 Section 8. CHAPTER IV. PART II. Irish and other interviewers. I have generally found that the traveler fails to understand a foreign country through treating it as a tendency and not as a balance. But if a thing were always tending in one direction it would soon tend to destruction. Everything that merely progresses finally perishes. Every nation, like every family, exists upon a compromise, and commonly a rather eccentric compromise, using the word eccentric in the sense of something that is somehow at once crazy and healthy. Now the foreigner commonly sees some feature that he thinks fantastic, without seeing the feature that balances it. The ordinary examples are obvious enough. An Englishman dining inside a hotel on the boulevard thinks the French eccentric in refusing to open a window, but he does not think the English eccentric in refusing to carry their chairs and tables out onto the pavement in Ludgate Circus. An Englishman will go poking about in little Swiss or Italian villages, in wild mountains or in remote islands, demanding tea and never reflects that he is like a Chinaman, who should enter all the wayside public houses in Canton Sussex and demand opium. But the point is not merely that he demands what he cannot expect to enjoy, it is that he ignores even what he does enjoy. He does not realize the sublime and starry paradox of the phrase vignordinaire, which to him should be a glorious jest like the phrase common gold or daily diamonds. These are the simple and self-evident cases. But there are many more subtle cases of the same thing, of the tendency to see that the nation fills up its own gaps with its own substitute, or corrects its own extravagance with its own precaution. The national antidote generally grows wild in the woods side by side with a national poison. If it did not, all the natives would be dead. For it is so, as I have said, that nations necessarily die of the undiluted poison called progress. It is so in this much abused and overabused example of the American journalist. The American interviewers really have exceedingly good manners for the purposes of their trade, granted that it is necessary to pursue their trade, and even what is called their hustling method can truly be said to cut both ways, or hustle both ways. For if they hustle in, they also hustle out. It may not at first sight seem, the very warmest compliment to a gentleman, to congratulate him on the fact that he soon goes away. But it really is a tribute to his perfection and a very delicate social art. And I'm quite serious when I say that in this respect the interviewers are artists. It might be more difficult for an Englishman to come to the point, particularly the sort of point which American journalists are supposed, with some exaggeration, to aim at. It might be more difficult for an Englishman to ask a total stranger on the spur of the moment for the exact inscription on his mother's grave. But I really think that if an Englishman once got so far as that, he would go very much farther, and certainly go on very much longer. The Englishman would approach the churchyard by a rather more wandering woodland path, but if once he had got to the grave I think he would have much more disposition, so to speak, to sit down on it. Our own national temperament would find it decidedly more difficult to disconnect when connections had really been established. Possibly that is the reason why our national temperament does not establish them. I suspect that the real reason that an Englishman does not talk is that he cannot leave off talking. I suspect that my solitary countrymen hiding in separate railway compartments are not so much retiring as a race of trappists as escaping from a race of talkers. However this may be, there is obviously something of practical advantage in the ease with which the American butterfly flits from flower to flower. He may, in a sense, force his acquaintance on us, but he does not force himself on us. Even when, to our prejudices, he seems to insist on knowing us, at least he does not insist on our knowing him. It may be, to some sensibilities, a bad thing that a total stranger should talk as if he were a friend, but it might possibly be worse if he insisted on being a friend before he would talk like one. To a great deal of the interviewing, indeed much the greater part of it, even this criticism does not apply. There is nothing which even an Englishman of extreme sensibility could regard as particularly private. The questions involved are generally, entirely public, and treated with not a little public spirit. Not my only reason for saying here what can be said even for the worst exceptions, is to point out this general and neglected principle, that the very thing that we complain of in a foreigner generally carries with it its own foreign cure. American interviewing is generally very reasonable, and it is always very rapid. And even those to whom talking to an intelligent fellow creature is as horrible as having a tooth-out may still admit that American interviewing has many of the qualities of American dentistry. Another effect that has given rise to this fallacy, this exaggeration of the vulgarity and curiosity of the press, is the distinction between the articles and the headlines, or rather the tendency to ignore that distinction. The few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seen in American stories have always been in the headlines. The headlines are written by somebody else. Some solitary and savage cynic locked up in the office, hating all mankind and raging and revenging himself at random, while the neat, polite and rational pressman can safely be let loose to wander about the town. For instance, I talked to two decidedly thoughtful fellow journalists immediately on my arrival at a town in which there had been some labor troubles. I told them my general view of labor in the very largest and perhaps the vaguest historical outline, pointing out that the one great tooth to be taught to the middle classes was that capitalism was itself a crisis, and a passing crisis, that it was not so much that it was breaking down as that it had never really stood up. Slaveries could last, and peasantries could last, but wage-earning communities could hardly even live, and were already dying. All this moral and even metaphysical generalization was most fairly and most faithfully reproduced by the interviewer, who had actually heard it casually and idly spoken. But on the top of this column of political philosophy was the extraordinary announcement in enormous letters, Chesterton takes sides in trolley strike. This was inaccurate. When I spoke I not only did not know that there was any trolley strike, but I did not know what a trolley strike was. I should have had an indistinct idea that a large number of citizens earned their living by carrying things about in wheel-barrels, and that they had desisted from the beneficent activities. Anyone who did not happen to be a journalist or know a little about journalism, American and English, would have supposed that the same man who wrote the article had suddenly gone mad and written the title. But I know that we have here to deal with two different types of journalists, and the man who writes the headlines I will not dare to describe, for I have not seen him except in dreams. Another innocent complication is that the interviewer does sometimes translate things into his native language. It would not seem odd that a French interviewer should translate them into French, and it is certain that the American interviewer sometimes translates them into American. Those who imagine the two languages to be the same are more innocent than any interviewer. To take one out of the twenty examples, some of which I have mentioned elsewhere, suppose an interviewer had said that I had the reputation of being a nut. I should be flattered but faintly surprised at such a tribute to my dress and dashing exterior. I should afterwards be sobered and enlightened by discovering that in America a nut does not mean a dandy, but a defective or imbecile person. And as I have here to translate their American phrase into English, it may be very defensible that they should translate my English phrases into American. Anyhow they often do translate them into American. In answer to the usual question about prohibition, I had made the usual answer, obvious to the point of dullness to those who are in daily contact with it, that it is a law that the rich make knowing they can always break it. From the printed interview it appears that I had said, prohibition, all matter of dollar sign. This is almost a vowed translation, like a French translation. Nobody can suppose that it would come natural to an Englishman to talk about a dollar, still less about a dollar sign, whatever that may be. It is exactly as if he had made me talk about the Skelte and Stevenson Toy Theatre, as a scent plain, and two scents colored, or condemned the parsimonious policy as dime-wise and dollar foolish. Another interviewer once asked me, who was the greatest American writer? I have forgotten exactly what I said, but after mentioning several names I said that the greatest natural genius and artistic force was probably Walt Whitman. The printed interview is more precise, and students of my literary and conversational style will be interested to know that I said, See here, Walt Whitman was your one real red-blooded man. Here again I hardly think the translation can have been quite unconscious. Most of my intimates are indeed aware that I do not talk like that. But I fancy that the same fact would have dawned on the journalist to whom I had been talking. And even this trivial point carries with it the two truths which must be, I fear, the rather monotonous moral of these pages. The first is that America and England can be far better friends when sharply divided than when shapelessly amalgamated. These two journalists were false reporters, but they were true translators. They were not so much interviewers as interpreters. And the second is that, in any such difference, it is often wholesome to look beneath a surface for superiority. For ability to translate does imply ability to understand. And many of these journalists really did understand. I think there are many English journalists who would be more puzzled by so simple an idea as the plutocratic foundation of prohibition. But the American knew at once that I meant it was a matter of a dollar sign, probably because he knew very well that it is. Then again there is a curious convention by which American interviewing makes itself out much worse than it is. The reports are far more rowdy and insolent than the conversations. This is probably a part of the fact that a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and to some vulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal. It must always be grasped that this vulgarity is an ideal even more than it is a reality. It is an ideal when it is not a reality. A very quiet and intelligent young man in a soft black hat and tortoise shell spectacles will ask for an interview with unimpeachable politeness, wait for his living subject with unimpeachable patience, talk to him quite sensibly for twenty minutes, and go noiselessly away. Then in the newspaper next morning you will read how he beat the bedroom door in and pursued his victim to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore from him the replies to all sorts of bold and ruthless questions printed in large black letters. I was often interviewed in the evening and had no notion of how atrociously I had been insulted till I saw it in the paper next morning. I had no notion I had been on the rack of an inquisitor until I saw it in plain print, and then, of course, I believed it, with the faith and docility unknown in any previous epic in history. An interesting essay might be written upon points upon which nations affect more vices than they possess, and it might deal more fully with the American pressman, who is a harmless club man in private, and becomes a sort of highway robber in print. I have turned this chapter into something like a defensive interviewer's, because I really think they are made to bear too much of the burden of the bad developments of modern journalism. But I am very far from meaning to suggest that those bad developments are not very bad. So far from wishing to minimize the evil, I would in a real sense rather magnify it. I would suggest that the evil itself is a much larger and more fundamental thing, and that to deal with it by abusing poor journalists, doing their particular and perhaps peculiar duty, is like dealing with a pestilence by rubbing at one of the spots. What is wrong with a modern world will not be righted by attributing the whole disease to each of its symptoms in turn. First to the tavern, then to the cinema, then to the reporter's room. The evil of journalism is not in the journalists, it is not in the poor men on the lower level of the profession, but in the rich men at the top of the profession, or rather in the rich men who are too much on top of the profession, even to belong to it. The trouble with newspapers is the newspaper trust, as the trouble might be with a wheat trust without involving a vilification of all the people who grow wheat. It is the American plutocracy and not the American press. What is the matter with the modern world is not modern headlines, or modern films, or modern machinery. What is the matter with the modern world is the modern world, and the cure will come from another. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton Section 9, Chapter 5, Part 1, Some American Cities There is one point almost to be called a paradox to be noted about New York, and that is that in one sense it is really new. The term very seldom has any relevance to the reality. The New Forest is nearly as old as the Conquest, and the New Theology is nearly as old as the Creed. Things have been offered to me, as the New Thought, that might be more properly called the Old Thoughtlessness, and the thing we call the New Poor Law is already old enough to know better. But there is a sense in which New York is always new, in the sense that it is always being renewed. A stranger might well say that the chief industry of the citizens consists of destroying their city, but he soon realizes that they always started all over again with undiminished energy and hope. At first I had a fancy that they never quite finished putting up a big building, without feeling that it was time to pull it down again, and that somebody began to dig up the first foundations while somebody else was putting on the last tiles. This fills the hole of this brilliant and bewildering place, with a quite unique and unparalleled air of rapid ruin. Ruins spring up so suddenly like mushrooms, which with us are the growth of age, like mosses, that one half expects to see Ivy climbing quickly up the broken walls as in Nightmare of the Time Machine, or in some incredibly accelerated cinema. There is no sight in any country that raises my own spirits so much as a scaffolding. It is a tragedy that they always take the scaffolding away and leave us nothing but a mere building. If they would only take the building away and leave us a beautiful scaffolding, it would in most cases be a gain to the loveliness of the earth. If I could analyze what it is that lifts the heart about the lightness and clarity of such a white and wooden skeleton, I could explain what it is that really charming about New York. In spite of its suffering from the curse of cosmopolitanism and even the provincial superstition of progress. It is partly that all this destruction and reconstruction is in unexhausted artistic energy, but it is partly also that it is in artistic energy that does not take itself too seriously. It is first because man is here, a carpenter, and secondly because he is a stage carpenter. Indeed there is about the whole scene the spirit of scene shifting. It therefore touches whatever nerve in us has since childhood thrilled at all theatrical things. But the picture will be imperfect unless we realize something which gives it unity and marks its chief difference from the climate and colors of Western Europe. We may say that the back scene remains the same. The sky remained and in the depths of winter it seemed to be blue with summer, and so clear that I almost flattered myself that clouds were English products like primroses. An American would probably retort on my charge of scene shifting by saying that at least he only shifted the towers and domes of the earth, and that in England it is the heavens that are shifting. And indeed we have changes from day to day that would seem to him as distinct as different magic lantern slides. One view showing the Bay of Naples and the next the North Pole. I do not mean of course that there are no changes in American weather, but as a matter of proportion it is true that the most unstable part of our scenery is the most stable part of theirs. Indeed we might almost be pardoned the boast that Britain alone really possesses the noble thing called weather. Most other countries having to be content with climate. It must be confessed, however, that they often are content with it. And the beauty of New York, which is considerable, is very largely due to the clarity that brings out the colors of varied buildings against the equal color of the sky. Strangely enough I found myself repeating about this fista of the West two vivid lines in which Mr. W. B. Yates has called up a vision of the East, and colored like the Eastern birds at evening in their rainless skies. To invoke a somewhat less poetic parallel, even the untraveled Englishman has probably seen American posters and trade advertisements of a patchy and gaudy kind in which a White House or a yellow motor car are cut out as in cardboard against the sky like blue marble. I used to think it was only New Art, but I found that it is really New York. It is not for nothing that the very nature of local character has gained the nickname of local color. Color runs through all our experience, and we all know that our childhood found talismanic gems in the very paints, in the paintbox, or even in their very names. And just as the very name of Crimson Lake really suggested to me some sanguine and mysterious, mere, dark yet red as blood, so the very name of burnt sienna became afterwards tangled up in my mind with the notion of something traditional and tragic, as if some such golden Italian city had really been darkened by many conflagrations in the wars of medieval democracy. Now if one had the caprice of conceiving some city exactly contrary to one that seared and seasoned by fire, its color might be called up to a childish fancy by the mere name of Raw Umber, and such a city is New York. I used to be puzzled by the name of Raw Umber, being unable to imagine the effect of Fried Umber or Stood Umber. But the colors of New York are exactly in that key, and might be adumbrated by phrases like Raw Pink or Raw Yellow. It is really in a sense like something uncooked, or something which the satiric would call half-baked. And yet the effect is not only beautiful, it is even delicate. I had no name for this nuance until I saw that somebody had written of the pastel-tinted towers of New York, and I knew that the name had been found. There are no paints dry enough to describe all that dry light, and it is not a box of colors but of crayons. If the Englishman returning to England is moved at the site of a block of white chalk, the American sees rather a bundle of chalks. Or can I imagine anything more moving? Fairy tales are told to children about a country where the trees are like sugar sticks, and the lakes like treacle. But most children would feel almost as greedy for a fairyland where the trees were like brushes of green paint, and the hills were of colored chalks. But here what accentuates this arid freshness is the fragmentary look of the continual reconstruction and change. The strong daylight finds everywhere the broken edge of things, and the sort of hues we see in newly turned earth or the white sections of trees. And it is in this respect that the local color can literally be taken as local character. For New York, considered in itself, is primarily a place of unrest. And those who sincerely love it, as many do, love it for the romance of its restlessness. A man almost looks at a building as he passes to wonder whether it will be there when he comes back from his walk. And the doubt is part of an indescribable notion, as of a white nightmare of daylight, which is increased by the very numbering of the streets with its tangle of numerals, which at first makes an English head real. The detail is merely a symbol, and when he is used to it he can see that it is like the most humdrum human customs both worse and better than his own. Two-seven-one West 52nd Street is the easiest of all addresses to find, but the hardest of all addresses to remember. He who is like myself, so constituted as necessarily to lose any piece of paper he has particular reason to preserve, will find himself wishing the place were called Pinecrest or Heather Craig, like any unobtrusive villa in the street. But his sense of some sort of incalculable calculations, as of the vision of a mad mathematician, is rooted in a more real impression. His first feeling that his head is turning round is due to something really dizzy in the movement of a life that turns dizzily like a wheel. If there be in that modern mind something paradoxical that can find peace and change, it is here that he has indeed built its habitation, or rather is still building and unbuilding it. Everyone might fancy that it changes in everything, and that nothing endures, but its invisible name. And even its name, as I have said, seems to make a boast of novelty. That is something like a sincere first impression of the atmosphere of New York. Those who think that is the atmosphere of America have never got any farther than New York. We might almost say that they have never entered America any more than if they had been detained like undesirable aliens at Ellis Island. And indeed there are a good many undesirable aliens detained in Manhattan Island, too. But of that I will not speak, being myself an alien with no particular pretensions to be desirable. Anyhow, such is New York, but such is not the New World. The greatest American Republic contains very considerable varieties, and of these varieties I necessarily saw far too little to allow me to generalize. But from the little I did see, I should venture on the generalization that the great part of America is singularly and even strikingly unlike New York. It goes without saying that New York is very unlike the vast agricultural plains and small agricultural towns of the Middle West, which I did see. It may be conjectured with some confidence that it is very unlike what is called the wild and sometimes the woolly west, which I did not see. But I am here comparing New York not with the newer states of the prairie or the mountains, but with the other older cities of the Atlantic coast. And New York, as it seems to me, is quite vitally different from the other historic cities of America. It is so different that it shows them all for the moment in a false light, as a long white search light will throw a light that is fantastic and theatrical upon ancient and quiet villages folded in the everlasting hills. Philadelphia and Boston and Baltimore are more like those quiet villages than they are like New York. If I were to call this book the Antiquities of America, I should give rise to misunderstanding and possibly to annoyance. And yet the double sense in such words is an undeserved misfortune for them. We talk of Plato or the Parthenon or the Greek passion for beauty as parts of the antique, but hardly of the antiquated. When we call them ancient it is not because they have perished, but because they have survived. In the same way, I heard some New Yorkers refer to Philadelphia or Baltimore as dead towns. They mean by a dead town, a town that has had the impudence not to die. Such people are astonished to find an ancient thing alive, just as they are now astonished and will be increasingly astonished to find Poland or the Papacy or the French nation still alive. And what I mean by Philadelphia and Baltimore being alive is precisely what these people mean by their being dead. It is continuity. It is the presence of the life first breathed into them and of the purpose of their being. It is the benediction of the founders of the colonies and the fathers of the Republic. This tradition is truly to be called life, for life alone can link the past and the future. It merely means that what was done yesterday makes some difference today, so what is done today will make some difference tomorrow. In New York it is difficult to feel that any day will make any difference. These moderns only die daily without power to rise from the dead. But I can truly claim that in coming into some of these more stable cities of the States I felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which has satisfied in eternal cities of the Mediterranean. I felt in America what many Americans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I have seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than when I saw from afar off above the vast gray labyrinth of Philadelphia great pen upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who has fashioned a new world and remembered that his body lay buried in a field at the turning of a lane, a league from my own door. For this aspect of America is rather neglected in the talk about electricity and headlines. Needless to say the modern vulgarity of avarice and advertisements sprawls all over Philadelphia or Boston. But so it does over Winchester or Canterbury. But most people know that there is something else to be found in Canterbury or Winchester. Many people know that it is rather more interesting and some people know that Alfred can still walk in Winchester and that St. Thomas at Canterbury was killed but did not die. It is at least as possible for a Philadelphian to feel the presence of pen and Franklin as for an Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and a becket. Tradition does not mean a dead town. It does not mean that the living are dead, but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago. I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago, and these things did and do matter. Quakerism is not my favorite creed, but on that day when William Penn stood unarmed upon that spot and made his treaty with the Red Indians, his creed of humanity did have a triumph and a triumph that has not turned back. The praise given to him is not a prigish fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions have illogically curtailed it. The non-conformists have been rather unfair to Penn, even in picking their praises, and they generally forget that toleration cuts both ways and that an open mind is open on all sides. Those who deify him for consenting to bargain with the savages cannot forgive him for consenting to bargain with the stewards. And the same is true of the other city, yet more closely connected with the tolerant experiment of the stewards. The State of Maryland was the first experiment in religious freedom in human history. Lord Baltimore and his Catholics were a long march ahead of William Penn and his Quakers on what is now called the Path of Progress, that the first religious toleration ever granted in the world, was granted by Roman Catholics, is one of those little informing details with which our Victorian histories did not exactly team. But when I went into my hotel at Baltimore and found two priests waiting to see me, I was moved in a new fashion. For I felt that I touched the end of a living chain, nor was the impression accidental. It will always remain with me, with a mixture of gratitude and grief. For they brought a message of welcome from a great American, whose name I had known from childhood, and whose career was drawing to its close. For it was but a few days after I left the city, that I learned that Cardinal Givens was dead. The end of Section 9, Chapter 5, Part 1 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox dot org. What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton Section 10, Chapter 5, Part 2 Some American Cities On the top of a hill on one side of the town stood the first monument raised after the Revolution to Washington. Beyond it was a new monument, saluting in the name of Lafayette, the American soldiers who fell fighting in France in the Great War. Between them were steps and stone seats, and I sat down on one of them and talked to two children who were clambering about on the basis of the monument. I felt a profound and radiant peace in the thought that they, at any rate, were not going to my lecture. It made me happy that in the talk neither they nor I had any names. I was full of that indescribable waking vision of the strangeness of life, and especially of the strangeness of locality, of how we find places and lose them, and see faces for a moment in a far off land. And it is equally mysterious if we remember, and mysterious if we forget. I had even, stirring in my head, the suggestion of some verses that I shall never finish. If I go back to Baltimore, the city of Maryland, but the bone would have to contain far too much, for I was thinking of a thousand things at once and wondering what the children would be like twenty years after, and whether they would travel in white goods or be interested in oil. And I was not touched, it may be said, by the fact that a neighboring shop had provided the only sample of the substance called tea ever found on the American continent. And in front of me soared up into the sky on wings of stone, the column of all those high hopes of humanity, a hundred years ago. And beyond there were lighted candles in the chapel and prayers in the antechambers, or perhaps already a prince of the church was dying. Only on a later page can I even attempt to comb out such a tangle of contrasts, which is indeed the tangle of America, and this mortal life. But sitting there on that stone seat, under that quiet sky, I had some experience of the thronging thousands of living thoughts and things, noisy and numberless as birds that give its everlasting vivacity and vitality to a dead town. Two other cities I visited which have this particular type of traditional character, the one being typical of the north and the other of the south. At least I may take as convenient antitypes the towns of Boston and St. Louis. And we might add Nashville as being a shade more truly southern than St. Louis. To the extreme south, in the sense of what is called the black belt, I never went at all. Now English travelers expect the south to be somewhat traditional, but they are not prepared for the aspects of Boston in the north, which are even more so. If we wished only for an antique of antithesis, we might say that on one side the places are more prosaic than the names and on the other, the names are more prosaic than the places. St. Louis is a fine town, and we recognize a fine instinct of the imagination that set on the hill overlooking the river the statue of that holy horseman who has christened the city. But the city is not as beautiful as its name. It could not be. Indeed these titles set up a standard to which the most splendid spires and turrets could not rise, and below which the commercial chimneys and sky signs conspicuously sink. We should think it odd if Belfast had borne the name of Joan of Arc. We should be slightly shocked if the town of Johannesburg happened to be called Jesus Christ. But few have noticed a blasphemy or even a somewhat challenging benediction to be found in the very name of San Francisco. But on the other hand a place like Boston is much more beautiful than its name, and as I have suggested an Englishman's general information or lack of information leaves him in some ignorance of the type of beauty that turns up in that type of place. He has heard so much about the purely commercial north as against the agricultural and aristocratic south, and the traditions of Boston and Philadelphia are rather too tenuous and delicate to be seen from across the Atlantic. But here also there are traditions and a great deal of traditionalism. The circle of old families which still meets with the certain exclusiveness in Philadelphia is the sort of thing that we in England should expect to find rather in New Orleans. The academic aristocracy of Boston, which Oliver Wendell Holmes called the Brahmins, is still a reality, though it was always a minority, and is now a very small minority. An epigram invented by Yale at the expense of Harvard describes it as very small indeed. Here is to Jolly Old Boston, the home of the Bean and the Cod, where Cabot speak only to Lowells and Lowells speak only to God. But an aristocracy must be a minority, and it is arguable that the smaller it is, the better. I am bound to say, however, that the distinguished Dr. Cabot, the present representative of the family, broke through any taboo that may tie his affections to his creator and to Miss Amy Lowell, and broadened his sympathy so indiscriminately as to show kindness and hospitality to so lost a being as an English lecturer. But if the thing is hardly a limit, it is very living as a memory, and Boston on this side is very much a place of memories. It would be paying at a very poor compliment merely to say that parts of it reminded me of England, for indeed they reminded me of English things that have largely vanished from England. There are old brown houses in the corners of squares and streets that are like limpses of a man's forgotten childhood. And when I saw the long path with posts where the autocrat may supposed to have walked with the school mistress, I felt I had come to the land where old tales come true. I pause in this place upon this particular aspect of America because it is very much missed in a mere contrast with England. I need not say that if I felt even about the slight figures of fiction, I felt it even more about solid figures of history. Such ghosts seemed particularly solid in the Southern States, precisely because of the comparative quietude and leisure of the atmosphere of the South. It was never more vivid to me than when coming in at a quiet hour of the night into the comparatively quiet hotel at Nashville in Tennessee, and mounting to a dim and deserted upper floor where I found myself before a faded picture, and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of Andrew Jackson. Watchful, like a white eagle. At that moment, perhaps, I was in more than one sense alone. Most Englishmen know a good deal of American fiction and nothing whatever of American history. They know more about the autocrat of the breakfast table than about the autocrat of the army and the people. The one great democratic despot of modern times. The Napoleon of the New World. The only notion the English public ever got about American politics they got from a novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. And to say the least of it, it was no exception to the prevalence of fiction over fact. Hundreds of us have heard of Tom Sawyer for one who has heard of Charles Sumner, and it is probable that most of us could pass a more detailed examination about Toddy and Budge than about Lincoln and Lee. But in the case of Andrew Jackson it may be that I felt a special sense of individual isolation. For I believe that there are even fewer among Englishmen than among Americans who realize that the energy of that great man was largely directed toward saving us from the chief evil which destroys the nations today. He sought to cut down, as with a sort of simplicity, the new and nameless enormity of finance, and he must have known, as by a lightning flash, that the people were behind him, because all the politicians were against him. The end of that struggle is not yet, but if the bank is stronger than the sword or the scepter of popular sovereignty, the end will be the end of democracy. It will have to choose between accepting an acknowledged dictator and accepting dictation which it dare not acknowledge. The process will have begun by giving power to people and refusing to give them their titles, and it will have ended by giving the power to the people who refused to give us their names. But I have a special reason for ending this chapter on the name of the great popular dictator who made war on the politicians and the Finnsers. This chapter does not profess to touch on one in twenty of the interesting cities of America, even in this particular aspect of their relation to the history of America, which is so much neglected in England. If that were so, there would be a great deal to say even about the newest of them. Chicago, for instance, is certainly something more than the mere pork-packing yard that English tradition suggests, and it has been building a boulevard not unworthy of its splendid position on its splendid lake. But all these cities are defiled and even diseased with industrialism. It is due to the Americans to remember that they have deliberately preserved one of their cities from such defilement and such disease. And that is the presidential city which stands on the American mind with the same ideal as the President. The idea of the Republic that rises above modern money getting and endures. There has really been an effort to keep the White House white. No factories are allowed in that town. No more than the necessary shops are tolerated. It is a beautiful city and really retains something of that classical serenity of the eighteenth century, in which the fathers of the Republic moved. With all respect to the colonial place of that name, I do not suppose that Wellington is particularly like Wellington. But Washington really is like Washington. In this, as in so many things, there is no harm in our criticizing foreigners if only we would also criticize ourselves. In other words, the world might need even less of its neutrality if it had a little more of the old humility. When we complain of American individualism, we forget that we have fostered it by ourselves having far less of this impersonal ideal of the Republic or Commonwealth as a whole. When we complain very justly, for instance, of great pictures passing into the possession of American magnets, we ought to remember that we paved the way for it by allowing them all to accumulate in the possession of English magnets. It is bad that a public treasure should be in the possession of a private man in America. But we took the first step in lightly letting it disappear into the private collection of a man in England. I know all about the genuine national tradition which treated the aristocracy as constituting the state. But these very foreign purchases go to prove that we ought to have had a state independent of the aristocracy. It is true that rich Americans do sometimes covet the monuments of our culture in a fashion that rightly revolts us as vulgar and irrational. They are said sometimes to want to take whole buildings away with them, and too many of such buildings are private and for sale. There were wilder stories of a millionaire wishing to transplant Glastonbury Abbey and similar buildings as if they were portable shrubs in pots. It is obvious that it is nonsense as well as vandalism to separate Glastonbury Abbey from Glastonbury. I can understand a man venerating it as a ruin, and I can understand a man despising it as a rubbish heap. But it is senseless to insult a thing in order to idolize it. It is meaningless to desecrate the shrine in order to worship the stones. That sort of thing is the bad side of American appetite and ambition, and we are perfectly right to see it not only as a deliberate blasphemy, but as an unconscious buffoonery. But there is another side to the American tradition, which is really too much liking in our own tradition, and it is illustrated in this idea of preserving Washington as a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without personal commerce. Nobody could buy the White House or the Washington Monument. It may be hinted, as by an inhabitant of Glastonbury, that nobody wants to, but nobody could if he did want to. There is really a certain air of serenity and security about the place, lacking in every other American town. It is increased, of course, by the clear blue skies of that half-southern province from which smoke has been vanished. The effect is not so much in the mere buildings, though they are classical and often beautiful. But whatever else they have built, they have built a great blue dome, the largest dome in the world, and the place does express something in the inconsistent idealism of this strange people. And here at least they have lifted it higher than all the skyscrapers, and set it in a stainless sky. CHAPTER VI. PART I THE SHARPEST PLEASURE OF A TRAVELER IS IN FINDING THE THINGS WHICH HE DID NOT EXPECT, BUT WHICH HE MIGHT HAVE EXPECTED TO EXPECT. I mean the things that are at once so strange and so obvious that they must have been noticed yet somehow they have not been noted. Thus I had heard a thousand things about Jerusalem before I ever saw it. I had heard rhapsodies and disparagements of every description. Some rationalistic critics with characteristic consistency had blamed it for its accumulated rubbish and its modern restoration, for its antiquated superstition and its up-to-date vulgarity. But somehow the one impression that had never pierced through their description was the simple and single impression of a city on a hill, with walls coming to the very edge of slopes that were almost as deep as walls. A turreted city which crowns a cone-shaped hill in so many medieval landscapes. One would suppose that this was at once the plainest and most picturesque of all the facts, yet somehow in my reading I had always lost it amid a mass of minor facts that were merely details. We know that a city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid, and yet it would seem that it is exactly the hill that is hid, though perhaps it is only hid from the wise and the understanding. I had a similar and simple expression when I discovered America. I cannot avoid the phrase, for it would really seem that each man discovers it for himself. Thus I had heard a great deal before I saw them about the tall and dominant buildings of New York. I agree that they have an instant effect on the imagination which I think is increased by the situation in which they stand and out of which they arose. They are all the more impressive because the building while it is vertically so vast is horizontally almost narrow. New York is an island and has all the intensive romance of an island. It is a thing of almost infinite height upon very finite foundations. It is almost like a lofty lighthouse upon a lonely rock. This story of the skyscrapers, which I had often heard, would by itself give us a curiously false impression of the freshest and most curious characteristic of American architecture. Told only in terms of these great towers of stone and brick in the big industrial cities, the story would tend too much to an impression of something cold and colossal like the monuments of Asia. It would suggest a modern Babylon altogether to Babylonian. It would imply that a man of the New World was a sort of new Pharaoh who built not so much a pyramid as a pagoda of pyramids. It would suggest houses built by mammoths out of mountains. The cities reared by elephants in their own Elephantine school of architecture. And New York does recall the most famous of all skyscrapers, the Tower of Babel. She recalls it nonetheless because there is no doubt about the confusion of tongues. In truth the very reverse is true of most of the buildings in America. I had no sooner passed out into the suburbs of New York on the way to Boston than I began to see something else quite contrary and far more curious. I saw forests upon forests of small houses stretching away to the horizon, as literal forests do. Villages and towns and cities, and they were in another sense literally like forests, they were all made of wood. It was almost as fantastic to an English eye as if they had all been made of cardboard. I had long outlived the silly old joke that referred to Americans as if they all lived in the backwoods. But in a sense if they do not live in the woods they are not yet out of the wood. I did not say this in any sense as a criticism. As it happens I am particularly fond of wood. Of all the superstitions which our fathers took lightly enough to love, the most natural seems to me the notion it is lucky to touch wood. Some of them affected me the less as superstitions because I feel them as symbols. If humanity had really thought Friday unlucky it would have talked about bad Friday instead of good Friday. And while I feel the thrill of a thirteen at a table I am not so sure that it is the most miserable of all human fates to fill the places of the twelve apostles. But the idea that there was something cleansing or wholesome about the touching of wood seems to me to be one of those ideas which are truly popular because they are truly poetic. It is probable enough that the conception came originally from the healing of the wood of the cross, but that only clenches the divine coincidence. It is like that other divine coincidence that the victim was a carpenter, who might also have made his own cross. Whether we take the mystical or the mythical explanation there is obviously a very deep connection between the human working in wood and such plain and pathetic mysticism. It gives something like a touch of the holy childishness to the tail as if that terrible engine could be a toy. In the same fashion a child fancies that mysterious and sinister horse which was the downfall of Troy as something plain and staring and perhaps spotted like his own rocking horse in the nursery. It might be said symbolically that Americans have a taste for rocking horses as they certainly have a taste for rocking chairs. A flippant critic might suggest that they still select rocking chairs so that even when they are sitting down they need not be sitting still. Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the matter, but I think the deeper significance of the rocking chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking horse. I think there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is childish in the good sense of the word, something that is innocent and easily pleased. It is not altogether untrue, still less is it unfriendly to say that the landscape seems to be dotted with Dahl's houses. It is the true tragedy of every fallen son of Adam that he has grown too big to live in a Dahl's house. These things seem somehow to escape the irony of time by not even challenging it. They are too temporary even to be merely temporal. These people are not building tombs. They are not, as in the fine image of Mrs. Maynell's poem, merely building ruins. It is not easy to imagine the ruins of a Dahl's house, that is why a Dahl's house is an everlasting habitation. How far it promises a political permanence is a matter for further discussion. I'm only describing the mood of discovery in which all these cottages built of lath, like the palaces of a pantomime, really seemed colored like the clouds of morning, which are both fugitive and eternal. There is also, in all this, an atmosphere that comes in another sense from the nursery. We hear much of Americans being educated on English literature, but I think few Americans realize how much English children have been educated on American literature. It is true, and it is inevitable, that they can only be educated on rather old fashioned American literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in one of his plays, noted truly the limitations of the young American millionaire, and especially the staleness of his English culture. But there is necessarily another side to it. If the Americans talk more of Macaulay than of Niche, we should probably talk more of Emerson than of Ezra Pound. Whether this staleness is necessarily a disadvantage is, of course, a different question. But in any case, it is true that the old American books were often the books of our childhood, even in the literal sense of the books of our nursery. I know few men in England who have not left their boyhood to some extent lost and entangled in the forests of Huckleberry Finn. I know few women in England, from the most revolutionary suffragette to the most carefully preserved early Victorian, who will not confess to having passed a happy childhood with the little women of Miss Alcott. Ellen's Babies was the first and by far the best book in the modern scriptures of baby worship. And about all this old fashioned American literature, there was an undefinable saver that satisfied and even fed our growing minds. Perhaps it was the smell of growing things. But I'm far from certain that it was not simply the smell of wood. Now that all the memory comes back to me, it seems to come back heavily in a hundred forms, with the fragrance and the touch of timber. There was the perpetual reference to the woodpile. The perpetual background of the woods. There was something crude and clean about everything. Something fresh and strange about those far off houses to which I could not then have put a name. Indeed many things become clear in this wilderness of wood, which could only be expressed in symbol and even in fantasy. I will not go so far as to say that it shortened the transition from log cabin to White House, as if the White House were itself made of white wood, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, that cuts like cheese, but lasts like iron for things like these. But I will say that the experience illuminates some other lines by Holmes himself. Little I ask, my wants are few. I only ask a hut of stone. I should not have known in England that he was already asking for a good deal, even in asking for that. In the presence of this wooden world the very combination of words seemed almost a contradiction, like a hut of marble or a hovel of gold. It was therefore with an almost infantile pleasure that I looked at all this promising expansion of fresh-cut timber and thought of the housing shortage at home. I know not by what incongruous movement of the mind there swept across me at the same moment, the thought of things ancestral and hoary with the light of ancient dawns. The last war brought back body armor. The next war may bring back bows and arrows. And I suddenly had a memory of old wooden houses in London and a model of Shakespeare's town. It is possible, indeed, that such Elizabethan memories may receive a check or a chill when the traveler comes, as he sometimes does, to the outskirts of one of these strange hamlets of new-frame houses, and is confronted with a placard inscribed in enormous letters, what just grew. He can always imagine that he sees the timber swelling before his eyes like pumpkins in some super-tropical summer, but he may have formed the conviction that no such proclamation could be found outside Shakespeare's town. And indeed there is a serious criticism here to anyone who knows history, since the things that grow are not always the things that remain, and pumpkins of that expansiveness have a tendency to burst. I was always told that Americans were harsh, hustling rather rude, and perhaps vulgar, but they were very practical and the future belonged to them. I confess I felt a fine shade of a difference. I liked the Americans. I thought they were sympathetic, imaginative, and full of fine enthousiasms. The one thing I could not always feel clear about was their future. I believe they were happier in their frame houses than most people in most houses, having democracy, good education, and a hobby of work. And one doubt that did float across me was something like, Will all this be here at all in two hundred years? That was the first impression produced by the wooden houses that seemed like the wagons of gypsies. It is a serious impression, but there is an answer to it. It is an answer that opens on the traveller more and more as he goes westward and finds the little towns dotted about the vast central prairies, and the answer is agriculture. Wooden houses may or may not last, but farms will last, and farming will always last. The houses may look like gypsy caravans on a heath or a common, but they are not on a heath or a common, they are on the most productive and prosperous land, perhaps in the modern world. The houses might fall down like shanties, but the fields would remain, and whoever tills those fields will count for a great deal in the affairs of humanity. They are already counting for a great deal and possibly for too much in the affairs of America. The real criticism of the Middle West is concerned with two facts, neither of which has been yet adequately appreciated by the educated class in England. The first is that the turn of the world has come, and the turn of the agricultural countries with it. That is the meaning of the resurrection of Ireland. That is the meaning of the practical surrender of the Bolshevist Jews to the Russian peasants. The other is that in most places these peasant societies carry on what may be called the Catholic tradition. The Middle West is perhaps the one considerable place where they still carry on the Puritan tradition, but the Puritan tradition was originally a tradition of the town, and the second truth about the Middle West turns largely on its moral relation to the town. As I shall suggest presently there is much in common between this agricultural society of America and the great agricultural societies of Europe. It tends, as the agricultural society nearly always does, to some decent degree of democracy. The agricultural society tends to the agrarian law. But in Puritan America there is an additional problem which I can hardly explain without a pair of phrases. There was a time when the progress of the cities seemed to mock the decay of the country. It is more and more true, I think, today that it is rather the decay of the cities that seems to poison the progress and promise of the countryside. The cinema boasts of being a substitute for the tavern. But I think it is a very bad substitute. I think so quite apart from the question about fermented liquor. Nobody enjoys cinemas more than I, but to enjoy them a man has only to look and not even to listen. And in a tavern he has to talk. Occasionally I admit he has to fight. But he need never move at the movies. Thus in the real village in are the real village politics, while in the other are only the remote and unreal metropolitan politics, and those central city politics are not only cosmopolitan politics but corrupt politics. They corrupt everything that they reach. And this is the real point about many perplexing questions. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER II. For instance, so far as I am concerned, it is the whole point about feminism and the factory. It is very largely the point about feminism and many other callings apparently more cultured than the factory, such as the law court and the political platform. When I see women so wildly anxious to tie themselves to all this machinery of the modern city, my first feeling is not indignation but that dark and ominous sort of pity with which we should see a crowd rushing to embark on a leaking ship under a towering storm. When I see wives and mothers going in for business-government I not only regard it as a bad business but as a bankrupt business. It seems to me very much as if the peasant women, just before the French Revolution, had insisted on being made duchesses or as is quite as logical and likely on being made duches. It is as if those ragged women, instead of crying out for bread, had cried out for powder and patches. By the time they were wearing them they would be the only people wearing them. For powder and patches soon went out of fashion. But bread does not go out of fashion. In the same way, if women desert the family for the factory, they may find they have only done it for a deserted factory. It would have been very unwise of the lower orders to claim all the privileges of the higher orders in the last days of the French monarchy. It would have been very laborious to learn the science of heraldry or the tables of precedence when all such things were at once most complicated and most moribund. It would be tiresome to be taught all those tricks just when the whole bag of tricks was coming to an end. A French satirist might have written a fine epilogue about Jacques Spannami coming up to Paris in his wooden shoes and demanding to be made gold stick-in waiting in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity. But I fear the stick-in waiting would be waiting still. One of the first topics on which I heard conversation turning in America was that of a very interesting book called Main Street, which involves many of these questions of the modern industrial and the eternal feminine. It is simply the story, or perhaps rather the study, than the story, of a young married woman in one of the multitudinous little towns on the great central plains of America, and of a sort of struggle between her own more restless culture and the provincial prosperity of her neighbors. There are a number of true and telling suggestions in the book. But the one touch which I found tingling in the memory of many readers was the last sentence in which the master of the house, with unshaken simplicity, merely asks for the whereabouts of some domestic implement. I think it was a screwdriver. It seems to me a harmless request. But from the way people talked about it, one might suppose he had asked for a screwdriver to screw down the wife in her coffin, and a great many advanced persons would tell us that the wooden house in which she lived really was like a wooden coffin. But this appears to me to be taking a somewhat funeral view of the life of humanity. For after all, on the face of it at any rate, this is merely the life of humanity and even the life which all humanitarians have strived to give to humanity. Revolutionists have treated it not only as the normal, but even as the ideal. But wars have been waged to establish this revolutionary heroes have fought had revolutionary martyrs have died, only to build such a wooden house for such a worthy family. Men have taken the sword and perished by the sword in order that the poor gentleman might have liberty to look for his screwdriver. For there is here a fact about America that is almost entirely unknown in England. The English have not in the least realized the real strength of America. We in England hear a great deal, we hear far too much about the economic energy of industrial America, about the money of Mr. Morgan or the machinery of Mr. Edison. We never realize that while we in England suffer from the same sort of successes in capitalism and clockwork, we have not got what the Americans have got, something at least to balance it in the way of a free agriculture, a vast field of free farms dotted with small free holders. For the reason I shall mention in a moment, they are not perhaps in the fullest and finest sense a peasantry. But they are in the practical and political sense a pure peasantry in that their comparative equality is a true counterweight to the toppling injustices of the towns, and even in places like that described as Main Street, that comparative equality can immediately be felt. The men may be provincials, but they are certainly citizens. They consult on a common basis and I repeat that in this after all they do achieve what many prophets and righteous men have died to achieve. This plain village, fairly prosperous, fairly equal, untaxed by tyrants and untroubled by wars, is after all the place which reformers have regarded as their aim whenever reformers have used their width sufficiently to have any aim. The march to Utopia, the march to the earthly paradise, the march to the New Jerusalem, has been very largely the march to Main Street, and the latest modern sensation is a book written to show how wretched it is to live there. All this is true, and I think the lady might be more contented in her coffin, which is more comfortably furnished than most of the coffins where her fellow creatures live. Nevertheless, there is an answer to this, or at least a modification of it. There is a case for the lady and a case against the gentleman and the screwdriver. And when we have noted what it really is, we have noted the real disadvantage in a situation like that of modern America, and especially the Middle West. And with that we come back to the truth with which I started this speculation, the truth that few have yet realized, but of which I, for one, am more and more convinced that industrialism is spreading because it is decaying, that only the dust and ashes of its dissolution are choking up the growth of natural things everywhere and turning the green world gray. In this relative agricultural equality the Americans of the Middle West are far in advance of the English of the 20th century. It is not their fault if they are still some centuries behind the English of the 12th century. But the defect by which they fall short of being a true peasantry is that they do not produce their own spiritual food, in the same sense as their own material food. They do not, like some peasantries, create other kinds of culture beside the kind called agriculture. Their culture comes from the great cities, and that is where all the evil comes from. If a man had gone across England in the Middle Ages, or even across Europe in more recent times, he would have found a culture which showed its vitality by its variety. We know the adventures of the three brothers in the old fairy tales who passed across the endless plain from city to city and found one kingdom ruled by a wizard and another wasted by a dragon, one people living in castles of crystal and another sitting by fountains of wine. These are but legendary enlargements of the real adventures of the traveler passing from one patch of peasantry to another and finding women wearing strange headdresses and men singing new songs. A traveler in America would be somewhat surprised if he found the people in the city of St. Louis all wearing crowns and crusading armor in honor of their patron saint. He might even feel some faint surprise if he found all the citizens of Philadelphia clad in a composite costume combining that of a Quaker with that of a Red Indian in honor of the noble treaty of William Penn. Yet these are the sort of local and traditional things that would really be found giving variety to the valleys of medieval Europe. I myself felt a perfectly genuine and generous exhilaration of freedom and fresh enterprise in new places like Oklahoma, but you would hardly find in Oklahoma what was found in Oberammergau, what goes to Oklahoma is not the peasant play, but the cinema. And the objection to the cinema is not so much that it goes to Oklahoma as that it does not come from Oklahoma. In other words, these people have on the economic side a much closer approach than we have to economic freedom. It is not for us who have allowed our land to be stolen by squires and then vulgarized by sham squires to sneer at such colonists as mere crude and prosaic. They at least have really kept something of the simplicity and therefore the dignity of democracy. And that democracy may yet save their country, even from the calamities of wealth and science. But while these farmers do not need to become industrial in order to become industrious, they do tend to become industrial in so far as they become intellectual. Their culture and to some great extent their creed do come along the railroads from the great modern urban centers and bring with them a blast of death and a reek of rotting things. It is that influence that alone prevents the Middle West from progressing towards the Middle Ages. For after all, linked up in a hundred legends of the Middle Ages may be found a symbolic pattern of hammers and nails and saws, and there is no reason why they should not have also sanctified screwdrivers. There is no reason why the screwdriver that seemed such a trifle to the author should not have been born in triumph down Main Street like a sword of state in some pageant of the Guild of St. Joseph of the Carpenters, or St. Dunstan of the Smiths. It was the Catholic poetry on piety that filled common life with something that is lacking in the worthwhile and virile democracy of the West. There are the Americans of intelligence so ignorant of this as some may suppose. There is an admirable society called the medievalists in Chicago whose name and address will strike many as suggesting a certain struggle of the soul against the environment. With the national hardiness they blaze on their note paper with heraldry and the hues of Gothic windows. With the national high spirits they assume the fancy dress of friars, but anyone who should essay to laugh at them instead of with them would find out his mistake. For many of them do really know a great deal about medievalism, much more than I do, or most other men brought up on an island that is crowded with its cathedrals. Something of the same spirit may be seen in the beautiful new plans on the buildings of Yale deliberately modeled not on classical harmony but on Gothic irregularity and surprise. The grace and energy of the medieval architecture resurrected by a man like Mr. R. A. Cram of Boston has behind it not merely artistic but historical and ethical enthusiasm, and enthusiasm for the Catholic creed which made medieval civilization. Even on the huge puritan plains of the Middle West the influence strays in the strangest fashion. And it is notable that among the pessimistic epithets of the Spoon River anthology in that churchyard, compared with which most churchyards are cheery, among the suicides and secret drinkers and monomaniacs and hideous hypocrites of that happy village, almost the only record of respect and a recognition of wider hopes is dedicated to the Catholic priest. But Main Street is Main Street in the Main. Main Street is Modern Street and its multiplicity of mildly half-educated people and all these historic things are a thousand miles from them. They have not heard the ancient noise, either of arts or arms, the building of the cathedral or the marching of the crusade, but at least they have not deliberately slandered the crusade and defaced the cathedral. And if they have not produced the peasant arts, they can still produce the peasant crafts. They can sow and plow and reap and live by these everlasting things. Nor shall the foundations of their state be moved, and the memory of those colossal fields of those fruitful deserts came back the more readily to my mind, because I finished these reflections in the very heart of a modern industrial city, if it can be said to have a heart. It was in fact an English industrial city, but it struck me that it might very well be an American one, and it also struck me that we yield rather too easily to America, the dusty palm of industrial enterprise, and feel far too little apprehension about greener and fresher vegetables. There is a story of an American who carefully studied all the sites of London or Rome or Paris and came to the conclusion that it had nothing on Minneapolis. It seems to me that Minneapolis has nothing on Manchester. There were the same gray vistas of shops, full of rubber tires and metallic appliances. A man felt he might walk a day without seeing a blade of grass. The whole horizon was so infinite with efficiency. The factory chimneys might have been Pittsburgh. The sky signs might have been New York. One looked up in a sort of despair at the sky, not for a sky sign, in a sense for a sign, for some sentence of significance and judgment. By the instinct that makes any man in such a scene seek for the only thing that has not been made by a man. But even that was illogical, for it was night, and I could only expect to see the stars, which might have reminded me of old glory. But that was not the sign that oppressed me. All the ground was a wilderness of stone and all the buildings of forest a brick. I was far in the interior of a labyrinth of lifeless things. Only looking up, between two black chimneys and a telegraph pole, I saw vast and far and faint, as the first men saw it, the silver pattern of the plow. THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN It is a commonplace that men are all agreed in using symbols and all differ about the meaning of the symbols. It is obvious that a Russian Republican might come to identify the eagle as a bird of empire, and therefore a bird of prey. But when he ultimately escaped to the land of the free, he might find the same bird on the American coinage, figuring as a bird of freedom. Doubtless he might find many other things to surprise him in the land of the free, and many calculated to make him think that the bird, if not imperial, was at least rather imperious. But I am not discussing those exceptional details here. It is equally obvious that a Russian reactionary might cross the world with a vow of vengeance against the red flag. But that authoritarian might have some difficulties with the authorities if he shot a man for using the red flag on the railway between Williston and Clapham Junction. But of course the difficulty about symbols is generally much more subtle than in these simple cases. I have remarked elsewhere that the first thing which a traveler should write about is the thing which he has not read about. It may be a small or a secondary thing, but it is a thing that he has seen and not merely expected to see. I gave the example of the great multitude of wooden houses in America. We might say of wooden towns and wooden cities. But after he has seen such things, his next duty is to see the meaning of them, and hear a great deal of complication and controversy as possible. The thing probably does not mean what he first supposes it to mean on the face of it. But even on the face of it it might mean many different, and even opposite things. For instance a wooden house might suggest an almost savage solitude, a rude shanty put together by a pioneer in a forest. Or it might mean a very recent and rapid solution of the housing problem conducted cheaply and therefore on a very large scale. A wooden house might suggest the very newest thing in America, or one of the very oldest things in England. It might mean a gray ruin at Stratford, or a white exhibition at Earl's Court. It is when we come to this interpretation of international symbols that we make most of the international mistakes. Without the smallest error of detail I will promise to prove that Oriental women are independent because they wear trousers, or Oriental men subject because they wear skirts. Merely to apply it to this case I will take the example of two very common place and trivial objects of modern life, a walking stick and a fur coat. As it happened I traveled about America with two sticks, like a Japanese nobleman with his two swords. I fear the simile is too stately. I bore more resemblance to a cripple with two crutches, or a highly ineffectual version of the devil on two sticks. I carried them both because I valued them both and did not wish to risk losing either of them in my erratic travels. One is a very plain gray stick from the woods of Buckinghamshire. But as I took it with me to Palestine it partakes of the character of a pilgrim's staff. When I can say that I have taken the same stick to Jerusalem and to Chicago I think the stick and I may both have a rest. The other which, I value even more, was given me by the Knights of Columbus at Yale, and I wish I could think that their chivalric title allowed me to regard it as a sword. Now I do not know whether the Americans I met, struck by the fastidious robbery of my dress and appearance, concluded that it is the custom of elegant English dandies to carry two walking sticks, but I do know that it is much less common among Americans than among Englishmen to carry even one. The point, however, is not merely that more sticks are carried by Englishmen than by Americans. It is that the sticks which are carried by Americans stand for something entirely different. In America a stick is commonly called a cane, and it has about it something of the atmosphere which the poet described as the nice conduct of the clouded cane. It would be an exaggeration to say that when the citizens of the United States see a man carrying a light stick, they deduce that if he does that he does nothing else. But there is about it a faint flavor of luxury and lounging, and most of the energetic citizens of this energetic society avoid it by instinct. Now in an Englishman like myself carrying a stick may imply lounging, but it does not imply luxury, and I can say with some firmness that it does not imply dandyism. In a great many Englishmen it means the very opposite even of lounging. By one of those fantastic paradoxes which are the mystery of nationality, a walking stick often actually means walking. It frequently suggests the very reverse of the bow with his clouded cane. It does not suggest a town type, but rather especially a country type. It rather implies the kind of Englishman who tramps about in lanes and meadows and knocks the tops off thistles. It suggests the sort of man who has carried the stick through his native woods, and perhaps even cut it in his native woods. There are plenty of these vigorous loungers, no doubt, in the rural parts of America. But the idea of a walking stick would not especially suggest them to Americans. It would not call up such figures like a fairy wand. It would be easy to trace back the difference to many English origins, possibly to aristocratic origins, to the idea of the old squire, a man vigorous and even rustic, but trained to hold a useless staff rather than a useful tool. It might be suggested that American citizens do at least so far love freedom as to like to have their hands free. It might be suggested, on the other hand, that they keep their hands for the handles of many machines, and that the hand on a handle is less free than the hand on a stick or even a tool. But these again are controversial questions, and I am only noting a fact. If an Englishman wished to imagine more or less exactly what the impression is and how misleading it is, he could find something like a parallel in what he himself feels about a fur coat. When I first found myself among the crowds on the main floor of a New York hotel, my rather exaggerated impression of the luxury of the place was largely produced by the number of men in fur coats, and what we should consider rather ostentatious fur coats with all the fur outside. Now an Englishman has a number of atmospheric, but largely accidental, associations in connection with a fur coat. I will not say that he thinks a man in a fur coat must be a wealthy and wicked man, but I do say that in his own ideal and perfect vision a wealthy and wicked man would wear a fur coat. Thus I had the sensation of standing in a surging mob of American millionaires, or even African millionaires, for the millionaires of Chicago must be like the Knights of the Round Table, compared with the millionaires of Johannesburg. But as a matter of fact, the man in the fur coat was not even an American millionaire, but simply an American. It did not signify luxury, but rather necessity, and even a harsh and almost heroic necessity. Orson probably wore a fur coat, and he was brought up by bears, but not the bears of Wall Street. Eskimos are generally represented as furry folk, but they are not necessarily engaged in delicate financial operations, even in the typical and appropriate occupation called freezing out. And if the American is not exactly an arctic traveler rushing from pole to pole, at least he is often literally fleeing from ice to ice. He has to make a very extreme distinction between outdoor and indoor clothing. He has to live in an ice house outside, and a hot house inside, so hot that he may be said to construct an ice house inside that. He turns himself into an ice house, and warms himself against the cold until he is warm enough to eat ices. But the point is that the same coat of fur, which in England would indicate the ciber at life, may here very well indicate the strenuous life. Just as the same walking stick, which would here suggest a lounger, would in England suggest a plotter, and almost a pilgrim. And these two trifles are types which I should like to put by way of proviso and apology at the very beginning of any attempt at a record of any impression of foreign society. They serve merely to illustrate the most important impression of all, the impression of how false all impressions may be. I suspect that most of the very false impressions have come from the careful record of very true facts. They have come from the fatal power of observing the facts without being able to observe the truth. They came from seeing the symbol with the most vivid clarity, and being blind to all that it symbolizes. It is as if a man who knew no Greek should imagine that he could read a Greek inscription because he took the Greek R for an English P, or the Greek Long E for an English H. I do not mention this merely as a criticism on other people's impressions of America, but as a criticism on my own. I wish it to be understood that I am well aware that all my views are subject to this sort of potential criticism, and that even when I am certain of the facts, I do not profess to be certain of the deductions. In this chapter I hope to point out how a misunderstanding of this kind affects the common impression, not altogether unfounded, that the Americans talk about dollars. But for the moment I am merely anxious to avoid a similar misunderstanding when I talk about Americans, about the dogmas of democracy, about the right of a people to own its symbols, whether they be coins or customs. I am convinced and no longer to be shaken. But about the meaning of those symbols, in silver or other substances, I am always open to correction. That error is the price we pay for the great glory of nationality, and in this sense I am quite ready at the start to warn my own readers against my own opinions. The fact without the truth is futile. Indeed the fact without the truth is false. I have already noted that this is especially true touching our observations of a strange country, and it is certainly true touching one small fag which has swelled into a large fable. I mean the fable about America commonly summed up in the phrase about the almighty dollar. I do not think the dollar is almighty in America. I fancy many things are mightier, including many ideals, and some rather insane ideals. But I think it might be maintained that the dollar has another of the attributes of deity. If it is not omnipotent, it is in a sense omnipresent. Whatever Americans think about dollars, it is I think relatively true that they talk about dollars. If a mere mechanical record could be taken by the modern machinery of dictaphones and stenography, I do not think it probable that the mere word dollars would occur more often in any given number of American conversations than the mere word pounds or shillings in a similar number of English conversations. And these statistics, like nearly all statistics, would be utterly useless and even fundamentally false. It is as if we should calculate that the word elephant had been mentioned a certain number of times in a particular London street, or so many times more often than the word thunderbolt had been used in Stokes' pokes. Doubtless there are statisticians capable of collecting those statistics also, and doubtless there are scientific social reformers capable of legislating on the basis of them. They would probably argue from the elephantine imagery of the London street that such and such a percentage of the householders were megalomaniacs and require medical care and police coercion. And doubtless their calculations, like nearly all such calculations, would leave out the only important point, as that street was in the immediate neighbourhood of the zoo, or was yet more happily situated under the benign shadow of the elephant and castle. And in the same way the mechanicals' calculation about the mention of dollars is entirely useless unless we have some moral understanding of why they are mentioned. It certainly does not mean merely a love of money, and if it did, a love of money may mean a great many very different and even contrary things. The love of money is very different in a peasant or in a pirate, in a miser or in a gambler, in a great financier or in a man doing some practical and productive work. Now this difference in the conversation of American and English businessmen arises, I think, from certain much deeper things in the American, which are generally not understood by the Englishman. It also arises from much deeper things in the Englishman, of which the Englishman is even more ignorant. To begin with, I fancy that the Americans, quite apart from any love of money, has a great love of measurement. He will mention the exact size or weight of things in a way which appears to us as irrelevant. It is as if we were to say that a man came to see us carrying three feet of walking stick and four inches of cigar. It is so in cases that have no possible connection with any avarice or greed for gain. An American will praise the prodigal generosity of some other man in giving up his own estate for the good of the poor, but he will generally say that the philanthropist gave them a two hundred acre park, where an Englishman would think it quite sufficient to say that he gave them a park. There is something about this precision which seems suitable to the American atmosphere, to the hard sunlight and the cloudless skies, and the glittering detail of the architecture and the landscape, just as the vaguer English version is consonant to our misdear and more impressionist scenery. It is also connected perhaps with something more boyish about the younger civilization and corresponds to the passionate particularity with which a boy will distinguish the uniforms of regiments, the rigs of ships, or even the colors of tram tickets. It is a certain godlike appetite for things as distinct from thoughts. The end of Section 13, Chapter 7, Part 1. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton. Section 14, Chapter 7, Part 2. The American Businessman But there is also, of course, a much deeper cause of the difference, and it can easily be deduced by noting the real nature of the difference itself. When two businessmen in a train are talking about dollars, I am not so foolish as to expect them to be talking about the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. But if they were two English businessmen, I should not expect them to be talking about business. Probably it would be about some sport, and most probably some sport in which they themselves never dreamed of indulging. The approximate difference is that the American talks about his work and the Englishman about his holidays. His ideal is not labor but leisure. Like every other national characteristic, this is not primarily a point for praise or blame. In essence it involves neither, and in effect it involves both. It is certainly connected with that snobbishness which is the great sin of English society. The Englishman does love to conceive himself as a sort of country gentleman, and his castles in the air are all castles in Scotland rather than in Spain. For as an ideal, a Scotch castle is as English as a Welch Rearbit, or an Irish stew. But if he talks less about money, I fear it is sometimes because in one sense he thinks more of it. Money is a mystery in the old and literal sense of something too sacred for speech. Gold is a god, and like the god of some agnostics, has no name and is worshipped only in his works. It is true in a sense that the English gentleman wishes to have enough money to be able to forget it. But it may be questioned whether he does entirely forget it. As against this weakness, the American has succeeded, at the price of a great deal of crudity and clatter, in making general a very real respect for work. He has partly disenchanted the dangerous glamour of the gentleman, and in that sense has achieved some degree of democracy, which is the most difficult achievement in the world. On the other hand there is a good side to the Englishman's daydream of leisure, and one which the American spirit tends to miss. It may be expressed in the words holiday or still better in the word hobby. The Englishman, in his character of Robin Hood, really has got two strings to his bow. Indeed the Englishman really is well represented by Robin Hood, for there is always something about him that may literally be called outlawed in the sense of being extra-legal or outside the rules. A Frenchman said of Browning that his center was not in the middle, and it may be said of many an Englishman, that his heart is not where his treasure is. Browning expressed a very English sentiment when he said, I like to know about your paints, a baker rhymes for his pursuit. Candlestick-makers, much acquaintance, his soul with song or happily mute, blows out his brains upon the flute. Stevenson touched on the same insular sentiment, when he said that many men he knew, who were meat salesmen to the outward eye, might in the life of contemplation sit with the saints. Now the extraordinary achievement of the American meat salesman is that his poetic enthusiasm can really be for meat sales, not for money, but for meat. An American commercial traveler asked me, with a religious fire in his eyes, whether I did not think that salesmanship could be an art. In England there are many salesmen who are sincerely fond of art, but seldom of the art of salesmanship. Art is with them a hobby, a thing of leisure and liberty. That is why the English traveler talks, if not of art, then of sport. That is why the two city men in the London train, if they are not talking about gulf, may be talking about gardening. If they are not talking about dollars or the equivalent of dollars, the reason lies much deeper than any superficial praise or blame touching the desire for wealth. In the English case at least it lies very deep in the English spirit. Many of the greatest English things have had this lighter and looser character of a hobby or a holiday experiment. Even a masterpiece has often been a by-product. The works of Shakespeare come out so casually that they can be attributed to the most improbable people, even to bacon. The sonnets of Shakespeare are picked up afterwards as if out of a waste-paper basket. The immortality of Dr. Johnson does not rest on the written leaves he collected, but entirely on the words he wasted, the words he scattered to the winds. So great a thing is Pickwick is almost the kind of accident. It began as something secondary and grew into something primary and preeminent. It began with mere words written to illustrate somebody else's pictures and swelled like an epic expanded from an epigram. It might almost be said that in the case of Pickwick the author began as the servant of the artist. But as in the same story of Pickwick, the servant became greater than the master. This incalculable and accidental quality, like all national qualities, has its strength and weaknesses, but it does represent a certain reserve fund of interests in the Englishman's life and distinguishes him from the other extreme type of the millionaire who works till he drops, or drops because he stops working. It is the great achievement of American civilization that in that country it really is not can't to talk about the dignity of labor. There is something that might almost be called the sanctity of labor. But it is subject to the profound law that when anything less than the highest becomes the sanctity, it tends also to become a superstition. When the candlestick maker does not blow out his brains upon the flute, there is always a danger that he may blow them out somewhere else, owing to depressed conditions in the candlestick market. Now, certainly one of the first impressions of America, or at any rate of New York, which is by no means the same thing as America, is that of a sort of mob of businessman behaving in many ways in a fashion very different from that of swarms of London citymen who go up every day to the city. They sit about in groups with red Indian gravity as you're passing the pipe of peace, though in fact most of them are smoking cigars and some of them are eating cigars. The latter strikes me as one of the most peculiar of transatlantic tastes, more peculiar than that of chewing gum. A man will sit for hours consuming a cigar as if it were a sugar stick, but I should imagine it to be a very disagreeable sugar stick. Why he attempts to enjoy a cigar without lighting it I do not know, whether it is a more economical way of carrying a mere symbol of commercial conversation, or whether something of the same queer outlandish morality that draws such a distinction between beer and ginger beer draws an equally ethical distinction between touching tobacco and lighting it. For the rest it would be easy to make a mere external sketch full of things equally strange, for this can always be done in a strange country. I allow for the fact of all foreigners looking alike, but I fancy that all those hard featured faces with spectacles and shaven jaws do rather look alike because they all like to make their faces hard. And with the mention of their mental attitude we realize the futility of any such external sketch. Unless we can see that these are something more than men smoking cigars and talking about dollars, we had much better not see them at all. It is customary to condemn the American as a materialist because of his worship of success, but indeed this very worship like any worship, even devil worship, proves him rather amistic than a materialist. A Frenchman who retires from business when he has money enough to drink his wine and eat his omelet in peace might much more plausibly be called a materialist by those who do not prefer to call him a man of sense. But Americans do worship success in the abstract as a sort of ideal vision. They follow success rather than money. They follow money rather than meat and drink. If their national life in one sense is a perpetual game of poker, they are playing excitedly for chips or counters as well as for coins. And by the ultimate test of material enjoyment, like the enjoyment of an omelet, even a coin is itself a counter. The Yankee cannot eat chips as the Frenchman can eat chip potatoes, but neither can he swallow red scents as the Frenchman swallows red wine. Thus when people say of a Yankee that he worships the dollar, they pay a compliment to his fine spirituality more true and delicate than they imagine. The dollar is an idol, because it is an image, but it is an image of success and not of enjoyment. That this romance is also a religion is shown in the fact that there is a queer sort of morality attached to it. The nearest parallel to it is something like the sense of honor in the old dueling days. There is not a material, but it is simply moral saver about the implied obligation to collect dollars or to collect chips. We hear too much in England of the phrase about making good, for no sensible Englishman favors the needless interlarding of English with scraps of foreign languages. But though it means nothing in English, it means something very particular in America. There is a fine shade of distinction between succeeding and making good, precisely because there must always be a sort of ethical echo in the word good. America does vaguely feel a man making good as something analogous to a man being good or a man doing good. It is connected with his serious self-respect and his sense of being worthy of those he loves. Nor is this curious, crude idealism wholly insincere, even when it drives him to what some of us would call stealing, any more than the duelless honor was insincere when it drove him to what some would call murder. A very clever American play, which I once saw acted, contained a complete working model of this morality. A girl was loyal too, but distressed by her engagement to a young man on whom there was a sort of cloud of humiliation. The atmosphere was exactly what it would have been in England if he had been accused of cowardice or card-sharping. And there was nothing whatever the matter with the poor young man except that some rotten mine or other in Arizona had not made good. Now in England we should either be below or above that ideal of good. If we were snobs we should be content to know that he was a gentleman of good connections, perhaps too much accustomed to private means to be expected to be business-like. If we were somewhat larger-minded people we should know that he might be as wise as Socrates and as splendid as Bayard, and yet be unfitted. Perhaps one should say therefore be unfitted for the dismal and dirty gambling of modern commerce. But whether we were snobbish enough to admire him for being an idler or chivalrous enough to admire him for being an outlaw, in neither case should we ever really, and in our hearts, despise him for being a failure. For it is this inner verdict of instinctive idealism that is the pointed issue. Of course there's nothing new or peculiar to the new world about a man's engagement practically failing through his financial failure. An English girl might easily drop a man because he was poor, or she might stick to him faithfully and defiantly, though he was poor. The point is that this girl was faithful, but she was not defiant. That is she was not proud. The whole psychology of the situation was that she shared the weird worldly idealism of her family, and it was wounded, as her patriotism would have been wounded, if he had betrayed his country. To do them justice, there was nothing to show that they would have had any real respect for a royal duke who had inherited millions. What the simple barbarians wanted was a man who could make good. That the process of making good would probably drag him through the mire of everything bad, that he would make good by bluffing, lying, swindling, and grinding the faces of the poor, did not seem to trouble them in the least. Against this fanaticism there is this shadow of truth, even in the fiction of aristocracy, that a gentleman may at least be allowed to be good without being bothered to make it. Another objection to the phrase about the Almighty Dollar is that it is an almighty phrase, and therefore an almighty nuisance. I mean that it is made to explain everything and to explain everything much too well. That is much too easily. It does not really help people to understand a foreign country, but it gives them the fatal illusion that they do understand it. Dollars stood for America as frogs stood for France because it was necessary to connect particular foreigners with something, or it would be so easy to confuse a moor with a Montagran or a Russian with a red Indian. The only cure for this sort of satisfied familiarity is the shock of something really unfamiliar. When people can see nothing at all in American democracy except a Yankee running after a dollar, then the only thing to do is to trip them up as they run after the Yankee, or run away with their notion of the Yankee, by the obstacle of certain odd and obstinate facts that have no relation to that notion. And as a matter of fact there are a number of such obstacles to any such generalization, a number of notable facts that have to be reconciled somehow to our previous notions. It does not matter for this purpose whether the facts are favorable or unfavorable, or whether the qualities are merits or defects, especially as we do not even understand them sufficiently to say which they are. The point is that we are brought to a pause and compelled to attempt to understand them rather better than we do. We have found one thing that we did not expect, and therefore the one thing that we cannot explain, and we are moved to an effort, probably an unsuccessful effort, to explain it. The end of Section 14, Chapter 7, Part 2.