and of assembling those people--that is her real, strange,
triumphant note. She changes so fast that you cannot at any moment say:
"This is my New York." And yet your New York it remains. The
tobacco-store at the corner of Fourteenth Street vanished in next to no
time after I had begun to use it as a means of communication with the
outside world--but it collected an extraordinary crop of associations
and became part of the Past with a rapidity such as could have been
equaled in surely no other city. And you may say the same of all New
York. Impressions are all there so vivid that what, in another place,
would leave next to no impress on the mind becomes between the Battery
and Central Park of almost epoch-making importance. So New York clothes
herself.

I have pointed out in another place that, being no architect, I do like
stones to be covered with moss or ivy and that, in consequence, Paris
round the Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile really repels me. The stones of
New York are no less machine-sawn, hard and antiseptically resistant to
the growth of lichen. But, no doubt because one thinks--or at least
feels--quite twice as fast in front of the buildings of Fifth Avenue as
before the stones of the Avenue de Wagram, Tiffany's, say, will clothe
itself with a shimmer of more remembered emotions than will all that
Paris avenue and the Avenue Hoche added to it.

I am talking of course of personal not historical emotions. Naturally if
you are of the type that can only find emotion in the contemplation of
spots where Marie Antoinette or Madame Roland or Ney or Landru were
executed New York will relatively little excite you. You can feel like
that at Lexington; the stone on the Common is more than impressive; the
shot there fired _was_ heard round the world. But Lexington Avenue is
about all that New York offers you in remembrance of that explosion and
it is curious to consider how when, reminiscently, you look back on the
faded social glories of Fifth Avenue it is practically only the names
and figures of actors that come back to you. Or of course Dempsey fought
Sullivan on East Fourteenth Street if I am not mistaken. Or was it
Sharkey?

And I have been on--or at any rate somewhere near--the spot where
Hamilton fought Burr and I have even been in the beautiful house in
Charlton Street from which Hamilton issued forth to that contest in New
Jersey. But that house will no longer exist when these pages are in your
hands and I do not know that it cut much ice whilst it still stood. And
neither the days of Andrew Jackson nor of Lincoln nor, for the matter of
that, of Cleveland or Harrison seem to have left much social impress on
New York. When I was young and for some time after, the Vanderbilts and
the Astors were the great names of Fifth Avenue; below them stood the
actors, the Players' Club being the most thrilling social place to which
the young visitor could be taken. You sat there at the next table to the
immensely great and the unspeakably chic. You can still sit there in the
old house in Gramercy Park--but you might be at the Garrick Club in
London where your dim thrills come from the faded type of ancient
playbills and improbable oil paintings of the Infant Roscius as
Tamburlaine.

It is certain that my conviction gains immensely as soon as another soul
can be found to share it; and, looking through the reminiscences of a
gentleman who must have rubbed shoulders with myself on the Fifth Avenue
of my slimness, I see exactly the names and exactly the restaurants
mentioned that would have sprung to my lips if I could ever remember any
names at all. . . . There, in those columns they are, the Astors and the
Vanderbilts . . . and then the Thespians, John Drew, Ethel Barrymore,
Maxine Elliott, Richard Mansfield, the Otis Skinners . . . all of them
promenading along Fifth Avenue as far down as Twenty-fifth Street,
lunching at Sherry's, tea-ing at Martin's. (For they _did_ tea even in
those days in New York, though you could not at Newport, R. I., as I
remember to my discomfiture!) Dining at Delmonico's; rehearsing anywhere
along middle Broadway. . . . I remember an extra-rehearsal of Richard
Mansfield's; during a heat-wave and at two in the morning he called his
company together and in tones of hollow-mouthed impressiveness said:
"Gentlemen and ladies, I insist that in my theatre no one shall
perspire. Let there be no sweat!" _Tempi passati! Tempi passati!_

I had meant indeed to allow myself to write more of those days when New
York was little and old and Sam McClure's Magazine as great a power as
_Maga_ a century before in England--with its Miss Tarbell and Miss
Cather and its youth and glory and beauty and resounding
muck-rake. . . . But Mr. Irwin has hopped in before me and done it
naturally better.

But had I done it it would not have been as presumptuous as it sounds in
a foreigner and visitor. For me New York as City has changed relatively
little. I know that this is contrary to the general idea. But I find my
way more easily about the part of New York that I frequent than about
the part of London that I used to frequent, and the parts of Paris that
I used to know at about the same time seem to me far more changed than
either. In New York at least the streets are permanent, change the
skyline never so much or so rapidly--but consider what used to be where
the Boulevard Raspail was only a very few years ago. . . . No, it is not
so much the place as the people that has changed: or, if the city has
changed the people have changed infinitely more.

I happen for sentimental reasons to have visited--or to have gone merely
to look at, at first an old residential house and then the buildings
that have occupied the site of that house. Well, the street occupies the
same position; I can go to it now blindfold from here. There was once
there a brownstone basement house, with steps ascending, and a stoop.
Its chief occupant came straight from Cranford, England; its Nottingham
lace curtains, its brown furniture, its Wilton carpets were testimony to
an immensely old New York gentility that need in no way bow its head
before Beacon Hill. It had mahogany doors, round-domed china cupboards,
generous staircases; at Thanksgiving time its relatives came all the way
from Concord, Mass., and from Philadelphia to pay seasonal and
obligatory visits. It gave way to a saloon of sorts and the street in
which it stood became so bibulously dangerous on account of the
prize-fighters and their hangers-on that for some time I had a certain
timorousness in going to look at the site from across the way. It lasted
like that during several of my visits. Now it is an innocent, very
crowded cheap-jacks resort where Jewish young men offer incredibly
colored foulards, socks, braces, corsets and minor garments on
completely unarranged, piled up trays. Still it is not difficult to find
as would be the case with the house of a professor of mine that I used
to call at somewhere between the rue de Fleurus and the Luxembourg. Even
the locality there is forgotten.

But its occupants were, in the first place, born New Yorkers with the
habits, the attractivenesses, the grave social manners of a caste that
had existed for generations and generations. They were already a little
impoverished and added to their incomes by discreetly affording shelter
to strangers--nice strangers who came from Tennessee, Pittsburgh,
Portland, Maine, and the South. . . . Well; they are all gone--to Paris,
to Versailles, to the more remote parts of the State of New Jersey, to
the cities of the Middle West. Only one of them still inhabits for a
part of the year one of the old Bloomsbury-ish named streets to the west
of Sixth Avenue, far downtown.

One may naturally exaggerate--one does. I wrote lately in my haste that
since being in New York for this present visit I had only met one born
New Yorker. That was true at the moment; but I met my contradiction only
an hour or so after that statement of mine had appeared in one of the
Sunday supplements. For whilst I was having tea at a party at the house
of a lady with a Knickerbocker Dutch name in a large very modern
apartment I was addressed by a reproachful gentleman who bade me cast my
eyes over the other guests at that party. There were perhaps thirty.
Every one of them including himself, he asserted, was a born New Yorker
and not only that but owned and inhabited the property on which he or
she had been born. And going out to dine in the same neighborhood later
on the same day I was assured by the charming wife of my hospitable host
that her husband not only owned and had been born on the property of
which the flat in which we found ourselves formed a part but that that
property had belonged to his family for six generations.

I am bound, however, to add the corollary that every one of those
people--or at any rate of those to whom I was privileged to
speak--stated that they were going to move out of New York. They were
going to live either in London or in the further country districts of
the New England States. New York had become too much for them.

And they are no pioneers, for of all the New Yorkers that I used
formerly here to know and who used to own their own properties and have
much the same social habits, not one remains or perhaps one daughter of
one family remains. I do not mean to say that all these New Yorkers have
abandoned or intend to abandon all contact with New York. They remain
within practicable motoring distance in the surrounding country--within,
as it were, the sphere of influence of the first-nights, the concerts,
the picture-shows, the dog- and horse-shows . . . and the medical
attendance. They remain to that degree New Yorkers and where your social
contacts are there is really your domicile. For, indeed, even London and
Paris may be said to be within motoring distance of New York and I am
frequently astonished to find to what a degree ladies resident within
reach of Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix prefer to do their shopping
from Thirty-Fourth Street upwards, during swallow-flight visits. I don't
say that they are right: I don't, indeed, say that they are wrong in
preferring the beautifully dressed, more _pimpants_ shop-fronts of Fifth
Avenue to the austerities of the more august Houses across the water.
Even for a man to shop in New York is twice as exciting as to shop in
Paris. I know that I have been induced to spend more on haberdashers in
this city in a few weeks than in any few of the last years in the Ville
Lumire--or in London either for the matter of that.

But the point is that the expatriated New Yorker remains at least as
much a New Yorker as the Londoner who leaves London remains a Londoner,
or the Parisian a Parisian away from the boulevards; their minds at any
rate go back to those pavements when they think of adornments, possibly
when they think of youthful glamour and romance . . . and certainly when
they think of the future. For I have been astonished to find in Europe
how, be the New Yorker never so apparently hardened a European--be he or
she never so indurated by the ways of Courts, Good Families, the English
Country House or the Almanach de Gotha--he or she will unshakably stick
to the idea that their children at the impressionable age must go back
to New York and get their maturings presided over at least by New
England institutions. That is unshakable.

And it is obviously not criticizable by me. If I had an English-speaking
son or daughter to educate decoratively it would seem to me to be
indifferent whether they went to Oxford or Harvard or Poughkeepsie or
Newnham. If on the other hand I had a son or daughter whose future
seemed to necessitate that instruction in technical matters that in
certain circles is to-day called education and if they would have to
continue English-speaking careers I should have no hesitation in sending
them to Columbia: if they had greater latitude of career I should send
them to both Columbia and either the Sorbonne or Montpellier. . . . So
the place of education used to seem to me immaterial and I used to be
astonished at the New Yorker's unshakableness in the matter. But
realizing as to-day I do how true it is that once a New Yorker you are
always a New Yorker, I understand the passion better and, interested as
I to-day am for New York, I am more than contented that it should be so.
And I should like to assure the reader that my interest in New York is
not merely a local interest born of having had a good time in the city
or of any other personal preoccupation. The really thrilling thing about
New York is that she is the last chance of European civilization. For,
say what you like about New York or about America, their civilizations
are European, like their traditions and their blood, and if New York
does not now make a good thing of it you may write: _Fuit Europa et
magna gloria. . . ._

So to have at heart the cause of New York is in effect to have at heart
the interests of Western humanity--of _homo Europoeus sapiens_, nothing
less. And one may presume that the return to New York of the children of
cultured and relatively law-abiding parents is for the good of New York
as, no doubt, of those children; and it is good that the city should
have the power to inspire the homing instinct in its children. They do
wander away--but so many return.

The old gibe against Gotham was that she was the Sink Hole of the
States--a conduit through which as it were good Americans went to Paris
to die . . . and bad ones to live. But the image is no longer that of a
mere passageway--of a place for ever receiving accessions of populations
that for ever pass on. The real fact is that the situation is one of a
constant flux and reflux.

And that, as far as I am concerned, is a satisfactory position. It is
not the New Yorker that renders America odious in the eyes of European
populations and it is not New York that will be shocked by cultural
graces learned in the Old World and brought back. And for myself what I
want to see is as great a mingling as may be feasible between the
peoples of such alien races as can be calculated to be of good will. Of
good will! I cannot see that much good can be done to any one by a
sudden influx into Europe of hordes of suddenly enriched
hundred-and-twenty-per-cent Americans--but I am personally acquainted
with a thousand or so of New Yorkers whose visits to those shores can
only do good to themselves . . . and to Europe.

There is, I am aware, the reverse of the medal. The salvation of America
I have been frequently assured can only come from the evolution by her
of a solid middle class. I used to receive that assurance more
frequently in the old day than at the present time; but even now I get
told that about twice a day when talking such subjects. But it has long
made itself manifest that in present-day conditions such a dream is the
most impracticable of plans. And it grows daily more impracticable.

America is apt proudly to figure to itself that it is immune from the
post-war disasters that have afflicted certain countries of Europe. But
precisely the same vicissitudes have attended on America's mopping up of
the gold supply of the world as have afflicted various European classes
on account of their denudation of currency. The _rentier_ and the
intellectual classes of New York, of Brooklyn, of Hoboken . . . or of
Boston, or Philadelphia and New Orleans, if their case is not yet as
parlous as those of the same classes of Berlin or Paris, are beginning
to find it almost as difficult to turn round as the investor and
intellectual of London.

Where are the inheritors of the great American names of yesterday? There
was in my day a millionaire--a "King" of something or other--who was
famous not only throughout the United States but on the Boulevards and
in Monte Carlo. I knew him slightly in both places and his words were
listened to everywhere with that almost religious awe that used in those
days to be accorded to the utterances of the unthinkably wealthy. At his
death he left a sum that was then regarded as enormous--somewhere
between six and ten million dollars. Well, the other day I overheard
rather than heard the budget of one of his grandsons. I mean that I was
at a gathering where the figures were being given not directly to myself
but to a third party, I being at liberty to listen to that conversation
or another as I chose. It appeared that Mr. S---- had inherited a round
million dollars from his father, the son of the late multimillionaire.
He estimated his unearned income from that source as fifty thousand a
year. His apartment on Park Avenue cost him for rent and upkeep,
servants' wages and other running expenses $13,000 per annum; alimony to
two divorced wives--and he said that one could not move in his world
without having at least two divorced wives--alimony then, the expenses
of hospitality and his car cost him another $24,000. His car, I
remember, cost him $8,000; he said that no man could run a car in New
York on less. That left him $13,000 for his _menus plaisirs_ . . .
clothes, summer holidays, poker, racing and the like. He said that it
was not enough. It was not nearly enough: he could not run a yacht and
nobody of his condition could live without a yacht. So he was going to
emigrate. . . .

Well, $50,000 a year is just about the income that was required for a
member of the English governing classes before the war . . . and before
the war Mr. S---- would have been quite a rich man even in America. A
man quite eligible for the American governing class if America had had
one. But nowadays he is nobody. So he goes.

And he is for the time at least leading a bachelor life. Imagine, then,
the case of a man with a wife--only one--and a couple of children; for
you cannot evolve a class without offspring for its continuance. On an
unearned income of $50,000 he will be continually pressed as strained as
was an English gentleman with two thousand a year before the war. He
won't be able to inhabit quite the house or apartment that he would like
to inhabit; at any rate, he will have to inhabit a much less spacious
and dignified affair than did his parents. His wife will not have quite
the dress allowances or social agreeabilities as he would like her to
have; his children will have nothing like the resources that they will
certainly claim as living with other children of an almost-governing
class. He will experience a state of almost perpetual unease; certainly
ease and he will be strangers. To remedy this he must either move to
Europe or take up the chairmanship of a rubber company or other agency
of sorts. In either case he will be unavailable as a member of a
possible Governing Class--for these must be both resident and at
leisure.

To look for a moment at a budget at the other end of the scale: I was
shown one by a member of a charitable organization operating in the
poorer quarters of New York. The settled income of this family was nil;
they made various sums from time to time by one more or less parasitic
job or another--from tips, to all intents and purposes. They were born
New Yorkers on both sides of the house--one of them in particular being
of a very old New England family. Well, the entire household
expenses--the rent, food, clothing: at any rate the necessary clothing,
the heating and the rest, were provided either by municipal and other
relief or by charity. The entire, haphazard income of the family--a man,
his wife, two grown sons and a nearly grown-up daughter--went to keeping
up a Buick car and a wireless installation. Their view was that these
last were necessities for the native-born American.

I was assured that that is by no means an uncommon case, though to what
extent that is true I have naturally no means of knowing; charity
workers are apt to exaggerate when generalizing and, on the other hand,
the same worker assured me that the poverty and squalor of the slums of
New York far exceeded those of the poorest quarters of London. I daresay
that is true, for I have never, even in the narrowest underground alleys
of the Mediterranean seaboard, met such horrible stenches as have
assailed me in the--generally Jewish--streets of the upper Eastside of
New York, whereas the Jewish quarters round the Tower and in Whitechapel
are singularly cleanly. But, indeed, the streets between lower Broadway
and the North River in the neighborhood of Wall Street are unsavory
enough. I was watching the other day the efforts of two men and a boy
with a hose to clean one of those descending roadways. I have never seen
such filth as was raised by the flood of water, deposited on the
sidewalk or on the passersby, and then left _in situ_ by that
irrigation.

And as America mops up more and more gold the prospects of the evolution
of a middle-governing class must grow more and more remote with the
continual fall in the value of currency. To evolve a class you must have
at least a generation or two of stability and of this there seems little
chance. Mind, I am not advancing the opinion that the evolution of a
Middle Class _would_ be a panacea for the woes of New York: I am merely
commenting on a rather generally received opinion. I do not see that New
York--whatever may be the case with America--I do not see that New York
has any very tangible woes. Still, even as to that I am quite aware that
I may easily be wrong. The conversation of the charity worker to which I
have referred may well give one pause--and the consideration that the
average wage of the manual and non-administrative worker of New York is
said to be $28 per week. If one considers the many very much higher
wages that have to come in to make up that average the lower rates of
pay must be more than sufficiently exiguous. And even with twenty-eight
dollars a week--and then some indeed!--I do not see myself having a good
time in New York. . . . Still, that is not my affair and I do not know
that I have seen anything that would lead me to think that there is any
real distress in New York. . . . There are naturally the hard cases.
There was one of an ex-German general who was the sort of body slave of
a very unpleasant negro. . . . An utterly unhelpable case. And other
unhelpables. . . . But, on the whole, the atmosphere of New York is one
of hope and given that atmosphere I imagine it must be better to live on
three dollars a day round about the queerly changed Bowery than on, say,
four quid a week with its slightly greater purchasing power almost
anywhere in London.

However, that is still not my affair any more than the Middle Classes
really are. My concern in life is with Thought and the Arts and if I had
to evolve a Governing Class it would be made up of a few Pure Thinkers
and as many Artists as are to be found in the world. And, in New York,
fluidly, you find a sufficiency of these to make up a government and, on
the surface of things, they seem to do themselves well enough. Otherwise
I should not here enjoy myself.

For if my brother artists are not in a position to do themselves
moderately well I would rather myself starve. That is the least little
cock that one can owe to sculapius. . . .

New York then enjoys on the surface a sufficiently vigorous artistic and
intellectual life. Any one accustomed to the artistic and thinking lives
of other capitals can here feel himself perfectly at home--and perfectly
normal. About the same views of the arts are held in Greenwich Village
and in Chelsea and in drawing-rooms on Park Avenue as will be found in
the corresponding districts in Paris. Probably on Riverside
Drive--postulating for convenience that Riverside Drive is the
rich-Jewish quarter--you will find more "advanced" views held than are
held in average Parisian drawing-rooms--and you will find artistic or
intellectual conversation anywhere in New York to be infinitely more
advanced than in the most advanced attic-studios of London.

This intellectual vividness New York owes partly to the presence of an
immense Jewish population, partly to the absence of a Governing Middle
Class. I don't like Jews. I make the statement quite advisedly and not
without tact--for, if I don't like Jews and still make the statement
that the arts flourish in New York largely because of its Jewish
population, the assertion may be regarded as more accurate than if I
were dealing with people whom I liked and to whom in consequence I might
be suspected of handing out large spoonfuls of apple-sauce. Apart from
that whether I like Jews or not can be of no importance to any one.

And the fact of their artistic helpfulness is incontestable . . . at any
rate as regards the plastic arts and the art of the Theatre. Jews in New
York buy a great many pictures; they buy probably the greater part of
the sculpture that is sold and the more recondite theatre--the less
recondite also I daresay--exists solely by the suffrage, the subsidy or
the attendance, of the rich or the poor Jew. The present theatrical
season has not been a good one: one might indeed say that it has been
pretty rotten. I at least have seen only one play that I have not been
slightly ashamed of having gone to. But that is merely temporary. Two
years ago I saw here more interesting plays in one month than in either
London or Paris during two years and no doubt when I get forcibly taken
to the play in New York this autumn the balance will again have
redressed itself in favor of New York.

I don't indeed profess to be a haunter of playhouses; I never, indeed,
go to one unless I am more or less forcibly taken--but that makes me a
fair judge of the state of the more "advanced" theatre in any place in
which I happen to be. The people who say to me: "Oh, you _must_ go to
So-and-So" and who take tickets and lead me to it are of a class whose
enthusiasms are not roused by the theatre of commerce. Thus on the whole
the _Dybbuk_ in Hebrew was about the only play in New York last season
that was incontestably worth being dragged to, and I was duly dragged to
it by an enthusiastic young lady, not a Jewess.

That may stand as a symbol for certain sides of the artistic life of New
York. There you have an amazing new art--or, if you prefer it, an
amazing development of an old art; it is subsidized by richish Jews,
supported amazingly by the poorer Jewish population, and produces the
only play to which a young Christian enthusiast can drag an elderly and
case-hardened, foreign non-enthusiast with some chance of finding her
choice approved.

How it may be with literature I do not so exactly know. At any rate the
only people I have found in New York--and I have not found them anywhere
else at all--who really loved books with a real, passionate, yearning
love that transcended their attention to all other terrestrial
manifestations were Jews--and the only people who subsidized young
writers during their early non-lucrative years. But rich Jews seem to do
this automatically all the world over. Rich Christians never will,
though poor ones will be found to do so.

Obviously this Israelite support of the arts would not suffice in itself
to make New York the art center that it is or is becoming; the majority
of the support that the arts here receives is Gentile enough all right
. . . but that support would hardly suffice to maintain a very vigorous
artistic life in this city without the Jewish addition. It makes the
difference between hardly supportable indigence and just bearable
comfort.

For a city to be an artistic--or any other--center there must be a
social life for the artists or others and that social life must be of a
kind to attract outsiders. Thus in New York you will find great numbers
not only of resident practitioners of one or other of the arts but you
will find attracted to her increasingly considerable numbers of
foreigners like myself and in addition all the practitioners of the arts
of other American cities which might legitimately expect to retain their
artists for themselves. This is very marked indeed in the case of the
art of letters.

It is strikingly the case with artistic as opposed to social life. I
have boldly and impenitently asserted in my earlier pages that for the
foreigner and in a rule of thumb way, New York is the capital of the
United States. But though this may be the case with financial, artistic
and even, stretching the point, with administrative matters it is very
impressively not so when it comes to social and other greatnesses.
Nothing is indeed more impressive than the decentralization in this
respect of the United States. It is not merely that the great social
names of New York are practically unknown in Chicago, St. Louis,
Charleston, New Orleans or Lincoln, Nebraska--not to mention California
and the coast, or even Boston! There appear indeed to be no great social
names in New York nowadays in the sense that twenty years ago there were
the Astor and Vanderbilt families and their rather tyrannous two or
three hundred of supporters. There is a very gay, insouciant and
enormously expensive social life in New York but relatively few names
swim to the surface of its whirlpool and those that do are for ever
changing. And, on the other hand, those that do not change, those that
have, as it were, names of some stability, frequent those particular
parages hardly if at all.

You may sit on the dais at some sort of semipublic dinner or another
say, at the Plaza Hotel--I for my sins have done it relatively
often--and you will have pointed out to you a table occupied by twelve
or fourteen rather dowdyish-looking people all obviously friends. And
you will be told that that table represents . . . my mind always boggles
at these figures: say six hundred or six thousands of millions of
dollars. At any rate from the impressed manner of your informant you
will gather that it is something terrific and august, that sum. But you
will not see those elderly, dowdyish figures at the brilliant displays
of the more evanescent brilliances, though, on the other hand, you may
see members of the more evanescent and brilliant crowd attending the
semipublic dinners at, say, the Plaza.

In either case it seems to me--though I may well be mistaken and have
little wish to dogmatize--New York offers for a city of say twelve
million inhabitants singularly few names that are socially august and
none at all that carry across the continent. California is said to owe
the brilliant social life that it and, say, New Mexico and the Coast
generally are said to possess, entirely to Eastern millionaires and that
is alleged as additional proof of the nonholding power of New York. But
obviously and visibly New York and more markedly Brooklyn and more
markedly still Hoboken _have_ settled social groups that in their very
greatly varied standards of wealth are fairly cohesive and quite
sufficiently old. (I get into the bad habit of using the term New York
when I mean what the telephone directories call Manhattan and the Bronx.
I hope I may be pardoned. For me New York is so intimately and solely
the few miles of which I have so often spoken here . . . along Fifth
Avenue and Broadway from the Battery!) Manhattan, then, Hoboken,
Brooklyn and other regions of Greater New York have incontestably their
stable, cohesive and long-established societies. You will indeed, if you
search, find more old-fashionedness in any one of those _pays_ than in
all broad England--and I daresay you might throw in France and New
England itself as make-weight. I used to know a most charming family of
old maids in Stamford, Conn., and they had silhouettes of General
Braddock in their parlor and went into mourning on the birthday of
General Washington. That was a quarter of a century ago, but I still
know to-day two families--downtown in Manhattan, not in New Orleans--who
go into mourning on Lincoln's birthday; and to visit in Hoboken on
Thanksgiving Day is to be thrown well back into the spacious times of
Victoria.

The oldest-fashioned house that I remember visiting of late years in
England was that of the late Miss Braddon, a charming museum-piece that
can have contained nothing more modern or less stately than the
displayed objects of the Great Exhibition of the Crystal Palace in 1852.
But that was modern in comparison to the house in which I was privileged
to eat my Thanksgiving Dinner just lately. We had walked in dead-still
autumn weather, discussing the Hall-Mills case, over the sward of a park
that had once belonged to one of the families implicated in that
atrocious process. Little boys and girls ran about exhibiting their
faces in Guy Fawkes masks; elderly couples toddled along carrying grips
and coming from the remotest parts of New Jersey or Vermont to pay their
respects to still older heads of the family. And, except that those high
grass levels looked down on the silver of the river and across to the
silver and gray of the towering faades of the city, we might have been
back in the thirties of last century, walking in Hampton Court Park and
discussing the case of, say, Lady Flora Hastings.

I daresay indeed that we might have been better thus employed for when
we--the younger son of the house, a mere stripling only a year or so
older than myself--reached the hospitable dwelling that had been bought
and built before the birth of my friend and by his father we were still
discussing the means by which the evidence had been obtained against the
members of that unquestionably innocent and atrociously martyred family.
But we were painedly headed off that modernity and soon we were
discussing the beauties of Heidelberg in the sixties and revealing the
horrid and still reverberating emotions that we had felt at first seeing
a lady smoke.

We ourselves had witnessed this degradation of a sex as early as 1892,
the offenders having been Russian princesses on a German railway; but
the lady of the house had been spared such pain for a quarter of a
century more until during that war-work which shook so many social
canons to the base some one at a sewing-bee had produced a box of
cigarettes. . . . So Victoria reigned supreme in Hoboken; only, after
lunch in our rocking-chairs we listened to Cornell playing Pennsylvania,
_O tempora, O mores_. . . .

These things tend everywhere to stratify themselves. There is obviously
in Manhattan itself a sufficiency of old Knickerbocker Dutch families
and of their gradually gathered Anglo-Saxon associate clans to let a
chance traveler who should fall amongst them, and them only, imagine
that New York is all Knickerbocker Dutch . . . at any rate all New York
that counted. But the fact remains that there is no one New York Society
as there is a London Society or a Tout Paris: and in New York no Cabot
speaks only to Lowells, nor do New York society persons as such cut any
great ice far outside Manhattan . . . and the Bronx. That the same is
true of other cities in America is not so surprising, though it is
surprising enough. The great names of A---- will quite astonishingly not
carry any weight at all in B----, not three hundred miles away, and
B---- with its really settled and quite old families ranged in their
hierarchies sends absolutely no sound of its famous names to C----,
D---- and F----. Obviously if you go to G---- and the report precedes
you in the local press that you have once been prominent amongst the
Four Hundred of New York you will be observed with more attention than
if you go entirely unheralded, but in the end your social place will be
assigned to you on your personal merits and relatively little because of
your introductions.

And this explains what at one time used to astonish me--the contentment
with which people of obvious social ambitions remained in relatively
quite small towns. This must seem queer to the European. France, Germany
and Italy are all less centralized in this respect than is England,
where if you desire to climb at all you must have an establishment not
infinitely far from Park Lane--but for the Frenchman Paris certainly has
an overwhelming attraction, and, although in the other countries Rome
and Berlin are not the only centers, one large center or another will
exercise attractions over the inhabitants of other cities only
relatively smaller. But on the whole this is not the case in the United
States; the attraction of dominating Country Club, the golf club, the
dog shows, the race meetings and the rest of quite small cities will
singularly suffice the citizens and the citizens' wives of those places,
and if the result makes, sometimes rather disconcertingly to the
foreigner, for Main Streetishness it does also quite remarkably make for
contentment.

I suppose, in fact, that the job of making oneself known to the Society
of all the United States is one of such appalling magnitude that no one,
even in the smallest of cities, is so lacking in a sense of humor as to
attempt it. And American Society makes universal seasonal flittings,
after Xmas to the South or to Winter sports centers, and after late
Spring to centers in one or other set of Hills, so that home towns and
home Main Streets are even more deserted than are Park Lane and the
Quartier de l'Etoile in August. So American Society does in those
resorts establish a sort of holiday hierarchy. This is founded rather on
immediately disposable dollars than on home rank. The multimillionaire
from Dayton, Ohio, meeting the equally--or rather more--multimillionaire
from Milwaukee at Miami or elsewhere takes rank in the Social Club
rather on the size and fittings of his yacht, the quantity of liquor at
his disposal, the hospitality he dispenses and the like than on his
standing in Dayton or Milwaukee. And in that way a sort of holiday,
ready-money countyfamilydom establishes itself year by year.

In a country of such infinite millions as is the United States there
will naturally be almost infinite ramifications in the way of social
hierarchies. In the neighborhood of Philadelphia--to mention only
conditions that I have actually observed--there are societies as close
as those of any English cathedral close. And closer. Be you never so
wealthy or never so intelligent you will there never get yourself called
on unless you have many more credentials than would satisfy an English
duchess or a bishop's lady, or be you as triple-starred in the Social
Register as is the _Mona Lisa_ in guides to the Louvre. And outside St.
Louis there is the County, which is less penetrable and spoken of with
more seriousness than was ever the case with our Shires and Dukeries.
And outside Chicago there are suburbs of an almost unexampled social
rigidity; and so with many other cities down to Boston.

And, of course, there is the Social Register itself. As to what this is
or with how much seriousness it is taken I could never satisfy myself;
nor could one of its compilers, whose acquaintance I am proud to have,
ever quite make me understand. There was, for instance, a very charming
and accomplished lady who was said to have come, straight from an
extremely far-Western wash-tub by way of marriage and the almost
simultaneous deaths and oil-striking of a husband and his partner, to a
position of nearly extreme wealth. She had various social vicissitudes,
so I was told, until she arrived at the position of having a golden
dinner service for state occasions--though I never myself saw it. At
about that time she was put upon the Social Register and, I presume, she
was in future received by all other persons whose names are there found.
But I could not discover from my informant--she being known to both of
us--whether that really was the case; or whether she owed her
advancement to the acquisition of the dinner service, to the great grace
and charm of her manner, to the fact that my friend had undoubtedly what
in Belgium is called a _boontje_ for her as indeed I might well have had
myself--or to what other cause. For the matter of that I could not
discover that the lady herself felt any singular elation because of that
accolade.




                               CHAPTER V


                          . . . AS THE PEOPLE

Of course in these matters I do not want to give myself the airs of one
who dogmatizes or of a specialist. But I think that it may be accepted
as a fairly safe generalization--as two fairly safe
generalizations--that, firstly, New York is not the exclusive social
capital of America that London is for England, Rome for Italy--or even
Chicago for the Middle West. And then that New York _is_ the artistic
center of the Western Hemisphere. I will indeed go further and say that
she is a World Center for Anglo-Saxondom.

I use the word "center" advisedly. For New York is so much more a place
to which artists are attracted and from which in turn they fly than one
in which they--or any one else--can dwell. The extreme closeness of
social relations; the endless indulgence in social gatherings; the
relative want of any privacy; the stimulus of the air as of the human
type there prevalent--all these things attractive as they are make it
also almost impossible there to "keep it up." So that I am open to doubt
whether the actual artistic output of New York is at all formidable.
Your address--your permanent _pied  terre_, may be anywhere between
Greenwich and Bronx Park, but I do not think that it is here that you
will work--or that here you will turn out your more permanent work. I
know that I at least am giving up the attempt and that very soon it will
be not from the glooms of Old Chelsea but in the blinding sunlight,
beneath the bare planes of Provence that I shall be contemplating the
charms of my Gotham. . . . Oh, with all the nostalgia in the world, I
grant you. But I still want to write one good book.

No, New York is no place for the working hours of the contemplative.
Obviously there are those who must stay there for long stretches: they
are to be both envied and feared for. A _belle dame sans merci_ has them
indeed in thrall. . . . And I never knew whether that Man-at-Arms was
the more to be felicitated or pitied--just as, asking myself the
question: If you had to choose between having your vital juices sucked
away by constant reclining in the arms of your Gotham--between that and
never seeing her again, for which would you elect? I don't know, and
fortunately for me the question hardly poses itself.

No--for me the charm of New York lies in, she is a Center because of,
the immense number of human contacts that she offers you. I have pointed
out that the attraction of Paris--which city I do not like--is that I
seldom go out to lunch from my studio along a few yards of Boulevard
without meeting some one, attractive in one way or other, with whom to
consume that frugal meal. It is almost the same with New York. Indeed I
here meet almost the same people. And that, in the end, is the great
pleasure of life.

I have sometimes wondered whether if just the same people could gather
themselves together, have _pieds  terre_ in or center round some airy,
sunlit city of almost perfect climate--say, Avignon!--the same pleasure
would not be attained. Perhaps it might; perhaps it might not. I have
tasted of something of the sort in a city on the shores of the
Mediterranean and the experience was agreeable enough. One talked; one
danced; one drank rosy wine. One talked; the sun shone; the wine was
_ros_, the mistral blew: one danced: one slept; the motor horns dinned
like mad; one wrote; one consumed bouillabaisses; the sun shone; the sea
sparkled; one wrote, one danced; one listened to Russian orchestras
playing _Carmen_. . . . The company was the best in the world. . . .

But the experiment could not last. The great painters had to go to
Paris--_pour la Saison Amricaine_; the pull of Paris exercised itself
through her publishers on the great writers; the great musicians only
stayed the night and passed on; the Russian orchestra had to go to play
the boatsong of the Volga at Deauville; they were replaced by an
excruciating, guaranteed-English orchestra coming from Trouville. I
myself had to get myself ready--with vigils over my arms--to go to New
York.

And in New York I met almost the same people . . . and then some!

So that New York as a center has indeed only one rival--but that for the
moment is a gigantic rival indeed--a very Goliath to a never-so-active
David. For it is certain that when at last I do, by way of the
Mediterranean, get to Paris I shall meet there all the people of the
aforesaid Littoral city and in addition all that I met in New York and
then some . . . and then some, and then some . . . and then infinitely
some.

It is, however, not much more possible to work in Paris than in New
York.

I do not know that that matters. The social game, gossip, the war of
ideas, the exchange of technical theories and all the other things that
go to make up useful artistic social life--these things are really
indispensable if you are to have any vigorous artistic traditions in a
city or a country. But as to whether you can pursue that social life and
work at your art during the daily intervals is at least doubtful. One
must recruit one's forces from humanity--but whether the operation can
synchronize with that of production, again I should not like to say.

In any case the artistic life of New York is assimilating itself more
and more to that of Paris--and I do not know that it does not carry the
process of international fusion further than Paris allows it to be
carried. The distinguished French that one begins to meet profusely on
Fifth, or Park Avenues mingle with the natives, are welcomed and
overwhelmed by the natives, in a way that never happens in the capital
of France. There foreigners are kept rather severely at a distance--and
the Middle Westerner-become-New-Yorker goes to Paris rather to meet
other Middle-Westerners-become-New-Yorkers than with any hope of meeting
members of the Acadmie Franaise . . . or even of the Goncourts. And
that is the slingstone of this David.

It is the real slingstone. New York will achieve its position--it has
achieved the position it has--rather by in- than by exclusiveness, and
it is good that there should be a place where all sort of
foreignesses--_all_ sorts--should be united as it were in a common
frame. It happens to me frequently to be told by gentlemen whose names
end in "berg" or "felt" or the like that what America needs is a
complete shutting of its boundaries to all Latin or English influences.
I am told the same often by other gentlemen whose names begin with Mac
or O'. New York, say they, must be proudly Nordic and must become
completely self-centered. I also, they imply, must be excluded because I
cannot be truly Anglo-Saxon since I am a "subject" not a "citizen" and
true Anglo-Saxondom is all the same as true democracy. Similarly all
American ports must be closed to American citizens desiring to voyage
Eastwards unless perhaps they guarantee that their destination is either
Berlin or Dublin. . . . That is, perhaps, not reasonable but it is at
least transparent.

I used at one time to be really alarmed by these manifestations, and my
alarm reached its climax when a young gentleman with a name like
Mansfield told me seriously, menacingly and almost vociferously that the
very strongest measures must be taken against all foreign influences in
the United States. He added various other pieces of information as to
the designs of American Big Business upon my Empire: within ten years
Old Glory would float not only over Dublin but over Delhi, Montreal,
Cape Town, Adelaide and the like. But a certain overseriousness of his
tone made one realize that in effect he was speaking ironically; that he
was parodying the aspirations and expressions of various captains of
American industry rather than voicing his own ideals or those of any
normal Americans.

I must obviously return to that side of matters, but for the moment I
will stick to my text, which is that it is a good thing for the world
that New York exists and is a meeting-place for good brains. And that it
does unite them as it were in a sort of a _cadre_ . . . as if all sorts
of different sizes and designs of type were being pressed and held
together in one printer's frame.

It is a good thing that I who am about as English as they make them can,
as I have already pointed out, sit at table with a dozen other persons
all to me foreigners in a foreign city and feel entirely ordinary and at
home--much more ordinary and much more at home than I should feel at any
London table--or at any other table outside Provence itself! But it is a
still better thing that that can happen to members of dozens and dozens
of other races all more type-hardened and as it were more insular. For
in that way New York assumes more and more the aspect of being the
birthplace of humanity.

And it becomes hourly more necessary that that is what we should
see--and soon! . . . for the breathing space allowed to European-derived
civilization is not infinite. No Empire and no Republic can very much
longer afford to carry on in a spirit of uncabined hundred percentism
and the world cannot support the appearance of another power having an
aspect of Prussianism. From this aspect of bogeydom New York redeems its
country--and it redeems its country far more by the cordiality it
displays to cosmopolitan artists and thinkers than by the fact that it
is the financial center of the Western Hemisphere. It is perhaps bad
_per se_ that in New York Erse and Teutons should have unbridled
opportunity to voice indirectly the wrongs of Kathleen ni Houlihan or
the reverses of Essen-manufactured arms . . . but it is better that they
should have liberty to raise their voices than that hospitality should
not be universal.

The modern world suffers so much from facilities of transport that it
would be sad indeed if facility of transport did not do something to
redress _that_ balance by mingling the more tolerant and reasonable of
men. Almost infinite harm is done by the swift carriage of newly
enriched hooligans from Wigan or the suburbs of Birmingham and the too
cheap transport of continually impoverished old maids from Leamington or
Putney--all in England--into foreign parts. And even greater harm is
done by the export of enriched hundred-per-centers and the ram-faced,
silver-haired and bespectacled female autocrats of Main Streets from all
the North American half-continent into Europe. And not much good is done
by the rarer visits of inspecting Europeans to the United States.

But the artist and the thinker are as a rule more tolerant and never
having enjoyed any great comforts in life or any assurance of them they
will put up with quite a good deal in the way of international
strangenesses. Take celery. . . . It is monstrous to eat blanched celery
with olives as an _hors d'oeuvre_. For God surely meant celery to be
eaten along with Stilton cheese at the end of a full meal, just before
the port. . . . Yet in New York--_horresco referens_--blanched celery is
continually eaten as I have described. I may add that in Paris the idea
of eating celery raw at all causes a shudder to run down the French
spine. The French God meant celery to be eaten in soup, or braised or
what is called _demi glace_.

Now at a New York club in company with three Englishmen engaged on or
about the purlieus of literature and two Frenchmen, one a portrait
painter and the other a sculptor, I have contentedly munched celery
before anything else . . . and so did all my company. And they never
spoke a mumbling word. . . . On the other hand at the hospitable board
of a magnate--not in New York--I listened to the patronizing harangue of
a British magnate who had come over to inspect American methods in his
own line of business. He told our host that in God's Own Country Eng.,
not God's Own Country U. S. A., celery always closed a meal with the
Stilton. He said that every man who knew what was what always closed his
meals with celery and Stilton; he said that if you really knew the
cleansing effect of celery eaten with Stilton cheese when it came to the
subsequent slow degustation of real old English port you would never eat
anything else. He said that only such hardly educated persons as the
inhabitants of States symbolized by abbreviations like "Mo." and "Ill."
would ever think of eating celery except after a meal; then it should be
accompanied by Stilton cheese and washed down by a good glass of old
Port. A good glass of old Port from a good old English cellar, as only
the half educated did not know, was infinitely enhanced by the cleansing
action of celery and Stilton--ripe old English Stilton--eaten together
at the end of a meal. . . . Why our hostess did not smack his face I
could not imagine. It was all I could do not to. . . .

Well, it would have been better if Sir John had not come to America.
For, somewhere in the neighborhood of a place in God's Own Country Eng.
where they manufacture small arms or something of the sort he is still
burbling about when celery should or should not be eaten. And his
family, assembled about him are exclaiming: "Great Scott! They eat
_celery_ at the beginning of lunch. . . . Oh I say, just listen to what
the dad says. . . . They eat celery . . . _celery_, mind you . . ." And
the information is conveyed to the more imbecile of English journals.
And there is no end to it. . . .

I should like to know what proportion of the responsibility for the
Napoleonic wars and for the War to End War respectively should be
assigned to the fact that one Enemy Nation ate sausages and the other
the legs of frogs. . . . Yet they eat ten times as many frogs in New
York alone as in all France and as much Frankfort sausage in Chicago and
New York together as in all High Germany.

About internecine and international Kitchens--but more particularly
about the Oyster as a symbol of differences between nations--I am going
to have my say almost immediately. Let me now wind up my utterances as
to the cosmopolitanism of Gotham.

I am tempted to revoice some one's epigram to the effect that New York
is the art center of Anglo-Saxondom because New York is not London. And
that is fairly true. It is fairly true really because to be an art
center a city must offer some sort of social _agrments_ to artists. You
might think that you could perfectly well have a city that was an art
center solely because it contained consumers of art products, those
troublesome people, the producers, being kept severely at a distance.
But you never _do_ have such a condition of things, I do not know why.
Even in the eighteenth century of Sir Joshua Reynolds when Dukes of
Norfolk and the like were always sitting for their portraits and going
on Grand Tours for the purpose of studying the arts you found that the
portrait painters got invited to dinners of the Kit Cat Club and the
like. And that was as near as London ever came to being a city of the
Arts.

To have a social life depends not so much--depends hardly at all--on
great stored-up or great diffused wealth; it depends solely on having
enough families of identical or almost identical resources to occupy the
leisure times of the participants in that society. French literary life
to-day must be about as impecunious an affair as the world has ever
seen; so with French military, naval, judicial and all other forms of
avocational life. These people live on almost nothing and to them the
$28 a week of the New York manual laborer would be almost affluence. Yet
their social lives are crowded, animated, gay--in a word sufficient; and
their professional lives are cheerful, honorable, efficient and dignify
their great nation.

You can just say as much of the artistic life of New York to-day--of the
artistic life of New York plus that of the Paris-American colony you can
say it without reservation. A writer or painter with a _pied  terre_ in
either Paris or New York and with easily found accommodation in either
New York or Paris can do himself very well indeed--I mean socially and
intellectually. On the other hand, I do not believe that any writer of
much seriousness of artistic purpose could live continuously in New
York, whilst it may be true--though I doubt it--that a writer living
continuously in Paris will lose touch with American conditions. He might
very probably lose touch with American markets--but in that I am not
interested.

You may say that all this is no affair of mine--but I get asked so
continuously questions on this subject by private persons and public
organs that I suppose what I have to say about it may be of some
interest. I happen to have had lately--and indeed continue to
have--opportunities for knowing where and how American works are
produced--more opportunities than are possessed by nearly all American
laymen and, I daresay, than many persons actively engaged in the
publication of books in the United States. And I may add that if I had
not had a certain enthusiasm for American literature I should not have
put myself in the way of encountering those opportunities.

There arises sporadically and from time to time in American literary
circles a sort of patriotic fervor which is not so much a Xenophobia as
a sort of determination that all matter printed in America shall be
marked: _Written and manufactured in the United States_. I should have
really nothing to say against that if the ideal were possible of
realization and unlikely to interfere with literature in general.
Before, however, it can be realized, the promoters must ensure that
living and social conditions in New York are such that American
literature can there be produced. And nowadays those conditions are just
not good enough. At the prices paid to quite prominent practitioners of
the Arts you cannot there get tranquillity enough, social ease
enough--and above all you cannot get household service enough to provide
you with interesting food, and completely smooth domestic conditions.

I do not mean to say that all these things are necessary adjuncts of the
lives of all artists--but they are the indispensable conditions for so
many that where they are absent, either the average level of artistic
output must fall or the workers _must_ go elsewhere. They _must_ go
elsewhere. . . . And it is to be remembered that I have spoken only of
the more prominent artists--of those with so assured a market that they
can at any rate to some extent dictate their own prices. But a man must
have worked long before he will have attained to such conditions--and to
have worked long in an atmosphere so exacting and amongst vicissitudes
so sudden and disastrous as pertain in American cities is to have run
rather terrible risks. . . . Rather terrible risks both mental and
hygienic.

Living conditions in New York--and I presume elsewhere in America--are
so terribly costly that almost the only resort of the young artist there
if he has to make a living is one form or other of journalism or of
commercial art. The aspirant thus hopes to make bread and butter whilst
throwing off this or that piece of imaginative work. One day, one or
other of those pieces will "catch on" to one or other of the mysterious
cogs of the immense machine that makes for fortunes for the Imaginative.
One prays that it may.

But the enterprise is very desperate. . . . In New York it is too
desperate. Journalism and the commercial arts may be the most admirable
sticks but they are terribly exacting mistresses. And they are all the
more exacting in that they have excitements of their own. It is probably
almost as--or it is on occasion almost more--exciting to have brought
off a great journalistic scoop or to have attained to super-eminence in
the realm of advertisement, strip-picture, or magazine-cover designing
as to have arrived at slow fame by any amount of imaginative-artistic
achievement. The glories and emoluments are more immediate and more
obvious and the performances less exacting.

But, even if the journalist make no scoop to draw him away from his more
imaginative ambitions and the commercial artist no entry into a Tom
Tiddler's ground where he may for ever remain, the mere occupation of
making a living by daily tasks is desperately hard and engrossing. Yet
to think out works of art takes time.

There is a belief that seems to me to be very prevalent in America at
this moment that journalism is a good road to imaginative achievement
because it brings you into contact with Life. At any rate lately in
Chicago I was appalled by an early-morning invasion of my bedroom. The
day before, in the course of an interview, I had happened to say
incautiously that journalism was an avocation exactly opposed to that of
producing works of fictional art. And the young men and women who burst
in on my--quite early--slumbers and who continued to burst in on my
occupations during most of that and several successive days were all
students at one or other Journalists' College in one or other of the
Universities of the Middle and Northwest.

"How is this?" they would all exclaim, in effect. "You say that
Journalism is bad for Novel Writing. But we are all taking courses of
from three to five years in Journalism in order to become Novelists
. . ." or essayists, or poets in either strict verse or _vers libre_.

I would withdraw into nonself-committal stammerings. I pointed out that
what I had said to my interviewer of yesterday had really been this: I
did not know much about the matter but I was pretty certain that the
qualities that made a man a good novelist would make him a bad
journalist and so I considered it a corollary that the qualities that
made a man a good journalist would make him a bad novelist. Or rather,
to reduce the matter to its lowest denominator. I might or might not be
a good novelist; I had no means of knowing; but I was certain that I
should make a damn bad journalist because I could not write short. I
needed space in which to develop my ideas . . . several or many
paragraphs. I could not run to "snap." No can do.

They, taking no interest in my predicaments since they were so immersed
in their own, would counter with the allegation that their professors
and other pastors and masters assured them that the career of a
journalist was of the greatest use to the imaginative writer because it
brought him into contact with Life. They visited murderer's female
companions in their homes; they saw conflagrations destroy elevators;
they detected crime; they interviewed the distinguished and the
villainous; they had exceptional opportunities of knowing how unusual
things were done. So they saw Life.

That let me out and with animation I pointed out that that was not
seeing life. The newspaper of necessity presented you with a distorted
image of life simply because it had to be more interesting than life. If
I judged Life by the Chicago newspapers I must think the world gone mad.
Yet life in Chicago was perfectly normal. The journalist had to tell you
that he smelt the Stockhouses in the foyer of Chicago Opera House. But
you did not. Neither did he. I said that the way to see life was to
live, but the journalist did not live. At any rate he did not live the
life that he wrote about. He rushed feverishly about with his eyes and
ears unnaturally open. But even murderers sometimes sit quietly at home,
reposing with their arms round their female companions, drinking near
beer. For most of the time. . . .

Then those young men and women in my bedroom would say that they did not
take much stock in my opinion, but they liked to hear all sides.

Nevertheless there is a great deal in what I say. The way in which to
gather knowledge of life for the purpose of conveying through your
writings the image of life itself--the only way _is_ to live. And if
possible to live before you write. If I had a son I should want him to
write imaginative work; there is no better or more dignified occupation.
But before he did so, I should recommend, he should earn his living--as
a sailor, an agricultural laborer, a veterinary surgeon--as anything
that was real and non-parasitic. I would even let him be a Financier or
a Big Business Man if nothing else would serve the turn. To me at least
it seems to be merely common sense to say that as the stuff of poetry is
the industries, vicissitudes, fears, emotions, sufferings and passions
of normal humanity, the writer will write better about these things if
he has really experienced them than if he has only looked on at their
more extreme manifestations.

But there are always uncommon cases to which common sense rules will not
apply. There must be young men and women, of genius even, who are
unsuited to gain their early livings at normal occupations, or whose
feelings will not let them do so. For these New York is the best place
in America . . . but it is not a good place because it does not arrange
itself to suit their necessities. Until it does so it must be content to
see such young men and women drift . . . into expatriation.

For them there is . . . Paris. And there might be very much worse
places. For Paris has long since adapted herself to affording easy and
dignified living conditions for very poor artists, and the formula for
the young man or woman of some genius coming from remoter America is
very simple and very stereotyped. He or she will visit New York, find
living conditions there so hard as to be impossible; will make just
enough money to get to Paris and to stay there; will there produce as
saleable work as he or she can; will revisit New York as often as
Finance will permit and will eventually find such recompense as Fate is
determined to allow to him or her.

I will now recount the history of my only _faux pas_ in New York . . .
at any rate of the only one of which I am conscious. It has a double
moral.

I was sitting then, late one evening, very fatiguedly, deep in an
armchair in a hospitable, darkened, rather book-lined room that might
have been Bloomsbury, or Hampstead or Oxford. I had been invited to meet
some one who at the moment was only two hours late. We had dined almost
too well; the wine had been. . . . But one does not talk about that.

There was at any rate conversation going on. A very distinguished
critic, a more than distinguished collector, some one else as
distinguished and some one else almost more distinguished. And as became
the book-lined dim room the conversation was about Poetry--and I did not
join in. I mean that the conversation concerned itself with a sort of
poetry about which I do not talk--by a foreign poet who is an admirable
fellow. And I have long considered that dog should not eat dog.

The conversation went on and on. I was thinking about American cooking,
a subject that was then no little concerning me . . . I mean from the
moral side. I was thinking with some terror that on the morrow I was
leaving my charmed circle, and going into New England where on the next
morning but one I should eat for breakfast: oysters, grilled sausages
with pancakes and maple syrup and an enormous slab of mince-pie. (It is
no good telling me that they do not eat oysters and mince-pie for
breakfast in New England. I have too often seen them do it--and done
it.) I was considering that such a breakfast would be good for one--was
_meant_ for one--in the days when one afterwards went up into the
blinding mists of the mountains and hewed timber, or over the turnips
with the dogs after partridge. But nowadays one should eschew both New
England and old English cookery. That I was dreamily thinking whilst the
conversation went on over my nearly prostrate frame.

On and on. And on. About the same foreign poet. I was considering the
elaboration of a lazy theory to the effect that if the American--_not_
the New York--character had its unamiable sides it must come from diet.
Pie and cereals. . . . Above all cereals. Or perhaps above all pie . . .
were calculated to make one grow in a virtue of a terribly
hundred-per-cent disagreeableness. I began figuring out a diet-campaign
that might make the Middle West a hundred-per-cent human. Of Boston one
might well despair . . . then into my reflections came the voice of one
asking me--_ME_--if I had not printed the first poem of the poet they
were minutely discussing. A most admirable fellow, I said that--that he
was a most admirable fellow. An assemblage of all the manly virtues. But
I did not think I had had that privilege.

The voice of the great Collector insisted that I had. He possessed the
files of some periodical or other that had once belonged to me. I did
not insist. Dog after all should not eat dog. . . . They went on
discussing the works of that poet. On and on. And on.

I became conscious of a slight headache; a slight feeling of nervous
irritation. It was due either to the dinner we had eaten or to the
thought of the breakfast I was to eat on the morrow after next. I grew
warmer and more somnolent and as I grew more somnolent I resented more
and more that conversation. It seemed to me an outrage; one does not
come to New York to hear that sort of thing. And I was leaving New York.
I hated leaving New York and going to . . . what was it Herrick called
it? The dull confines of the drooping. . . . Oh, well, New
England. . . . And suddenly I heard my voice burst out:

"For God's sake can't you fellows give over talking about the imbecile
mud of that imbecile ass and talk about a decent American poet?"

Dog alas, had eaten dog. . . . I have never ceased regretting the
outburst. But its immediate results were overwhelming. A complete
silence descended in which you could hear the deep breathings of my
fellow guests. It was like being in French Flanders where I had once
heard single shells falling into a church and the thin sifting sound of
the stained glass as after each explosion showers of it tinkled down
into the roofless chancel. Then the awed voice of the collector said:

"But haven't Her Majesty Queen Victoria, the Captain of the Marylebone
Cricket Club, the Dean of Westminster, the Head Waiter at Hurlingham and
the Committee of the Carlton Club all certified that he is a poet and
gentleman after their own hearts."

I was by that recovering myself. I said:

"Indeed, yes. Not one of the best of the second best London clubs should
be without him. . . . But why not talk about the poems of Mr. Arlington
Robinson, who is a poet of the same genre but a million times better?"

(It was in effect Mr. Arlington Robinson for whom I had been waiting, by
then nearly two hours and a half.)

You should have heard them sigh with relief. You see, they did not like
talking about that foreign poet's work; they had been doing it to make
me, a foreigner, feel at home. So that they were at once gratified to be
able to leave off doing it and relieved to have my testimony as to the
poet's eligibility for good clubs. And indeed he was an admirable
fellow.

So we talked for a time about Mr. Robinson--who did not turn up; and
then someone quoted quite a lot of Shelley's _West Wind_ and soon we
were singing: "He was a man, he was doing her wrong!" and other
folk-songs. I like the way New Yorkers--and inhabitants of Boston too,
for I have heard them do it at the Boston equivalent of the London
Athenum Club--I like the way then that New Yorkers sing after their
dinners. Three or four young men get together in a corner of a room and
set up a college song in four parts; then two or three others
simultaneously start a dialect ballad; others sitting on the floors in
other rooms begin to sing _Ich grolle nicht_ or _Ich weiss nicht was
soll es bedeuten_ and from a special combination of wireless and
gramophone a dark, enormous voice peals out in _Deep River_. . . . It is
so exactly what the occupants of Oxford Common Rooms or members of the
Athenum do not do after dinner; and as my life has been spent in
avoiding doing what those gentlemen do do, I like what here I find.

But the absence of the academic element in New York society does make
life bitter hard all America over for a certain class of literary
talent. . . . America's mopping up of the world's gold supply keeps even
its more distinguished imaginative writers and nonreporting journalists
always under a threat of straitened circumstances. The emoluments of the
pen are the last of honoraria to rise in sympathy with the fall in the
purchasing value of currency and it is only lately even in America that
literary earnings have in any way jumped with the jumping prices of all
commodities and services. Every American working man possesses and has
long possessed an automobile--but I know many, many American men of
letters who do not and most of those who do have only lately acquired
them.

Now I am far from saying that the possession of an automobile implies
anything much in the way of rational happiness to its possessor, indeed
I should say that it did nothing of the sort, and that as opposed to the
American working man, the English and still more the French working man
had far more opportunity for happiness--supposing that his ingredients
of happiness were in any way the same as mine, which last is naturally
the determining factor. But the possession of a resource by a class is
at least a barometric indication of pecuniary levels when it is pointed
out that another class does not as a rule run to that resource. And it
is hardly an exaggeration to say that the rise in the rate of emoluments
in the learned classes of America has nothing like kept pace _pro rata_
with the enormous rise that has come to the classes making a living by
manual labor and by the superintendence of manual laborers. . . . But,
indeed, happening to visit an engineering works where I had a friend who
possessed quite remarkable scientific degrees and attainments and who
worked partly on investigation in the laboratories and partly actually
at the furnaces . . . happening, then, to ask this young man what he was
paid, I was told a sum that I have forgotten but that seemed relatively
very minute--and I was begged not to reveal what that sum was anywhere
because if the laborers amongst whom he part-worked should get to know
how little he was paid, they would lose all respect for him and he would
have his life made burdensome.

It is seldom that one finds such direct evidence that the possession of
theoretic knowledge of a trade or mystery is a disadvantage from the
point of view of salary--but such cases are by no means rare and grow
daily more numerous. And again, I do not mean to say that even rate of
pay as long as it is of a nature to keep body and soul together need
have anything to do with happiness or decency of life. During several
periods of my career I must have worked for far less money than any
compositor to-day in either London or New York and I am quite certain
that those periods were by no means the least dignified or socially
agreeable that I have known.

But a rise in prices of commodities means something more--and more
disastrous--than mere fall in wages; it means the gradual squeezing out
and disappearance of whole trades--and more particularly what are called
luxury trades. Then their providers must starve. And that is what has
happened to the more learned, standardized and aloof forms of the art of
criticism in America to-day. It has happened indeed to the art of
poetry--but poetry has always been in that position; only until latterly
the poet in America has as a rule managed to struggle along with the
help of payments for writing critical articles. Now that resource has
completely or almost completely gone.

I do not mean that I set any great store by the ponderous and usually
almost completely imbecile "Review" which is such a feature of the
printed matter of my own country, or for the daily and weekly journals
where the same sort of stuff, slightly watered down, is offered to--and
avoided by--the public. Indeed the greatest part of my life has been
spent in combating those indolent pomposities. The existence of such
sorts of printed matter and their acceptance at the hands of the public
as representing Criticism is mostly responsible for the fact that the
English as a nation hardly read at all. The public says, that is to say:
If the books that these writers praise are indeed good books we don't
like them; on the other hand, we do not want to read bad books which
might be bad for us. Let us go and see a football match. . . . So it
becomes increasingly difficult for any young, lively or aggressive
talent in England to find any opening at all.

And the lively and agreeable way in which books and the arts generally
are treated in the lighter American periodicals is, _pari passu_,
responsible for the extraordinary--the extraordinary!--vividness,
curiosity and life that are exhibited by the American public with regard
to those subjects. I do not know that I am a writer of any merit; no one
has any means of knowing that with regard to himself; but whatever my
merit, it is equal in Great Britain and the United States. . . . And to
be a writer in England is to be like--oh, say, a tin of jellied eels
that has for years reposed on a country grocer's shelves--whereas if you
were a piece of bread on a mill-pond that contained a hundred thousand
hungry minnows you would not be one-tenth so pulled about as if you were
a writer of any position at all in New York. . . . And as to America!

It is of course, partly a social matter--but it is very largely one of
publicity. Let us put it that in England there are titles and the
English can therefore display, as to the habits and ideas of titled
people all that lively curiosity that they do not display for artists
and their products. The place of the titled in America is filled--and
quite admirably filled--by the millionaire; but the millionaire--and
indeed even the billionaire have not quite the divine right to public
curiosity that pertains to a wholesale fishmonger who shall have
received the accolade of his Sovereign. Not _quite_! And their habits
are perhaps not so picturesque. I don't know. I imagine that if you have
an aristocracy it can afford time to be bad--bold and bad; whereas Big
Business is a more strenuous affair. And then Big Business Men have to
be so surrounded by detectives that it must be difficult to be
picturesque and practically impossible to be naughtily so. At any rate
all the personal pronouncements of the really Big Business Man that I
have come across have been of an astonishingly virtuous hue. I cannot
imagine, say, the Duke of Westminster writing like Mr. Henry Ford, whose
works I have read with a singular sense of improvement. I have never
seen either the Duke or my distinguished namesake--nor for the matter of
that have I ever seen a portrait of either; but I imagine that the Duke
and his usual associates would be more likely to occupy space on the
shiny pages of social periodicals than Mr. Ford and his. . . . Those
pages must, however, be filled; editors and public are alike hungry for
stuff that will fill them. So the Artist has to be called in. . . . And
I imagine that my friend Mr. Dreiser and Mr. Ford between them get about
as much publicity as the Duke in England off his own bat. . . . But I
hope Mr. Dreiser gets much, much more.

All that is very much for the good of the arts and of the world. For
although it is the work rather than the personality of the artist that
is of value, where a great deal of curiosity is satisfied as to the
personality of the artist some attention at least will be paid to his
work. And the press that pays that attention will at least try to be
readable.

That then is all to the good. You have, in New York at least, no
governing Middle Class, that class being everywhere the enemy of the
artist, but you do have a sort of gay, changing and artistically
harmless Smart Set that has neither the morgue of entrenched academic
classes nor the enforced exclusiveness of ancient aristocracies. On the
contrary, the New York and even the American, rich and newly enriched,
are apt to see that a certain prominence, even a certain historic
durability of name, sometimes come from contact, or even association,
with the Great Artist. . . . There was, for instance, a Philip of Spain
who is immortal because he picked up the dropped paint-brush of
Velasquez. I do not know what else he did. He was perhaps the
non-productive husband of Mary II (Bloody) of England and perhaps he
launched a thousand ships upon which God blew so that they were
destroyed. . . . _Afflavit Deus et dissipati sunt_. . . . I do not know
about that. But I do know that one of the most monumentally active and
wealthy men of New York, a man so active that you have to enter his
house by a secret door after sitting for an examination by detectives,
for all the world as if you were being measured for the Bertillon
system--and of activities so formidable that he has had to be put in
commission as it were by the United States Government . . . this
gentleman then remarked to me that he always liked to be in the society
of the late Messrs. Abbey and Sargent because Philip of Spain was famous
for having picked up the paint-brushes of the Sargent of his day. And
when I asked him which Philip that was he said he did not know and did
not care. And neither did I.

I have indeed heard that on the days on which the best known
portrait-painter in New York to-day keeps open house in his studio there
will be six hundred, or it may be six thousand, million dollars there
represented at tea-time. And his studio when _he_ drops a brush
resembles the scene on the field when Princeton plays football with
Harvard. . . . That is no doubt an exaggeration. Still a certain
parallel could be drawn between the Athens of the days of Pericles and
to-day's New York. Pericles had mopped up all the silver in the world
and all the artists in the world very naturally followed it to Athens
and were awarded escorts of drums and fifes. It is true that Athens soon
fell upon disaster. So, coincidentally did Spain shortly after she had
mopped up all the gold of the then world and Philip honored the painter.
For it would seem to be a rule of Nature that a race cannot mop up the
world supply of either precious metal and afterwards prosper. In revenge
it will take to honoring the arts.

Be that as it may there can be no doubt that the increase of the gold at
the disposal of the United States has caused prices to harden and that
the hardening of prices has caused the disappearance of the more
ponderous forms of American critico-literary periodicals. At the same
time the increasing esteem in which New York and America hold the arts
is having the effect of enormously increasing the number of their
practitioners in those countries. Nothing is indeed so striking as the
increase of attendances at the already very numerous universities and
colleges that cover the United States. You see old colleges that for
years have gone on with from four to five hundred undergraduates
suddenly, in the course of a twelvemonth, being attended by from fifteen
hundred to two thousand, and the greater State Universities, like those
of California, growing to numbers that are almost incredible. . . . Of
course nothing like all these students address their studies to the
humanities, but the numbers of those taking what is called "English" as
a course must have quintupled itself in the last twenty years, whilst if
you add to that the number that enroll themselves in the classes for
Journalists, the increase must be still more sensational. And all these
students, young men and women, must contemplate more or less seriously
producing works of the pen or the typewriter in their after years. And
another curious factor is the relatively new disposition of the American
parent to regard the Arts as offering dignified and moderately lucrative
careers to their offspring.

In the old days the American father relentlessly cut off with a shilling
any son of his who proposed to become any sort of an artist, the mothers
weepingly acquiescing the while. Of course that still happens, but the
number of American fathers who to-day accept such a position with
equanimity or even with complacency must have very sensibly increased
and, as for the mothers . . . although I am constantly being asked
questions by them as to whether or no Paris is a good place to which to
let one's son go in order to study the arts I do not think that I have
once been asked lately whether one sort of artistic career or another
was or was not a good thing for a young man or woman.

The net result of all this unparalleled artistic activity--unparalleled
at any rate for Anglo-Saxondom--is that a very great number of young
things with only very slender talents behind their enthusiasms become
artists; and that in addition the number of young things of quite
considerable artistic but almost completely unmarketable gifts is also
steadily on the increase. It is these last that to-day suffer very
severely.

They suffer very severely because the heavier type of periodical never
had any great vogue in the United States and has now a very much
diminished one, so that the state of the young--or even the old--writer
whose gift lies towards what in England is called Belles
Lettres--towards the essay, the critical article and the poem--is apt to
be very dreadful indeed. For it is to be remembered that, heavy and
pompous as the great monthlies and quarterlies usually were, they
sometimes belied themselves by publishing something delicate and good.
The hours of depression that I have passed in New York--and there have
of course been some--have arisen very largely from that set of causes.
It is dreadful to see young persons of great if tenuous gifts want not
only the most indispensable comforts of life but any visible or
imaginable means of securing the barest recognition. And of that there
is too much in New York.

It is a state that will no doubt one day cure itself. The taste for the
larger canvas and the more vivid hues of popular work--I am not casting
any stones at the more popular type of work; heaven forbid that I
should. The most vulgar excesses of the most popular press are better
for the nation, for humanity and even for the arts than the least
deleterious of pompous scholasticisms--but the taste for the exclusively
vivid is apt to sate itself in the natural course of things. Then comes
the day of more delicate arts. That is really all that there is to be
said or to hope for. In the meantime that type of American talent can
only say: Thank God for Paris.

And that type of hundred-per-cent or Teuto-Erse American who clamors
against the expatriate artist is doing a very cruel thing . . . and a
very unpatriotic. People of delicate talent are as necessary to national
life as the most blatant of successful industrialists--as necessary as
the priest. Otherwise your nation becomes a howling pandemonium. And if
you cannot, for temporary economic reasons, keep them alive within the
walls of your own city you must let them found colonies outside. For the
prosperous and the alert New York is a very beautiful place. It is as I
have said again and again, outside Provence, the most beautiful place
that I know. They are complement and supplement, those two.

But only if you are fortunate . . . or resilient. Meager means and
closed opportunities on the other hand, there, are terrible and not to
be supported. Even dead poverty with accompanying relief are better. The
poor are on the whole well cared for; there is much bread distributed
and many free circuses. It is pretty in the dark days of winter to see
the Xmas trees beneath Washington Square Arch or on Madison Square. I do
not know that the like is to be seen anywhere else at any time.

But the struggle to keep the head above water in New York is worse than
is the case in any other region that I know. And the reason does not lie
in the worship of wealth. London is a rather nasty place in which to be
poor because the nature of my countrymen is such as to accord no human
respect to the man who cannot afford a considerable
establishment--preferably without working to support it. You might there
be Darwin, Descartes, Ronsard and Apelles rolled into one but if you did
not live at a good address you would not have the respect of your
neighbors or any recognition from the wives of bishops. And that is
galling. Otherwise one can scrape along on relatively little in
London. . . . And Paris is the best place in the world in which to be
poor because it is a city arranged for the life of the poor; there if
you have wealth you are suspect whilst if you are known to be a poet the
gens d'armes stop the traffic for your crossing and the commanders of
state fortresses turn out the guard in your honor. That is agreeable,
but one can get on without it.

But New York is terrible not because of the snobbishness of its
inhabitants; there is next to no snobbishness there. On the whole you
will there be very little looked down on for being poor and indeed I
believe that a millionaire in America--and even in New York--will have a
worse chance before a jury than any gunman who is penniless. That is
always agreeable and I daresay that if there were any garrison in New
York its commander would turn out its guard to meet a distinguished poet
if the proceeding were suggested to him and he thought it would give
pleasure. . . . No, if you are poor in New York no one will much trouble
you. You will have to go without. And there, that is terrible.

It is terrible with a terribleness passing nearly all others, not
because you will have to do without luxuries or the glorious habiliments
of the more fortunate. We can all do without those. . . . No, it is
terrible to be poor in New York, terrible for the contemplative, because
of the extreme dearness of all personal service.

The thinker--and every artist in the end is chiefly a thinker--is the
bare and naked thing he is before the wind of circumstance chiefly
because of his dependence on personal assistance and surveillance. Every
incidental attention that he has imperiously to pay to his material
surroundings is an interruption to a train of thought. I do not say that
a poet may not with advantage to himself spend hours a day in digging in
his garden, but the constant train of petty interruptions of domestic
life will as often as not completely destroy his thought. He must then
either get outside help or live in squalor upon dreadful food.

I am not saying anything against the quality of domestic help in New
York or even in America. Such domestic help as you do get is admirable
in its considerateness and its efficiency and so indeed is the public
and semipublic service when it comes in contact with the individual. You
will not find anywhere in the world better service than you will get
from Pullman porters, hotel valets, parlormaids and the like. Of course
you will get as good from attached retainers in Europe, but you will not
get much better. I imagine that two things contribute to this--the fact
that negroes set the pace in personal public services, so that such
white attendants on the public as you find are forced self-protectively
to adopt the touching airs of personal affection as still distinguish
the Southern born negro. And then, presumably, such Europe-born domestic
servants as one finds in New York and elsewhere are domestic servants by
avocation. Otherwise with all the opportunities that Big Business offers
them in its workshops, they would do something else. . . . At any rate
where service is to be found it is of a very admirable quality whether
in public caravansaries or in the homes of the rich and the moderately
rich--of a very admirable quality, engrossed in its occupation and very
agreeable and soft to receive. And not servile.

That I suppose is again the negroid touch--the negroid contagion. For me
there is nothing so disagreeable as to be waited on by European
men-servants. I have always the feeling that your English butler or
Italian waiter with their differing obsequiousnesses have in the backs
of their minds the ambition to revenge themselves eventually on you
either by blackmail or the knife--and I do not know that the English
house-parlormaid is much better. I shiver not infrequently whilst she
hovers round me. But the negro servant is cheerful, self-assertive,
interested--and singularly soft in his or her ministrations. And I
think, as I have already said, that the white domestic staff is apt to
take its color by degrees from the negro just as, it seems to me, all
real American cooking has its coloring from the admirable concoctions of
the Southern negress. . . . And of course there is American music!

But the pity of it is that there is not enough of it to go round or
nearly round; and to live in America--and still more in New York--to
live at all, you have, unless you are at least moderately rich, to
subsist on standardized and devitalized food, without personal
attention, in an atmosphere either of very dreadful public meals and
domesticities or of continual personal stress. For even if you eat off
paper plates nothing that has not come out of a tin, if your heating be
entirely central and all your domestic work done with the aid of
labor-saving appliances, the domestic work of even a very small
establishment will be fairly exhausting if you have other work to think
about. And all the while your vitality will be suffering because of the
quality of your sustenance and your want of personal ease. . . . It is
all the bliss of life to have some one fetch a handkerchief for you.

I had a deep glimpse into this the other day. I was talking to the wife
of a very admirable poet and critic somewhere downtown--precisely on
these subjects. And I was unfolding theories of food which I shall
presently unfold here at some length. . . .

I do not, by the bye, apologize for treating in these pages of subjects
that are usually considered to be beneath the attention of the Muse.
These things are the stuff of life . . . of national life as opposed to
national glories. It is no doubt very glorious that one man in a great
nation should have at his disposal one billion dollars. I am really not
in the least ironical. I remember the wave of emotion that went over the
United States when we read in the morning papers that one man possessed
a billion dollars. . . . That was the sort of people we were: we had
produced a man who possessed a billion dollars. No doubt the same sort
of wave of emotion went over Hellas when the Hellenes read in their
morning papers that Herakles had cleansed the stables of Augeas. They
were the sort of people who produced demi-gods.

But life is made up of the people who creep up and down between those
mighty legs . . . not of demi-gods. So rather than write of the
possessor of a billion as typefying New York I prefer to write of things
culinary. . . . Thus I was talking to the wife of a very admirable poet
and critic, somewhere downtown . . . about cooking. I will not here
enlarge upon my theories. Roughly speaking I said that people leading a
town existence did not need to be crammed with cereals as a Dorking fowl
is crammed with mash by the higgler. Obviously if you lift heavy weights
or dig in heavy soil you will lose weight yourself and that loss must be
supplied. But the poet-critic sits in a chair from dawn till eve. It is
his brain that needs support. Between seven A. M. and eleven P. M. he
will not have lost half an ounce. . . . So if you make him spend an hour
and a half in chewing dried wheat you will not have supplied him with
anything but fat-reparative material, his brain will starve and his time
be wasted. . . . What you must give him is several portions of different
fish and non-refrigerated meat, cooked with extraordinary care,
seasoned, deep-fried, parboiled, baked, cooled-off and rebaked with the
sauces from the bones and fat, strained and added at the last moment as
a marinade. So he will obtain the fuel that his brain needs.

There went up at my words an extraordinary wail from the wife of that
poet-critic. . . . This is a true tragedy told lightly. She said:

"For heaven's sake do not let Harry hear what you are saying. I love
him. He is much, _much_ too thin. . . . But how can I feed him as you
say? . . . I work all the morning as secretary to an
advertisement-writer and all afternoon as a mannequin on Third
Avenue. . . . So I tell him that what he really needs is cereals . . .
vitamins No. 13 and 14 with a proper balance of proteins and
calories. . . . I don't know what it means. . . . It probably means,
poor dear, that he ought sometimes to have what he likes to eat. . . . I
do not mean that that is what the advertisement writers mean, but that
that is what his thinness and his dreadful, dreadful appetite mean!"




                               CHAPTER VI


                            THE LORDLY DISH

I seldom sit down to an American meal without remembering pleasurably
the scriptural verse: "He asked for water and she gave him milk; she
brought forth butter in a lordly dish," and when I am not otherwise
engaged I frequently wonder why it is that Americans who are not sparing
of their criticisms of things Continental never--or never as far as I
know--grumble at the parsimony of European _restaurateurs_ in the matter
of that comestible. For myself the continually refilled miniature saucer
of firm, fresh butter that is always beside my plate on the American
table is a constant source of pleasure. And to all appearances it is
supplied gratis, though whether it be or no I have no means of knowing
since I have never looked at a bill in this country.

I don't look at bills--not because I am extravagant, or British, or
plutocratic. In France or England I not infrequently examine a waiter's
reckoning with some attention. In France you are not respected if you do
not do it, and I do not care whether the English waiter respects me or
not, so having learned the habit in Paris, I do not bother to
discontinue it in London. But then in London and Paris I know the
language. I don't mean to say that in New York or Chicago I should not
understand the wounding things that a detected waiter might say to
me--the point is that I should not know how to sass him back, whereas in
either of the other metropolitan cities I enjoy making a scene in
dishonest restaurants. I remember one . . . That has nothing to do with
American cooking but it has this American association for me in that we
were taken for Americans--and South Americans at that--and treated as
such. That is to say that we were--or rather my friend was--charged
eighteen pounds odd or say ninety dollars for four indifferent dinners
such as are served at monstrous and expensive caravansaries the world
over, for three bottles of wine two of which were corked, and some
liqueurs. With its sequel that made an agreeable evening.

But I do not mean to write of those large and despicable places which
are all the same the world over. Their procedures are identical, find
yourself in which hemisphere you may. They hire a famous chef. He has as
a rule one special dish which he rides to death in the menu and only
carefully prepares for the very rare customer who is well known to be
captious. He has too many underlings to be able to superintend them
properly and as a rule he lets them do as they will after a lesson or
so. His hot plates--or whatever means he adopts of keeping dishes
warm--keep dishes warm until they are tasteless, tepid, and entirely
tedious. It is indeed the tediousness of meals in these places that is
their chief characteristic even if the chef has distinguished himself
over his special _plat_. For what is the good of eating canvas-back duck
_ la_ New Orleans, or _canard Rouennais_, or wild duckling with
marrowfats and orange-peel sauce, be they never so delicious, if all the
rest of the meal be tepid and slovenly? That is deep boredom. I would
rather have a little bully beef, a raw onion, some good strong cheese, a
leaf or so of cos lettuce and salt, some good crusty bread and plenty of
fresh butter--and of course a bottle of hard old ale. I aver that I have
had better appetite for such a meal--and better talk over it--than I
have ever had for the most excruciatingly French-misnamed cookery in any
of the Ritzes or Carltons or Splendides in any city of any continent. Of
course their champagnes will stimulate the tongue, but personally I hate
both champagne and the conversation it induces. Claret is the only wine
over which to converse; _chteau neuf du pape_ is good if you are tired
and wish to soliloquize or talk heated politics; Burgundy is good to
make love upon--but champagne is only good for the fag-end of dances,
and in the form of cocktails for young ladies at that.

But what is this? . . . I am writing in Chicago. This is a daydream. I
must have nodded. Here I drink ginger-ale with my meals, the water
tasting nightmarishly of chlorine.

But how else is one to write of cooking? The purpose of meals is
companionship, reminiscence and communion, otherwise they are mere
stoking. And immensely much of the pleasure of consuming choice meats is
geographical. How often when, at a really good board, you are dwelling
on chicken with all its fixings will you not observe a dreamy look steal
over the face of your dinner partner! Then you know that she is thinking
of Maryland with its steamy fields at dusk when the chickens come to
hand and the grasses are fragrant. Or how often have we not dreamed of
the Common and the Back Bay, or of Lexington, or Concord or the
Adirondacks when we consumed _cassoulet de Castelnaudary_, which in its
more commercial forms of the Paris restaurants is nothing but baked
beans and pork? . . . Of course when you consume _cassoulet de
Castelnaudary_ in Castelnaudary I do not know what geographically you
think about. You compose, I imagine, a _nunc dimittis_. I know I have
done so. We had on that occasion between us two bottles of the most
priceless 1906 Ch-- But I know I must not. The _cassoulet_ came off a
fire that has never been extinguished since 1367 and that has always had
a _cassoulet_ on it. . . . And the sunlight beating down on the white
road sent hot rays up through the jalousies and the commercial travelers
cleaned their knives on the tablecloths and like the morning stars sang
in their glory. Do you know what you sing on such occasions? It is

    _Aussitt que la lumire vient entrer mes rideaux,_
    _Je commence ma carrire par visiter mes tonneaux_
    _Le plus grand roi . . ._

But I _know_ I must not.

The curious thing is that I cannot remember what I ate long, long ago in
Baltimore or elsewhere in Maryland--except for watermelon which comes
back to me as resembling a bath sponge that has sopped up some very weak
sugared water. We used to cut chunks out of it with the machetes with
which we cut the corn, and then we would return to cutting the corn
beneath a vertical sun in the copper sky. I remember, too, sitting with
my feet on a barrel at the store at crossroads, waiting with the rest of
the inhabitants for the mail and consuming dried apple-rings from
another barrel. And I used to wonder what could have been the cause of
the subsequent nightmare. I remember, too, bringing numerous packages
back from the store in the buckboard I was given to drive. I remember
how the buckboard was tied together with bits of string and the harness
with decayed rope. I still see the agile chestnut horses; I still feel
the jolting over the roads which in England we should have called sand
dunes and ravines because of the rocks; I remember the sun which in
England we should have called a blast-furnace and the dust and the
katydids. . . . But as for what was in those packages from which we
presumably ate . . . nary bite!

But stay. There comes back to me succotash in little saucers which did
not interest me. But corn grilled, or rather toasted on the cob! Ah,
that I remember. I remember the butter dripping off the elbows in the
kitchen of the colonial farmhouse where we ate. And, by a process of
reasoning rather than by recollection of taste, I remember fried eggs
and chicken on Sundays. I say process of reasoning because I remember
the farmer saying that he dare not kill one of his own beasts or hogs
because they were all marked down by the meat trust. You could not, he
said, buy fresh meat between Baltimore or Philadelphia and San
Francisco. Perhaps he was exaggerating.

At any rate I do not remember much of the rural food of Maryland or
Pennsylvania in those days; but I do remember pleasurably certain foods
in New England and New York. I never, I think, ate baked beans actually
in Boston, but I do remember eating admirable beans in Fall River,
Massachusetts, in a little frame-house, the property of a trolley
conductor. He had begun by asking if I were English and then had said
that his wife was English. I talked queer but not so queer as her. So he
took me home to lunch with him. And there, sure enough, was his wife
and, sure enough, she did talk queer for she was a Lancashire
cotton-operative lassie speaking a dialect so broad that it was all I
could do to understand her. So we cowered us down in i' th' ingle and
had a gradely pow, while the beans were baking in the bean pot, which
was as delicately browned as any meerschaum. She was a high-colored,
buxom creature. I don't remember whether she had come to Fall River of
her own accord to make her fortune in the cotton mills or whether the
trolley conductor had visited Manchester and married her because she was
a skilled cotton-operative. But she wore a shawl over her head for all
the world as she might have done in Ancoats market, and in spite of it
her beans were admirable--as good as the _cassoulet_ of Parisian
restaurants. I have certainly latterly never tasted anything so good.
But that is perhaps prejudice.

You see, the other day, somewhere north of Boston, I read the wail of a
New England gastronome. It was to the effect that, alas and alas, local
comestibles no longer come from the designated localities. Boston beans
come, the pork from Chicago, the beans from, say, Milwaukee; and they
are all canned somewhere in the Middle West. And so with all food in
America: it came, he said, out of tins--even canvas-back duck, Russian
caviare, and soft-shelled crabs. That writer indeed averred that there
were only two clubs in New York where you could be certain of eating
genuine canvas-back and you had to order it beforehand at that. He
perhaps exaggerates!

How that may be I do not know. Standardization must have its victories
that are more cruel than those of war. It is true that during the late
War we had frequently to eat baked beans and mutton out of cans. I
remember a first-class carriage on a siding outside Hazebrouck at one
o'clock in the morning with the thermometer below zero and no windows in
the carriage; and my btman heating one of those Mackonochic rations
over three candles tied together; and our sharing it. And damned good it
was. But to eat it in an apartment house in peace time, with no chance
of even such exercise as running from shells would be pretty cruel.

Standardization and de-territorialization go on the world over. Last
summer in Avignon in the south of France under the shadow of the Palace
of the Popes, in a restaurant that I had found admirable for thirty
years--I had, indeed, years ago eaten there in the company of Frederic
Mistral, the Provenal poet--there, in that sacred and august shadow I
was offered Norwegian anchovies with the _hors d'oeuvres_ and _pche
Melba_ made with California peaches out of a tin. The Mediterranean that
swarms with real anchovies was only fifty miles away, and Norway is
seven hundred or so--and Heaven alone knows how far it is from
California to Avignon, whilst in the spring whole hillsides of Provence
are nacreous-pink with peach blossoms. But the peaches go to London; and
Norwegians and Californians go to Avignon to eat their home products,
and I come to New York to eat Mediterranean anchovies. It is perhaps not
a mad world, but it seems a pretty queer one sometimes.

The gentlemen who write to the newspapers about the deterioration of
their national cookings may perhaps be regarded with suspicion. They are
apt to cry _O tempora! O mores!_ because it is agreeable so to cry and,
being usually oldish, their palates have frequently deteriorated. I
daresay my own may have. And I usually avoid newspaper comments on food.
I never can understand what sort of person writes them. Nevertheless,
they are sometimes amusing. I have lately been reading a controversy
between a writer in an anti-American English paper and another in a
pro-German and, therefore, anti-English review published in New York.
Says the one, "It is impossible to find anything decent to eat in New
York"; and the other, "It is impossible to eat any London food." Cries
the Briton, What price the shoulder of mutton at A's; the beefsteak,
oyster and kidney pudding at B's; the quince and apple tart at C's; the
beef _ la mode_ at D's; the Welsh rarebit at E's; the entres at F's;
the dessert at G's? . . . all in London. Retorts the American, What
about the _Sauerkraut_ at H's, the _Kaiserschmorren_ at I's; the
_Limburger mit Pumpernickel_ at L's; the _gedaempfte Gaensebrust_ at
M's? . . . all in New York. And so the contest rages. Let us try to
ascend into regions more serene.

Think of oysters. . . . There are few things that I have so frequently
discussed with Middle-Westerners on the boulevards not of Chicago, Ill.,
but of Paris, France.

There are few things over which excited patriotisms are more hideously
stirred. You may more safely blaspheme against the Tricolor, the Union
Jack, or Old Glory than breathe a word against the blue point, the
Whitstable native, or the Marenne. And on the boulevards where the
battle of the oyster is daily waged during all the months that have r's
in them I am frequently alarmed for fear knives should finish up these
contentions.

The Americans allege that blue points alone are divinities amongst
bivalves; they allege that all European oysters taste strongly of
copper. The Europeans have naturally never tasted American oysters, but
the idea that anything can be said against their sacred and nacreous
sea-food with the traditions that go back to Caligula--_that_ sets them
foaming at the mouth. The subject last year so intrigued me that I one
day determined to give the matter an exhaustive test. The idea occurred
to me in Paris, in mid-September, and from that day to this I have
consumed oysters daily and at almost every meal. In New England I have
even had them for breakfast. This you will not believe, but I have. And
well, I have eaten them in Paris, in New York, in Boston; and--though I
was warned against it--in Chicago. I even wished to eat them in St.
Louis, but I was there taken firmly in hand and given some sort of soup
instead. I hate soup.

So imagining myself fairly qualified and being sure of my impartiality,
I venture to give this verdict. It is incorrect to say that the European
oyster tastes of copper. Indeed, how can the American gastronome know
how copper tastes, whereas have not every Briton and every French child
sucked coppers in his cradle? He ought not to do it but he does, so that
few savors can be more familiar to him than that of the humble ha'penny.
At any rate, it is familiar to me and I solemnly aver that what the
European oyster tastes of is the sea--and that is why we love it. Whilst
we devour it we see frigate-warfare in which the victories are won by
Nelson or Villeneuve, according as we were born on one side of the
blanket or the other; we see the limitless verges of eternal ocean; the
blue of Capriote grottoes gleams translucently before our reminiscent
eyes. And, as I have already said, one of the chief values of food is
the reminiscential romance that it causes to arise.

The clam does taste of copper and, except in the form of clambake eaten
on an open beach, I personally dislike it very much. But the blue point
and the other American oysters are different. They are completely
flavorless and they rely for their attraction on texture. For their
flavor they have to fall back on such adjuncts as tomato catsup,
horseradish sauce, and other excitants of the palate. They are, in
short, different. No doubt if you have seen them in their beds or if you
have consumed them on the shores of Nantucket they will make you see the
ocean by means of their texture; but for me the only thing that happens
when I eat a blue point is that I see the face of the nice person with
whom I was eating when I first placed one of those morsels, duly
dripping with cocktail sauce, between my lips. . . . That is good
enough; _je ne demande pas mieux_. And by a curious coincidence, it was
the same person who refused to allow me to eat oysters in St. Louis.

The singular flavorlessness of the American oyster impressed me so much
that at first in my haste I averred that you might just as well take one
of the little round crackers, butter it well, and soak it in cocktail
sauce. But that is not true. I remember, by the bye, twenty-one years
ago at Mouquin's--alas, there is no longer any Mouquin's--asking Miss
Cather, whose name I permit myself the pleasure of mentioning, why she
took horseradish sauce with her oysters. She replied, "Well, you see
they have sometimes rather a funny flavor." But that was twenty-one
years ago, and refrigeration has abolished that characteristic. Still it
is not true that buttered cracker will really replace the blue point. I
eat them frequently just for the flavor of the cocktail sauce but I
don't then see any pleasant visions.

No, the real merit of the blue point as of the Cape Cod and their even
vaster compatriots is their texture. If you could give the denizens of
East Atlantic shallows that texture or if you could give their American
relatives the European flavor then indeed you would have called the New
World in to redress the balance of the Old. You can indeed convey their
jolly plumpness to the Whitstable native and doubtless to the Marenne. I
once kept a number of English deep-sea oysters in a shallow tub of
frequently renewed sea-water, feeding them on very fine oatmeal the
while, for about a fortnight. At the end of that time they were as plump
as butter. . . . But they had completely lost all flavor! And they had
not the pleasant--let me call it resilience--of the Westerner.

And of course, with its great varieties of size, the American oyster can
give points and a beating in the matter of emotion. Its gamut is
extraordinary. The Marenne or the Whitstable native--or even the humble
Portuguese oyster, which resembles a teaspoonful of sea-water to which
has been added a little gummy mud--all these you must eat in a sort of
reverie so that your tongue may miss none of the passages of flavor.
They should, I think, really be eaten in solitude. But over the American
oyster you can converse freely, you can be gay, I daresay the young
could even make love, as they can over Burgundy. Madame la Duchesse de
Clermont-Tonnere in her admirable book on _les bonnes choses de la
France_ states that the favorite--the almost sole--comestible consumed
in the _cabinets particuliers_ of that pleasant land is the crayfish,
the drink being Pommard, so that it is on the scarlet shells of those
crustaceans rather than upon the nacreous blue-gray ones that you tread
when mounting the stairs. How that may be I do not know but the duchess'
assertion goes to prove my contention that the European oyster is an
attendant upon reverie.

But it seems to me that you can do anything over any American sea food.
I daresay you could even cry over a Cotuit, and as for me, when called
upon to consume one of those things as large as soup plates that now and
then come in one's way, I feel myself to be a cave-dweller, a real
he-man, devouring young babies, having in each hand a half-gnawed
shinbone with which I bash on the head my fellow guests to right and
left.

I am now going to make a terrible confession: I find American food in
practically _all_ public places to be huge in size, splendid in
appearance, but almost invariably as nearly flavorless as possible. That
is not really an indictment of American cookery, but merely of the
material employed and, if it is an indictment at all, it is meant to
attach only to meals served in public places. For I want to make as
strong a point as I can of the following statement, since it is the
Great Truth about cooking. If I could I would print the whole in
capitals so as the more firmly to rivet it on your attention. I am
amazed when I hear Americans complain with heat and even as if with
hatred that you cannot get decent food in England. These individuals I
always ask at once, "Do you know any English families? Have you ever
eaten in an English upper or upper middle-class home? Or have you ever
even eaten in a first-class English club?" Of course they never have.
You could exactly reverse the questions and the answers. And that is the
Great Truth.

In wealthy--and still more in wealthyish--American homes the cooking is
as admirable as it could be anywhere. I remember an American dinner
which was cooked in Paris by a French woman whom the American family in
question had taken with them to spend two years in this country. She had
been an authentic _cordon bleu_ to start with and she had picked up her
American cooking from negresses in, I think, Kentucky. At any rate it
was in the South. And this combination resulting in this particular
dinner was as good as anything I have ever eaten. It was as good as
anything could possibly be. That was American cooking.

But if you reproduced the same sort of circumstances for English
cooking--I mean that if you took a French cook and installed her for two
years in England in such circumstances as would let her assimilate the
knowledge of English "good plain" or "professed" cooks, the dishes she
would cook on returning to Paris would be just as admirable. They might,
indeed, be better. Except for the wine--since you cannot get good wine
in England!--they might really be better if she remained in London where
materials are better than they are in Paris--at any rate in the
department of meat and fish.

That would be English cooking. For there is no sense in talking of any
national cooking except in terms of meals produced by really skilled
professional practitioners in moderately wealthy homes, the meals to be
composed of first-rate materials. For it is to be remembered that
cooking begins before the kitchen is reached, the selection of foods
being almost as important as their preparation or their heating and
dishing up. I cannot, of course, claim to have any very intimate
knowledge of the materials that are at the disposal of the American
professed family cook. I have taken the trouble to visit one or two
markets and to examine the meats, fish, and fruits displayed. They all
seem to me to suffer from standardization, and certainly they all do
seem to suffer from cold storage or refrigeration. But that very good
material can be obtained in this country I know because of innumerable
meals that I have eaten in kindly and hospitable families.

American public meals are horrible--but so are English public meals and
so, for the matter of that, are French, German, Italian, and Spanish
Anglo-Saxonized ones. For, in the matter at least of cookery, the world
suffers from overcommunication and too efficient transport. I dare say
that in California even Californian apples, oranges, or figs may have
some flavor. They certainly have not in London, New York, Boston,
Avignon, or Strasbourg. That may, of course, be due to transport, but I
happen to have paid some slight--of course mainly epistolary--attention
to the matter of fig-culture in the Far West, and I believe it to be due
in that case to climate and soil--the most delicious of small Italian
brown figs becoming almost as entirely tasteless and fibrous as the
native Californian fruit within a year or so after transplantation. But
it is not merely the transporting of food materials from one end of the
world to the other that is responsible for the dead monotony,
inedibility, and indigestibleness of all western European and farther
Occidental public cooking. I sometimes think that, long before the
invention of wireless telegraphy, _restaurateurs_ and restaurant cooks
must have developed some thirteenth or fourteenth sense by which from
the Prado to the Lido and from the Strand to the banks of the Nile and
back again to the shores of Lake Michigan they have telepathically
communicated their terrible secrets of the preparation of tepid
underdone beef, sauces compounded in imitation of billstickers' paste,
_cte de veaux Clamart_, chicken cutlets, and the even more unnameable
vegetable horrors that you are called upon to eat amongst marble and
gilding, with spiky palm leaves threatening to tickle the back of your
neck, to the sound of standardized jazz or standardized Tzigane or
Viennese waltzes. As far as I am concerned, the best public meals I have
eaten I ate lately in Chicago.

These things run in strata. Below these gilded atrocities are to be
found the Cimmerian box-shaped caves where eat the poorer white-collared
classes--the clerks and stenographers who are the ball-bearings of our
civilization. Here you may reach the lowest depths of despondency over
imitation-marble table tops. I say despondency because whether in
London, in New York, in Birmingham, Manchester, or any other American or
British provincial city to eat regularly in these places you must not
only feed without interest but you must have arrived at a state of being
without hope, and so your digestion will color your mentality with the
gloomier shades of despair.

The curve goes upward in the strata socially below this. I have eaten in
what we call "good pull-ups for carmen," cabmen's shelters, and the like
in I don't know how many European cities, and in several American ones,
and I have never in one of them come across food that was not admirable
in quality, if usually a thought tough, roughly served, of course, but
always piping hot and well-flavored. That is because that class of human
beings--the men who drive horses in wagons, or motor lorries, who haul
heavy burdens about the world and up to sixth or fourteenth floors--goes
to make up the one Occidental city class which takes a keen interest in
its food. It needs good keenly flavored viands to crush between its
powerful teeth and it sees that it gets them. Its subsequent labors take
care of its digestion.

It sees that it gets them. . . . The whole moral of the world of food
considered as a delight lies in those words. Except by accident or when
making purposed excursions for the purpose of this writing, I have lived
as well, I have found as good food and as well cooked, in New York as I
habitually do in Paris. That is because if I may express a he-man's
sentiments in soldierly language I damn well see that I get it. It takes
some trouble, it means exploring nooks and corners, mostly in the
basements of obscure streets. But it can be done. It might be done by
everybody.

It might be done and Anglo-Saxondom should do it, as they used to say of
the Northwest Passage. I have spent some time lately in examining with
attention the weekly menus afforded presumably for non-wealthy
households by the cookery experts of Sunday papers of many cities in
this continent, and all I can say is that when reading them I have felt
precisely the same profound dejection which has been mine when perusing
similar diet sheets in Great Britain. And I know something about it. For
a long period of time I prepared the weekly diet sheets for large units
of His Britannic Majesty's expeditionary force. Nay, I even waged an
eternal war in the course of which I was frequently disciplinarily but
not morally bruised--a war with the Command in Chief of the culinary
branch of the service. In private life the gentleman who commanded this
arm of our forces was the director of one of those immense concerns that
spread indigestion, ennui, and despondency through sixty per cent of the
thirteen million population of the capital of our empire. He would
produce for my guidance diet sheets that might have been compiled by
Isabel of the _New York Sunday Eagle_ or Dora of the _Liverpool Weekly
Herald_. There was the same superfluity of what I believe is called in
this country "roughage" and the same complete want of anything with any
taste to it. I for my part completely ignored his orders; I gave my men
as many savory, small portions as the food at my disposal and the
industry of my cooks could command. I tried to contrive that frying was
done with animal and, if possible, with pork fat; I nibbled coppers away
from money allotted to the awful things called in this country cereals
and spent it on condiments. In France I even bartered small quantities
of, say, hominy-ration for garlic. All hell broke loose over my
battalions; The G. O. C. i. C. Messing launched worse than papal bulls
at my head. But my men were contented, alert, cheerful, good at drills,
admirable marksmen, and perfect demons with the bayonet. . . . And I was
not shot.

The dreadful topic of "roughage" needs a whole volume to itself. I must
limit myself here to the briefest moral summing up. Happiness,
contentment, alertness, clear eyes, bright crisp hair--and even, who
knows? consummate salesmanship!--can come only from eating many small
portions of food that you really like and that is so savory that your
mouth waters in anticipation. It is by the water of your mouth that your
eyes will be made to shine. You must eat, when you eat in restaurants,
in tiny places--they can be found in New York--where there are no
gilding, palms, or music. The money that might have been spent on those
will there be put into the viands and the wages of the cook. You must
talk frequently to the proprietor about his menus and discuss what you
eat with your wife or your fellow guest. And above all you must eat what
you like and only what you like. You must also see that garlic is in
your food but only in sufficient quantities to accentuate the flavor,
not to have a taste of its own. You will object that in that case you
will be distinguished by an unpleasing odor. But in a whole gay
population which consumes garlic you yourself, having consumed it and
being gay, will not be so distinguished, neither will your neighbors.

Those terrible inquisitors, the physicians of to-day, have discovered
that in garlic is to be found the real fountain of youth. So they are
prescribing it for you--for almost all complaints--but synthetically and
flavorlessly. The doctor is like the priest. He tries to kill joy, but
along the lines of your superstitions and fears. We--you and I
Anglo-Saxons--are trying to-day with our cookery to condone the sins of
our Puritan ancestors. It is the only Puritanism that remains in New
York, which is not America, and also in Great Britain, which is not yet
America. So we let the physician replace the priest to whom we no longer
resort; and the doctor, knowing that our superstitions trend that way,
knowing that we think it sinful to take a delight in the palates that
the good God has given us for our health and delight--the doctor insists
that we eat things tasteless, uncondimented, unassoiled, unblest--and
horribly productive of what in this country is, I believe, called "gas,"
but to which our grosser shepherds give a more romantic name.

Let us, then, limit the term the American cuisine, to the admirable, the
almost perfect, meals that negroes here prepare in their culinary
ecstasies. For no negress knows how she cooks. Neither do I when I cook.
I use everything within sight in a frenzy resembling a whirlwind, and it
takes an army of scullery maids to clean up the kitchen after me. But
you won't have a headache after a hogshead of their--or my--cooking.

Let me finish with a story--for people like stories. When I was last in
London I listened to a dialogue of two young women of the shop-assistant
type on the top of a bus. Says the first, "You aren't out with your toff
to-night?" Says the second, "No. I says to 'im, 'Charley, you've 'ad me
out every night this week. We've bin to Lyon's Corner House, to the A.
B. C, to the Carlton Grill, and the Savoy. I don't know where we 'aven't
bin. And what I says is, "Give me a rest. Let me stop at 'ome and eat
something out of a tin." '"

I thought it might have been New York. And upon my soul I don't know
whether I ought to have rejoiced because the populace is revolting
against the food provided in public places or whether I ought to have
cried _O tempora! O mores!_




                              CHAPTER VII


                    REGIONS CSAR NEVER KNEW. . . .

So that I am forced back upon the position from which I set out . . .
that allowing for changes in circumstances humanity is much the same the
world over. American cookery is much the same . . . is very little
better and very little worse than cookery the world over. Americans,
that is to say, who pay attention to cookery get better cooking than
people in other countries who do not. The reverse is also true. . . . On
the whole I should be inclined to give a little prize to the Westerners
because of the little, unexplainable dish of butter with which I began
my last chapter. For me that has sanctified many indifferent meals; but
as I say I cannot explain it. Is butter singularly cheap in the United
States . . . or is there a clause about it in the Declaration of
Independence? I should imagine not; but there is no knowing. I have
never met any one in the United States who has ever read that
document. . . . For the matter of that I found myself at table the other
day with half a dozen well-educated Americans and of that company I was
the only one who knew the name of the first settlement founded by the
pilgrim fathers. . . .

I was caused to turn my attention to these historico-international
matters rather more than ten years ago, before the late war, by an
American--a New England--lady who assured me with singular and
impressive animus that the mince-pie was unknown in England. She was not
saying that English mince-pies were not so good as New England
mince-pies. . . . And indeed I may insert here the statement that the
best mince-pie I have ever tasted I ate lately in Park Avenue, here, at
the house of a Philadelphia lady who has spent most of her life in
England and France. And the pie was cooked by an inhabitant of the
country of France where mince-pie is unknown except as a very rare Xmas
import from London. . . . But that long ago New England lady stated with
tears--almost--in her voice that I hated America. And because I hated
America I wanted to deprive New England of the credit of having invented
the mince-pie. . . .

Well, I can only say that there is a statute of Oliver Protector
forbidding the English to eat mince-pie on Sundays--so mince-pie must
have been known in England in the days of the Commonwealth. Of course
one of the Pilgrim Fathers--for I believe the Pilgrim Fathers set out
for Plymouth before the days of Cromwell--one of them may have sent back
a letter by the returning Mayflower describing how he baked plum-frumity
in shallow pie-crust. Because there exist quite a number of Elizabethan
receipts for making plum-frumity and if you made dishes according to
those receipts you would have to-day what we call mince-meat. And it is
no good saying that Raleigh brought back that receipt from New England
because Raleigh never went to New England--and there exists a
fourteenth-century English receipt for making a Conceit or Device in
which what to-day we call mince-meat is recommended to be baked in
pie-crust. It is true that the pie-crust ought to be shaped in the form
of a square castle and gilded. But there was the mince-pie--and as far
as I can remember Columbus had not committed his indiscretion before
1332. . . . And what English person does not know that for every
mince-pie you eat in a different house between Xmas and Twelfth Night
you will have a happy month in the ensuing year? . . . How many
mince-pies have I not eaten under the compulsion of that belief . . .
and how many doctors have not profited by it?

But, curiously enough, only yesterday morning or so whilst in a
breakfast-car just west of Altoona I was accused by a lady from Boston
who sat casually opposite me of hating America--because I do not like
salad. So history repeats itself. That quite charming, rather fresh,
gray-haired, true Puritan descendant from Plymouth days said to me: "I
guess you are English and hate America or you would not say that about
American salads." . . . For I will confess that I have suffered, oh,
_dreadfully_! from the American habit of introducing salads at any, at
the most unexpected, points of their meals. I hate salads; I do not
believe that any one should eat any raw green vegetables unless he is
certain exactly where and how it was grown and then only if he has seen
it cut and washed. I would certainly never eat salad either in Paris or
China. . . . Still, that is only a personal obsession. I am not saying
that salads should not be eaten by other people; that it is bad taste to
eat salad, or anything like that. I mean that I am not condemnatory.
Only that I have suffered. (There are people who do not like butter.)

Still, the case of those last is not so bad. You can leave your butter
saucer beside your plate untouched and no one will notice. Salad is
different. Of course if you eat in a public restaurant you can refrain
as long as you are careful to see that your guests do not go without.
But it is my happy fate to receive a quite extraordinary amount of
hospitality in this country . . . and then my trouble begins. Being a
foreigner and guest I am generally seated beside the hostess . . . and
the hostess is almost invariably proud of her salad. . . . I will tell
you. . . . I was seated the other day at the hospitable board that I
most like to attend in all the city of New York--beside the New York
hostess that I most like. Well, the room was beautiful and the hostess,
and the appointments and the guests; the food was as good as I have ever
eaten, the wines--yes, the wines!--unexceptionable, from a pre-war
cellar. And then. . . . After the most delectable small birds and
fixings that you can imagine there was served a salad. . . . Of
alligator pears and shrimps!

Now alligator pears are the most delicious things in the world . . .
_naturel_, and eaten if possible in the open air. But here they were
sliced with a dreadful--oh, a _dreadful_--dressing of a purplish color.
And shrimps are all very well in their way, in sauce with fish, or out
of sauce if they are large enough and some one else is at the pains of
peeling them for you. But here they were with a sort of Thousand Island
dressing. And alligator pears! You know . . . it was too much. I looked
at my hostess and said, after I had tasted that salad:

"I can't. . . . Oh I _can't_!"

The most intense concern came over her face as she said:

"Oh, I am so sorry. I invented that salad for you, myself." And there it
stood on the menu . . . _Salade  la Ford_!

Now I do not know if I look or talk like a man who would like alligator
pears with shrimps and Thousand Island dressing. I suppose I do, and the
thought is bitter. But still more bitter is the fear that I may not be
asked to that house again. Better men have been cut off less cherished
visiting lists for smaller offenses. . . . And I believe that hostess to
be _exigeante_. She told me indeed during that meal that she had,
precisely, cut off her visiting list during the first two years of
Prohibition every man who came drunk to her house or had there
exceeded. . . . So I may not be asked again: after all one's sobriety
may well be doubted if one refuses alligator pears. . . . A bitter
thought. Still that was only two days ago; I may yet.[2]

And one eats even worse salads. I have had to. I invented myself, years
ago, a salad of celery, apples and walnuts. I gave it up after trial.
Here it meets me every day. . . . But most detestable of all is a sweet
macedoine of fruits with oil and vinegar dressing. The people who give
you that are the sort of people who never have olive oil--and the best
cottonseed oils and other substitutes have nauseating, sweetish
after-flavors.

Now as regards the lady in the Gotham express--I was on the way, here,
to Chicago--I had, just to make conversation and a little for
instruction, for I seldom get opportunities of conversing with
Bostoners--they not liking my ribald habit of mind--I had asked her then
why she ate salad; whether she liked it or whether she regarded it as a
duty.

She flushed, suspecting that I was poking fun at the New England
Conscience. Mind, I had said nothing against salads. But immediately she
had jumped to the conclusion that I was English and hated America. And
that, indeed, is how most international misunderstandings are caused to
arise. For, at any rate at that moment I was feeling quite remarkably a
New Yorker, having been as it were violently thrown back upon Gothamism
by the contemplation of the terrible, brown-snow-covered flats of the
Middle West. . . . She, on the other hand, was traveling to somewhere in
the neighborhood of, let us say, Terre Haute, Indiana, where she
proposed to recover from a nervous breakdown caused by overwork of a
sedentary and responsible kind on Beacon Hill. . . . It seemed to be a
curious place to which to go amidst the snow for the purpose of curing
sick nerves. But I think there were relatives farming there who had come
from the neighborhood of Williamstown, Mass.

She was, as I have said, gray-haired, very fresh colored, tall and
extremely thin but charming with the charm that Mary E. Wilkins used to
impart into her New England spinsters of a quarter of a century since.
She ate for breakfast a poached egg, a salad of lettuce with French
dressing and a measured quantity--I should imagine about three
ounces--of some sort of maize-flour bread with a measured teaspoonful of
butter. She drank imitation coffee without milk and with one lump of
sugar. . . . She said that she was trying to gain weight. But having
eaten that breakfast she sighed and said:

"Oh, I suppose I may as well get it over now!" and she ordered another
poached egg. Then she looked over at me and with troubled brows
explained that her doctor ordered her to consume two eggs a day. She
_hated_ eggs. So it was a question of going through the day to find a
meal at which her courage would let her consume those eggs. Sometimes
she would eat one at breakfast and one at lunch. Sometimes she would
shudder through two at lunch. Sometimes--horribly--she would find
herself near bedtime with both uneaten. Then she would have them both,
in a crisis of revulsion, beaten up with some milk.

I had remarked that a doctor who ordered his patient to consume food
from which his stomach revolted, with the idea of fattening his patient,
could not be much of a doctor. The essence of making food nourish and
therefore fatten a patient lay in prescribing for him what he liked;
otherwise the gastric juices did not function and the food was
improperly digested. I said indeed incautiously that a really healthful
meal was made up of food at the anticipation of which your mouth
watered. She said that that was a horrible idea. She said that she would
never _think_ of telling her doctor what she liked or did not like: it
was your duty to like what was good for the majority of humanity. It was
your duty, too, never to think of what you liked or did not like. She
was beginning, meanwhile, shudderingly, on her second egg.

It had been then that I had asked her if she really liked salad. I am,
as you see, a little mad on that subject and I had gone a little madder
since seeing the menu of a 35-cent lunch, lately, at a great department
store. It consisted of two kinds of bread, one of maize-meal, the other
of flour, a salad of endive with French dressing, or, alternatively, a
fruit salad with the same sort of dressing, a cup of tea . . . and
ice-water unlimited. And the thought of the mothers and wives of a great
city that I loved martyrized in the midst of their hard days' labors for
keeping the home together with nothing but those gaseous horrors to
sustain them had indeed driven me a little madder than ever. . . . But I
had had no propagandist or interested motives in putting that question.
I had just wanted to know whether that unknown lady really liked salad
or ate it merely as a matter of duty. . . .

And after she had unmasked my nationality and had asserted that I was
still thirsting for revenge over Bunker's Hill, Boston, she continued,
flushing more deeply and with quite exaggerated animus:

"Of course I like salad or I should not eat it. I eat it three times a
day--at breakfast, lunch and dinner. I should eat it four times if I
thought it right to eat four meals a day. Besides it contains the
largest known quantity of Vitamin No. 3."

I continued, however, remorselessly:

"Did you always like salad? Or did you only develop a taste for these
debauches of raw greenstuff after you had heard about the Vitamins?"

She began at once spiritedly. Of course she had always liked salads. She
had always eaten. . . . But then she hesitated. Her love for truth was
too great; much as she would have desired to add another victory to
Bunker's Hill by confounding me, she said: No, she could not remember.
She had never much considered her food. But she imagined that she had
certainly eaten more salads since she had heard of Vitamins.

So I let it go at that, though I had wanted to tell her that the
consuming of food that you liked was good for you because it was an
instinct implanted in you by protective nature, whereas to acquire with
effort a taste for eating food that you disliked was as bad as acquiring
any other unnatural appetite. But I was on no propagandist mission; I
should only have pained her and should have done her no more good than I
shall do to my present, unknown reader. A magic word like Vitamin 3 will
send a whole race, a whole humanity, plunging to destruction like the
Gadarene swine. And who am I to interrupt that catastrophe? . . . So I
will let that alone along with the consideration of all the train of
inhibitions and complexes, nation- and world-wide that are involved with
it. . . . I only told that lady that my personal rule of life was to do
what I wanted and take what I got for it. She remarked cheerfully:

"How very English! Do the English still think like that?"

I said: "Heaven forbid! The English think extraordinarily as you do."

But she ignored me, continuing that it was strange that we should be so
unchanged considering all the lessons we must have had and adding that
she had often deplored our terrible conditions and even sometimes
thought we deserved some respect for the brave fight we were making
against hopeless odds. But what would you have? . . .

I gathered in fact that she considered that I and all my compatriots
were starving because we did not model ourselves on Beacon Hill. . . .
And that will always seem a queer point of view to us because we have
always considered that Boston was what it was because Beacon Hill
modeled itself on the more intellectual parts of the suburb of
Hampstead, London, Eng.

That, however, is as near having an international conversation as I have
in late years come on the Western side of the Atlantic. I feel myself
here so unobservantly at home that, although I am not above having a
little fun at the expense of any local patriotism anywhere, I should
feel much more inclined to do it with some malice at the expense of an
inhabitant of Manchester, Eng., a city which I detest, than at that of
any Chicagoan, or citizen of Indianapolis or any settler near, let us
say again, Terre Haute, Ind. That is perhaps because I don't know
Chicago or Indianapolis or Terre Haute and I did once know
Manchester. . . . But certainly I have felt less strange in those places
than in say Birmingham, Leeds and Middlesboro'. . . . Boston is another
matter, for it has always seemed to me to be difficult to believe that
the Hub can be greater than the Whole.

The train, however, slid along over the unending plains, the pallid
reflections from the brown snow usually gliding over our faces up to the
ceiling of the car. . . . But every now and then that light would be cut
off by horrors in the way of mine-shafts and other black things. And,
not being in the mood to continue on discussions I began to reflect on
the nature of plains.

I like plains--in the sense that I intensely dislike having to climb
anything at all and that I am fond of riding a bicycle in level
country. . . . But here the plains seemed to commit what I will call the
sin of enormity and I was conscious of a slightly stifling feeling--a
feeling of stifling added to that inseparable from riding in Pullman
coaches. . . . I was hundreds of miles from the sea.

I had felt the same in Middle Europe, but here I had superadded a
sensation of mournfulness that in Middle Europe and even in New England
I should never feel. . . . There were no old buildings. I don't mean to
say that there was nothing dilapidated. The farms near enough to see
were mostly singularly unpainted, gardenless and in the mournful light
endlessly depressing under the drab, low-running snow-clouds. . . . I
don't mean to say that even a New England landscape, say up towards the
foothills of the White Mountains, cannot be mournful enough with its
deserted farms, its dilapidated fences, its ruined orchards under the
snow. But at least, with its rolling hills, its small ravines, there is
an end to it for the eye as there is an end to it as a civilization.

Here there is none; to the landscape there is no end and the farming in
the sad farms or the industrial occupations in the sad industrial towns
may well go on for ever and ever. . . . Mind, I am not writing this as
one who knows; I will write as one who knows a good deal more in a
minute. Here I am merely describing my own feelings at entering--at
finding with a sudden catch of the breath that I had awakened
_in_--AMERICA.

For New England--farming New England whether with or without Boston as
make-weight, is not America; what of it remains old New England is only
Old England hardened in type. Even New England cooking is only English
country cooking--hardened in type. You will get just the same in English
cottages and farms--the chicken pot pie just the same, the boiled dinner
exactly the same as our boiled silverside with vegetable additions, the
baked beans just the same as our haricot mutton, and the pies just the
same but a little less heavy in the crust--and the censoriousness, and
the scandals, and the dreadful tales of unimaginative cruelties. A
little harder perhaps in New Hampshire than in the old one. But not
much. . . .

Still that life is very much passing. I saw from the train the other day
an unroofed farm that I remember years and years ago, near Canaan, and
then it contained its stalwart owner whose family had owned it since it
was a settlement. . . . But he was married to the Italian maid of some
summer boarders at a nearby summer resort and so dreadfully poor that he
could not afford even a newspaper, let alone decent clothes. . . . Well,
it was obvious even then that he would not much longer stick on there.
Now it is equally obvious that he has gone. . . . There is some dairy
farming in the bottoms; dagoes do some truck farming near the cities
. . . which means in English that Italians raise cabbages and lettuce.
Here and there in foothills--I believe more in the State of New York
than elsewhere--a sort of dreadfully hard, superstitious, peasant
population still clings harshly to the rocks, much as they still do in
parts of the South. But that is not America. There was no doubt a time
when agricultural New England could typify the New World. But it cannot
any longer. Life there is too hard, too uneasy, too much of a struggle.

And there does there linger, in spite of the dagoes truckfarming and the
alien dairymen, a sense of oldness . . . of old frames of mind. You can
look out of the train at a little dale, covered with snow as if over a
lawn, broken by a little stream, with a shack of sorts overhung by bare
apple-trees. You can imagine yourself getting down at the little
frame-house of the station where will be your sledge with the blanketed,
fine, free-moving local-bred horse. The familiar expressman with his
silver-rimmed spectacles will greet you with parcels. The sledge piled
high, you will drive, buried in peltry, over the smooth snow to the
shack where some one you like very much awaits you. And there would be
the great fire and the brown eyes and the soft voice and the long night
beneath the snow . . . the sound of the horse munching his oats in the
warm stable that, I hasten to add, your fairy tale must have provided,
coming to you through the board-walls of the shack.

But here in the plains I do not believe that day dream would visit you.
You would have to drive miles and miles along wet, swamped tracks, on
brick roads if you were lucky, with the water swishing over the axles
. . . of your Ford. And you would leave the poor thing out of doors,
under the snow.

Yet here again I must utter my warning that I am not setting down what
is my own private preference as if it should be regarded as an
infallible standard of taste. There is no reason why you should regard
the quiet day dream amongst oldish things as the only occupation for a
proper man any more than there is any reason why you should not regard a
Ford car left out in the snow as being as proper an ending for a fairy
tale as a horse munching beans in a warm stable. The one would be nearly
as modern as the other to Julius Csar, who, if he drove anything, drove
a quadriga that could not turn round; yet he was no doubt at least as
exclusive in his tastes and modern in his point of view as you or I. And
these are the regions Csar never knew, swayed in the end by the
posterity of Boadicea.

And, again, I am painfully aware that some one may come along and assert
that even the unending plains through which the trains proceed with the
air of being out upon eternal, level journeys--even those plains are not
America. Some one is always ready to say to me, even in the Middle West
itself: "Ah, this is not AMERICA. You do not know America until you have
seen the Coast." And gentlemen from the South tell me that the West is
not America, and young women from Seattle tell me that New Mexico is not
_America_.

So that the one thing I am certain of is what I set out with . . . that
New York is not America . . . and of that I am certain--certain
sure--because all, all the rest, the inhabitants of Terre Haute, of
Seattle, of Los Angeles, of St. Augustine, of Norfolk, Va., or Boston,
Mass. . . . all, all the rest of the inhabitants of the Republic of the
United States of North America will assure you that New York is not
that. . . . But who then has seen America? I don't know. Surely no
American. I know one person who has been in thirty-eight states of the
Union. He was born in Hoboken and lives in Paris. I know another--a born
New Yorker--who has been in all the forty-eight states. The only person
I have ever met who has, she was taken the round of the states on
successive trips organized by her (New York) school because it was
considered to be the duty of a New Yorker to know his or her country.
And she spends the greater part of her time in Europe and is certainly
more familiar with the _mises  mort_ of Seville, Spain, than with the
stockyards of Chicago which, Middle Westerners assure me, are the true
heart of America. . . . Well, I have never seen them and do not propose
to.

So I am going to take the bit between my teeth, amid most of all this
confusion, and boldly to assume that the Middle West is America. . . .
As such it is productive of disillusionment to the casual visitor.

I have spent my life--I seem to have spent my life--amongst Middle
Westerners. I have, that is to say, passed periods in England, in
France, in Belgium, in Germany, in Wales--and in New York. But set
beside the Middle Westerners the relatively quiet inhabitants of these
other places hardly seem to bulk on the map. The late War itself was a
quiet affair compared with some gatherings of Middle Westerners in
Europe that it has been my good fortune to attend. So, very naturally
one figured them as born on the backs of mustangs with bowie knives in
their teeth and leading subsequently lives compared to which the lives
of Brett Harte's mining camp gamblers were parlor games.

But alas . . . the most truculent of these heroes was born in Oak Park.
Oak Park is a suburb of Chicago--a very pleasant place with a number of
trees on its boulevards and seats set up, as the inscriptions tell you,
by members of the Oak Park Rotary Club. I have been to Oak Park. . . .
Well, I myself was born in Merton, Surrey, then in the country but now a
suburb of London. And I can assure you that Merton Surrey is not
one-half as decorous as Oak Park, Ill. And it is rather more dangerous.
For it abuts on Wimbledon Common, where there are real ponds and on
Sunday golf-balls there fly about quite thickly. . . . And at Oak Park I
interrogated a junior relation of my ferocious friend as to his ideals.
He was a charming little boy of, say, twelve. He said that his ambition
was eventually to drive the Flying American between Chicago and New
York. . . . Well, at his age, in Merton, my ambition was to drive the
Flying Dutchman--still the fastest train in the world--360 miles in 359
minutes non-stop. Something like that. . . . But, of course, one does
not mention that in Oak Park.

So I gather that the occupations and ambitions of the suburbs are much
the same whether in Chicago or London. There are many more Ford cars in
Chicago but there are many more people in London; you have to allow for
such differences!

And it was much the same with the homes of the other ferocious Middle
Western friends of mine that I have been hospitably allowed to visit.
These were mostly quite quiet farmsteads standing rather unsheltered in
great fields. In very great fields where life is completely uneventful.
But one completely uneventful life in one very great field is very much
like another. My country cottage outside Paris stands on the edge of a
very great field. It runs as far as the eye can reach almost level, a
very little undulating. A few clumps of trees scatter themselves here
and there, anywhere between your eye and the horizon. There are a few
whitish gray farms, too, here and there--badly in need of painting. It
goes on like that for miles and miles and miles.

It is in short the Middle West. The second most ferocious of my Middle
Western friends coming to call on me, confronted suddenly with that
prospect round the house-end, fell back a step or two and exclaimed:

"This is outside Lincoln, Nebraska!"

His particular form of truculence was to dilate on the immense, empty
silences of the Middle West. At any moment on the Boulevards he would
stop and exclaim: "Oh, but the great desolate silences . . ." Thus
conveying an idea of himself as the essential, strong silent man--a sort
of immense _Penseur_ by Rodin dominating a thousand miles of empty
land. . . . As a matter of fact he was born in a newspaper office of a
rather large Middle Western town and the rest of his life had been spent
in and around newspaper offices, mostly in the East.

On the other hand, Middle Westerners born and having lived all their
lives on farms hundreds of miles from a city are fond of representing
themselves as perfectly remorseless Chicago speculators, ruining
millions by their Napoleonically unmoved operations in the Wheat Pit.
And then there are people born in North Carolina who like to convey that
they are natives of the Great Wild Plains, and natives of Indiana who
like to convey that they are really refined Southern gentlemen. . . . I
do not mean to say that they have not these feelings; not lying but
romance moves them. . . . And there are immense stretches of territory
where you find only Swedes and other immense stretches of territory
where German is your only language. . . . One is told nevertheless that
all these . . . _all_ these, whilst retaining their native tongues,
raiment, foods, habits and modes of thought become in some subtle way
American and so meant by providence to rule New York, which is not
American.

I was, that is to say, told by a quite serious, educated and unimpulsive
gentleman that he lived--somewhere near Chesterton, Indiana, I think--in
a community where he was the only adult born American, all the rest
being either Danes or Mecklenburgers. Nevertheless he quite seriously
stated that these agriculturists had so assimilated the American spirit
that they were better Americans than his own first cousins who had
migrated from the state of Missouri, where they had been born, to New
York. He stated that quite seriously, as I have said, and with equal
seriousness and good humor added that if New York did not bend to the
will of the American citizens of his township--in such matters as
Prohibition and the religion of its governor--New York would have
eventually to be controlled, if necessary, by force of arms.

I pointed out that in that case aliens, many of them not even
naturalized, were better Americans than a great body of American-born
citizens--that in fact Americanism, in his view, was a frame of mind
rather than a question of territorialism or state allegiance. To this he
quite agreed. I, I may state, was not arguing with him; I was merely
trying to obtain information. And he emphasized and strengthened what I
had advanced. Americanism, he said, was a point of view. . . . And he
would go further. In his view good, honest, sober, industrious and
Protestant farmers still in Denmark, or elsewhere in Scandinavia and
North Germany were morally better Americans than a great proportion of
the inhabitants at least of the Eastern States. Not politically of
course--but every gain of a European nation for Prohibition was a
world-gain for Americanism. . . . I may add that this gentleman was an
upper official in the United States Consular Service, so that he knew
both the United States and North Europe.

I had come curiously enough across touches of the same frame of mind in
the Boston lady of the two poached eggs. For, after she had finished the
latter of those abhorred eatables, she invited me to accompany her to
the look-out car at the end of the train so that I might observe
something that I had never observed before. . . . And in that invitation
the slight, not in the least unpleasant, pleasure that she had in
contemplating my British ignorance of so vast and vastly resourceful a
country triumphed over the fact that she much disliked the aspect of the
country and condemned its inhabitants for their lack of culture as
compared with that of the dwellers on Beacon Hill. . . . She told me
incidentally that she felt very triumphant at having polished off her
eggs because she would now have her mind free for the rest of the day.
So she would be able to study with attention an immense body of
literature in the form of press cuttings that she had got together, and
alternately practice on the typewriter that was to be found in the
parlor car--a complete mastery of that instrument not being as yet
amongst her accomplishments.

In the observation car she pointed out to me the rails of the line
running perfectly level in a perfectly diminishing perspective between
the brownish snow to the lowering horizon and she asked me if I was not
thrilled to think that those rails ran like that for a great many
miles. . . . Seven thousand, I think she said. Or perhaps not so many.

I said that I was not thrilled--nor do I believe that she was--only she
thought that foreigners ought so to be. I said that I disliked the
thought and the sight very much. It emphasized one's sense of impotence;
it was as bad as looking at the night sky and considering that the
nearest star was seven thousand million miles away. I said I liked
plains to have a border of hills; I said that once you stood in a plain
with a completely unbroken horizon all round you it made no difference
to you at that moment whether the plain continued for seven thousand
miles or only for seventy and that if you moved into another, adjacent
complete horizon it made no difference to you then, either. So, it made
no difference.

She said it did make a difference because of the hurricanes that swept
unbroken across its surface and I said that that did not make me like it
any better. She said that I ought to like to contemplate places where
the wonders of nature occurred and I said that if they were not actually
taking place the thought of them could be just as impressive on Fifth
Avenue, whilst if they were going to take place I should prefer not to
be there.

It is in that way that international discussions are carried on. . . .
But when we had finished talking through our hats she patted her great
leather wallet of newspaper cuttings with an almost girlish satisfaction
and said that she was now going to gather ammunition. She was usually
employed in organization work for some religious association--I did not
catch what. The work being very hard and she having no domestic help for
herself and her aged father she had had a nervous breakdown, so that her
brain had not hitherto allowed her to follow the matter of the cuttings.
They concerned themselves with Prohibition--being either arguments in
favor of that measure by distinguished Prohibitionists, statistics going
to show the harm resulting from the use of alcohol, or accounts of
individual calamity caused by that use. . . . And she said with the same
almost girlish pleasure and with the triumph that had attended her
swallowing of her last egg:

"Now I shall be able really to post myself on the subjects that are
nearest my heart."

Now odd as it may appear that was the first time I had ever met a
Prohibitionist. Of the hundreds and hundreds of Americans I have
met--and I suppose I have met by now at least as many Americans as the
average private American citizen meets in the course of his life--that
was the first American I had ever met who was a Prohibitionist, at any
rate to let me know it. And most Americans one has met during the last
four years have indicated decisively enough, either by their tongues or
their conditions, in which way their convictions lay. I do not mean to
say that I believe the American in the majority to be wet; there is no
means of knowing how the majority may to-day be. But I am at least aware
that there are many, many millions of American Prohibitionists.

And I may as well add that I hold no views on the subject--or rather no
one preponderating view. If it were ever my fate--which I pray that it
may not be--to have to vote either for or against Prohibition in my own
country I should be sore put to it by my conscience. I have on the one
hand the strongest possible repulsion from interfering compulsorily with
the morals of my fellow beings. I do indeed regard that as the greatest
sin that one human being can commit against another and I am lost in
amazement that any human being can be found with the courage to
undertake the task. On the other hand, I do believe that the evils
caused by drink are so terrible, so profound and so far-reaching that if
a law could be framed that would effectively--absolutely
effectively!--render all consumption of alcoholic liquor impossible I
should be horribly hard put not to vote for it. I may add that before
Prohibition had exercised the influence that it has on the habits of
Americans that I know and still more on those that I have seen in public
places in Europe and here, I held no very strong views against drink--or
even against drunkenness. But till then I had never witnessed its
effects on any great scale, nor, as far as I can remember, had I
experienced them. I wish I could say the same to-day, after a
comparatively short visit to this country.

And I have no hesitation in saying that much--that most--of the American
drunkenness that I have seen has been the direct effect of Prohibition;
I know too many Americans who before the passing of the Volstead Act
were persons of remarkable sobriety--as were _all_ Americans before that
date--and who, either, now drink quite lamentably as a protest against
that measure or who from drinking as a protest, in a spirit of defiance,
have acquired the dreadful habit. And this is most marked amongst
younger women and quite young girls. It is lamentable; it is horrible,
to me to go to the houses of quite nice people and to see a young girl
of seventeen or eighteen fall flat, dead drunk on the floor. _What_ sort
of children will that child have? . . . And yet I would not like to say
how many times I have seen that happen in the last few years. In Europe
and in America! In my own house, too, for the matter of that, and, in
that case certainly not as a result of liquor there consumed. . . . And
always as a Protest. . . . And always without any protest against that
Protest!

At any rate that was the first time that I had met a Prohibitionist, so
I was naturally anxious to hear from her own lips the reason for her
faith. I therefore asked her point-blank what was her main argument in
favor of the measure that according to herself she had most at heart.

She answered that it was furnished by the working-class father of a
family who ruined his family through drink, beat his children, murdered
his wife and so on.

I said that I supposed that her work on a religious organization had
given her a great experience of such cases. She said, no, her work was
neither charitable, nor, except in its religious aspects, in any way
social. She knew equally no members of the poorer classes whose families
had suffered at the hands of drink-addicted male heads.

I asked her what proportion of working-class homes throughout the United
States had been broken up or suffered by drunken heads of families. She
said she had not studied the statistics; she was now just going to,
having had previously no time. The proportion, however, had been very
considerable--before Prohibition. She knew it from statements made by
preachers and by distinguished Prohibitionists.

I asked her whether any of her intimate friends or any members of her
family had ever suffered from the vicarious effects of drunkards. She
said that she would not be likely to know people who knew people who
drank and that her family had drunk nothing but water from the days of
the Landing.

I asked her what proportion of working-class, pre-Prohibition drinking
had been indulged in by men and women respectively. She remarked with
heat that only a foreigner could imagine that any American woman ever
drank. . . . And then she added almost agonizedly, wringing her hands
together:

"Oh, if you only _knew_ how terrible is the fate of a working-class
family when the father drinks you would not speak as you do against
Prohibition."

I said that far from speaking against Prohibition I was trying to
discover what were the chief arguments in its favor. But she said:

"No, no. You English hate us Americans. . . . You want to see us again
reduced to your own sodden condition. . . ." And then her whole face
became transfused as at a beatific vision. She might have been Joan of
Arc--and indeed at the moment she was beautiful.

"And oh," she said, "in two or three years we shall have forced
Prohibition on your own country. That will be the great triumph of
America. . . . Her ewe lamb!"

Well, it is pleasant to contemplate the fifteenth-century English at the
feet of Joan of Arc. . . . But whether it would be so pleasant so to
contemplate oneself I do not know.

And, for one moment, looking at that radiant Bostonian I remembered one
questioning minute I once had in the headquarters of the Women's Social
and Political Union Headquarters when Miss Christabel Pankhurst, radiant
with her great idea, was telling me something. . . . I thought suddenly:

"Supposing that when Women have the vote they should choose to enforce
their views with the devices of Inquisitors!" And I imagined Miss
Pankhurst dressed as Torquemada, quietly and seriously holding a red hot
poker on my nose until I agreed to some proposition or other of
hers. . . .

Well, in front of the Boston lady of the eggs I felt much the same
uneasy sensation. . . . You see, she did not know a great deal about
Drink . . . but she was perfectly ready, a new Joan of Arc, to invade
Great Britain in support of its abolition by law.

Now she was charming if fanatic and, in spite of her years, young with a
girlish enthusiasm. . . . And I have yet to meet the American lady who
is not. . . . But, hastening over those immense plains, I remembered
with misgiving the description given by my depressed New York friend of
what he called the real rulers of America--the one or two billionaires
and the several million ram-faced, silver-haired, pince-nez'd females
who rule the small towns spread over this vast expanse.

And it is difficult for a European to realize how vast the expanses are.
If I want to go from Paris to London it is an easy affair. I just do it.
There are the hour or so to the coast. You stretch your legs on the
quay. Then, shortly you are at Victoria. Or to go from Paris to
Marseilles is a small affair. Or from Ostend to Vienna.

But to go from anywhere to anywhere in America is a great affair. You
must pack for the journey itself as for a country house visit. Pullman
cars are no doubt as good as they can be, but they do cramp your style
and their heated air causes martyrdoms or if the darky in charge chooses
to leave the steam-heat turned off you freeze. And that lasts long . . .
long.

So one travels only after prayer and preparation. I can go cheerfully
from London to Birmingham for lunch and be back in time to dress for
dinner. But I shall never forget proposing once to some one from what
then seemed the next city to New York to go and see him for the
week-end. He said it would take three days to get to his city and three
to get back--with half a day's wait at a junction thrown in.

These things the European does not realize. On the other hand, the
American really feels that if in England he took a too hasty step he
would be in the sea. But he should not let his women take that into
their sober calculations when they contemplate forcible conversions of
the British Empire any more than the European should imagine that
America with her enormous distances and divergences of interests can be
summed up by the contemplation of any one city or city-type.

Unfortunately isolation and the occupying of situations of local
eminence are apt to produce unreasonablenesses. The populations of New
York and Great Britain amount to more than the population of Beacon Hill
even if you add to it the population of the Middle West. It is forty
million against fifty-nine or so. Or if you add the population of the
British Empire the disproportion is even greater. Yet not only did I
have to hear that Boston lady seriously threaten my country and myself
with coercive conversion by unspecified means to a form of virtue for
which we are probably unprepared but, in a small town in the State of
Illinois, I was seriously informed by a prominent member of the local
ladies' club that the Middle West would send armed forces--nothing
less!--against, in the first place, New York, and then the British
Empire if those two populations did not conform to the frame of mind of
her ladies' club.

I was seriously and minatorily given that message by an elderly and
authoritative lady in front of a half-circle of feminine supporters. The
pronouncement was of no importance, but I sometimes think that if all
persons who made similarly gross _bvues_ of an international kind could
be held up to public ridicule it would be a good thing. For supposing
that I had been a publicist interested in fomenting international
misunderstandings I could have made a good deal of mischief out of that
lady's attempt to appear glorious in the eyes of her subordinates.

Of course similar imbecilities can be paralleled in any country in the
world. The Zulus are a boastful race; so are the Dyak head hunters. I
once heard a drunken fisherman in Selsey, Sussex, Eng., declare that if
the German navy appeared off Selsey he would sink them all with his
two-man coble; and the remarks of the quieter inhabitants of a
Mediterranean seaport with which I am acquainted when the men of the U.
S. S. _Pittsburgh_ have been more than usually demonstrative in their
unfortunate streets are almost as bellicose as those of any lady in any
Middle Western town at any time.

Small isolated communities dominated by determined females of a certain
age must be censorious and must pride themselves on their virtues. I
daresay if the cathedral cities of England and the priests' housekeepers
and sub-prefects' wives of France dominated their national businesses
England and France would be less satisfactory affairs than they are. And
when for a long time a propaganda of what is called uplift has been
carried on in a place--or in a wide region--it will have its effect on
the moral aspect and agreeableness of that place or that region. That
place or region will regard all others as sink-holes of iniquity. I once
heard a cottage woman in almost the smallest place in the county of Kent
say: "Sussex is the sink-hole of England and Rye Town is the sink-hole
of Sussex," she herself having had a numerous illegitimate family by a
traveling tinker, her husband being disabled. . . . Well, in the Middle
West I have heard it said that New York State is the sink-hole of North
America and New York City the sink-hole of its State. . . . I have heard
that said. I daresay the speakers were more technically virtuous, too,
than poor old Mary Walker of Bonnington, who is dead many years now, God
rest her soul. . . .

And as for Europe . . . God bless _my_ soul . . . I shall never forget
being asked by a soft-voiced, extremely erudite nun somewhere in
Indianapolis if the English were all as wicked as she had been taught to
believe. It was in the same village that the policeman knocked at my
door long after midnight to assure me that he hated me because I was
English. . . . You do not believe that these things happen; yet they do.

Why, in a much, much larger place a distinguished legal character told
me that he did not like his wife to be seen talking to me on a public
platform--because I was English, but still more because I came from New
York. That had nothing to do with my personal record because he consoled
me by saying that he did not mind how many times I had tea with the lady
in private. But if she were seen talking with any Englishman and
particularly with one in any way associated with New York he would lose
votes and his judgeship. . . . It must be queer to come before a judge
like that.

Nevertheless, those are the only three instances of dislike for Great
Britain that I have personally come across from Middle Westerners either
in or out of the Middle West and, as I say, I have known a great many.
And they are trivial enough unless, as my depressed New York friends
tell me, they really represent the frame of mind of the Governing
District of the United States. Where you have many men you will have
many imbeciles and ill-bred people. Where in addition communities are
small, innumerable and isolated the percentage of such beings will tend
to become large. They die out as education and the means of
communication spread. And I might point out, at the risk of being
accused of self-glorification, that I made a speech over the radio in
the Middle West, to what was, I was told, a very immense audience. In
that speech I said practically--and indeed identically--what I have said
in my Advertisement to this book: that all humanity were much of a
muchness; that it was time international differences were minimized
instead of being accentuated and so on. . . . And subsequently I
received an immense body of correspondence from all over the Middle West
all enthusiastically agreeing with what I had said. And I had no
dissenting communications.

So I may hope that my New York friends exaggerate. Nevertheless, I have
so many times heard in cold, level, good-humored tones--outside New
York--that if New York and the other Eastern States that have a majority
against Prohibition do not submit to the will of the other States the
same measures will be taken against them as were taken sixty years or so
ago against other Dissidents. . . . I have heard that so many times that
I am really afraid.

Naturally, one goes out to see what one wants to see; still more does
one go out to see that which one fears. The most composed of us are
defeatists--foreseers of disaster at bottom. And I have not yet got over
the shock of hearing---to give an anecdote on the other side of the
medal--of hearing a perfectly composed and reasonable born inhabitant of
New York State quite seriously say that within a very few years New York
and the Eastern Seaboard must in the nature of things secede from the
Union. He said that it was unthinkable that a civilized, cultured, white
community could go on for much longer living at the beck and call of a
barbarous, censorious, half-educated, Hun-Berserker-Dago collection of
undigested foreigners and prudes.

At hearing that I fair, as the saying is, jumped out of my skin. But I
could discern no sign of humor on the face of my interlocutor and he
proceeded to counter my rather breathless arguments to the contrary with
a series of historical and international propositions that I was not
wholly in a position to combat. He said, for instance, that the
agricultural Middle West was not only cutting itself more and more
adrift from the rest of the industrial and administrative Union but
that, as it were off its own bat, the Middle West was beginning to
involve the Union in international troubles that were almost impossible
of solution. . . . There were all these utterly self-centered foreign
farmers, completely careless of what happened to the rest of humanity,
determined to dispose of their endless hundreds of thousands of millions
of bushels of cereals to the outside world, as ruthlessly determined on
access to the sea either by way of the lakes and Canada or by way of the
Mississippi--as ruthlessly determined on that as was ever Russia on
access to the Mediterranean. They _must_ end by attempting the
annexation of British North America. Even now the question of the
lowering of the level of the great lakes in the interest of Chicago and
the Mississippi basin was causing complications with the Canadian
Government. Well, it was a canon of Eastern, Far Western and Washington
diplomacy that Canada must be left to the British Empire in order to
secure British support against an Eastern power. . . . Why was the whole
fate of the Union to be jeopardized because Chicago could not dispose of
her sewage without deepening the Chicago river and because the wheat and
corn farmers wanted cheaper and cheaper transport to Europe?. . . And
why, above all, was the civilized East to be lowered to the level of the
incult plainlands?

I am bound to say that my friend had large interests in a power station
whose operations are being seriously jeopardized by the fall in the
level of the lakes and I am equally bound to add that I have been
assured by a United States meteorological expert that the lowering of
the level of the lakes was purely a matter of weather cycles and had
nothing at all to do with the level of the Chicago river. . . . But the
contentions of my New York friend I have several times heard echoed
round the club districts of Gotham just as I have--but still more often,
and much, much, more often proportionately--heard it said in the Middle
West that New York and the East must be coerced into conformity. I mean
that I have been only a very short time as yet in the neighborhood of
the Loop but I have heard coercive sentiments there uttered over and
over again.

You may say that all these matters are no affair of mine; and the
temptation for me to leave the subject of Prohibition altogether alone
has been very great indeed. I am not naturally courageous and I shrink
as much as another man from putting my hand--however impartially--into a
hornet's nest. But it seemed to me that it would be sheer cowardice to
write anything at all about New York and to leave out all mention of
what is after all the weightiest problem of the hour--and the most
apparently insoluble problem of the future.

I must say again that I take no sides in this matter, still less do I
offer any personal solution of the problem. It is obvious that my
sympathies are with the Eastern Seaboard rather than with the Middle
West as I know it and that I know nothing at all of the Coast--the
Pacific Coast. But I have learned from a long apprenticeship to writing
to keep my sympathies within bounds when reflecting on and still more
when writing about, matters which have two sides to them. I am aware
that in that way one runs the risk of pleasing no one. That risk one
must take. I think that the reflections of a person with considerable
love for one at least of the parties and no dislike for the other--the
reflections of a person who has passed a good deal of time on those
reflections, must be of _some_ value.

I stand--I and my type, we stand--for a certain suavity, a certain
good-humor in approach to all problems of international or of personal
contacts. And when nations or civilizations have reached a certain age,
as a rule, they develop that suavity and good-humor. I find them in New
York; I am told that they do not exist in the Middle West. As to that
last I have no means of judging. I have come across cases of stupid
insularity in that region--but I have come across cases as stupid in
Canterbury, in the agricultural districts of France, Belgium,
Germany. . . . In Provence even.

There seems to me to be a very sharp cleavage between the Eastern
Seaboard and the agricultural Middle West--but it does not seem to me to
be any more acute than the eternal cleavage that has always existed
between agricultural and civic interests. The Eastern Seaboard takes its
complexion largely from its great harbor towns, and the agricultural
frame of mind has there been very largely stamped out with the relative
stamping out of agricultural pursuits--by Middle Western competition.
That seems to be inevitable. Small farming cannot compete with large.
Even the truck farmer owing to his necessary contact with cities is a
quite different person from the farmer of the great plains.

I see no reason myself why the farmer of the great plains and his
women-folk should insist that the inhabitants of the great cities and
ports should have exactly the same psychology and habits as themselves,
yet that does happen. . . . But it would seem to me to be better to
attempt to enforce moral frames of mind by example than by coercion.
Older national organizations have long since given up as impracticable
the attempt to make their peoples good by Act of Parliament.

And indeed I would hazard the generalization that the psychologies and
habits of the peoples of great cities and ports _must_ be different from
those of people who carry on physical or physico-administrative
activities amongst the winds of vast plains. I who spend hours daily
over white paper wracking my brains for words, or my financial relative
who spends perhaps longer hours over paper amidst the constant
variations of market news _must_ have different derivatives from a
Swedish farmer who passes his day from sun-up till dusk over fields of
wheat. We must have different exercise, distraction, medicines, food,
modes of locomotion and mental safety valves. We must or we must die or
go mad.

It is in the effort to point this moral as inoffensively as possible
that I have devoted so much of this volume to the subject of food. That
is a device. I am actually more interested in conversation and the
things of the mind than in what goes on in the kitchens of the world. I
like, I mean, Provence better than most countries, yet its cookery is
far from good. Far, far from good. But regarded symbolically it must be
evident to the meanest intelligence that the townsman cannot eat the
same food as the Swedish farmer of the plains. If he does he must
die. . . . So I have tried to represent the doctor and the
diet-specialist as ignoring that rule with disastrous results as in the
case of the Boston lady with the two eggs. I will labor the point a
little more and then leave it. . . . I happened the other day to ask a
New York specialist--not a medical specialist--why in her opinion a
large number of very nice New Yorkers drank so appallingly on occasion
and again, why so many of them made such singular combinations in the
way of food?. . . I had for instance just before been offered guava
jelly with lettuce and cream-cheese which I had indeed constantly seen
on menus but had never tried. It had struck me as being, to say the
least, startling.

She answered that the reason for both singularities was the appalling
dullness of life in New York. You drank there to get some fun out of
things and you made your tongue, as the saying is, sit up because you
must get some kick from somewhere.

Now it had not struck me that life in New York was dull--but I can see
that fixed life in a great city can assume an aspect of monotony.
Chicago can go into ecstasies over the visit of a hawk just as the East
End of London can over that of a Princess.

And, singularly, I had once made rather minute inquiries into medieval
cookery--which was diversified enough in all conscience--and had arrived
at an almost similar conclusion. Rather barbarous concoctions of
Anglo-Saxon origin--like mince-pies and plum puddings and most
consumptions simultaneously of violently opposed viands--are all
medieval in origin. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries people
delighted in such mixtures as honey, oysters, assafoetida, peacocks'
tongues, cods' livers, cloves and apples. . . . And, indeed, what is the
herring salad that is so profusely consumed in parts of Chicago but the
survival of dishes of that type? . . . Well, the conclusion that I had
arrived at was that the Middle Ages consumed those horrors because of
the appalling dullness of medieval life.

On the other hand they had no spirits to drink in the Middle Ages--so
they went mad.

They murdered, tortured, held black masses, built cathedrals with
decorations of obscene gargoyles, devils, the indecently deformed; they
died of plagues, leprosies, murrains; wars, civil strife, commotions
were their principal employments; when they were past everything else
they went on pilgrimages and died in martyrdoms. . . . They were in
short mad when they were not bored--and they went mad because they were
so bored. So they sent out Columbus.

Thus my thoughts had run parallel with that specialist's words.

But whether life in modern America is so dull, who shall say? . . . I
think that, in effect, what my specialist meant was that unless your
mind has the support of the processes of pure thought you will either go
mad or drink or eat nightmare dishes. . . . All three, very likely! And
pure thought needs the contagion of other thinkers besides you; it needs
fuel--both vitamins and roughage. . . .

Well, humanity has never yet achieved a society where original thinkers
will be as thick on the ground as all that. Theophrastus' description of
the market-place of Athens of the day of Pericles does not give one much
idea that Athens in the days of Pericles was so singularly
high-brow. . . . And I have already said that little old New York was
good enough for me--which means that there I can find enough of good
conversation to keep me going until I want to go and do some more work
in Provence. . . . That is the beginning of a Great Good Place, for Rome
itself was not built in a day.

But as far as I can see the design of the denizens of the land round,
say, Chesterton, Ind., and of hundred-per-centers in general is to
create an American--an AMERICAN--who shall have all the characteristics
of the Scandinavian-North-German-Lutheran farmer. There will be about
him nothing of any culture that has come down the ages. He will have no
trace of French or English wisdoms. And he shall steam-roller out all
the lights of Broadway and by act of Congress render New York virtuous
in his own image. . . . And he will achieve this by the aid of Irish
municipal bosses and the female presidents of small-town Rotary Clubs.
That is an ambition like another; a peril like another.

But I do not believe that it need be very operative. . . . I was asked
to write this book by some one who has a certain right to ask me to
write books. No, I do not mean any lady, I mean a publisher. He wanted
me to write a book to prove that AMERICA had assumed in the eyes of the
outside world the position that Prussia had before the late War.

And America undoubtedly has assumed that position--in the eyes of
Europe. She looks like the great, bullying, militarist Thing that
Prussia certainly looked like. I am using the expression "looked like"
with care and attention. Voices do certainly issue from the immense
plains that sound remarkably like the voice of the ex-King of Prussia. I
was reading this morning on the cars an article by a Middle Western
publicist. . . . It said that the population of America was annoyed by
the way in which Europe talked about the Debt. If Europe did not cease
talking about the Debt, then. . . .

What? . . . That was not stated! . . . But one seemed to hear the tread
of the iron heel and to see glimpses of the flashing of the sword. . . .
The suggestion undoubtedly was that if Europe continued to talk about
the Debt--merely, mark, to talk about it, not to repudiate--United
States gunboats running up the Seine would take, for the benefit of
Chicago, all the treasures of the Louvre.

It was a stupid and unimportant article by, precisely, the President of
a Rotary Club of a small town about a hundred miles from Chicago. . . .
But some European might have read it. I am pretty sure that I am the
only one that did and I am pretty harmless. But some one more
mischievous might have. And that way madness lies. I and more pacific
Europeans and all the inhabitants of New York and all the diplomats of
Washington might shout ourselves blue in the face over explaining that
this was only the insignificant opinion of a small-town savage. . . .
But, in Europe, we are taught to regard the United States as the Great
Republic, all of whose citizens are by Divine Right emperors. . . .
Emperors should learn to be polite. We are still paying for one who was
not.

For myself I have no settled opinion about the Debt. It seems to me
that, should the United States exact it to the uttermost farthing, the
pleasant people that I know in America will starve. That I should
hate. . . . American commerce may also suffer. That finds me
unmoved. . . . On the other hand, should the United States excuse the
Debt she will not get much gratitude at the date that we have reached.
On the other hand, again, it seems unlikely that the United States can
collect the Debt by force of arms unless she employed her late Enemy
Nations to do it for her. They are the only peoples in the world to be
in the position to wage a war. They have repudiated.

The fact is that I know nothing about that matter. There is no human
soul who knows anything about it. It is the first time in the history of
the world that one nation has set out to bleed white a group of lately
allied nations. It has the aspect of an interesting experiment--promoted
perhaps by Teuto-Erse-Negro scientists. It would be quite a good thing
to forget about.

For myself I take a more hopeful view of the prospects of our common
civilization. It must disappear if any one of the powers now pertaining
to it should revive the late Prussian dream of world-domination, but I
take a more hopeful view of it precisely because of what I know--I
_know_!--of the mental activities of the great plains.

Let us, for the sake of argument, grant that the Middle West is the
great danger to humanity. . . . In the day when I was a boy it used to
be said that the pendulum of government of the United States swung
between the State of Maine and Maryland. To-day it is claimed that it
swings from Chicago and that the dominant generation in Chicago is
ignorant, intolerant, corrupt and stupid. Well, the present dominant
generation may be all that. I do not know.

But as to the Middle Western generation that is coming along--that will
inevitably come into power--I have means of knowing. And I am quite
certain that nowhere in the world--nowhere at any rate in that part of
the world that makes the North Atlantic into a lake is there so great an
intellectual curiosity, so great a thirst for knowledge and so great a
determination to put that knowledge in employment. I will not enlarge on
what are my particular qualifications to know this but I will simply
limit myself to saying that it is my real conviction that the artistic
output of the United States is the most impressive in the world and that
the great proportion of it--the immensely greater proportion--comes from
the plains.

That the output of the United States should be large is not astonishing;
its population is overwhelmingly greater than that of any other Western
Nation interested in the arts; neither has its youth been decimated in
numbers and exhausted in its vitality, its interests and its hold on
life. Europe has lost a generation; America has not and you cannot miss
a beat in the great clock of Time and keep level in the race.

Those are the fortunes of war. The immense material advantage of the
United States at the present moment may be for the advantage of humanity
or it may not. Time alone can tell. But the enormous intellectual
advances that this country has lately everywhere made at the hands of
its young render it immensely more likely that those immense material
resources may be put to reasonable uses. Then, both in practice and
example the world will be immensely the gainer.

To put these generalizations concretely let me for a moment write
loosely. I am told constantly--and that is the European image--that the
United States, dominated over by the Middle West, is in the hands,
politically, of ignorant, corrupt and practically criminal men of a
passing generation and of ignorant, corrupt and fanatically cruel women
of about the same ages. We are to despair when we think of Dayton,
Tennessee, and to despair when we think of Chicago, Ill. I think the
picture exaggerated--but were it true down to its minutest line I could
personally view the situation with composure. Even to-day Chicago is a
place in which one can pursue one's avocations with composure; to-morrow
when the young take hold it may be even municipally and politically
satisfactory.

It will be; for you cannot rule a population of highly educated and
well-instructed young native-born men and women as you can an ignorant
one of middle-aged and indifferent Scandinavians, North Germans, Irish,
Finns, Negroes and the Bad Hats of the world. God forbid that I should
be taken as asserting that that last is a fair adumbration of the case
to-day. It is the case as put by more Easterly detractors of this
region. For myself I have seen here nothing but what contented me. . . .
But then I moved only amongst such people and in such districts as were
likely to please me. I neither saw nor smelt the stockyards--but then I
have neither seen nor smelt the _abattoirs_ of Paris. I mean that I do
not normally visit the slaughterhouses of cities which I visit or in
which I dwell; neither do most people.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Well, the train which had run for hours and hours over the plains seemed
now to begin to run through miles and miles of frame houses, standing in
the snow amongst the trees of boulevards . . . broad, snowy streets.
There, towering up over its levels, was Chicago.

A cathedral is what Chicago suggests to me--recurrently and
irresistibly! I mean that, whenever I think of that queer, jagged mass
rising up amongst its mournful and illimitable plains I see a vaster and
more fantastically Gothic Chartres, a more irregular, a more eager Notre
Dame de Paris. And she has about her, for me at least, a note of the
pathetic. That is a verbal present which will be resented no doubt by
the Chicagoan. I hope it will not annoy them because they are nice
people and have done me, as we say, very proud. But still she seems to
me, that most splendid and self-conscious of cities, to have the pathos
that attaches to the very young person full of hopes but beset with
enormous responsibilities . . . a very Queen Victoria saying, at the age
of eighteen on ascending the throne: "I will be GOOD!"

The denizen of the Loop is apt to be wild with his figures. Seated in
the anteroom of the Blackstone which intimately resembles those of the
great hotels of our own Midland cities on account of its dimness and
agreeable quietness, I was informed by all the ladies and gentlemen that
there came to interview me that Chicago was four times as big as London.
This must be an exaggeration.

Unless I invent them I am not strong on figures myself, but I can
consult a guidebook and I can read advertisements. Now all the
newspapers of Chicago have lately published the figures--not of their
circulations as is done in London but of the local populations to whom
they might be expected to appeal. This they put at forty million and
this may be taken as the population of the Middle West. It is unlikely
that they err by diminution.

Moreover in all the guide books to Chicago the population of the city is
given as three million. Not three million two hundred and twenty-two
thousand, two hundred and twenty-one as would be the case with other
cities. (The population of the Administrative County of London, let us
say, at the last census was thirteen million, four hundred and
ninety-two thousand, nine hundred and seventy-three; that of postal
London--of London to which letters are distributed from the London
General Post Office--is seventeen million, six hundred and forty-nine
thousand two hundred and seventy-four. On the other hand, I am usually
assured in New York that the population of this city is twenty-five and
three-quarter millions. But Harper's Magazine of last month quotes
figures to prove that London is by two millions larger than New York.
The population of London, then, must exceed twenty-seven million. These
figures are confusing but easily invented.)

Nevertheless, the guide books to Chicago assert with equanimity that her
population numbers three million. But probably even whilst these words
were being written these figures were increased by seventy births,
decreased by twenty-two deaths, increased by nine thousand two hundred
and forty-seven arrivals by road and rail. You may see a railroad
advertisement in Chicago asserting that, I think, thirty thousand trains
leave or arrive _per diem_ in the city of the Loop--so the figures of
population are once more decreased by six thousand and seventy-one
departures. . . . How agreeable it is to contemplate these exactitudes!

You will say that there is about all this nothing of the pathetic. . . .
Well, there are many kinds of pathos, but the most intimate note of the
pathetic that for me was here set vibrating was one that I have already
adumbrated towards the end of my last chapter. It was that of one of the
young men who interviewed me in the aforesaid anteroom of the
Blackstone. He said--and it was true--that he was a poet of some merit
and a critic of considerable erudition. Yet he could only make a
living--and a very poor living at that--by interviewing me for, let us
say, the _Cold Storage Gazette_. It was not the _Cold Storage Gazette_,
nor do I know if such a paper exists, but it was a journal that I should
have thought just as unlikely to want its representative to interview
me. They probably mistook me for some one else of the same surname.

But though I know that this young man was quite a good poet and a very
good critic of letters, I do not think that he can have been a very good
interviewer, because his interview resolved itself into his telling me
all about his own career and his own aspirations and to asking my advice
as to whether he should emigrate to London.

I rather strongly advised him to do so. He had enough money to keep
himself in London for a year and I was fairly confident that, by the end
of that time, he would have his foot in the stirrup as at least a
reviewer. But said he rather despondently: "Since the population of
Chicago is so much bigger than that of the dwindling British metropolis
and since, in the end, the demand for _belles lettres_ must depend on
population, was it possible that the consumption of reading matter of
that description could be sufficient to support its native reviewers,
let alone any immigrants?"

Without going into figures I reminded him that the reading horse-power
of a populace depends rather on its tastes and culture than on its size
and that, though Chicago may well prefer to read the exciting details of
the cold-storage trade, the more effete Londoner had a considerable
appetite for serious Reviews and for periodicals known to the book-trade
as the Heavies. I myself found them irresistibly somniferous.
Nevertheless, from time to time and as if by accident, they would print
something good and delicate. So I considered that he might chance it.

The thought has since entered my head that perhaps I was perpetrating a
treachery towards intellectual Chicago. For intellectual Chicago
complains bitterly that, although she raises almost the entire crop of
young writers whom the United States presents to the world, none of them
remains in that city once he can see his way to making a living
elsewhere. Some one indeed explained to me once that the position of
Chicago, _vis--vis_ of New York and, more remotely of Europe, was just
that of Dublin beside London and, more remotely, France.

I daresay the parallel is exact enough. The Middle West certainly
produces more than its share of the world's young writers; but when they
are not in New York they are mostly to be found in Paris. . . .

But that is not for me so much the pathos of Chicago. That is to be
found in its eagerness. For this city is like the young puppies to whom
you say: "Poor things! Your troubles are all before you!"

It is true that, in the way of troubles, there was once the Fire. But it
is said in Chicago that that was of immense advantage, since it inspired
the inhabitants of the city with that determined vigor, that rushing
tenacity that, they claim, to-day distinguishes them. How that may be I
do not know. Whilst I was there the hospitality of Chicago was so
overwhelming that I spent my time almost entirely in dining- or in
drawing-rooms, hardly ever going off Michigan Avenue. I will therefore
take it that the pace of the city of the Loop is much greater than that
of her of the Woolworth Building.

Certainly you can get up and down Michigan Avenue faster in a taxi than
you can get up or down Fifth Avenue. It is less congested. But you can
get up and down Sixth Avenue in New York considerably faster--and Third,
Seventh and other Avenues _much_ faster!--than you can the Chicago
streets that contain the Loop. But then Chicago is proud of that
institution, whereas I never heard a New Yorker have a good word for his
elevated railways.

It may be true, too, that the business pace of Chicago is faster than
that of New York. I did no business there whereas, for my sins and
pleasures, I have done plenty between the Battery and Central Park. But
the Chicago people say that they work faster, harder and more ruthlessly
than the Gothamites and I am content to leave it at that.

I observed on the sidewalks of Chicago, however, far fewer
proportionately of the particular, "ruthless" type of face that very
much for me distinguishes Madison Square. It is a face, slightly grayish
in complexion, showing generally a thin stubble of bright silver beard.
It has singular extent of space from nostril to upper lip; deep lines
run from each wing of the nose to the lip-corners. The jaw is remarkably
prognathous and heavy-jowled as if with the dewlaps of the bloodhound.
On the pugnacious snub-nose are perched pertinaciously tilted pince-nez
and the whole expression is that of remorselessness. If the possessor is
merely looking after a bus he does it with the ferocity of Nero, and
with the same ruthlessness he purchases his evening paper, gives a child
a cent or cleans his nails. He eats like a pike snapping semi-circular
gobbets out of a corpse.

I do not suppose that this truculence of aspect is any proof of
truculence of behavior; it is due probably partly to the belief that
remorselessness of expression is good for trade and no doubt largely to
Irish descent. . . . To me it appeared that there were relatively fewer
Irish in Chicago than in New York--but then I saw relatively fewer
negroes whereas I am told that there are actually far more. And there
would appear to be--though actually I saw little proof of it--an
organized anti-British party in this city. Organized hatred of Great
Britain, as I have already pointed out, proceeds mostly from Irish and
Germans or from the descendants of Irish and Germans so that the
movement such as it is is un-American enough, but it gets support from
such hundred-per-centers as are determinedly anti-European and anti-New
York--the latter feeling being probably by far the strongest of all. Or
perhaps the Irish movement is the strongest.

I have already adumbrated the case of my friend the country policeman,
but I am tempted to say a word or so more about him. Being then unable
to sleep one night I was sitting in my bedroom playing solitaire when my
door which I had left ajar because of the appalling and unmodifiable
heat of the room pushed itself ghostily open and there entered from the
corridor a rural policeman. This was in a country inn in Indiana. He
told me that he had come to tell me that he hated me. He said that his
grandfather had been an Irishman and thus he hated me because of the
wrongs I had inflicted on Ireland. I asked him what he supposed I had
done to the dark Rosaleen but he only repeated several times that he
hated me and then faded away along the corridor without answering my
questions. Similarly the nuns in the immense convent school not far away
were full of the idea that the English were wicked people, principally
because of the sorrows of Ireland. I suppose they teach that to their
many hundred pupils. That seems a pity.

It is a pity that any one people should be constantly influenced against
any other one people--and it is still more a pity that such hatreds
should be made a mainspring in party politics because that at once
elevates the mere pity to something of a danger to civilization. But
indeed any hatred of body to body is a danger to civilization, for these
things have a tendency to grow like snowballs and to gather unrelated
matter. Thus it would appear that lately the negro vote on a side issue
has been added to the Irish and the German and so a solid mass of
anti-Ally votes has been accumulated. And more indirect causes
contribute. Thus one of the chief newspapers of Chicago entertains a
rooted aversion from England, and in consequence from France because it
is said the grandfather of the present proprietors detested Matthew
Arnold--as if that journal wished to see United States flotillas steam
up the Thames in order to burn the last copy of _The Forsaken Merman_
beneath the ashes of the British Museum Reading Room. That is no doubt
not true--though I can imagine Matthew Arnold irritating Chicago.

So Chicago contains without doubt a number of hatreds, though as I have
said I did not personally witness any manifestation of any of them. The
one thing that struck me as an emanation from the sense of which it was
impossible to escape during almost every conversation was the hatred of
New York. Chicago appears to hate Gotham with a vehemence such as Dublin
hardly addresses to London. New York is too large to reciprocate the
feeling; indeed I have always the impression that New York has never
heard even of the Loop. But if New York _had_ any corporate sentiment
she might well feel alarmed. She has, however, no self-consciousness and
Chicago journals may go on advocating the labeling of all New York
visitors with distinguishing letters so that the virgin purity of the
Middle West may remain unsullied . . . yes, Chicago and the Middle
Western press may go on advocating all sorts of measures to be taken
against New Yorkers without, as far as I can see, the stirring of an
eyelid on the part of any one on the Eastern Seaboard.

Chicago and the Middle West, then, with their population of about forty
million--the population of a large European nation--is practically the
America that, as I have said, I have always dreaded. I entered it with,
say, about the perturbation of one taking for the first time the
desperate step of procuring his first _carte d'identit_ from a French
prefecture of police. That was precisely the quality of my fears. I was
frightened of the unknown things that impinge on one's shynesses or
one's dignity rather than of any physical dangers. I dislike for
instance being treated as a moron on subways if I do not know precisely
how many cents to put into coin-boxes. It is largely for that reason
that I have always feared the America that is not New York. . . . And it
is largely the fault of Americans themselves--a fault of a kind that
they share with all people who go abroad. As I must have made plain,
except for a short period many years ago, the only Americans I had met
were Americans abroad--either in New York or in Europe. And if the
Middle Westerners one meets in Paris find it necessary to assume the
aspects, voices, accents and behaviors of cowboys crossed with liberal
strains of prize-fighters and old-time Bowery toughs, the Americans one
meets in New York almost exaggerate those characteristics. The
ex-American New Yorker may very well intend that it is only in dreams
that he will revisit his particular Hebrides; but to any stranger he
will idealize his abandoned home beyond all reason--and he will idealize
it in the direction of ferocities. Of he-mannishnesses! He may be the
most civilized of human beings in his private tastes and a gentle poet
by profession, but it seems to be a national reaction to outside
contacts to represent himself as a devil of a fellow come from hell on
earth.

That is patriotism--but it is partly what makes the United States
dreaded and hated in Europe where there are no wide spaces in which you
could even pretend to have ruthlessly roped violent mustangs. And,
though no one spoke a harsh word to me during my short sojourn on the
plains, I took refuge in Chicago as might a rat fleeing from a terrier
in under a flower-pot. Those vast, vast, vast levels were not for me;
when I sit in an observation car I like to see something other than an
endless perspective of dwindling rails stretch backwards to infinity and
I did not feel safe until I had again turned round the Horse-Shoe Bend
and I found myself again at Altoona.

Now let me once more emphasize that I am expressing merely a personal
preference--and that I am quite aware that it is a personal preference.
I hope I am poet enough to be able to understand the glamour that vast
skies, vast level expanses of wheat, unending miles of corn, can
exercise on the young mind--and long uneventful days and communings with
solitude and young games in barns and twilights and stars overhead. And
I am more than aware that if this region is the scene of a terrific
mental activity it is probably just because of those empty solitudes and
those long communings. I would be prepared to admit if you insisted
enough on it that the Middle West is the only Europeanly civilized space
left on the globe where a man can get alone with himself to think. Only,
it is not for me . . . who stand for small, mixed farming amongst old
things. _My_ youth must provide glamour for me as pie and its
concomitants must for the New Englander--so that if I say that I rather
shudder at vast stretches of plain as at the thought of enormous wedges
of pie it is an indication rather of taste than of moral superiority. So
I fled to Chicago as to a sanctuary where there would be at least some
small chambers sealed up from the sky.

And even in Chicago I did not feel quite safe; I had still the feeling
that the flower-pot might turn over and reveal me to the gaze of a
pitiless, ironic and harsh-voiced Middle Western Deity. Still, there I
was in the cathedral with such benefit of clergy as one could have.

Yes, a cathedral, a sanctuary, a holy place. For the eyes of the whole
Middle West--of a nation as strongly populated as Great Britain and
covering a territory much more vast--all those eighty million eyes are
turned daily to this city as those of Moslems the world over turn to
Mecca. I know of no other great city of which so much is
expected--certainly it is not London or Paris; not Berlin and certainly,
certainly not New York. Those cities exist; some of them administer;
none of them is regarded as a leader into a land of promise. You feel
that amazing centripetal pressure all through those vast plains and all
through the cities of those plains. "It is Chicago, Chicago, Chicago,"
they chant, "that is going to lead us to a glory such as the world has
never seen." It is to happen in three days' time; in three months. In
three years at the utter outside.

I read in a great Middle Western organ the quite seriously written
assertion that to-day New York is still the greatest port of the Union
and the financial center of the world. But in three years' time it is to
be Chicago that shall be the financial center of the world and her
attendant city to the south its greatest port. How exactly New York is
to be beggared in so short a while the writer did not specify, but his
article was written with such conviction that for a moment I felt a
vague concern. My beloved Gotham might really be threatened. But
confidence returned. After all it is unlikely that New York will be
beggared before she has had a run for her money and no one can ask more
than that. And indeed I care, as I must have made plain, nothing about
which is the financial center of the world or its greatest port. I
imagine that London actually is but that does not render London
attractive to me; whereas, whether she is or isn't little old New York
remains good enough.

My first, inner impression of the city of the Phoenix was that here was
an immense Great Exhibition--uncompleted as are all Great Exhibitions on
their opening days. I once happened to see a President of the French
Republic being conducted round an Exposition Universelle in such
circumstances. The attendant officials took off their top-hats and waved
them towards vast, waste spaces as grandly as towards already existing,
sparkling palaces of French Arts and French industries. One day there
would there arise the Pavilion of the East. And with the eyes of faith
they saw.

So it is with Chicago. Lincoln sits, like a Pharaoh, gazing at the Field
Museum in the distance over whole Saharas of waste lands; great placards
announce that here will be bridges, fountains, parks; terrific
skyscrapers tower down over ruined hovels on what is to be the finest
Boulevard of the world. . . . It is as unfinished, precisely as a Great
Exhibition on opening day. Yet the good Chicagoan sees it all, with the
eye of faith, as it will be.

His face lights up, his eyes sparkle when he says: "_Isn't_ Chicago the
most beautiful city in the world?" and then adds hastily: "At any rate
in three years' time it will be!" And certainly Chicago is on the way to
becoming a very beautiful new city and certainly she is attractive and
interesting to-day where she is new and where her streets are not
overshadowed with Loops and things. And with her parks and boulevards
she is so spaciously planned that she must be the most far-flung city of
the world. . . .

And I like to think of her as being there, the great cathedral of human
hopes rising up over the mournful plains, full, full, full of those
restlessly energized human beings who run for ever up and down the veins
of that living organism like the countless corpuscles of human blood.
May the next three years be good to her boulevards!

-----

Footnote 2:

Note later. I have.




                                L'ENVOI


So that here I sit in the blazing sun in a white square where the trunks
of the plane trees are white because planes have a certain chameleon
habit of color. And looking back upon what I have written about my
Gotham towering aloft so many thousand miles away I do not feel much
call to alter anything that there stands. Distance could not add
enchantment to that view, for I don't think that much more enchantment
could have been expressed. But neither does it detract. New York does
not have white sunlight, white housefronts, white plane trunks--nor
indeed does it have the Mediterranean just round the corner of the
square. On the other hand, it possesses hope.

That is the last thing that here you look for. The light of the sun:
yes; composure: perhaps; laughter, tolerance, frugality . . . an eternal
_mi-careme_. But what you do not get in New York and what you do get
here is . . . disillusionment. Perhaps in America you do not get that
and that is why Europe regards both Gotham and Old Glory with ironic
dislike. . . . Prussia, too, was not disillusioned until very lately.

Almost immediately, stuffing this manuscript into my pocket, I shall go
in the narrowest streets, to the Rade, an enclosed harbor, an inlet of
the waters of the Mediterranean. That, too, they have not got in Gotham.
I shall sit over my coffee and my . . . but that, too. . . . In short, I
shall bake my skull in the sun and against the diamond background of the
moving waters. I shall see Turks, Americans, English, _braves marins_,
ladies of the profession, poets, Malay women, naval officers,
_souteneurs_, head-waiters, negro troopers in khaki, Corsicans,
Levantines, Algerines . . . all strolling with half shut eyes under the
blaze of the sun. . . . It might be Bronx Park on an August Sunday if
you could get the sea there.

And a lady from Philadelphia with a French poet for husband will be
telling me what New York is like. . . . There is no one in this world
who will not tell me what New York is like . . . New Zealanders,
Whitechapel Jews, French painters, Marseilles Spaniards, Italian
artists' models, Viennese law-students, Greek naval officers, Paris
cocottes, each and every one who has never been west of the Scillies
will tell me what New York is like. So, indeed, will Mr. Mencken.

But I shall sit lazily in the sun and lazily listen to the description
of an amazing place from a charming Philadelphia lady who has only been
in the United States once in sixteen years--and then before the days of
Prohibition. From time to time her husband the French poet will tell me
all about the amazing gunmen, the beer-wars, the unbelievable
millionaires of Chicago . . . or the sex-morality of the younger
generation of Gotham. Of this last I have no means of judging: I know
nothing, or I know too much. At any rate I know enough to let myself
know that I have not sufficient knowledge to form a judgment. My glass
is not big but I drink out of my own glass.

All these people, Philadelphia ladies, New Zealanders, Mr. Mencken, the
Paris cocottes . . . all these will tell me of a New York that I have
never seen and all leave out the fact that the note of New York as of
all the United States of North America is hope. The dean of X---- and
the Master of Y---- will tell me that all the inhabitants of the State
of Missouri are Yahoos because they do not know the name of the founder
of Magdalen College or that the husband of Princess Elizabeth Marie of
England was Prince Frederic Christian of
Sonderburg-Sollenhausen-Ullstein. And if I say that they are hoping to
get to Heaven by shorter cuts they will look at me down their noses.

But in the end that is what distinguishes the New World from the
Old. . . . New York believes that the Good Time is not only desirable
but to be obtained this side of cloud-cuckoo land. Here we believe that
it is not. Nevertheless, we have assimilated jazz--jazz-dancing and
jazz-music. Nothing more innocent, frugal and beautiful was ever given
to the disillusioned by those full of hope. In the medieval times the
most that the poor could hope for was one day to get justice in heaven;
to-day they dance inexpensively from the Lizard to the Caucasus. . . .
That is the doing of Gotham. Against that you may set all the
Puritanisms, crassnesses, wants of artistry, ignorances and presumptions
committed by individuals in the United States and chronicled by my
friends Messrs Mencken, Pound & Co., by the Master of Y----, the Dean of
X---- and the British Poet who smelt the stockyards in the foyer of the
Chicago Opera House, and they will not come to a feather's weight in the
golden scales of the recording angel.

And, as far as I am concerned, the proof of the pudding is in the
eating. I mean that if one contemplative, nervous, irritable European
can moon around New York doing and feeling much as he does and feels in
the white sunlight beneath the white planes, there is no reason why
another should not, and if two why not two hundred thousand, and so on,
including a great population of the less heavily handicapped.

I have been thinking again of the city of the Elite that might be set up
hereabouts if we took the Best of Paris and the Best of New York and
whatever good we could discover in London and founded a city. But, after
reflection, I think not, thank you. For there would then be nothing left
to hope for. We should miss the canyons, the contacts, the shadows, the
clangings, we should miss the pain and the necessity for hope. We should
miss Gotham.

NEW YORK, _1st Dec., 1926_.

TOULON, _9th Apr., 1927_.






[End of New York is not America, by Ford Madox Ford]
