Part 11 (1/2)
And still their devious course pursue, To keep the paths that others do.
But how the wise old wood-G.o.ds laugh Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah, many things this tale might teach--But I am not ordained to preach.
PHILADELPHIA
I was fortunate in the city over which William Penn, in giant effigy, keeps watch and ward, in having as guide, philosopher and friend Mr.
A. Edward Newton, the Johnsonian, and the author of one of the best examples of ”amateur” literature that I know--”The Amenities of Book-Collecting.” Mr. Newton took me everywhere, even to the little seventeenth-century Swedish church, which architecturally may be described as the antipodes of Philadelphia's newer glory, the Curtis Building, where editors are lodged like kings and can be attained to (if at all) only through marble halls. We went to St. Peter's, where, suddenly awaking during the sermon, one would think oneself to be in a London city church, and to the Historical Museum, where I found among the Quaker records many of my own ancestors and was bewildered amid such a profusion of relics of Penn, Was.h.i.+ngton and Franklin. In the old library were more traces of Franklin, including his famous electrical appliance, again testifying to the white flame with which American hero-wors.h.i.+p can burn; and we found the sagacious Benjamin once more at the Franklin Inn Club, where the simplicity of the eighteenth century mingles with the humour and culture of the twentieth. We then drove through several miles of Fairmount Park, stopping for a few minutes in the hope of finding the late J. G. Johnson's Vermeer in the gallery there; but for the moment it was in hiding, the walls being devoted to his Italian pictures.
Finally we drew up at the gates of that strange and imposing Corinthian temple which might have been dislodged from its original site and hurled to Philadelphia by the first Quaker, Poseidon--the Girard College. This solemn fane we were permitted to enter only on convincing the porter that we were not ministers of religion--an easy enough task for Mr.
Newton, who wears with grace the natural abandon of a Voltairean, but a difficult one for me. Why Stephen Girard, the worthy ”merchant and mariner” who endowed this inst.i.tution, was so suspicious of the cloth, no matter what its cut, I do not know; no doubt he had his reasons; but his prejudices are faithfully respected by his janitor, whose eye is a very gimlet of suspicion. However, we got in and saw the philanthropist's tomb and his household effects behind those ma.s.sive columns.
That evening I spent in Mr. Newton's library among Blake and Lamb and Johnson autographs and MSS., breaking the Tenth Commandment with a recklessness that would have satisfied and delighted Stephen Girard's gatekeeper; and the next day we were off to Valley Forge to see with what imaginative thoughtfulness the Government has been transforming Was.h.i.+ngton's camp into a national park and restoring the old landmarks.
It was a fine spring day and the woods were flecked with the white and pink blossoms of the dogwood--a tree which in England is only an inconspicuous hedgerow bush but here has both charm and importance and some of the unexpectedness of a tropical growth. I wish we could acclimatise it.
The memorial chapel now in course of completion on one of the Valley Forge eminences seemed to me a very admirable example not only of modern Gothic but of votive piety. And such a wealth of American symbolism cannot exist elsewhere. But in the severe little cottage where Was.h.i.+ngton made his headquarters, down by the stream, with all his frugal campaigning furniture and accessories in their old places, I felt more emotion than in the odour of sanct.i.ty. The simple reality of it conquered the stained gla.s.s.
GENERAL REFLECTIONS
Looking back on it all I realise that America never struck me as a new country, although its inhabitants often seemed to be a new people. The cities are more mature than the citizens. New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Was.h.i.+ngton--all have an air of permanence and age. The buildings, even the most fantastic, suggest indigenousness, or at least stability; nor would the presence of more ancient structures increase this effect. To the eye of the ordinary Englishman accustomed to work in what we call the City, in Fleet Street, in the Strand, in Piccadilly, or in Oxford Street, New York would not appear to be a younger place than London, and Boston might easily strike him as older. Nor is London more than a little older, except in spots, such as the Tower and the Temple and the Abbey, and that little Tudor row in Holborn, all separated by vast tracts of modernity. Indeed, I would almost go farther and say that London sets up an illusion of being newer even than New York by reason of its more disturbing street traffic both in the roads and on the footways, and the prevalence of the gaily coloured omnibuses which thunder along so many thoroughfares in notable contrast with the sedate and sober vehicles that serve Fifth Avenue and are hardly seen elsewhere.
Meanwhile an illusion of antiquity is set up by New York's habit of commingling business houses and private residences, which surely belongs to an older order of society. In London we have done away with such a blend. Our nearest approach to Fifth Avenue is, I suppose, Regent Street; but there are no mansions among the shops of Regent Street. Our shops are there and our mansions are elsewhere, far away, in what we call residential quarters--such as Park Lane, Queen's Gate, Mayfair, the Bayswater Road, and Grosvenor Square. To turn out of Fifth Avenue into the quiet streets where people live is to receive a distinct impression of sedateness such as New York is never supposed to convey. One has the same feeling in the other great American cities.
But when it comes to their inhabitants there are to the English eye fewer signs of maturity. I have never been able to get rid of the idea that every one I have met in America, no matter how grave a senior, instead of being really and self-consciously in the thick of life, is only getting ready to begin. Perhaps this is due in part to the pleasure--the excitement almost--which American business men--and all Americans are business men--take in their work. They not merely do it, but they enjoy doing it and they watch themselves doing it. They seem to have a knack of withdrawing aside and observing themselves as from the stalls, not without applause. In other words, they dramatise continually. Now, one does not do this when one is old--it is a childish game--and it is another proof that they are younger than we, who do not enjoy our work, and indeed, most of us, are ashamed of it and want the world to believe that we live like the lilies on private means.
Similarly, many Americans seem, when they talk, to be two persons: one the talker, and the other the listener charmed by the quality of his discourse. There is nothing detrimental in such duplicity. Indeed, I think I have a very real envy of it. But one of the defects of the listening habit is perhaps to make them too rhetorical, too verbose. It is odd that the nation that has given us so much epigrammatic slang and the telegraph and the telephone and the typewriter should have so little of what might be called intellectual short-hand. But so it is. Too many Americans are remorseless when they are making themselves clear.