What I Saw in America — Chapter 06 Part 1 In the American Country

_In the American Country_ The sharpest pleasure of a traveller is in finding the things which he did not expect, but which he might have expected to expect.

I mean the things that are at once so strange and so obvious that they must have been noticed, yet somehow they have not been noted.

Thus I had heard a thousand things about Jerusalem before I ever saw it; I had heard rhapsodies and disparagements of every description.

Modern rationalistic critics, with characteristic consistency, had blamed it for its accumulated rubbish and its modern restoration, for its antiquated superstition and its up-to-date vulgarity.

But somehow the one impression that had never pierced through their description was the simple and single impression of a city on a hill, with walls coming to the very edge of slopes that were almost as steep as walls; the turreted city which crowns a cone-shaped hill in so many mediaeval landscapes.

One would suppose that this was at once the plainest and most picturesque of all the facts; yet somehow, in my reading, I had always lost it amid a mass of minor facts that were merely details.

We know that a city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid; and yet it would seem that it is exactly the hill that is hid; though perhaps it is only hid from the wise and the understanding.

I had a similar and simple impression when I discovered America.

I cannot avoid the phrase; for it would really seem that each man discovers it for himself.

Thus I had heard a great deal, before I saw them, about the tall and dominant buildings of New York.

I agree that they have an instant effect on the imagination; which I think is increased by the situation in which they stand, and out of which they arose.

They are all the more impressive because the building, while it is vertically so vast, is horizontally almost narrow.

New York is an island, and has all the intensive romance of an island.

It is a thing of almost infinite height upon very finite foundations.

It is almost like a lofty lighthouse upon a lonely rock.

But this story of the sky-scrapers, which I had often heard, would by itself give a curiously false impression of the freshest and most curious characteristic of American architecture.

Told only in terms of these great towers of stone and brick in the big industrial cities, the story would tend too much to an impression of something cold and colossal like the monuments of Asia.

It would suggest a modern Babylon altogether too Babylonian.

It would imply that a man of the new world was a sort of new Pharaoh, who built not so much a pyramid as a pagoda of pyramids.

It would suggest houses built by mammoths out of mountains; the cities reared by elephants in their own elephantine school of architecture.

And New York does recall the most famous of all sky-scrapers--the tower of Babel.

She recalls it none the less because there is no doubt about the confusion of tongues.

But in truth the very reverse is true of most of the buildings in America.

I had no sooner passed out into the suburbs of New York on the way to Boston than I began to see something else quite contrary and far more curious.

I saw forests upon forests of small houses stretching away to the horizon as literal forests do; villages and towns and cities.

And they were, in another sense, literally like forests.

They were all made of wood.

It was almost as fantastic to an English eye as if they had been all made of cardboard.

I had long outlived the silly old joke that referred to Americans as if they all lived in the backwoods.

But, in a sense, if they do not live in the woods, they are not yet out of the wood.

I do not say this in any sense as a criticism.

As it happens, I am particularly fond of wood.

Of all the superstitions which our fathers took lightly enough to love, the most natural seems to me the notion it is lucky to touch wood.

Some of them affect me the less as superstitions, because I feel them as symbols.

If humanity had really thought Friday unlucky it would have talked about bad Friday instead of good Friday.

And while I feel the thrill of thirteen at a table, I am not so sure that it is the most miserable of all human fates to fill the places of the Twelve Apostles.

But the idea that there was something cleansing or wholesome about the touching of wood seems to me one of those ideas which are truly popular, because they are truly poetic.

It is probable enough that the conception came originally from the healing of the wood of the Cross; but that only clinches the divine coincidence.

It is like that other divine coincidence that the Victim was a carpenter, who might almost have made His own cross.

Whether we take the mystical or the mythical explanation, there is obviously a very deep connection between the human working in wood and such plain and pathetic mysticism.

It gives something like a touch of the holy childishness to the tale, as if that terrible engine could be a toy.

In the same fashion a child fancies that mysterious and sinister horse, which was the downfall of Troy, as something plain and staring, and perhaps spotted, like his own rocking-horse in the nursery.

It might be said symbolically that Americans have a taste for rocking-horses, as they certainly have a taste for rocking-chairs.

A

flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still.

Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse.

I think there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is innocent, and easily pleased.

It is not altogether untrue, still less is it unfriendly, to say that the landscape seems to be dotted with dolls' houses.

It is the true tragedy of every fallen son of Adam that he has grown too big to live in a doll's house.

These things seem somehow to escape the irony of time by not even challenging it; they are too temporary even to be merely temporal.

These people are not building tombs; they are not, as in the fine image of Mrs. Meynell's poem, merely building ruins.

It is not easy to imagine the ruins of a doll's house;

and that is why a doll's house is an everlasting habitation.

How far it promises a political permanence is a matter for further discussion; I am only describing the mood of discovery; in which all these cottages built of lath, like the palaces of a pantomime, really seemed coloured like the clouds of morning; which are both fugitive and eternal.

There is also in all this an atmosphere that comes in another sense from the nursery.

We hear much of Americans being educated on English literature; but I think few Americans realise how much English children have been educated on American literature.

It is true, and it is inevitable, that they can only be educated on rather old-fashioned American literature.

Mr. Bernard Shaw, in one of his plays, noted truly the limitations of the young American millionaire, and especially the staleness of his English culture; but there is necessarily another side to it.

If the American talked more of Macaulay than of Nietzsche, we should probably talk more of Emerson than of Ezra Pound.

Whether this staleness is necessarily a disadvantage is, of course, a different question.

But, in any case, it is true that the old American books were often the books of our childhood, even in the literal sense of the books of our nursery.

I know few men in England who have not left their boyhood to some extent lost and entangled in the forests of _Huckleberry Finn_.

I know few women in England, from the most revolutionary Suffragette to the most carefully preserved Early Victorian, who will not confess to having passed a happy childhood with the Little Women of Miss Alcott.

_Helen's Babies_ was the first and by far the best book in the modern scriptures of baby-worship.

And about all this old-fashioned American literature there was an undefinable savour that satisfied, and even fed, our growing minds.

Perhaps it was the smell of growing things;

but I am far from certain that it was not simply the smell of wood.

Now that all the memory comes back to me, it seems to come back heavy in a hundred forms with the fragrance and the touch of timber.

There was the perpetual reference to the wood-pile, the perpetual background of the woods.

There was something crude and clean about everything; something fresh and strange about those far-off houses, to which I could not then have put a name.

Indeed, many things become clear in this wilderness of wood, which could only be expressed in symbol and even in fantasy.

I

will not go so far as to say that it shortened the transition from Log Cabin to White House; as if the White House were itself made of white wood (as Oliver Wendell Holmes said), 'that cuts like cheese, but lasts like iron for things like these.'

But I will say that the experience illuminates some other lines by Holmes himself:-- Little I ask, my wants are few, I only ask a hut of stone.

I should not have known, in England, that he was already asking for a good deal even in asking for that.

In the presence of this wooden world the very combination of words seems almost a contradiction, like a hut of marble, or a hovel of gold.

It was therefore with an almost infantile pleasure that I looked at all this promising expansion of fresh-cut timber and thought of the housing shortage at home.

I know not by what incongruous movement of the mind there swept across me, at the same moment, the thought of things ancestral and hoary with the light of ancient dawns.

The last war brought back body-armour; the next war may bring back bows and arrows.

And I suddenly had a memory of old wooden houses in London; and a model of Shakespeare's town.

It is possible indeed that such Elizabethan memories may receive a check or a chill when the traveller comes, as he sometimes does, to the outskirts of one of these strange hamlets of new frame-houses, and is confronted with a placard inscribed in enormous letters, 'Watch Us Grow.'

He can always imagine that he sees the timbers swelling before his eyes like pumpkins in some super-tropical summer.

But he may have formed the conviction that no such proclamation could be found outside Shakespeare's town.

And indeed there is a serious criticism here, to any one who knows history; since the things that grow are not always the things that remain; and pumpkins of that expansiveness have a tendency to burst.

I was always told that Americans were harsh, hustling, rather rude and perhaps vulgar; but they were very practical and the future belonged to them.

I confess I felt a fine shade of difference; I liked the Americans; I thought they were sympathetic, imaginative, and full of fine enthusiasms; the one thing I could not always feel clear about was their future.

I believe they were happier in their frame-houses than most people in most houses; having democracy, good education, and a hobby of work; the one doubt that did float across me was something like, 'Will all this be here at all in two hundred years?'

That was the first impression produced by the wooden houses that seemed like the waggons of gipsies; it is a serious impression, but there is an answer to it.

It is an answer that opens on the traveller more and more as he goes westward, and finds the little towns dotted about the vast central prairies.

And the answer is agriculture.

Wooden houses may or may not last; but farms will last; and farming will always last.

The houses may look like gipsy caravans on a heath or common; but they are not on a heath or common.

They are on the most productive and prosperous land, perhaps, in the modern world.

The houses might fall down like shanties, but the fields would remain; and whoever tills those fields will count for a great deal in the affairs of humanity.

They are already counting for a great deal, and possibly for too much, in the affairs of America.

The real criticism of the Middle West is concerned with two facts, neither of which has been yet adequately appreciated by the educated class in England.

The first is that the turn of the world has come, and the turn of the agricultural countries with it.

That is the meaning of the resurrection of Ireland; that is the meaning of the practical surrender of the Bolshevist Jews to the Russian peasants.

The other is that in most places these peasant societies carry on what may be called the Catholic tradition.

The Middle West is perhaps the one considerable place where they still carry on the Puritan tradition.

But the Puritan tradition was originally a tradition of the town; and the second truth about the Middle West turns largely on its moral relation to the town.

As I shall suggest presently, there is much in common between this agricultural society of America and the great agricultural societies of Europe.

It tends, as the agricultural society nearly always does, to some decent degree of democracy.

The agricultural society tends to the agrarian law.

But in Puritan America there is an additional problem, which I can hardly explain without a periphrasis.

There was a time when the progress of the cities seemed to mock the decay of the country.

It is more and more true, I think, to-day that it is rather the decay of the cities that seems to poison the progress and promise of the countryside.

The cinema boasts of being a substitute for the tavern, but I think it a very bad substitute.

I think so quite apart from the question about fermented liquor.

Nobody enjoys cinemas more than I, but to enjoy them a man has only to look and not even to listen, and in a tavern he has to talk.

Occasionally, I admit, he has to fight;

but he need never move at the movies.

Thus in the real village inn are the real village politics, while in the other are only the remote and unreal metropolitan politics.

And those central city politics are not only cosmopolitan politics but corrupt politics.

They corrupt everything that they reach, and this is the real point about many perplexing questions.