Part 6 (2/2)

Paul's--”Dead,” I muttered, as I looked at its derivative facade,--I went in to take breath. From the end of the vast, cold s.p.a.ce came the dreary wail I remembered so well. I had heard Church music at Moscow, and knew what it ought to be. But the tremendous pa.s.sion of that Eastern plain-song would have offended these discreet walls. I was in a ”sacred edifice”; and with a pang of regret I recalled the wooden shrines of j.a.pan under the great trees, the solemn Buddhas, and the crowds of cheerful wors.h.i.+ppers. I walked down the empty nave and came under the dome. Then something happened--the thing that always happens when one comes into touch with the work of a genius. And Wren's dome proves that he was that. I sat down, and the organ began to play; or rather, the dome began to sing. And down the stream of music floated in fragments visions of my journey--Indians nude like bronzes, blue-coated Chinese, white robes and bare limbs from j.a.pan, plains of corn, plains of rice, plains of scorched gra.s.s; snow-peaks under the stars, volcanoes, green and black; huge rivers, tumbling streams, waterfalls, lakes, the ocean; hovels and huts of wood or sun-dried bricks, thatched or tiled; marble palaces and baths; red lacquer, golden tiles; saints, kings, conquerors, and, enduring or wors.h.i.+pping these, a myriad generations of peasants through long millenniums, toiling, suffering, believing, in one unchanging course of life, before the dawn of history on and down to here and now. As they were, so they are; and I heard them sound as with the drone of Oriental music. Then above that drone something new appeared. Late in time, Western history emerged, and--astonis.h.i.+ng thing--began to move and change! ”Why,” I said, ”there's something trying to happen! What is it? Is there going to be a melody?” There was not one. But there was--has the reader ever heard the second--or is it the third?--overture to ”Leonora”? A scale begins to run up, first on the violins; then one by one the other instruments join in, till the great ba.s.ses are swept into the current and run and scale too. So it was here. The West began; but the East caught it up. The unchanging drone began to move and flow. Faster and faster, louder and louder, more and more intensely, crying and flaming towards--what? Beethoven knew, and put it into his music. We cannot put it into ideas or words. We can see the problem, not the solution; and the problem is this. To reconcile the Western flight down Time with the Eastern rest in Eternity; the Western multiformity with the Eastern ident.i.ty; the Western energy with the Eastern peace. For G.o.d is neither Time nor Eternity, but Time in Eternity; neither One nor Many, but One in Many; neither Spirit nor Matter, but Matter-Spirit. That the great artists know, and the great saints; the modern artists and the modern saints, who have been or who will be. Goethe was one; Beethoven was one; and there will be greater, when the contact between East and West becomes closer, and the sparks from pole to pole fly faster.

I had dropped into mere thinking, and realised that the organ had stopped. I left the great church and came out upon the back of Queen Anne, which made me laugh. Still, it was quite religious; so were the 'buses, and the motor-cars, and the shops and offices, and the Law Courts, and the top-hats, and the crossing-sweepers. ”Dear people,” I said, ”you are not dead, any more than I am. You think you are, as I too often do. When you feel dead you should go to church; but not in a 'sacred edifice.' Beethoven, even in the Queen's Hall, is better.”

PART IV

AMERICA

I

THE ”DIVINE AVERAGE”

The great countries of the East have each a civilisation that is original, if not independent. India, China, j.a.pan, each has a peculiar outlook on the world. Not so America, at any rate in the north. America, we might say, does not exist; there exists instead an offshoot of Europe. Nor does an ”American spirit” exist; there exists instead the spirit of the average Western man. Americans are immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Putting aside the negroes and a handful of orientals, there is nothing to be found here that is not to be found in Western Europe; only here what thrives is not what is distinctive of the different European countries, but what is common to them all. What America does, not, of course, in a moment, but with incredible rapidity, is to obliterate distinctions. The Scotchman, the Irishman, the German, the Scandinavian, the Italian, even, I suppose, the Czech, drops his costume, his manner, his language, his traditions, his beliefs, and retains only his common Western humanity. Transported to this continent all the varieties developed in Europe revert to the original type, and flourish in unexampled vigour and force. It is not a new type that is evolved; it is the fundamental type, growing in a new soil, in luxuriant profusion. Describe the average Western man and you describe the American; from east to west, from north to south, everywhere and always the same--masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, at once good-natured and brutal, kind if you do not cross him, ruthless if you do, greedy, ambitious, self-reliant, active for the sake of activity, intelligent and unintellectual, quick-witted and cra.s.s, contemptuous of ideas but amorous of devices, valuing nothing but success, recognising nothing but the actual, Man in the concrete, undisturbed by spiritual life, the master of methods and slave of things, and therefore the conqueror of the world, the unquestioning, the undoubting, the child with the muscles of a man, the European stripped bare, and shown for what he is, a predatory, unreflecting, naf, precociously accomplished brute.

One does not then find in America anything one does not find in Europe; but one finds in Europe what one does not find in America. One finds, as well as the average, what is below and what is above it. America has, broadly speaking, no waste products. The wreckage, everywhere evident in Europe, is not evident there. Men do not lose their self-respect, they win it; they do not drop out, they work in. This is the great result not of American inst.i.tutions or ideas, but of American opportunities. It is the poor immigrant who ought to sing the praises of this continent. He alone has the proper point of view; and he, unfortunately, is dumb. But often, when I have contemplated with dreary disgust, in the outskirts of New York, the hideous wooden shanties planted askew in wastes of garbage, and remembered Naples or Genoa or Venice, suddenly it has been borne in upon me that the Italians living there feel that they have their feet on the ladder leading to paradise; that for the first time they have before them a prospect and a hope; and that while they have lost, or are losing, their manners, their beauty and their charm, they have gained something which, in their eyes, and perhaps in reality, more than compensates for losses they do not seem to feel, they have gained self-respect, independence, and the allure of the open horizon. ”The vision of America,” a friend writes, ”is the vision of the lifting up of the millions.” This, I believe, is true, and it is America's great contribution to civilisation. I do not forget it; but neither shall I dwell upon it; for though it is, I suppose, the most important thing about America, it is not what I come across in my own experience. What strikes more often and more directly home to me is the other fact that America, if she is not burdened by ma.s.ses lying below the average, is also not inspired by an elite rising above it. Her distinction is the absence of distinction. No wonder Walt Whitman sang the ”Divine Average.” There was nothing else in America for him to sing. But he should not have called it divine; he should have called it ”human, all too human.”

Or _is_ it divine? Divine somehow in its potentialities? Divine to a deeper vision than mine? I was writing this at Brooklyn, in a room that looks across the East River to New York. And after putting down those words, ”human, all too human,” I stepped out on to the terrace. Across the gulf before me went shooting forward and back interminable rows of fiery shuttles; and on its surface seemed to float blazing basilicas.

Beyond rose into the darkness a dazzling tower of light, dusking and s.h.i.+mmering, primrose and green, up to a diadem of gold. About it hung galaxies and constellations, outs.h.i.+ning the firmament of stars; and all the air was full of strange voices, more than human, ingeminating Babylonian oracles out of the bosom of night. This is New York. This it is that the average man has done, he knows not why; this is the symbol of his work, so much more than himself, so much more than what seems to be itself in the common light of day. America does not know what she is doing, neither do I know, nor any man. But the impulse that drives her, so mean and poor to the critic's eye, has perhaps more significance in the eye of G.o.d; and the optimism of this continent, so seeming-frivolous, is justified, may be, by reason lying beyond its ken.

II

A CONTINENT OF PIONEERS

The American, I said, in the previous letter, is the average Western man. It should be added, he is the average man in the guise of pioneer.

Much that surprises or shocks Europeans in the American character is to be explained, I believe, by this fact. Among pioneers the individual is everything and the society nothing. Every man relies on himself and on his personal relations. He is a friend, and an enemy; he is never a citizen. Justice, order, respect for law, honesty even and honour are to him mere abstract names; what is real is intelligence and force, the service done or the injury inflicted, the direct emotional reaction to persons and deeds. And still, as it seems to the foreign observer, even in the long-settled east, still more in the west, this att.i.tude prevails. To the American politician or business man, that a thing is right or wrong, legal or illegal, seems a pale and irrelevant consideration. The real question is, will it pay? will it please Theophilus P. Polk or vex Harriman Q. Kunz? If it is illegal, will it be detected? If detected, will it be prosecuted? What are our resources for evading or defeating the law? And all this with good temper and good conscience. What stands in the way, says the pioneer, must be swept out of it; no matter whether it be the moral or the civil law, a public authority or a rival in business. ”The strong business man” has no use for scruples. Public or social considerations do not appeal to him. Or if they do present themselves, he satisfies himself with the belief that, from activities so strenuous and remarkable as his, Good must result to the community. If he break the law, that is the fault of the law, for being stupid and obstructive; if he break individuals, that is their fault for being weak. _Vae victis!_ Never has that principle, or rather instinct, ruled more paramount than it does in America.

To say this, is to say that American society is the most individualistic in the modern world. This follows naturally from the whole situation of the country. The pioneer has no object save to get rich; the government of pioneers has no object save to develop the country quickly. To this object everything is sacrificed, including the interests of future generations. All new countries have taken the most obvious and easy course. They have given away for nothing, or for a song, the whole of their natural resources to anybody who will undertake to exploit them.

And those who have appropriated this wealth have judged it to be theirs by a kind of natural right. ”These farms, mines, forests, oilsprings--of course they are ours. Did not we discover them? Did not we squat upon them? Have we not 'mixed our labour with them'?” If pressed as to the claims of later comers they would probably reply that there remains ”as much and as good” for others. And this of course is true for a time; but for a very short time, even when it is a continent that is being divided up. Practically the whole territory of the United States is now in private owners.h.i.+p. Still, the owners have made such good use of their opportunities that they have created innumerable opportunities for non-owners. Artisans get good wages; lawyers make fortunes; stock and share holders get high dividends. Every one feels that he is nouris.h.i.+ng, and flouris.h.i.+ng by his own efforts. He has no need to combine with his fellows; or, if he does combine, is ready to desert them in a moment when he sees his own individual chance.

But this is only a phase; and inevitably, by the logic of events, there supervenes upon it another on which, it would appear, America is just now entering. With all her natural resources distributed among individuals or corporations, and with the tide of immigration unchecked, she begins to feel the first stress of the situation of which the tension in Europe has already become almost intolerable. It is the situation which cannot fail to result from the system of private property and inheritance established throughout the Western world.

Opportunities diminish, cla.s.ses segregate. There arises a caste of wage-earners never to be anything but wage-earners; a caste of property-owners, handing on their property to their descendants; and substantially, after all deductions have been made for exaggeration and simplification, a division of society into capitalists and proletarians.

American society is beginning to crystallise out into the forms of European society. For, once more, America is nothing new; she is a repet.i.tion of the old on a larger scale. And, curiously, she is less ”new” than the other new countries. Australia and New Zealand for years past have been trying experiments in social policy; they are determined to do what they can to prevent the recurrence there of the European situation. But in America, there is no sign of such tendencies. The political and social philosophy of the United States is still that of the early English individualists. And, no doubt, there are adequate causes, if not good reasons for this. The immense wealth and size of the country, the huge agricultural population, the proportionally smaller aggregation in cities has maintained in the ma.s.s of the people what I have called the ”pioneer” att.i.tude. Opportunity has been, and still is, more open than in any other country; and, in consequence, there has hardly emerged a definite ”working cla.s.s” with a cla.s.s consciousness.

This, however, is a condition that cannot be expected to continue.

America will develop on the lines of Europe, because she has European inst.i.tutions; and ”labour” will a.s.sert itself more and more as an independent factor in politics.

Whether it will a.s.sert itself successfully is another matter. At present, as is notorious, American politics are controlled by wealth, more completely, perhaps, than those of any other country, even of England. The ”corporations” make it a main part of their business to capture Congress, the Legislatures, the Courts and the city governments; and they are eminently successful. The smallest country town has its ”boss,” in the employ of the Railway; the Public Service Corporations control the cities; and the protected interests dominate the Senate.

Business governs America; and business does not include labour. In no civilised country except j.a.pan is labour-legislation so undeveloped as in the States; in none is capital so uncontrolled; in none is justice so openly prost.i.tuted to wealth. America is the paradise of plutocracy; for the rich there enjoy not only a real power but a social prestige such as can hardly have been accorded to them even in the worst days of the Roman Empire. Great fortunes and their owners are regarded with a respect as naf and as intense as has ever been conceded to birth in Europe. No American youth of ambition, I am told, leaves college with any less or greater purpose in his heart than that of emulating Mr.

Carnegie or Mr. Rockefeller. And, on the other hand, it must be conceded, rich men feel an obligation to dispose of their wealth for public purposes, to a degree quite unknown in Europe. By these lavish gifts the people are dazzled. They feel that the millionaire has paid his ransom; and are ready to forgive irregularities in the process of acquiring wealth when they are atoned for by such splendid penance. Thus the rich man in America comes to a.s.sume the position of a kind of popular dictator. He is admired on account of his prowess and forgiven on account of his beneficence. And, since every one feels that one day he may have the chance of imitating him, no one judges him too severely.

He is regarded not as the ”exploiter,” the man grown fat on the labour of others. Rather he is the type, the genius of the American people; and they point to him with pride as ”one of our strong men,” ”one of our conservative men of business.”

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