Books: Letters from America
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Rupert Brooke >> Letters from America
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Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night. There comes an hour
of evening when lower Broadway, the business end of the town, is
deserted. And if, having felt yourself immersed in men and the frenzy of
cities all day, you stand out in the street in this sudden hush, you
will hear, like a strange questioning voice from another world, the
melancholy boom of a foghorn, and realise that not half a mile away are
the waters of the sea, and some great liner making its slow way out to
the Atlantic. After that, the lights come out up-town, and the New York
of theatres and vaudevilles and restaurants begins to roar and flare.
The merciless lights throw a mask of unradiant glare on the human beings
in the streets, making each face hard, set, wolfish, terribly blue. The
chorus of voices becomes shriller. The buildings tower away into
obscurity, looking strangely theatrical, because lit from below. And
beyond them soars the purple roof of the night. A stranger of another
race, loitering here, might cast his eyes up, in a vague wonder what
powers, kind or maleficent, controlled or observed this whirlpool. He
would find only this unresponsive canopy of black, unpierced even, if
the seeker stood near a centre of lights, by any star. But while he
looks, away up in the sky, out of the gulfs of night, spring two vast
fiery tooth-brushes, erect, leaning towards each other, and hanging on
to the bristles of them a little Devil, little but gigantic, who kicks
and wriggles and glares. After a few moments the Devil, baffled by the
firmness of the bristles, stops, hangs still, rolls his eyes, moon-
large, and, in a fury of disappointment, goes out, leaving only the
night, blacker and a little bewildered, and the unconscious throngs of
ant-like human beings. Turning with terrified relief from this
exhibition of diabolic impotence, the stranger finds a divine hand
writing slowly across the opposite quarter of the heavens its igneous
message of warning to the nations, "Wear--Underwear for Youths and Men-
Boys." And close by this message come forth a youth and a man-boy,
flaming and immortal, clad in celestial underwear, box a short round,
vanish, reappear for another round, and again disappear. Night after
night they wage this combat. What gods they are who fight endlessly and
indecisively over New York is not for our knowledge; whether it be Thor
and Odin, or Zeus and Cronos, or Michael and Lucifer, or Ormuzd and
Ahriman, or Good-as-a-means and Good-as-an-end. The ways of our lords
were ever riddling and obscure. To the right a celestial bottle,
stretching from the horizon to the zenith, appears, is uncorked, and
scatters the worlds with the foam of what ambrosial liquor may have
been within. Beyond, a Spanish goddess, some minor deity in the
Dionysian theogony, dances continually, rapt and mysterious, to the
music of the spheres, her head in Cassiopeia and her twinkling feet
among the Pleiades. And near her, Orion, archer no longer, releases
himself from his strained posture to drive a sidereal golf-ball out of
sight through the meadows of Paradise; then poses, addresses, and drives
again.
"O Nineveh, are these thy gods,
Thine also, mighty Nineveh?"
Why this theophany, or how the gods have got out to perform their
various 'stunts' on the _flammantia moenia mundi_, is not asked by
their incurious devotees. Through Broadway the dingily glittering tide
spreads itself over the sands of 'amusement.' Theatres and 'movies' are
aglare. Cars shriek down the street; the Elevated train clangs and
curves perilously overhead; newsboys wail the baseball news; wits cry
their obscure challenges to one another, 'I should worry!' or 'She's
some Daisy!' or 'Good-night, Nurse!' In houses off the streets around
children are being born, lovers are kissing, people are dying. Above, in
the midst of those coruscating divinities, sits one older and greater
than any. Most colossal of all, it flashes momently out, a woman's head,
all flame against the darkness. It is beautiful, passionless, in its
simplicity and conventional representation queerly like an archaic Greek
or early Egyptian figure. Queen of the night behind, and of the gods
around, and of the city below--here, if at all, you think, may one find
the answer to the riddle. Her ostensible message, burning in the
firmament beside her, is that we should buy pepsin chewing-gum. But
there is more, not to be given in words, ineffable. Suddenly, when she
has surveyed mankind, she closes her left eye. Three times she winks,
and then vanishes. No ordinary winks these, but portentous, terrifyingly
steady, obliterating a great tract of the sky. Hour by hour she does
this, night by night, year by year. That enigmatic obscuration of light,
that answer that is no answer, is, perhaps, the first thing in this
world that a child born near here will see, and the last that a dying
man will have to take for a message to the curious dead. She is
immortal. Men have worshipped her as Isis and as Ashtaroth, as Venus, as
Cybele, Mother of the Gods, and as Mary. There is a statue of her by
the steps of the British Museum. Here, above the fantastic civilisation
she observes, she has no name. She is older than the sky-scrapers
amongst which she sits; and one, certainly, of her eyelids is a trifle
weary. And the only answer to our cries, the only comment upon our
cities, is that divine stare, the wink, once, twice, thrice. And then
darkness.
IV
BOSTON AND HARVARD
It is right to leave Boston late in a summer afternoon, and by sea.
Naval departure is always the better. A train snatches you, hot, dusty,
and smoky, with an irritated hurry out of the back parts of a town. The
last glimpse of a place you may have grown to like or love is, ignobly,
interminable rows of the bedroom-windows in mean streets, a few hovels,
some cinder-heaps, and a factory chimney. As like as not, you are reft
from a last wave to the city's unresponsive and dingy back by the roar
and suffocation of a tunnel. By sea one takes a gracefuller, more
satisfactory farewell.
Boston put on her best appearance to watch our boat go out for New York.
The harbour was bright with sunlight and blue water and little white
sails, and there wasn't more than the faintest smell of tea. The city
sat primly on her little hills, decorous, civilised, European-looking.
It is homely after New York. The Boston crowd is curiously English.
They have nice eighteenth-century houses there, and ivy grows on the
buildings. And they are hospitable. All Americans are hospitable; but
they haven't _quite_ time in New York to practise the art so
perfectly as the Bostonians. It is a lovely art.... But Boston also
makes you feel at home without meaning to. A delicious ancient Toryism
is to be found here. "What is wrong with America," a middle-aged lady
told me, "is this _Democracy_. They ought to take the votes away
from these people, who don't know how to use them, and give them only to
_us_, the Educated." My heart leapt the Atlantic, and was in a
Cathedral or University town of South England.
Yet Boston is alive. It sits, in comfortable middle-age, on the ruins of
its glory. But it is not buried beneath them. It used to lead America in
Literature, Thought, Art, everything. The years have passed. It is
remarkable how nearly now Boston is to New York what Munich is to
Berlin. Boston and Munich were the leaders forty years ago. They can't
quite make out that they aren't now. It is too incredible that Art
should leave her goose-feather bed and away to the wraggle-taggle
business-men. And certainly, if Berlin and New York are more 'live,'
Boston and Munich are more themselves, less feverishly imitations of
Paris. But the undisputed palm is there no more; and its absence is
felt.
But I had little time to taste Boston itself. I was lured across the
river to a place called Cambridge, where is the University of Harvard.
Harvard is the Oxford and Cambridge of America, they claim. She has
moulded the nation's leaders and uttered its ideals. Harvard, Boston,
New England, it is impossible to say how much they are interwoven, and
how they have influenced America. I saw Harvard in 'Commencement,' which
is Eights Week and May Week, the festive winding-up of the year, a time
of parties and of valedictions. One of the great events of Commencement,
and of the year, is the Harvard-Yale baseball match. To this I went,
excited at the prospect of my first sight of a 'ball game,' and my mind
vaguely reminiscent of the indolent, decorous, upper-class crowd, the
sunlit spaces, the dignified ritual, and white-flannelled grace of
Lord's at the 'Varsity cricket match. The crowd was gay, and not very
large. We sat in wooden stands, which were placed in the shape of a
large V. As all the hitting which counts in baseball takes place well in
front of the wicket, so to speak, the spectators have the game right
under their noses; the striker stands in the angle of the V and plays
outwards. The field was a vast place, partly stubbly grass, partly worn
and patchy, like a parade-ground. Beyond it lay the river; beyond that
the town of Cambridge and the University buildings. Around me were
undergraduates, with their mothers and sisters. 'Cambridge'! ... but
there entered to us, across the field, a troop of several hundred men,
all dressed in striped shirts of the same hue and pattern, and headed by
a vast banner which informed the world that they were the graduates of
1910, celebrating their triennial. In military formation they moved
across the plain towards us, led by a band, ceaselessly vociferating,
and raising their straw hats in unison to mark the time. There followed
the class of 1907, attired as sailors; 1903, the decennial class, with
some samples of their male children marching with them, and a banner
inscribed "515 Others. No Race Suicide"; 1898, carefully arranged in an
H-shaped formation, dancing along to their music with a slow polka-step,
each with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front, and at the
head of all their leader, dancing backwards in perfect time, marshalling
them; 1888, middle-aged men, again with some children, and a Highland
regiment playing the bagpipes.
When these had passed to the seats allotted for them, I had time to
observe the players, who were practising about the ground, and I was
shocked. They wear dust-coloured shirts and dingy knickerbockers,
fastened under the knee, and heavy boots. They strike the English eye as
being attired for football, or a gladiatorial combat, rather than a
summer game. The very close-fitting caps, with large peaks, give them
picturesquely the appearance of hooligans. Baseball is a good game to
watch, and in outline easy to understand, as it is merely glorified
rounders. A cricketer is fascinated by their rapidity and skill in
catching and throwing. There is excitement in the game, but little
beauty except in the long-limbed 'pitcher,' whose duty it is to hurl the
ball rather further than the length of a cricket-pitch, as bewilderingly
as possible. In his efforts to combine speed, mystery, and curve, he
gets into attitudes of a very novel and fantastic, but quite obvious,
beauty. M. Nijinsky would find them repay study.
One queer feature of this sport is that unoccupied members of the
batting side, fielders, and even spectators, are accustomed to join in
vocally. You have the spectacle of the representatives of the
universities endeavouring to frustrate or unnerve their opponents, at
moments of excitement, by cries of derision and mockery, or heartening
their own supporters and performers with exclamations of 'Now, Joe!' or
'He's got them!' or 'He's the boy!' At the crises in the fortunes of the
game, the spectators take a collective and important part. The Athletic
Committee appoints a 'cheer-leader' for the occasion. Every five or ten
minutes this gentleman, a big, fine figure in white, springs out from
his seat at the foot of the stands, addresses the multitude through a
megaphone with a 'One! Two! Three!' hurls it aside, and, with a wild
flinging and swinging of his body and arms, conducts ten thousand voices
in the Harvard yell. That over, the game proceeds, and the cheer-leader
sits quietly waiting for the next moment of peril or triumph. I shall
not easily forget that figure, bright in the sunshine, conducting with
his whole body, passionate, possessed by a demon, bounding in the
frenzy of his inspiration from side to side, contorted, rhythmic,
ecstatic. It seemed so wonderfully American, in its combination of
entire wildness and entire regulation, with the whole just a trifle
fantastic. Completely friendly and befriended as I was, I couldn't help
feeling at those moments very alien and very, very old--even more so
than after the protracted game had ended in a victory for Harvard, when
the dusty plain was filled with groups and lines of men dancing in
solemn harmony, and a shouting crowd, broken by occasional individuals
who could find some little eminence to lead a Harvard yell from, and who
conducted the bystanders, and then vanished, and the crowd swirled on
again.
Different enough was the scene next day, when all Harvard men who were
up for Commencement assembled and, arranged by years, marched round the
yard. Class by class they paraded, beginning with veterans of the
'fifties, down to the class of 1912. I wonder if English nerves could
stand it. It seems to bring the passage of time so very presently and
vividly to the mind. To see, with such emphatic regularity, one's
coevals changing in figure, and diminishing in number, summer after
summer!.... Perhaps it is nobler, this deliberate viewing of oneself as
part of the stream. To the spectator, certainly, the flow and transiency
become apparent and poignant. In five minutes fifty years of America, of
so much of America, go past one. The shape of the bodies, apart from the
effects of age, the lines of the faces, the ways of wearing hair and
beard and moustaches, all these change a little decade by decade, before
your eyes. And through the whole appearance runs some continuity, which
is Harvard.
The orderly progression of the years was unbroken, except at one point.
There was one gap, large and arresting. Though all years were
represented, there seemed to be nobody in the procession between fifty
and sixty. I asked a Harvard friend the reason. "The War," he said. He
told me there had always been that gap. Those who were old enough to be
conscious of the war had lost a big piece of their lives. With their
successors a new America began. I don't know how true it is. Certainly,
the dates worked out right. And I met an American on a boat who had been
a child in one of the neutral States. He used to watch the regiments
forming in the main street of his town, and marching out, some north
and some south. He said it felt as though pieces of his body were being
torn in different directions. And he was only nine.
The procession filed in to an open court, to hear the speeches of the
recipients of honorary degrees, and the President's annual statement.
There was still, in every sense, a solemn atmosphere. The President's
speech floated out into the great open space; fragments of it were blown
to one's ears concerning deaths, and the spirit of the place, and a
detailed account of the money given during the year. Eleven hundred
thousand dollars in all--a record, or nearly a record. We roared
applause. The American universities appear still to dream of the things
of this world. They keep putting up the most wonderful and expensive
buildings. But they do not pay their teachers well.
Yet Harvard is a spirit, a way of looking at things, austerely refined,
gently moral, kindly. The perception of it grows on the foreigner. Its
charm is so deliciously old in this land, so deliciously young compared
with the lovely frowst of Oxford and Cambridge. You see it in
temperament, the charm of simplicity and good-heartedness and culture;
in the Harvard undergraduate, who is a boy, while his English
contemporary is either a young man or a schoolboy, less pleasant
stages; and in the old Bostonian who heard, and still hears, the
lectures of Dickens and Thackeray. Class Day brings so many of that
older generation together. They reveal what Harvard, what Boston, was.
There is something terrifying in the completeness of their lives and
their civilisation. They are like a company of dons whose studies are of
a remote and finished world. But the subject of their scholarship is the
Victorian age, and especially Victorian England. Hence their liveliness
and certainty, greater than men can reach who are concerned with the
dubieties and changes of incomplete things. Hence the wit, the stock of
excellent stories, the wrinkled wisdom and mirth of the type. They are
the flower of a civilisation, its ripest critics, and final judges.
Carlyle and Emerson are their greatest living heroes. One of them bent
the kindliness and alert interest of his eighty years upon me. "So you
come from Rugby," he said. "Tell me, do you know that curious creature,
Matthew Arnold?" I couldn't bring myself to tell him that, even in
Rugby, we had forgiven that brilliant youth his iconoclastic tendencies
some time since, and that, as a matter of fact, he had died when I was
eight months old.
V
MONTREAL AND OTTAWA
My American friends were full of kindly scorn when I announced that I
was going to Canada. 'A country without a soul!' they cried, and pressed
books upon me, to befriend me through that Philistine bleakness. Their
commiseration unnerved me, but I was heartened by a feeling that I was,
in a sense, going home, and by the romance of journeying. There was
romance in the long grim American train, in the great lake we passed in
the blackest of nights, and could just see glinting behind dark trees;
in the negro car-attendant; in the boy who perpetually cried: 'Pea-nuts!
Candy!' up and down the long carriages; in the lofty box they put me in
to sleep; and in the fat old lady who had the berth under mine, and
snored shrilly the whole night through. There was almost romance, even,
in the fact that after all there was no restaurant-car on the train;
and, having walked all day in the country, I dined off an orange. I
suppose an Englishman in another country, if he is simple enough, is
continually and alternately struck by two thoughts: 'How like England
this is!' and 'How unlike England this is!' When I had woken next
morning, and, lying on my back, had got inside my clothes with a series
of fish-like jumps, I found myself looking with startled eyes out of the
window at the largest river I had ever seen. It was blue, and sunlit,
and it curved spaciously. But beyond that we ran into the squalider
parts of a city. It became immediately obvious that we were not in New
York or Boston or any of the more orderly, the rather foreign, cities of
America. There was something in the untidiness of those grimy houses,
the smoky disorder of the backyards, that ran a thrill of nostalgia
through me. I recognised the English way of doing things--with a
difference that I could not define till later.
Determined to be in all ways the complete tourist, I took a rough
preliminary survey of Montreal in an 'observation-car.' It was a large
motor-wagonette, from which everything in Montreal could be seen in two
hours. We were a most fortuitous band of twenty, who had elected so to
see it. Our guide addressed us from the front through a small
megaphone, telling us what everything was, what we were to be interested
in, what to overlook, what to admire. He seemed the exact type of a
spiritual pastor and master, shepherding his stolid and perplexed flock
on a regulated path through the dust and clatter of the world. And the
great hollow device out of which our instruction proceeded was so
perfectly a blind mouth. I had never understood _Lycidas_ before.
We were sheepish enough, and fairly hungry. However, we were excellently
fed. "On the right, ladies and gentlemen, is the Bank of Montreal; on
the left the Presbyterian Church of St Andrew's; on the right, again,
the well-designed residence of Sir Blank Blank; further on, on the same
side, the Art Museum...." The outcome of it all was a vague general
impression that Montreal consists of banks and churches. The people of
this city spend much of their time in laying up their riches in this
world or the next. Indeed, the British part of Montreal is dominated by
the Scotch race; there is a Scotch spirit sensible in the whole place--
in the rather narrow, rather gloomy streets, the solid, square, grey,
aggressively prosperous buildings, the general greyness of the city, the
air of dour prosperity. Even the Canadian habit of loading the streets
with heavy telephone wires, supported by frequent black poles, seemed to
increase the atmospheric resemblance to Glasgow.
But besides all this there is a kind of restraint in the air, due,
perhaps, to a state of affairs which, more than any other, startles the
ordinary ignorant English visitor. The average man in England has an
idea of Canada as a young-eyed daughter State, composed of millions of
wheat-growers and backwoodsmen of British race. It surprises him to
learn that more than a quarter of the population is of French descent,
that many of them cannot speak English, that they control a province,
form the majority in the biggest city in Canada, and are a perpetual
complication in the national politics. Even a stranger who knows this is
startled at the complete separateness of the two races. Inter-marriage
is very rare. They do not meet socially; only on business, and that not
often. In the same city these two communities dwell side by side, with
different traditions, different languages, different ideals, without
sympathy or comprehension. The French in Canada are entirely devoted to--
some say under the thumb of--the Roman Catholic Church. They seem like
a piece of the Middle Ages, dumped after a trans-secular journey into a
quite uncompromising example of our commercial time. Some of their
leaders are said to have dreams of a French Republic--or theocracy--on
the banks of the St Lawrence. How this, or any other, solution of the
problem is to come about, no man knows. Racial difficulties are the most
enduring of all. The French and British in Canada seem to have behaved
with quite extraordinary generosity and kindliness towards each other.
No one is to blame. But it is not in human nature that two communities
should live side by side, pretending they are one, without some
irritation and mutual loss of strength. There is no open strife. But
'incidents,' and the memory of incidents, bear continual witness to the
truth of the situation. And racial disagreement is at the bottom, often
unconsciously, of many political and social movements. Sir Wilfrid
Laurier performed a miracle. But no one of French birth will ever again
be Premier of Canada.
Montreal and Eastern Canada suffer from that kind of ill-health which
afflicts men who are cases of 'double personality'--debility and
spiritual paralysis. The 'progressive' British-Canadian man of commerce
is comically desperate of peasants who _will not_ understand that
increase of imports and volume of trade and numbers of millionaires are
the measures of a city's greatness; and to his eye the Roman Catholic
Church, with her invaluable ally Ignorance, keeps up her incessant war
against the general good of the community of which she is part. So
things remain.
I made my investigations in Montreal. I have to report that the
Discobolus [Footnote: See Samuel Butler's poem, "Oh God! oh Montreal!"
--Ed.] is very well, and, nowadays, looks the whole world in the face,
almost quite unabashed. West of Montreal, the country seems to take on a
rather more English appearance. There is still a French admixture. But
the little houses are not purely Gallic, as they are along the Lower St
Lawrence; and once or twice I detected real hedges.
Ottawa came as a relief after Montreal. There is no such sense of strain
and tightness in the atmosphere. The British, if not greatly in the
majority, are in the ascendency; also, the city seems conscious of other
than financial standards, and quietly, with dignity, aware of her own
purpose. The Canadians, like the Americans, chose to have for their
capital a city which did not lead in population or in wealth. This is
particularly fortunate in Canada, an extremely individualistic country,
whose inhabitants are only just beginning to be faintly conscious of
their nationality. Here, at least, Canada is more than the Canadian. A
man desiring to praise Ottawa would begin to do so without statistics of
wealth and the growth of population; and this can be said of no other
city in Canada except Quebec. Not that there are not immense lumber-
mills and the rest in Ottawa. But the Government farm, and the
Parliament buildings, are more important. Also, although the 'spoils'
system obtains a good deal in this country, the nucleus of the Civil
Service is much the same as in England; so there is an atmosphere of
Civil Servants about Ottawa, an atmosphere of safeness and honour and
massive buildings and well-shaded walks. After all, there is in the
qualities of Civility and Service much beauty, of a kind which would
adorn Canada.
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