WhatISawInAmerica

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WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIMITED LONDON

MCMXXII

Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD. at the Edinburgh

University Press

Contents

PAGE

WHAT IS AMERICA? 1

A MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 19

A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 33

IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 47

SOME AMERICAN CITIES 63

IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 80

THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 97

PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 121

PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 145

FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 163

THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 182

THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 195

IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 208

LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 222

WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 235

A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 253

THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 267

THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 281

THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 295

What is America?

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the

mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and

imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there

is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the

thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders,

embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead

or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what

they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant

for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond

that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather

an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be

inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw

dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the

abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as

those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the

fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar

manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in

fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if

men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand

each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger—the moment

when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a

meeting meant a duel.

Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travellers

are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. I do not blame

them for being amused; it is perfectly natural to be amused at a

Dutchman for being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where they are

wrong is that they take their own amusement seriously. They base on it

their serious ideas of international instruction. It was said that the

Englishman takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despising

foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He comes to scoff

and does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate. Hence in

international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too

much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely

consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is

actually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is the

only excuse of this book.

Let me begin my American impressions with two impressions I had before I

went to America. One was an incident and the other an idea; and when

taken together they illustrate the attitude I mean. The first principle

is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is

foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong

because it is funny. The reaction of his senses and superficial habits

of mind against something new, and to him abnormal, is a perfectly

healthy reaction. But the mind which imagines that mere unfamiliarity

can possibly prove anything about inferiority is a very inadequate mind.

It is inadequate even in criticising things that may really be inferior

to the things involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro for

having a black face than to sneer at him for having a sloping skull. It

is proportionally even more preferable to laugh rather than judge in

dealing with highly civilised peoples. Therefore I put at the beginning

two working examples of what I felt about America before I saw it; the

sort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy as a joke, and the sort of

thing he has a duty to understand and respect, because it is the

explanation of the joke.

When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports, I was

capable of expecting the American consulate to be American. Embassies

and consulates are by tradition like islands of the soil for which they

stand; and I have often found the tradition corresponding to a truth. I

have seen the unmistakable French official living on omelettes and a

little wine and serving his sacred abstractions under the last

palm-trees fringing a desert. In the heat and noise of quarrelling Turks

and Egyptians, I have come suddenly, as with the cool shock of his own

shower-bath, on the listless amiability of the English gentleman. The

officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very

polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin

Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in

the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all

appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices.

But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up

in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game

called ‘Confessions’ which my friends and I invented in our youth; an

examination paper containing questions like, ‘If you saw a rhinoceros

in the front garden, what would you do?’ One of my friends, I remember,

wrote, ‘Take the pledge.’ But that is another story, and might bring Mr.

Pussyfoot Johnson on the scene before his time.

One of the questions on the paper was, ‘Are you an anarchist?’ To which

a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, ‘What

the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist?’ along with some

playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes an

[Greek: archê]. Then there was the question, ‘Are you in favour of

subverting the government of the United States by force?’ Against this I

should write, ‘I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour

and not the beginning.’ The inquisitor, in his more than morbid

curiosity, had then written down, ‘Are you a polygamist?’ The answer to

this is, ‘No such luck’ or ‘Not such a fool,’ according to our

experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that

given to W. T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, ‘Shall

I slay my brother Boer?’—the answer that ran, ‘Never interfere in

family matters.’ But among many things that amused me almost to the

point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was

the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it

respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip

into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting

down to write with a beautiful gravity, ‘I am an anarchist. I hate you

all and wish to destroy you.’ Or, ‘I intend to subvert by force the

government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long

sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest

opportunity.’ Or again, ‘Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my

forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as

secretaries.’ There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these

answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists

are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and

they are certain to tell no lies.

Now that is a model of the sort of foreign practice, founded on foreign

problems, at which a man’s first impulse is naturally to laugh. Nor have

I any intention of apologising for my laughter. A man is perfectly

entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it

incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as

incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The

very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking

about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and

that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.

Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be easy enough

to suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal spirit

of inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all the

ancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there will be something

to be said later; but superficially it is true that this degree of

officialism is comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only the

year before I had occasion to have my papers passed by governments which

many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and

assassins; I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled

by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one

wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether

I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit

the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of

civil authority. These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did not

care about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally would not have

minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a

polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in

the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire

into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of

practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be easy to

argue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern

despotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop the

fancy that, as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the

American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition.

Only the traveller who stops at that point is totally wrong; and the

traveller only too often does stop at that point. He has found something

to make him laugh, and he will not suffer it to make him think. And the

remedy is not to unsay what he has said, not even, so to speak, to

unlaugh what he has laughed, not to deny that there is something unique

and curious about this American inquisition into our abstract opinions,

but rather to continue the train of thought, and follow the admirable

advice of Mr. H. G. Wells, who said, ‘It is not much good thinking of a

thing unless you think it out.’ It is not to deny that American

officialism is rather peculiar on this point, but to inquire what it

really is which makes America peculiar, or which is peculiar to America.

In short, it is to get some ultimate idea of what America is; and the

answer to that question will reveal something much deeper and grander

and more worthy of our intelligent interest.

It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the

American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it

does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a

compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish

Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only

nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth

with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of

Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also

theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all

men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give

them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It

certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn

atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority

from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern

political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas,

and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim

is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about

divine, at least about human things.

Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the

world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of

all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of

all men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to

exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute

something else for Jewish religion or Greek philosophy. It was truly

said to be a net drawing in of all kinds; but a net of a certain

pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even of

the most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and true

among others of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been narrow

touching theology, it could not confess to being narrow about

nationality or ethnology. The Spanish Inquisition might be admittedly

Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish.

Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be

broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was

heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And

we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for

making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now in

a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the

same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experiment

of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a

melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a

certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The

melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was traced on the lines of

Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it

becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it

implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so

far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious

because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal,

precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And in

something of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist,

precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.

Now for America this is no idle theory. It may have been theoretical,

though it was thoroughly sincere, when that great Virginian gentleman

declared it in surroundings that still had something of the character of

an English countryside. It is not merely theoretical now. There is

nothing to prevent America being literally invaded by Turks, as she is

invaded by Jews or Bulgars. In the most exquisitely inconsequent of the

Bab Ballads, we are told concerning Pasha Bailey Ben:—

One morning knocked at half-past eight

A tall Red Indian at his gate.

In Turkey, as you ‘r’ p’raps aware,

Red Indians are extremely rare.

But the converse need by no means be true. There is nothing in the

nature of things to prevent an emigration of Turks increasing and

multiplying on the plains where the Red Indians wandered; there is

nothing to necessitate the Turks being extremely rare. The Red Indians,

alas, are likely to be rarer. And as I much prefer Red Indians to Turks,

not to mention Jews, I speak without prejudice; but the point here is

that America, partly by original theory and partly by historical

accident, does lie open to racial admixtures which most countries would

think incongruous or comic. That is why it is only fair to read any

American definitions or rules in a certain light, and relatively to a

rather unique position. It is not fair to compare the position of those

who may meet Turks in the back street with that of those who have never

met Turks except in the Bab Ballads. It is not fair simply to compare

America with England in its regulations about the Turk. In short, it is

not fair to do what almost every Englishman probably does; to look at

the American international examination paper, and laugh and be satisfied

with saying, ‘We don’t have any of that nonsense in England.’

We do not have any of that nonsense in England because we have never

attempted to have any of that philosophy in England. And, above all,

because we have the enormous advantage of feeling it natural to be

national, because there is nothing else to be. England in these days is

not well governed; England is not well educated; England suffers from

wealth and poverty that are not well distributed. But England is

English; esto perpetua. England is English as France is French or

Ireland Irish; the great mass of men taking certain national traditions

for granted. Now this gives us a totally different and a very much

easier task. We have not got an inquisition, because we have not got a

creed; but it is arguable that we do not need a creed, because we have

got a character. In any of the old nations the national unity is

preserved by the national type. Because we have a type we do not need to

have a test.

Take that innocent question, ‘Are you an anarchist?’ which is

intrinsically quite as impudent as ‘Are you an optimist?’ or ‘Are you a

philanthropist?’ I am not discussing here whether these things are

right, but whether most of us are in a position to know them rightly.

Now it is quite true that most Englishmen do not find it necessary to go

about all day asking each other whether they are anarchists. It is quite

true that the phrase occurs on no British forms that I have seen. But

this is not only because most of the Englishmen are not anarchists. It

is even more because even the anarchists are Englishmen. For instance,

it would be easy to make fun of the American formula by noting that the

cap would fit all sorts of bald academic heads. It might well be

maintained that Herbert Spencer was an anarchist. It is practically

certain that Auberon Herbert was an anarchist. But Herbert Spencer was

an extraordinarily typical Englishman of the Nonconformist middle class.

And Auberon Herbert was an extraordinarily typical English aristocrat of

the old and genuine aristocracy. Every one knew in his heart that the

squire would not throw a bomb at the Queen, and the Nonconformist would

not throw a bomb at anybody. Every one knew that there was something

subconscious in a man like Auberon Herbert, which would have come out

only in throwing bombs at the enemies of England; as it did come out in

his son and namesake, the generous and unforgotten, who fell flinging

bombs from the sky far beyond the German line. Every one knows that

normally, in the last resort, the English gentleman is patriotic. Every

one knows that the English Nonconformist is national even when he denies

that he is patriotic. Nothing is more notable indeed than the fact that

nobody is more stamped with the mark of his own nation than the man who

says that there ought to be no nations. Somebody called Cobden the

International Man; but no man could be more English than Cobden.

Everybody recognises Tolstoy as the iconoclast of all patriotism; but

nobody could be more Russian than Tolstoy. In the old countries where

there are these national types, the types may be allowed to hold any

theories. Even if they hold certain theories, they are unlikely to do

certain things. So the conscientious objector, in the English sense,

may be and is one of the peculiar by-products of England. But the

conscientious objector will probably have a conscientious objection to

throwing bombs.

Now I am very far from intending to imply that these American tests are

good tests, or that there is no danger of tyranny becoming the

temptation of America. I shall have something to say later on about that

temptation or tendency. Nor do I say that they apply consistently this

conception of a nation with the soul of a church, protected by religious

and not racial selection. If they did apply that principle consistently,

they would have to exclude pessimists and rich cynics who deny the

democratic ideal; an excellent thing but a rather improbable one. What I

say is that when we realise that this principle exists at all, we see

the whole position in a totally different perspective. We say that the

Americans are doing something heroic, or doing something insane, or

doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of simply

wondering what the devil they are doing.

When we realise the democratic design of such a cosmopolitan

commonwealth, and compare it with our insular reliance or instincts, we

see at once why such a thing has to be not only democratic but dogmatic.

We see why in some points it tends to be inquisitive or intolerant. Any

one can see the practical point by merely transferring into private life

a problem like that of the two academic anarchists, who might by a

coincidence be called the two Herberts. Suppose a man said, ‘Buffle, my

old Oxford tutor, wants to meet you; I wish you’d ask him down for a day

or two. He has the oddest opinions, but he’s very stimulating.’ It would

not occur to us that the oddity of the Oxford don’s opinions would lead

him to blow up the house; because the Oxford don is an English type.

Suppose somebody said, ‘Do let me bring old Colonel Robinson down for

the week-end; he’s a bit of a crank but quite interesting.’ We should

not anticipate the colonel running amuck with a carving-knife and

offering up human sacrifice in the garden; for these are not among the

daily habits of an old English colonel; and because we know his habits,

we do not care about his opinions. But suppose somebody offered to bring

a person from the interior of Kamskatka to stay with us for a week or

two, and added that his religion was a very extraordinary religion, we

should feel a little more inquisitive about what kind of religion it

was. If somebody wished to add a Hairy Ainu to the family party at

Christmas, explaining that his point of view was so individual and

interesting, we should want to know a little more about it and him. We

should be tempted to draw up as fantastic an examination paper as that

presented to the emigrant going to America. We should ask what a Hairy

Ainu was, and how hairy he was, and above all what sort of Ainu he was.

Would etiquette require us to ask him to bring his wife? And if we did

ask him to bring his wife, how many wives would he bring? In short, as

in the American formula, is he a polygamist? Merely as a point of

housekeeping and accommodation the question is not irrelevant. Is the

Hairy Ainu content with hair, or does he wear any clothes? If the police

insist on his wearing clothes, will he recognise the authority of the

police? In short, as in the American formula, is he an anarchist?

Of course this generalisation about America, like other historical

things, is subject to all sorts of cross divisions and exceptions, to

be considered in their place. The negroes are a special problem, because

of what white men in the past did to them. The Japanese are a special

problem, because of what men fear that they in the future may do to

white men. The Jews are a special problem, because of what they and the

Gentiles, in the past, present, and future, seem to have the habit of

doing to each other. But the point is not that nothing exists in America

except this idea; it is that nothing like this idea exists anywhere

except in America. This idea is not internationalism; on the contrary it

is decidedly nationalism. The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to

make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of

making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In

a word, what is unique is not America but what is called

Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing

ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not

trying to Anglicise thousands of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders.

France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or

German prisoners of war. America is the one place in the world where

this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on.

And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalisation.

It would be truer to say it is the nationalisation of the

internationalised. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out

of exiles. This is what at once illuminates and softens the moral

regulations which we may really think faddist or fanatical. They are

abnormal; but in one sense this experiment of a home for the homeless is

abnormal. In short, it has long been recognised that America was an

asylum. It is only since Prohibition that it has looked a little like a

lunatic asylum.

It was before sailing for America, as I have said, that I stood with the

official paper in my hand and these thoughts in my head. It was while I

stood on English soil that I passed through the two stages of smiling

and then sympathising; of realising that my momentary amusement, at

being asked if I were not an Anarchist, was partly due to the fact that

I was not an American. And in truth I think there are some things a man

ought to know about America before he sees it. What we know of a country

beforehand may not affect what we see that it is; but it will vitally

affect what we appreciate it for being, because it will vitally affect

what we expect it to be. I can honestly say that I had never expected

America to be what nine-tenths of the newspaper critics invariably

assume it to be. I never thought it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony,

knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different

colonists. During the war I felt that the very worst propaganda for the

Allies was the propaganda for the Anglo-Saxons. I tried to point out

that in one way America is nearer to Europe than England is. If she is

not nearer to Bulgaria, she is nearer to Bulgars; if she is not nearer

to Bohemia, she is nearer to Bohemians. In my New York hotel the head

waiter in the dining-room was a Bohemian; the head waiter in the

grill-room was a Bulgar. Americans have nationalities at the end of the

street which for us are at the ends of the earth. I did my best to

persuade my countrymen not to appeal to the American as if he were a

rather dowdy Englishman, who had been rusticating in the provinces and

had not heard the latest news about the town. I shall record later some

of those arresting realities which the traveller does not expect; and

which, in some cases I fear, he actually does not see because he does

not expect. I shall try to do justice to the psychology of what Mr.

Belloc has called ‘Eye-Openers in Travel.’ But there are some things

about America that a man ought to see even with his eyes shut. One is

that a state that came into existence solely through its repudiation and

abhorrence of the British Crown is not likely to be a respectful copy of

the British Constitution. Another is that the chief mark of the

Declaration of Independence is something that is not only absent from

the British Constitution, but something which all our constitutionalists

have invariably thanked God, with the jolliest boasting and bragging,

that they had kept out of the British Constitution. It is the thing

called abstraction or academic logic. It is the thing which such jolly

people call theory; and which those who can practise it call thought.

And the theory or thought is the very last to which English people are

accustomed, either by their social structure or their traditional

teaching. It is the theory of equality. It is the pure classic

conception that no man must aspire to be anything more than a citizen,

and that no man should endure to be anything less. It is by no means

especially intelligible to an Englishman, who tends at his best to the

virtues of the gentleman and at his worst to the vices of the snob. The

idealism of England, or if you will the romance of England, has not been

primarily the romance of the citizen. But the idealism of America, we

may safely say, still revolves entirely round the citizen and his

romance. The realities are quite another matter, and we shall consider

in its place the question of whether the ideal will be able to shape

the realities or will merely be beaten shapeless by them. The ideal is

besieged by inequalities of the most towering and insane description in

the industrial and economic field. It may be devoured by modern

capitalism, perhaps the worst inequality that ever existed among men. Of

all that we shall speak later. But citizenship is still the American

ideal; there is an army of actualities opposed to that ideal; but there

is no ideal opposed to that ideal. American plutocracy has never got

itself respected like English aristocracy. Citizenship is the American

ideal; and it has never been the English ideal. But it is surely an

ideal that may stir some imaginative generosity and respect in an

Englishman, if he will condescend to be also a man. In this vision of

moulding many peoples into the visible image of the citizen, he may see

a spiritual adventure which he can admire from the outside, at least as

much as he admires the valour of the Moslems and much more than he

admires the virtues of the Middle Ages. He need not set himself to

develop equality, but he need not set himself to misunderstand it. He

may at least understand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant, and he may

possibly find some assistance in this task by reading what they said. He

may realise that equality is not some crude fairy tale about all men

being equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe

but cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by

which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity

as intangible as death. He may at least be a philosopher and see that

equality is an idea; and not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics

who, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne in

tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other twenty times over, with

unwearied iteration, that equality is an illusion.

In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extreme

disproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing of

changing lights and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies and

distortions. We find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find

him forgotten; we see a race dominant and cannot linger to see it decay.

It is the experience of men that always returns to the equality of men;

it is the average that ultimately justifies the average man. It is when

men have seen and suffered much and come at the end of more elaborate

experiments, that they see men as men under an equal light of death and

daily laughter; and none the less mysterious for being many. Nor is it

in vain that these Western democrats have sought the blazonry of their

flag in that great multitude of immortal lights that endure behind the

fires we see, and gathered them into the corner of Old Glory whose

ground is like the glittering night. For veritably, in the spirit as

well as in the symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our

skies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration; and wherever

the old shadow stoops upon the earth, the stars return.

A Meditation in a New York Hotel

All this must begin with an apology and not an apologia. When I went

wandering about the States disguised as a lecturer, I was well aware

that I was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. I was even in

the worst possible position to be a sight-seer. A lecturer to American

audiences can hardly be in the holiday mood of a sight-seer. It is

rather the audience that is sight-seeing; even if it is seeing a rather

melancholy sight. Some say that people come to see the lecturer and not

to hear him; in which case it seems rather a pity that he should disturb

and distress their minds with a lecture. He might merely display himself

on a stand or platform for a stipulated sum; or be exhibited like a

monster in a menagerie. The circus elephant is not expected to make a

speech. But it is equally true that the circus elephant is not allowed

to write a book. His impressions of travel would be somewhat sketchy and

perhaps a little over-specialised. In merely travelling from circus to

circus he would, so to speak, move in rather narrow circles. Jumbo the

great elephant (with whom I am hardly so ambitious as to compare

myself), before he eventually went to the Barnum show, passed a

considerable and I trust happy part of his life in Regent’s Park. But if

he had written a book on England, founded on his impressions of the Zoo,

it might have been a little disproportionate and even misleading in its

version of the flora and fauna of that country. He might imagine that

lions and leopards were commoner than they are in our hedgerows and

country lanes, or that the head and neck of a giraffe was as native to

our landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apologise in

anticipation for a probable lack of proportion in this work. Like the

elephant, I may have seen too much of a special enclosure where a

special sort of lions are gathered together. I may exaggerate the

territorial, as distinct from the vertical space occupied by the

spiritual giraffe; for the giraffe may surely be regarded as an example

of Uplift, and is even, in a manner of speaking, a high-brow. Above all,

I shall probably make generalisations that are much too general; and are

insufficient through being exaggerative. To this sort of doubt all my

impressions are subject; and among them the negative generalisation with

which I shall begin this rambling meditation on American hotels.

In all my American wanderings I never saw such a thing as an inn. They

may exist; but they do not arrest the traveller upon every road as they

do in England and in Europe. The saloons no longer existed when I was

there, owing to the recent reform which restricted intoxicants to the

wealthier classes. But we feel that the saloons have been there; if one

may so express it, their absence is still present. They remain in the

structure of the street and the idiom of the language. But the saloons

were not inns. If they had been inns, it would have been far harder even

for the power of modern plutocracy to root them out. There will be a

very different chase when the White Hart is hunted to the forests or

when the Red Lion turns to bay. But people could not feel about the

American saloon as they will feel about the English inns. They could not

feel that the Prohibitionist, that vulgar chucker-out, was chucking

Chaucer out of the Tabard and Shakespeare out of the Mermaid. In justice

to the American Prohibitionists it must be realised that they were not

doing quite such desecration; and that many of them felt the saloon a

specially poisonous sort of place. They did feel that drinking-places

were used only as drug-shops. So they have effected the great

reconstruction, by which it will be necessary to use only drug-shops as

drinking-places. But I am not dealing here with the problem of

Prohibition except in so far as it is involved in the statement that the

saloons were in no sense inns. Secondly, of course, there are the

hotels. There are indeed. There are hotels toppling to the stars, hotels

covering the acreage of villages, hotels in multitudinous number like a

mob of Babylonian or Assyrian monuments; but the hotels also are not

inns.

Broadly speaking, there is only one hotel in America. The pattern of it,

which is a very rational pattern, is repeated in cities as remote from

each other as the capitals of European empires. You may find that hotel

rising among the red blooms of the warm spring woods of Nebraska, or

whitened with Canadian snows near the eternal noise of Niagara. And

before touching on this solid and simple pattern itself, I may remark

that the same system of symmetry runs through all the details of the

interior. As one hotel is like another hotel, so one hotel floor is like

another hotel floor. If the passage outside your bedroom door, or

hallway as it is called, contains, let us say, a small table with a

green vase and a stuffed flamingo, or some trifle of the sort, you may

be perfectly certain that there is exactly the same table, vase, and

flamingo on every one of the thirty-two landings of that towering

habitation. This is where it differs most perhaps from the crooked

landings and unexpected levels of the old English inns, even when they

call themselves hotels. To me there was something weird, like a magic

multiplication, in the exquisite sameness of these suites. It seemed to

suggest the still atmosphere of some eerie psychological story. I once

myself entertained the notion of a story, in which a man was to be

prevented from entering his house (the scene of some crime or calamity)

by people who painted and furnished the next house to look exactly like

it; the assimilation going to the most fantastic lengths, such as

altering the numbering of houses in the street. I came to America and

found an hotel fitted and upholstered throughout for the enactment of my

phantasmal fraud. I offer the skeleton of my story with all humility to

some of the admirable lady writers of detective stories in America, to

Miss Carolyn Wells, or Miss Mary Roberts Rhinehart, or Mrs. A. K. Green

of the unforgotten Leavenworth Case. Surely it might be possible for the

unsophisticated Nimrod K. Moose, of Yellow Dog Flat, to come to New York

and be entangled somehow in this net of repetitions or recurrences.

Surely something tells me that his beautiful daughter, the Rose of Red

Murder Gulch, might seek for him in vain amid the apparently

unmistakable surroundings of the thirty-second floor, while he was being

quietly butchered by the floor-clerk on the thirty-third floor, an agent

of the Green Claw (that formidable organisation); and all because the

two floors looked exactly alike to the virginal Western eye. The

original point of my own story was that the man to be entrapped walked

into his own house after all, in spite of it being differently painted

and numbered, simply because he was absent-minded and used to taking a

certain number of mechanical steps. This would not work in the hotel;

because a lift has no habits. It is typical of the real tameness of

machinery, that even when we talk of a man turning mechanically we only

talk metaphorically; for it is something that a mechanism cannot do. But

I think there is only one real objection to my story of Mr. Moose in the

New York hotel. And that is unfortunately a rather fatal one. It is that

far away in the remote desolation of Yellow Dog, among those outlying

and outlandish rocks that almost seem to rise beyond the sunset, there

is undoubtedly an hotel of exactly the same sort, with all its floors

exactly the same.

Anyhow the general plan of the American hotel is commonly the same, and,

as I have said, it is a very sound one so far as it goes. When I first

went into one of the big New York hotels, the first impression was

certainly its bigness. It was called the Biltmore; and I wondered how

many national humorists had made the obvious comment of wishing they had

built less. But it was not merely the Babylonian size and scale of such

things, it was the way in which they are used. They are used almost as

public streets, or rather as public squares. My first impression was

that I was in some sort of high street or market-place during a carnival

or a revolution. True, the people looked rather rich for a revolution

and rather grave for a carnival; but they were congested in great crowds

that moved slowly like people passing through an overcrowded railway

station. Even in the dizzy heights of such a sky-scraper there could not

possibly be room for all those people to sleep in the hotel, or even to

dine in it. And, as a matter of fact, they did nothing whatever except

drift into it and drift out again. Most of them had no more to do with

the hotel than I have with Buckingham Palace. I have never been in

Buckingham Palace, and I have very seldom, thank God, been in the big

hotels of this type that exist in London or Paris. But I cannot believe

that mobs are perpetually pouring through the Hotel Cecil or the Savoy

in this fashion, calmly coming in at one door and going out of the

other. But this fact is part of the fundamental structure of the

American hotel; it is built upon a compromise that makes it possible.

The whole of the lower floor is thrown open to the public streets and

treated as a public square. But above it and all round it runs another

floor in the form of a sort of deep gallery, furnished more luxuriously

and looking down on the moving mobs beneath. No one is allowed on this

floor except the guests or clients of the hotel. As I have been one of

them myself, I trust it is not unsympathetic to compare them to active

anthropoids who can climb trees, and so look down in safety on the herds

or packs of wilder animals wandering and prowling below. Of course there

are modifications of this architectural plan, but they are generally

approximations to it; it is the plan that seems to suit the social life

of the American cities. There is generally something like a ground floor

that is more public, a half-floor or gallery above that is more private,

and above that the bulk of the block of bedrooms, the huge hive with its

innumerable and identical cells.

The ladder of ascent in this tower is of course the lift, or, as it is

called, the elevator. With all that we hear of American hustle and

hurry it is rather strange that Americans seem to like more than we do

to linger upon long words. And indeed there is an element of delay in

their diction and spirit, very little understood, which I may discuss

elsewhere. Anyhow they say elevator when we say lift, just as they say

automobile when we say motor and stenographer when we say typist, or

sometimes (by a slight confusion) typewriter. Which reminds me of

another story that never existed, about a man who was accused of having

murdered and dismembered his secretary when he had only taken his typing

machine to pieces; but we must not dwell on these digressions. The

Americans may have another reason for giving long and ceremonious titles

to the lift. When first I came among them I had a suspicion that they

possessed and practised a new and secret religion, which was the cult of

the elevator. I fancied they worshipped the lift, or at any rate

worshipped in the lift. The details or data of this suspicion it were

now vain to collect, as I have regretfully abandoned it, except in so

far as they illustrate the social principles underlying the structural

plan of the building. Now an American gentleman invariably takes off his

hat in the lift. He does not take off his hat in the hotel, even if it

is crowded with ladies. But he always so salutes a lady in the elevator;

and this marks the difference of atmosphere. The lift is a room, but the

hotel is a street. But during my first delusion, of course, I assumed

that he uncovered in this tiny temple merely because he was in church.

There is something about the very word elevator that expresses a great

deal of his vague but idealistic religion. Perhaps that flying chapel

will eventually be ritualistically decorated like a chapel; possibly

with a symbolic scheme of wings. Perhaps a brief religious service will

be held in the elevator as it ascends; in a few well-chosen words

touching the Utmost for the Highest. Possibly he would consent even to

call the elevator a lift, if he could call it an uplift. There would be

no difficulty, except what I cannot but regard as the chief moral

problem of all optimistic modernism. I mean the difficulty of imagining

a lift which is free to go up, if it is not also free to go down.

I think I know my American friends and acquaintances too well to

apologise for any levity in these illustrations. Americans make fun of

their own institutions; and their own journalism is full of such

fanciful conjectures. The tall building is itself artistically akin to

the tall story. The very word sky-scraper is an admirable example of an

American lie. But I can testify quite as eagerly to the solid and

sensible advantages of the symmetrical hotel. It is not only a pattern

of vases and stuffed flamingoes; it is also an equally accurate pattern

of cupboards and baths. It is a dignified and humane custom to have a

bathroom attached to every bedroom; and my impulse to sing the praises

of it brought me once at least into a rather quaint complication. I

think it was in the city of Dayton; anyhow I remember there was a

Laundry Convention going on in the same hotel, in a room very

patriotically and properly festooned with the stars and stripes, and

doubtless full of promise for the future of laundering. I was

interviewed on the roof, within earshot of this debate, and may have

been the victim of some association or confusion; anyhow, after

answering the usual questions about Labour, the League of Nations, the

length of ladies’ dresses, and other great matters, I took refuge in a

rhapsody of warm and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. The

editor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the column of his

contributor’s ‘story,’ and seeing nothing but metaphysical terms such as

justice, freedom, the abstract disapproval of sweating, swindling, and

the like, paused at last upon the ablutionary allusion, and his eye

brightened. ‘That’s the only copy in the whole thing,’ he said, ‘A

Bath-Tub in Every Home.’ So these words appeared in enormous letters

above my portrait in the paper. It will be noted that, like many things

that practical men make a great point of, they miss the point. What I

had commended as new and national was a bathroom in every bedroom. Even

feudal and moss-grown England is not entirely ignorant of an occasional

bath-tub in the home. But what gave me great joy was what followed. I

discovered with delight that many people, glancing rapidly at my

portrait with its prodigious legend, imagined that it was a commercial

advertisement, and that I was a very self-advertising commercial

traveller. When I walked about the streets, I was supposed to be

travelling in bath-tubs. Consider the caption of the portrait, and you

will see how similar it is to the true commercial slogan: ‘We offer a

Bath-Tub in Every Home.’ And this charming error was doubtless clinched

by the fact that I had been found haunting the outer courts of the

temple of the ancient Guild of Lavenders. I never knew how many shared

the impression; I regret to say that I only traced it with certainty in

two individuals. But I understand that it included the idea that I had

come to the town to attend the Laundry Convention, and had made an

eloquent speech to that senate, no doubt exhibiting my tubs.

Such was the penalty of too passionate and unrestrained an admiration

for American bathrooms; yet the connection of ideas, however

inconsequent, does cover the part of social practice for which these

American institutions can really be praised. About everything like

laundry or hot and cold water there is not only organisation, but what

does not always or perhaps often go with it, efficiency. Americans are

particular about these things of dress and decorum; and it is a virtue

which I very seriously recognise, though I find it very hard to emulate.

But with them it is a virtue; it is not a mere convention, still less a

mere fashion. It is really related to human dignity rather than to

social superiority. The really glorious thing about the American is that

he does not dress like a gentleman; he dresses like a citizen or a

civilised man. His Puritanic particularity on certain points is really

detachable from any definite social ambitions; these things are not a

part of getting into society but merely of keeping out of savagery.

Those millions and millions of middling people, that huge middle class

especially of the Middle West, are not near enough to any aristocracy

even to be sham aristocrats, or to be real snobs. But their standards

are secure; and though I do not really travel in a bath-tub, or believe

in the bath-tub philosophy and religion, I will not on this matter

recoil misanthropically from them: I prefer the tub of Dayton to the tub

of Diogenes. On these points there is really something a million times

better than efficiency, and that is something like equality.

In short, the American hotel is not America; but it is American. In some

respects it is as American as the English inn is English. And it is

symbolic of that society in this among other things: that it does tend

too much to uniformity; but that that very uniformity disguises not a

little natural dignity. The old Romans boasted that their republic was a

nation of kings. If we really walked abroad in such a kingdom, we might

very well grow tired of the sight of a crowd of kings, of every man with

a gold crown on his head or an ivory sceptre in his hand. But it is

arguable that we ought not to grow tired of the repetition of crowns and

sceptres, any more than of the repetition of flowers and stars. The

whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really an effort to absorb

and animate these multitudinous modern repetitions; and Walt Whitman

would be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a

list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bathrooms. I do not

sneer at the generous effort of the giant; though I think, when all is

said, that it is a criticism of modern machinery that the effort should

be gigantic as well as generous.

While there is so much repetition there is little repose. It is the

pattern of a kaleidoscope rather than a wall-paper; a pattern of figures

running and even leaping like the figures in a zoetrope. But even in the

groups where there was no hustle there was often something of

homelessness. I do not mean merely that they were not dining at home;

but rather that they were not at home even when dining, and dining at

their favourite hotel. They would frequently start up and dart from the

room at a summons from the telephone. It may have been fanciful, but I

could not help feeling a breath of home, as from a flap or flutter of

St. George’s Cross, when I first sat down in a Canadian hostelry, and

read the announcement that no such telephonic or other summonses were

allowed in the dining-room. It may have been a coincidence, and there

may be American hotels with this merciful proviso and Canadian hotels

without it; but the thing was symbolic even if it was not evidential. I

felt as if I stood indeed upon English soil, in a place where people

liked to have their meals in peace.

The process of the summons is called ‘paging,’ and consists of sending a

little boy with a large voice through all the halls and corridors of the

building, making them resound with a name. The custom is common, of

course, in clubs and hotels even in England; but in England it is a mere

whisper compared with the wail with which the American page repeats the

formula of ‘Calling Mr. So and So.’ I remember a particularly crowded

parterre in the somewhat smoky and oppressive atmosphere of Pittsburg,

through which wandered a youth with a voice the like of which I have

never heard in the land of the living, a voice like the cry of a lost

spirit, saying again and again for ever, ‘Carling Mr. Anderson.’ One

felt that he never would find Mr. Anderson. Perhaps there never had been

any Mr. Anderson to be found. Perhaps he and every one else wandered in

an abyss of bottomless scepticism; and he was but the victim of one out

of numberless nightmares of eternity, as he wandered a shadow with

shadows and wailed by impassable streams. This is not exactly my

philosophy, but I feel sure it was his. And it is a mood that may

frequently visit the mind in the centres of highly active and successful

industrial civilisation.

Such are the first idle impressions of the great American hotel, gained

by sitting for the first time in its gallery and gazing on its drifting

crowds with thoughts equally drifting. The first impression is of

something enormous and rather unnatural, an impression that is gradually

tempered by experience of the kindliness and even the tameness of so

much of that social order. But I should not be recording the sensations

with sincerity, if I did not touch in passing the note of something

unearthly about that vast system to an insular traveller who sees it for

the first time. It is as if he were wandering in another world among the

fixed stars; or worse still, in an ideal Utopia of the future.

Yet I am not certain; and perhaps the best of all news is that nothing

is really new. I sometimes have a fancy that many of these new things in

new countries are but the resurrections of old things which have been

wickedly killed or stupidly stunted in old countries. I have looked over

the sea of little tables in some light and airy open-air café; and my

thoughts have gone back to the plain wooden bench and wooden table that

stands solitary and weather-stained outside so many neglected English

inns. We talk of experimenting in the French café, as of some fresh and

almost impudent innovation. But our fathers had the French café, in the

sense of the free-and-easy table in the sun and air. The only difference

was that French democracy was allowed to develop its café, or multiply

its tables, while English plutocracy prevented any such popular growth.

Perhaps there are other examples of old types and patterns, lost in the

old oligarchy and saved in the new democracies. I am haunted with a hint

that the new structures are not so very new; and that they remind me of

something very old. As I look from the balcony floor the crowds seem to

float away and the colours to soften and grow pale, and I know I am in

one of the simplest and most ancestral of human habitations. I am

looking down from the old wooden gallery upon the courtyard of an inn.

This new architectural model, which I have described, is after all one

of the oldest European models, now neglected in Europe and especially in

England. It was the theatre in which were enacted innumerable picaresque

comedies and romantic plays, with figures ranging from Sancho Panza to

Sam Weller. It served as the apparatus, like some gigantic toy set up in

bricks and timber, for the ancient and perhaps eternal game of tennis.

The very terms of the original game were taken from the inn courtyard,

and the players scored accordingly as they hit the buttery-hatch or the

roof. Singular speculations hover in my mind as the scene darkens and

the quadrangle below begins to empty in the last hours of night. Some

day perhaps this huge structure will be found standing in a solitude

like a skeleton; and it will be the skeleton of the Spotted Dog or the

Blue Boar. It will wither and decay until it is worthy at last to be a

tavern. I do not know whether men will play tennis on its ground floor,

with various scores and prizes for hitting the electric fan, or the

lift, or the head waiter. Perhaps the very words will only remain as

part of some such rustic game. Perhaps the electric fan will no longer

be electric and the elevator will no longer elevate, and the waiter will

only wait to be hit. But at least it is only by the decay of modern

plutocracy, which seems already to have begun, that the secret of the

structure even of this plutocratic palace can stand revealed. And after

long years, when its lights are extinguished and only the long shadows

inhabit its halls and vestibules, there may come a new noise like

thunder; of D’Artagnan knocking at the door.

A Meditation in Broadway

When I had looked at the lights of Broadway by night, I made to my

American friends an innocent remark that seemed for some reason to amuse

them. I had looked, not without joy, at that long kaleidoscope of

coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks,

advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the

two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God; colour and fire. I

said to them, in my simplicity, ‘What a glorious garden of wonders this

would be, to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.’

Here it is but a text for a further suggestion. But let us suppose that

there does walk down this flaming avenue a peasant, of the sort called

scornfully an illiterate peasant; by those who think that insisting on

people reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies who

read in all languages and the forgers who write in all hands. On this

principle indeed, a peasant merely acquainted with things of little

practical use to mankind, such as ploughing, cutting wood, or growing

vegetables, would very probably be excluded; and it is not for us to

criticise from the outside the philosophy of those who would keep out

the farmer and let in the forger. But let us suppose, if only for the

sake of argument, that the peasant is walking under the artificial suns

and stars of this tremendous thoroughfare; that he has escaped to the

land of liberty upon some general rumour and romance of the story of

its liberation, but without being yet able to understand the arbitrary

signs of its alphabet. The soul of such a man would surely soar higher

than the sky-scrapers, and embrace a brotherhood broader than Broadway.

Realising that he had arrived on an evening of exceptional festivity,

worthy to be blazoned with all this burning heraldry, he would please

himself by guessing what great proclamation or principle of the Republic

hung in the sky like a constellation or rippled across the street like a

comet. He would be shrewd enough to guess that the three festoons

fringed with fiery words of somewhat similar pattern stood for

‘Government of the People, For the People, By the People’; for it must

obviously be that, unless it were ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.’ His

shrewdness would perhaps be a little shaken if he knew that the triad

stood for ‘Tang Tonic To-day; Tang Tonic To-morrow; Tang Tonic All the

Time.’ He will soon identify a restless ribbon of red lettering, red hot

and rebellious, as the saying, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ He

will fail to identify it as the equally famous saying, ‘Skyoline Has

Gout Beaten to a Frazzle.’ Therefore it was that I desired the peasant

to walk down that grove of fiery trees, under all that golden foliage,

and fruits like monstrous jewels, as innocent as Adam before the Fall.

He would see sights almost as fine as the flaming sword or the purple

and peacock plumage of the seraphim; so long as he did not go near the

Tree of Knowledge.

In other words, if once he went to school it would be all up; and indeed

I fear in any case he would soon discover his error. If he stood wildly

waving his hat for liberty in the middle of the road as Chunk Chutney

picked itself out in ruby stars upon the sky, he would impede the

excellent but extremely rigid traffic system of New York. If he fell on

his knees before a sapphire splendour, and began saying an Ave Maria

under a mistaken association, he would be conducted kindly but firmly by

an Irish policeman to a more authentic shrine. But though the foreign

simplicity might not long survive in New York, it is quite a mistake to

suppose that such foreign simplicity cannot enter New York. He may be

excluded for being illiterate, but he cannot be excluded for being

ignorant, nor for being innocent. Least of all can he be excluded for

being wiser in his innocence than the world in its knowledge. There is

here indeed more than one distinction to be made. New York is a

cosmopolitan city; but it is not a city of cosmopolitans. Most of the

masses in New York have a nation, whether or no it be the nation to

which New York belongs. Those who are Americanised are American, and

very patriotically American. Those who are not thus nationalised are not

in the least internationalised. They simply continue to be themselves;

the Irish are Irish; the Jews are Jewish; and all sorts of other tribes

carry on the traditions of remote European valleys almost untouched. In

short, there is a sort of slender bridge between their old country and

their new, which they either cross or do not cross, but which they

seldom simply occupy. They are exiles or they are citizens; there is no

moment when they are cosmopolitans. But very often the exiles bring with

them not only rooted traditions, but rooted truths.

Indeed it is to a great extent the thought of these strange souls in

crude American garb that gives a meaning to the masquerade of New York.

In the hotel where I stayed the head waiter in one room was a Bohemian;

and I am glad to say that he called himself a Bohemian. I have already

protested sufficiently, before American audiences, against the pedantry

of perpetually talking about Czecho-Slovakia. I suggested to my American

friends that the abandonment of the word Bohemian in its historical

sense might well extend to its literary and figurative sense. We might

be expected to say, ‘I’m afraid Henry has got into very Czecho-Slovakian

habits lately,’ or ‘Don’t bother to dress; it’s quite a Czecho-Slovakian

affair.’ Anyhow my Bohemian would have nothing to do with such nonsense;

he called himself a son of Bohemia, and spoke as such in his criticisms

of America, which were both favourable and unfavourable. He was a squat

man, with a sturdy figure and a steady smile; and his eyes were like

dark pools in the depth of a darker forest, but I do not think he had

ever been deceived by the lights of Broadway.

But I found something like my real innocent abroad, my real peasant

among the sky-signs, in another part of the same establishment. He was a

much leaner man, equally dark, with a hook nose, hungry face, and fierce

black moustaches. He also was a waiter, and was in the costume of a

waiter, which is a smarter edition of the costume of a lecturer. As he

was serving me with clam chowder or some such thing, I fell into speech

with him and he told me he was a Bulgar. I said something like, ‘I’m

afraid I don’t know as much as I ought to about Bulgaria. I suppose most

of your people are agricultural, aren’t they?’ He did not stir an inch

from his regular attitude, but he slightly lowered his low voice and

said, ‘Yes. From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when

people get away from that they are lost.’

To hear such a thing said by the waiter was alone an epoch in the life

of an unfortunate writer of fantastic novels. To see him clear away the

clam chowder like an automaton, and bring me more iced water like an

automaton or like nothing on earth except an American waiter (for piling

up ice is the cold passion of their lives), and all this after having

uttered something so dark and deep, so starkly incongruous and so

startlingly true, was an indescribable thing, but very like the picture

of the peasant admiring Broadway. So he passed, with his artificial

clothes and manners, lit up with all the ghastly artificial light of the

hotel, and all the ghastly artificial life of the city; and his heart

was like his own remote and rocky valley, where those unchanging words

were carved as on a rock.

I do not profess to discuss here at all adequately the question this

raises about the Americanisation of the Bulgar. It has many aspects, of

some of which most Englishmen and even some Americans are rather

unconscious. For one thing, a man with so rugged a loyalty to land could

not be Americanised in New York; but it is not so certain that he could

not be Americanised in America. We might almost say that a peasantry is

hidden in the heart of America. So far as our impressions go, it is a

secret. It is rather an open secret; covering only some thousand square

miles of open prairie. But for most of our countrymen it is something

invisible, unimagined, and unvisited; the simple truth that where all

those acres are there is agriculture, and where all that agriculture is

there is considerable tendency towards distributive or decently

equalised property, as in a peasantry. On the other hand, there are

those who say that the Bulgar will never be Americanised, that he only

comes to be a waiter in America that he may afford to return to be a

peasant in Bulgaria. I cannot decide this issue, and indeed I did not

introduce it to this end. I was led to it by a certain line of

reflection that runs along the Great White Way, and I will continue to

follow it. The criticism, if we could put it rightly, not only covers

more than New York but more than the whole New World. Any argument

against it is quite as valid against the largest and richest cities of

the Old World, against London or Liverpool or Frankfort or Belfast. But

it is in New York that we see the argument most clearly, because we see

the thing thus towering into its own turrets and breaking into its own

fireworks.

I disagree with the aesthetic condemnation of the modern city with its

sky-scrapers and sky-signs. I mean that which laments the loss of beauty

and its sacrifice to utility. It seems to me the very reverse of the

truth. Years ago, when people used to say the Salvation Army doubtless

had good intentions, but we must all deplore its methods, I pointed out

that the very contrary is the case. Its method, the method of drums and

democratic appeal, is that of the Franciscans or any other march of the

Church Militant. It was precisely its aims that were dubious, with their

dissenting morality and despotic finance. It is somewhat the same with

things like the sky-signs in Broadway. The aesthete must not ask me to

mingle my tears with his, because these things are merely useful and

ugly. For I am not specially inclined to think them ugly; but I am

strongly inclined to think them useless. As a matter of art for art’s

sake, they seem to me rather artistic. As a form of practical social

work they seem to me stark stupid waste. If Mr. Bilge is rich enough to

build a tower four hundred feet high and give it a crown of golden

crescents and crimson stars, in order to draw attention to his

manufacture of the Paradise Tooth Paste or The Seventh Heaven Cigar, I

do not feel the least disposition to thank him for any serious form of

social service. I have never tried the Seventh Heaven Cigar; indeed a

premonition moves me towards the belief that I shall go down to the dust

without trying it. I have every reason to doubt whether it does any

particular good to those who smoke it, or any good to anybody except

those who sell it. In short Mr. Bilge’s usefulness consists in being

useful to Mr. Bilge, and all the rest is illusion and sentimentalism.

But because I know that Bilge is only Bilge, shall I stoop to the

profanity of saying that fire is only fire? Shall I blaspheme crimson

stars any more than crimson sunsets, or deny that those moons are golden

any more than that this grass is green? If a child saw these coloured

lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other coloured

toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to

dance in respectful imitation of the child. Indeed I am in a mood of so

much sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city, that I

should be almost sorry to see social sanity and a sense of proportion

return to extinguish them. I fear the day is breaking, and the broad

daylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this

delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peasants and priests and all

sorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, and

their stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial,

useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh Heaven Cigar, even

when they see it shining as with stars in the seventh heaven. They will

not be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests and

peasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by advertisements.

Only a very soft-headed, sentimental, and rather servile generation of

men could possibly be affected by advertisements at all. People who are

a little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually independent, see

the rather simple joke; and are not impressed by this or any other form

of self-praise. Almost any other men in almost any other age would have

seen the joke. If you had said to a man in the Stone Age, ‘Ugg says Ugg

makes the best stone hatchets,’ he would have perceived a lack of

detachment and disinterestedness about the testimonial. If you had said

to a medieval peasant, ‘Robert the Bowyer proclaims, with three blasts

of a horn, that he makes good bows,’ the peasant would have said, ‘Well,

of course he does,’ and thought about something more important. It is

only among people whose minds have been weakened by a sort of mesmerism

that so transparent a trick as that of advertisement could ever have

been tried at all. And if ever we have again, as for other reasons I

cannot but hope we shall, a more democratic distribution of property and

a more agricultural basis of national life, it would seem at first sight

only too likely that all this beautiful superstition will perish, and

the fairyland of Broadway with all its varied rainbows fade away. For

such people the Seventh Heaven Cigar, like the nineteenth-century city,

will have ended in smoke. And even the smoke of it will have vanished.

But the next stage of reflection brings us back to the peasant looking

at the lights of Broadway. It is not true to say in the strict sense

that the peasant has never seen such things before. The truth is that he

has seen them on a much smaller scale, but for a much larger purpose.

Peasants also have their ritual and ornament, but it is to adorn more

real things. Apart from our first fancy about the peasant who could not

read, there is no doubt about what would be apparent to a peasant who

could read, and who could understand. For him also fire is sacred, for

him also colour is symbolic. But where he sets up a candle to light the

little shrine of St. Joseph, he finds it takes twelve hundred candles to

light the Seventh Heaven Cigar. He is used to the colours in church

windows showing red for martyrs or blue for madonnas; but here he can

only conclude that all the colours of the rainbow belong to Mr. Bilge.

Now upon the aesthetic side he might well be impressed; but it is

exactly on the social and even scientific side that he has a right to

criticise. If he were a Chinese peasant, for instance, and came from a

land of fireworks, he would naturally suppose that he had happened to

arrive at a great firework display in celebration of something; perhaps

the Sacred Emperor’s birthday, or rather birthnight. It would gradually

dawn on the Chinese philosopher that the Emperor could hardly be born

every night. And when he learnt the truth the philosopher, if he was a

philosopher, would be a little disappointed … possibly a little

disdainful.

Compare, for instance, these everlasting fireworks with the damp squibs

and dying bonfires of Guy Fawkes Day. That quaint and even queer

national festival has been fading for some time out of English life.

Still, it was a national festival, in the double sense that it

represented some sort of public spirit pursued by some sort of popular

impulse. People spent money on the display of fireworks; they did not

get money by it. And the people who spent money were often those who had

very little money to spend. It had something of the glorious and

fanatical character of making the poor poorer. It did not, like the

advertisements, have only the mean and materialistic character of making

the rich richer. In short, it came from the people and it appealed to

the nation. The historical and religious cause in which it originated is

not mine; and I think it has perished partly through being tied to a

historical theory for which there is no future. I think this is

illustrated in the very fact that the ceremonial is merely negative and

destructive. Negation and destruction are very noble things as far as

they go, and when they go in the right direction; and the popular

expression of them has always something hearty and human about it. I

shall not therefore bring any fine or fastidious criticism, whether

literary or musical, to bear upon the little boys who drag about a

bolster and a paper mask, calling out

Guy Fawkes Guy

Hit him in the eye.

But I admit it is a disadvantage that they have not a saint or hero to

crown in effigy as well as a traitor to burn in effigy. I admit that

popular Protestantism has become too purely negative for people to

wreathe in flowers the statue of Mr. Kensit or even of Dr. Clifford. I

do not disguise my preference for popular Catholicism; which still has

statues that can be wreathed in flowers. I wish our national feast of

fireworks revolved round something positive and popular. I wish the

beauty of a Catherine Wheel were displayed to the glory of St.

Catherine. I should not especially complain if Roman candles were really

Roman candles. But this negative character does not destroy the national

character; which began at least in disinterested faith and has ended at

least in disinterested fun. There is nothing disinterested at all about

the new commercial fireworks. There is nothing so dignified as a dingy

guy among the lights of Broadway. In that thoroughfare, indeed, the very

word guy has another and milder significance. An American friend

congratulated me on the impression I produced on a lady interviewer,

observing, ‘She says you’re a regular guy.’ This puzzled me a little at

the time. ‘Her description is no doubt correct,’ I said, ‘but I confess

that it would never have struck me as specially complimentary.’ But it

appears that it is one of the most graceful of compliments, in the

original American. A guy in America is a colourless term for a human

being. All men are guys, being endowed by their Creator with certain …

but I am misled by another association. And a regular guy means, I

presume, a reliable or respectable guy. The point here, however, is that

the guy in the grotesque English sense does represent the dilapidated

remnant of a real human tradition of symbolising real historic ideals by

the sacramental mystery of fire. It is a great fall from the lowest of

these lowly bonfires to the highest of the modern sky-signs. The new

illumination does not stand for any national ideal at all; and what is

yet more to the point, it does not come from any popular enthusiasm at

all. That is where it differs from the narrowest national Protestantism

of the English institution. Mobs have risen in support of No Popery; no

mobs are likely to rise in defence of the New Puffery. Many a poor crazy

Orangeman has died saying, ‘To Hell with the Pope’; it is doubtful

whether any man will ever, with his last breath, frame the ecstatic

words, ‘Try Hugby’s Chewing Gum.’ These modern and mercantile legends

are imposed upon us by a mercantile minority, and we are merely passive

to the suggestion. The hypnotist of high finance or big business merely

writes his commands in heaven with a finger of fire. All men really are

guys, in the sense of dummies. We are only the victims of his

pyrotechnic violence; and it is he who hits us in the eye.

This is the real case against that modern society that is symbolised by

such art and architecture. It is not that it is toppling, but that it is

top-heavy. It is not that it is vulgar, but rather that it is not

popular. In other words, the democratic ideal of countries like America,

while it is still generally sincere and sometimes intense, is at issue

with another tendency, an industrial progress which is of all things on

earth the most undemocratic. America is not alone in possessing the

industrialism, but she is alone in emphasising the ideal that strives

with industrialism. Industrial capitalism and ideal democracy are

everywhere in controversy; but perhaps only here are they in conflict.

France has a democratic ideal; but France is not industrial. England and

Germany are industrial; but England and Germany are not really

democratic. Of course when I speak here of industrialism I speak of

great industrial areas; there is, as will be noted later, another side

to all these countries; there is in America itself not only a great deal

of agricultural society, but a great deal of agricultural equality;

just as there are still peasants in Germany and may some day again be

peasants in England. But the point is that the ideal and its enemy the

reality are here crushed very close to each other in the high, narrow

city; and that the sky-scraper is truly named because its top, towering

in such insolence, is scraping the stars off the American sky, the very

heaven of the American spirit.

That seems to me the main outline of the whole problem. In the first

chapter of this book, I have emphasised the fact that equality is still

the ideal though no longer the reality of America. I should like to

conclude this one by emphasising the fact that the reality of modern

capitalism is menacing that ideal with terrors and even splendours that

might well stagger the wavering and impressionable modern spirit. Upon

the issue of that struggle depends the question of whether this new

great civilisation continues to exist, and even whether any one cares if

it exists or not. I have already used the parable of the American flag,

and the stars that stand for a multitudinous equality; I might here take

the opposite symbol of these artificial and terrestrial stars flaming on

the forehead of the commercial city; and note the peril of the last

illusion, which is that the artificial stars may seem to fill the

heavens, and the real stars to have faded from sight. But I am content

for the moment to reaffirm the merely imaginative pleasure of those

dizzy turrets and dancing fires. If those nightmare buildings were

really all built for nothing, how noble they would be! The fact that

they were really built for something need not unduly depress us for a

moment, or drag down our soaring fancies. There is something about these

vertical lines that suggests a sort of rush upwards, as of great

cataracts topsy-turvy. I have spoken of fireworks, but here I should

rather speak of rockets. There is only something underneath the mind

murmuring that nothing remains at last of a flaming rocket except a

falling stick. I have spoken of Babylonian perspectives, and of words

written with a fiery finger, like that huge unhuman finger that wrote on

Belshazzar’s wall… But what did it write on Belshazzar’s wall?… I

am content once more to end on a note of doubt and a rather dark

sympathy with those many-coloured solar systems turning so dizzily, far

up in the divine vacuum of the night.

‘From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when people get away

from that they are lost.’

Irish and other Interviewers

It is often asked what should be the first thing that a man sees when he

lands in a foreign country; but I think it should be the vision of his

own country. At least when I came into New York Harbour, a sort of grey

and green cloud came between me and the towers with multitudinous

windows, white in the winter sunlight; and I saw an old brown house

standing back among the beech-trees at home, the house of only one among

many friends and neighbours, but one somehow so sunken in the very heart

of England as to be unconscious of her imperial or international

position, and out of the sound of her perilous seas. But what made most

clear the vision that revisited me was something else. Before we touched

land the men of my own guild, the journalists and reporters, had already

boarded the ship like pirates. And one of them spoke to me in an accent

that I knew; and thanked me for all I had done for Ireland. And it was

at that moment that I knew most vividly that what I wanted was to do

something for England.

Then, as it chanced, I looked across at the statue of Liberty, and saw

that the great bronze was gleaming green in the morning light. I had

made all the obvious jokes about the statue of Liberty. I found it had a

soothing effect on earnest Prohibitionists on the boat to urge, as a

point of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to be given back to the

French, a vicious race abandoned to the culture of the vine. I proposed

that the last liquors on board should be poured out in a pagan libation

before it. And then I suddenly remembered that this Liberty was still in

some sense enlightening the world, or one part of the world; was a lamp

for one sort of wanderer, a star of one sort of seafarer. To one

persecuted people at least this land had really been an asylum; even if

recent legislation (as I have said) had made them think it a lunatic

asylum. They had made it so much their home that the very colour of the

country seemed to change with the infusion; as the bronze of the great

statue took on a semblance of the wearing of the green.

It is a commonplace that the Englishman has been stupid in his relations

with the Irish; but he has been far more stupid in his relations with

the Americans on the subject of the Irish. His propaganda has been worse

than his practice; and his defence more ill-considered than the most

indefensible things that it was intended to defend. There is in this

matter a curious tangle of cross-purposes, which only a parallel example

can make at all clear. And I will note the point here, because it is

some testimony to its vivid importance that it was really the first I

had to discuss on American soil with an American citizen. In a double

sense I touched Ireland before I came to America. I will take an

imaginary instance from another controversy; in order to show how the

apology can be worse than the action. The best we can say for ourselves

is worse than the worst that we can do.

There was a time when English poets and other publicists could always be

inspired with instantaneous indignation about the persecuted Jews in

Russia. We have heard less about them since we heard more about the

persecuting Jews in Russia. I fear there are a great many middle-class

Englishmen already who wish that Trotsky had been persecuted a little

more. But even in those days Englishmen divided their minds in a curious

fashion; and unconsciously distinguished between the Jews whom they had

never seen, in Warsaw, and the Jews whom they had often seen in

Whitechapel. It seemed to be assumed that, by a curious coincidence,

Russia possessed not only the very worst Anti-Semites but the very best

Semites. A moneylender in London might be like Judas Iscariot; but a

moneylender in Moscow must be like Judas Maccabaeus.

Nevertheless there remained in our common sense an unconscious but

fundamental comprehension of the unity of Israel; a sense that some

things could be said, and some could not be said, about the Jews as a

whole. Suppose that even in those days, to say nothing of these, an

English protest against Russian Anti-Semitism had been answered by the

Russian Anti-Semites, and suppose the answer had been somewhat as

follows:—

‘It is all very well for foreigners to complain of our denying civic

rights to our Jewish subjects; but we know the Jews better than they do.

They are a barbarous people, entirely primitive, and very like the

simple savages who cannot count beyond five on their fingers. It is

quite impossible to make them understand ordinary numbers, to say

nothing of simple economics. They do not realise the meaning or the

value of money. No Jew anywhere in the world can get into his stupid

head the notion of a bargain, or of exchanging one thing for another.

Their hopeless incapacity for commerce or finance would retard the

progress of our people, would prevent the spread of any sort of economic

education, would keep the whole country on a level lower than that of

the most prehistoric methods of barter. What Russia needs most is a

mercantile middle class; and it is unjust to ask us to swamp its small

beginnings in thousands of these rude tribesmen, who cannot do a sum of

simple addition, or understand the symbolic character of a threepenny

bit. We might as well be asked to give civic rights to cows and pigs as

to this unhappy, half-witted race who can no more count than the beasts

of the field. In every intellectual exercise they are hopelessly

incompetent; no Jew can play chess; no Jew can learn languages; no Jew

has ever appeared in the smallest part in any theatrical performance; no

Jew can give or take any pleasure connected with any musical instrument.

These people are our subjects; and we understand them. We accept full

responsibility for treating such troglodytes on our own terms.’

It would not be entirely convincing. It would sound a little far-fetched

and unreal. But it would sound exactly like our utterances about the

Irish, as they sound to all Americans, and rather especially to

Anti-Irish Americans. That is exactly the impression we produce on the

people of the United States when we say, as we do say in substance,

something like this: ‘We mean no harm to the poor dear Irish, so dreamy,

so irresponsible, so incapable of order or organisation. If we were to

withdraw from their country they would only fight among themselves; they

have no notion of how to rule themselves. There is something charming

about their unpracticability, about their very incapacity for the coarse

business of politics. But for their own sakes it is impossible to leave

these emotional visionaries to ruin themselves in the attempt to rule

themselves. They are like children; but they are our own children, and

we understand them. We accept full responsibility for acting as their

parents and guardians.’

Now the point is not only that this view of the Irish is false, but that

it is the particular view that the Americans know to be false. While we

are saying that the Irish could not organise, the Americans are

complaining, often very bitterly, of the power of Irish organisation.

While we say that the Irishman could not rule himself, the Americans are

saying, more or less humorously, that the Irishman rules them. A highly

intelligent professor said to me in Boston, ‘We have solved the Irish

problem here; we have an entirely independent Irish Government.’ While

we are complaining, in an almost passionate manner, of the impotence of

mere cliques of idealists and dreamers, they are complaining, often in a

very indignant manner, of the power of great gangs of bosses and

bullies. There are a great many Americans who pity the Irish, very

naturally and very rightly, for the historic martyrdom which their

patriotism has endured. But there are a great many Americans who do not

pity the Irish in the least. They would be much more likely to pity the

English; only this particular way of talking tends rather to make them

despise the English. Thus both the friends of Ireland and the foes of

Ireland tend to be the foes of England. We make one set of enemies by

our action, and another by our apology.

It is a thing that can from time to time be found in history; a

misunderstanding that really has a moral. The English excuse would carry

much more weight if it had more sincerity and more humility. There are

a considerable number of people in the United States who could

sympathise with us, if we would say frankly that we fear the Irish.

Those who thus despise our pity might possibly even respect our fear.

The argument I have often used in other places comes back with

prodigious and redoubled force, after hearing anything of American

opinion; the argument that the only reasonable or reputable excuse for

the English is the excuse of a patriotic sense of peril; and that the

Unionist, if he must be a Unionist, should use that and no other. When

the Unionist has said that he dare not let loose against himself a

captive he has so cruelly wronged, he has said all that he has to say;

all that he has ever had to say; all that he will ever have to say. He

is like a man who has sent a virile and rather vindictive rival unjustly

to penal servitude; and who connives at the continuance of the sentence,

not because he himself is particularly vindictive, but because he is

afraid of what the convict will do when he comes out of prison. This is

not exactly a moral strength, but it is a very human weakness; and that

is the most that can be said for it. All other talk, about Celtic frenzy

or Catholic superstition, is cant invented to deceive himself or to

deceive the world. But the vital point to realise is that it is cant

that cannot possibly deceive the American world. In the matter of the

Irishman the American is not to be deceived. It is not merely true to

say that he knows better. It is equally true to say that he knows worse.

He knows vices and evils in the Irishman that are entirely hidden in the

hazy vision of the Englishman. He knows that our unreal slanders are

inconsistent even with the real sins. To us Ireland is a shadowy Isle of

Sunset, like Atlantis, about which we can make up legends. To him it is

a positive ward or parish in the heart of his huge cities, like

Whitechapel; about which even we cannot make legends but only lies. And,

as I have said, there are some lies we do not tell even about

Whitechapel. We do not say it is inhabited by Jews too stupid to count

or know the value of a coin.

The first thing for any honest Englishman to send across the sea is

this; that the English have not the shadow of a notion of what they are

up against in America. They have never even heard of the batteries of

almost brutal energy, of which I had thus touched a live wire even

before I landed. People talk about the hypocrisy of England in dealing

with a small nationality. What strikes me is the stupidity of England in

supposing that she is dealing with a small nationality; when she is

really dealing with a very large nationality. She is dealing with a

nationality that often threatens, even numerically, to dominate all the

other nationalities of the United States. The Irish are not decaying;

they are not unpractical; they are scarcely even scattered; they are not

even poor. They are the most powerful and practical world-combination

with whom we can decide to be friends or foes; and that is why I thought

first of that still and solid brown house in Buckinghamshire, standing

back in the shadow of the trees.

Among my impressions of America I have deliberately put first the figure

of the Irish-American interviewer, standing on the shore more symbolic

than the statue of Liberty. The Irish interviewer’s importance for the

English lay in the fact of his being an Irishman, but there was also

considerable interest in the circumstance of his being an interviewer.

And as certain wild birds sometimes wing their way far out to sea and

are the first signal of the shore, so the first Americans the traveller

meets are often American interviewers; and they are generally birds of a

feather, and they certainly flock together. In this respect, there is a

slight difference in the etiquette of the craft in the two countries,

which I was delighted to discuss with my fellow craftsmen. If I could at

that moment have flown back to Fleet Street I am happy to reflect that

nobody in the world would in the least wish to interview me. I should

attract no more attention than the stone griffin opposite the Law

Courts; both monsters being grotesque but also familiar. But supposing

for the sake of argument that anybody did want to interview me, it is

fairly certain that the fact of one paper publishing such an interview

would rather prevent the other papers from doing so. The repetition of

the same views of the same individual in two places would be considered

rather bad journalism; it would have an air of stolen thunder, not to

say stage thunder.

But in America the fact of my landing and lecturing was evidently

regarded in the same light as a murder or a great fire, or any other

terrible but incurable catastrophe, a matter of interest to all pressmen

concerned with practical events. One of the first questions I was asked

was how I should be disposed to explain the wave of crime in New York.

Naturally I replied that it might possibly be due to the number of

English lecturers who had recently landed. In the mood of the moment it

seemed possible that, if they had all been interviewed, regrettable

incidents might possibly have taken place. But this was only the mood of

the moment, and even as a mood did not last more than a moment. And

since it has reference to a rather common and a rather unjust conception

of American journalism, I think it well to take it first as a fallacy to

be refuted, though the refutation may require a rather longer approach.

I have generally found that the traveller 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 boulevards 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 on to

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 Kent and 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 realise the sublime and starry paradox of the phrase, _vin

ordinaire_, 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 gap 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 the 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 over-abused 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 in a

very delicate social art; and I am 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. But 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. And 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 labour

troubles. I told them my general view of Labour in the very largest and

perhaps the vaguest historical outline; pointing out that the one great

truth 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 generalisation 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-barrows, and that they had desisted from the

beneficent activities. Any one 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 appeared that I had said,

‘Prohibition! All matter of dollar sign.’ This is almost avowed

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 Skelt and Stevenson Toy Theatre as ‘a cent plain, and two

cents coloured’ or condemned a 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 the surface for a 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 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 on to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore from

him replies to all sorts of bald 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 a faith

and docility unknown in any previous epoch of 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 clubman in private, and becomes a sort of

highway-robber in print.

I have turned this chapter into something like a defence of

interviewers, 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 minimise 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 the modern world will not be righted by attributing the whole

disease to each of its symptoms in turn; first to the tavern and then to

the cinema and 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.

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 more

properly be 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 realises that

they always start it 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 whole 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 the 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 earth. If I could analyse 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 is 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 an unexhausted

artistic energy; but it is partly also that it is an 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 realise

something which gives it unity and marks its chief difference from the

climate and colours 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 shifty. 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 colours of varied

buildings against the equal colour of the sky. Strangely enough I found

myself repeating about this vista of the West two vivid lines in which

Mr. W. B. Yeats has called up a vision of the East:—

And coloured like the eastern birds

At evening in their rainless skies.

To invoke a somewhat less poetic parallel, even the untravelled

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 a 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 colour. Colour runs through all our experience;

and we all know that our childhood found talismanic gems in the very

paints in the paint-box, 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 mediaeval

democracy. Now if one had the caprice of conceiving some city exactly

contrary to one thus seared and seasoned by fire, its colour 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 stewed umber. But

the colours 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 colours but of crayons. If the

Englishman returning to England is moved at the sight of a block of

white chalk, the American sees rather a bundle of chalks. Nor 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

coloured 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 edges 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 colour 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 reel. 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. ‘271

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

‘Pine Crest’ or ‘Heather Crag’ like any unobtrusive villa in Streatham.

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 the modern mind something paradoxical that can find peace in

change, it is here that it has indeed built its habitation or rather is

still building and unbuilding it. One 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

great American Republic contains very considerable varieties, and of

these varieties I necessarily saw far too little to allow me to

generalise. But from the little I did see, I should venture on the

generalisation 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 searchlight 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 rather 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 as what was done yesterday makes some difference to-day, so

what is done to-day will make some difference to-morrow. 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

is satisfied in the 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 grey labyrinth of Philadelphia, great

Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had 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 advertisement 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 Penn and Franklin as for an

Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and of 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 favourite 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

priggish fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions have

illogically curtailed it. The Nonconformists 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 Stuarts. And the same is

true of the other city, yet more closely connected with the tolerant

experiment of the Stuarts. 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 teem. 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 Gibbons was dead.

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 the bases 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 that 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 ever go back to Baltimore

The city of Maryland.

But the poem 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 untouched (it may be said) by the fact

that a neighbouring 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 chapels and prayers in the ante-chambers, where 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 anti-types 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

travellers 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 antic 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

recognise 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 noted 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 a 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 Cabots 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 sympathies 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 it 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 glimpses of a man’s forgotten

childhood; and when I saw the long path with posts where the Autocrat

may be supposed to have walked with the schoolmistress, 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 it even about 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 realise that the energy of that

great man was largely directed towards saving us from the chief evil

which destroys the nations to-day. He sought to cut down, as with a

sword 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

sceptre 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 people who refuse 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

financiers. 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 in the

American mind for 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 criticising

foreigners, if only we would also criticise ourselves. In other words,

the world might need even less of its new charity, 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 magnates, we ought to remember that we paved the

way for it by allowing them all to accumulate in the possession of

English magnates. 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

idolatrise 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 lacking

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 banished. 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 sky-scrapers,

and set it in a stainless sky.

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.

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 in a leaking ship

under a lowering 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 dukes.

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

apologue about Jacques Bonhomme 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 neighbours. 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 screw-driver. It seems to me a harmless

request, but from the way people talked about it one might suppose he

had asked for a screw-driver to screw down the wife in her coffin. And a

great many advanced persons would tell us that wooden house in which

she lived really was like a wooden coffin. But this appears to me to be

taking a somewhat funereal 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 striven to

give to humanity. Revolutionists have treated it not only as the normal

but even as the ideal. Revolutionary wars have been waged to establish

this; revolutionary heroes have fought, and 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 screw-driver. For there is

here a fact about America that is almost entirely unknown in England.

The English have not in the least realised 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 realise 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 freeholders. 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 injustice

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 wits 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 screw-driver. 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 realised, 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 grey.

In this relative agricultural equality the Americans of the Middle West

are far in advance of the English of the twentieth century. It is not

their fault if they are still some centuries behind the English of the

twelfth 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 besides 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 a traveller passing from one patch of peasantry to

another, and finding women wearing strange head-dresses and men singing

new songs.

A traveller in America would be somewhat surprised if he found the

people in the city of St. Louis all wearing crowns and crusading armour

in honour 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 honour

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 mediaeval 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 vulgarised by sham squires, to sneer at such

colonists as merely 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 centres,

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 screw-drivers. There

is no reason why the screw-driver that seemed such a trifle to the

author should not have been borne 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 and

piety that filled common life with something that is lacking in the

worthy and virile democracy of the West. Nor are Americans of

intelligence so ignorant of this as some may suppose. There is an

admirable society called the Mediaevalists in Chicago; whose name and

address will strike many as suggesting a certain struggle of the soul

against the environment. With the national heartiness they blazon their

note-paper with heraldry and the hues of Gothic windows; with the

national high spirits they assume the fancy dress of friars; but any one

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

mediaevalism; 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 and buildings of Yale,

deliberately modelled not on classical harmony but on Gothic

irregularity and surprise. The grace and energy of the mediaeval

architecture resurrected by a man like Mr. R. A. Cram of Boston has

behind it not merely artistic but historical and ethical enthusiasm; an

enthusiasm for the Catholic creed which made mediaeval civilisation.

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

epitaphs 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

in 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 plough 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 into 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 sights 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 grey vistas of shops full of rubber tyres and

metallic appliances; a man felt that 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 Pittsburg; the sky-signs might have

been New York. One looked up in a sort of despair at the sky, not for a

sky-sign but 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 men. 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 a forest of 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 Plough.

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 Willesden 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 traveller should write about is the thing which he

has not read about. It may be a small or 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 here a

great deal of complication and controversy is 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 grey 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 commonplace and trivial objects of modern life—a walking stick and

a fur coat.

As it happened, I travelled 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 grey 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

foppery 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 flavour 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 beau with his

clouded cane; it does not suggest a town type, but rather specially 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 a 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 traveller

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 icehouse outside and a

hothouse inside; so hot that he may be said to construct an icehouse

inside that. He turns himself into an icehouse 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 sybarite 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

plodder 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 impressions of a 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 symbolises. 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 its own 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 fact 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 Stoke Poges.

Doubtless there are statisticians capable of carefully 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 required medical

care and police coercion. And doubtless their calculations, like nearly

all such calculations, would leave out the only important point; as that

the street was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Zoo, or was yet

more happily situated under the benignant shadow of the Elephant and

Castle. And in the same way the mechanical 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 business men

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 American, 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 200-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 mistier and more

impressionist scenery. It is also connected perhaps with something more

boyish about the younger civilisation; and corresponds to the passionate

particularity with which a boy will distinguish the uniforms of

regiments, the rigs of ships, or even the colours of tram tickets. It is

a certain godlike appetite for things, as distinct from thoughts.

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 business men 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 business men 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 labour 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 Welsh

rarebit or an Irish stew. And 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 day-dream of

leisure, and one which the American spirit tends to miss. It may be

expressed in the word ‘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 centre 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 a butcher paints,

A baker rhymes for his pursuit,

Candlestick-maker much acquaints

His soul with song, or haply 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 traveller 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 traveller 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 golf, 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 wastepaper 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 as Pickwick is

almost a kind of accident; it began as something secondary and grew into

something primary and pre-eminent. 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 weakness; 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 who

drops because he stops working. It is the great achievement of American

civilisation that in that country it really is not cant to talk about

the dignity of labour. There is something that might almost be called

the sanctity of labour; but it is subject to the profound law that when

anything less than the highest becomes a 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 business men, behaving in many ways in a fashion very

different from that of the swarms of London city men who go up every day

to the city. They sit about in groups with Red-Indian gravity, as if

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 merely

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 look rather alike, because they all like

to make their faces hard. And with the mention of their mental attitude

we realise 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 a mystic than a materialist. The

Frenchman who retires from business when he has money enough to drink

his wine and eat his omelette 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 omelette, even a coin is itself a

counter. The Yankee cannot eat chips as the Frenchman can eat chipped

potatoes; but neither can he swallow red cents 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 honour in the old duelling days. There is

not a material but a distinctly moral savour 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

favours the needless interlarding of English with scraps of foreign

languages. But though it means nothing in English, it means something

very particular in American. 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 duellist’s honour 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 to, 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 businesslike. 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 point at issue. Of course there is 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

although 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 Montenegrin

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 generalisation; 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 favourable or unfavourable, 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 the 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.

For instance, Americans are very unpunctual. That is the last thing that

a critic expects who comes to condemn them for hustling and haggling and

vulgar ambition. But it is almost the first fact that strikes the

spectator on the spot. The chief difference between the humdrum English

business man and the hustling American business man is that the hustling

American business man is always late. Of course there is a great deal of

difference between coming late and coming too late. But I noticed the

fashion first in connection with my own lectures; touching which I

could heartily recommend the habit of coming too late. I could easily

understand a crowd of commercial Americans not coming to my lectures at

all; but there was something odd about their coming in a crowd, and the

crowd being expected to turn up some time after the appointed hour. The

managers of these lectures (I continue to call them lectures out of

courtesy to myself) often explained to me that it was quite useless to

begin properly until about half an hour after time. Often people were

still coming in three-quarters of an hour or even an hour after time.

Not that I objected to that, as some lecturers are said to do; it seemed

to me an agreeable break in the monotony; but as a characteristic of a

people mostly engaged in practical business, it struck me as curious and

interesting. I have grown accustomed to being the most unbusinesslike

person in any given company; and it gave me a sort of dizzy exaltation

to find I was not the most unpunctual person in that company. I was

afterwards told by many Americans that my impression was quite correct;

that American unpunctuality was really very prevalent, and extended to

much more important things. But at least I was not content to lump this

along with all sorts of contrary things that I did not happen to like,

and call it America. I am not sure of what it really means, but I rather

fancy that though it may seem the very reverse of the hustling, it has

the same origin as the hustling. The American is not punctual because he

is not punctilious. He is impulsive, and has an impulse to stay as well

as an impulse to go. For, after all, punctuality belongs to the same

order of ideas as punctuation; and there is no punctuation in

telegrams. The order of clocks and set hours which English business has

always observed is a good thing in its own way; indeed I think that in a

larger sense it is better than the other way. But it is better because

it is a protection against hustling, not a promotion of it. In other

words, it is better because it is more civilised; as a great Venetian

merchant prince clad in cloth of gold was more civilised; or an old

English merchant drinking port in an oak-panelled room was more

civilised; or a little French shopkeeper shutting up his shop to play

dominoes is more civilised. And the reason is that the American has the

romance of business and is monomaniac, while the Frenchman has the

romance of life and is sane. But the romance of business really is a

romance, and the Americans are really romantic about it. And that

romance, though it revolves round pork or petrol, is really like a

love-affair in this; that it involves not only rushing but also

lingering.

The American is too busy to have business habits. He is also too much in

earnest to have business rules. If we wish to understand him, we must

compare him not with the French shopkeeper when he plays dominoes, but

with the same French shopkeeper when he works the guns or mans the

trenches as a conscript soldier. Everybody used to the punctilious

Prussian standard of uniform and parade has noticed the roughness and

apparent laxity of the French soldier, the looseness of his clothes, the

unsightliness of his heavy knapsack, in short his inferiority in every

detail of the business of war except fighting. There he is much too

swift to be smart. He is much too practical to be precise. By a strange

illusion which can lift pork-packing almost to the level of patriotism,

the American has the same free rhythm in his romance of business. He

varies his conduct not to suit the clock but to suit the case. He gives

more time to more important and less time to less important things; and

he makes up his time-table as he goes along. Suppose he has three

appointments; the first, let us say, is some mere trifle of erecting a

tower twenty storeys high and exhibiting a sky-sign on the top of it;

the second is a business discussion about the possibility of printing

advertisements of soft drinks on the table-napkins at a restaurant; the

third is attending a conference to decide how the populace can be

prevented from using chewing-gum and the manufacturers can still manage

to sell it. He will be content merely to glance at the sky-sign as he

goes by in a trolley-car or an automobile; he will then settle down to

the discussion with his partner about the table-napkins, each speaker

indulging in long monologues in turn; a peculiarity of much American

conversation. Now if in the middle of one of these monologues, he

suddenly thinks that the vacant space of the waiter’s shirt-front might

also be utilised to advertise the Gee Whiz Ginger Champagne, he will

instantly follow up the new idea in all its aspects and possibilities,

in an even longer monologue; and will never think of looking at his

watch while he is rapturously looking at his waiter. The consequence is

that he will come late into the great social movement against

chewing-gum, where an Englishman would probably have arrived at the

proper hour. But though the Englishman’s conduct is more proper, it need

not be in all respects more practical. The Englishman’s rules are better

for the business of life, but not necessarily for the life of business.

And it is true that for many of these Americans business is the

business of life. It is really also, as I have said, the romance of

life. We shall admire or deplore this spirit, accordingly as we are glad

to see trade irradiated with so much poetry, or sorry to see so much

poetry wasted on trade. But it does make many people happy, like any

other hobby; and one is disposed to add that it does fill their

imaginations like any other delusion. For the true criticism of all this

commercial romance would involve a criticism of this historic phase of

commerce. These people are building on the sand, though it shines like

gold, and for them like fairy gold; but the world will remember the

legend about fairy gold. Half the financial operations they follow deal

with things that do not even exist; for in that sense all finance is a

fairy tale. Many of them are buying and selling things that do nothing

but harm; but it does them good to buy and sell them. The claim of the

romantic salesman is better justified than he realises. Business really

is romance; for it is not reality.

There is one real advantage that America has over England, largely due

to its livelier and more impressionable ideal. America does not think

that stupidity is practical. It does not think that ideas are merely

destructive things. It does not think that a genius is only a person to

be told to go away and blow his brains out; rather it would open all its

machinery to the genius and beg him to blow his brains in. It might

attempt to use a natural force like Blake or Shelley for very ignoble

purposes; it would be quite capable of asking Blake to take his tiger

and his golden lions round as a sort of Barnum’s Show, or Shelley to

hang his stars and haloed clouds among the lights of Broadway. But it

would not assume that a natural force is useless, any more than that

Niagara is useless. And there is a very definite distinction here

touching the intelligence of the trader, whatever we may think of either

course touching the intelligence of the artist. It is one thing that

Apollo should be employed by Admetus, although he is a god. It is quite

another thing that Apollo should always be sacked by Admetus, because he

is a god. Now in England, largely owing to the accident of a rivalry and

therefore a comparison with France, there arose about the end of the

eighteenth century an extraordinary notion that there was some sort of

connection between dullness and success. What the Americans call a

bonehead became what the English call a hard-headed man. The merchants

of London evinced their contempt for the fantastic logicians of Paris by

living in a permanent state of terror lest somebody should set the

Thames on fire. In this as in much else it is much easier to understand

the Americans if we connect them with the French who were their allies

than with the English who were their enemies. There are a great many

Franco-American resemblances which the practical Anglo-Saxons are of

course too hard-headed (or boneheaded) to see. American history is

haunted with the shadow of the Plebiscitary President; they have a

tradition of classical architecture for public buildings. Their cities

are planned upon the squares of Paris and not upon the labyrinth of

London. They call their cities Corinth and Syracuse, as the French

called their citizens Epaminondas and Timoleon. Their soldiers wore the

French kepi; and they make coffee admirably, and do not make tea at all.

But of all the French elements in America the most French is this real

practicality. They know that at certain times the most businesslike of

all qualities is ‘l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de

l’audace.’ The publisher may induce the poet to do a pot-boiler; but the

publisher would cheerfully allow the poet to set the Mississippi on

fire, if it would boil his particular pot. It is not so much that

Englishmen are stupid as that they are afraid of being clever; and it is

not so much that Americans are clever as that they do not try to be any

stupider than they are. The fire of French logic has burnt that out of

America as it has burnt it out of Europe, and of almost every place

except England. This is one of the few points on which English

insularity really is a disadvantage. It is the fatal notion that the

only sort of commonsense is to be found in compromise, and that the only

sort of compromise is to be found in confusion. This must be clearly

distinguished from the commonplace about the utilitarian world not

rising to the invisible values of genius. Under this philosophy the

utilitarian does not see the utility of genius, even when it is quite

visible. He does not see it, not because he is a utilitarian, but

because he is an idealist whose ideal is dullness. For some time the

English aspired to be stupid, prayed and hoped with soaring spiritual

ambition to be stupid. But with all their worship of success, they did

not succeed in being stupid. The natural talents of a great and

traditional nation were always breaking out in spite of them. In spite

of the merchants of London, Turner did set the Thames on fire. In spite

of our repeatedly explained preference for realism to romance, Europe

persisted in resounding with the name of Byron. And just when we had

made it perfectly clear to the French that we despised all their

flamboyant tricks, that we were a plain prosaic people and there was no

fantastic glory or chivalry about us, the very shaft we sent against

them shone with the name of Nelson, a shooting and a falling star.

Presidents and Problems

All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen.

All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen.

This difference, deep and perhaps ineradicable in the temperaments of

the two peoples, explains a thousand things in their literature and

their laws. The American national poet praised his people for their

readiness ‘to rise against the never-ending audacity of elected

persons.’ The English national anthem is content to say heartily, but

almost hastily, ‘Confound their politics,’ and then more cheerfully, as

if changing the subject, ‘God Save the King.’ For this is especially the

secret of the monarch or chief magistrate in the two countries. They arm

the President with the powers of a King, that he may be a nuisance in

politics. We deprive the King even of the powers of a President, lest he

should remind us of a politician. We desire to forget the never-ending

audacity of elected persons; and with us therefore it really never does

end. That is the practical objection to our own habit of changing the

subject, instead of changing the ministry. The King, as the Irish wit

observed, is not a subject; but in that sense the English crowned head

is not a King. He is a popular figure intended to remind us of the

England that politicians do not remember; the England of horses and

ships and gardens and good fellowship. The Americans have no such

purely social symbol; and it is rather the root than the result of this

that their social luxury, and especially their sport, are a little

lacking in humanity and humour. It is the American, much more than the

Englishman, who takes his pleasures sadly, not to say savagely.

The genuine popularity of constitutional monarchs, in parliamentary

countries, can be explained by any practical example. Let us suppose

that great social reform, The Compulsory Haircutting Act, has just begun

to be enforced. The Compulsory Haircutting Act, as every good citizen

knows, is a statute which permits any person to grow his hair to any

length, in any wild or wonderful shape, so long as he is registered with

a hairdresser who charges a shilling. But it imposes a universal

close-shave (like that which is found so hygienic during a curative

detention at Dartmoor) on all who are registered only with a barber who

charges threepence. Thus, while the ornamental classes can continue to

ornament the street with Piccadilly weepers or chin-beards if they

choose, the working classes demonstrate the care with which the State

protects them by going about in a fresher, cooler, and cleaner

condition; a condition which has the further advantage of revealing at a

glance that outline of the criminal skull, which is so common among

them. The Compulsory Haircutting Act is thus in every way a compact and

convenient example of all our current laws about education, sport,

liquor and liberty in general. Well, the law has passed and the masses,

insensible to its scientific value, are still murmuring against it. The

ignorant peasant maiden is averse to so extreme a fashion of bobbing her

hair; and does not see how she can even be a flapper with nothing to

flap. Her father, his mind already poisoned by Bolshevists, begins to

wonder who the devil does these things, and why. In proportion as he

knows the world of to-day, he guesses that the real origin may be quite

obscure, or the real motive quite corrupt. The pressure may have come

from anybody who has gained power or money anyhow. It may come from the

foreign millionaire who owns all the expensive hairdressing saloons; it

may come from some swindler in the cutlery trade who has contracted to

sell a million bad razors. Hence the poor man looks about him with

suspicion in the street; knowing that the lowest sneak or the loudest

snob he sees may be directing the government of his country. Anybody may

have to do with politics; and this sort of thing is politics. Suddenly

he catches sight of a crowd, stops, and begins wildly to cheer a

carriage that is passing. The carriage contains the one person who has

certainly not originated any great scientific reform. He is the only

person in the commonwealth who is not allowed to cut off other people’s

hair, or to take away other people’s liberties. He at least is kept out

of politics; and men hold him up as they did an unspotted victim to

appease the wrath of the gods. He is their King, and the only man they

know is not their ruler. We need not be surprised that he is popular,

knowing how they are ruled.

The popularity of a President in America is exactly the opposite. The

American Republic is the last mediaeval monarchy. It is intended that

the President shall rule, and take all the risks of ruling. If the hair

is cut he is the haircutter, the magistrate that bears not the razor in

vain. All the popular Presidents, Jackson and Lincoln and Roosevelt,

have acted as democratic despots, but emphatically not as

constitutional monarchs. In short, the names have become curiously

interchanged; and as a historical reality it is the President who ought

to be called a King.

But it is not only true that the President could correctly be called a

King. It is also true that the King might correctly be called a

President. We could hardly find a more exact description of him than to

call him a President. What is expected in modern times of a modern

constitutional monarch is emphatically that he should preside. We expect

him to take the throne exactly as if he were taking the chair. The

chairman does not move the motion or resolution, far less vote it; he is

not supposed even to favour it. He is expected to please everybody by

favouring nobody. The primary essentials of a President or Chairman are

that he should be treated with ceremonial respect, that he should be

popular in his personality and yet impersonal in his opinions, and that

he should actually be a link between all the other persons by being

different from all of them. This is exactly what is demanded of the

constitutional monarch in modern times. It is exactly the opposite to

the American position; in which the President does not preside at all.

He moves; and the thing he moves may truly be called a motion; for the

national idea is perpetual motion. Technically it is called a message;

and might often actually be called a menace. Thus we may truly say that

the King presides and the President reigns. Some would prefer to say

that the President rules; and some Senators and members of Congress

would prefer to say that he rebels. But there is no doubt that he moves;

he does not take the chair or even the stool, but rather the stump.

Some people seem to suppose that the fall of President Wilson was a

denial of this almost despotic ideal in America. As a matter of fact it

was the strongest possible assertion of it. The idea is that the

President shall take responsibility and risk; and responsibility means

being blamed, and risk means the risk of being blamed. The theory is

that things are done by the President; and if things go wrong, or are

alleged to go wrong, it is the fault of the President. This does not

invalidate, but rather ratifies the comparison with true monarchs such

as the mediaeval monarchs. Constitutional princes are seldom deposed;

but despots were often deposed. In the simpler races of sunnier lands,

such as Turkey, they were commonly assassinated. Even in our own history

a King often received the same respectful tribute to the responsibility

and reality of his office. But King John was attacked because he was

strong, not because he was weak. Richard the Second lost the crown

because the crown was a trophy, not because it was a trifle. And

President Wilson was deposed because he had used a power which is such,

in its nature, that a man must use it at the risk of deposition. As a

matter of fact, of course, it is easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson’s real

unpopularity, and still more easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson’s real

failure. There are a great many people in America who justify and

applaud him; and what is yet more interesting, who justify him not on

pacifist and idealistic, but on patriotic and even military grounds. It

is especially insisted by some that his demonstration, which seemed

futile as a threat against Mexico, was a very far-sighted preparation

for the threat against Prussia. But in so far as the democracy did

disagree with him, it was but the occasional and inevitable result of

the theory by which the despot has to anticipate the democracy.

Thus the American King and the English President are the very opposite

of each other; yet they are both the varied and very national

indications of the same contemporary truth. It is the great weariness

and contempt that have fallen upon common politics in both countries. It

may be answered, with some show of truth, that the new American

President represents a return to common politics; and that in that sense

he marks a real rebuke to the last President and his more uncommon

politics. And it is true that many who put Mr. Harding in power regard

him as the symbol of something which they call normalcy; which may

roughly be translated into English by the word normality. And by this

they do mean, more or less, the return to the vague capitalist

conservatism of the nineteenth century. They might call Mr. Harding a

Victorian if they had ever lived under Victoria. Perhaps these people do

entertain the extraordinary notion that the nineteenth century was

normal. But there are very few who think so, and even they will not

think so long. The blunder is the beginning of nearly all our present

troubles. The nineteenth century was the very reverse of normal. It

suffered a most unnatural strain in the combination of political

equality in theory with extreme economic inequality in practice.

Capitalism was not a normalcy but an abnormalcy. Property is normal, and

is more normal in proportion as it is universal. Slavery may be normal

and even natural, in the sense that a bad habit may be second nature.

But Capitalism was never anything so human as a habit; we may say it was

never anything so good as a bad habit. It was never a custom; for men

never grew accustomed to it. It was never even conservative; for before

it was even created wise men had realised that it could not be

conserved. It was from the first a problem; and those who will not even

admit the Capitalist problem deserve to get the Bolshevist solution. All

things considered, I cannot say anything worse of them than that.

The recent Presidential election preserved some trace of the old Party

System of America; but its tradition has very nearly faded like that of

the Party System of England. It is easy for an Englishman to confess

that he never quite understood the American Party System. It would

perhaps be more courageous in him, and more informing, to confess that

he never really understood the British Party System. The planks in the

two American platforms may easily be exhibited as very disconnected and

ramshackle; but our own party was as much of a patchwork, and indeed I

think even more so. Everybody knows that the two American factions were

called ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican.’ It does not at all cover the case to

identify the former with Liberals and the latter with Conservatives. The

Democrats are the party of the South and have some true tradition from

the Southern aristocracy and the defence of Secession and State Rights.

The Republicans rose in the North as the party of Lincoln, largely

condemning slavery. But the Republicans are also the party of Tariffs,

and are at least accused of being the party of Trusts. The Democrats are

the party of Free Trade; and in the great movement of twenty years ago

the party of Free Silver. The Democrats are also the party of the Irish;

and the stones they throw at Trusts are retorted by stones thrown at

Tammany. It is easy to see all these things as curiously sporadic and

bewildering; but I am inclined to think that they are as a whole more

coherent and rational than our own old division of Liberals and

Conservatives. There is even more doubt nowadays about what is the

connecting link between the different items in the old British party

programmes. I have never been able to understand why being in favour of

Protection should have anything to do with being opposed to Home Rule;

especially as most of the people who were to receive Home Rule were

themselves in favour of Protection. I could never see what giving people

cheap bread had to do with forbidding them cheap beer; or why the party

which sympathises with Ireland cannot sympathise with Poland. I cannot

see why Liberals did not liberate public-houses or Conservatives

conserve crofters. I do not understand the principle upon which the

causes were selected on both sides; and I incline to think that it was

with the impartial object of distributing nonsense equally on both

sides. Heaven knows there is enough nonsense in American politics too;

towering and tropical nonsense like a cyclone or an earthquake. But when

all is said, I incline to think that there was more spiritual and

atmospheric cohesion in the different parts of the American party than

in those of the English party; and I think this unity was all the more

real because it was more difficult to define. The Republican party

originally stood for the triumph of the North, and the North stood for

the nineteenth century; that is for the characteristic commercial

expansion of the nineteenth century; for a firm faith in the profit and

progress of its great and growing cities, its division of labour, its

industrial science, and its evolutionary reform. The Democratic party

stood more loosely for all the elements that doubted whether this

development was democratic or was desirable; all that looked back to

Jeffersonian idealism and the serene abstractions of the eighteenth

century, or forward to Bryanite idealism and some simplified Utopia

founded on grain rather than gold. Along with this went, not at all

unnaturally, the last and lingering sentiment of the Southern squires,

who remembered a more rural civilisation that seemed by comparison

romantic. Along with this went, quite logically, the passions and the

pathos of the Irish, themselves a rural civilisation, whose basis is a

religion or what the nineteenth century tended to call a superstition.

Above all, it was perfectly natural that this tone of thought should

favour local liberties, and even a revolt on behalf of local liberties,

and should distrust the huge machine of centralised power called the

Union. In short, something very near the truth was said by a suicidally

silly Republican orator, who was running Blaine for the Presidency, when

he denounced the Democratic party as supported by ‘Rome, rum, and

rebellion.’ They seem to me to be three excellent things in their place;

and that is why I suspect that I should have belonged to the Democratic

party, if I had been born in America when there was a Democratic party.

But I fancy that by this time even this general distinction has become

very dim. If I had been an American twenty years ago, in the time of the

great Free Silver campaign, I should certainly never have hesitated for

an instant about my sympathies or my side. My feelings would have been

exactly those that are nobly expressed by Mr. Vachell Lindsay, in a poem

bearing the characteristic title of ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan.’ And,

by the way, nobody can begin to sympathise with America whose soul does

not to some extent begin to swing and dance to the drums and gongs of

Mr. Vachell Lindsay’s great orchestra; which has the note of his whole

nation in this: that a refined person can revile it a hundred times over

as violent and brazen and barbarous and absurd, but not as insincere;

there is something in it, and that something is the soul of many million

men. But the poet himself, in the political poem referred to, speaks of

Bryan’s fall over Free Silver as ‘defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my

dream’; and it is only too probable that the cause has fallen as well as

the candidate. The William Jennings Bryan of later years is not the man

whom I should have seen in my youth, with the visionary eyes of Mr.

Vachell Lindsay. He has become a commonplace Pacifist, which is in its

nature the very opposite of a revolutionist; for if men will fight

rather than sacrifice humanity on a golden cross, it cannot be wrong for

them to resist its being sacrificed to an iron cross. I came into very

indirect contact with Mr. Bryan when I was in America, in a fashion that

made me realise how hard it has become to recover the illusions of a

Bryanite. I believe that my lecture agent was anxious to arrange a

debate, and I threw out a sort of loose challenge to the effect that

woman’s suffrage had weakened the position of woman; and while I was

away in the wilds of Oklahoma my lecture agent (a man of blood-curdling

courage and enterprise) asked Mr. Bryan to debate with me. Now Mr. Bryan

is one of the greatest orators of modern history, and there is no

conceivable reason why he should trouble to debate with a wandering

lecturer. But as a matter of fact he expressed himself in the most

magnanimous and courteous terms about my personal position, but said (as

I understood) that it would be improper to debate on female suffrage as

it was already a part of the political system. And when I heard that, I

could not help a sigh; for I recognised something that I knew only too

well on the front benches of my own beloved land. The great and glorious

demagogue had degenerated into a statesman. I had never expected for a

moment that the great orator could be bothered to debate with me at all;

but it had never occurred to me, as a general moral principle, that two

educated men were for ever forbidden to talk sense about a particular

topic, because a lot of other people had already voted on it. What is

the matter with that attitude is the loss of the freedom of the mind.

There can be no liberty of thought unless it is ready to unsettle what

has recently been settled, as well as what has long been settled. We are

perpetually being told in the papers that what is wanted is a strong man

who will do things. What is wanted is a strong man who will undo things;

and that will be a real test of strength.

Anyhow, we could have believed, in the time of the Free Silver fight,

that the Democratic party was democratic with a small d. In Mr. Wilson

it was transfigured, his friends would say into a higher and his foes

into a hazier thing. And the Republican reaction against him, even where

it has been healthy, has also been hazy. In fact, it has been not so

much the victory of a political party as a relapse into repose after

certain political passions; and in that sense there is a truth in the

strange phrase about normalcy; in the sense that there is nothing more

normal than going to sleep. But an even larger truth is this; it is most

likely that America is no longer concentrated on these faction fights at

all, but is considering certain large problems upon which those factions

hardly troubled to take sides. They are too large even to be classified

as foreign policy distinct from domestic policy. They are so large as to

be inside as well as outside the state. From an English standpoint the

most obvious example is the Irish; for the Irish problem is not a

British problem, but also an American problem. And this is true even of

the great external enigma of Japan. The Japanese question may be a part

of foreign policy for America, but it is a part of domestic policy for

California. And the same is true of that other intense and intelligent

Eastern people, the genius and limitations of which have troubled the

world so much longer. What the Japs are in California, the Jews are in

America. That is, they are a piece of foreign policy that has become

imbedded in domestic policy; something which is found inside but still

has to be regarded from the outside. On these great international

matters I doubt if Americans got much guidance from their party system;

especially as most of these questions have grown very recently and

rapidly to enormous size. Men are left free to judge of them with fresh

minds. And that is the truth in the statement that the Washington

Conference has opened the gates of a new world.

On the relations to England and Ireland I will not attempt to dwell

adequately here. I have already noted that my first interview was with

an Irishman, and my first impression from that interview a vivid sense

of the importance of Ireland in Anglo-American relations; and I have

said something of the Irish problem, prematurely and out of its proper

order, under the stress of that sense of urgency. Here I will only add

two remarks about the two countries respectively. A great many British

journalists have recently imagined that they were pouring oil upon the

troubled waters, when they were rather pouring out oil to smooth the

downward path; and to turn the broad road to destruction into a

butter-slide. They seem to have no notion of what to do, except to say

what they imagine the very stupidest of their readers would be pleased

to hear, and conceal whatever the most intelligent of their readers

would probably like to know. They therefore informed the public that

‘the majority of Americans’ had abandoned all sympathy with Ireland,

because of its alleged sympathy with Germany; and that this majority of

Americans was now ardently in sympathy with its English brothers across

the sea. Now to begin with, such critics have no notion of what they are

saying when they talk about the majority of Americans. To anybody who

has happened to look in, let us say, on the city of Omaha, Nebraska, the

remark will have something enormous and overwhelming about it. It is

like saying that the majority of the inhabitants of China would agree

with the Chinese Ambassador in a preference for dining at the Savoy

rather than the Ritz. There are millions and millions of people living

in those great central plains of the North American Continent of whom

it would be nearer the truth to say that they have never heard of

England, or of Ireland either, than to say that their first emotional

movement is a desire to come to the rescue of either of them. It is

perfectly true that the more monomaniac sort of Sinn Feiner might

sometimes irritate this innocent and isolated American spirit by being

pro-Irish. It is equally true that a traditional Bostonian or Virginian

might irritate it by being pro-English. The only difference is that

large numbers of pure Irishmen are scattered in those far places, and

large numbers of pure Englishmen are not. But it is truest of all to say

that neither England nor Ireland so much as crosses the mind of most of

them once in six months. Painting up large notices of ‘Watch Us Grow,’

making money by farming with machinery, together with an occasional

hold-up with six-shooters and photographs of a beautiful murderess or

divorcée, fill up the round of their good and happy lives, and fleet the

time carelessly as in the golden age.

But putting aside all this vast and distant democracy, which is the real

‘majority of Americans,’ and confining ourselves to that older culture

on the eastern coast which the critics probably had in mind, we shall

find the case more comforting but not to be covered with cheap and false

comfort. Now it is perfectly true that any Englishman coming to this

eastern coast, as I did, finds himself not only most warmly welcomed as

a guest, but most cordially complimented as an Englishman. Men recall

with pride the branches of their family that belong to England or the

English counties where they were rooted; and there are enthusiasms for

English literature and history which are as spontaneous as patriotism

itself. Something of this may be put down to a certain promptitude and

flexibility in all American kindness, which is never sufficiently stodgy

to be called good nature. The Englishman does sometimes wonder whether

if he had been a Russian, his hosts would not have remembered remote

Russian aunts and uncles and disinterred a Muscovite great-grandmother;

or whether if he had come from Iceland, they would not have known as

much about Icelandic sagas and been as sympathetic about the absence of

Icelandic snakes. But with a fair review of the proportions of the case

he will dismiss this conjecture, and come to the conclusion that a

number of educated Americans are very warmly and sincerely sympathetic

with England.

What I began to feel, with a certain creeping chill, was that they were

only too sympathetic with England. The word sympathetic has sometimes

rather a double sense. The impression I received was that all these

chivalrous Southerners and men mellow with Bostonian memories were

rallying to England. They were on the defensive; and it was poor old

England that they were defending. Their attitude implied that somebody

or something was leaving her undefended, or finding her indefensible.

The burden of that hearty chorus was that England was not so black as

she was painted; it seemed clear that somewhere or other she was being

painted pretty black. But there was something else that made me

uncomfortable; it was not only the sense of being somewhat boisterously

forgiven; it was also something involving questions of power as well as

morality. Then it seemed to me that a new sensation turned me hot and

cold; and I felt something I have never before felt in a foreign land.

Never had my father or my grandfather known that sensation; never during

the great and complex and perhaps perilous expansion of our power and

commerce in the last hundred years had an Englishman heard exactly that

note in a human voice. England was being pitied. I, as an Englishman,

was not only being pardoned but pitied. My country was beginning to be

an object of compassion, like Poland or Spain. My first emotion, full of

the mood and movement of a hundred years, was one of furious anger. But

the anger has given place to anxiety; and the anxiety is not yet at an

end.

It is not my business here to expound my view of English politics, still

less of European politics or the politics of the world; but to put down

a few impressions of American travel. On many points of European

politics the impression will be purely negative; I am sure that most

Americans have no notion of the position of France or the position of

Poland. But if English readers want the truth, I am sure this is the

truth about their notion of the position of England. They are wondering,

or those who are watching are wondering, whether the term of her success

is come and she is going down the dark road after Prussia. Many are

sorry if this is so; some are glad if it is so; but all are seriously

considering the probability of its being so. And herein lay especially

the horrible folly of our Black-and-Tan terrorism over the Irish people.

I have noted that the newspapers told us that America had been chilled

in its Irish sympathies by Irish detachment during the war. It is the

painful truth that any advantage we might have had from this we

ourselves immediately proceeded to destroy. Ireland might have put

herself wrong with America by her attitude about Belgium, if England had

not instantly proceeded to put herself more wrong by her attitude

towards Ireland. It is quite true that two blacks do not make a white;

but you cannot send a black to reproach people with tolerating

blackness; and this is quite as true when one is a Black Brunswicker and

the other a Black-and-Tan. It is true that since then England has made

surprisingly sweeping concessions; concessions so large as to increase

the amazement that the refusal should have been so long. But

unfortunately the combination of the two rather clinches the conception

of our decline. If the concession had come before the terror, it would

have looked like an attempt to emancipate, and would probably have

succeeded. Coming so abruptly after the terror, it looked only like an

attempt to tyrannise, and an attempt that failed. It was partly an

inheritance from a stupid tradition, which tried to combine what it

called firmness with what it called conciliation; as if when we made up

our minds to soothe a man with a five-pound note, we always took care to

undo our own action by giving him a kick as well. The English politician

has often done that; though there is nothing to be said of such a fool,

except that he has wasted a fiver. But in this case he gave the kick

first, received a kicking in return, and then gave up the money; and

it was hard for the bystanders to say anything except that he had been

badly beaten. The combination and sequence of events seems almost as if

it were arranged to suggest the dark and ominous parallel. The first

action looked only too like the invasion of Belgium, and the second like

the evacuation of Belgium. So that vast and silent crowd in the West

looked at the British Empire, as men look at a great tower that has

begun to lean. Thus it was that while I found real pleasure, I could not

find unrelieved consolation in the sincere compliments paid to my

country by so many cultivated Americans; their memories of homely

corners of historic counties from which their fathers came, of the

cathedral that dwarfs the town, or the inn at the turning of the road.

There was something in their voices and the look in their eyes which

from the first disturbed me. So I have heard good Englishmen, who died

afterwards the death of soldiers, cry aloud in 1914, ‘It seems

impossible, of those jolly Bavarians!’ or, ‘I will never believe it,

when I think of the time I had at Heidelberg!’

But there are other things besides the parallel of Prussia or the

problem of Ireland. The American press is much freer than our own; the

American public is much more familiar with the discussion of corruption

than our own; and it is much more conscious of the corruption of our

politics than we are. Almost any man in America may speak of the Marconi

Case; many a man in England does not even know what it means. Many

imagine that it had something to do with the propriety of politicians

speculating on the Stock Exchange. So that it means a great deal to

Americans to say that one figure in that drama is ruling India and

another is ruling Palestine. And this brings me to another problem,

which is also dealt with much more openly in America than in England. I

mention it here only because it is a perfect model of the

misunderstandings in the modern world. If any one asks for an example

of exactly how the important part of every story is left out, and even

the part that is reported is not understood, he could hardly have a

stronger case than the story of Henry Ford of Detroit.

When I was in Detroit I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ford, and it

really was a pleasure. He is a man quite capable of views which I think

silly to the point of insanity; but he is not the vulgar benevolent

boss. It must be admitted that he is a millionaire; but he cannot really

be convicted of being a philanthropist. He is not a man who merely wants

to run people; it is rather his views that run him, and perhaps run away

with him. He has a distinguished and sensitive face; he really invented

things himself, unlike most men who profit by inventions; he is

something of an artist and not a little of a fighter. A man of that type

is always capable of being wildly wrong, especially in the sectarian

atmosphere of America; and Mr. Ford has been wrong before and may be

wrong now. He is chiefly known in England for a project which I think

very preposterous; that of the Peace Ship, which came to Europe during

the war. But he is not known in England at all in connection with a much

more important campaign, which he has conducted much more recently and

with much more success; a campaign against the Jews like one of the

Anti-Semitic campaigns of the Continent. Now any one who knows anything

of America knows exactly what the Peace Ship would be like. It was a

national combination of imagination and ignorance, which has at least

some of the beauty of innocence. Men living in those huge, hedgeless

inland plains know nothing about frontiers or the tragedy of a fight for

freedom; they know nothing of alarum and armaments or the peril of a

high civilisation poised like a precious statue within reach of a mailed

fist. They are accustomed to a cosmopolitan citizenship, in which men of

all bloods mingle and in which men of all creeds are counted equal.

Their highest moral boast is humanitarianism; their highest mental boast

is enlightenment. In a word, they are the very last men in the world who

would seem likely to pride themselves on a prejudice against the Jews.

They have no religion in particular, except a sincere sentiment which

they would call ‘true Christianity,’ and which specially forbids an

attack on the Jews. They have a patriotism which prides itself on

assimilating all types, including the Jews. Mr. Ford is a pure product

of this pacific world, as was sufficiently proved by his pacifism. If a

man of that sort has discovered that there is a Jewish problem, it is

because there is a Jewish problem. It is certainly not because there is

an Anti-Jewish prejudice. For if there had been any amount of such

racial and religious prejudice, he would have been about the very last

sort of man to have it. His particular part of the world would have been

the very last place to produce it. We may well laugh at the Peace Ship,

and its wild course and inevitable shipwreck; but remember that its very

wildness was an attempt to sail as far as possible from the castle of

Front-de-Boeuf. Everything that made him Anti-War should have

prevented him from being Anti-Semite. We may mock him for being mad on

peace; but we cannot say that he was so mad on peace that he made war on

Israel.

It happened that, when I was in America, I had just published some

studies on Palestine; and I was besieged by Rabbis lamenting my

‘prejudice.’ I pointed out that they would have got hold of the wrong

word, even if they had not got hold of the wrong man. As a point of

personal autobiography, I do not happen to be a man who dislikes Jews;

though I believe that some men do. I have had Jews among my most

intimate and faithful friends since my boyhood, and I hope to have them

till I die. But even if I did have a dislike of Jews, it would be

illogical to call that dislike a prejudice. Prejudice is a very lucid

Latin word meaning the bias which a man has before he considers a case.

I might be said to be prejudiced against a Hairy Ainu because of his

name, for I have never been on terms of such intimacy with him as to

correct my preconceptions. But if after moving about in the modern world

and meeting Jews, knowing Jews, doing business with Jews, and reading

and hearing about Jews, I came to the conclusion that I did not like

Jews, my conclusion certainly would not be a prejudice. It would simply

be an opinion; and one I should be perfectly entitled to hold; though as

a matter of fact I do not hold it. No extravagance of hatred merely

following on experience of Jews can properly be called a prejudice.

Now the point is that this new American Anti-Semitism springs from

experience and nothing but experience. There is no prejudice for it to

spring from. Or rather the prejudice is all the other way. All the

traditions of that democracy, and very creditable traditions too, are in

favour of toleration and a sort of idealistic indifference. The

sympathies in which these nineteenth-century people were reared were all

against Front-de-Boeuf and in favour of Rebecca. They inherited a

prejudice against Anti-Semitism; a prejudice of Anti-Anti-Semitism.

These people of the plains have found the Jewish problem exactly as they

might have struck oil; because it is there, and not even because they

were looking for it. Their view of the problem, like their use of the

oil, is not always satisfactory; and with parts of it I entirely

disagree. But the point is that the thing which I call a problem, and

others call a prejudice, has now appeared in broad daylight in a new

country where there is no priestcraft, no feudalism, no ancient

superstition to explain it. It has appeared because it is a problem;

and those are the best friends of the Jews, including many of the Jews

themselves, who are trying to find a solution. That is the meaning of

the incident of Mr. Henry Ford of Detroit; and you will hardly hear an

intelligible word about it in England.

The talk of prejudice against the Japs is not unlike the talk of

prejudice against the Jews. Only in this case our indifference has

really the excuse of ignorance. We used to lecture the Russians for

oppressing the Jews, before we heard the word Bolshevist and began to

lecture them for being oppressed by the Jews. In the same way we have

long lectured the Californians for oppressing the Japs, without allowing

for the possibility of their foreseeing that the oppression may soon be

the other way. As in the other case, it may be a persecution but it is

not a prejudice. The Californians know more about the Japanese than we

do; and our own colonists when they are placed in the same position

generally say the same thing. I will not attempt to deal adequately here

with the vast international and diplomatic problems which arise with the

name of the new power in the Far East. It is possible that Japan, having

imitated European militarism, may imitate European pacifism. I cannot

honestly pretend to know what the Japanese mean by the one any more than

by the other. But when Englishmen, especially English Liberals like

myself, take a superior and censorious attitude towards Americans and

especially Californians, I am moved to make a final remark. When a

considerable number of Englishmen talk of the grave contending claims of

our friendship with Japan and our friendship with America, when they

finally tend in a sort of summing up to dwell on the superior virtues of

Japan, I may be permitted to make a single comment.

We are perpetually boring the world and each other with talk about the

bonds that bind us to America. We are perpetually crying aloud that

England and America are very much alike, especially England. We are

always insisting that the two are identical in all the things in which

they most obviously differ. We are always saying that both stand for

democracy, when we should not consent to stand their democracy for half

a day. We are always saying that at least we are all Anglo-Saxons, when

we are descended from Romans and Normans and Britons and Danes, and they

are descended from Irishmen and Italians and Slavs and Germans. We tell

a people whose very existence is a revolt against the British Crown that

they are passionately devoted to the British Constitution. We tell a

nation whose whole policy has been isolation and independence that with

us she can bear safely the White Man’s Burden of universal empire. We

tell a continent crowded with Irishmen to thank God that the Saxon can

always rule the Celt. We tell a populace whose very virtues are lawless

that together we uphold the Reign of Law. We recognise our own

law-abiding character in people who make laws that neither they nor

anybody else can abide. We congratulate them on clinging to all they

have cast away, and on imitating everything which they came into

existence to insult. And when we have established all these nonsensical

analogies with a nonexistent nation, we wait until there is a crisis in

which we really are at one with America, and then we falter and threaten

to fail her. In a battle where we really are of one blood, the blood of

the great white race throughout the world, when we really have one

language, the fundamental alphabet of Cadmus and the script of Rome,

when we really do represent the same reign of law, the common conscience

of Christendom and the morals of men baptized, when we really have an

implicit faith and honour and type of freedom to summon up our souls as

with trumpets—then many of us begin to weaken and waver and wonder

whether there is not something very nice about little yellow men, whose

heroic stories revolve round polygamy and suicide, and whose heroes wore

two swords and worshipped the ancestors of the Mikado.

Prohibition in Fact and Fancy

I went to America with some notion of not discussing Prohibition. But I

soon found that well-to-do Americans were only too delighted to discuss

it over the nuts and wine. They were even willing, if necessary, to

dispense with the nuts. I am far from sneering at this; having a general

philosophy which need not here be expounded, but which may be symbolised

by saying that monkeys can enjoy nuts but only men can enjoy wine. But

if I am to deal with Prohibition, there is no doubt of the first thing

to be said about it. The first thing to be said about it is that it does

not exist. It is to some extent enforced among the poor; at any rate it

was intended to be enforced among the poor; though even among them I

fancy it is much evaded. It is certainly not enforced among the rich;

and I doubt whether it was intended to be. I suspect that this has

always happened whenever this negative notion has taken hold of some

particular province or tribe. Prohibition never prohibits. It never has

in history; not even in Moslem history; and it never will. Mahomet at

least had the argument of a climate and not the interest of a class. But

if a test is needed, consider what part of Moslem culture has passed

permanently into our own modern culture. You will find the one Moslem

poem that has really pierced is a Moslem poem in praise of wine. The

crown of all the victories of the Crescent is that nobody reads the

Koran and everybody reads the Rubaiyat.

Most of us remember with satisfaction an old picture in Punch,

representing a festive old gentleman in a state of collapse on the

pavement, and a philanthropic old lady anxiously calling the attention

of a cabman to the calamity. The old lady says, ‘I’m sure this poor

gentleman is ill,’ and the cabman replies with fervour, ‘Ill! I wish I

‘ad ‘alf ‘is complaint.’

We talk about unconscious humour; but there is such a thing as

unconscious seriousness. Flippancy is a flower whose roots are often

underground in the subconsciousness. Many a man talks sense when he

thinks he is talking nonsense; touches on a conflict of ideas as if it

were only a contradiction of language, or really makes a parallel when

he means only to make a pun. Some of the Punch jokes of the best

period are examples of this; and that quoted above is a very strong

example of it. The cabman meant what he said; but he said a great deal

more than he meant. His utterance contained fine philosophical doctrines

and distinctions of which he was not perhaps entirely conscious. The

spirit of the English language, the tragedy and comedy of the condition

of the English people, spoke through him as the god spoke through a

teraph-head or brazen mask of oracle. And the oracle is an omen; and in

some sense an omen of doom.

Observe, to begin with, the sobriety of the cabman. Note his measure,

his moderation; or to use the yet truer term, his temperance. He only

wishes to have half the old gentleman’s complaint. The old gentleman is

welcome to the other half, along with all the other pomps and luxuries

of his superior social station. There is nothing Bolshevist or even

Communist about the temperance cabman. He might almost be called

Distributist, in the sense that he wishes to distribute the old

gentleman’s complaint more equally between the old gentleman and

himself. And, of course, the social relations there represented are very

much truer to life than it is fashionable to suggest. By the realism of

this picture Mr. Punch made amends for some more snobbish pictures, with

the opposite social moral. It will remain eternally among his real

glories that he exhibited a picture in which the cabman was sober and

the gentleman was drunk. Despite many ideas to the contrary, it was

emphatically a picture of real life. The truth is subject to the

simplest of all possible tests. If the cabman were really and truly

drunk he would not be a cabman, for he could not drive a cab. If he had

the whole of the old gentleman’s complaint, he would be sitting happily

on the pavement beside the old gentleman; a symbol of social equality

found at last, and the levelling of all classes of mankind. I do not say

that there has never been such a monster known as a drunken cabman; I do

not say that the driver may not sometimes have approximated imprudently

to three-quarters of the complaint, instead of adhering to his severe

but wise conception of half of it. But I do say that most men of the

world, if they spoke sincerely, could testify to more examples of

helplessly drunken gentlemen put inside cabs than of helplessly drunken

drivers on top of them. Philanthropists and officials, who never look at

people but only at papers, probably have a mass of social statistics to

the contrary; founded on the simple fact that cabmen can be

cross-examined about their habits and gentlemen cannot. Social workers

probably have the whole thing worked out in sections and compartments,

showing how the extreme intoxication of cabmen compares with the

parallel intoxication of costermongers; or measuring the drunkenness of

a dustman against the drunkenness of a crossing-sweeper. But there is

more practical experience embodied in the practical speech of the

English; and in the proverb that says ‘as drunk as a lord.’

Now Prohibition, whether as a proposal in England or a pretence in

America, simply means that the man who has drunk less shall have no

drink, and the man who has drunk more shall have all the drink. It means

that the old gentleman shall be carried home in the cab drunker than

ever; but that, in order to make it quite safe for him to drink to

excess, the man who drives him shall be forbidden to drink even in

moderation. That is what it means; that is all it means; that is all it

ever will mean. It tends to that in Moslem countries; where the

luxurious and advanced drink champagne, while the poor and fanatical

drink water. It means that in modern America; where the wealthy are all

at this moment sipping their cocktails, and discussing how much harder

labourers can be made to work if only they can be kept from festivity.

This is what it means and all it means; and men are divided about it

according to whether they believe in a certain transcendental concept

called ‘justice,’ expressed in a more mystical paradox as the equality

of men. So long as you do not believe in justice, and so long as you are

rich and really confident of remaining so, you can have Prohibition and

be as drunk as you choose.

I see that some remarks by the Rev. R. J. Campbell, dealing with social

conditions in America, are reported in the press. They include some

observations about Sinn Fein in which, as in most of Mr. Campbell’s

allusions to Ireland, it is not difficult to detect his dismal origin,

or the acrid smell of the smoke of Belfast. But the remarks about

America are valuable in the objective sense, over and above their

philosophy. He believes that Prohibition will survive and be a success,

nor does he seem himself to regard the prospect with any special

disfavour. But he frankly and freely testifies to the truth I have

asserted; that Prohibition does not prohibit, so far as the wealthy are

concerned. He testifies to constantly seeing wine on the table, as will

any other grateful guest of the generous hospitality of America; and he

implies humorously that he asked no questions about the story told him

of the old stocks in the cellars. So there is no dispute about the

facts; and we come back as before to the principles. Is Mr. Campbell

content with a Prohibition which is another name for Privilege? If so,

he has simply absorbed along with his new theology a new morality which

is different from mine. But he does state both sides of the inequality

with equal logic and clearness; and in these days of intellectual fog

that alone is like a ray of sunshine.

Now my primary objection to Prohibition is not based on any arguments

against it, but on the one argument for it. I need nothing more for its

condemnation than the only thing that is said in its defence. It is said

by capitalists all over America; and it is very clearly and correctly

reported by Mr. Campbell himself. The argument is that employees work

harder, and therefore employers get richer. That this idea should be

taken calmly, by itself, as the test of a problem of liberty, is in

itself a final testimony to the presence of slavery. It shows that

people have completely forgotten that there is any other test except the

servile test. Employers are willing that workmen should have exercise,

as it may help them to do more work. They are even willing that workmen

should have leisure; for the more intelligent capitalists can see that

this also really means that they can do more work. But they are not in

any way willing that workmen should have fun; for fun only increases the

happiness and not the utility of the worker. Fun is freedom; and in that

sense is an end in itself. It concerns the man not as a worker but as a

citizen, or even as a soul; and the soul in that sense is an end in

itself. That a man shall have a reasonable amount of comedy and poetry

and even fantasy in his life is part of his spiritual health, which is

for the service of God; and not merely for his mechanical health, which

is now bound to the service of man. The very test adopted has all the

servile implication; the test of what we can get out of him, instead of

the test of what he can get out of life.

Mr. Campbell is reported to have suggested, doubtless rather as a

conjecture than a prophecy, that England may find it necessary to become

teetotal in order to compete commercially with the efficiency and

economy of teetotal America. Well, in the eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries there was in America one of the most economical and

efficient of all forms of labour. It did not happen to be feasible for

the English to compete with it by copying it. There were so many

humanitarian prejudices about in those days. But economically there

seems to be no reason why a man should not have prophesied that England

would be forced to adopt American Slavery then, as she is urged to adopt

American Prohibition now. Perhaps such a prophet would have prophesied

rightly. Certainly it is not impossible that universal Slavery might

have been the vision of Calhoun as universal Prohibition seems to be the

vision of Campbell. The old England of 1830 would have said that such a

plea for slavery was monstrous; but what would it have said of a plea

for enforced water-drinking? Nevertheless, the nobler Servile State of

Calhoun collapsed before it could spread to Europe. And there is always

the hope that the same may happen to the far more materialistic Utopia

of Mr. Campbell and Soft Drinks.

Abstract morality is very important; and it may well clear the mind to

consider what would be the effect of Prohibition in America, if it were

introduced there. It would, of course, be a decisive departure from the

tradition of the Declaration of Independence. Those who deny that are

hardly serious enough to demand attention. It is enough to say that they

are reduced to minimising that document in defence of Prohibition,

exactly as the slave-owners were reduced to minimising it in defence of

Slavery. They are reduced to saying that the Fathers of the Republic

meant no more than that they would not be ruled by a king. And they are

obviously open to the reply which Lincoln gave to Douglas on the slavery

question; that if that great charter was limited to certain events in

the eighteenth century, it was hardly worth making such a fuss about in

the nineteenth—or in the twentieth. But they are also open to another

reply which is even more to the point, when they pretend that

Jefferson’s famous preamble only means to say that monarchy is wrong.

They are maintaining that Jefferson only meant to say something that he

does not say at all. The great preamble does not say that all

monarchical government must be wrong; on the contrary, it rather implies

that most government is right. It speaks of human governments in general

as justified by the necessity of defending certain personal rights. I

see no reason whatever to suppose that it would not include any royal

government that does defend those rights. Still less do I doubt what it

would say of a republican government that does destroy those rights.

But what are those rights? Sophists can always debate about their

degree; but even sophists cannot debate about their direction. Nobody in

his five wits will deny that Jeffersonian democracy wished to give the

law a general control in more public things, but the citizens a more

general liberty in private things. Wherever we draw the line, liberty

can only be personal liberty; and the most personal liberties must at

least be the last liberties we lose. But to-day they are the first

liberties we lose. It is not a question of drawing the line in the right

place, but of beginning at the wrong end. What are the rights of man, if

they do not include the normal right to regulate his own health, in

relation to the normal risks of diet and daily life? Nobody can pretend

that beer is a poison as prussic acid is a poison; that all the millions

of civilised men who drank it all fell down dead when they had touched

it. Its use and abuse is obviously a matter of judgment; and there can

be no personal liberty, if it is not a matter of private judgment. It

is not in the least a question of drawing the line between liberty and

licence. If this is licence, there is no such thing as liberty. It is

plainly impossible to find any right more individual or intimate. To say

that a man has a right to a vote, but not a right to a voice about the

choice of his dinner, is like saying that he has a right to his hat but

not a right to his head.

Prohibition, therefore, plainly violates the rights of man, if there are

any rights of man. What its supporters really mean is that there are

none. And in suggesting this, they have all the advantages that every

sceptic has when he supports a negation. That sort of ultimate

scepticism can only be retorted upon itself, and we can point out to

them that they can no more prove the right of the city to be oppressive

than we can prove the right of the citizen to be free. In the primary

metaphysics of such a claim, it would surely be easier to make it out

for a single conscious soul than for an artificial social combination.

If there are no rights of men, what are the rights of nations? Perhaps a

nation has no claim to self-government. Perhaps it has no claim to good

government. Perhaps it has no claim to any sort of government or any

sort of independence. Perhaps they will say that is not implied in the

Declaration of Independence. But without going deep into my reasons for

believing in natural rights, or rather in supernatural rights (and

Jefferson certainly states them as supernatural), I am content here to

note that a man’s treatment of his own body, in relation to traditional

and ordinary opportunities for bodily excess, is as near to his

self-respect as social coercion can possibly go; and that when that is

gone there is nothing left. If coercion applies to that, it applies to

everything; and in the future of this controversy it obviously will

apply to everything. When I was in America, people were already applying

it to tobacco. I never can see why they should not apply it to talking.

Talking often goes with tobacco as it goes with beer; and what is more

relevant, talking may often lead both to beer and tobacco. Talking often

drives a man to drink, both negatively in the form of nagging and

positively in the form of bad company. If the American Puritan is so

anxious to be a censor morum, he should obviously put a stop to the

evil communications that really corrupt good manners. He should

reintroduce the Scold’s Bridle among the other Blue Laws for a land of

blue devils. He should gag all gay deceivers and plausible cynics; he

should cut off all flattering lips and the tongue that speaketh proud

things. Nobody can doubt that nine-tenths of the harm in the world is

done simply by talking. Jefferson and the old democrats allowed people

to talk, not because they were unaware of this fact, but because they

were fettered by this old fancy of theirs about freedom and the rights

of man. But since we have already abandoned that doctrine in a final

fashion, I cannot see why the new principle should not be applied

intelligently; and in that case it would be applied to the control of

conversation. The State would provide us with forms already filled up

with the subjects suitable for us to discuss at breakfast; perhaps

allowing us a limited number of epigrams each. Perhaps we should have to

make a formal application in writing, to be allowed to make a joke that

had just occurred to us in conversation. And the committee would

consider it in due course. Perhaps it would be effected in a more

practical fashion, and the private citizens would be shut up as the

public-houses were shut up. Perhaps they would all wear gags, which the

policeman would remove at stated hours; and their mouths would be opened

from one to three, as now in England even the public-houses are from

time to time accessible to the public. To some this will sound

fantastic; but not so fantastic as Jefferson would have thought

Prohibition. But there is one sense in which it is indeed fantastic, for

by hypothesis it leaves out the favouritism that is the fundamental of

the whole matter. The only sense in which we can say that logic will

never go so far as this is that logic will never go the length of

equality. It is perfectly possible that the same forces that have

forbidden beer may go on to forbid tobacco. But they will in a special

and limited sense forbid tobacco—but not cigars. Or at any rate not

expensive cigars. In America, where large numbers of ordinary men smoke

rather ordinary cigars, there would be doubtless a good opportunity of

penalising a very ordinary pleasure. But the Havanas of the millionaire

will be all right. So it will be if ever the Puritans bring back the

Scold’s Bridle and the statutory silence of the populace. It will only

be the populace that is silent. The politicians will go on talking.

These I believe to be the broad facts of the problem of Prohibition; but

it would not be fair to leave it without mentioning two other causes

which, if not defences, are at least excuses. The first is that

Prohibition was largely passed in a sort of fervour or fever of

self-sacrifice, which was a part of the passionate patriotism of America

in the war. As I have remarked elsewhere, those who have any notion of

what that national unanimity was like will smile when they see America

made a model of mere international idealism. Prohibition was partly a

sort of patriotic renunciation; for the popular instinct, like every

poetic instinct, always tends at great crises to great gestures of

renunciation. But this very fact, while it makes the inhumanity far more

human, makes it far less final and convincing. Men cannot remain

standing stiffly in such symbolical attitudes; nor can a permanent

policy be founded on something analogous to flinging a gauntlet or

uttering a battle-cry. We might as well expect all the Yale students to

remain through life with their mouths open, exactly as they were when

they uttered the college yell. It would be as reasonable as to expect

them to remain through life with their mouths shut, while the wine-cup

which has been the sacrament of all poets and lovers passed round among

all the youth of the world. This point appeared very plainly in a

discussion I had with a very thoughtful and sympathetic American critic,

a clergyman writing in an Anglo-Catholic magazine. He put the sentiment

of these healthier Prohibitionists, which had so much to do with the

passing of Prohibition, by asking, ‘May not a man who is asked to give

up his blood for his country be asked to give up his beer for his

country?’ And this phrase clearly illuminates all the limitations of the

case. I have never denied, in principle, that it might in some abnormal

crisis be lawful for a government to lock up the beer, or to lock up the

bread. In that sense I am quite prepared to treat the sacrifice of beer

in the same way as the sacrifice of blood. But is my American critic

really ready to treat the sacrifice of blood in the same way as the

sacrifice of beer? Is bloodshed to be as prolonged and protracted as

Prohibition? Is the normal noncombatant to shed his gore as often as he

misses his drink? I can imagine people submitting to a special

regulation, as I can imagine them serving in a particular war. I do

indeed despise the political knavery that deliberately passes drink

regulations as war measures and then preserves them as peace measures.

But that is not a question of whether drink and drunkenness are wrong,

but of whether lying and swindling are wrong. But I never denied that

there might need to be exceptional sacrifices for exceptional occasions;

and war is in its nature an exception. Only, if war is the exception,

why should Prohibition be the rule? If the surrender of beer is worthy

to be compared to the shedding of blood, why then blood ought to be

flowing for ever like a fountain in the public squares of Philadelphia

and New York. If my critic wants to complete his parallel, he must draw

up rather a remarkable programme for the daily life of the ordinary

citizens. He must suppose that, through all their lives, they are

paraded every day at lunch time and prodded with bayonets to show that

they will shed their blood for their country. He must suppose that every

evening, after a light repast of poison gas and shrapnel, they are made

to go to sleep in a trench under a permanent drizzle of shell-fire. It

is surely obvious that if this were the normal life of the citizen, the

citizen would have no normal life. The common sense of the thing is that

sacrifices of this sort are admirable but abnormal. It is not normal for

the State to be perpetually regulating our days with the discipline of a

fighting regiment; and it is not normal for the State to be perpetually

regulating our diet with the discipline of a famine. To say that every

citizen must be subject to control in such bodily things is like saying

that every Christian ought to tear himself with red-hot pincers because

the Christian martyrs did their duty in time of persecution. A man has a

right to control his body, though in a time of martyrdom he may give his

body to be burned; and a man has a right to control his bodily health,

though in a state of siege he may give his body to be starved. Thus,

though the patriotic defence was a sincere defence, it is a defence that

comes back on the defenders like a boomerang. For it proves only that

Prohibition ought to be ephemeral, unless war ought to be eternal.

The other excuse is much less romantic and much more realistic. I have

already said enough of the cause which is really realistic. The real

power behind Prohibition is simply the plutocratic power of the pushing

employers who wish to get the last inch of work out of their workmen.

But before the progress of modern plutocracy had reached this stage,

there was a predetermining cause for which there was a much better case.

The whole business began with the problem of black labour. I have not

attempted in this book to deal adequately with the question of the

negro. I have refrained for a reason that may seem somewhat sensational;

that I do not think I have anything particularly valuable to say or

suggest. I do not profess to understand this singularly dark and

intricate matter; and I see no use in men who have no solution filling

up the gap with sentimentalism. The chief thing that struck me about the

coloured people I saw was their charming and astonishing cheerfulness.

My sense of pathos was appealed to much more by the Red Indians; and

indeed I wish I had more space here to do justice to the Red Indians.

They did heroic service in the war; and more than justified their

glorious place in the day-dreams and nightmares of our boyhood. But the

negro problem certainly demands more study than a sight-seer could give

it; and this book is controversial enough about things that I have

really considered, without permitting it to exhibit me as a sight-seer

who shoots at sight. But I believe that it was always common ground to

people of common sense that the enslavement and importation of negroes

had been the crime and catastrophe of American history. The only

difference was originally that one side thought that, the crime once

committed, the only reparation was their freedom; while the other

thought that, the crime once committed, the only safety was their

slavery. It was only comparatively lately, by a process I shall have to

indicate elsewhere, that anything like a positive case for slavery

became possible. Now among the many problems of the presence of an alien

and at least recently barbaric figure among the citizens, there was a

very real problem of drink. Drink certainly has a very exceptionally

destructive effect upon negroes in their native countries; and it was

alleged to have a peculiarly demoralising effect upon negroes in the

United States; to call up the passions that are the particular

temptation of the race and to lead to appalling outrages that are

followed by appalling popular vengeance. However this may be, many of

the states of the American Union, which first forbade liquor to

citizens, meant simply to forbid it to negroes. But they had not the

moral courage to deny that negroes are citizens. About all their

political expedients necessarily hung the load that hangs so heavy on

modern politics; hypocrisy. The superior race had to rule by a sort of

secret society organised against the inferior. The American politicians

dared not disfranchise the negroes; so they coerced everybody in theory

and only the negroes in practice. The drinking of the white men became

as much a conspiracy as the shooting by the white horsemen of the

Ku-Klux Klan. And in that connection, it may be remarked in passing that

the comparison illustrates the idiocy of supposing that the moral sense

of mankind will ever support the prohibition of drinking as if it were

something like the prohibition of shooting. Shooting in America is

liable to take a free form, and sometimes a very horrible form; as when

private bravos were hired to kill workmen in the capitalistic interests

of that pure patron of disarmament, Carnegie. But when some of the rich

Americans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered with,

because they are only using up their existing stocks of wine, we may

well be disposed to smile. When I was there, at any rate, they were

using them up very fast; and with no apparent fears about the supply.

But if the Ku-Klux Klan had started suddenly shooting everybody they

didn’t like in broad daylight, and had blandly explained that they were

only using up the stocks of their ammunition, left over from the Civil

War, it seems probable that there would at least have been a little

curiosity about how much they had left. There might at least have been

occasional inquiries about how long it was likely to go on. It is even

conceivable that some steps might have been taken to stop it.

No steps are taken to stop the drinking of the rich, chiefly because

the rich now make all the rules and therefore all the exceptions, but

partly because nobody ever could feel the full moral seriousness of this

particular rule. And the truth is, as I have indicated, that it was

originally established as an exception and not as a rule. The

emancipated negro was an exception in the community, and a certain plan

was, rightly or wrongly, adopted to meet his case. A law was made

professedly for everybody and practically only for him. Prohibition is

only important as marking the transition by which the trick, tried

successfully on black labour, could be extended to all labour. We in

England have no right to be Pharisaic at the expense of the Americans in

this matter; for we have tried the same trick in a hundred forms. The

true philosophical defence of the modern oppression of the poor would be

to say frankly that we have ruled them so badly that they are unfit to

rule themselves. But no modern oligarch is enough of a man to say this.

For like all virile cynicism it would have an element of humility; which

would not mix with the necessary element of hypocrisy. So we proceed,

just as the Americans do, to make a law for everybody and then evade it

for ourselves. We have not the honesty to say that the rich may bet

because they can afford it; so we forbid any man to bet in any place;

and then say that a place is not a place. It is exactly as if there were

an American law allowing a negro to be murdered because he is not a man

within the meaning of the Act. We have not the honesty to drive the poor

to school because they are ignorant; so we pretend to drive everybody;

and then send inspectors to the slums but not to the smart streets. We

apply the same ingenuous principle; and are quite as undemocratic as

Western democracy. Nevertheless there is an element in the American case

which cannot be present in ours; and this chapter may well conclude upon

so important a change.

America can now say with pride that she has abolished the colour bar. In

this matter the white labourer and the black labourer have at last been

put upon an equal social footing. White labour is every bit as much

enslaved as black labour; and is actually enslaved by a method and a

model only intended for black labour. We might think it rather odd if

the exact regulations about flogging negroes were reproduced as a plan

for punishing strikers; or if industrial arbitration issued its reports

in the precise terminology of the Fugitive Slave Law. But this is in

essentials what has happened; and one could almost fancy some negro orgy

of triumph, with the beating of gongs and all the secret violence of

Voodoo, crying aloud to some ancestral Mumbo Jumbo that the Poor White

Trash was being treated according to its name.

Fads and Public Opinion

A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He is

perfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in a

reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. I was a

foreigner in America; and I can truly claim that the sense of my own

laughable position never left me. But when the native and the foreigner

have finished with seeing the fun of each other in things that are meant

to be serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dangerous

ground of things that are meant to be funny. The sense of humour is

generally very national; perhaps that is why the internationalists are

so careful to purge themselves of it. I had occasion during the war to

consider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to have

arisen between the English and American soldiers at the front. And,

rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that they arose from the

failure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he is

humorous. And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be

the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke.

The English and the American types of humour are in one way directly

contrary. The most American sort of fun involves a soaring imagination,

piling one house on another in a tower like that of a sky-scraper. The

most English humour consists of a sort of bathos, of a man returning to

the earth his mother in a homely fashion; as when he sits down suddenly

on a butter-slide. English farce describes a man as being in a hole.

American fantasy, in its more aspiring spirit, describes a man as being

up a tree. The former is to be found in the cockney comic songs that

concern themselves with hanging out the washing or coming home with the

milk. The latter is to be found in those fantastic yarns about machines

that turn live pigs into pig-skin purses or burning cities that serve to

hatch an egg. But it will be inevitable, when the two come first into

contact, that the bathos will sound like vulgarity and the extravagance

will sound like boasting.

Suppose an American soldier said to an English soldier in the trenches,

‘The Kaiser may want a place in the sun; I reckon he won’t have a place

in the solar system when we begin to hustle.’ The English soldier will

very probably form the impression that this is arrogance; an impression

based on the extraordinary assumption that the American means what he

says. The American has merely indulged in a little art for art’s sake,

and abstract adventure of the imagination; he has told an American short

story. But the Englishman, not understanding this, will think the other

man is boasting, and reflecting on the insufficiency of the English

effort. The English soldier is very likely to say something like, ‘Oh,

you’ll be wanting to get home to your old woman before that, and asking

for a kipper with your tea.’ And it is quite likely that the American

will be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of abstract beauty

answered in so personal a fashion. Being an American, he will probably

have a fine and chivalrous respect for his wife; and may object to her

being called an old woman. Possibly he in turn may be under the

extraordinary delusion that talking of the old woman really means that

the woman is old. Possibly he thinks the mysterious demand for a kipper

carries with it some charge of ill-treating his wife; which his national

sense of honour swiftly resents. But the real cross-purposes come from

the contrary direction of the two exaggerations, the American making

life more wild and impossible than it is, and the Englishman making it

more flat and farcical than it is; the one escaping from the house of

life by a skylight and the other by a trap-door.

This difficulty of different humours is a very practical one for

practical people. Most of those who profess to remove all international

differences are not practical people. Most of the phrases offered for

the reconciliation of severally patriotic peoples are entirely serious

and even solemn phrases. But human conversation is not conducted in

those phrases. The normal man on nine occasions out of ten is rather a

flippant man. And the normal man is almost always the national man.

Patriotism is the most popular of all the virtues. The drier sort of

democrats who despise it have the democracy against them in every

country in the world. Hence their international efforts seldom go any

farther than to effect an international reconciliation of all

internationalists. But we have not solved the normal and popular problem

until we have an international reconciliation of all nationalists.

It is very difficult to see how humour can be translated at all. When

Sam Weller is in the Fleet Prison and Mrs. Weller and Mr. Stiggins sit

on each side of the fireplace and weep and groan with sympathy, old Mr.

Weller observes, ‘Vell, Sammy, I hope you find your spirits rose by this

‘ere lively visit.’ I have never looked up this passage in the popular

and successful French version of Pickwick; but I confess I am curious

as to what French past-participle conveys the precise effect of the word

‘rose.’ A translator has not only to give the right translation of the

right word but the right translation of the wrong word. And in the same

way I am quite prepared to suspect that there are English jokes which an

Englishman must enjoy in his own rich and romantic solitude, without

asking for the sympathy of an American. But Englishmen are generally

only too prone to claim this fine perception, without seeing that the

fine edge of it cuts both ways. I have begun this chapter on the note of

national humour because I wish to make it quite clear that I realise how

easily a foreigner may take something seriously that is not serious.

When I think something in America is really foolish, it may be I that am

made a fool of. It is the first duty of a traveller to allow for this;

but it seems to be the very last thing that occurs to some travellers.

But when I seek to say something of what may be called the fantastic

side of America, I allow beforehand that some of it may be meant to be

fantastic. And indeed it is very difficult to believe that some of it is

meant to be serious. But whether or no there is a joke, there is

certainly an inconsistency; and it is an inconsistency in the moral

make-up of America which both puzzles and amuses me.

The danger of democracy is not anarchy but convention. There is even a

sort of double meaning in the word ‘convention’; for it is also used for

the most informal and popular sort of parliament; a parliament not

summoned by any king. The Americans come together very easily without

any king; but their coming together is in every sense a convention, and

even a very conventional convention. In a democracy riot is rather the

exception and respectability certainly the rule. And though a

superficial sight-seer should hesitate about all such generalisations,

and certainly should allow for enormous exceptions to them, he does

receive a general impression of unity verging on uniformity. Thus

Americans all dress well; one might almost say that American women all

look well; but they do not, as compared with Europeans, look very

different. They are in the fashion; too much in the fashion even to be

conspicuously fashionable. Of course there are patches, both Bohemian

and Babylonian, of which this is not true, but I am talking of the

general tone of a whole democracy. I have said there is more

respectability than riot; but indeed in a deeper sense the same spirit

is behind both riot and respectability. It is the same social force that

makes it possible for the respectable to boycott a man and for the

riotous to lynch him. I do not object to it being called ‘the herd

instinct,’ so long as we realise that it is a metaphor and not an

explanation.

Public opinion can be a prairie fire. It eats up everything that opposes

it; and there is the grandeur as well as the grave disadvantages of a

natural catastrophe in that national unity. Pacifists who complained in

England of the intolerance of patriotism have no notion of what

patriotism can be like. If they had been in America, after America had

entered the war, they would have seen something which they have always

perhaps subconsciously dreaded, and would then have beyond all their

worst dreams detested; and the name of it is democracy. They would have

found that there are disadvantages in birds of a feather flocking

together; and that one of them follows on a too complacent display of

the white feather. The truth is that a certain flexible sympathy with

eccentrics of this kind is rather one of the advantages of an

aristocratic tradition. The imprisonment of Mr. Debs, the American

Pacifist, which really was prolonged and oppressive, would probably have

been shortened in England where his opinions were shared by aristocrats

like Mr. Bertrand Russell and Mr. Ponsonby. A man like Lord Hugh Cecil

could be moved to the defence of conscientious objectors, partly by a

true instinct of chivalry; but partly also by the general feeling that a

gentleman may very probably have aunts and uncles who are quite as mad.

He takes the matter personally, in the sense of being able to imagine

the psychology of the persons. But democracy is no respecter of persons.

It is no respecter of them, either in the bad and servile or in the good

and sympathetic sense. And Debs was nothing to democracy. He was but one

of the millions. This is a real problem, or question in the balance,

touching different forms of government; which is, of course, quite

neglected by the idealists who merely repeat long words. There was

during the war a society called the Union of Democratic Control, which

would have been instantly destroyed anywhere where democracy had any

control, or where there was any union. And in this sense the United

States have most emphatically got a union. Nevertheless I think there is

something rather more subtle than this simple popular solidity behind

the assimilation of American citizens to each other. There is something

even in the individual ideals that drives towards this social sympathy.

And it is here that we have to remember that biological fancies like the

herd instinct are only figures of speech, and cannot really cover

anything human. For the Americans are in some ways a very self-conscious

people. To compare their social enthusiasm to a stampede of cattle is to

ask us to believe in a bull writing a diary or a cow looking in a

looking-glass. Intensely sensitive by their very vitality, they are

certainly conscious of criticism and not merely of a blind and brutal

appetite. But the peculiar point about them is that it is this very

vividness in the self that often produces the similarity. It may be that

when they are unconscious they are like bulls and cows. But it is when

they are self-conscious that they are like each other.

Individualism is the death of individuality. It is so, if only because

it is an ‘ism.’ Many Americans become almost impersonal in their worship

of personality. Where their natural selves might differ, their ideal

selves tend to be the same. Anybody can see what I mean in those strong

self-conscious photographs of American business men that can be seen in

any American magazine. Each may conceive himself to be a solitary

Napoleon brooding at St. Helena; but the result is a multitude of

Napoleons brooding all over the place. Each of them must have the eyes

of a mesmerist; but the most weak-minded person cannot be mesmerised by

more than one millionaire at a time. Each of the millionaires must

thrust forward his jaw, offering (if I may say so) to fight the world

with the same weapon as Samson. Each of them must accentuate the length

of his chin, especially, of course, by always being completely

clean-shaven. It would be obviously inconsistent with Personality to

prefer to wear a beard. These are of course fantastic examples on the

fringe of American life; but they do stand for a certain assimilation,

not through brute gregariousness, but rather through isolated dreaming.

And though it is not always carried so far as this, I do think it is

carried too far. There is not quite enough unconsciousness to produce

real individuality. There is a sort of worship of will-power in the

abstract, so that people are actually thinking about how they can will,

more than about what they want. To this I do think a certain corrective

could be found in the nature of English eccentricity. Every man in his

humour is most interesting when he is unconscious of his humour; or at

least when he is in an intermediate stage between humour in the old

sense of oddity and in the new sense of irony. Much is said in these

days against negative morality; and certainly most Americans would show

a positive preference for positive morality. The virtues they venerate

collectively are very active virtues; cheerfulness and courage and vim,

otherwise zip, also pep and similar things. But it is sometimes

forgotten that negative morality is freer than positive morality.

Negative morality is a net of a larger and more open pattern, of which

the lines or cords constrict at longer intervals. A man like Dr. Johnson

could grow in his own way to his own stature in the net of the Ten

Commandments; precisely because he was convinced there were only ten of

them. He was not compressed into the mould of positive beauty, like

that of the Apollo Belvedere or the American citizen.

This criticism is sometimes true even of the American woman, who is

certainly a much more delightful person than the mesmeric millionaire

with his shaven jaw. Interviewers in the United States perpetually asked

me what I thought of American women, and I confessed a distaste for such

generalisations which I have not managed to lose. The Americans, who are

the most chivalrous people in the world, may perhaps understand me; but

I can never help feeling that there is something polygamous about

talking of women in the plural at all; something unworthy of any

American except a Mormon. Nevertheless, I think the exaggeration I

suggest does extend in a less degree to American women, fascinating as

they are. I think they too tend too much to this cult of impersonal

personality. It is a description easy to exaggerate even by the faintest

emphasis; for all these things are subtle and subject to striking

individual exceptions. To complain of people for being brave and bright

and kind and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. And

yet there is something in the background that can only be expressed by a

symbol, something that is not shallowness but a neglect of the

subconsciousness and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that can

be missed amid all that laughter and light, under those starry

candelabra of the ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came over

me, in a wordless wave, that I should like to see a sulky woman. How she

would walk in beauty like the night, and reveal more silent spaces full

of older stars! These things cannot be conveyed in their delicate

proportion even in the most detached description. But the same thing

was in the mind of a white-bearded old man I met in New York, an Irish

exile and a wonderful talker, who stared up at the tower of gilded

galleries of the great hotel, and said with that spontaneous movement of

style which is hardly heard except from Irish talkers: ‘And I have been

in a village in the mountains where the people could hardly read or

write; but all the men were like soldiers, and all the women had pride.’

It sounds like a poem about an Earthly Paradise to say that in this land

the old women can be more beautiful than the young. Indeed, I think Walt

Whitman, the national poet, has a line somewhere almost precisely to

that effect. It sounds like a parody upon Utopia, and the image of the

lion lying down with the lamb, to say it is a place where a man might

almost fall in love with his mother-in-law. But there is nothing in

which the finer side of American gravity and good feeling does more

honourably exhibit itself than in a certain atmosphere around the older

women. It is not a cant phrase to say that they grow old gracefully; for

they do really grow old. In this the national optimism really has in it

the national courage. The old women do not dress like young women; they

only dress better. There is another side to this feminine dignity in the

old, sometimes a little lost in the young, with which I shall deal

presently. The point for the moment is that even Whitman’s truly poetic

vision of the beautiful old women suffers a little from that bewildering

multiplicity and recurrence that is indeed the whole theme of Whitman.

It is like the green eternity of Leaves of Grass. When I think of the

eccentric spinsters and incorrigible grandmothers of my own country, I

cannot imagine that any one of them could possibly be mistaken for

another, even at a glance. And in comparison I feel as if I had been

travelling in an Earthly Paradise of more decorative harmonies; and I

remember only a vast cloud of grey and pink as of the plumage of

cherubim in an old picture. But on second thoughts, I think this may be

only the inevitable effect of visiting any country in a swift and

superficial fashion; and that the grey and pink cloud is probably an

illusion, like the spinning prairies scattered by the wheel of the

train.

Anyhow there is enough of this equality, and of a certain social unity

favourable to sanity, to make the next point about America very much of

a puzzle. It seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never seen

an answer even such as I shall attempt here, why a democracy should

produce fads; and why, where there is so genuine a sense of human

dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny. I am

not referring solely or even specially to Prohibition, which I discuss

elsewhere. Prohibition is at least a superstition, and therefore next

door to a religion; it has some imaginable connection with moral

questions, as have slavery or human sacrifice. But those who ask us to

model ourselves on the States which punish the sin of drink forget that

there are States which punish the equally shameless sin of smoking a

cigarette in the open air. The same American atmosphere that permits

Prohibition permits of people being punished for kissing each other. In

other words, there are States psychologically capable of making a man a

convict for wearing a blue neck-tie or having a green front-door, or

anything else that anybody chooses to fancy. There is an American

atmosphere in which people may some day be shot for shaking hands, or

hanged for writing a post-card.

As for the sort of thing to which I refer, the American newspapers are

full of it and there is no name for it but mere madness. Indeed it is

not only mad, but it calls itself mad. To mention but one example out of

many, it was actually boasted that some lunatics were teaching children

to take care of their health. And it was proudly added that the children

were ‘health-mad.’ That it is not exactly the object of all mental

hygiene to make people mad did not occur to them; and they may still be

engaged in their earnest labours to teach babies to be valetudinarians

and hypochondriacs in order to make them healthy. In such cases, we may

say that the modern world is too ridiculous to be ridiculed. You cannot

caricature a caricature. Imagine what a satirist of saner days would

have made of the daily life of a child of six, who was actually admitted

to be mad on the subject of his own health. These are not days in which

that great extravaganza could be written; but I dimly see some of its

episodes like uncompleted dreams. I see the child pausing in the middle

of a cart-wheel, or when he has performed three-quarters of a

cart-wheel, and consulting a little note-book about the amount of

exercise per diem. I see him pausing half-way up a tree, or when he has

climbed exactly one-third of a tree; and then producing a clinical

thermometer to take his own temperature. But what would be the good of

imaginative logic to prove the madness of such people, when they

themselves praise it for being mad?

There is also the cult of the Infant Phenomenon, of which Dickens made

fun and of which educationalists make fusses. When I was in America

another newspaper produced a marvellous child of six who had the

intellect of a child of twelve. The only test given, and apparently one

on which the experiment turned, was that she could be made to understand

and even to employ the word ‘annihilate.’ When asked to say something

proving this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism, ‘When

common sense comes in, superstition is annihilated.’ In reply to which,

by way of showing that I also am as intelligent as a child of twelve,

and there is no arrested development about me, I will say in the same

elegant diction, ‘When psychological education comes in, common sense is

annihilated.’ Everybody seems to be sitting round this child in an

adoring fashion. It did not seem to occur to anybody that we do not

particularly want even a child of twelve to talk about annihilating

superstition; that we do not want a child of six to talk like a child of

twelve, or a child of twelve to talk like a man of fifty, or even a man

of fifty to talk like a fool. And on the principle of hoping that a

little girl of six will have a massive and mature brain, there is every

reason for hoping that a little boy of six will grow a magnificent and

bushy beard.

Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American

cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce

psychoanalysis—that is, enforce confession without absolution. And I

confess I cannot connect this feature with the genuine democratic spirit

of the mass. I can only suggest, in concluding this chapter, two

possible causes rather peculiar to America, which may have made this

great democracy so unlike all other democracies, and in this so

manifestly hostile to the whole democratic idea.

The first historical cause is Puritanism; but not Puritanism merely in

the sense of Prohibitionism. The truth is that prohibitions might have

done far less harm as prohibitions, if a vague association had not

arisen, on some dark day of human unreason, between prohibition and

progress. And it was the progress that did the harm, not the

prohibition. Men can enjoy life under considerable limitations, if they

can be sure of their limited enjoyments; but under Progressive

Puritanism we can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is not

limitation; it is unlimited limitation. The evil is not in the

restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever restrict the

restriction. The prohibitions are bound to progress point by point; more

and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for

it is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of

the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thus

the worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so much

Puritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but

by subdivision. It not only broke religion into small pieces, but it was

bound to choose the smallest piece. There is in America, I believe, a

large religious body that has felt it right to separate itself from

Christendom because it cannot believe in the morality of wearing

buttons. I do not know how the schism arose; but it is easy to suppose,

for the sake of argument, that there had originally existed some Puritan

body which condemned the frivolity of ribbons though not of buttons. I

was going to say of badges but not buttons; but on reflection I cannot

bring myself to believe that any American, however insane, would object

to wearing badges. But the point is that as the holy spirit of

progressive prophesy rested on the first sect because it had invented a

new objection to ribbons, so that holy spirit would then pass from it to

the new sect who invented a further objection to buttons. And from them

it must inevitably pass to any rebel among them who shall choose to rise

and say that he disapproves of trousers because of the existence of

trouser-buttons. Each secession in turn must be right because it is

recent, and progress must progress by growing smaller and smaller. That

is the progressive theory, the legacy of seventeenth-century

sectarianism, the dogma implied in much modern politics, and the evident

enemy of democracy. Democracy is reproached with saying that the

majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always

right. Progressives are prophets; and fortunately not all the people are

prophets. Thus in the atmosphere of this slowly dying sectarianism

anybody who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannise over the

people. If he chooses to say that drinking is always wrong, or that

kissing is always wrong, or that wearing buttons is always wrong, people

are afraid to contradict him for fear they should be contradicting their

own great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion of the

ancestor-worship of China; and instead of vainly appealing to something

that is dead, they appeal to something that may never be born.

There is another cause of this strange servile disease in American

democracy. It is to be found in American feminism, and feminist America

is an entirely different thing from feminine America. I should say that

the overwhelming majority of American girls laugh at their female

politicians at least as much as the majority of American men despise

their male politicians. But though the aggressive feminists are a

minority, they are in this atmosphere which I have tried to analyse; the

atmosphere in which there is a sort of sanctity about the minority. And

it is this superstition of seriousness that constitutes the most solid

obstacle and exception to the general and almost conventional pressure

of public opinion. When a fad is frankly felt to be anti-national, as

was Abolitionism before the Civil War, or Pro-Germanism in the Great

War, or the suggestion of racial admixture in the South at all times,

then the fad meets far less mercy than anywhere else in the world; it is

snowed under and swept away. But when it does not thus directly

challenge patriotism or popular ideas, a curious halo of hopeful

solemnity surrounds it, merely because it is a fad, but above all if it

is a feminine fad. The earnest lady-reformer who really utters a warning

against the social evil of beer or buttons is seen to be walking clothed

in light, like a prophetess. Perhaps it is something of the holy aureole

which the East sees shining around an idiot.

But I think there is another explanation, feminine rather than feminist,

and proceeding from normal women and not from abnormal idiots. It is

something that involves an old controversy, but one upon which I have

not, like so many politicians, changed my opinion. It concerns the

particular fashion in which women tend to regard, or rather to

disregard, the formal and legal rights of the citizen. In so far as this

is a bias, it is a bias in the directly opposite direction from that now

lightly alleged. There is a sort of underbred history going about,

according to which women in the past have always been in the position of

slaves. It is much more to the point to note that women have always been

in the position of despots. They have been despotic because they ruled

in an area where they had too much common sense to attempt to be

constitutional. You cannot grant a constitution to a nursery; nor can

babies assemble like barons and extort a Great Charter. Tommy cannot

plead a Habeas Corpus against going to bed; and an infant cannot be

tried by twelve other infants before he is put in the corner. And as

there can be no laws or liberties in a nursery, the extension of

feminism means that there shall be no more laws or liberties in a state

than there are in a nursery. The woman does not really regard men as

citizens but as children. She may, if she is a humanitarian, love all

mankind; but she does not respect it. Still less does she respect its

votes. Now a man must be very blind nowadays not to see that there is a

danger of a sort of amateur science or pseudo-science being made the

excuse for every trick of tyranny and interference. Anybody who is not

an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street;

but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down

the chimney or even under the bed. In other words, it is a danger of

turning the policeman into a sort of benevolent burglar. Against this

protests are already being made, and will increasingly be made, if men

retain any instinct of independence or dignity at all. But to complain

of the woman interfering in the home will always sound like complaining

of the oyster intruding into the oyster-shell. To object that she has

too much power over education will seem like objecting to a hen having

too much to do with eggs. She has already been given an almost

irresponsible power over a limited region in these things; and if that

power is made infinite it will be even more irresponsible. If she adds

to her own power in the family all these alien fads external to the

family, her power will not only be irresponsible but insane. She will be

something which may well be called a nightmare of the nursery; a mad

mother. But the point is that she will be mad about other nurseries as

well as her own, or possibly instead of her own. The results will be

interesting; but at least it is certain that under this softening

influence government of the people, by the people, for the people, will

most assuredly perish from the earth.

But there is always another possibility. Hints of it may be noted here

and there like muffled gongs of doom. The other day some people

preaching some low trick or other, for running away from the glory of

motherhood, were suddenly silenced in New York; by a voice of deep and

democratic volume. The prigs who potter about the great plains are

pygmies dancing round a sleeping giant. That which sleeps, so far as

they are concerned, is the huge power of human unanimity and intolerance

in the soul of America. At present the masses in the Middle West are

indifferent to such fancies or faintly attracted by them, as fashions of

culture from the great cities. But any day it may not be so; some

lunatic may cut across their economic rights or their strange and buried

religion; and then he will see something. He will find himself running

like a nigger who has wronged a white woman or a man who has set the

prairie on fire. He will see something which the politicians fan in its

sleep and flatter with the name of the people, which many reactionaries

have cursed with the name of the mob, but which in any case has had

under its feet the crowns of many kings. It was said that the voice of

the people is the voice of God; and this at least is certain, that it

can be the voice of God to the wicked. And the last antics of their

arrogance shall stiffen before something enormous, such as towers in the

last words that Job heard out of the whirlwind; and a voice they never

knew shall tell them that his name is Leviathan, and he is lord over all

the children of pride.

The Extraordinary American

When I was in America I had the feeling that it was far more foreign

than France or even than Ireland. And by foreign I mean fascinating

rather than repulsive. I mean that element of strangeness which marks

the frontier of any fairyland, or gives to the traveller himself the

almost eerie title of the stranger. And I saw there more clearly than in

countries counted as more remote from us, in race or religion, a paradox

that is one of the great truths of travel.

We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found

something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character

easy to read, we are reading into it our own character. If when we see

an event we can promptly provide an explanation, we may be pretty

certain that we had ourselves prepared the explanation before we saw the

event. It follows from this that the best picture of a foreign people

can probably be found in a puzzle picture. If we can find an event of

which the meaning is really dark to us, it will probably throw some

light on the truth. I will therefore take from my American experiences

one isolated incident, which certainly could not have happened in any

other country I have ever clapped eyes on. I have really no notion of

what it meant. I have heard even from Americans about five different

conjectures about its meaning. But though I do not understand it, I do

sincerely believe that if I did understand it, I should understand

America.

It happened in the city of Oklahoma, which would require a book to

itself, even considered as a background. The State of Oklahoma is a

district in the south-west recently reclaimed from the Red Indian

territory. What many, quite incorrectly, imagine about all America is

really true of Oklahoma. It is proud of having no history. It is glowing

with the sense of having a great future—and nothing else. People are

just as likely to boast of an old building in Nashville as in Norwich;

people are just as proud of old families in Boston as in Bath. But in

Oklahoma the citizens do point out a colossal structure, arrogantly

affirming that it wasn’t there last week. It was against the colours of

this crude stage scenery, as of a pantomime city of pasteboard, that the

fantastic figure appeared which still haunts me like a walking note of

interrogation. I was strolling down the main street of the city, and

looking in at a paper-stall vivid with the news of crime, when a

stranger addressed me; and asked me, quite politely but with a curious

air of having authority to put the question, what I was doing in that

city.

He was a lean brown man, having rather the look of a shabby tropical

traveller, with a grey moustache and a lively and alert eye. But the

most singular thing about him was that the front of his coat was covered

with a multitude of shining metallic emblems made in the shape of stars

and crescents. I was well accustomed by this time to Americans adorning

the lapels of their coats with little symbols of various societies; it

is a part of the American passion for the ritual of comradeship. There

is nothing that an American likes so much as to have a secret society

and to make no secret of it. But in this case, if I may put it so, the

rash of symbolism seemed to have broken out all over the man, in a

fashion that indicated that the fever was far advanced. Of this minor

mystery, however, his first few sentences offered a provisional

explanation. In answer to his question, touching my business in

Oklahoma, I replied with restraint that I was lecturing. To which he

replied without restraint, but rather with an expansive and radiant

pride, ‘I also am lecturing. I am lecturing on astronomy.’

So far a certain wild rationality seemed to light up the affair. I knew

it was unusual, in my own country, for the Astronomer Royal to walk down

the Strand with his coat plastered all over with the Solar System.

Indeed, it was unusual for any English astronomical lecturer to

advertise the subject of his lectures in this fashion. But though it

would be unusual, it would not necessarily be unreasonable. In fact, I

think it might add to the colour and variety of life, if specialists did

adopt this sort of scientific heraldry. I should like to be able to

recognise an entomologist at sight by the decorative spiders and

cockroaches crawling all over his coat and waistcoat. I should like to

see a conchologist in a simple costume of shells. An osteopath, I

suppose, would be agreeably painted so as to resemble a skeleton, while

a botanist would enliven the street with the appearance of a

Jack-in-the-Green. So while I regarded the astronomical lecturer in the

astronomical coat as a figure distinguishable, by a high degree of

differentiation, from the artless astronomers of my island home (enough

their simple loveliness for me) I saw in him nothing illogical, but

rather an imaginative extreme of logic. And then came another turn of

the wheel of topsy-turvydom, and all the logic was scattered to the

wind.

Expanding his starry bosom and standing astraddle, with the air of one

who owned the street, the strange being continued, ‘Yes, I am lecturing

on astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, palaeontology, embryology,

eschatology,’ and so on in a thunderous roll of theoretical sciences

apparently beyond the scope of any single university, let alone any

single professor. Having thus introduced himself, however, he got to

business. He apologised with true American courtesy for having

questioned me at all, and excused it on the ground of his own exacting

responsibilities. I imagined him to mean the responsibility of

simultaneously occupying the chairs of all the faculties already

mentioned. But these apparently were trifles to him, and something far

more serious was clouding his brow.

‘I feel it to be my duty,’ he said, ‘to acquaint myself with any

stranger visiting this city; and it is an additional pleasure to welcome

here a member of the Upper Ten.’ I assured him earnestly that I knew

nothing about the Upper Ten, except that I did not belong to them; I

felt, not without alarm, that the Upper Ten might be another secret

society. He waved my abnegation aside and continued, ‘I have a great

responsibility in watching over this city. My friend the mayor and I

have a great responsibility.’ And then an extraordinary thing happened.

Suddenly diving his hand into his breast-pocket, he flashed something

before my eyes like a hand-mirror; something which disappeared again

almost as soon as it appeared. In that flash I could only see that it

was some sort of polished metal plate, with some letters engraved on it

like a monogram. But the reward of a studious and virtuous life, which

has been spent chiefly in the reading of American detective stories,

shone forth for me in that hour of trial; I received at last the prize

of a profound scholarship in the matter of imaginary murders in

tenth-rate magazines. I remembered who it was who in the Yankee

detective yarn flashes before the eyes of Slim Jim or the Lone Hand

Crook a badge of metal sometimes called a shield. Assuming all the

desperate composure of Slim Jim himself, I replied, ‘You mean you are

connected with the police authorities here, don’t you? Well, if I commit

a murder here, I’ll let you know.’ Whereupon that astonishing man waved

a hand in deprecation, bowed in farewell with the grace of a dancing

master; and said, ‘Oh, those are not things we expect from members of

the Upper Ten.’

Then that moving constellation moved away, disappearing in the dark

tides of humanity, as the vision passed away down the dark tides from

Sir Galahad and, starlike, mingled with the stars.

That is the problem I would put to all Americans, and to all who claim

to understand America. Who and what was that man? Was he an astronomer?

Was he a detective? Was he a wandering lunatic? If he was a lunatic who

thought he was an astronomer, why did he have a badge to prove he was a

detective? If he was a detective pretending to be an astronomer, why did

he tell a total stranger that he was a detective two minutes after

saying he was an astronomer? If he wished to watch over the city in a

quiet and unobtrusive fashion, why did he blazon himself all over with

all the stars of the sky, and profess to give public lectures on all the

subjects of the world? Every wise and well-conducted student of murder

stories is acquainted with the notion of a policeman in plain clothes.

But nobody could possibly say that this gentleman was in plain clothes.

Why not wear his uniform, if he was resolved to show every stranger in

the street his badge? Perhaps after all he had no uniform; for these

lands were but recently a wild frontier rudely ruled by vigilance

committees. Some Americans suggested to me that he was the Sheriff; the

regular hard-riding, free-shooting Sheriff of Bret Harte and my

boyhood’s dreams. Others suggested that he was an agent of the Ku-Klux

Klan, that great nameless revolution of the revival of which there were

rumours at the time; and that the symbol he exhibited was theirs. But

whether he was a sheriff acting for the law, or a conspirator against

the law, or a lunatic entirely outside the law, I agree with the former

conjectures upon one point. I am perfectly certain he had something else

in his pocket besides a badge. And I am perfectly certain that under

certain circumstances he would have handled it instantly, and shot me

dead between the gay bookstall and the crowded trams. And that is the

last touch to the complexity; for though in that country it often seems

that the law is made by a lunatic, you never know when the lunatic may

not shoot you for keeping it. Only in the presence of that citizen of

Oklahoma I feel I am confronted with the fullness and depth of the

mystery of America. Because I understand nothing, I recognise the thing

that we call a nation; and I salute the flag.

But even in connection with this mysterious figure there is a moral

which affords another reason for mentioning him. Whether he was a

sheriff or an outlaw, there was certainly something about him that

suggested the adventurous violence of the old border life of America;

and whether he was connected with the police or no, there was certainly

violence enough in his environment to satisfy the most ardent policeman.

The posters in the paper-shop were placarded with the verdict in the

Hamon trial; a cause célèbre which reached its crisis in Oklahoma

while I was there. Senator Hamon had been shot by a girl whom he had

wronged, and his widow demanded justice, or what might fairly be called

vengeance. There was very great excitement culminating in the girl’s

acquittal. Nor did the Hamon case appear to be entirely exceptional in

that breezy borderland. The moment the town had received the news that

Clara Smith was free, newsboys rushed down the street shouting, ‘Double

stabbing outrage near Oklahoma,’ or ‘Banker’s throat cut on Main

Street,’ or otherwise resuming their regular mode of life. It seemed as

much as to say, ‘Do not imagine that our local energies are exhausted in

shooting a Senator,’ or ‘Come, now, the world is young, even if Clara

Smith is acquitted, and the enthusiasm of Oklahoma is not yet cold.’

But my particular reason for mentioning the matter is this. Despite my

friend’s mystical remarks about the Upper Ten, he lived in an atmosphere

of something that was at least the very reverse of a respect for

persons. Indeed, there was something in the very crudity of his social

compliment that smacked, strangely enough, of that egalitarian soil. In

a vaguely aristocratic country like England, people would never dream

of telling a total stranger that he was a member of the Upper Ten. For

one thing, they would be afraid that he might be. Real snobbishness is

never vulgar; for it is intended to please the refined. Nobody licks the

boots of a duke, if only because the duke does not like his boots

cleaned in that way. Nobody embraces the knees of a marquis, because it

would embarrass that nobleman. And nobody tells him he is a member of

the Upper Ten, because everybody is expected to know it. But there is a

much more subtle kind of snobbishness pervading the atmosphere of any

society trial in England. And the first thing that struck me was the

total absence of that atmosphere in the trial at Oklahoma. Mr. Hamon was

presumably a member of the Upper Ten, if there is such a thing. He was a

member of the Senate or Upper House in the American Parliament; he was a

millionaire and a pillar of the Republican party, which might be called

the respectable party; he is said to have been mentioned as a possible

President. And the speeches of Clara Smith’s counsel, who was known by

the delightfully Oklahomite title of Wild Bill McLean, were wild enough

in all conscience; but they left very little of my friend’s illusion

that members of the Upper Ten could not be accused of crimes. Nero and

Borgia were quite presentable people compared with Senator Hamon when

Wild Bill McLean had done with him. But the difference was deeper, and

even in a sense more delicate than this. There is a certain tone about

English trials, which does at least begin with a certain scepticism

about people prominent in public life being abominable in private life.

People do vaguely doubt the criminality of ‘a man in that position’;

that is, the position of the Marquise de Brinvilliers or the Marquis de

Sade. Prima facie, it would be an advantage to the Marquis de Sade

that he was a marquis. But it was certainly against Hamon that he was a

millionaire. Wild Bill did not minimise him as a bankrupt or an

adventurer; he insisted on the solidity and size of his fortune, he made

mountains out of the ‘Hamon millions,’ as if they made the matter much

worse; as indeed I think they do. But that is because I happen to share

a certain political philosophy with Wild Bill and other wild buffaloes

of the prairies. In other words, there is really present here a

democratic instinct against the domination of wealth. It does not

prevent wealth from dominating; but it does prevent the domination from

being regarded with any affection or loyalty. Despite the man in the

starry coat, the Americans have not really any illusions about the Upper

Ten. McLean was appealing to an implicit public opinion when he pelted

the Senator with his gold.

But something more is involved. I became conscious, as I have been

conscious in reading the crime novels of America, that the millionaire

was taken as a type and not an individual. This is the great difference;

that America recognises rich crooks as a class. Any Englishman might

recognise them as individuals. Any English romance may turn on a crime

in high life; in which the baronet is found to have poisoned his wife,

or the elusive burglar turns out to be the bishop. But the English are

not always saying, either in romance or reality, ‘What’s to be done, if

our food is being poisoned by all these baronets?’ They do not murmur in

indignation, ‘If bishops will go on burgling like this, something must

be done.’ The whole point of the English romance is the exceptional

character of a crime in high life. That is not the tone of American

novels or American newspapers or American trials like the trial in

Oklahoma. Americans may be excited when a millionaire crook is caught,

as when any other crook is caught; but it is at his being caught, not at

his being discovered. To put the matter shortly, England recognises a

criminal class at the bottom of the social scale. America also

recognises a criminal class at the top of the social scale. In both, for

various reasons, it may be difficult for the criminals to be convicted;

but in America the upper class of criminals is recognised. In both

America and England, of course, it exists.

This is an assumption at the back of the American mind which makes a

great difference in many ways; and in my opinion a difference for the

better. I wrote merely fancifully just now about bishops being burglars;

but there is a story in New York, illustrating this, which really does

in a sense attribute a burglary to a bishop. The story was that an

Anglican Lord Spiritual, of the pompous and now rather antiquated

school, was pushing open the door of a poor American tenement with all

the placid patronage of the squire and rector visiting the cottagers,

when a gigantic Irish policeman came round the corner and hit him a

crack over the head with a truncheon on the assumption that he was a

house-breaker. I hope that those who laugh at the story see that the

laugh is not altogether against the policeman; and that it is not only

the policeman, but rather the bishop, who had failed to recognise some

fine logical distinctions. The bishop, being a learned man, might well

be called upon (when he had sufficiently recovered from the knock on

the head) to define what is the exact difference between a house-breaker

and a home-visitor; and why the home-visitor should not be regarded as a

house-breaker when he will not behave as a guest. An impartial

intelligence will be much less shocked at the policeman’s disrespect for

the home-visitor than by the home-visitor’s disrespect for the home.

But that story smacks of the western soil, precisely because of the

element of brutality there is in it. In England snobbishness and social

oppression are much subtler and softer; the manifestations of them at

least are more mellow and humane. In comparison there is indeed

something which people call ruthless about the air of America,

especially the American cities. The bishop may push open the door

without an apology, but he would not break open the door with a

truncheon; but the Irish policeman’s truncheon hits both ways. It may be

brutal to the tenement dweller as well as to the bishop; but the

difference and distinction is that it might really be brutal to the

bishop. It is because there is after all, at the back of all that

barbarism, a sort of a negative belief in the brotherhood of men, a dark

democratic sense that men are really men and nothing more, that the

coarse and even corrupt bureaucracy is not resented exactly as

oligarchic bureaucracies are resented. There is a sense in which

corruption is not so narrow as nepotism. It is upon this queer cynical

charity, and even humility, that it has been possible to rear so high

and uphold so long that tower of brass, Tammany Hall. The modern police

system is in spirit the most inhuman in history, and its evil belongs

to an age and not to a nation. But some American police methods are evil

past all parallel; and the detective can be more crooked than a hundred

crooks. But in the States it is not only possible that the policeman is

worse than the convict, it is by no means certain that he thinks that he

is any better. In the popular stories of O. Henry there are light

allusions to tramps being kicked out of hotels which will make any

Christian seek relief in strong language and a trust in heaven—not to

say in hell. And yet books even more popular than O. Henry’s are those

of the ‘sob-sisterhood’ who swim in lachrymose lakes after love-lorn

spinsters, who pass their lives in reclaiming and consoling such tramps.

There are in this people two strains of brutality and sentimentalism

which I do not understand, especially where they mingle; but I am fairly

sure they both work back to the dim democratic origin. The Irish

policeman does not confine himself fastidiously to bludgeoning bishops;

his truncheon finds plenty of poor people’s heads to hit; and yet I

believe on my soul he has a sort of sympathy with poor people not to be

found in the police of more aristocratic states. I believe he also reads

and weeps over the stories of the spinsters and the reclaimed tramps; in

fact, there is much of such pathos in an American magazine (my sole

companion on many happy railway journeys) which is not only devoted to

detective stories, but apparently edited by detectives. In these stories

also there is the honest, popular astonishment at the Upper Ten

expressed by the astronomical detective, if indeed he was a detective

and not a demon from the dark Red-Indian forests that faded to the

horizon behind him. But I have set him as the head and text of this

chapter because with these elements of the Third Degree of devilry and

the Seventh Heaven of sentimentalism I touch on elements that I do not

understand; and when I do not understand, I say so.

The Republican in the Ruins

The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone; especially to

a wood-cut or a lithographic stone. Modern people put their trust in

pictures, especially scientific pictures, as much as the most

superstitious ever put it in religious pictures. They publish a portrait

of the Missing Link as if he were the Missing Man, for whom the police

are always advertising; for all the world as if the anthropoid had been

photographed before he absconded. The scientific diagram may be a

hypothesis; it may be a fancy; it may be a forgery. But it is always an

idol in the true sense of an image; and an image in the true sense of a

thing mastering the imagination and not the reason. The power of these

talismanic pictures is almost hypnotic to modern humanity. We can never

forget that we have seen a portrait of the Missing Link; though we

should instantly detect the lapse of logic into superstition, if we were

told that the old Greek agnostics had made a statue of the Unknown God.

But there is a still stranger fashion in which we fall victims to the

same trick of fancy. We accept in a blind and literal spirit, not only

images of speculation, but even figures of speech. The nineteenth

century prided itself on having lost its faith in myths, and proceeded

to put all its faith in metaphors. It dismissed the old doctrines about

the way of life and the light of the world; and then it proceeded to

talk as if the light of truth were really and literally a light, that

could be absorbed by merely opening our eyes; or as if the path of

progress were really and truly a path, to be found by merely following

our noses. Thus the purpose of God is an idea, true or false; but the

purpose of Nature is merely a metaphor; for obviously if there is no God

there is no purpose. Yet while men, by an imaginative instinct, spoke of

the purpose of God with a grand agnosticism, as something too large to

be seen, something reaching out to worlds and to eternities, they speak

of the purpose of Nature in particular and practical problems of curing

babies or cutting up rabbits. This power of the modern metaphor must be

understood, by way of an introduction, if we are to understand one of

the chief errors, at once evasive and pervasive, which perplex the

problem of America.

America is always spoken of as a young nation; and whether or no this be

a valuable and suggestive metaphor, very few people notice that it is a

metaphor at all. If somebody said that a certain deserving charity had

just gone into trousers, we should recognise that it was a figure of

speech, and perhaps a rather surprising figure of speech. If somebody

said that a daily paper had recently put its hair up, we should know it

could only be a metaphor, and possibly a rather strained metaphor. Yet

these phrases would mean the only thing that can possibly be meant by

calling a corporate association of all sorts of people ‘young’; that is,

that a certain institution has only existed for a certain time. I am not

now denying that such a corporate nationality may happen to have a

psychology comparatively analogous to the psychology of youth. I am not

even denying that America has it. I am only pointing out, to begin with,

that we must free ourselves from the talismanic tyranny of a metaphor

which we do not recognise as a metaphor. Men realised that the old

mystical doctrines were mystical; they do not realise that the new

metaphors are metaphorical. They have some sort of hazy notion that

American society must be growing, must be promising, must have the

virtues of hope or the faults of ignorance, merely because it has only

had a separate existence since the eighteenth century. And that is

exactly like saying that a new chapel must be growing taller, or that a

limited liability company will soon have its second teeth.

Now in truth this particular conception of American hopefulness would be

anything but hopeful for America. If the argument really were, as it is

still vaguely supposed to be, that America must have a long life before

it, because it only started in the eighteenth century, we should find a

very fatal answer by looking at the other political systems that did

start in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was called the

Age of Reason; and there is a very real sense in which the other systems

were indeed started in a spirit of reason. But starting from reason has

not saved them from ruin. If we survey the Europe of to-day with real

clarity and historic comprehension, we shall see that it is precisely

the most recent and the most rationalistic creations that have been

ruined. The two great States which did most definitely and emphatically

deserve to be called modern states were Prussia and Russia. There was no

real Prussia before Frederick the Great; no real Russian Empire before

Peter the Great. Both those innovators recognised themselves as

rationalists bringing a new reason and order into an indeterminate

barbarism; and doing for the barbarians what the barbarians could not do

for themselves. They did not, like the kings of England or France or

Spain or Scotland, inherit a sceptre that was the symbol of a historic

and patriotic people. In this sense there was no Russia but only an

Emperor of Russia. In this sense Prussia was a kingdom before it was a

nation; if it ever was a nation. But anyhow both men were particularly

modern in their whole mood and mind. They were modern to the extent of

being not only anti-traditional, but almost anti-patriotic. Peter forced

the science of the West on Russia to the regret of many Russians.

Frederick talked the French of Voltaire and not the German of Luther.

The two experiments were entirely in the spirit of Voltairean

rationalism; they were built in broad daylight by men who believed in

nothing but the light of common day; and already their day is done.

If then the promise of America were in the fact that she is one of the

latest births of progress, we should point out that it is exactly the

latest born that were the first to die. If in this sense she is praised

as young, it may be answered that the young have died young, and have

not lived to be old. And if this be confused with the argument that she

came in an age of clarity and scepticism, uncontaminated by old

superstitions, it could still be retorted that the works of superstition

have survived the works of scepticism. But the truth is, of course, that

the real quality of America is much more subtle and complex than this;

and is mixed not only of good and bad, and rational and mystical, but

also of old and new. That is what makes the task of tracing the true

proportions of American life so interesting and so impossible.

To begin with, such a metaphor is always as distracting as a mixed

metaphor. It is a double-edged tool that cuts both ways; and

consequently opposite ways. We use the same word ‘young’ to mean two

opposite extremes. We mean something at an early stage of growth, and

also something having the latest fruits of growth. We might call a

commonwealth young if it conducted all its daily conversation by

wireless telegraphy; meaning that it was progressive. But we might also

call it young if it conducted all its industry with chipped flints;

meaning that it was primitive. These two meanings of youth are

hopelessly mixed up when the word is applied to America. But what is

more curious, the two elements really are wildly entangled in America.

America is in some ways what is called in advance of the times, and in

some ways what is called behind the times; but it seems a little

confusing to convey both notions by the same word.

On the one hand, Americans often are successful in the last inventions.

And for that very reason they are often neglectful of the last but one.

It is true of men in general, dealing with things in general, that while

they are progressing in one thing, such as science, they are going back

in another thing, such as art. What is less fully realised is that this

is true even as between different methods of science. The perfection of

wireless telegraphy might well be followed by the gross imperfection of

wires. The very enthusiasm of American science brings this out very

vividly. The telephone in New York works miracles all day long. Replies

from remote places come as promptly as in a private talk; nobody cuts

anybody off; nobody says, ‘Sorry you’ve been troubled.’ But then the

postal service of New York does not work at all. At least I could never

discover it working. Letters lingered in it for days and days, as in

some wild village of the Pyrenees. When I asked a taxi-driver to drive

me to a post-office, a look of far-off vision and adventure came into

his eyes, and he said he had once heard of a post-office somewhere near

West Ninety-Seventh Street. Men are not efficient in everything, but

only in the fashionable thing. This may be a mark of the march of

science; it does certainly in one sense deserve the description of

youth. We can imagine a very young person forgetting the old toy in the

excitement of a new one.

But on the other hand, American manners contain much that is called

young in the contrary sense; in the sense of an earlier stage of

history. There are whole patches and particular aspects that seem to me

quite Early Victorian. I cannot help having this sensation, for

instance, about the arrangement for smoking in the railway carriages.

There are no smoking carriages, as a rule; but a corner of each of the

great cars is curtained off mysteriously, that a man may go behind the

curtain and smoke. Nobody thinks of a woman doing so. It is regarded as

a dark, bohemian, and almost brutally masculine indulgence; exactly as

it was regarded by the dowagers in Thackeray’s novels. Indeed, this is

one of the many such cases in which extremes meet; the extremes of

stuffy antiquity and cranky modernity. The American dowager is sorry

that tobacco was ever introduced; and the American suffragette and

social reformer is considering whether tobacco ought not to be

abolished. The tone of American society suggests some sort of

compromise, by which women will be allowed to smoke, but men forbidden

to do so.

In one respect, however, America is very old indeed. In one respect

America is more historic than England; I might almost say more

archaeological than England. The record of one period of the past,

morally remote and probably irrevocable, is there preserved in a more

perfect form as a pagan city is preserved at Pompeii. In a more general

sense, of course, it is easy to exaggerate the contrast as a mere

contrast between the old world and the new. There is a superficial

satire about the millionaire’s daughter who has recently become the wife

of an aristocrat; but there is a rather more subtle satire in the

question of how long the aristocrat has been aristocratic. There is

often much misplaced mockery of a marriage between an upstart’s daughter

and a decayed relic of feudalism; when it is really a marriage between

an upstart’s daughter and an upstart’s grandson. The sentimental

socialist often seems to admit the blue blood of the nobleman, even when

he wants to shed it; just as he seems to admit the marvellous brains of

the millionaire, even when he wants to blow them out. Unfortunately (in

the interests of social science, of course) the sentimental socialist

never does go so far as bloodshed or blowing out brains; otherwise the

colour and quality of both blood and brains would probably be a

disappointment to him. There are certainly more American families that

really came over in the Mayflower than English families that really

came over with the Conqueror; and an English county family clearly

dating from the time of the Mayflower would be considered a very

traditional and historic house. Nevertheless, there are ancient things

in England, though the aristocracy is hardly one of them. There are

buildings, there are institutions, there are even ideas in England which

do preserve, as in a perfect pattern, some particular epoch of the past,

and even of the remote past. A man could study the Middle Ages in

Lincoln as well as in Rouen; in Canterbury as well as in Cologne. Even

of the Renaissance the same is true, at least on the literary side; if

Shakespeare was later he was also greater than Ronsard. But the point is

that the spirit and philosophy of the periods were present in fullness

and in freedom. The guildsmen were as Christian in England as they were

anywhere; the poets were as pagan in England as they were anywhere.

Personally I do not admit that the men who served patrons were freer

than those who served patron saints. But each fashion had its own kind

of freedom; and the point is that the English, in each case, had the

fullness of that kind of freedom. But there was another ideal of freedom

which the English never had at all; or, anyhow, never expressed at all.

There was another ideal, the soul of another epoch, round which we built

no monuments and wrote no masterpieces. You will find no traces of it in

England; but you will find them in America.

The thing I mean was the real religion of the eighteenth century. Its

religion, in the more defined sense, was generally Deism, as in

Robespierre or Jefferson. In the more general way of morals and

atmosphere it was rather Stoicism, as in the suicide of Wolfe Tone. It

had certain very noble and, as some would say, impossible ideals; as

that a politician should be poor, and should be proud of being poor. It

knew Latin; and therefore insisted on the strange fancy that the

Republic should be a public thing. Its Republican simplicity was

anything but a silly pose; unless all martyrdom is a silly pose. Even of

the prigs and fanatics of the American and French Revolutions we can

often say, as Stevenson said of an American, that ‘thrift and courage

glowed in him.’ And its virtue and value for us is that it did remember

the things we now most tend to forget; from the dignity of liberty to

the danger of luxury. It did really believe in self-determination, in

the self-determination of the self, as well as of the state. And its

determination was really determined. In short, it believed in

self-respect; and it is strictly true even of its rebels and regicides

that they desired chiefly to be respectable. But there were in it the

marks of religion as well as respectability; it had a creed; it had a

crusade. Men died singing its songs; men starved rather than write

against its principles. And its principles were liberty, equality, and

fraternity, or the dogmas of the Declaration of Independence. This was

the idea that redeemed the dreary negations of the eighteenth century;

and there are still corners of Philadelphia or Boston or Baltimore where

we can feel so suddenly in the silence its plain garb and formal

manners, that the walking ghost of Jefferson would hardly surprise us.

There is not the ghost of such a thing in England. In England the real

religion of the eighteenth century never found freedom or scope. It

never cleared a space in which to build that cold and classic building

called the Capitol. It never made elbow-room for that free if sometimes

frigid figure called the Citizen.

In eighteenth-century England he was crowded out, partly perhaps by the

relics of better things of the past, but largely at least by the

presence of much worse things in the present. The worst things kept out

the best things of the eighteenth century. The ground was occupied by

legal fictions; by a godless Erastian church and a powerless Hanoverian

king. Its realities were an aristocracy of Regency dandies, in costumes

made to match Brighton Pavilion; a paganism not frigid but florid. It

was a touch of this aristocratic waste in Fox that prevented that great

man from being a glorious exception. It is therefore well for us to

realise that there is something in history which we did not experience;

and therefore probably something in Americans that we do not understand.

There was this idealism at the very beginning of their individualism.

There was a note of heroic publicity and honourable poverty which

lingers in the very name of Cincinnati.

But I have another and special reason for noting this historical fact;

the fact that we English never made anything upon the model of a

capitol, while we can match anybody with the model of a cathedral. It is

far from improbable that the latter model may again be a working model.

For I have myself felt, naturally and for a long time, a warm sympathy

with both those past ideals, which seem to some so incompatible. I have

felt the attraction of the red cap as well as the red cross, of the

Marseillaise as well as the Magnificat. And even when they were in

furious conflict I have never altogether lost my sympathy for either.

But in the conflict between the Republic[1] and the Church, the point

often made against the Church seems to me much more of a point against

the Republic. It is emphatically the Republic and not the Church that I

venerate as something beautiful but belonging to the past. In fact I

feel exactly the same sort of sad respect for the republican ideal that

many mid-Victorian free-thinkers felt for the religious ideal. The most

sincere poets of that period were largely divided between those who

insisted, like Arnold and Clough, that Christianity might be a ruin, but

after all it must be treated as a picturesque ruin; and those, like

Swinburne, who insisted that it might be a picturesque ruin, but after

all it must be treated as a ruin. But surely their own pagan temple of

political liberty is now much more of a ruin than the other; and I fancy

I am one of the few who still take off their hats in that ruined temple.

That is why I went about looking for the fading traces of that lost

cause, in the old-world atmosphere of the new world.

But I do not, as a fact, feel that the cathedral is a ruin; I doubt if I

should feel it even if I wished to lay it in ruins. I doubt if Mr.

M’Cabe really thinks that Catholicism is dying, though he might deceive

himself into saying so. Nobody could be naturally moved to say that the

crowded cathedral of St. Patrick in New York was a ruin, or even that

the unfinished Anglo-Catholic cathedral at Washington was a ruin, though

it is not yet a church; or that there is anything lost or lingering

about the splendid and spirited Gothic churches springing up under the

inspiration of Mr. Cram of Boston. As a matter of feeling, as a matter

of fact, as a matter quite apart from theory or opinion, it is not in

the religious centres that we now have the feeling of something

beautiful but receding, of something loved but lost. It is exactly in

the spaces cleared and levelled by America for the large and sober

religion of the eighteenth century; it is where an old house in

Philadelphia contains an old picture of Franklin, or where the men of

Maryland raised above their city the first monument of Washington. It is

there that I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted,

whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead, and all save he departed. It

is then that I feel as if I were the last Republican.

But when I say that the Republic of the Age of Reason is now a ruin, I

should rather say that at its best it is a ruin. At its worst it has

collapsed into a death-trap or is rotting like a dunghill. What is the

real Republic of our day as distinct from the ideal Republic of our

fathers, but a heap of corrupt capitalism crawling with worms; with

those parasites, the professional politicians? I was re-reading

Swinburne’s bitter but not ignoble poem, ‘Before a Crucifix,’ in which

he bids Christ, or the ecclesiastical image of Christ, stand out of the

way of the onward march of a political idealism represented by United

Italy or the French Republic. I was struck by the strange and ironic

exactitude with which every taunt he flings at the degradation of the

old divine ideal would now fit the degradation of his own human ideal.

The time has already come when we can ask his Goddess of Liberty, as

represented by the actual Liberals, ‘Have you filled full men’s

starved-out souls; have you brought freedom on the earth?’ For every

engine in which these old free-thinkers firmly and confidently trusted

has itself become an engine of oppression and even of class oppression.

Its free parliament has become an oligarchy. Its free press has become a

monopoly. If the pure Church has been corrupted in the course of two

thousand years, what about the pure Republic that has rotted into a

filthy plutocracy in less than a hundred?

O, hidden face of man, whereover

The years have woven a viewless veil,

If thou wert verily man’s lover

What did thy love or blood avail?

Thy blood the priests make poison of;

And in gold shekels coin thy love.

Which has most to do with shekels to-day, the priests or the

politicians? Can we say in any special sense nowadays that clergymen, as

such, make a poison out of the blood of the martyrs? Can we say it in

anything like the real sense, in which we do say that yellow journalists

make a poison out of the blood of the soldiers?

But I understand how Swinburne felt when confronted by the image of the

carven Christ, and, perplexed by the contrast between its claims and its

consequences, he said his strange farewell to it, hastily indeed, but

not without regret, not even really without respect. I felt the same

myself when I looked for the last time on the Statue of Liberty.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] In the conclusion of this chapter I mean by the Republic

not merely the American Republic, but the whole modern representative

system, as in France or even in England.

Is the Atlantic Narrowing?

A certain kind of question is asked very earnestly in our time. Because

of a certain logical quality in it, connected with premises and data, it

is very difficult to answer. Thus people will ask what is the hidden

weakness in the Celtic race that makes them everywhere fail or fade

away; or how the Germans contrived to bring all their organisation into

a state of such perfect efficiency; and what was the significance of the

recent victory of Prussia. Or they will ask by what stages the modern

world has abandoned all belief in miracles; and the modern newspapers

ceased to print any news of murders. They will ask why English politics

are free from corruption; or by what mental and moral training certain

millionaires were enabled to succeed by sheer force of character; in

short, they will ask why plutocrats govern well and how it is that pigs

fly, spreading their pink pinions to the breeze or delighting us as they

twitter and flutter from tree to tree. The logical difficulty of

answering these questions is connected with an old story about Charles

the Second and a bowl of goldfish, and with another anecdote about a

gentleman who was asked, ‘When did you leave off beating your wife?’ But

there is something analogous to it in the present discussions about the

forces drawing England and America together. It seems as if the

reasoners hardly went far enough back in their argument, or took

trouble enough to disentangle their assumptions. They are still moving

with the momentum of the peculiar nineteenth-century notion of progress;

of certain very simple tendencies perpetually increasing and needing no

special analysis. It is so with the international rapprochement I have

to consider here.

In other places I have ventured to express a doubt about whether nations

can be drawn together by an ancient rumour about races; by a sort of

prehistoric chit-chat or the gossip of the Stone Age. I have ventured

farther; and even expressed a doubt about whether they ought to be drawn

together, or rather dragged together, by the brute violence of the

engines of science and speed. But there is yet another horrible doubt

haunting my morbid mind, which it will be better for my constitution to

confess frankly. And that is the doubt about whether they are being

drawn together at all.

It has long been a conversational commonplace among the enlightened that

all countries are coming closer and closer to each other. It was a

conversational commonplace among the enlightened, somewhere about the

year 1913, that all wars were receding farther and farther into a

barbaric past. There is something about these sayings that seems simple

and familiar and entirely satisfactory when we say them; they are of

that consoling sort which we can say without any of the mental pain of

thinking what we are saying. But if we turn our attention from the

phrases we use to the facts that we talk about, we shall realise at

least that there are a good many facts on the other side and examples

pointing the other way. For instance, it does happen occasionally, from

time to time, that people talk about Ireland. He would be a very

hilarious humanitarian who should maintain that Ireland and England have

been more and more assimilated during the last hundred years. The very

name of Sinn Fein is an answer to it, and the very language in which

that phrase is spoken. Curran and Sheil would no more have dreamed of

uttering the watchword of ‘Repeal’ in Gaelic than of uttering it in

Zulu. Grattan could hardly have brought himself to believe that the real

repeal of the Union would actually be signed in London in the strange

script as remote as the snaky ornament of the Celtic crosses. It would

have seemed like Washington signing the Declaration of Independence in

the picture-writing of the Red Indians. Ireland has clearly grown away

from England; and her language, literature, and type of patriotism are

far less English than they were. On the other hand, no one will pretend

that the mass of modern Englishmen are much nearer to talking Gaelic or

decorating Celtic crosses. A hundred years ago it was perfectly natural

that Byron and Moore should walk down the street arm in arm. Even the

sight of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. W. B. Yeats walking down the street

arm in arm would now arouse some remark.

I could give any number of other examples of the same new estrangement

of nations. I could cite the obvious facts that Norway and Sweden parted

company not very long ago, that Austria and Hungary have again become

separate states. I could point to the mob of new nations that have

started up after the war; to the fact that the great empires are now

nearly all broken up; that the Russian Empire no longer directs Poland,

that the Austrian Empire no longer directs Bohemia, that the Turkish

Empire no longer directs Palestine. Sinn Fein is the separatism of the

Irish. Zionism is the separatism of the Jews. But there is one simple

and sufficing example, which is here more to my purpose, and is at least

equally sufficient for it. And that is the deepening national difference

between the Americans and the English.

Let me test it first by my individual experience in the matter of

literature. When I was a boy I read a book like _The Autocrat of the

Breakfast-Table_ exactly as I read another book like _The Book of

Snobs_. I did not think of it as an American book, but simply as a book.

Its wit and idiom were like those of the English literary tradition; and

its few touches of local colour seemed merely accidental, like those of

an Englishman who happened to be living in Switzerland or Sweden. My

father and my father’s friends were rightly enthusiastic for the book;

so that it seemed to come to me by inheritance like Gulliver’s Travels

or Tristram Shandy. Its language was as English as Ruskin, and a great

deal more English than Carlyle. Well, I have seen in later years an

almost equally wide and well-merited popularity of the stories of O.

Henry. But never for one moment could I or any one else reading them

forget that they were stories by an American about America. The very

first fact about them is that they are told with an American accent,

that is, in the unmistakable tones of a brilliant and fascinating

foreigner. And the same is true of every other recent work of which the

fame has managed to cross the Atlantic. We did not say that _The Spoon

River Anthology_ was a new book, but that it was a new book from

America. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported

from Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the

‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard.’ People in England who heard of Main

Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street; with the

principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire or

Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I practically identified the

boarding-house of the Autocrat with any boarding-house I happened to

know in Brompton or Brighton. No doubt there were differences; but the

point is that the differences did not pierce the consciousness or prick

the illusion. I said to myself, ‘People are like this in

boarding-houses,’ not ‘People are like this in Boston.’

This can be seen even in the simple matter of language, especially in

the sense of slang. Take, for instance, the delightful sketch in the

causerie of Oliver Wendell Holmes; the character of the young man called

John. He is the very modern type in every modern country who does

specialise in slang. He is the young fellow who is something in the

City; the everyday young man of the Gilbertian song, with a stick and a

pipe and a half-bred black-and-tan. In every country he is at once witty

and commonplace. In every country, therefore, he tends both to the

vivacity and the vulgarity of slang. But when he appeared in Holmes’s

book, his language was not very different from what it would have been

in a Brighton instead of a Boston boarding-house; or, in short, if the

young man called John had more commonly been called ‘Arry. If he had

appeared in a modern American book, his language would have been almost

literally unintelligible. At the least an Englishman would have had to

read some of the best sentences twice, as he sometimes has to read the

dizzy and involved metaphors of O. Henry. Nor is it an answer that this

depended on the personalities of the particular writers. A comparison

between the real journalism of the time of Holmes and the real

journalism of the time of Henry reveals the same thing. It is the

expansion of a slight difference of style into a luxuriant difference of

idiom; and the process continued indefinitely would certainly produce a

totally different language. After a few centuries the signatures of

American ambassadors would look as fantastic as Gaelic, and the very

name of the Republic be as strange as Sinn Fein.

It is true that there has been on the surface a certain amount of give

and take; or at least, as far as the English are concerned, of take

rather than give. But it is true that it was once all the other way; and

indeed the one thing is something like a just nemesis of the other.

Indeed, the story of the reversal is somewhat singular, when we come to

think of it. It began in a certain atmosphere and spirit of certain

well-meaning people who talked about the English-speaking race; and were

apparently indifferent to how the English was spoken, whether in the

accent of a Jamaican negro or a convict from Botany Bay. It was their

logical tendency to say that Dante was a Dago. It was their logical

punishment to say that Disraeli was an Englishman. Now there may have

been a period when this Anglo-American amalgamation included more or

less equal elements from England and America. It never included the

larger elements, or the more valuable elements of either. But, on the

whole, I think it true to say that it was not an allotment but an

interchange of parts; and that things first went all one way and then

all the other. People began by telling the Americans that they owed all

their past triumphs to England; which was false. They ended up by

telling the English that they would owe all their future triumphs to

America; which is if possible still more false. Because we chose to

forget that New York had been New Amsterdam, we are now in danger of

forgetting that London is not New York. Because we insisted that Chicago

was only a pious imitation of Chiswick, we may yet see Chiswick an

inferior imitation of Chicago. Our Anglo-Saxon historians attempted that

conquest in which Howe and Burgoyne had failed, and with infinitely less

justification on their side. They attempted the great crime of the

Anglicisation of America. They have called down the punishment of the

Americanisation of England. We must not murmur; but it is a heavy

punishment.

It may lift a little of its load, however, if we look at it more

closely; we shall then find that though it is very much on top of us, it

is only on top. In that sense such Americanisation as there is is very

superficial. For instance, there is a certain amount of American slang

picked up at random; it appears in certain pushing types of journalism

and drama. But we may easily dwell too much on this tragedy; of people

who have never spoken English beginning to speak American. I am far from

suggesting that American, like any other foreign language, may not

frequently contribute to the common culture of the world phrases for

which there is no substitute; there are French phrases so used in

England and English phrases in France. The word ‘high-brow,’ for

instance, is a real discovery and revelation, a new and necessary name

for something that walked nameless but enormous in the modern world, a

shaft of light and a stroke of lightning. That comes from America and

belongs to the world, as much as ‘The Raven’ or The Scarlet Letter or

the novels of Henry James belong to the world. In fact, I can imagine

Henry James originating it in the throes of self-expression, and

bringing out a word like ‘high-browed,’ with a sort of gentle jerk, at

the end of searching sentences which groped sensitively until they found

the phrase. But most of the American slang that is borrowed seems to be

borrowed for no particular reason. It either has no point or the point

is lost by translation into another context and culture. It is either

something which does not need any grotesque and exaggerative

description, or of which there already exists a grotesque and

exaggerative description more native to our tongue and soil. For

instance, I cannot see that the strong and simple expression ‘Now it is

for you to pull the police magistrate’s nose’ is in any way strengthened

by saying, ‘Now it is up to you to pull the police magistrate’s nose.’

When Tennyson says of the men of the Light Brigade ‘Theirs but to do and

die,’ the expression seems to me perfectly lucid. ‘Up to them to do and

die’ would alter the metre without especially clarifying the meaning.

This is an example of ordinary language being quite adequate; but there

is a further difficulty that even wild slang comes to sound like

ordinary language. Very often the English have already as humorous and

fanciful idiom of their own, only that through habit it has lost its

humour. When Keats wrote the line, ‘What pipes and timbrels, what wild

ecstasy!’ I am willing to believe that the American humorist would have

expressed the same sentiment by beginning the sentence with ‘Some

pipe!’ When that was first said, somewhere in the wilds of Colorado, it

was really funny; involving a powerful understatement and the suggestion

of a mere sample. If a spinster has informed us that she keeps a bird,

and we find it is an ostrich, there will be considerable point in the

Colorado satirist saying inquiringly, ‘Some bird?’ as if he were

offering us a small slice of a small plover. But if we go back to this

root and rationale of a joke, the English language already contains

quite as good a joke. It is not necessary to say, ‘Some bird’; there is

a far finer irony in the old expression, ‘Something like a bird.’ It

suggests that the speaker sees something faintly and strangely birdlike

about a bird; that it remotely and almost irrationally reminds him of a

bird; and that there is about ostrich plumes a yard long something like

the faint and delicate traces of a feather. It has every quality of

imaginative irony, except that nobody even imagines it to be ironical.

All that happens is that people get tired of that turn of phrase, take

up a foreign phrase and get tired of that, without realising the point

of either. All that happens is that a number of weary people who used to

say, ‘Something like a bird,’ now say, ‘Some bird,’ with undiminished

weariness. But they might just as well use dull and decent English; for

in both cases they are only using jocular language without seeing the

joke.

There is indeed a considerable trade in the transplantation of these

American jokes to England just now. They generally pine and die in our

climate, or they are dead before their arrival; but we cannot be certain

that they were never alive. There is a sort of unending frieze or

scroll of decorative designs unrolled ceaselessly before the British

public, about a hen-pecked husband, which is indistinguishable to the

eye from an actual self-repeating pattern like that of the Greek Key,

but which is imported as if it were as precious and irreplaceable as the

Elgin Marbles. Advertisement and syndication make mountains out of the

most funny little mole-hills; but no doubt the mole-hills are

picturesque enough in their own landscape. In any case there is nothing

so national as humour; and many things, like many people, can be

humorous enough when they are at home. But these American jokes are

boomed as solemnly as American religions; and their supporters gravely

testify that they are funny, without seeing the fun of it for a moment.

This is partly perhaps the spirit of spontaneous institutionalism in

American democracy, breaking out in the wrong place. They make humour an

institution; and a man will be set to tell an anecdote as if to play the

violin. But when the story is told in America it really is amusing; and

when these jokes are reprinted in England they are often not even

intelligible. With all the stupidity of the millionaire and the

monopolist, the enterprising proprietor prints jokes in England which

are necessarily unintelligible to nearly every English person; jokes

referring to domestic and local conditions quite peculiar to America. I

saw one of these narrative caricatures the other day in which the whole

of the joke (what there was of it) turned on the astonishment of a

housewife at the absurd notion of not having an ice-box. It is perfectly

true that nearly every ordinary American housewife possesses an ice-box.

An ordinary English housewife would no more expect to possess an

ice-box than to possess an iceberg. And it would be about as sensible to

tow an iceberg to an English port all the way from the North Pole, as to

trail that one pale and frigid joke to Fleet Street all the way from the

New York papers. It is the same with a hundred other advertisements and

adaptations. I have already confessed that I took a considerable delight

in the dancing illuminations of Broadway—in Broadway. Everything there

is suitable to them, the vast interminable thoroughfare, the toppling

houses, the dizzy and restless spirit of the whole city. It is a city of

dissolving views, and one may almost say a city in everlasting

dissolution. But I do not especially admire a burning fragment of

Broadway stuck up opposite the old Georgian curve of Regent Street. I

would as soon express sympathy with the Republic of Switzerland by

erecting a small Alp, with imitation snow, in the middle of St. James’s

Park.

But all this commercial copying is very superficial; and above all, it

never copies anything that is really worth copying. Nations never

learn anything from each other in this way. We have many things to

learn from America; but we only listen to those Americans who have still

to learn them. Thus, for instance, we do not import the small farm but

only the big shop. In other words, we hear nothing of the democracy of

the Middle West, but everything of the plutocracy of the middleman, who

is probably as unpopular in the Middle West as the miller in the Middle

Ages. If Mr. Elihu K. Pike could be transplanted bodily from the

neighbourhood of his home town of Marathon, Neb., with his farm and his

frame-house and all its fittings, and they could be set down exactly in

the spot now occupied by Selfridge’s (which could be easily cleared away

for the purpose), I think we could really get a great deal of good by

watching him, even if the watching were inevitably a little too like

watching a wild beast in a cage or an insect under a glass case. Urban

crowds could collect every day behind a barrier or railing, and gaze at

Mr. Pike pottering about all day in his ancient and autochthonous

occupations. We could see him growing Indian corn with all the gravity

of an Indian; though it is impossible to imagine Mrs. Pike blessing the

cornfield in the manner of Minnehaha. As I have said, there is a certain

lack of humane myth and mysticism about this Puritan peasantry. But we

could see him transforming the maize into pop-corn, which is a very

pleasant domestic ritual and pastime, and is the American equivalent of

the glory of roasting chestnuts. Above all, many of us would learn for

the first time that a man can really live and walk about upon something

more productive than a pavement; and that when he does so he can really

be a free man, and have no lord but the law. Instead of that, America

can give nothing to London but those multiple modern shops, of which it

has too many already. I know that many people entertain the innocent

illusion that big shops are more efficient than small ones; but that is

only because the big combinations have the monopoly of advertisement as

well as trade. The big shop is not in the least remarkable for

efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency. It is

secure in its reputation for always sacking the wrong man. A big shop,

considered as a place to shop in, is simply a village of small shops

roofed in to keep out the light and air; and one in which none of the

shopkeepers is really responsible for his shop. If any one has any

doubts on this matter, since I have mentioned it, let him consider this

fact: that in practice we never do apply this method of commercial

combination to anything that matters very much. We do not go to the

surgical department of the Stores to have a portion of our brain removed

by a delicate operation; and then pass on to the advocacy department to

employ one or any of its barristers, when we are in temporary danger of

being hanged. We go to men who own their own tools and are responsible

for the use of their own talents. And the same truth applies to that

other modern method of advertisement, which has also so largely fallen

across us like the gigantic shadow of America. Nations do not arm

themselves for a mortal struggle by remembering which sort of submarine

they have seen most often on the hoardings. They can do it about

something like soap, precisely because a nation will not perish by

having a second-rate sort of soap, as it might by having a second-rate

sort of submarine. A nation may indeed perish slowly by having a

second-rate sort of food or drink or medicine; but that is another and

much longer story, and the story is not ended yet. But nobody wins a

great battle at a great crisis because somebody has told him that

Cadgerboy’s Cavalry Is the Best. It may be that commercial enterprise

will eventually cover these fields also, and advertisement-agents will

provide the instruments of the surgeon and the weapons of the soldier.

When that happens, the armies will be defeated and the patients will

die. But though we modern people are indeed patients, in the sense of

being merely receptive and accepting things with astonishing patience,

we are not dead yet; and we have lingering gleams of sanity.

For the best things do not travel. As I appear here as a traveller, I

may say with all modesty that the best people do not travel either. Both

in England and America the normal people are the national people; and I

repeat that I think they are growing more and more national. I do not

think the abyss is being bridged by cosmopolitan theories; and I am sure

I do not want it bridged by all this slang journalism and blatant

advertisement. I have called all that commercial publicity the gigantic

shadow of America. It may be the shadow of America, but it is not the

light of America. The light lies far beyond, a level light upon the

lands of sunset, where it shines upon wide places full of a very simple

and a very happy people; and those who would see it must seek for it.

Lincoln and Lost Causes

It has already been remarked here that the English know a great deal

about past American literature, but nothing about past American history.

They do not know either, of course, as well as they know the present

American advertising, which is the least important of the three. But it

is worth noting once more how little they know of the history, and how

illogically that little is chosen. They have heard, no doubt, of the

fame and the greatness of Henry Clay. He is a cigar. But it would be

unwise to cross-examine any Englishman, who may be consuming that luxury

at the moment, about the Missouri Compromise or the controversies with

Andrew Jackson. And just as the statesman of Kentucky is a cigar, so the

state of Virginia is a cigarette. But there is perhaps one exception, or

half-exception, to this simple plan. It would perhaps be an exaggeration

to say that Plymouth Rock is a chicken. Any English person keeping

chickens, and chiefly interested in Plymouth Rocks considered as

chickens, would nevertheless have a hazy sensation of having seen the

word somewhere before. He would feel subconsciously that the Plymouth

Rock had not always been a chicken. Indeed, the name connotes something

not only solid but antiquated; and is not therefore a very tactful name

for a chicken. There would rise up before him something memorable in

the haze that he calls his history; and he would see the history books

of his boyhood and old engravings of men in steeple-crowned hats

struggling with sea-waves or Red Indians. The whole thing would suddenly

become clear to him if (by a simple reform) the chickens were called

Pilgrim Fathers.

Then he would remember all about it. The Pilgrim Fathers were champions

of religious liberty; and they discovered America. It is true that he

has also heard of a man called Christopher Columbus; but that was in

connection with an egg. He has also heard of somebody known as Sir

Walter Raleigh; and though his principal possession was a cloak, it is

also true that he had a potato, not to mention a pipe of tobacco. Can it

be possible that he brought it from Virginia, where the cigarettes come

from? Gradually the memories will come back and fit themselves together

for the average hen-wife who learnt history at the English elementary

schools, and who has now something better to do. Even when the narrative

becomes consecutive, it will not necessarily become correct. It is not

strictly true to say that the Pilgrim Fathers discovered America. But it

is quite as true as saying that they were champions of religious

liberty. If we said that they were martyrs who would have died

heroically in torments rather than tolerate any religious liberty, we

should be talking something like sense about them, and telling the real

truth that is their due. The whole Puritan movement, from the Solemn

League and Covenant to the last stand of the last Stuarts, was a

struggle against religious toleration, or what they would have called

religious indifference. The first religious equality on earth was

established by a Catholic cavalier in Maryland. Now there is nothing in

this to diminish any dignity that belongs to any real virtues and

virilities in the Pilgrim Fathers; on the contrary, it is rather to the

credit of their consistency and conviction. But there is no doubt that

the note of their whole experiment in New England was intolerance, and

even inquisition. And there is no doubt that New England was then only

the newest and not the oldest of these colonial experiments. At least

two Cavaliers had been in the field before any Puritans. And they had

carried with them much more of the atmosphere and nature of the normal

Englishman than any Puritan could possibly carry. They had established

it especially in Virginia, which had been founded by a great Elizabethan

and named after the great Elizabeth. Before there was any New England in

the North, there was something very like Old England in the South.

Relatively speaking, there is still.

Whenever the anniversary of the Mayflower comes round, there is a

chorus of Anglo-American congratulation and comradeship, as if this at

least were a matter on which all can agree. But I knew enough about

America, even before I went there, to know that there are a good many

people there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote a

protest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state of

Virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; and

why a few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to erase a record

that begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includes

Washington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of America

until it was broken in the Civil War. From Virginia came the first great

Presidents and most of the Fathers of the Republic. Its adherence to

the Southern side in the war made it a great war, and for a long time a

doubtful war. And in the leader of the Southern armies it produced what

is perhaps the one modern figure that may come to shine like St. Louis

in the lost battle, or Hector dying before holy Troy.

Again, it is characteristic that while the modern English know nothing

about Lee they do know something about Lincoln; and nearly all that they

know is wrong. They know nothing of his Southern connections, nothing of

his considerable Southern sympathy, nothing of the meaning of his

moderation in face of the problem of slavery, now lightly treated as

self-evident. Above all, they know nothing about the respect in which

Lincoln was quite un-English, was indeed the very reverse of English;

and can be understood better if we think of him as a Frenchman, since it

seems so hard for some of us to believe that he was an American. I mean

his lust for logic for its own sake, and the way he kept mathematical

truths in his mind like the fixed stars. He was so far from being a

merely practical man, impatient of academic abstractions, that he

reviewed and revelled in academic abstractions, even while he could not

apply them to practical life. He loved to repeat that slavery was

intolerable while he tolerated it, and to prove that something ought to

be done while it was impossible to do it. This was probably very

bewildering to his brother-politicians; for politicians always whitewash

what they do not destroy. But for all that this inconsistent consistency

beat the politicians at their own game, and this abstracted logic proved

the most practical of all. For when the chance did come to do something,

there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell

from the clear heights of heaven; it had not been tossed about and lost

like a common missile in the market-place. The matter is worth

mentioning, because it has a moral for a much larger modern question. A

wise man’s attitude towards industrial capitalism will be very like

Lincoln’s attitude towards slavery. That is, he will manage to endure

capitalism; but he will not endure a defence of capitalism. He will

recognise the value, not only of knowing what he is doing, but of

knowing what he would like to do. He will recognise the importance of

having a thing clearly labelled in his own mind as bad, long before the

opportunity comes to abolish it. He may recognise the risk of even worse

things in immediate abolition, as Lincoln did in abolitionism. He will

not call all business men brutes, any more than Lincoln would call all

planters demons; because he knows they are not. He will regard many

alternatives to capitalism as crude and inhuman, as Lincoln regarded

John Brown’s raid; because they are. But he will clear his mind from

cant about capitalism; he will have no doubt of what is the truth about

Trusts and Trade Combines and the concentration of capital; and it is

the truth that they endure under one of the ironic silences of heaven,

over the pageants and the passing triumphs of hell.

But the name of Lincoln has a more immediate reference to the

international matters I am considering here. His name has been much

invoked by English politicians and journalists in connection with the

quarrel with Ireland. And if we study the matter, we shall hardly admire

the tact and sagacity of those journalists and politicians.

History is an eternal tangle of cross-purposes; and we could not take a

clearer case, or rather a more complicated case, of such a tangle, than

the facts lying behind a political parallel recently mentioned by many

politicians. I mean the parallel between the movement for Irish

independence and the attempted secession of the Southern Confederacy in

America. Superficially any one might say that the comparison is natural

enough; and that there is much in common between the quarrel of the

North and South in Ireland and the quarrel of the North and South in

America. In both cases the South was on the whole agricultural, the

North on the whole industrial. True, the parallel exaggerates the

position of Belfast; to complete it we must suppose the whole Federal

system to have consisted of Pittsburg. In both the side that was more

successful was felt by many to be less attractive. In both the same

political terms were used, such as the term ‘Union’ and ‘Unionism.’ An

ordinary Englishman comes to America, knowing these main lines of

American history, and knowing that the American knows the similar main

lines of Irish history. He knows that there are strong champions of

Ireland in America; possibly he also knows that there are very genuine

champions of England in America. By every possible historical analogy,

he would naturally expect to find the pro-Irish in the South and the

pro-English in the North. As a matter of fact, he finds almost exactly

the opposite. He finds Boston governed by Irishmen, and Nashville

containing people more pro-English than Englishmen. He finds Virginians

not only of British blood, like George Washington, but of British

opinions almost worthy of George the Third.

But I do not say this, as will be seen in a moment, as a criticism of

the comparative Toryism of the South. I say it as a criticism of the

superlative stupidity of English propaganda. On another page I remark on

the need for a new sort of English propaganda; a propaganda that should

be really English and have some remote reference to England. Now if it

were a matter of making foreigners feel the real humours and humanities

of England, there are no Americans so able or willing to do it as the

Americans of the Southern States. As I have already hinted, some of them

are so loyal to the English humanities, that they think it their duty to

defend even the English inhumanities. New England is turning into New

Ireland. But Old England can still be faintly traced in Old Dixie. It

contains some of the best things that England herself has had, and

therefore (of course) the things that England herself has lost, or is

trying to lose. But above all, as I have said, there are people in these

places whose historic memories and family traditions really hold them to

us, not by alliance but by affection. Indeed, they have the affection in

spite of the alliance. They love us in spite of our compliments and

courtesies and hands across the sea; all our ambassadorial salutations

and speeches cannot kill their love. They manage even to respect us in

spite of the shady Jew stockbrokers we send them as English envoys, or

the ‘efficient’ men, who are sent out to be tactful with foreigners

because they have been too tactless with trades unionists. This type of

traditional American, North or South, really has some traditions

connecting him with England; and though he is now in a very small

minority, I cannot imagine why England should wish to make it smaller.

England once sympathised with the South. The South still sympathises

with England. It would seem that the South, or some elements in the

South, had rather the advantage of us in political firmness and

fidelity; but it does not follow that that fidelity will stand every

shock. And at this moment, and in this matter, of all things in the

world, our political propagandists must try to bolster British

Imperialism up, by kicking Southern Secession when it is down. The

English politicians eagerly point out that we shall be justified in

crushing Ireland exactly as Sumner and Stevens crushed the most English

part of America. It does not seem to occur to them that this comparison

between the Unionist triumph in America and a Unionist triumph in

Britain is rather hard upon our particular sympathisers, who did not

triumph. When England exults in Lincoln’s victory over his foes, she is

exulting in his victory over her own friends. If her diplomacy continues

as delicate and chivalrous as it is at present, they may soon be her

only friends. England will be defending herself at the expense of her

only defenders. But however this may be, it is as well to bear witness

to some of the elements of my own experience; and I can answer for it,

at least, that there are some people in the South who will not be

pleased at being swept into the rubbish heap of history as rebels and

ruffians; and who will not, I regret to say, by any means enjoy even

being classed with Fenians and Sinn Feiners.

Now touching the actual comparison between the conquest of the

Confederacy and the conquest of Ireland, there are, of course, a good

many things to be said which politicians cannot be expected to

understand. Strange to say, it is not certain that a lost cause was

never worth winning; and it would be easy to argue that the world lost

very much indeed when that particular cause was lost. These are not days

in which it is exactly obvious that an agricultural society was more

dangerous than an industrial one. And even Southern slavery had this one

moral merit, that it was decadent; it has this one historic advantage,

that it is dead. The Northern slavery, industrial slavery, or what is

called wage slavery, is not decaying but increasing; and the end of it

is not yet. But in any case, it would be well for us to realise that the

reproach of resembling the Confederacy does not ring in all ears as an

unanswerable condemnation. It is scarcely a self-evident or sufficient

argument, to some hearers, even to prove that the English are as

delicate and philanthropic as Sherman, still less that the Irish are as

criminal and lawless as Lee. Nor will it soothe every single soul on the

American continent to say that the English victory in Ireland will be

followed by a reconstruction, like the reconstruction exhibited in the

film called ‘The Birth of a Nation.’ And, indeed, there is a further

inference from that fine panorama of the exploits of the Ku-Klux Klan.

It would be easy, as I say, to turn the argument entirely in favour of

the Confederacy. It would be easy to draw the moral, not that the

Southern Irish are as wrong as the Southern States, but that the

Southern States were as right as the Southern Irish. But upon the whole,

I do not incline to accept the parallel in that sense any more than in

the opposite sense. For reasons I have already given elsewhere, I do

believe that in the main Abraham Lincoln was right. But right in what?

If Lincoln was right, he was right in guessing that there was not

really a Northern nation and a Southern nation, but only one American

nation. And if he has been proved right, he has been proved right by the

fact that men in the South, as well as the North, do now feel a

patriotism for that American nation. His wisdom, if it really was

wisdom, was justified not by his opponents being conquered, but by their

being converted. Now, if the English politicians must insist on this

parallel, they ought to see that the parallel is fatal to themselves.

The very test which proved Lincoln right has proved them wrong. The very

judgment which may have justified him quite unquestionably condemns

them. We have again and again conquered Ireland, and have never come an

inch nearer to converting Ireland. We have had not one Gettysburg, but

twenty Gettysburgs; but we have had no Union. And that is where, as I

have remarked, it is relevant to remember that flying fantastic vision

on the films that told so many people what no histories have told them.

I heard when I was in America rumours of the local reappearance of the

Ku-Klux Klan; but the smallness and mildness of the manifestation, as

compared with the old Southern or the new Irish case, is alone a

sufficient example of the exception that proves the rule. To approximate

to any resemblance to recent Irish events, we must imagine the Ku-Klux

Klan riding again in more than the terrors of that vision, wild as the

wind, white as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. If there were

really such a revival of the Southern action, there would equally be a

revival of the Southern argument. It would be clear that Lee was right

and Lincoln was wrong; that the Southern States were national and were

as indestructible as nations. If the South were as rebellious as

Ireland, the North would be as wrong as England.

But I desire a new English diplomacy that will exhibit, not the things

in which England is wrong but the things in which England is right. And

England is right in England, just as she is wrong in Ireland; and it is

exactly that rightness of a real nation in itself that it is at once

most difficult and most desirable to explain to foreigners. Now the

Irishman, and to some extent the American, has remained alien to

England, largely because he does not truly realise that the Englishman

loves England, still less can he really imagine why the Englishman loves

England. That is why I insist on the stupidity of ignoring and insulting

the opinions of those few Virginians and other Southerners who really

have some inherited notion of why Englishmen love England; and even love

it in something of the same fashion themselves. Politicians who do not

know the English spirit when they see it at home, cannot of course be

expected to recognise it abroad. Publicists are eloquently praising

Abraham Lincoln, for all the wrong reasons; but fundamentally for that

worst and vilest of all reasons—that he succeeded. None of them seems

to have the least notion of how to look for England in England; and they

would see something fantastic in the figure of a traveller who found it

elsewhere, or anywhere but in New England. And it is well, perhaps, that

they have not yet found England where it is hidden in England; for if

they found it, they would kill it.

All I am concerned to consider here is the inevitable failure of this

sort of Anglo-American propaganda to create a friendship. To praise

Lincoln as an Englishman is about as appropriate as if we were praising

Lincoln as an English town. We are talking about something totally

different. And indeed the whole conversation is rather like some such

cross-purposes about some such word as ‘Lincoln’; in which one party

should be talking about the President and the other about the cathedral.

It is like some wild bewilderment in a farce, with one man wondering how

a President could have a church-spire, and the other wondering how a

church could have a chin-beard. And the moral is the moral on which I

would insist everywhere in this book; that the remedy is to be found in

disentangling the two and not in entangling them further. You could not

produce a democrat of the logical type of Lincoln merely out of the

moral materials that now make up an English cathedral town, like that on

which Old Tom of Lincoln looks down. But on the other hand, it is quite

certain that a hundred Abraham Lincolns, working for a hundred years,

could not build Lincoln Cathedral. And the farcical allegory of an

attempt to make Old Tom and Old Abe embrace to the glory of the

illogical Anglo-Saxon language is but a symbol of something that is

always being attempted, and always attempted in vain. It is not by

mutual imitation that the understanding can come. It is not by erecting

New York sky-scrapers in London that New York can learn the sacred

significance of the towers of Lincoln. It is not by English dukes

importing the daughters of American millionaires that England can get

any glimpse of the democratic dignity of American men. I have the best

of all reasons for knowing that a stranger can be welcomed in America;

and just as he is courteously treated in the country as a stranger, so

he should always be careful to treat it as a strange land. That sort of

imaginative respect, as for something different and even distant, is the

only beginning of any attachment between patriotic peoples. The English

traveller may carry with him at least one word of his own great language

and literature; and whenever he is inclined to say of anything ‘This is

passing strange,’ he may remember that it was no inconsiderable

Englishman who appended to it the answer, ‘And therefore as a stranger

give it welcome.’

Wells and the World State

There was recently a highly distinguished gathering to celebrate the

past, present, and especially future triumphs of aviation. Some of the

most brilliant men of the age, such as Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. J. L.

Garvin, made interesting and important speeches, and many scientific

aviators luminously discussed the new science. Among their graceful

felicitations and grave and quiet analyses a word was said, or a note

was struck, which I myself can never hear, even in the most harmless

after-dinner speech, without an impulse to leap up and yell, and smash

the decanters and wreck the dinner-table.

Long ago, when I was a boy, I heard it with fury; and never since have I

been able to understand any free man hearing it without fury. I heard it

when Bloch, and the old prophets of pacifism by panic, preached that war

would become too horrible for patriots to endure. It sounded to me like

saying that an instrument of torture was being prepared by my dentist,

that would finally cure me of loving my dog. And I felt it again when

all these wise and well-meaning persons began to talk about the

inevitable effect of aviation in bridging the Atlantic, and establishing

alliance and affection between England and America.

I resent the suggestion that a machine can make me bad. But I resent

quite equally the suggestion that a machine can make me good. It might

be the unfortunate fact that a coolness had arisen between myself and

Mr. Fitzarlington Blenkinsop, inhabiting the suburban villa and garden

next to mine; and I might even be largely to blame for it. But if

somebody told me that a new kind of lawn-mower had just been invented,

of so cunning a structure that I should be forced to become a

bosom-friend of Mr. Blenkinsop whether I liked it or not, I should be

very much annoyed. I should be moved to say that if that was the only

way of cutting my grass I would not cut my grass, but continue to cut my

neighbour. Or suppose the difference were even less defensible; suppose

a man had suffered from a trifling shindy with his wife. And suppose

somebody told him that the introduction of an entirely new

vacuum-cleaner would compel him to a reluctant reconciliation with his

wife. It would be found, I fancy, that human nature abhors that vacuum.

Reasonably spirited human beings will not be ordered about by bicycles

and sewing-machines; and a sane man will not be made good, let alone

bad, by the things he has himself made. I have occasionally dictated to

a typewriter, but I will not be dictated to by a typewriter, even of the

newest and most complicated mechanism; nor have I ever met a typewriter,

however complex, that attempted such a tyranny.

Yet this and nothing else is what is implied in all such talk of the

aeroplane annihilating distinctions as well as distances; and an

international aviation abolishing nationalities. This and nothing else

was really implied in one speaker’s prediction that such aviation will

almost necessitate an Anglo-American friendship. Incidentally, I may

remark, it is not a true suggestion even in the practical and

materialistic sense; and the speaker’s phrase refuted the speaker’s

argument. He said that international relations must be more friendly

when men can get from England to America in a day. Well, men can already

get from England to Germany in a day; and the result was a mutual

invitation of which the formalities lasted for five years. Men could get

from the coast of England to the coast of France very quickly, through

nearly all the ages during which those two coasts were bristling with

arms against each other. They could get there very quickly when Nelson

went down by that Burford Inn to embark for Trafalgar; they could get

there very quickly when Napoleon sat in his tent in that camp at

Boulogne that filled England with alarums of invasion. Are these the

amiable and pacific relations which will unite England and America, when

Englishmen can get to America in a day? The shortening of the distance

seems quite as likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate that

endless guerilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas in the

Middle Ages; when French invaders carried away the bells of Rye, and the

men of those flats of East Sussex gloriously pursued and recovered them.

I do not know whether American privateers, landing at Liverpool, would

carry away a few of the more elegant factory chimneys as a substitute

for the superstitious symbols of the past. I know not if the English, on

ripe reflection, would essay with any enthusiasm to get them back. But

anyhow it is anything but self-evident that people cannot fight each

other because they are near to each other; and if it were true, there

would never have been any such thing as border warfare in the world. As

a fact, border warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which it

was most difficult to bring under control. And our own traditional

position in face of this new logic is somewhat disconcerting. We have

always supposed ourselves safer because we were insular and therefore

isolated. We have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on having

enjoyed peace because we were cut off from our neighbours. And now they

are telling us that we shall only enjoy peace when we are joined up with

our neighbours. We have pitied the poor nations with frontiers, because

a frontier only produces fighting; and now we are trusting to a frontier

as the only thing that will produce friendship. But, as a matter of

fact, and for a far deeper and more spiritual reason, a frontier will

not produce friendship. Only friendliness produces friendship. And we

must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces

friendliness.

But apart from this fallacy about the facts, I feel, as I say, a strong

abstract anger against the idea, or what some would call the ideal. If

it were true that men could be taught and tamed by machines, even if

they were taught wisdom or tamed to amiability, I should think it the

most tragic truth in the world. A man so improved would be, in an

exceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to save it. But in truth he

cannot be so completely coerced into good; and in so far as he is

incompletely coerced, he is quite as likely to be coerced into evil. Of

the financial characters who figure as philanthropists and philosophers

in such cases, it is strictly true to say that their good is evil. The

light in their bodies is darkness, and the highest objects of such men

are the lowest objects of ordinary men. Their peace is mere safety,

their friendship is mere trade; their international friendship is mere

international trade. The best we can say of that school of capitalism is

that it will be unsuccessful. It has every other vice, but it is not

practical. It has at least the impossibility of idealism; and so far as

remoteness can carry it, that Inferno is indeed a Utopia. All the

visible manifestations of these men are materialistic; but at least

their visions will not materialise. The worst we suffer; but the best we

shall at any rate escape. We may continue to endure the realities of

cosmopolitan capitalism; but we shall be spared its ideals.

But I am not primarily interested in the plutocrats whose vision takes

so vulgar a form. I am interested in the same thing when it takes a far

more subtle form, in men of genius and genuine social enthusiasm like

Mr. H. G. Wells. It would be very unfair to a man like Mr. Wells to

suggest that in his vision the Englishman and the American are to

embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. He is a

man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the

motley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruction which he

proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of

necessitarianism. He tells us that our national dignities and

differences must be melted into the huge mould of a World State, or else

(and I think these are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed by

the instruments and machinery we have ourselves made. In effect, men

must abandon patriotism or they will be murdered by science. After this,

surely no one can accuse Mr. Wells of an undue tenderness for scientific

over other types of training. Greek may be a good thing or no; but

nobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried past a certain point,

everybody will be torn in pieces like Orpheus, or burned up like Semele,

or poisoned like Socrates. Philosophy, theology and logic may or may not

be idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the study of

philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately forces its students to

manufacture racks and thumb-screws against their will; or that even

logicians need be so alarmingly logical as all that. Science seems to be

the only branch of study in which people have to be waved back from

perfection as from a pestilence. But my business is not with the

scientific dangers which alarm Mr. Wells, but with the remedy he

proposes for them; or rather with the relation of that remedy to the

foundation and the future of America. Now it is not too much to say that

Mr. Wells finds his model in America. The World State is to be the

United States of the World. He answers almost all objections to the

practicability of such a peace among states, by pointing out that the

American States have such a peace, and by adding, truly enough, that

another turn of history might easily have seen them broken up by war.

The pattern of the World State is to be found in the New World.

Oddly enough, as it seems to me, he proposes almost cosmic conquests for

the American Constitution, while leaving out the most successful thing

in that Constitution. The point appeared in answer to a question which

many, like myself, must have put in this matter; the question of

despotism and democracy. I cannot understand any democrat not seeing the

danger of so distant and indirect a system of government. It is hard

enough anywhere to get representatives to represent. It is hard enough

to get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little town,

even when the townsmen meet the town councillors every day in the

street, and could kick them down the street if they liked. What the same

town councillors would be like if they were ruling all their

fellow-creatures from the North Pole or the New Jerusalem, is a vision

of Oriental despotism beyond the towering fancies of Tamberlane. This

difficulty in all representative government is felt everywhere, and not

least in America. But I think that if there is one truth apparent in

such a choice of evils, it is that monarchy is at least better than

oligarchy; and that where we have to act on a large scale, the most

genuine popularity can gather round a particular person like a Pope or a

President of the United States, or even a dictator like Caesar or

Napoleon, rather than round a more or less corrupt committee which can

only be defined as an obscure oligarchy. And in that sense any oligarchy

is obscure. For people to continue to trust twenty-seven men it is

necessary, as a preliminary formality, that people should have heard of

them. And there are no twenty-seven men of whom everybody has heard as

everybody in France had heard of Napoleon, as all Catholics have heard

of the Pope or all Americans have heard of the President. I think the

mass of ordinary Americans do really elect their President; and even

where they cannot control him at least they watch him, and in the long

run they judge him. I think, therefore, that the American Constitution

has a real popular institution in the Presidency. But Mr. Wells would

appear to want the American Constitution without the Presidency. If I

understand his words rightly, he seems to want the great democracy

without its popular institution. Alluding to this danger, that the

World State might be a world tyranny, he seems to take tyranny entirely

in the sense of autocracy. He asks whether the President of the World

State would not be rather too tremendous a person, and seems to suggest

in answer that there need not even be any such person. He seems to imply

that the committee controlling the planet could meet almost without any

one in the chair, certainly without any one on the throne. I cannot

imagine anything more manifestly made to be a tyranny than such an

acephalous aristocracy. But while Mr. Wells’s decision seems to me

strange, his reason for it seems to me still more extraordinary.

He suggests that no such dictator will be needed in his World State

because ‘there will be no wars and no diplomacy.’ A World State ought

doubtless to go round the world; and going round the world seems to be a

good training for arguing in a circle. Obviously there will be no wars

and no war-diplomacy if something has the power to prevent them; and we

cannot deduce that the something will not want any power. It is rather

as if somebody, urging that the Germans could only be defeated by

uniting the Allied commands under Marshal Foch, had said that after all

it need not offend the British Generals because the French supremacy

need only be a fiction, the Germans being defeated. We should naturally

say that the German defeat would only be a reality because the Allied

command was not a fiction. So the universal peace would only be a

reality if the World State were not a fiction. And it could not be even

a state if it were not a government. This argument amounts to saying,

first that the World State will be needed because it is strong, and

then that it may safely be weak because it will not be needed.

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy. I do not say it is

incompatible with it; but any combination of the two will be a

compromise between the two. The only purely popular government is local,

and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because

they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen

who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote

and altogether alien cities. All Irishmen may know roughly the same sort

of things about Ireland; but it is absurd to say they all know the same

things about Iceland, when they may include a scholar steeped in

Icelandic sagas or a sailor who has been to Iceland. To make all

politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If

your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend

of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have

been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more

select minority who have come back.

Given this difficulty about quite direct democracy over large areas, I

think the nearest thing to democracy is despotism. At any rate I think

it is some sort of more or less independent monarchy, such as Andrew

Jackson created in America. And I believe it is true to say that the two

men whom the modern world really and almost reluctantly regards with

impersonal respect, as clothed by their office with something historic

and honourable, are the Pope and the President of the United States.

But to admire the United States as the United States is one thing. To

admire them as the World State is quite another. The attempt of Mr.

Wells to make America a sort of model for the federation of all the free

nations of the earth, though it is international in intention, is really

as narrowly national, in the bad sense, as the desire of Mr. Kipling to

cover the world with British Imperialism, or of Professor Treitschke to

cover it with Prussian Pan-Germanism. Not being schoolboys, we no longer

believe that everything can be settled by painting the map red. Nor do I

believe it can be done by painting it blue with white spots, even if

they are called stars. The insufficiency of British Imperialism does not

lie in the fact that it has always been applied by force of arms. As a

matter of fact, it has not. It has been effected largely by commerce, by

colonisation of comparatively empty places, by geographical discovery

and diplomatic bargain. Whether it be regarded as praise or blame, it is

certainly the truth that among all the things that have called

themselves empires, the British has been perhaps the least purely

military, and has least both of the special guilt and the special glory

that goes with militarism. The insufficiency of British Imperialism is

not that it is imperial, let alone military. The insufficiency of

British Imperialism is that it is British; when it is not merely Jewish.

It is that just as a man is no more than a man, so a nation is no more

than a nation; and any nation is inadequate as an international model.

Any state looks small when it occupies the whole earth. Any polity is

narrow as soon as it is as wide as the world. It would be just the same

if Ireland began to paint the map green or Montenegro were to paint it

black. The objection to spreading anything all over the world is that,

among other things, you have to spread it very thin.

But America, which Mr. Wells takes as a model, is in another sense

rather a warning. Mr. Wells says very truly that there was a moment in

history when America might well have broken up into independent states

like those of Europe. He seems to take it for granted that it was in all

respects an advantage that this was avoided. Yet there is surely a case,

however mildly we put it, for a certain importance in the world still

attaching to Europe. There are some who find France as interesting as

Florida; and who think they can learn as much about history and humanity

in the marble cities of the Mediterranean as in the wooden towns of the

Middle West. Europe may have been divided, but it was certainly not

destroyed; nor has its peculiar position in the culture of the world

been destroyed. Nothing has yet appeared capable of completely eclipsing

it, either in its extension in America or its imitation in Japan. But

the immediate point here is perhaps a more important one. There is now

no creed accepted as embodying the common sense of all Europe, as the

Catholic creed was accepted as embodying it in mediaeval times. There is

no culture broadly superior to all others, as the Mediterranean culture

was superior to that of the barbarians in Roman times. If Europe were

united in modern times, it would probably be by the victory of one of

its types over others, possibly over all the others. And when America

was united finally in the nineteenth century, it was by the victory of

one of its types over others. It is not yet certain that this victory

was a good thing. It is not yet certain that the world will be better

for the triumph of the North over the Southern traditions of America.

It may yet turn out to be as unfortunate as a triumph of the North

Germans over the Southern traditions of Germany and of Europe.

The men who will not face this fact are men whose minds are not free.

They are more crushed by Progress than any pietists by Providence. They

are not allowed to question that whatever has recently happened was all

for the best. Now Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a

theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It

is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far

more miraculous than a miracle. If there be no purpose, or if the

purpose permits of human free will, then in either case it is almost

insanely unlikely that there should be in history a period of steady and

uninterrupted progress; or in other words a period in which poor

bewildered humanity moves amid a chaos of complications, without making

a single mistake. What has to be hammered into the heads of most normal

newspaper-readers to-day is that Man has made a great many mistakes.

Modern Man has made a great many mistakes. Indeed, in the case of that

progressive and pioneering character, one is sometimes tempted to say

that he has made nothing but mistakes. Calvinism was a mistake, and

Capitalism was a mistake, and Teutonism and the flattery of the Northern

tribes were mistakes. In the French the persecution of Catholicism by

the politicians was a mistake, as they found out in the Great War; when

the memory gave Irish or Italian Catholics an excuse for hanging back.

In England the loss of agriculture and therefore of food-supply in war,

and the power to stand a siege, was a mistake. And in America the

introduction of the negroes was a mistake; but it may yet be found that

the sacrifice of the Southern white man to them was even more of a

mistake.

The reason of this doubt is in one word. We have not yet seen the end of

the whole industrial experiment; and there are already signs of it

coming to a bad end. It may end in Bolshevism. It is more likely to end

in the Servile State. Indeed, the two things are not so different as

some suppose, and they grow less different every day. The Bolshevists

have already called in Capitalists to help them to crush the free

peasants. The Capitalists are quite likely to call in Labour Leaders to

whitewash their compromise as social reform or even Socialism. The

cosmopolitan Jews who are the Communists in the East will not find it so

very hard to make a bargain with the cosmopolitan Jews who are

Capitalists in the West. The Western Jews would be willing to admit a

nominal Socialism. The Eastern Jews have already admitted that their

Socialism is nominal. It was the Bolshevist leader himself who said,

‘Russia is again a Capitalist country.’ But whoever makes the bargain,

and whatever is its precise character, the substance of it will be

servile. It will be servile in the only rational and reliable sense;

that is, an arrangement by which a mass of men are ensured shelter and

livelihood, in return for being subjected to a law which obliges them to

continue to labour. Of course it will not be called the Servile State;

it is very probable that it will be called the Socialist State. But

nobody seems to realise how very near all the industrial countries are

to it. At any moment it may appear in the simple form of compulsory

arbitration; for compulsory arbitration dealing with private employers

is by definition slavery. When workmen receive unemployment pay, and at

the same time arouse more and more irritation by going on strike, it may

seem very natural to give them the unemployment pay for good and forbid

them the strike for good; and the combination of those two things is by

definition slavery. And Trotsky can beat any Trust magnate as a

strike-breaker; for he does not even pretend that his compulsory labour

is a free bargain. If Trotsky and the Trust magnate come to a working

compromise, that compromise will be a Servile State. But it will also be

the supreme and by far the most constructive and conclusive result of

the industrial movement in history; of the power of machinery or money;

of the huge populations of the modern cities; of scientific inventions

and resources; of all the things before which the agricultural society

of the Southern Confederacy went down. But even those who cannot see

that commercialism may end in the triumph of slavery can see that the

Northern victory has to a great extent ended in the triumph of

commercialism. And the point at the moment is that this did definitely

mean, even at the time, the triumph of one American type over another

American type; just as much as any European war might mean the triumph

of one European type over another. A victory of England over France

would be a victory of merchants over peasants; and the victory of

Northerners over Southerners was a victory of merchants over squires. So

that that very unity, which Mr. Wells contrasts so favourably with war,

was not only itself due to a war, but to a war which had one of the most

questionable and even perilous of the results of war. That result was a

change in the balance of power, the predominance of a particular

partner, the exaltation of a particular example, the eclipse of

excellent traditions when the defeated lost their international

influence. In short, it made exactly the same sort of difference of

which we speak when we say that 1870 was a disaster to Europe, or that

it was necessary to fight Prussia lest she should Prussianise the whole

world. America would have been very different if the leadership had

remained with Virginia. The world would have been very different if

America had been very different. It is quite reasonable to rejoice that

the issue went as it did; indeed, as I have explained elsewhere, for

other reasons I do on the whole rejoice in it. But it is certainly not

self-evident that it is a matter for rejoicing. One type of American

state conquered and subjugated another type of American state; and the

virtues and value of the latter were very largely lost to the world. So

if Mr. Wells insists on the parallel of a United States of Europe, he

must accept the parallel of a Civil War of Europe. He must suppose that

the peasant countries crush the industrial countries or vice versa; and

that one or other of them becomes the European tradition to the neglect

of the other. The situation which seems to satisfy him so completely in

America is, after all, the situation which would result in Europe if the

Germanic Empires, let us say, had entirely arrested the special

development of the Slavs; or if the influence of France had really

broken off short under a blow from Britain. The Old South had qualities

of humane civilisation which have not sufficiently survived; or at any

rate have not sufficiently spread. It is true that the decline of the

agricultural South has been considerably balanced by the growth of the

agricultural West. It is true, as I have occasion to emphasise in

another place, that the West does give the New America something that is

nearly a normal peasantry, as a pendant to the industrial towns. But

this is not an answer; it is rather an augmentation of the argument. In

so far as America is saved it is saved by being patchy; and would be

ruined if the Western patch had the same fate as the Southern patch.

When all is said, therefore, the advantages of American unification are

not so certain that we can apply them to a world unification. The doubt

could be expressed in a great many ways and by a great many examples.

For that matter, it is already being felt that the supremacy of the

Middle West in politics is inflicting upon other localities exactly the

sort of local injustice that turns provinces into nations struggling to

be free. It has already inflicted what amounts to religious persecution,

or the imposition of an alien morality, on the wine-growing civilisation

of California. In a word, the American system is a good one as

governments go; but it is too large, and the world will not be improved

by making it larger. And for this reason alone I should reject this

second method of uniting England and America; which is not only

Americanising England, but Americanising everything else.

But the essential reason is that a type of culture came out on top in

America and England in the nineteenth century, which cannot and would

not be tolerated on top of the world. To unite all the systems at the

top, without improving and simplifying their social organisation below,

would be to tie all the tops of the trees together where they rise

above a dense and poisonous jungle, and make the jungle darker than

before. To create such a cosmopolitan political platform would be to

build a roof above our own heads to shut out the sunlight, on which only

usurers and conspirators clad in gold could walk about in the sun. This

is no moment when industrial intellectualism can inflict such an

artificial oppression upon the world. Industrialism itself is coming to

see dark days, and its future is very doubtful. It is split from end to

end with strikes and struggles for economic life, in which the poor not

only plead that they are starving, but even the rich can only plead that

they are bankrupt. The peasantries are growing not only more prosperous

but more politically effective; the Russian moujik has held up the

Bolshevist Government of Moscow and Petersburg; a huge concession has

been made by England to Ireland; the League of Nations has decided for

Poland against Prussia. It is not certain that industrialism will not

wither even in its own field; it is certain that its intellectual ideas

will not be allowed to cover every field; and this sort of cosmopolitan

culture is one of its ideas. Industrialism itself may perish; or on the

other hand industrialism itself may survive, by some searching and

scientific reform that will really guarantee economic security to all.

It may really purge itself of the accidental maladies of anarchy and

famine; and continue as a machine, but at least as a comparatively clean

and humanely shielded machine; at any rate no longer as a man-eating

machine. Capitalism may clear itself of its worst corruptions by such

reform as is open to it; by creating humane and healthy conditions for

labour, and setting the labouring classes to work under a lucid and

recognised law. It may make Pittsburg one vast model factory for all who

will model themselves upon factories; and may give to all men and women

in its employment a clear social status in which they can be contented

and secure. And on the day when that social security is established for

the masses, when industrial capitalism has achieved this larger and more

logical organisation and found peace at last, a strange and shadowy and

ironic triumph, like an abstract apology, will surely hover over all

those graves in the Wilderness where lay the bones of so many gallant

gentlemen; men who had also from their youth known and upheld such a

social stratification, who had the courage to call a spade a spade and a

slave a slave.

A New Martin Chuzzlewit

The aim of this book, if it has one, is to suggest this thesis; that the

very worst way of helping Anglo-American friendship is to be an

Anglo-American. There is only one thing lower, of course, which is being

an Anglo-Saxon. It is lower, because at least Englishmen do exist and

Americans do exist; and it may be possible, though repulsive, to imagine

an American and an Englishman in some way blended together. But if

Angles and Saxons ever did exist, they are all fortunately dead now; and

the wildest imagination cannot form the weakest idea of what sort of

monster would be made by mixing one with the other. But my thesis is

that the whole hope, and the only hope, lies not in mixing two things

together, but rather in cutting them very sharply asunder. That is the

only way in which two things can succeed sufficiently in getting outside

each other to appreciate and admire each other. So long as they are

different and yet supposed to be the same, there can be nothing but a

divided mind and a staggering balance. It may be that in the first

twilight of time man and woman walked about as one quadruped. But if

they did, I am sure it was a quadruped that reared and bucked and kicked

up its heels. Then the flaming sword of some angel divided them, and

they fell in love with each other.

Should the reader require an example a little more within historical

range, or a little more subject to critical tests, than the above

prehistoric anecdote (which I need not say was revealed to me in a

vision) it would be easy enough to supply them both in a hypothetical

and a historical form. It is obvious enough in a general way that if we

begin to subject diverse countries to an identical test, there will not

only be rivalry, but what is far more deadly and disastrous,

superiority. If we institute a competition between Holland and

Switzerland as to the relative grace and agility of their mountain

guides, it will be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy;

it will also be clear that certain facts about the configuration of

Holland have escaped our international eye. If we establish a comparison

between them in skill and industry in the art of building dykes against

the sea, it will be equally clear that the injustice falls the other

way; it will also be clear that the situation of Switzerland on the map

has received insufficient study. In both cases there will not only be

rivalry but very unbalanced and unjust rivalry; in both cases,

therefore, there will not only be enmity but very bitter or insolent

enmity. But so long as the two are sharply divided there can be no

enmity because there can be no rivalry. Nobody can argue about whether

the Swiss climb mountains better than the Dutch build dykes; just as

nobody can argue about whether a triangle is more triangular than a

circle is round.

This fancy example is alphabetically and indeed artificially simple;

but, having used it for convenience, I could easily give similar

examples not of fancy but of fact. I had occasion recently to attend the

Christmas festivity of a club in London for the exiles of one of the

Scandinavian nations. When I entered the room the first thing that

struck my eye, and greatly raised my spirits, was that the room was

dotted with the colours of peasant costumes and the specimens of peasant

craftsmanship. There were, of course, other costumes and other crafts in

evidence; there were men dressed like myself (only better) in the garb

of the modern middle classes; there was furniture like the furniture of

any other room in London. Now, according to the ideal formula of the

ordinary internationalist, these things that we had in common ought to

have moved me to a sense of the kinship of all civilisation. I ought to

have felt that as the Scandinavian gentleman wore a collar and tie, and

I also wore a collar and tie, we were brothers and nothing could come

between us. I ought to have felt that we were standing for the same

principles of truth because we were wearing the same pair of trousers;

or rather, to speak with more precision, similar pairs of trousers.

Anyhow, the pair of trousers, that cloven pennon, ought to have floated

in fancy over my head as the banner of Europe or the League of Nations.

I am constrained to confess that no such rush of emotions overcame me;

and the topic of trousers did not float across my mind at all. So far as

those things were concerned, I might have remained in a mood of mortal

enmity, and cheerfully shot or stabbed the best dressed gentleman in the

room. Precisely what did warm my heart with an abrupt affection for that

northern nation was the very thing that is utterly and indeed lamentably

lacking in my own nation. It was something corresponding to the one

great gap in English history, corresponding to the one great blot on

English civilisation. It was the spiritual presence of a peasantry,

dressed according to its own dignity, and expressing itself by its own

creations.

The sketch of America left by Charles Dickens is generally regarded as

something which is either to be used as a taunt or covered with an

apology. Doubtless it was unduly critical, even of the America of that

day; yet curiously enough it may well be the text for a true

reconciliation at the present day. It is true that in this, as in other

things, the Dickensian exaggeration is itself exaggerated. It is also

true that, while it is over-emphasised, it is not allowed for. Dickens

tended too much to describe the United States as a vast lunatic asylum;

but partly because he had a natural inspiration and imagination suited

to the description of lunatic asylums. As it was his finest poetic fancy

that created a lunatic over the garden wall, so it was his fancy that

created a lunatic over the western sea. To read some of the complaints,

one would fancy that Dickens had deliberately invented a low and

farcical America to be a contrast to his high and exalted England. It is

suggested that he showed America as full of rowdy bullies like Hannibal

Chollop, or ridiculous wind-bags like Elijah Pogram, while England was

full of refined and sincere spirits like Jonas Chuzzlewit, Chevy Slime,

Montague Tigg, and Mr. Pecksniff. If Martin Chuzzlewit makes America a

lunatic asylum, what in the world does it make England? We can only say

a criminal lunatic asylum. The truth is, of course, that Dickens so

described them because he had a genius for that sort of description; for

the making of almost maniacal grotesques of the same type as Quilp or

Fagin. He made these Americans absurd because he was an artist in

absurdity; and no artist can help finding hints everywhere for his own

peculiar art. In a word, he created a laughable Pogram for the same

reason that he created a laughable Pecksniff; and that was only because

no other creature could have created them.

It is often said that we learn to love the characters in romances as if

they were characters in real life. I wish we could sometimes love the

characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are

a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even

appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a

story. Martin Chuzzlewit is itself indeed an unsatisfactory and even

unfortunate example; for it is, among its author’s other works, a rather

unusually harsh and hostile story. I do not suggest that we should feel

towards an American friend that exact shade or tint of tenderness that

we feel towards Mr. Hannibal Chollop. Our enjoyment of the foreigner

should rather resemble our enjoyment of Pickwick than our enjoyment of

Pecksniff. But there is this amount of appropriateness even in the

particular example; that Dickens did show in both countries how men can

be made amusing to each other. So far the point is not that he made fun

of America, but that he got fun out of America. And, as I have already

pointed out, he applied exactly the same method of selection and

exaggeration to England. In the other English stories, written in a more

amiable mood, he applied it in a more amiable manner; but he could apply

it to an American too, when he was writing in that mood and manner. We

can see it in the witty and withering criticism delivered by the Yankee

traveller in the musty refreshment room of Mugby Junction; a genuine

example of a genuinely American fun and freedom satirising a genuinely

British stuffiness and snobbery. Nobody expects the American traveller

to admire the refreshments at Mugby Junction; but he might admire the

refreshment at one of the Pickwickian inns, especially if it contained

Pickwick. Nobody expects Pickwick to like Pogram; but he might like the

American who made fun of Mugby Junction. But the point is that, while he

supported him in making fun, he would also think him funny. The two

comic characters could admire each other, but they would also be amused

at each other. And the American would think the Englishman funny because

he was English; and a very good reason too. The Englishman would think

the American amusing because he was American; nor can I imagine a better

ground for his amusement.

Now many will debate on the psychological possibility of such a

friendship founded on reciprocal ridicule, or rather on a comedy of

comparisons. But I will say of this harmony of humours what Mr. H. G.

Wells says of his harmony of states in the unity of his World State. If

it be truly impossible to have such a peace, then there is nothing

possible except war. If we cannot have friends in this fashion, then we

shall sooner or later have enemies in some other fashion. There is no

hope in the pompous impersonalities of internationalism.

And this brings us to the real and relevant mistake of Dickens. It was

not in thinking his Americans funny, but in thinking them foolish

because they were funny. In this sense it will be noticed that Dickens’s

American sketches are almost avowedly superficial; they are descriptions

of public life and not private life. Mr. Jefferson Brick had no private

life. But Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit undoubtedly had a private life; and even

kept some parts of it exceeding private. Mr. Pecksniff was also a

domestic character; so was Mr. Quilp. Mr. Pecksniff and Mr. Quilp had

slightly different ways of surprising their families; Mr. Pecksniff by

playfully observing ‘Boh!’ when he came home; Mr. Quilp by coming home

at all. But we can form no picture of how Mr. Hannibal Chollop playfully

surprised his family; possibly by shooting at them; possibly by not

shooting at them. We can only say that he would rather surprise us by

having a family at all. We do not know how the Mother of the Modern

Gracchi managed the Modern Gracchi; for her maternity was rather a

public than a private office. We have no romantic moonlit scenes of the

love-making of Elijah Pogram, to balance against the love story of Seth

Pecksniff. These figures are all in a special sense theatrical; all

facing one way and lit up by a public limelight. Their ridiculous

characters are detachable from their real characters, if they have any

real characters. And the author might perfectly well be right about what

is ridiculous, and wrong about what is real. He might be as right in

smiling at the Pograms and the Bricks as in smiling at the Pickwicks and

the Boffins. And he might still be as wrong in seeing Mr. Pogram as a

hypocrite as the great Buzfuz was wrong in seeing Mr. Pickwick as a

monster of revolting heartlessness and systematic villainy. He might

still be as wrong in thinking Jefferson Brick a charlatan and a cheat as

was that great disciple of Lavater, Mrs. Wilfer, in tracing every

wrinkle of evil cunning in the face of Mrs. Boffin. For Mr. Pickwick’s

spectacles and gaiters and Mrs. Boffin’s bonnets and boudoir are after

all superficial jokes; and might be equally well seen whatever we saw

beneath them. A man may smile and smile and be a villain; but a man may

also make us smile and not be a villain. He may make us smile and not

even be a fool. He may make us roar with laughter and be an exceedingly

wise man.

Now that is the paradox of America which Dickens never discovered.

Elijah Pogram was far more fantastic than his satirist thought; and the

most grotesque feature of Brick and Chollop was hidden from him. The

really strange thing was that Pogram probably did say, ‘Rough he may be.

So air our bars. Wild he may be. So air our buffalers,’ and yet was a

perfectly intelligent and public-spirited citizen while he said it. The

extraordinary thing is that Jefferson Brick may really have said, ‘The

libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood,’ and yet

Jefferson Brick may have served freedom, resisting unto blood. There

really has been a florid school of rhetoric in the United States which

has made it quite possible for serious and sensible men to say such

things. It is amusing simply as a difference of idiom or costume is

always amusing; just as English idiom and English costume are amusing to

Americans. But about this kind of difference there can be no kind of

doubt. So sturdy not to say stuffy a materialist as Ingersoll could say

of so shoddy not to say shady a financial politician as Blaine, ‘Like an

arméd warrior, like a pluméd knight, James G. Blaine strode down the

hall of Congress, and flung his spear full and true at the shield of

every enemy of his country and every traducer of his fair name.’

Compared with that, the passage about bears and buffaloes, which Mr.

Pogram delivered in defence of the defaulting post-master, is really a

very reasonable and appropriate statement. For bears and buffaloes are

wild and rough and in that sense free; while pluméd knights do not throw

their lances about like the assegais of Zulus. And the defaulting

post-master was at least as good a person to praise in such a fashion as

James G. Blaine of the Little Rock Railway. But anybody who had treated

Ingersoll or Blaine merely as a fool and a figure of fun would have very

rapidly found out his mistake. But Dickens did not know Brick or Chollop

long enough to find out his mistake. It need not be denied that, even

after a full understanding, he might still have found things to smile at

or to criticise. I do not insist on his admitting that Hannibal Chollop

was as great a hero as Hannibal, or that Elijah Pogram was as true a

prophet as Elijah. But I do say very seriously that they had something

about their atmosphere and situation that made possible a sort of

heroism and even a sort of prophecy that were really less natural at

that period in that Merry England whose comedy and common sense we sum

up under the name of Dickens. When we joke about the name of Hannibal

Chollop, we might remember of what nation was the general who dismissed

his defeated soldiers at Appomatox with words which the historian has

justly declared to be worthy of Hannibal: ‘We have fought through this

war together. I have done my best for you.’ It is not fair to forget

Jefferson, or even Jefferson Davis, entirely in favour of Jefferson

Brick.

For all these three things, good, bad, and indifferent, go together to

form something that Dickens missed, merely because the England of his

time most disastrously missed it. In this case, as in every case, the

only way to measure justly the excess of a foreign country is to measure

the defect of our own country. For in this matter the human mind is the

victim of a curious little unconscious trick, the cause of nearly all

international dislikes. A man treats his own faults as original sin and

supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes

that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple

foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realise

that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his

vices as well as his virtues. His own faults are things with which he is

so much at home that he at once forgets and assumes them abroad. He is

so faintly conscious of them in himself that he is not even conscious of

the absence of them in other people. He assumes that they are there so

that he does not see that they are not there. The Englishman takes it

for granted that a Frenchman will have all the English faults. Then he

goes on to be seriously angry with the Frenchman for having dared to

complicate them by the French faults. The notion that the Frenchman has

the French faults and not the English faults is a paradox too wild to

cross his mind.

He is like an old Chinaman who should laugh at Europeans for wearing

ludicrous top-hats and curling up their pig-tails inside them; because

obviously all men have pig-tails, as all monkeys have tails. Or he is

like an old Chinese lady who should justly deride the high-heeled shoes

of the West, considering them a needless addition to the sufficiently

tight and secure bandaging of the foot; for, of course, all women bind

up their feet, as all women bind up their hair. What these Celestial

thinkers would not think of, or allow for, is the wild possibility that

we do not have pig-tails although we do have top-hats, or that our

ladies are not silly enough to have Chinese feet, though they are silly

enough to have high-heeled shoes. Nor should we necessarily have come an

inch nearer to the Chinese extravagances even if the chimney-pot hat

rose higher than a factory chimney or the high heels had evolved into a

sort of stilts. By the same fallacy the Englishman will not only curse

the French peasant as a miser, but will also try to tip him as a beggar.

That is, he will first complain of the man having the surliness of an

independent man, and then accuse him of having the servility of a

dependent one. Just as the hypothetical Chinaman cannot believe that we

have top-hats but not pig-tails, so the Englishman cannot believe that

peasants are not snobs even when they are savages. Or he sees that a

Paris paper is violent and sensational; and then supposes that some

millionaire owns twenty such papers and runs them as a newspaper trust.

Surely the Yellow Press is present everywhere to paint the map yellow,

as the British Empire to paint it red. It never occurs to such a critic

that the French paper is violent because it is personal, and personal

because it belongs to a real and responsible person, and not to a ring

of nameless millionaires. It is a pamphlet, and not an anonymous

pamphlet. In a hundred other cases the same truth could be illustrated;

the situation in which the black man first assumes that all mankind is

black, and then accuses the rest of the artificial vice of painting

their faces red and yellow, or the hypocrisy of white-washing

themselves after the fashion of whited sepulchres. The particular case

of it now before us is that of the English misunderstanding of America;

and it is based, as in all these cases, on the English misunderstanding

of England.

For the truth is that England has suffered of late from not having

enough of the free shooting of Hannibal Chollop; from not understanding

enough that the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood.

The prosperous Englishman will not admit this; but then the prosperous

Englishman will not admit that he has suffered from anything. That is

what he is suffering from. Until lately at least he refused to realise

that many of his modern habits had been bad habits, the worst of them

being contentment. For all the real virtue in contentment evaporates,

when the contentment is only satisfaction and the satisfaction is only

self-satisfaction. Now it is perfectly true that America and not England

has seen the most obvious and outrageous official denials of liberty.

But it is equally true that it has seen the most obvious flouting of

such official nonsense, far more obvious than any similar evasions in

England. And nobody who knows the subconscious violence of the American

character would ever be surprised if the weapons of Chollop began to be

used in that most lawful lawlessness. It is perfectly true that the

libation of freedom must sometimes be drunk in blood, and never more

(one would think) than when mad millionaires forbid it to be drunk in

beer. But America, as compared with England, is the country where one

can still fancy men obtaining the libation of beer by the libation of

blood. Vulgar plutocracy is almost omnipotent in both countries; but I

think there is now more kick of reaction against it in America than in

England. The Americans may go mad when they make laws; but they recover

their reason when they disobey them. I wish I could believe that there

was as much of that destructive repentance in England; as indeed there

certainly was when Cobbett wrote. It faded gradually like a dying fire

through the Victorian era; and it was one of the very few realities that

Dickens did not understand. But any one who does understand it will know

that the days of Cobbett saw the last lost fight for English democracy;

and that if he had stood at that turning of the historic road, he would

have wished a better fate to the frame-breakers and the fury against the

first machinery, and luck to the Luddite fires.

Anyhow, what is wanted is a new Martin Chuzzlewit, told by a wiser Mark

Tapley. It is typical of something sombre and occasionally stale in the

mood of Dickens when he wrote that book, that the comic servant is not

really very comic. Mark Tapley is a very thin shadow of Sam Weller. But

if Dickens had written it in a happier mood, there might have been a

truer meaning in Mark Tapley’s happiness. For it is true that this

illogical good humour amid unreason and disorder is one of the real

virtues of the English people. It is the real advantage they have in

that adventure all over the world, which they were recently and

reluctantly induced to call an Empire. That receptive ridicule remains

with them as a secret pleasure when they are colonists—or convicts.

Dickens might have written another version of the great romance, and one

in which America was really seen gaily by Mark instead of gloomily by

Martin. Mark Tapley might really have made the best of America. Then

America would have lived and danced before us like Pickwick’s England, a

fairyland of happy lunatics and lovable monsters, and we might still

have sympathised as much with the rhetoric of Lafayette Kettle as with

the rhetoric of Wilkins Micawber, or with the violence of Chollop as

with the violence of Boythorn. That new Martin Chuzzlewit will never be

written; and the loss of it is more tragic than the loss of _Edwin

Drood_. But every man who has travelled in America has seen glimpses and

episodes in that untold tale; and far away on the Red-Indian frontiers

or in the hamlets in the hills of Pennsylvania, there are people whom I

met for a few hours or for a few moments, whom I none the less sincerely

like and respect because I cannot but smile as I think of them. But the

converse is also true; they have probably forgotten me; but if they

remember they laugh.

The Spirit of America

I suggest that diplomatists of the internationalist school should spend

some of their money on staging farces and comedies of cross-purposes,

founded on the curious and prevalent idea that England and America have

the same language. I know, of course, that we both inherit the glorious

tongue of Shakespeare, not to mention the tune of the musical glasses;

but there have been moments when I thought that if we spoke Greek and

they spoke Latin we might understand each other better. For Greek and

Latin are at least fixed, while American at least is still very fluid. I

do not know the American language, and therefore I do not claim to

distinguish between the American language and the American slang. But I

know that highly theatrical developments might follow on taking the

words as part of the English slang or the English language. I have

already given the example of calling a person ‘a regular guy,’ which in

the States is a graceful expression of respect and esteem, but which on

the stage, properly handled, might surely lead the way towards a divorce

or duel or something lively. Sometimes coincidence merely clinches a

mistake, as it so often clinches a misprint. Every proof-reader knows

that the worst misprint is not that which makes nonsense but that which

makes sense; not that which is obviously wrong but that which is

hideously right. He who has essayed to write ‘he got the book,’ and has

found it rendered mysteriously as ‘he got the boob’ is pensively

resigned. It is when it is rendered quite lucidly as ‘he got the boot’

that he is moved to a more passionate mood of regret. I have had

conversations in which this sort of accident would have wholly misled

me, if another accident had not come to the rescue. An American friend

of mine was telling me of his adventures as a cinema-producer down in

the south-west where real Red Indians were procurable. He said that

certain Indians were ‘very bad actors.’ It passed for me as a very

ordinary remark on a very ordinary or natural deficiency. It would

hardly seem a crushing criticism to say that some wild Arab chieftain

was not very good at imitating a farmyard; or that the Grand Llama of

Thibet was rather clumsy at making paper boats. But the remark might be

natural in a man travelling in paper boats, or touring with an invisible

farmyard for his menagerie. As my friend was a cinema-producer, I

supposed he meant that the Indians were bad cinema actors. But the

phrase has really a high and austere moral meaning, which my levity had

wholly missed. A bad actor means a man whose actions are bad or morally

reprehensible. So that I might have embraced a Red Indian who was

dripping with gore, or covered with atrocious crimes, imagining there

was nothing the matter with him beyond a mistaken choice of the

theatrical profession. Surely there are here the elements of a play, not

to mention a cinema play. Surely a New England village maiden might find

herself among the wigwams in the power of the formidable and fiendish

‘Little Blue Bison,’ merely through her mistaken sympathy with his

financial failure as a Film Star. The notion gives me glimpses of all

sorts of dissolving views of primeval forests and flamboyant theatres;

but this impulse of irrelevant theatrical production must be curbed.

There is one example, however, of this complication of language actually

used in contrary senses, about which the same figure can be used to

illustrate a more serious fact.

Suppose that, in such an international interlude, an English girl and an

American girl are talking about the fiancé of the former, who is coming

to call. The English girl will be haughty and aristocratic (on the

stage), the American girl will of course have short hair and skirts and

will be cynical; Americans being more completely free from cynicism than

any people in the world. It is the great glory of Americans that they

are not cynical; for that matter, English aristocrats are hardly ever

haughty; they understand the game much better than that. But on the

stage, anyhow, the American girl may say, referring to her friend’s

fiancé, with a cynical wave of the cigarette, ‘I suppose he’s bound to

come and see you.’ And at this the blue blood of the Vere de Veres will

boil over; the English lady will be deeply wounded and insulted at the

suggestion that her lover only comes to see her because he is forced to

do so. A staggering stage quarrel will then ensue, and things will go

from bad to worse; until the arrival of an Interpreter who can talk both

English and American. He stands between the two ladies waving two pocket

dictionaries, and explains the error on which the quarrel turns. It is

very simple; like the seed of all tragedies. In English ‘he is bound to

come and see you’ means that he is obliged or constrained to come and

see you. In American it does not. In American it means that he is bent

on coming to see you, that he is irrevocably resolved to do so, and will

surmount any obstacle to do it. The two young ladies will then embrace

as the curtain falls.

Now when I was lecturing in America I was often told, in a radiant and

congratulatory manner, that such and such a person was bound to come and

hear me lecture. It seemed a very cruel form of conscription, and I

could not understand what authority could have made it compulsory. In

the course of discovering my error, however, I thought I began to

understand certain American ideas and instincts that lie behind this

American idiom. For as I have urged before, and shall often urge again,

the road to international friendship is through really understanding

jokes. It is in a sense through taking jokes seriously. It is quite

legitimate to laugh at a man who walks down the street in three white

hats and a green dressing gown, because it is unfamiliar; but after all

the man has some reason for what he does; and until we know the reason

we do not understand the story, or even understand the joke. So the

outlander will always seem outlandish in custom or costume; but serious

relations depend on our getting beyond the fact of difference to the

things wherein it differs. A good symbolical figure for all this may be

found among the people who say, perhaps with a self-revealing

simplicity, that they are bound to go to a lecture.

If I were asked for a single symbolic figure summing up the whole of

what seems eccentric and interesting about America to an Englishman, I

should be satisfied to select that one lady who complained of Mrs.

Asquith’s lecture and wanted her money back. I do not mean that she was

typically American in complaining; far from it. I, for one, have a great

and guilty knowledge of all that amiable American audiences will endure

without complaint. I do not mean that she was typically American in

wanting her money; quite the contrary. That sort of American spends

money rather than hoards it; and when we convict them of vulgarity we

acquit them of avarice. Where she was typically American, summing up a

truth individual and indescribable in any other way, is that she used

these words: ‘I’ve risen from a sick-bed to come and hear her, and I

want my money back.’

The element in that which really amuses an Englishman is precisely the

element which, properly analysed, ought to make him admire an American.

But my point is that only by going through the amusement can he reach

the admiration. The amusement is in the vision of a tragic sacrifice for

what is avowedly a rather trivial object. Mrs. Asquith is a candid lady

of considerable humour; and I feel sure she does not regard the

experience of hearing her read her diary as an ecstasy for which the

sick should thus suffer martyrdom. She also is English; and had no other

claim but to amuse Americans and possibly to be amused by them. This

being so, it is rather as if somebody said, ‘I have risked my life in

fire and pestilence to find my way to the music hall,’ or, ‘I have

fasted forty days in the wilderness sustained by the hope of seeing

Totty Toddles do her new dance.’ And there is something rather more

subtle involved here. There is something in an Englishman which would

make him feel faintly ashamed of saying that he had fasted to hear

Totty Toddles, or risen from a sick-bed to hear Mrs. Asquith. He would

feel that it was undignified to confess that he had wanted mere

amusement so much; and perhaps that he had wanted anything so much. He

would not like, so to speak, to be seen rushing down the street after

Totty Toddles, or after Mrs. Asquith, or perhaps after anybody. But

there is something in it distinct from a mere embarrassment at admitting

enthusiasm. He might admit the enthusiasm if the object seemed to

justify it; he might perfectly well be serious about a serious thing.

But he cannot understand a person being proud of serious sacrifices for

what is not a serious thing. He does not like to admit that a little

thing can excite him; that he can lose his breath in running, or lose

his balance in reaching, after something that might be called silly.

Now that is where the American is fundamentally different. To him the

enthusiasm itself is meritorious. To him the excitement itself is

dignified. He counts it a part of his manhood to fast or fight or rise

from a bed of sickness for something, or possibly for anything. His

ideal is not to be a lock that only a worthy key can open, but a ‘live

wire’ that anything can touch or anybody can use. In a word, there is a

difference in the very definition of virility and therefore of virtue. A

live wire is not only active, it is also sensitive. Thus sensibility

becomes actually a part of virility. Something more is involved than the

vulgar simplification of the American as the irresistible force and the

Englishman as the immovable post. As a fact, those who speak of such

things nowadays generally mean by something irresistible something

simply immovable, or at least something unalterable, motionless even in

motion, like a cannon ball; for a cannon ball is as dead as a cannon.

Prussian militarism was praised in that way—until it met a French force

of about half its size on the banks of the Marne. But that is not what

an American means by energy; that sort of Prussian energy is only

monotony without repose. American energy is not a soulless machine; for

it is the whole point that he puts his soul into it. It is a very small

box for so big a thing; but it is not an empty box. But the point is

that he is not only proud of his energy, he is proud of his excitement.

He is not ashamed of his emotion, of the fire or even the tear in his

manly eye, when he tells you that the great wheel of his machine breaks

four billion butterflies an hour.

That is the point about American sport; that it is not in the least

sportive. It is because it is not very sportive that we sometimes say it

is not very sporting. It has the vices of a religion. It has all the

paradox of original sin in the service of aboriginal faith. It is

sometimes untruthful because it is sincere. It is sometimes treacherous

because it is loyal. Men lie and cheat for it as they lied for their

lords in a feudal conspiracy, or cheated for their chieftains in a

Highland feud. We may say that the vassal readily committed treason; but

it is equally true that he readily endured torture. So does the American

athlete endure torture. Not only the self-sacrifice but the solemnity of

the American athlete is like that of the American Indian. The athletes

in the States have the attitude of the athletes among the Spartans, the

great historical nation without a sense of humour. They suffer an

ascetic régime not to be matched in any monasticism and hardly in any

militarism. If any tradition of these things remains in a saner age,

they will probably be remembered as a mysterious religious order of

fakirs or dancing dervishes, who shaved their heads and fasted in honour

of Hercules or Castor and Pollux. And that is really the spiritual

atmosphere though the gods have vanished; and the religion is

subconscious and therefore irrational. For the problem of the modern

world is that it has continued to be religious when it has ceased to be

rational. Americans really would starve to win a cocoa-nut shy. They

would fast or bleed to win a race of paper boats on a pond. They would

rise from a sick-bed to listen to Mrs. Asquith.

But it is the real reason that interests me here. It is certainly not

that Americans are so stupid as not to know that cocoa-nuts are only

cocoa-nuts and paper boats only made of paper. Americans are, on an

average, rather more intelligent than Englishmen; and they are well

aware that Hercules is a myth and that Mrs. Asquith is something of a

mythologist. It is not that they do not know that the object is small in

itself; it is that they do really believe that the enthusiasm is great

in itself. They admire people for being impressionable. They admire

people for being excited. An American so struggling for some

disproportionate trifle (like one of my lectures) really feels in a

mystical way that he is right, because it is his whole morality to be

keen. So long as he wants something very much, whatever it is, he feels

he has his conscience behind him, and the common sentiment of society

behind him, and God and the whole universe behind him. Wedged on one leg

in a hot crowd at a trivial lecture, he has self-respect; his dignity

is at rest. That is what he means when he says he is bound to come to

the lecture.

Now the Englishman is fond of occasional larks. But these things are not

larks; nor are they occasional. It is the essential of the Englishman’s

lark that he should think it a lark; that he should laugh at it even

when he does it. Being English myself, I like it; but being English

myself, I know it is connected with weaknesses as well as merits. In its

irony there is condescension and therefore embarrassment. This patronage

is allied to the patron, and the patron is allied to the aristocratic

tradition of society. The larks are a variant of laziness because of

leisure; and the leisure is a variant of the security and even supremacy

of the gentleman. When an undergraduate at Oxford smashes half a hundred

windows he is well aware that the incident is merely a trifle. He can be

trusted to explain to his parents and guardians that it was merely a

trifle. He does not say, even in the American sense, that he was bound

to smash the windows. He does not say that he had risen from a sick-bed

to smash the windows. He does not especially think he has risen at all;

he knows he has descended (though with delight, like one diving or

sliding down the banisters) to something flat and farcical and full of

the English taste for the bathos. He has collapsed into something

entirely commonplace; though the owners of the windows may possibly not

think so. This rather indescribable element runs through a hundred

English things, as in the love of bathos shown even in the sound of

proper names; so that even the yearning lover in a lyric yearns for

somebody named Sally rather than Salome, and for a place called Wapping

rather than a place called Westermain. Even in the relapse into

rowdiness there is a sort of relapse into comfort. There is also what is

so large a part of comfort; carelessness. The undergraduate breaks

windows because he does not care about windows, not because he does care

about more fresh air like a hygienist, or about more light like a German

poet. Still less does he heroically smash a hundred windows because they

come between him and the voice of Mrs. Asquith. But least of all does he

do it because he seriously prides himself on the energy apart from its

aim, and on the will-power that carries it through. He is not ‘bound’ to

smash the windows, even in the sense of being bent upon it. He is not

bound at all but rather relaxed; and his violence is not only a

relaxation but a laxity. Finally, this is shown in the fact that he only

smashes windows when he is in the mood to smash windows; when some

fortunate conjunction of stars and all the tints and nuances of nature

whisper to him that it would be well to smash windows. But the American

is always ready, at any moment, to waste his energies on the wilder and

more suicidal course of going to lectures. And this is because to him

such excitement is not a mood but a moral ideal. As I note in another

connection, much of the English mystery would be clear to Americans if

they understood the word ‘mood.’ Englishmen are very moody, especially

when they smash windows. But I doubt if many Americans understand

exactly what we mean by the mood; especially the passive mood.

It is only by trying to get some notion of all this that an Englishman

can enjoy the final crown and fruit of all international friendship;

which is really liking an American to be American. If we only think that

parts of him are excellent because parts of him are English, it would be

far more sensible to stop at home and possibly enjoy the society of a

whole complete Englishman. But anybody who does understand this can take

the same pleasure in an American being American that he does in a

thunderbolt being swift and a barometer being sensitive. He can see that

a vivid sensibility and vigilance really radiate outwards through all

the ramifications of machinery and even of materialism. He can see that

the American uses his great practical powers upon very small

provocation; but he can also see that there is a kind of sense of

honour, like that of a duellist, in his readiness to be provoked.

Indeed, there is some parallel between the American man of action,

however vulgar his aims, and the old feudal idea of the gentleman with a

sword at his side. The gentleman may have been proud of being strong or

sturdy; he may too often have been proud of being thick-headed; but he

was not proud of being thick-skinned. On the contrary, he was proud of

being thin-skinned. He also seriously thought that sensitiveness was a

part of masculinity. It may be very absurd to read of two Irish

gentlemen trying to kill each other for trifles, or of two

Irish-American millionaires trying to ruin each other for trash. But the

very pettiness of the pretext and even the purpose illustrates the same

conception; which may be called the virtue of excitability. And it is

really this, and not any rubbish about iron will-power and masterful

mentality, that redeems with romance their clockwork cosmos and its

industrial ideals. Being a live wire does not mean that the nerves

should be like wires; but rather that the very wires should be like

nerves.

Another approximation to the truth would be to say that an American is

really not ashamed of curiosity. It is not so simple as it looks. Men

will carry off curiosity with various kinds of laughter and bravado,

just as they will carry off drunkenness or bankruptcy. But very few

people are really proud of lying on a door-step, and very few people are

really proud of longing to look through a key-hole. I do not speak of

looking through it, which involves questions of honour and self-control;

but few people feel that even the desire is dignified. Now I fancy the

American, at least by comparison with the Englishman, does feel that his

curiosity is consistent with his dignity, because dignity is consistent

with vivacity. He feels it is not merely the curiosity of Paul Pry, but

the curiosity of Christopher Columbus. He is not a spy but an explorer;

and he feels his greatness rather grow with his refusal to turn back, as

a traveller might feel taller and taller as he neared the source of the

Nile or the North-West Passage. Many an Englishman has had that feeling

about discoveries in dark continents; but he does not often have it

about discoveries in daily life. The one type does believe in the

indignity and the other in the dignity of the detective. It has nothing

to do with ethics in the merely external sense. It involves no

particular comparison in practical morals and manners. It is something

in the whole poise and posture of the self; of the way a man carries

himself. For men are not only affected by what they are; but still more,

when they are fools, by what they think they are; and when they are

wise, by what they wish to be.

There are truths that have almost become untrue by becoming untruthful.

There are statements so often stale and insincere that one hesitates to

use them, even when they stand for something more subtle. This point

about curiosity is not the conventional complaint against the American

interviewer. It is not the ordinary joke against the American child. And

in the same way I feel the danger of it being identified with the cant

about ‘a young nation’ if I say that it has some of the attractions, not

of American childhood, but of real childhood. There is some truth in the

tradition that the children of wealthy Americans tend to be too

precocious and luxurious. But there is a sense in which we can really

say that if the children are like adults, the adults are like children.

And that sense is in the very best sense of childhood. It is something

which the modern world does not understand. It is something that modern

Americans do not understand, even when they possess it; but I think they

do possess it.

The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture

which he now most commonly quotes is, ‘The kingdom of heaven is within

you.’ That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and

prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in

creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace

that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it

is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a

little child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit; but

the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It

is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is

outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his

appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that

the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it

somewhere else.

The Spirit of England

Nine times out of ten a man’s broad-mindedness is necessarily the

narrowest thing about him. This is not particularly paradoxical; it is,

when we come to think of it, quite inevitable. His vision of his own

village may really be full of varieties; and even his vision of his own

nation may have a rough resemblance to the reality. But his vision of

the world is probably smaller than the world. His vision of the universe

is certainly much smaller than the universe. Hence he is never so

inadequate as when he is universal; he is never so limited as when he

generalises. This is the fallacy in the many modern attempts at a

creedless creed, at something variously described as essential

Christianity or undenominational religion or a world faith to embrace

all the faiths in the world. It is that every sectarian is more

sectarian in his unsectarianism than he is in his sect. The emancipation

of a Baptist is a very Baptist emancipation. The charity of a Buddhist

is a very Buddhist charity, and very different from Christian charity.

When a philosophy embraces everything it generally squeezes everything,

and squeezes it out of shape; when it digests it necessarily

assimilates. When a theosophist absorbs Christianity it is rather as a

cannibal absorbs Christian missionaries. In this sense it is even

possible for the larger thing to be swallowed by the smaller; and for

men to move about not only in a Clapham sect but in a Clapham cosmos

under Clapham moon and stars.

But if this danger exists for all men, it exists especially for the

Englishman. The Englishman is never so insular as when he is imperial;

except indeed when he is international. In private life he is a good

friend and in practical politics generally a good ally. But theoretical

politics are more practical than practical politics. And in theoretical

politics the Englishman is the worst ally the world ever saw. This is

all the more curious because he has passed so much of his historical

life in the character of an ally. He has been in twenty great alliances

and never understood one of them. He has never been farther away from

European politics than when he was fighting heroically in the thick of

them. I myself think that this splendid isolation is sometimes really

splendid; so long as it is isolation and does not imagine itself to be

imperialism or internationalism. With the idea of being international,

with the idea of being imperial, comes the frantic and farcical idea of

being impartial. Generally speaking, men are never so mean and false and

hypocritical as when they are occupied in being impartial. They are

performing the first and most typical of all the actions of the devil;

they are claiming the throne of God. Even when it is not hypocrisy but

only mental confusion, it is always a confusion worse and worse

confounded. We see it in the impartial historians of the Victorian Age,

who now seem far more Victorian than the partial historians. Hallam

wrote about the Middle Ages; but Hallam was far less mediaeval than

Macaulay; for Macaulay was at least a fighter. Huxley had more mediaeval

sympathies than Herbert Spencer for the same reason; that Huxley was a

fighter. They both fought in many ways for the limitations of their own

rationalistic epoch; but they were nearer the truth than the men who

simply assumed those limitations as rational. The war of the

controversionalists was a wider thing than the peace of the arbiters.

And in the same way the Englishman never cuts a less convincing figure

before other nations than when he tries to arbitrate between them.

I have by this time heard a great deal about the necessity of saving

Anglo-American friendship, a necessity which I myself feel rather too

strongly to be satisfied with the ambassadorial and editorial style of

achieving it. I have already said that the worst style of all is to be

Anglo-American; or, as the more illiterate would express, to be

Anglo-Saxon. I am more and more convinced that the way for the

Englishman to do it is to be English; but to know that he is English and

not everything else as well. Thus the only sincere answer to Irish

nationalism is English nationalism, which is a reality; and not English

imperialism, which is a reactionary fiction, or English

internationalism, which is a revolutionary one.

For the English are reviled for their imperialism because they are not

imperialistic. They dislike it, which is the real reason why they do it

badly; and they do it badly, which is the real reason why they are

disliked when they do it. Nobody calls France imperialistic because she

has absorbed Brittany. But everybody calls England imperialistic because

she has not absorbed Ireland. The Englishman is fixed and frozen for

ever in the attitude of a ruthless conqueror; not because he has

conquered such people, but because he has not conquered them; but he is

always trying to conquer them with a heroism worthy of a better cause.

For the really native and vigorous part of what is unfortunately called

the British Empire is not an empire at all, and does not consist of

these conquered provinces at all. It is not an empire but an adventure;

which is probably a much finer thing. It was not the power of making

strange countries similar to our own, but simply the pleasure of seeing

strange countries because they were different from our own. The

adventurer did indeed, like the third son, set out to seek his fortune,

but not primarily to alter other people’s fortunes; he wished to trade

with people rather than to rule them. But as the other people remained

different from him, so did he remain different from them. The adventurer

saw a thousand strange things and remained a stranger. He was the

Robinson Crusoe on a hundred desert islands; and on each he remained as

insular as on his own island.

What is wanted for the cause of England to-day is an Englishman with

enough imagination to love his country from the outside as well as the

inside. That is, we need somebody who will do for the English what has

never been done for them, but what is done for any outlandish peasantry

or even any savage tribe. We want people who can make England

attractive; quite apart from disputes about whether England is strong or

weak. We want somebody to explain, not that England is everywhere, but

what England is anywhere; not that England is or is not really dying,

but why we do not want her to die. For this purpose the official and

conventional compliments or claims can never get any farther than

pompous abstractions about Law and Justice and Truth; the ideals which

England accepts as every civilised state accepts them, and violates as

every civilised state violates them. That is not the way in which the

picture of any people has ever been painted on the sympathetic

imagination of the world. Enthusiasts for old Japan did not tell us that

the Japs recognised the existence of abstract morality; but that they

lived in paper houses or wrote letters with paint-brushes. Men who

wished to interest us in Arabs did not confine themselves to saying that

they are monotheists or moralists; they filled our romances with the

rush of Arab steeds or the colours of strange tents or carpets. What we

want is somebody who will do for the Englishman with his front garden

what was done for the Jap and his paper house; who shall understand the

Englishman with his dog as well as the Arab with his horse. In a word,

what nobody has really tried to do is the one thing that really wants

doing. It is to make England attractive as a nationality, and even as a

small nationality.

For it is a wild folly to suppose that nations will love each other

because they are alike. They will never really do that unless they are

really alike; and then they will not be nations. Nations can love each

other as men and women love each other, not because they are alike but

because they are different. It can easily be shown, I fancy, that in

every case where a real public sympathy was aroused for some unfortunate

foreign people, it has always been accompanied with a particular and

positive interest in their most foreign customs and their most foreign

externals. The man who made a romance of the Scotch High-lander made a

romance of his kilt and even of his dirk; the friend of the Red Indians

was interested in picture writing and had some tendency to be

interested in scalping. To take a more serious example, such nations as

Serbia had been largely commended to international consideration by the

study of Serbian epics, or Serbian songs. The epoch of negro

emancipation was also the epoch of negro melodies. Those who wept over

Uncle Tom also laughed over Uncle Remus. And just as the admiration for

the Redskin almost became an apology for scalping, the mysterious

fascination of the African has sometimes almost led us into the fringes

of the black forest of Voodoo. But the sort of interest that is felt

even in the scalp-hunter and the cannibal, the torturer and the

devil-worshipper, that sort of interest has never been felt in the

Englishman.

And this is the more extraordinary because the Englishman is really very

interesting. He is interesting in a special degree in this special

manner; he is interesting because he is individual. No man in the world

is more misrepresented by everything official or even in the ordinary

sense national. A description of English life must be a description of

private life. In that sense there is no public life. In that sense there

is no public opinion. There have never been those prairie fires of

public opinion in England which often sweep over America. At any rate,

there have never been any such popular revolutions since the popular

revolutions of the Middle Ages. The English are a nation of amateurs;

they are even a nation of eccentrics. An Englishman is never more

English than when he is considered a lunatic by the other Englishmen.

This can be clearly seen in a figure like Dr. Johnson, who has become

national not by being normal but by being extraordinary. To express this

mysterious people, to explain or suggest why they like tall hedges and

heavy breakfasts and crooked roads and small gardens with large fences,

and why they alone among Christians have kept quite consistently the

great Christian glory of the open fireplace, here would be a strange and

stimulating opportunity for any of the artists in words, who study the

souls of strange peoples. That would be the true way to create a

friendship between England and America, or between England and anything

else; yes, even between England and Ireland. For this justice at least

has already been done to Ireland; and as an indignant patriot I demand a

more equal treatment for the two nations.

I have already noted the commonplace that in order to teach

internationalism we must talk nationalism. We must make the nations as

nations less odious or mysterious to each other. We do not make men love

each other by describing a monster with a million arms and legs, but by

describing the men as men, with their separate and even solitary

emotions. As this has a particular application to the emotions of the

Englishman, I will return to the topic once more. Now Americans have a

power that is the soul and success of democracy, the power of

spontaneous social organisation. Their high spirits, their humane ideals

are really creative, they abound in unofficial institutions; we might

almost say in unofficial officialism. Nobody who has felt the presence

of all the leagues and guilds and college clubs will deny that Whitman

was national when he said he would build states and cities out of the

love of comrades. When all this communal enthusiasm collides with the

Englishman, it too often seems literally to leave him cold. They say he

is reserved; they possibly think he is rude. And the Englishman, having

been taught his own history all wrong, is only too likely to take the

criticism as a compliment. He admits that he is reserved because he is

stern and strong; or even that he is rude because he is shrewd and

candid. But as a fact he is not rude and not especially reserved; at

least reserve is not the meaning of his reluctance. The real difference

lies, I think, in the fact that American high spirits are not only high

but level; that the hilarious American spirit is like a plateau, and the

humorous English spirit like a ragged mountain range.

The Englishman is moody; which does not in the least mean that the

Englishman is morose. Dickens, as we all feel in reading his books, was

boisterously English. Dickens was moody when he wrote Oliver Twist;

but he was also moody when he wrote Pickwick. That is, he was in

another and much healthier mood. The mood was normal to him in the sense

that nine times out of ten he felt and wrote in that humorous and

hilarious mood. But he was, if ever there was one, a man of moods; and

all the more of a typical Englishman for being a man of moods. But it

was because of this, almost entirely, that he had a misunderstanding

with America.

In America there are no moods, or there is only one mood. It is the same

whether it is called hustle or uplift; whether we regard it as the

heroic love of comrades or the last hysteria of the herd instinct. It

has been said of the typical English aristocrats of the Government

offices that they resemble certain ornamental fountains and play from

ten till four; and it is true that an Englishman, even an English

aristocrat, is not always inclined to play any more than to work. But

American sociability is not like the Trafalgar fountains. It is like

Niagara. It never stops, under the silent stars or the rolling storms.

There seems always to be the same human heat and pressure behind it; it

is like the central heating of hotels as explained in the advertisements

and announcements. The temperature can be regulated; but it is not. And

it is always rather overpowering for an Englishman, whose mood changes

like his own mutable and shifting sky. The English mood is very like the

English weather; it is a nuisance and a national necessity.

If any one wishes to understand the quarrel between Dickens and the

Americans, let him turn to that chapter in Martin Chuzzlewit, in which

young Martin has to receive endless defiles and deputations of total

strangers each announced by name and demanding formal salutation. There

are several things to be noticed about this incident. To begin with, it

did not happen to Martin Chuzzlewit; but it did happen to Charles

Dickens. Dickens is incorporating almost without alteration a passage

from a diary in the middle of a story; as he did when he included the

admirable account of the prison petition of John Dickens as the prison

petition of Wilkins Micawber. There is no particular reason why even the

gregarious Americans should so throng the portals of a perfectly obscure

steerage passenger like young Chuzzlewit. There was every reason why

they should throng the portals of the author of Pickwick and _Oliver

Twist_. And no doubt they did. If I may be permitted the aleatory image,

you bet they did. Similar troops of sociable human beings have visited

much more insignificant English travellers in America, with some of whom

I am myself acquainted. I myself have the luck to be a little more

stodgy and less sensitive than many of my countrymen; and certainly less

sensitive than Dickens. But I know what it was that annoyed him about

that unending and unchanging stream of American visitors; it was the

unending and unchanging stream of American sociability and high spirits.

A people living on such a lofty but level tableland do not understand

the ups and downs of the English temperament; the temper of a nation of

eccentrics or (as they used to be called) of humorists. There is

something very national in the very name of the old play of _Every Man

in His Humour_. But the play more often acted in real life is ‘Every Man

Out of His Humour.’ It is true, as Matthew Arnold said, that an

Englishman wants to do as he likes; but it is not always true even that

he likes what he likes. An Englishman can be friendly and yet not feel

friendly. Or he can be friendly and yet not feel hospitable. Or he can

feel hospitable and yet not welcome those whom he really loves. He can

think, almost with tears of tenderness, about people at a distance who

would be bores if they came in at the door.

American sociability sweeps away any such subtlety. It cannot be

expected to understand the paradox or perversity of the Englishman, who

thus can feel friendly and avoid friends. That is the truth in the

suggestion that Dickens was sentimental. It means that he probably felt

most sociable when he was solitary. In all these attempts to describe

the indescribable, to indicate the real but unconscious differences

between the two peoples, I have tried to balance my words without the

irrelevant bias of praise and blame. Both characteristics always cut

both ways. On one side this comradeship makes possible a certain

communal courage, a democratic derision of rich men in high places,

that is not easy in our smaller and more stratified society. On the

other hand the Englishman has certainly more liberty, if less equality

and fraternity. But the richest compensation of the Englishman is not

even in the word ‘liberty,’ but rather in the word ‘poetry.’ That humour

of escape or seclusion, that genial isolation, that healing of wounded

friendship by what Christian Science would call absent treatment, that

is the best atmosphere of all for the creation of great poetry; and out

of that came ‘bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang’ and

‘Thou wast not made for death, immortal bird.’ In this sense it is

indeed true that poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity; which may

be extended to mean affection remembered in loneliness. There is in it a

spirit not only of detachment but even of distance; a spirit which does

desire, as in the old English rhyme, to be not only over the hills but

also far away. In other words, in so far as it is true that the

Englishman is an exception to the great truth of Aristotle, it is

because he is not so near to Aristotle as he is to Homer. In so far as

he is not by nature a political animal, it is because he is a poetical

animal. We see it in his relations to the other animals; his quaint and

almost illogical love of dogs and horses and dependants whose political

rights cannot possibly be defined in logic. Many forms of hunting or

fishing are but an excuse for the same thing which the shameless

literary man does without any excuse. Sport is speechless poetry. It

would be easy for a foreigner, by taking a few liberties with the facts,

to make a satire about the sort of silent Shelley who decides ultimately

to shoot the skylark. It would be easy to answer these poetic

suggestions by saying that he himself might be responsible for ruining

the choirs where late the sweet birds sang, or that the immortal bird

was likely to be mortal when he was out with his gun. But these

international satires are never just; and the real relations of an

Englishman and an English bird are far more delicate. It would be

equally easy and equally unjust to suggest a similar satire against

American democracy; and represent Americans merely as birds of a feather

who can do nothing but flock together. But this would leave out the fact

that at least it is not the white feather; that democracy is capable of

defiance and of death for an idea. Touching the souls of great nations,

these criticisms are generally false because they are critical.

But when we are quite sure that we rejoice in a nation’s strength, then

and not before we are justified in judging its weakness. I am quite sure

that I rejoice in any democratic success without arrière pensée; and

nobody who knows me will credit me with a covert sneer at civic

equality. And this being granted, I do think there is a danger in the

gregariousness of American society. The danger of democracy is not

anarchy; on the contrary, it is monotony. And it is touching this that

all my experience has increased my conviction that a great deal that is

called female emancipation has merely been the increase of female

convention. Now the males of every community are far too conventional;

it was the females who were individual and criticised the conventions of

the tribe. If the females become conventional also, there is a danger of

individuality being lost. This indeed is not peculiar to America; it is

common to the whole modern industrial world, and to everything which

substitutes the impersonal atmosphere of the State for the personal

atmosphere of the home. But it is emphasised in America by the curious

contradiction that Americans do in theory value and even venerate the

individual. But individualism is still the foe of individuality. Where

men are trying to compete with each other they are trying to copy each

other. They become featureless by ‘featuring’ the same part.

Personality, in becoming a conscious ideal, becomes a common ideal. In

this respect perhaps there is really something to be learnt from the

Englishman with his turn or twist in the direction of private life.

Those who have travelled in such a fashion as to see all the American

hotels and none of the American houses are sometimes driven to the

excess of saying that the Americans have no private life. But even if

the exaggeration has a hint of truth, we must balance it with the

corresponding truth; that the English have no public life. They on their

side have still to learn the meaning of the public thing, the republic;

and how great are the dangers of cowardice and corruption when the very

State itself has become a State secret.

The English are patriotic; but patriotism is the unconscious form of

nationalism. It is being national without understanding the meaning of a

nation. The Americans are on the whole too self-conscious, kept moving

too much in the pace of public life, with all its temptations to

superficiality and fashion; too much aware of outside opinion and with

too much appetite for outside criticism. But the English are much too

unconscious; and would be the better for an increase in many forms of

consciousness, including consciousness of sin. But even their sin is

ignorance of their real virtue. The most admirable English things are

not the things that are most admired by the English, or for which the

English admire themselves. They are things now blindly neglected and in

daily danger of being destroyed. It is all the worse that they should be

destroyed, because there is really nothing like them in the world. That

is why I have suggested a note of nationalism rather than patriotism for

the English; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not as the

nature of things. We say of some ballad from the Balkans or some peasant

costume in the Netherlands that it is unique; but the good things of

England really are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars and

revolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique. The particular kind

of beauty there is in an English village, the particular kind of humour

there is in an English public-house, are things that cannot be found in

lands where the village is far more simply and equally governed, or

where the vine is far more honourably served and praised. Yet we shall

not save them by merely sinking into them with the conservative sort of

contentment, even if the commercial rapacity of our plutocratic reforms

would allow us to do so. We must in a sense get far away from England in

order to behold her; we must rise above patriotism in order to be

practically patriotic; we must have some sense of more varied and remote

things before these vanishing virtues can be seen suddenly for what they

are; almost as one might fancy that a man would have to rise to the

dizziest heights of the divine understanding before he saw, as from a

peak far above a whirlpool, how precious is his perishing soul.

The Future of Democracy

The title of this final chapter requires an apology. I do not need to be

reminded, alas, that the whole book requires an apology. It is written

in accordance with a ritual or custom in which I could see no particular

harm, and which gives me a very interesting subject, but a custom which

it would be not altogether easy to justify in logic. Everybody who goes

to America for a short time is expected to write a book; and nearly

everybody does. A man who takes a holiday at Trouville or Dieppe is not

confronted on his return with the question, ‘When is your book on France

going to appear?’ A man who betakes himself to Switzerland for the

winter sports is not instantly pinned by the statement, ‘I suppose your

History of the Helvetian Republic is coming out this spring?’ Lecturing,

at least my kind of lecturing, is not much more serious or meritorious

than ski-ing or sea-bathing; and it happens to afford the holiday-maker

far less opportunity of seeing the daily life of the people. Of all this

I am only too well aware; and my only defence is that I am at least

sincere in my enjoyment and appreciation of America, and equally sincere

in my interest in its most serious problem, which I think a very serious

problem indeed; the problem of democracy in the modern world. Democracy

may be a very obvious and facile affair for plutocrats and politicians

who only have to use it as a rhetorical term. But democracy is a very

serious problem for democrats. I certainly do not apologise for the word

democracy; but I do apologise for the word future. I am no Futurist; and

any conjectures I make must be taken with the grain of salt which is

indeed the salt of the earth; the decent and moderate humility which

comes from a belief in free will. That faith is in itself a divine

doubt. I do not believe in any of the scientific predictions about

mankind; I notice that they always fail to predict any of the purely

human developments of men; I also notice that even their successes prove

the same truth as their failures; for their successful predictions are

not about men but about machines. But there are two things which a man

may reasonably do, in stating the probabilities of a problem, which do

not involve any claim to be a prophet. The first is to tell the truth,

and especially the neglected truth, about the tendencies that have

already accumulated in human history; any miscalculation about which

must at least mislead us in any case. We cannot be certain of being

right about the future; but we can be almost certain of being wrong

about the future, if we are wrong about the past. The other thing that

he can do is to note what ideas necessarily go together by their own

nature; what ideas will triumph together or fall together. Hence it

follows that this final chapter must consist of two things. The first is

a summary of what has really happened to the idea of democracy in recent

times; the second a suggestion of the fundamental doctrine which is

necessary for its triumph at any time.

The last hundred years has seen a general decline in the democratic

idea. If there be anybody left to whom this historical truth appears a

paradox, it is only because during that period nobody has been taught

history, least of all the history of ideas. If a sort of intellectual

inquisition had been established, for the definition and differentiation

of heresies, it would have been found that the original republican

orthodoxy had suffered more and more from secessions, schisms, and

backslidings. The highest point of democratic idealism and conviction

was towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the American

Republic was ‘dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.’ It

was then that the largest number of men had the most serious sort of

conviction that the political problem could be solved by the vote of

peoples instead of the arbitrary power of princes and privileged orders.

These men encountered various difficulties and made various compromises

in relation to the practical politics of their time; in England they

preserved aristocracy; in America they preserved slavery. But though

they had more difficulties, they had less doubts. Since their time

democracy has been steadily disintegrated by doubts; and these political

doubts have been contemporary with and often identical with religious

doubts. This fact could be followed over almost the whole field of the

modern world; in this place it will be more appropriate to take the

great American example of slavery. I have found traces in all sorts of

intelligent quarters of an extraordinary idea that all the Fathers of

the Republic owned black men like beasts of burden because they knew no

better, until the light of liberty was revealed to them by John Brown

and Mrs. Beecher Stowe. One of the best weekly papers in England said

recently that even those who drew up the Declaration of Independence did

not include negroes in its generalisation about humanity. This is quite

consistent with the current convention, in which we were all brought up;

the theory that the heart of humanity broadens in ever larger circles of

brotherhood, till we pass from embracing a black man to adoring a black

beetle. Unfortunately it is quite inconsistent with the facts of

American history. The facts show that, in this problem of the Old South,

the eighteenth century was more liberal than the nineteenth century.

There was more sympathy for the negro in the school of Jefferson than

in the school of Jefferson Davis. Jefferson, in the dark estate of his

simple Deism, said the sight of slavery in his country made him tremble,

remembering that God is just. His fellow Southerners, after a century of

the world’s advance, said that slavery in itself was good, when they did

not go farther and say that negroes in themselves were bad. And they

were supported in this by the great and growing modern suspicion that

nature is unjust. Difficulties seemed inevitably to delay justice, to

the mind of Jefferson; but so they did to the mind of Lincoln. But that

the slave was human and the servitude inhuman—that was, if anything,

clearer to Jefferson than to Lincoln. The fact is that the utter

separation and subordination of the black like a beast was a progress;

it was a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and experiment; a

triumph of science over superstition. It was ‘the way the world was

going,’ as Matthew Arnold reverentially remarked in some connection;

perhaps as part of a definition of God. Anyhow, it was not Jefferson’s

definition of God. He fancied, in his far-off patriarchal way, a Father

who had made all men brothers; and brutally unbrotherly as was the

practice, such democratical Deists never dreamed of denying the theory.

It was not until the scientific sophistries began that brotherhood was

really disputed. Gobineau, who began most of the modern talk about the

superiority and inferiority of racial stocks, was seized upon eagerly by

the less generous of the slave-owners and trumpeted as a new truth of

science and a new defence of slavery. It was not really until the dawn

of Darwinism, when all our social relations began to smell of the

monkey-house, that men thought of the barbarian as only a first and the

baboon as a second cousin. The full servile philosophy has been a modern

and even a recent thing; made in an age whose invisible deity was the

Missing Link. The Missing Link was a true metaphor in more ways than

one; and most of all in its suggestion of a chain.

By a symbolic coincidence, indeed, slavery grew more brazen and brutal

under the encouragement of more than one movement of the progressive

sort. Its youth was renewed for it by the industrial prosperity of

Lancashire; and under that influence it became a commercial and

competitive instead of a patriarchal and customary thing. We may say

with no exaggerative irony that the unconscious patrons of slavery were

Huxley and Cobden. The machines of Manchester were manufacturing a great

many more things than the manufacturers knew or wanted to know; but they

were certainly manufacturing the fetters of the slave, doubtless out of

the best quality of steel and iron. But this is a minor illustration of

the modern tendency, as compared with the main stream of scepticism

which was destroying democracy. Evolution became more and more a vision

of the break-up of our brotherhood, till by the end of the nineteenth

century the genius of its greatest scientific romancer saw it end in the

anthropophagous antics of the Time Machine. So far from evolution

lifting us above the idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at least

with a logical and potential argument for eating them. In the case of

the American negroes, it may be remarked, it does at any rate permit the

preliminary course of roasting them. All this materialistic hardening,

which replaced the remorse of Jefferson, was part of the growing

evolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of the human race,

or rather that there was really no such thing as the human race. The

South had begun by agreeing reluctantly to the enslavement of men. The

South ended by agreeing equally reluctantly to the emancipation of

monkeys.

That is what had happened to the democratic ideal in a hundred years.

Anybody can test it by comparing the final phase, I will not say with

the ideal of Jefferson, but with the ideal of Johnson. There was far

more horror of slavery in an eighteenth-century Tory like Dr. Johnson

than in a nineteenth-century Democrat like Stephen Douglas. Stephen

Douglas may be mentioned because he is a very representative type of the

age of evolution and expansion; a man thinking in continents, like Cecil

Rhodes, human and hopeful in a truly American fashion, and as a

consequence cold and careless rather than hostile in the matter of the

old mystical doctrines of equality. He ‘did not care whether slavery was

voted up or voted down.’ His great opponent Lincoln did indeed care

very much. But it was an intense individual conviction with Lincoln

exactly as it was with Johnson. I doubt if the spirit of the age was not

much more behind Douglas and his westward expansion of the white race. I

am sure that more and more men were coming to be in the particular

mental condition of Douglas; men in whom the old moral and mystical

ideals had been undermined by doubt but only with a negative effect of

indifference. Their positive convictions were all concerned with what

some called progress and some imperialism. It is true that there was a

sincere sectional enthusiasm against slavery in the North; and that the

slaves were actually emancipated in the nineteenth century. But I doubt

whether the Abolitionists would ever have secured Abolition. Abolition

was a by-product of the Civil War; which was fought for quite other

reasons. Anyhow, if slavery had somehow survived to the age of Rhodes

and Roosevelt and evolutionary imperialism, I doubt if the slaves would

ever have been emancipated at all. Certainly if it had survived till the

modern movement for the Servile State, they would never have been

emancipated at all. Why should the world take the chains off the black

man when it was just putting them on the white? And in so far as we owe

the change to Lincoln, we owe it to Jefferson. Exactly what gives its

real dignity to the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a

primitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up the

tables of an ancient law, against the trend of the nineteenth century;

repeating, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are

created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc.,’ to a

generation that was more and more disposed to say something like this:

‘We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all

things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity

and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,’ and so

on. I do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have founded

a state; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would never

have overthrown a slave state. What it did do, as I have said, was to

produce some very wonderful literary and artistic flights of sceptical

imagination. The world did have new visions, if they were visions of

monsters in the moon and Martians striding about like spiders as tall as

the sky, and the workmen and capitalists becoming two separate species,

so that one could devour the other as gaily and greedily as a cat

devours a bird. No one has done justice to the meaning of Mr. Wells and

his original departure in fantastic fiction; to these nightmares that

were the last apocalypse of the nineteenth century. They meant that the

bottom had fallen out of the mind at last, that the bridge of

brotherhood had broken down in the modern brain, letting up from the

chasms this infernal light like a dawn. All had grown dizzy with degree

and relativity; so that there would not be so very much difference

between eating dog and eating darkie, or between eating darkie and

eating dago. There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt

that we were the superior sort.

Against all this irresistible force stood one immovable post. Against

all this dance of doubt and degree stood something that can best be

symbolised by a simple example. An ape cannot be a priest, but a negro

can be a priest. The dogmatic type of Christianity, especially the

Catholic type of Christianity, had riveted itself irrevocably to the

manhood of all men. Where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils it

could not save itself even by surrender. It could not gradually dilute

democracy, as could a merely sceptical or secular democrat. There stood,

in fact or in possibility, the solid and smiling figure of a black

bishop. And he was either a man claiming the most towering spiritual

privileges of a man, or he was the mere buffoonery and blasphemy of a

monkey in a mitre. That is the point about Christian and Catholic

democracy; it is not that it is necessarily at any moment more

democratic, it is that its indestructible minimum of democracy really is

indestructible. And by the nature of things that mystical democracy was

destined to survive, when every other sort of democracy was free to

destroy itself. And whenever democracy destroying itself is suddenly

moved to save itself, it always grasps at rag or tag of that old

tradition that alone is sure of itself. Hundreds have heard the story

about the mediaeval demagogue who went about repeating the rhyme

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?

Many have doubtless offered the obvious answer to the question, ‘The

Serpent.’ But few seem to have noticed what would be the more modern

answer to the question, if that innocent agitator went about propounding

it. ‘Adam never delved and Eve never span, for the simple reason that

they never existed. They are fragments of a Chaldeo-Babylonian mythos,

and Adam is only a slight variation of Tag-Tug, pronounced Uttu. For the

real beginning of humanity we refer you to Darwin’s _Origin of

Species_.’ And then the modern man would go on to justify plutocracy to

the mediaeval man by talking about the Struggle for Life and the

Survival of the Fittest; and how the strongest man seized authority by

means of anarchy, and proved himself a gentleman by behaving like a cad.

Now I do not base my beliefs on the theology of John Ball, or on the

literal and materialistic reading of the text of Genesis; though I think

the story of Adam and Eve infinitely less absurd and unlikely than that

of the prehistoric ‘strongest man’ who could fight a hundred men. But I

do note the fact that the idealism of the leveller could be put in the

form of an appeal to Scripture, and could not be put in the form of an

appeal to Science. And I do note also that democrats were still driven

to make the same appeal even in the very century of Science. Tennyson

was, if ever there was one, an evolutionist in his vision and an

aristocrat in his sympathies. He was always boasting that John Bull was

evolutionary and not revolutionary, even as these Frenchmen. He did not

pretend to have any creed beyond faintly trusting the larger hope. But

when human dignity is really in danger, John Bull has to use the same

old argument as John Ball. He tells Lady Clara Vere de Vere that ‘the

gardener Adam and his wife smile at the claim of long descent’; their

own descent being by no means long. Lady Clara might surely have scored

off him pretty smartly by quoting from ‘Maud’ and ‘In Memoriam’ about

evolution and the eft that was lord of valley and hill. But Tennyson has

evidently forgotten all about Darwin and the long descent of man. If

this was true of an evolutionist like Tennyson, it was naturally ten

times truer of a revolutionist like Jefferson. The Declaration of

Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created

all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they

were certainly evolved unequal.

There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine

origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world

will find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of

sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds.

Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of

constraining the tyrant. An idealist may say to a capitalist, ‘Don’t you

sometimes feel in the rich twilight, when the lights twinkle from the

distant hamlet in the hills, that all humanity is a holy family?’ But it

is equally possible for the capitalist to reply with brevity and

decision, ‘No, I don’t,’ and there is no more disputing about it further

than about the beauty of a fading cloud. And the modern world of moods

is a world of clouds, even if some of them are thunderclouds.

For I have only taken here, as a convenient working model, the case of

negro slavery; because it was long peculiar to America and is popularly

associated with it. It is more and more obvious that the line is no

longer running between black and white but between rich and poor. As I

have already noted in the case of Prohibition, the very same arguments

of the inevitable suicide of the ignorant, of the impossibility of

freedom for the unfit, which were once applied to barbarians brought

from Africa are now applied to citizens born in America. It is argued

even by industrialists that industrialism has produced a class submerged

below the status of emancipated mankind. They imply that the Missing

Link is no longer missing, even from England or the Northern States, and

that the factories have manufactured their own monkeys. Scientific

hypotheses about the feeble-minded and the criminal type will supply the

masters of the modern world with more and more excuses for denying the

dogma of equality in the case of white labour as well as black. And any

man who knows the world knows perfectly well that to tell the

millionaires, or their servants, that they are disappointing the

sentiments of Thomas Jefferson, or disregarding a creed composed in the

eighteenth century, will be about as effective as telling them that they

are not observing the creed of St. Athanasius or keeping the rule of St.

Benedict.

The world cannot keep its own ideals. The secular order cannot make

secure any one of its own noble and natural conceptions of secular

perfection. That will be found, as time goes on, the ultimate argument

for a Church independent of the world and the secular order. What has

become of all those ideal figures from the Wise Man of the Stoics to the

democratic Deist of the eighteenth century? What has become of all that

purely human hierarchy of chivalry, with its punctilious pattern of the

good knight, its ardent ambition in the young squire? The very name of

knight has come to represent the petty triumph of a profiteer, and the

very word squire the petty tyranny of a landlord. What has become of all

that golden liberality of the Humanists, who found on the high

tablelands of the culture of Hellas the very balance of repose in beauty

that is most lacking in the modern world? The very Greek language that

they loved has become a mere label for snuffy and snobbish dons, and a

mere cock-shy for cheap and half-educated utilitarians, who make it a

symbol of superstition and reaction. We have lived to see a time when

the heroic legend of the Republic and the Citizen, which seemed to

Jefferson the eternal youth of the world, has begun to grow old in its

turn. We cannot recover the earthly estate of knighthood, to which all

the colours and complications of heraldry seemed as fresh and natural as

flowers. We cannot re-enact the intellectual experiences of the

Humanists, for whom the Greek grammar was like the song of a bird in

spring. The more the matter is considered the clearer it will seem that

these old experiences are now only alive, where they have found a

lodgment in the Catholic tradition of Christendom, and made themselves

friends for ever. St. Francis is the only surviving troubadour. St.

Thomas More is the only surviving Humanist. St. Louis is the only

surviving knight.

It would be the worst sort of insincerity, therefore, to conclude even

so hazy an outline of so great and majestic a matter as the American

democratic experiment, without testifying my belief that to this also

the same ultimate test will come. So far as that democracy becomes or

remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic.

In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly

undemocratic. Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond

the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at

least of patronage. Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen

slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in

method but in aim; since they are but the negations of the human

appetites of property and personality. Eighteenth-century ideals,

formulated in eighteenth-century language, have no longer in themselves

the power to hold all those pagan passions back. Even those documents

depended upon Deism; their real strength will survive in men who are

still Deists; and the men who are still Deists are more than Deists. Men

will more and more realise that there is no meaning in democracy if

there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no meaning in

anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an

authority that is the author of our rights. There is truth in every

ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that

finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of

Jove. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them

as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures

may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats

existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land

of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went

forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIMITED LONDON

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIMITED LONDRA

MCMXXII

Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD. at the Edinburgh

University Press

Contents

PAGE

WHAT IS AMERICA? 1

A MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 19

MCMXXII

Stampato in Gran Bretagna da T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD. presso la Edinburgh

University Press

Indice

PAG.

CHE COS’È L’AMERICA? 1

UNA MEDITAZIONE IN UN HOTEL DI NEW YORK 19

A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 33 IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 47

UNA MEDITAZIONE A BROADWAY 33 INTERVISTATORI IRLANDESI E ALTRI 47

SOME AMERICAN CITIES 63 IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 80

ALCUNE CITTÀ AMERICANE 63 NELLA CAMPAGNA AMERICANA 80

THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 97 PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 121

L’UOMO D’AFFARI AMERICANO 97 PRESIDENTI E PROBLEMI 121

PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 145 FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 163

IL PROIBIZIONISMO TRA FATTI E FANTASIA 145 LE MODE E L’OPINIONE PUBBLICA 163

THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 182 THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 195

LO STRAORDINARIO AMERICANO 182 IL REPUBBLICANO TRA LE ROVINE 195

IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 208

LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 222

L’ATLANTICO SI STA RESTRINGENDO? 208

LINCOLN E LE CAUSE PERDUTE 222

WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 235

A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 253

THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 267

WELLS E LO STATO MONDIALE 235

UN NUOVO MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 253

LO SPIRITO DELL’AMERICA 267

THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 281

THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 295

What is America?

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the

mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and

imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there

is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the

thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders,

embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead

or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what

they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant

for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond

that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather

an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be

inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw

dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the

abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as

those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the

fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar

manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in

fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if

men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand

each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger—the moment

when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a

meeting meant a duel.

Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travellers

are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. I do not blame

them for being amused; it is perfectly natural to be amused at a

Dutchman for being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where they are

wrong is that they take their own amusement seriously. They base on it

their serious ideas of international instruction. It was said that the

Englishman takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despising

foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He comes to scoff

and does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate. Hence in

international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too

much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely

consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is

actually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is the

only excuse of this book.

Let me begin my American impressions with two impressions I had before I

went to America. One was an incident and the other an idea; and when

taken together they illustrate the attitude I mean. The first principle

is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is

foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong

because it is funny. The reaction of his senses and superficial habits

of mind against something new, and to him abnormal, is a perfectly

healthy reaction. But the mind which imagines that mere unfamiliarity

can possibly prove anything about inferiority is a very inadequate mind.

It is inadequate even in criticising things that may really be inferior

to the things involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro for

having a black face than to sneer at him for having a sloping skull. It

is proportionally even more preferable to laugh rather than judge in

dealing with highly civilised peoples. Therefore I put at the beginning

two working examples of what I felt about America before I saw it; the

sort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy as a joke, and the sort of

thing he has a duty to understand and respect, because it is the

explanation of the joke.

When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports, I was

capable of expecting the American consulate to be American. Embassies

and consulates are by tradition like islands of the soil for which they

stand; and I have often found the tradition corresponding to a truth. I

have seen the unmistakable French official living on omelettes and a

little wine and serving his sacred abstractions under the last

palm-trees fringing a desert. In the heat and noise of quarrelling Turks

and Egyptians, I have come suddenly, as with the cool shock of his own

shower-bath, on the listless amiability of the English gentleman. The

officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very

polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin

Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in

the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all

appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices.

But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up

in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game

called ‘Confessions’ which my friends and I invented in our youth; an

examination paper containing questions like, ‘If you saw a rhinoceros

in the front garden, what would you do?’ One of my friends, I remember,

wrote, ‘Take the pledge.’ But that is another story, and might bring Mr.

Pussyfoot Johnson on the scene before his time.

One of the questions on the paper was, ‘Are you an anarchist?’ To which

a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, ‘What

the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist?’ along with some

playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes an

[Greek: archê]. Then there was the question, ‘Are you in favour of

subverting the government of the United States by force?’ Against this I

should write, ‘I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour

and not the beginning.’ The inquisitor, in his more than morbid

curiosity, had then written down, ‘Are you a polygamist?’ The answer to

LO SPIRITO D’INGHILTERRA 281

IL FUTURO DELLA DEMOCRAZIA 295

Che cos’è l’America?

Non sono mai riuscito a perdere la mia vecchia convinzione che il viaggio restringa la

mente. Per lo meno un uomo deve compiere un doppio sforzo di umiltà morale e

di energia immaginativa per impedirle di restringergli la mente. In verità v’è

qualcosa di commovente e persino di tragico nel pensiero del

turista sventato, che avrebbe potuto restare a casa amando i Lapponi,

abbracciando i Cinesi e stringendosi al cuore i Patagoni, a Hampstead

o a Surbiton, se non fosse per il suo cieco e suicida impulso di andare a vedere che

aspetto avessero. Questo non vuol essere una sciocchezza; ancor meno vuol essere

la più sciocca specie di sciocchezza, che è il cinismo. Il vincolo umano

che egli sente a casa non è un’illusione. Al contrario, è piuttosto

una realtà interiore. L’uomo è dentro tutti gli uomini. In un senso reale ogni uomo può essere

dentro qualunque uomo. Ma viaggiare è lasciare l’interno e accostarsi

pericolosamente all’esterno. Finché pensava agli uomini in

astratto, come nude figure faticanti in qualche fregio classico, semplicemente come

coloro che faticano e amano i propri figli e muoiono, pensava la

verità fondamentale su di loro. Andando a osservare i loro insoliti

modi e costumi, li invita a mascherarsi con

fantastiche maschere e costumi. Molti internazionalisti moderni parlano come se

gli uomini di diverse nazionalità non dovessero che incontrarsi e mescolarsi e comprendersi

l’un l’altro. In realtà quello è il momento del supremo pericolo — il momento

in cui si incontrano. Potremmo rabbrividire, come al vecchio eufemismo per cui un

incontro significava un duello.

Il viaggio dovrebbe unire il divertimento all’istruzione; ma la maggior parte dei viaggiatori

si diverte tanto che rifiuta di essere istruita. Non li biasimo

per il fatto di divertirsi; è perfettamente naturale divertirsi di un

Olandese perché è olandese o di un Cinese perché è cinese. Dove sbagliano

è che prendono sul serio il proprio divertimento. Vi fondano

le loro serie idee di istruzione internazionale. Si è detto che l’

Inglese prova tristemente i suoi piaceri; e il piacere di disprezzare

gli stranieri è quello che prova più tristemente di tutti. Viene per schernire

e non resta a pregare, ma piuttosto a scomunicare. Quindi nelle

relazioni internazionali si ride troppo poco, e si sogghigna

troppo. Ma io credo che vi sia una via migliore, che consiste in gran

parte nel riso; una forma di amicizia tra le nazioni che è

in realtà fondata sulle differenze. Accennare a una tale via migliore è la

sola scusa di questo libro.

Comincerò le mie impressioni americane con due impressioni che ebbi prima di

andare in America. Una fu un episodio e l’altra un’idea; e

prese insieme illustrano l’atteggiamento che intendo. Il primo principio

è che nessuno dovrebbe vergognarsi di trovar buffa una cosa perché è

straniera; il secondo è che dovrebbe vergognarsi di ritenerla sbagliata

perché è buffa. La reazione dei suoi sensi e delle sue superficiali abitudini

mentali contro qualcosa di nuovo, e per lui anormale, è una reazione perfettamente

sana. Ma la mente che immagina che la semplice estraneità

possa provare alcunché sull’inferiorità è una mente assai inadeguata.

È inadeguata perfino nel criticare cose che possono davvero essere inferiori

alle cose qui in gioco. È assai meglio ridere di un negro perché

ha la faccia nera che sogghignare di lui perché ha il cranio sfuggente. È

proporzionalmente ancor più preferibile ridere piuttosto che giudicare nel

trattare con popoli altamente civili. Perciò pongo all’inizio

due esempi pratici di ciò che sentivo riguardo all’America prima di vederla; il

genere di cosa che un uomo ha il diritto di godersi come uno scherzo, e il genere di

cosa che ha il dovere di comprendere e rispettare, perché è la

spiegazione dello scherzo.

Quando mi recai al consolato americano per regolarizzare i miei passaporti, ero

capace di aspettarmi che il consolato americano fosse americano. Le ambasciate

e i consolati sono per tradizione come isole del suolo che

rappresentano; e ho spesso trovato la tradizione corrispondere a una verità. Ho

visto l’inconfondibile funzionario francese vivere di frittate e un

po’ di vino e servire le sue sacre astrazioni sotto le ultime

palme che orlano un deserto. Nel calore e nel frastuono di Turchi ed Egiziani litiganti,

mi sono imbattuto d’improvviso, come col fresco urto della sua stessa

doccia, nella svogliata amabilità del gentiluomo inglese. I

funzionari che interpellai erano molto americani, specie nell’essere molto

cortesi; poiché qualunque fosse stato l’umore o il significato di Martin

Chuzzlewit, ho sempre trovato gli Americani di gran lunga il popolo più cortese

del mondo. Mi misero tra le mani un modulo da compilare, in tutto

e per tutto simile ad altri moduli che avevo compilato in altri uffici passaporti.

Ma in realtà era assai diverso da qualsiasi modulo avessi mai compilato

in vita mia. Per lo meno somigliava un po’ a una versione più libera del gioco

chiamato ‘Confessioni’ che i miei amici e io inventammo in gioventù; un

questionario contenente domande come: ‘Se vedeste un rinoceronte

nel giardino sul davanti, che cosa fareste?’ Uno dei miei amici, ricordo,

scrisse: ‘Farei voto d’astinenza.’ Ma questa è un’altra storia, e potrebbe portare in scena il signor

Pussyfoot Johnson prima del suo tempo.

Una delle domande sul foglio era: ‘Siete un anarchico?’ Alla quale

un filosofo distaccato si sentirebbe naturalmente incline a rispondere: ‘Che

diavolo ve ne importa? Siete voi un ateo?’ insieme a qualche

scherzoso tentativo di contro-interrogare il funzionario su che cosa costituisca un

[Greek: archê]. Poi c’era la domanda: ‘Siete favorevole a

sovvertire il governo degli Stati Uniti con la forza?’ A ciò

scriverei: ‘Preferisco rispondere a questa domanda alla fine del mio viaggio

e non all’inizio.’ L’inquisitore, nella sua più che morbosa

curiosità, aveva poi scritto: ‘Siete un poligamo?’ La risposta a

this is, ‘No such luck’ or ‘Not such a fool,’ according to our

experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that

given to W. T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, ‘Shall

I slay my brother Boer?’—the answer that ran, ‘Never interfere in

family matters.’ But among many things that amused me almost to the

point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was

the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it

respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip

into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting

down to write with a beautiful gravity, ‘I am an anarchist. I hate you

all and wish to destroy you.’ Or, ‘I intend to subvert by force the

government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long

sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest

opportunity.’ Or again, ‘Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my

forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as

secretaries.’ There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these

answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists

are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and

they are certain to tell no lies.

Now that is a model of the sort of foreign practice, founded on foreign

problems, at which a man’s first impulse is naturally to laugh. Nor have

I any intention of apologising for my laughter. A man is perfectly

entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it

incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as

incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The

very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking

about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and

that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.

Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be easy enough

to suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal spirit

of inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all the

ancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there will be something

to be said later; but superficially it is true that this degree of

officialism is comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only the

year before I had occasion to have my papers passed by governments which

many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and

assassins; I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled

by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one

wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether

I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit

the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of

civil authority. These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did not

care about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally would not have

minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a

polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in

the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire

into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of

practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be easy to

argue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern

despotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop the

fancy that, as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the

American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition.

Only the traveller who stops at that point is totally wrong; and the

traveller only too often does stop at that point. He has found something

to make him laugh, and he will not suffer it to make him think. And the

remedy is not to unsay what he has said, not even, so to speak, to

unlaugh what he has laughed, not to deny that there is something unique

and curious about this American inquisition into our abstract opinions,

but rather to continue the train of thought, and follow the admirable

advice of Mr. H. G. Wells, who said, ‘It is not much good thinking of a

thing unless you think it out.’ It is not to deny that American

officialism is rather peculiar on this point, but to inquire what it

really is which makes America peculiar, or which is peculiar to America.

In short, it is to get some ultimate idea of what America is; and the

answer to that question will reveal something much deeper and grander

and more worthy of our intelligent interest.

It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the

American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it

does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a

compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish

Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only

nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth

with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of

Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also

theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all

men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give

them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It

certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn

atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority

from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern

political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas,

and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim

is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about

divine, at least about human things.

Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the

questa è: ‘Magari!’ oppure ‘Non sono così sciocco,’ a seconda della nostra

esperienza dell’altro sesso. Ma forse una risposta migliore sarebbe quella

data a W. T. Stead quando fece circolare la domanda retorica: ‘Devo

uccidere il mio fratello Boero?’ — la risposta che diceva: ‘Non immischiarti mai nelle

faccende di famiglia.’ Ma fra le molte cose che mi divertirono quasi al

punto di trattare il modulo con tale irriverenza, la più divertente fu

il pensiero dello spietato fuorilegge che si sentisse costretto a trattarlo

con rispetto. Mi piace pensare al bandito straniero, che cerca di introdursi

in America con documenti ufficiali sotto ufficiale protezione, e si mette

a scrivere con bella gravità: ‘Sono un anarchico. Vi odio

tutti e desidero distruggervi.’ Oppure: ‘Intendo sovvertire con la forza il

governo degli Stati Uniti quanto prima, piantando il lungo

coltello a fodero della tasca sinistra dei pantaloni nel signor Harding alla prima

occasione.’ O ancora: ‘Sì, sono un poligamo di sicuro, e le mie

quarantasette mogli mi accompagnano nel viaggio travestite da

segretarie.’ Pare esservi una certa semplicità di mente in queste

risposte; ed è rassicurante sapere che gli anarchici e i poligami

sono così puri e buoni che alla polizia basta porre loro domande ed

essi di certo non diranno menzogne.

Ora, questo è un modello del genere di pratica straniera, fondata su problemi

stranieri, di fronte alla quale il primo impulso di un uomo è naturalmente ridere. Né

ho alcuna intenzione di scusarmi della mia risata. Un uomo è perfettamente

autorizzato a ridere di una cosa perché gli capita di trovarla

incomprensibile. Ciò che non ha il diritto di fare è ridere di essa in quanto

incomprensibile, e poi criticarla come se la comprendesse. Il

fatto stesso della sua estraneità e del suo mistero dovrebbe indurlo a riflettere

sulle cause più profonde che rendono la gente così diversa da lui, e

ciò senza semplicemente presumere che debbano essergli inferiori.

Superficialmente è una faccenda piuttosto strana. Sarebbe abbastanza facile

suggerire che in questo l’America ha introdotto uno spirito del tutto anormale

di inquisizione; un’interferenza con la libertà ignota fra tutti gli

antichi dispotismi e aristocrazie. Su ciò vi sarà qualcosa

da dire più avanti; ma superficialmente è vero che questo grado di

burocratismo è relativamente unico. In un viaggio che feci appena l’

anno prima ebbi occasione di far vistare i miei documenti da governi che

molte persone rispettabili in Occidente identificherebbero vagamente con corsari e

assassini; sono stato dall’altra parte del Giordano, nella terra governata

da un rozzo capo arabo, dove la polizia somigliava tanto ai briganti che ci si

chiedeva che aspetto avessero i briganti. Ma non mi chiesero se

fossi venuto a sovvertire il potere dello Sceriffo; e non mostrarono

la minima curiosità per le mie opinioni personali sul fondamento etico dell’

autorità civile. Questi ministri dell’antico dispotismo musulmano non si

curavano se io fossi un anarchico; e naturalmente non si sarebbero

preoccupati se fossi stato un poligamo. Il capo arabo era probabilmente

egli stesso un poligamo. Questi schiavi dell’autocrazia asiatica si accontentavano,

alla vecchia maniera liberale, di giudicarmi dalle mie azioni; non indagavano

nei miei pensieri. Ritenevano il loro potere limitato alla limitazione della

pratica; non mi vietavano di sostenere una teoria. Sarebbe facile

argomentare qui che la democrazia occidentale perseguita là dove perfino il

dispotismo orientale tollera o emancipa. Sarebbe facile sviluppare la

fantasia che, in confronto ai sultani della Turchia o dell’Egitto, la

Costituzione americana sia una cosa come la Inquisizione spagnola.

Solo che il viaggiatore che si ferma a quel punto ha del tutto torto; e il

viaggiatore fin troppo spesso si ferma a quel punto. Ha trovato qualcosa

che lo fa ridere, e non permetterà che lo faccia pensare. E il

rimedio non è disdire ciò che ha detto, e nemmeno, per così dire,

ritirare la risata che ha riso, non negare che vi sia qualcosa di unico

e curioso in questa inquisizione americana sulle nostre opinioni astratte,

ma piuttosto proseguire il filo del pensiero, e seguire l’ammirevole

consiglio del signor H. G. Wells, che disse: ‘Non serve a molto pensare a una

cosa se non la si pensa fino in fondo.’ Non si tratta di negare che il burocratismo

americano sia piuttosto peculiare su questo punto, ma di indagare che cosa

sia davvero ciò che rende l’America peculiare, o ciò che è peculiare all’America.

In breve, si tratta di farsi qualche idea ultima di ciò che l’America è; e la

risposta a quella domanda rivelerà qualcosa di assai più profondo e grandioso

e più degno del nostro intelligente interesse.

Può esser parso qualcosa di men che un complimento paragonare la

Costituzione americana alla Inquisizione spagnola. Ma, per quanto strano, ciò

comporta una verità; e forse ancor più stranamente, comporta un

complimento. La Costituzione americana somiglia davvero all’Inquisizione

spagnola in questo: che è fondata su un credo. L’America è la sola

nazione al mondo che sia fondata su un credo. Quel credo è enunciato

con dogmatica e persino teologica lucidità nella Dichiarazione d’

Indipendenza; forse l’unico brano di politica pratica che sia anche

politica teorica e anche grande letteratura. Enuncia che tutti

gli uomini sono uguali nella loro pretesa alla giustizia, che i governi esistono per dar

loro quella giustizia, e che la loro autorità è per tale ragione giusta. Essa

certamente condanna l’anarchismo, e per implicazione condanna anche

l’ateismo, poiché nomina chiaramente il Creatore come l’autorità ultima

da cui questi eguali diritti derivano. Nessuno si aspetta che un moderno

sistema politico proceda logicamente nell’applicazione di simili dogmi,

e nella questione di Dio e del Governo è naturalmente Dio la cui pretesa

è presa più alla leggera. Il punto è che vi è un credo, se non intorno alle cose

divine, almeno intorno a quelle umane.

Ora, un credo è insieme la cosa più ampia e la più angusta al

world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of

all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of

all men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to

exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute

something else for Jewish religion or Greek philosophy. It was truly

said to be a net drawing in of all kinds; but a net of a certain

pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even of

the most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and true

among others of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been narrow

touching theology, it could not confess to being narrow about

nationality or ethnology. The Spanish Inquisition might be admittedly

Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish.

Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be

broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was

heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And

we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for

making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now in

a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the

same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experiment

of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a

melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a

certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The

melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was traced on the lines of

Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it

becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it

implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so

far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious

because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal,

precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And in

something of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist,

precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.

Now for America this is no idle theory. It may have been theoretical,

though it was thoroughly sincere, when that great Virginian gentleman

declared it in surroundings that still had something of the character of

an English countryside. It is not merely theoretical now. There is

nothing to prevent America being literally invaded by Turks, as she is

invaded by Jews or Bulgars. In the most exquisitely inconsequent of the

Bab Ballads, we are told concerning Pasha Bailey Ben:—

One morning knocked at half-past eight

A tall Red Indian at his gate.

In Turkey, as you ‘r’ p’raps aware,

Red Indians are extremely rare.

But the converse need by no means be true. There is nothing in the

nature of things to prevent an emigration of Turks increasing and

multiplying on the plains where the Red Indians wandered; there is

nothing to necessitate the Turks being extremely rare. The Red Indians,

alas, are likely to be rarer. And as I much prefer Red Indians to Turks,

not to mention Jews, I speak without prejudice; but the point here is

that America, partly by original theory and partly by historical

accident, does lie open to racial admixtures which most countries would

think incongruous or comic. That is why it is only fair to read any

American definitions or rules in a certain light, and relatively to a

rather unique position. It is not fair to compare the position of those

who may meet Turks in the back street with that of those who have never

met Turks except in the Bab Ballads. It is not fair simply to compare

America with England in its regulations about the Turk. In short, it is

not fair to do what almost every Englishman probably does; to look at

the American international examination paper, and laugh and be satisfied

with saying, ‘We don’t have any of that nonsense in England.’

We do not have any of that nonsense in England because we have never

attempted to have any of that philosophy in England. And, above all,

because we have the enormous advantage of feeling it natural to be

national, because there is nothing else to be. England in these days is

not well governed; England is not well educated; England suffers from

wealth and poverty that are not well distributed. But England is

English; esto perpetua. England is English as France is French or

Ireland Irish; the great mass of men taking certain national traditions

for granted. Now this gives us a totally different and a very much

easier task. We have not got an inquisition, because we have not got a

creed; but it is arguable that we do not need a creed, because we have

got a character. In any of the old nations the national unity is

preserved by the national type. Because we have a type we do not need to

have a test.

Take that innocent question, ‘Are you an anarchist?’ which is

intrinsically quite as impudent as ‘Are you an optimist?’ or ‘Are you a

philanthropist?’ I am not discussing here whether these things are

right, but whether most of us are in a position to know them rightly.

Now it is quite true that most Englishmen do not find it necessary to go

about all day asking each other whether they are anarchists. It is quite

true that the phrase occurs on no British forms that I have seen. But

this is not only because most of the Englishmen are not anarchists. It

is even more because even the anarchists are Englishmen. For instance,

it would be easy to make fun of the American formula by noting that the

cap would fit all sorts of bald academic heads. It might well be

maintained that Herbert Spencer was an anarchist. It is practically

certain that Auberon Herbert was an anarchist. But Herbert Spencer was

mondo. Nella sua natura è ampio quanto il suo disegno di una fratellanza di

tutti gli uomini. Nella sua natura è limitato dalla sua definizione della natura di

tutti gli uomini. Ciò valeva per la Chiesa cristiana, di cui si diceva con verità che

non escludeva né Giudeo né Greco, ma che sostituiva senz’altro

qualcos’altro alla religione ebraica o alla filosofia greca. Si diceva con verità che

fosse una rete che raccoglieva ogni sorta di cose; ma una rete di un certo

disegno, il disegno di Pietro il Pescatore. E questo è vero perfino delle

più disastrose distorsioni o degradazioni di quel credo; e vero

fra le altre dell’Inquisizione spagnola. Poteva essere angusta

in fatto di teologia, ma non poteva dichiararsi angusta in fatto di

nazionalità o etnologia. L’Inquisizione spagnola poteva essere, va riconosciuto,

inquisitoriale; ma l’Inquisizione spagnola non poteva essere meramente spagnola.

Un tale Spagnolo, anche quando era più angusto del proprio credo, doveva essere

più ampio del proprio impero. Poteva bruciare un filosofo perché era

eterodosso; ma doveva accettare un barbaro perché era ortodosso. E

vediamo, anche in tempi moderni, che la stessa Chiesa che si biasima perché

fa dei saggi degli eretici è pure biasimata perché fa dei selvaggi dei sacerdoti. Ora, in

una maniera assai più vaga e più evoluzionistica, c’è qualcosa della

stessa idea sullo sfondo del grande esperimento americano; l’esperimento

di una democrazia di razze diverse che è stata paragonata a un

crogiolo. Ma perfino quella metafora implica che il crogiolo stesso sia di una

certa forma e di una certa sostanza; una sostanza piuttosto solida. Il

crogiolo non deve fondersi. La forma originaria fu tracciata sulle linee della

democrazia jeffersoniana; e rimarrà in quella forma finché non

diventi informe. L’America invita tutti gli uomini a divenire cittadini; ma

implica il dogma che esista una cosa come la cittadinanza. Solo che, per

quanto riguarda il suo ideale primario, la sua esclusività è religiosa

perché non è razziale. Il missionario può condannare un cannibale,

proprio perché non può condannare un Isolano delle Sandwich. E con

qualcosa dello stesso spirito l’Americano può escludere un poligamo,

proprio perché non può escludere un Turco.

Ora, per l’America questa non è oziosa teoria. Poteva essere teorica,

benché fosse del tutto sincera, quando quel grande gentiluomo della Virginia

la dichiarò in un contesto che aveva ancora qualcosa del carattere di

una campagna inglese. Ora non è più meramente teorica. Non c’è

nulla che impedisca all’America di essere letteralmente invasa dai Turchi, come è

invasa da Ebrei o Bulgari. Nella più squisitamente sconclusionata delle

Bab Ballads, ci si dice a proposito del Pascià Bailey Ben: —

Un mattino bussò alle otto e mezza

un alto Pellerossa al suo cancello.

In Turchia, come forse saprai,

i Pellerossa sono assai rari.

Ma l’inverso non è affatto detto che sia vero. Non c’è nulla nella

natura delle cose che impedisca a un’emigrazione di Turchi di crescere e

moltiplicarsi nelle pianure dove vagavano i Pellerossa; non c’è

nulla che imponga che i Turchi siano assai rari. I Pellerossa,

ahimè, saranno probabilmente più rari. E poiché preferisco di gran lunga i Pellerossa ai Turchi,

per non parlare degli Ebrei, parlo senza pregiudizio; ma il punto qui è

che l’America, in parte per teoria originaria e in parte per accidente

storico, è davvero aperta a mescolanze razziali che la maggior parte dei paesi

riterrebbe incongrue o comiche. Ecco perché è giusto leggere ogni

definizione o regola americana in una certa luce, e in rapporto a una

posizione piuttosto unica. Non è giusto paragonare la posizione di coloro

che possono incontrare Turchi nel vicolo dietro casa con quella di coloro che non hanno mai

incontrato Turchi se non nelle Bab Ballads. Non è giusto semplicemente paragonare

l’America all’Inghilterra nelle sue norme sul Turco. In breve, non è

giusto fare ciò che probabilmente fa quasi ogni Inglese: guardare

il questionario internazionale americano, ridere e accontentarsi

di dire: ‘Da noi in Inghilterra non abbiamo di queste sciocchezze.’

Non abbiamo di queste sciocchezze in Inghilterra perché non abbiamo mai

tentato di avere di quella filosofia in Inghilterra. E, soprattutto,

perché abbiamo l’enorme vantaggio di sentire naturale l’essere

nazionali, perché non c’è altro da essere. L’Inghilterra di questi tempi non è

ben governata; l’Inghilterra non è ben istruita; l’Inghilterra soffre di

ricchezza e povertà che non sono ben distribuite. Ma l’Inghilterra è

inglese; esto perpetua. L’Inghilterra è inglese come la Francia è francese o

l’Irlanda irlandese; la gran massa degli uomini che dà per scontate certe tradizioni

nazionali. Ora, questo ci offre un compito totalmente diverso e assai

più facile. Non abbiamo un’inquisizione, perché non abbiamo un

credo; ma si può sostenere che non ci serva un credo, perché abbiamo

un carattere. In qualsiasi delle vecchie nazioni l’unità nazionale è

preservata dal tipo nazionale. Poiché abbiamo un tipo, non abbiamo bisogno di

avere un test.

Prendete quella innocente domanda, ‘Siete un anarchico?’, che è

intrinsecamente altrettanto impudente di ‘Siete un ottimista?’ o ‘Siete un

filantropo?’ Non discuto qui se queste cose siano

giuste, ma se i più di noi siano in grado di conoscerle rettamente.

Ora, è verissimo che la maggior parte degli Inglesi non trova necessario andare

in giro tutto il giorno a chiedersi l’un l’altro se sono anarchici. È del tutto

vero che la frase non compare su alcun modulo britannico che io abbia visto. Ma

ciò non è solo perché la maggior parte degli Inglesi non è anarchica. È

ancor più perché anche gli anarchici sono Inglesi. Per esempio,

sarebbe facile prendersi gioco della formula americana notando che il

berretto calzerebbe ogni sorta di calve teste accademiche. Si potrebbe bene

sostenere che Herbert Spencer fosse un anarchico. È praticamente

certo che Auberon Herbert fosse un anarchico. Ma Herbert Spencer era

an extraordinarily typical Englishman of the Nonconformist middle class.

And Auberon Herbert was an extraordinarily typical English aristocrat of

the old and genuine aristocracy. Every one knew in his heart that the

squire would not throw a bomb at the Queen, and the Nonconformist would

not throw a bomb at anybody. Every one knew that there was something

subconscious in a man like Auberon Herbert, which would have come out

only in throwing bombs at the enemies of England; as it did come out in

his son and namesake, the generous and unforgotten, who fell flinging

bombs from the sky far beyond the German line. Every one knows that

normally, in the last resort, the English gentleman is patriotic. Every

one knows that the English Nonconformist is national even when he denies

that he is patriotic. Nothing is more notable indeed than the fact that

nobody is more stamped with the mark of his own nation than the man who

says that there ought to be no nations. Somebody called Cobden the

International Man; but no man could be more English than Cobden.

Everybody recognises Tolstoy as the iconoclast of all patriotism; but

nobody could be more Russian than Tolstoy. In the old countries where

there are these national types, the types may be allowed to hold any

theories. Even if they hold certain theories, they are unlikely to do

certain things. So the conscientious objector, in the English sense,

may be and is one of the peculiar by-products of England. But the

conscientious objector will probably have a conscientious objection to

throwing bombs.

Now I am very far from intending to imply that these American tests are

good tests, or that there is no danger of tyranny becoming the

temptation of America. I shall have something to say later on about that

temptation or tendency. Nor do I say that they apply consistently this

conception of a nation with the soul of a church, protected by religious

and not racial selection. If they did apply that principle consistently,

they would have to exclude pessimists and rich cynics who deny the

democratic ideal; an excellent thing but a rather improbable one. What I

say is that when we realise that this principle exists at all, we see

the whole position in a totally different perspective. We say that the

Americans are doing something heroic, or doing something insane, or

doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of simply

wondering what the devil they are doing.

When we realise the democratic design of such a cosmopolitan

commonwealth, and compare it with our insular reliance or instincts, we

see at once why such a thing has to be not only democratic but dogmatic.

We see why in some points it tends to be inquisitive or intolerant. Any

one can see the practical point by merely transferring into private life

a problem like that of the two academic anarchists, who might by a

coincidence be called the two Herberts. Suppose a man said, ‘Buffle, my

old Oxford tutor, wants to meet you; I wish you’d ask him down for a day

or two. He has the oddest opinions, but he’s very stimulating.’ It would

not occur to us that the oddity of the Oxford don’s opinions would lead

him to blow up the house; because the Oxford don is an English type.

Suppose somebody said, ‘Do let me bring old Colonel Robinson down for

the week-end; he’s a bit of a crank but quite interesting.’ We should

not anticipate the colonel running amuck with a carving-knife and

offering up human sacrifice in the garden; for these are not among the

daily habits of an old English colonel; and because we know his habits,

we do not care about his opinions. But suppose somebody offered to bring

a person from the interior of Kamskatka to stay with us for a week or

two, and added that his religion was a very extraordinary religion, we

should feel a little more inquisitive about what kind of religion it

was. If somebody wished to add a Hairy Ainu to the family party at

Christmas, explaining that his point of view was so individual and

interesting, we should want to know a little more about it and him. We

should be tempted to draw up as fantastic an examination paper as that

presented to the emigrant going to America. We should ask what a Hairy

Ainu was, and how hairy he was, and above all what sort of Ainu he was.

Would etiquette require us to ask him to bring his wife? And if we did

ask him to bring his wife, how many wives would he bring? In short, as

in the American formula, is he a polygamist? Merely as a point of

housekeeping and accommodation the question is not irrelevant. Is the

Hairy Ainu content with hair, or does he wear any clothes? If the police

insist on his wearing clothes, will he recognise the authority of the

police? In short, as in the American formula, is he an anarchist?

Of course this generalisation about America, like other historical

things, is subject to all sorts of cross divisions and exceptions, to

be considered in their place. The negroes are a special problem, because

of what white men in the past did to them. The Japanese are a special

problem, because of what men fear that they in the future may do to

white men. The Jews are a special problem, because of what they and the

Gentiles, in the past, present, and future, seem to have the habit of

doing to each other. But the point is not that nothing exists in America

except this idea; it is that nothing like this idea exists anywhere

except in America. This idea is not internationalism; on the contrary it

is decidedly nationalism. The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to

make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of

making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In

a word, what is unique is not America but what is called

Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing

un Inglese straordinariamente tipico della classe media anticonformista.

E Auberon Herbert era un aristocratico inglese straordinariamente tipico della

vecchia e genuina aristocrazia. Ognuno sapeva in cuor suo che lo

squire non avrebbe lanciato una bomba contro la Regina, e l’anticonformista non

avrebbe lanciato una bomba contro nessuno. Ognuno sapeva che c’era qualcosa

di subconscio in un uomo come Auberon Herbert, che sarebbe emerso

solo nel lanciare bombe contro i nemici dell’Inghilterra; come in effetti emerse nel

suo figlio e omonimo, il generoso e non dimenticato, che cadde scagliando

bombe dal cielo ben oltre la linea tedesca. Ognuno sa che

normalmente, in ultima istanza, il gentiluomo inglese è patriottico. Ognuno

sa che l’anticonformista inglese è nazionale anche quando nega

di essere patriottico. Nulla è più notevole, in verità, del fatto che

nessuno è più segnato dal marchio della propria nazione dell’uomo che

dice che non dovrebbero esserci nazioni. Qualcuno chiamò Cobden l’

Uomo Internazionale; ma nessun uomo poteva essere più inglese di Cobden.

Tutti riconoscono in Tolstoj l’iconoclasta di ogni patriottismo; ma

nessuno poteva essere più russo di Tolstoj. Nei vecchi paesi dove

esistono questi tipi nazionali, ai tipi si può permettere di sostenere qualsiasi

teoria. Anche se sostengono certe teorie, è improbabile che facciano

certe cose. Così l’obiettore di coscienza, nel senso inglese,

può essere ed è uno dei peculiari sottoprodotti dell’Inghilterra. Ma l’

obiettore di coscienza avrà probabilmente un’obiezione di coscienza al

lanciare bombe.

Ora, sono ben lungi dall’intendere insinuare che questi test americani siano

buoni test, o che non vi sia pericolo che la tirannia divenga la

tentazione dell’America. Avrò qualcosa da dire più avanti su quella

tentazione o tendenza. Né dico che essi applichino coerentemente questa

concezione di una nazione con l’anima di una chiesa, protetta da selezione religiosa

e non razziale. Se applicassero quel principio coerentemente,

dovrebbero escludere i pessimisti e i ricchi cinici che negano l’

ideale democratico; cosa eccellente ma piuttosto improbabile. Ciò che

dico è che, quando ci rendiamo conto che questo principio esiste affatto, vediamo

l’intera posizione in una prospettiva totalmente diversa. Diciamo che gli

Americani stanno facendo qualcosa di eroico, o qualcosa di folle, o

lo stanno facendo in modo impraticabile o indegno, invece di semplicemente

chiederci che diavolo stiano facendo.

Quando ci rendiamo conto del disegno democratico di un tale

commonwealth cosmopolita, e lo paragoniamo alla nostra insulare fiducia o ai nostri istinti,

vediamo subito perché una tale cosa debba essere non solo democratica ma dogmatica.

Vediamo perché in certi punti tenda a essere inquisitrice o intollerante. Chiunque

può cogliere il punto pratico semplicemente trasferendo nella vita privata

un problema come quello dei due anarchici accademici, che per una

coincidenza potrebbero chiamarsi i due Herbert. Supponiamo che un uomo dicesse: ‘Buffle, il mio

vecchio tutore di Oxford, desidera conoscerti; vorrei che lo invitassi per un giorno

o due. Ha le opinioni più strambe, ma è molto stimolante.’ Non ci

verrebbe in mente che la stramberia delle opinioni del docente di Oxford lo portasse

a far saltare in aria la casa; perché il docente di Oxford è un tipo inglese.

Supponiamo che qualcuno dicesse: ‘Lascia che porti il vecchio Colonnello Robinson per

il fine settimana; è un po’ svitato ma piuttosto interessante.’ Non

prevedremmo che il colonnello dia di matto con un trinciante e

offra un sacrificio umano nel giardino; poiché queste non sono fra le

abitudini quotidiane di un vecchio colonnello inglese; e poiché conosciamo le sue abitudini,

non ci curiamo delle sue opinioni. Ma supponiamo che qualcuno si offrisse di portare

una persona dall’interno della Kamčatka a stare con noi per una settimana o

due, e aggiungesse che la sua religione era una religione assai straordinaria,

ci sentiremmo un po’ più curiosi di sapere che genere di religione

fosse. Se qualcuno desiderasse aggiungere un Ainu Peloso alla festa di famiglia a

Natale, spiegando che il suo punto di vista era così individuale e

interessante, vorremmo sapere qualcosa di più su di esso e su di lui. Saremmo

tentati di stilare un questionario tanto fantastico quanto quello

presentato all’emigrante che va in America. Chiederemmo che cosa fosse un Ainu

Peloso, e quanto fosse peloso, e soprattutto che sorta di Ainu fosse.

L’etichetta esigerebbe che gli chiedessimo di portare la moglie? E se gli

chiedessimo di portare la moglie, quante mogli porterebbe? In breve, come

nella formula americana, è un poligamo? Anche solo come questione di

gestione domestica e di alloggio la domanda non è irrilevante. L’Ainu

Peloso si accontenta del pelo, o indossa qualche veste? Se la polizia

insiste perché indossi vesti, riconoscerà l’autorità della

polizia? In breve, come nella formula americana, è un anarchico?

Naturalmente questa generalizzazione sull’America, come altre cose

storiche, è soggetta a ogni sorta di divisioni trasversali ed eccezioni, da

considerarsi a suo luogo. I negri sono un problema speciale, per

ciò che gli uomini bianchi in passato fecero loro. I Giapponesi sono un problema

speciale, per ciò che gli uomini temono che essi in futuro possano fare agli

uomini bianchi. Gli Ebrei sono un problema speciale, per ciò che essi e i

Gentili, nel passato, nel presente e nel futuro, paiono avere l’abitudine di

farsi a vicenda. Ma il punto non è che nulla esista in America

tranne questa idea; è che nulla di simile a questa idea esiste in alcun luogo

tranne che in America. Questa idea non è internazionalismo; al contrario

è decisamente nazionalismo. Gli Americani sono molto patriottici, e desiderano

rendere i loro nuovi cittadini Americani patriottici. Ma è l’idea di

fare una nuova nazione letteralmente di qualsiasi vecchia nazione capiti. In

una parola, ciò che è unico non è l’America ma ciò che si chiama

Americanizzazione. Non comprendiamo nulla finché non comprendiamo lo stupefacente

ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not

trying to Anglicise thousands of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders.

France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or

German prisoners of war. America is the one place in the world where

this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on.

And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalisation.

It would be truer to say it is the nationalisation of the

internationalised. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out

of exiles. This is what at once illuminates and softens the moral

regulations which we may really think faddist or fanatical. They are

abnormal; but in one sense this experiment of a home for the homeless is

abnormal. In short, it has long been recognised that America was an

asylum. It is only since Prohibition that it has looked a little like a

lunatic asylum.

It was before sailing for America, as I have said, that I stood with the

official paper in my hand and these thoughts in my head. It was while I

stood on English soil that I passed through the two stages of smiling

and then sympathising; of realising that my momentary amusement, at

being asked if I were not an Anarchist, was partly due to the fact that

I was not an American. And in truth I think there are some things a man

ought to know about America before he sees it. What we know of a country

beforehand may not affect what we see that it is; but it will vitally

affect what we appreciate it for being, because it will vitally affect

what we expect it to be. I can honestly say that I had never expected

America to be what nine-tenths of the newspaper critics invariably

assume it to be. I never thought it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony,

knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different

colonists. During the war I felt that the very worst propaganda for the

Allies was the propaganda for the Anglo-Saxons. I tried to point out

that in one way America is nearer to Europe than England is. If she is

not nearer to Bulgaria, she is nearer to Bulgars; if she is not nearer

to Bohemia, she is nearer to Bohemians. In my New York hotel the head

waiter in the dining-room was a Bohemian; the head waiter in the

grill-room was a Bulgar. Americans have nationalities at the end of the

street which for us are at the ends of the earth. I did my best to

persuade my countrymen not to appeal to the American as if he were a

rather dowdy Englishman, who had been rusticating in the provinces and

had not heard the latest news about the town. I shall record later some

of those arresting realities which the traveller does not expect; and

which, in some cases I fear, he actually does not see because he does

not expect. I shall try to do justice to the psychology of what Mr.

Belloc has called ‘Eye-Openers in Travel.’ But there are some things

about America that a man ought to see even with his eyes shut. One is

that a state that came into existence solely through its repudiation and

abhorrence of the British Crown is not likely to be a respectful copy of

the British Constitution. Another is that the chief mark of the

Declaration of Independence is something that is not only absent from

the British Constitution, but something which all our constitutionalists

have invariably thanked God, with the jolliest boasting and bragging,

that they had kept out of the British Constitution. It is the thing

called abstraction or academic logic. It is the thing which such jolly

people call theory; and which those who can practise it call thought.

And the theory or thought is the very last to which English people are

accustomed, either by their social structure or their traditional

teaching. It is the theory of equality. It is the pure classic

conception that no man must aspire to be anything more than a citizen,

and that no man should endure to be anything less. It is by no means

especially intelligible to an Englishman, who tends at his best to the

virtues of the gentleman and at his worst to the vices of the snob. The

idealism of England, or if you will the romance of England, has not been

primarily the romance of the citizen. But the idealism of America, we

may safely say, still revolves entirely round the citizen and his

romance. The realities are quite another matter, and we shall consider

in its place the question of whether the ideal will be able to shape

the realities or will merely be beaten shapeless by them. The ideal is

besieged by inequalities of the most towering and insane description in

the industrial and economic field. It may be devoured by modern

capitalism, perhaps the worst inequality that ever existed among men. Of

all that we shall speak later. But citizenship is still the American

ideal; there is an army of actualities opposed to that ideal; but there

is no ideal opposed to that ideal. American plutocracy has never got

itself respected like English aristocracy. Citizenship is the American

ideal; and it has never been the English ideal. But it is surely an

ideal that may stir some imaginative generosity and respect in an

Englishman, if he will condescend to be also a man. In this vision of

moulding many peoples into the visible image of the citizen, he may see

a spiritual adventure which he can admire from the outside, at least as

much as he admires the valour of the Moslems and much more than he

admires the virtues of the Middle Ages. He need not set himself to

develop equality, but he need not set himself to misunderstand it. He

may at least understand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant, and he may

possibly find some assistance in this task by reading what they said. He

may realise that equality is not some crude fairy tale about all men

being equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe

ambizione di americanizzare il camciadalo e l’ainu peloso. Non stiamo

cercando di anglicizzare migliaia di cuochi francesi o suonatori d’organetto italiani.

La Francia non cerca di gallicizzare migliaia di gitanti inglesi o

di prigionieri di guerra tedeschi. L’America è l’unico luogo al mondo dove

questo processo, sano o malsano, possibile o impossibile, sia in corso.

E il processo, come ho fatto notare, non è internazionalizzazione.

Sarebbe più esatto dire che è la nazionalizzazione degli

internazionalizzati. È fare una patria di vagabondi e una nazione

di esuli. È questo che al tempo stesso illumina e addolcisce le

regolazioni morali che possiamo davvero giudicare maniache o fanatiche. Sono

anomale; ma in un certo senso questo esperimento di una patria per i senza patria è

anomalo. Insomma, si è riconosciuto da tempo che l’America era un

asilo. È solo dal Proibizionismo che ha preso un poco l’aria di un

asilo di folli.

Fu prima di salpare per l’America, come ho detto, che me ne stavo con il

documento ufficiale in mano e questi pensieri in testa. Fu mentre me ne

stavo sul suolo inglese che attraversai le due fasi del sorridere

e poi del provare simpatia; del rendermi conto che il mio momentaneo divertimento, per

essermi sentito chiedere se non fossi un anarchico, era in parte dovuto al fatto che

non ero un americano. E in verità credo vi siano alcune cose che un uomo

dovrebbe sapere sull’America prima di vederla. Ciò che sappiamo di un paese

in anticipo può non influire su ciò che vediamo che esso è; ma influirà in modo vitale

su ciò per cui lo apprezziamo, perché influirà in modo vitale

su ciò che ci aspettiamo che sia. Posso dire onestamente di non essermi mai aspettato

che l’America fosse ciò che nove decimi dei critici dei giornali immancabilmente

danno per scontato che sia. Non l’ho mai creduta una sorta di colonia anglosassone,

sapendo che era sempre più gremita di folle di coloni assai

diversi. Durante la guerra sentivo che la peggiore propaganda in assoluto per gli

Alleati fosse la propaganda a favore degli anglosassoni. Cercai di far notare

che per un verso l’America è più vicina all’Europa di quanto lo sia l’Inghilterra. Se non è

più vicina alla Bulgaria, è più vicina ai Bulgari; se non è più vicina

alla Boemia, è più vicina ai Boemi. Nel mio albergo di New York il primo

cameriere della sala da pranzo era un Boemo; il primo cameriere della

grill-room era un Bulgaro. Gli Americani hanno in fondo alla

strada nazionalità che per noi stanno ai confini della terra. Feci del mio meglio per

persuadere i miei connazionali a non rivolgersi all’Americano come se fosse un

Inglese piuttosto sciatto, che si fosse ritirato in campagna nelle province e

non avesse udito le ultime notizie della città. Registrerò più avanti alcune

di quelle sorprendenti realtà che il viaggiatore non si aspetta; e

che, in certi casi temo, in realtà non vede perché non le

aspetta. Cercherò di rendere giustizia alla psicologia di ciò che il signor

Belloc ha chiamato ‘Rivelazioni di viaggio.’ Ma vi sono alcune cose

sull’America che un uomo dovrebbe vedere anche a occhi chiusi. Una è

che uno Stato venuto all’esistenza unicamente attraverso il proprio ripudio e

la propria avversione per la Corona britannica difficilmente sarà una copia rispettosa della

Costituzione britannica. Un’altra è che il tratto principale della

Dichiarazione d’Indipendenza è qualcosa che non solo è assente dalla

Costituzione britannica, ma qualcosa che tutti i nostri costituzionalisti

hanno immancabilmente ringraziato Dio, con la più allegra iattanza e vanteria,

di aver tenuto fuori dalla Costituzione britannica. È la cosa

chiamata astrazione o logica accademica. È la cosa che gente tanto gioviale

chiama teoria; e che quanti sanno praticarla chiamano pensiero.

E la teoria, o pensiero, è l’ultima cosa a cui gli Inglesi siano

avvezzi, sia per la loro struttura sociale sia per il loro tradizionale

insegnamento. È la teoria dell’uguaglianza. È la pura concezione classica

secondo cui nessun uomo deve aspirare a essere qualcosa di più di un cittadino,

e nessun uomo deve sopportare di essere qualcosa di meno. Non è affatto

particolarmente intelligibile a un Inglese, che tende nel suo meglio alle

virtù del gentiluomo e nel suo peggio ai vizi dello snob. L’

idealismo dell’Inghilterra, o se preferite il romanticismo dell’Inghilterra, non è stato

principalmente il romanticismo del cittadino. Ma l’idealismo dell’America, possiamo

dirlo con sicurezza, ruota ancora interamente intorno al cittadino e al suo

romanticismo. Le realtà sono tutt’altra faccenda, e considereremo

a suo luogo la questione se l’ideale sarà in grado di plasmare

le realtà o ne verrà semplicemente ridotto informe a suon di colpi. L’ideale è

assediato da disuguaglianze della più torreggiante e folle specie nel

campo industriale ed economico. Può essere divorato dal moderno

capitalismo, forse la peggiore disuguaglianza mai esistita fra gli uomini. Di

tutto ciò parleremo più avanti. Ma la cittadinanza è ancora l’ideale

americano; c’è un esercito di realtà opposto a quell’ideale; ma non

c’è alcun ideale opposto a quell’ideale. La plutocrazia americana non è mai riuscita a

farsi rispettare come l’aristocrazia inglese. La cittadinanza è l’ideale

americano; e non è mai stato l’ideale inglese. Ma è certo un

ideale che può destare una certa generosità immaginativa e rispetto in un

Inglese, se egli si degnerà di essere anche un uomo. In questa visione di

plasmare molti popoli nell’immagine visibile del cittadino, egli può scorgere

un’avventura spirituale che può ammirare dall’esterno, almeno

quanto ammira il valore dei Musulmani e assai più di quanto

ammiri le virtù del Medioevo. Non ha bisogno di mettersi a

sviluppare l’uguaglianza, ma non ha bisogno di mettersi a fraintenderla. Egli

può almeno capire ciò che Jefferson e Lincoln intendevano, e può

forse trovare qualche aiuto in questo compito leggendo ciò che dissero. Egli

può rendersi conto che l’uguaglianza non è una rozza favola secondo cui tutti gli uomini

siano ugualmente alti o ugualmente scaltri; cosa che non solo non possiamo credere

but cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by

which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity

as intangible as death. He may at least be a philosopher and see that

equality is an idea; and not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics

who, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne in

tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other twenty times over, with

unwearied iteration, that equality is an illusion.

In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extreme

disproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing of

changing lights and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies and

distortions. We find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find

him forgotten; we see a race dominant and cannot linger to see it decay.

It is the experience of men that always returns to the equality of men;

it is the average that ultimately justifies the average man. It is when

men have seen and suffered much and come at the end of more elaborate

experiments, that they see men as men under an equal light of death and

daily laughter; and none the less mysterious for being many. Nor is it

in vain that these Western democrats have sought the blazonry of their

flag in that great multitude of immortal lights that endure behind the

fires we see, and gathered them into the corner of Old Glory whose

ground is like the glittering night. For veritably, in the spirit as

well as in the symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our

skies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration; and wherever

the old shadow stoops upon the earth, the stars return.

A Meditation in a New York Hotel

All this must begin with an apology and not an apologia. When I went

wandering about the States disguised as a lecturer, I was well aware

that I was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. I was even in

the worst possible position to be a sight-seer. A lecturer to American

audiences can hardly be in the holiday mood of a sight-seer. It is

rather the audience that is sight-seeing; even if it is seeing a rather

melancholy sight. Some say that people come to see the lecturer and not

to hear him; in which case it seems rather a pity that he should disturb

and distress their minds with a lecture. He might merely display himself

on a stand or platform for a stipulated sum; or be exhibited like a

monster in a menagerie. The circus elephant is not expected to make a

speech. But it is equally true that the circus elephant is not allowed

to write a book. His impressions of travel would be somewhat sketchy and

perhaps a little over-specialised. In merely travelling from circus to

circus he would, so to speak, move in rather narrow circles. Jumbo the

great elephant (with whom I am hardly so ambitious as to compare

myself), before he eventually went to the Barnum show, passed a

considerable and I trust happy part of his life in Regent’s Park. But if

he had written a book on England, founded on his impressions of the Zoo,

it might have been a little disproportionate and even misleading in its

version of the flora and fauna of that country. He might imagine that

lions and leopards were commoner than they are in our hedgerows and

country lanes, or that the head and neck of a giraffe was as native to

our landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apologise in

anticipation for a probable lack of proportion in this work. Like the

elephant, I may have seen too much of a special enclosure where a

special sort of lions are gathered together. I may exaggerate the

territorial, as distinct from the vertical space occupied by the

spiritual giraffe; for the giraffe may surely be regarded as an example

of Uplift, and is even, in a manner of speaking, a high-brow. Above all,

I shall probably make generalisations that are much too general; and are

insufficient through being exaggerative. To this sort of doubt all my

impressions are subject; and among them the negative generalisation with

which I shall begin this rambling meditation on American hotels.

In all my American wanderings I never saw such a thing as an inn. They

may exist; but they do not arrest the traveller upon every road as they

do in England and in Europe. The saloons no longer existed when I was

there, owing to the recent reform which restricted intoxicants to the

wealthier classes. But we feel that the saloons have been there; if one

may so express it, their absence is still present. They remain in the

structure of the street and the idiom of the language. But the saloons

were not inns. If they had been inns, it would have been far harder even

for the power of modern plutocracy to root them out. There will be a

very different chase when the White Hart is hunted to the forests or

when the Red Lion turns to bay. But people could not feel about the

American saloon as they will feel about the English inns. They could not

feel that the Prohibitionist, that vulgar chucker-out, was chucking

Chaucer out of the Tabard and Shakespeare out of the Mermaid. In justice

to the American Prohibitionists it must be realised that they were not

doing quite such desecration; and that many of them felt the saloon a

specially poisonous sort of place. They did feel that drinking-places

were used only as drug-shops. So they have effected the great

reconstruction, by which it will be necessary to use only drug-shops as

drinking-places. But I am not dealing here with the problem of

Prohibition except in so far as it is involved in the statement that the

saloons were in no sense inns. Secondly, of course, there are the

hotels. There are indeed. There are hotels toppling to the stars, hotels

covering the acreage of villages, hotels in multitudinous number like a

ma non possiamo credere che qualcuno vi creda. È un assoluto morale per

cui tutti gli uomini hanno un valore invariabile e indistruttibile e una dignità

intangibile come la morte. Può almeno essere un filosofo e vedere che

l’uguaglianza è un’idea; e non essere semplicemente uno di quegli scettici dalla testa molle

che, saliti con bassi trucchi in alto loco, bevono cattivo champagne in

squallidi salotti d’albergo, e si ripetono l’un l’altro venti volte, con

instancabile iterazione, che l’uguaglianza è un’illusione.

In verità è la disuguaglianza a essere l’illusione. L’estrema

sproporzione fra gli uomini, che ci pare di vedere nella vita, è cosa fatta di

luci mutevoli e di ombre che si allungano, un crepuscolo pieno di fantasie e

distorsioni. Troviamo un uomo famoso e non possiamo vivere abbastanza a lungo da

vederlo dimenticato; vediamo una razza dominante e non possiamo indugiare a vederla decadere.

È l’esperienza degli uomini che ritorna sempre all’uguaglianza degli uomini;

è la media che in ultimo giustifica l’uomo medio. È quando

gli uomini hanno visto e sofferto molto e giungono al termine di esperimenti più elaborati,

che vedono gli uomini come uomini sotto un’eguale luce di morte e

di quotidiano riso; e non meno misteriosi per essere molti. Né è

invano che questi democratici d’Occidente hanno cercato il blasone della loro

bandiera in quella grande moltitudine di luci immortali che perdurano dietro i

fuochi che vediamo, e le hanno raccolte nell’angolo di Old Glory il cui

fondo è come la notte scintillante. Poiché veramente, nello spirito tanto

quanto nel simbolo, soli e lune e meteore passano e riempiono i nostri

cieli d’una conflagrazione fugace e quasi teatrale; e ovunque

la vecchia ombra si china sulla terra, le stelle ritornano.

Una meditazione in un albergo di New York

Tutto ciò deve cominciare con delle scuse e non con un’apologia. Quando andai

vagando per gli Stati travestito da conferenziere, ero ben consapevole

di non essere sufficientemente ben travestito per fare la spia. Ero anzi nella

peggiore posizione possibile per fare il turista. Un conferenziere davanti a un pubblico

americano difficilmente può trovarsi nell’umore vacanziero del turista. È

piuttosto il pubblico a fare il turista; anche se contempla uno spettacolo alquanto

malinconico. C’è chi dice che la gente venga a vedere il conferenziere e non

a udirlo; nel qual caso sembra un vero peccato che egli debba disturbare

e affliggere le loro menti con una conferenza. Potrebbe semplicemente esibirsi

su un palco o una pedana per una somma pattuita; o essere esposto come un

mostro in un serraglio. Dall’elefante del circo non ci si aspetta che tenga un

discorso. Ma è altrettanto vero che all’elefante del circo non è concesso

di scrivere un libro. Le sue impressioni di viaggio sarebbero un po’ sommarie e

forse un po’ troppo specializzate. Nel viaggiare unicamente di circo in

circo si muoverebbe, per così dire, in cerchi piuttosto ristretti. Jumbo il

grande elefante (con cui non sono così ambizioso da

paragonarmi), prima di andare infine allo spettacolo di Barnum, trascorse una

considerevole e spero felice parte della sua vita a Regent’s Park. Ma se

avesse scritto un libro sull’Inghilterra, fondato sulle sue impressioni dello Zoo,

esso sarebbe potuto risultare un po’ sproporzionato e persino fuorviante nella sua

versione della flora e della fauna di quel paese. Potrebbe immaginare che

leoni e leopardi fossero più comuni di quanto siano nelle nostre siepi e

nei nostri viottoli di campagna, o che il capo e il collo della giraffa fossero altrettanto propri

dei nostri paesaggi quanto il campanile di un villaggio. Ed ecco perché mi scuso in

anticipo per una probabile mancanza di proporzione in quest’opera. Come l’

elefante, posso aver visto troppo di uno speciale recinto dove una

speciale sorta di leoni è radunata insieme. Posso esagerare lo

spazio territoriale, a differenza di quello verticale occupato dalla

giraffa spirituale; poiché la giraffa può certo essere considerata un esempio

di Elevazione, ed è persino, in un certo senso, un’intellettuale. Soprattutto,

farò probabilmente generalizzazioni fin troppo generali; e

insufficienti proprio perché esagerate. A questa sorta di dubbio tutte le mie

impressioni sono soggette; e fra esse la generalizzazione negativa con

cui darò inizio a questa vagabonda meditazione sugli alberghi americani.

In tutti i miei vagabondaggi americani non vidi mai una cosa come una locanda. Possono

esistere; ma non fermano il viaggiatore su ogni strada come

fanno in Inghilterra e in Europa. I saloon non esistevano più quando vi

fui, a causa della recente riforma che riservava gli alcolici alle

classi più agiate. Ma sentiamo che i saloon ci sono stati; se così

si può dire, la loro assenza è ancora presente. Rimangono nella

struttura della strada e nell’idioma della lingua. Ma i saloon

non erano locande. Se fossero stati locande, sarebbe stato assai più arduo persino

per il potere della moderna plutocrazia sradicarli. Vi sarà una

caccia assai diversa quando il Cervo Bianco sarà braccato nelle foreste o

quando il Leone Rosso si volgerà a far fronte. Ma la gente non poteva provare per il

saloon americano ciò che proverà per le locande inglesi. Non potevano

sentire che il Proibizionista, quel volgare buttafuori, stesse buttando

Chaucer fuori dal Tabard e Shakespeare fuori dalla Mermaid. In giustizia

verso i Proibizionisti americani bisogna riconoscere che non stavano

compiendo proprio una simile profanazione; e che molti di loro sentivano il saloon un

luogo particolarmente velenoso. Sentivano davvero che i luoghi di mescita

erano usati soltanto come farmacie. Così hanno attuato la grande

ricostruzione, per cui sarà necessario usare soltanto le farmacie come

luoghi di mescita. Ma qui non mi occupo del problema del

Proibizionismo se non nella misura in cui è implicato nell’affermazione che i

saloon non erano in alcun senso locande. In secondo luogo, naturalmente, ci sono gli

alberghi. Eccome. Ci sono alberghi che svettano fino alle stelle, alberghi

che coprono la superficie di villaggi, alberghi in numero moltitudinario come una

mob of Babylonian or Assyrian monuments; but the hotels also are not

inns.

Broadly speaking, there is only one hotel in America. The pattern of it,

which is a very rational pattern, is repeated in cities as remote from

each other as the capitals of European empires. You may find that hotel

rising among the red blooms of the warm spring woods of Nebraska, or

whitened with Canadian snows near the eternal noise of Niagara. And

before touching on this solid and simple pattern itself, I may remark

that the same system of symmetry runs through all the details of the

interior. As one hotel is like another hotel, so one hotel floor is like

another hotel floor. If the passage outside your bedroom door, or

hallway as it is called, contains, let us say, a small table with a

green vase and a stuffed flamingo, or some trifle of the sort, you may

be perfectly certain that there is exactly the same table, vase, and

flamingo on every one of the thirty-two landings of that towering

habitation. This is where it differs most perhaps from the crooked

landings and unexpected levels of the old English inns, even when they

call themselves hotels. To me there was something weird, like a magic

multiplication, in the exquisite sameness of these suites. It seemed to

suggest the still atmosphere of some eerie psychological story. I once

myself entertained the notion of a story, in which a man was to be

prevented from entering his house (the scene of some crime or calamity)

by people who painted and furnished the next house to look exactly like

it; the assimilation going to the most fantastic lengths, such as

altering the numbering of houses in the street. I came to America and

found an hotel fitted and upholstered throughout for the enactment of my

phantasmal fraud. I offer the skeleton of my story with all humility to

some of the admirable lady writers of detective stories in America, to

Miss Carolyn Wells, or Miss Mary Roberts Rhinehart, or Mrs. A. K. Green

of the unforgotten Leavenworth Case. Surely it might be possible for the

unsophisticated Nimrod K. Moose, of Yellow Dog Flat, to come to New York

and be entangled somehow in this net of repetitions or recurrences.

Surely something tells me that his beautiful daughter, the Rose of Red

Murder Gulch, might seek for him in vain amid the apparently

unmistakable surroundings of the thirty-second floor, while he was being

quietly butchered by the floor-clerk on the thirty-third floor, an agent

of the Green Claw (that formidable organisation); and all because the

two floors looked exactly alike to the virginal Western eye. The

original point of my own story was that the man to be entrapped walked

into his own house after all, in spite of it being differently painted

and numbered, simply because he was absent-minded and used to taking a

certain number of mechanical steps. This would not work in the hotel;

because a lift has no habits. It is typical of the real tameness of

machinery, that even when we talk of a man turning mechanically we only

talk metaphorically; for it is something that a mechanism cannot do. But

I think there is only one real objection to my story of Mr. Moose in the

New York hotel. And that is unfortunately a rather fatal one. It is that

far away in the remote desolation of Yellow Dog, among those outlying

and outlandish rocks that almost seem to rise beyond the sunset, there

is undoubtedly an hotel of exactly the same sort, with all its floors

exactly the same.

Anyhow the general plan of the American hotel is commonly the same, and,

as I have said, it is a very sound one so far as it goes. When I first

went into one of the big New York hotels, the first impression was

certainly its bigness. It was called the Biltmore; and I wondered how

many national humorists had made the obvious comment of wishing they had

built less. But it was not merely the Babylonian size and scale of such

things, it was the way in which they are used. They are used almost as

public streets, or rather as public squares. My first impression was

that I was in some sort of high street or market-place during a carnival

or a revolution. True, the people looked rather rich for a revolution

and rather grave for a carnival; but they were congested in great crowds

that moved slowly like people passing through an overcrowded railway

station. Even in the dizzy heights of such a sky-scraper there could not

possibly be room for all those people to sleep in the hotel, or even to

dine in it. And, as a matter of fact, they did nothing whatever except

drift into it and drift out again. Most of them had no more to do with

the hotel than I have with Buckingham Palace. I have never been in

Buckingham Palace, and I have very seldom, thank God, been in the big

hotels of this type that exist in London or Paris. But I cannot believe

that mobs are perpetually pouring through the Hotel Cecil or the Savoy

in this fashion, calmly coming in at one door and going out of the

other. But this fact is part of the fundamental structure of the

American hotel; it is built upon a compromise that makes it possible.

The whole of the lower floor is thrown open to the public streets and

treated as a public square. But above it and all round it runs another

floor in the form of a sort of deep gallery, furnished more luxuriously

and looking down on the moving mobs beneath. No one is allowed on this

floor except the guests or clients of the hotel. As I have been one of

them myself, I trust it is not unsympathetic to compare them to active

anthropoids who can climb trees, and so look down in safety on the herds

or packs of wilder animals wandering and prowling below. Of course there

are modifications of this architectural plan, but they are generally

approximations to it; it is the plan that seems to suit the social life

folla di monumenti babilonesi o assiri; ma anche gli alberghi non sono

locande.

In generale, non c’è che un unico albergo in America. Il suo modello,

che è un modello assai razionale, si ripete in città remote l’una

dall’altra quanto le capitali degli imperi europei. Potete trovare quell’albergo

che si erge fra i rossi germogli dei tiepidi boschi di primavera del Nebraska, o

imbiancato dalle nevi canadesi presso l’eterno fragore del Niagara. E

prima di toccare questo modello solido e semplice in sé, posso osservare

che lo stesso sistema di simmetria attraversa tutti i particolari degli

interni. Come un albergo è simile a un altro albergo, così un piano d’albergo è simile a

un altro piano d’albergo. Se il corridoio fuori dalla porta della vostra camera, o

l’andito come lo chiamano, contiene, poniamo, un tavolino con un

vaso verde e un fenicottero impagliato, o qualche ninnolo del genere, potete

essere perfettamente certi che vi sia esattamente lo stesso tavolino, vaso e

fenicottero su ciascuno dei trentadue pianerottoli di quella torreggiante

dimora. È qui forse che più differisce dai tortuosi

pianerottoli e dai livelli inattesi delle vecchie locande inglesi, anche quando si

chiamano alberghi. A me pareva esservi qualcosa di strano, come una magica

moltiplicazione, nella squisita identità di queste suite. Sembrava

suggerire l’immobile atmosfera di qualche inquietante racconto psicologico. Un tempo

io stesso vagheggiai l’idea di un racconto, in cui a un uomo si dovesse

impedire di entrare nella sua casa (il teatro di qualche delitto o sciagura)

da parte di gente che dipingeva e arredava la casa accanto perché sembrasse esattamente come

la sua; spingendo l’assimilazione fino ai limiti più fantastici, come

l’alterare la numerazione delle case della via. Giunsi in America e

trovai un albergo attrezzato e tappezzato in ogni sua parte per la messa in scena della mia

fantasmatica truffa. Offro lo scheletro del mio racconto con tutta umiltà ad

alcune delle mirabili scrittrici di romanzi polizieschi d’America, a

Miss Carolyn Wells, o Miss Mary Roberts Rhinehart, o Mrs. A. K. Green

dell’indimenticato Caso Leavenworth. Certo sarebbe possibile che lo

sprovveduto Nimrod K. Moose, di Yellow Dog Flat, giunga a New York

e resti in qualche modo impigliato in questa rete di ripetizioni o ricorrenze.

Certo qualcosa mi dice che la sua bella figlia, la Rosa di Red

Murder Gulch, potrebbe cercarlo invano fra le apparentemente

inconfondibili suppellettili del trentaduesimo piano, mentre egli veniva

quietamente macellato dall’inserviente di piano al trentatreesimo, un agente

dell’Artiglio Verde (quella formidabile organizzazione); e tutto perché i

due piani apparivano esattamente uguali al vergine occhio dell’Ovest. Il

punto originario del mio racconto era che l’uomo da intrappolare entrava

nella propria casa dopotutto, malgrado fosse diversamente dipinta

e numerata, semplicemente perché era distratto e uso a compiere un

certo numero di passi meccanici. Questo non funzionerebbe nell’albergo;

perché un ascensore non ha abitudini. È tipico della vera mansuetudine del

macchinario che, persino quando parliamo di un uomo che si volge meccanicamente, parliamo solo

in senso metaforico; poiché è qualcosa che un meccanismo non può fare. Ma

credo vi sia una sola vera obiezione al mio racconto del signor Moose nell’

albergo di New York. E purtroppo è piuttosto fatale. È che

lontano, nella remota desolazione di Yellow Dog, fra quelle sperdute

e strampalate rocce che quasi paiono levarsi oltre il tramonto, c’è

indubbiamente un albergo esattamente dello stesso genere, con tutti i suoi piani

esattamente uguali.

Comunque il piano generale dell’albergo americano è di solito lo stesso, e,

come ho detto, è assai valido nei suoi limiti. Quando per la prima volta

entrai in uno dei grandi alberghi di New York, la prima impressione fu

certamente la sua grandezza. Si chiamava il Biltmore; e mi domandai quanti

umoristi nazionali avessero fatto l’ovvio commento di augurarsi che l’avessero

costruito meno grande. Ma non era soltanto la babilonica mole e scala di simili

cose, era il modo in cui vengono usate. Vengono usate quasi come

strade pubbliche, o meglio come piazze pubbliche. La mia prima impressione fu

d’essere in una sorta di corso o mercato durante un carnevale

o una rivoluzione. Vero, la gente pareva piuttosto ricca per una rivoluzione

e piuttosto grave per un carnevale; ma era stipata in grandi folle

che si muovevano lente come gente che attraversa una stazione ferroviaria

sovraffollata. Persino nelle vertiginose altezze di un simile grattacielo non poteva

esserci posto per tutta quella gente da dormire nell’albergo, e nemmeno da

cenarvi. E, di fatto, non facevano proprio nulla se non

affluirvi alla deriva e defluirne di nuovo. La maggior parte aveva a che fare con

l’albergo non più di quanto io abbia a che fare con Buckingham Palace. Non sono mai stato a

Buckingham Palace, e ben di rado, grazie a Dio, sono stato nei grandi

alberghi di questo tipo che esistono a Londra o a Parigi. Ma non posso credere

che le folle si riversino perpetuamente attraverso l’Hotel Cecil o il Savoy

a questo modo, entrando placidamente da una porta e uscendo dall’

altra. Ma questo fatto è parte della struttura fondamentale dell’

albergo americano; è costruito su un compromesso che lo rende possibile.

L’intero piano inferiore è aperto alle strade pubbliche ed

è trattato come una piazza pubblica. Ma sopra di esso e tutt’intorno corre un altro

piano a foggia di una sorta di profonda galleria, arredata più lussuosamente

e affacciata sulle folle in movimento di sotto. Nessuno è ammesso su questo

piano tranne gli ospiti o i clienti dell’albergo. Poiché io stesso sono stato uno

di loro, confido non sia poco benevolo paragonarli ad attivi

antropoidi che sanno arrampicarsi sugli alberi, e così guardare al sicuro giù verso le mandrie

o i branchi di animali più selvaggi che vagano e si aggirano in basso. Naturalmente ci

sono modificazioni di questo piano architettonico, ma sono in genere

approssimazioni a esso; è il piano che par confarsi alla vita sociale

of the American cities. There is generally something like a ground floor

that is more public, a half-floor or gallery above that is more private,

and above that the bulk of the block of bedrooms, the huge hive with its

innumerable and identical cells.

The ladder of ascent in this tower is of course the lift, or, as it is

called, the elevator. With all that we hear of American hustle and

hurry it is rather strange that Americans seem to like more than we do

to linger upon long words. And indeed there is an element of delay in

their diction and spirit, very little understood, which I may discuss

elsewhere. Anyhow they say elevator when we say lift, just as they say

automobile when we say motor and stenographer when we say typist, or

sometimes (by a slight confusion) typewriter. Which reminds me of

another story that never existed, about a man who was accused of having

murdered and dismembered his secretary when he had only taken his typing

machine to pieces; but we must not dwell on these digressions. The

Americans may have another reason for giving long and ceremonious titles

to the lift. When first I came among them I had a suspicion that they

possessed and practised a new and secret religion, which was the cult of

the elevator. I fancied they worshipped the lift, or at any rate

worshipped in the lift. The details or data of this suspicion it were

now vain to collect, as I have regretfully abandoned it, except in so

far as they illustrate the social principles underlying the structural

plan of the building. Now an American gentleman invariably takes off his

hat in the lift. He does not take off his hat in the hotel, even if it

is crowded with ladies. But he always so salutes a lady in the elevator;

and this marks the difference of atmosphere. The lift is a room, but the

hotel is a street. But during my first delusion, of course, I assumed

that he uncovered in this tiny temple merely because he was in church.

There is something about the very word elevator that expresses a great

deal of his vague but idealistic religion. Perhaps that flying chapel

will eventually be ritualistically decorated like a chapel; possibly

with a symbolic scheme of wings. Perhaps a brief religious service will

be held in the elevator as it ascends; in a few well-chosen words

touching the Utmost for the Highest. Possibly he would consent even to

call the elevator a lift, if he could call it an uplift. There would be

no difficulty, except what I cannot but regard as the chief moral

problem of all optimistic modernism. I mean the difficulty of imagining

a lift which is free to go up, if it is not also free to go down.

I think I know my American friends and acquaintances too well to

apologise for any levity in these illustrations. Americans make fun of

their own institutions; and their own journalism is full of such

fanciful conjectures. The tall building is itself artistically akin to

the tall story. The very word sky-scraper is an admirable example of an

American lie. But I can testify quite as eagerly to the solid and

sensible advantages of the symmetrical hotel. It is not only a pattern

of vases and stuffed flamingoes; it is also an equally accurate pattern

of cupboards and baths. It is a dignified and humane custom to have a

bathroom attached to every bedroom; and my impulse to sing the praises

of it brought me once at least into a rather quaint complication. I

think it was in the city of Dayton; anyhow I remember there was a

Laundry Convention going on in the same hotel, in a room very

patriotically and properly festooned with the stars and stripes, and

doubtless full of promise for the future of laundering. I was

interviewed on the roof, within earshot of this debate, and may have

been the victim of some association or confusion; anyhow, after

answering the usual questions about Labour, the League of Nations, the

length of ladies’ dresses, and other great matters, I took refuge in a

rhapsody of warm and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. The

editor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the column of his

contributor’s ‘story,’ and seeing nothing but metaphysical terms such as

justice, freedom, the abstract disapproval of sweating, swindling, and

the like, paused at last upon the ablutionary allusion, and his eye

brightened. ‘That’s the only copy in the whole thing,’ he said, ‘A

Bath-Tub in Every Home.’ So these words appeared in enormous letters

above my portrait in the paper. It will be noted that, like many things

that practical men make a great point of, they miss the point. What I

had commended as new and national was a bathroom in every bedroom. Even

feudal and moss-grown England is not entirely ignorant of an occasional

bath-tub in the home. But what gave me great joy was what followed. I

discovered with delight that many people, glancing rapidly at my

portrait with its prodigious legend, imagined that it was a commercial

advertisement, and that I was a very self-advertising commercial

traveller. When I walked about the streets, I was supposed to be

travelling in bath-tubs. Consider the caption of the portrait, and you

will see how similar it is to the true commercial slogan: ‘We offer a

Bath-Tub in Every Home.’ And this charming error was doubtless clinched

by the fact that I had been found haunting the outer courts of the

temple of the ancient Guild of Lavenders. I never knew how many shared

the impression; I regret to say that I only traced it with certainty in

two individuals. But I understand that it included the idea that I had

come to the town to attend the Laundry Convention, and had made an

eloquent speech to that senate, no doubt exhibiting my tubs.

Such was the penalty of too passionate and unrestrained an admiration

for American bathrooms; yet the connection of ideas, however

inconsequent, does cover the part of social practice for which these

delle città americane. C’è di solito qualcosa come un pianterreno

più pubblico, un mezzanino o galleria al di sopra più privato,

e sopra ancora la mole del blocco delle camere, l’enorme alveare con le sue

innumerevoli e identiche celle.

La scala d’ascesa in questa torre è naturalmente il lift, o, come lo

chiamano, l’elevatore. Con tutto quel che udiamo sulla foga e sulla fretta

americana, è piuttosto strano che gli Americani sembrino amare più di noi

indugiare sulle parole lunghe. E in effetti c’è un elemento di lentezza nella

loro dizione e nel loro spirito, ben poco compreso, di cui potrò discutere

altrove. Comunque dicono elevatore dove noi diciamo lift, proprio come dicono

automobile dove noi diciamo motor e stenografo dove noi diciamo dattilografo, o

talvolta (per lieve confusione) macchina da scrivere. Il che mi ricorda

un altro racconto mai esistito, di un uomo accusato di aver

assassinato e smembrato la sua segretaria quando aveva soltanto smontato la sua

macchina da scrivere; ma non dobbiamo indugiare su queste digressioni. Gli

Americani possono avere un’altra ragione per dare titoli lunghi e cerimoniosi

al lift. Quando giunsi la prima volta fra loro ebbi il sospetto che essi

possedessero e praticassero una nuova e segreta religione, che era il culto

dell’elevatore. Immaginavo che adorassero il lift, o in ogni caso

adorassero nel lift. I particolari o i dati di questo sospetto sarebbe

ormai vano raccogliere, avendolo con rammarico abbandonato, se non nella

misura in cui illustrano i principi sociali che stanno sotto il piano

strutturale dell’edificio. Ora, un gentiluomo americano immancabilmente si toglie il

cappello nel lift. Non si toglie il cappello nell’albergo, anche se esso

è affollato di signore. Ma saluta sempre così una signora nell’elevatore;

e ciò segna la differenza d’atmosfera. Il lift è una stanza, ma l’

albergo è una strada. Ma durante la mia prima illusione, naturalmente, presunsi

che egli si scoprisse in quel minuscolo tempio semplicemente perché era in chiesa.

C’è qualcosa nella parola stessa elevatore che esprime gran

parte della sua vaga ma idealistica religione. Forse quella cappella volante

sarà infine decorata ritualisticamente come una cappella; magari

con uno schema simbolico d’ali. Forse un breve ufficio religioso

si terrà nell’elevatore mentre ascende; in poche ben scelte parole

che toccano l’Altissimo per il Sommo. Forse acconsentirebbe persino a

chiamare l’elevatore un ascensore, se potesse chiamarlo un’ascensione. Non ci sarebbe

difficoltà, tranne ciò che non posso non considerare il principale problema morale

di tutto l’ottimistico modernismo. Intendo la difficoltà d’immaginare

un ascensore libero di salire, se non è anche libero di scendere.

Credo di conoscere i miei amici e conoscenti americani troppo bene per

scusarmi d’ogni leggerezza in queste illustrazioni. Gli Americani si fanno beffe delle

proprie istituzioni; e il loro stesso giornalismo è pieno di simili

fantasiose congetture. L’edificio alto è esso stesso artisticamente affine alla

storia alta. La parola stessa grattacielo è un mirabile esempio di una

menzogna americana. Ma posso testimoniare con pari zelo i solidi e

sensati vantaggi dell’albergo simmetrico. Non è soltanto un motivo ricorrente

di vasi e fenicotteri impagliati; è anche un motivo altrettanto preciso

di armadi e bagni. È un’usanza dignitosa e umana avere un

bagno annesso a ogni camera; e il mio impulso a cantarne le lodi

mi trascinò almeno una volta in una complicazione piuttosto curiosa. Credo

fosse nella città di Dayton; comunque ricordo che c’era una

Convention delle Lavanderie in corso nello stesso albergo, in una sala assai

patriotticamente e propriamente addobbata con le stelle e strisce, e

senza dubbio colma di promesse per il futuro del lavaggio. Fui

intervistato sul tetto, a portata d’orecchio di questo dibattito, e posso

essere stato vittima di qualche associazione o confusione; comunque, dopo

aver risposto alle solite domande sul Lavoro, sulla Società delle Nazioni, sulla

lunghezza degli abiti femminili, e su altre grandi questioni, mi rifugiai in una

rapsodia di calde e ben meritate lodi dei bagni americani. Il

redattore, mi risulta, scorrendo con occhio cupo la colonna del

‘pezzo’ del suo collaboratore, e non vedendo altro che termini metafisici come

giustizia, libertà, l’astratta disapprovazione dello sfruttamento, della truffa, e

simili, si fermò infine sull’allusione abluzionale, e il suo occhio si

illuminò. ‘Ecco l’unico pezzo buono in tutto quanto,’ disse, ‘Una

Vasca da Bagno in Ogni Casa.’ Così queste parole apparvero in enormi lettere

sopra il mio ritratto sul giornale. Si noterà che, come molte cose

su cui gli uomini pratici tanto insistono, esse mancano il bersaglio. Ciò che

avevo lodato come nuovo e nazionale era un bagno in ogni camera. Persino

la feudale e muschiosa Inghilterra non ignora del tutto un’occasionale

vasca da bagno in casa. Ma ciò che mi diede grande gioia fu quel che seguì. Io

scoprii con diletto che molti, gettando un rapido sguardo al mio

ritratto con la sua prodigiosa didascalia, immaginavano che fosse una réclame

commerciale, e che io fossi un auto-pubblicitario commesso

viaggiatore. Quando passeggiavo per le strade, si supponeva che io

viaggiassi in vasche da bagno. Considerate la didascalia del ritratto, e

vedrete quanto sia simile al vero slogan commerciale: ‘Offriamo una

Vasca da Bagno in Ogni Casa.’ E questo delizioso equivoco fu senza dubbio suggellato

dal fatto che ero stato colto ad aggirarmi nelle corti esterne del

tempio dell’antica Corporazione dei Lavandai. Non seppi mai quanti condividessero

l’impressione; mi duole dire che la rintracciai con certezza solo in

due individui. Ma mi risulta che comprendesse l’idea che io fossi

venuto in città per assistere alla Convention delle Lavanderie, e avessi tenuto un

eloquente discorso a quel senato, esibendo senza dubbio le mie vasche.

Tale fu la pena d’un’ammirazione troppo appassionata e sfrenata

per i bagni americani; eppure la connessione delle idee, per quanto

incongruente, ricopre bene quella parte della pratica sociale per cui questi

American institutions can really be praised. About everything like

laundry or hot and cold water there is not only organisation, but what

does not always or perhaps often go with it, efficiency. Americans are

particular about these things of dress and decorum; and it is a virtue

which I very seriously recognise, though I find it very hard to emulate.

But with them it is a virtue; it is not a mere convention, still less a

mere fashion. It is really related to human dignity rather than to

social superiority. The really glorious thing about the American is that

he does not dress like a gentleman; he dresses like a citizen or a

civilised man. His Puritanic particularity on certain points is really

detachable from any definite social ambitions; these things are not a

part of getting into society but merely of keeping out of savagery.

Those millions and millions of middling people, that huge middle class

especially of the Middle West, are not near enough to any aristocracy

even to be sham aristocrats, or to be real snobs. But their standards

are secure; and though I do not really travel in a bath-tub, or believe

in the bath-tub philosophy and religion, I will not on this matter

recoil misanthropically from them: I prefer the tub of Dayton to the tub

of Diogenes. On these points there is really something a million times

better than efficiency, and that is something like equality.

In short, the American hotel is not America; but it is American. In some

respects it is as American as the English inn is English. And it is

symbolic of that society in this among other things: that it does tend

too much to uniformity; but that that very uniformity disguises not a

little natural dignity. The old Romans boasted that their republic was a

nation of kings. If we really walked abroad in such a kingdom, we might

very well grow tired of the sight of a crowd of kings, of every man with

a gold crown on his head or an ivory sceptre in his hand. But it is

arguable that we ought not to grow tired of the repetition of crowns and

sceptres, any more than of the repetition of flowers and stars. The

whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really an effort to absorb

and animate these multitudinous modern repetitions; and Walt Whitman

would be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a

list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bathrooms. I do not

sneer at the generous effort of the giant; though I think, when all is

said, that it is a criticism of modern machinery that the effort should

be gigantic as well as generous.

While there is so much repetition there is little repose. It is the

pattern of a kaleidoscope rather than a wall-paper; a pattern of figures

running and even leaping like the figures in a zoetrope. But even in the

groups where there was no hustle there was often something of

homelessness. I do not mean merely that they were not dining at home;

but rather that they were not at home even when dining, and dining at

their favourite hotel. They would frequently start up and dart from the

room at a summons from the telephone. It may have been fanciful, but I

could not help feeling a breath of home, as from a flap or flutter of

St. George’s Cross, when I first sat down in a Canadian hostelry, and

read the announcement that no such telephonic or other summonses were

allowed in the dining-room. It may have been a coincidence, and there

may be American hotels with this merciful proviso and Canadian hotels

without it; but the thing was symbolic even if it was not evidential. I

felt as if I stood indeed upon English soil, in a place where people

liked to have their meals in peace.

The process of the summons is called ‘paging,’ and consists of sending a

little boy with a large voice through all the halls and corridors of the

building, making them resound with a name. The custom is common, of

course, in clubs and hotels even in England; but in England it is a mere

whisper compared with the wail with which the American page repeats the

formula of ‘Calling Mr. So and So.’ I remember a particularly crowded

parterre in the somewhat smoky and oppressive atmosphere of Pittsburg,

through which wandered a youth with a voice the like of which I have

never heard in the land of the living, a voice like the cry of a lost

spirit, saying again and again for ever, ‘Carling Mr. Anderson.’ One

felt that he never would find Mr. Anderson. Perhaps there never had been

any Mr. Anderson to be found. Perhaps he and every one else wandered in

an abyss of bottomless scepticism; and he was but the victim of one out

of numberless nightmares of eternity, as he wandered a shadow with

shadows and wailed by impassable streams. This is not exactly my

philosophy, but I feel sure it was his. And it is a mood that may

frequently visit the mind in the centres of highly active and successful

industrial civilisation.

Such are the first idle impressions of the great American hotel, gained

by sitting for the first time in its gallery and gazing on its drifting

crowds with thoughts equally drifting. The first impression is of

something enormous and rather unnatural, an impression that is gradually

tempered by experience of the kindliness and even the tameness of so

much of that social order. But I should not be recording the sensations

with sincerity, if I did not touch in passing the note of something

unearthly about that vast system to an insular traveller who sees it for

the first time. It is as if he were wandering in another world among the

fixed stars; or worse still, in an ideal Utopia of the future.

Yet I am not certain; and perhaps the best of all news is that nothing

is really new. I sometimes have a fancy that many of these new things in

new countries are but the resurrections of old things which have been

istituzioni americane possono davvero essere lodate. In tutto ciò che riguarda

il bucato o l’acqua calda e fredda c’è non solo organizzazione, ma ciò che

non sempre o forse non spesso l’accompagna, l’efficienza. Gli Americani sono

meticolosi in queste cose dell’abito e del decoro; ed è una virtù

che riconosco molto seriamente, per quanto la trovi assai ardua da emulare.

Ma per loro è una virtù; non è una mera convenzione, ancor meno una

mera moda. È davvero legata alla dignità umana più che alla

superiorità sociale. La cosa davvero gloriosa dell’Americano è che

egli non si veste da gentiluomo; si veste da cittadino o da

uomo civile. La sua puritana meticolosità su certi punti è davvero

staccabile da ogni definita ambizione sociale; queste cose non sono

parte dell’entrare in società ma soltanto del tenersi fuori dalla barbarie.

Quei milioni e milioni di persone mediocri, quell’enorme classe media

specialmente del Middle West, non sono abbastanza vicine ad alcuna aristocrazia

nemmeno per essere finti aristocratici, o veri snob. Ma i loro criteri

sono saldi; e per quanto io non viaggi davvero in una vasca da bagno, né creda

nella filosofia e nella religione della vasca da bagno, su questa materia non

arretrerò misantropicamente da loro: preferisco la tinozza di Dayton alla tinozza

di Diogene. Su questi punti c’è davvero qualcosa un milione di volte

migliore dell’efficienza, ed è qualcosa come l’uguaglianza.

Insomma, l’albergo americano non è l’America; ma è americano. Per certi

aspetti è americano quanto la locanda inglese è inglese. Ed è

simbolico di quella società in questo fra le altre cose: che esso tende

troppo all’uniformità; ma che quella stessa uniformità nasconde non

poca naturale dignità. Gli antichi Romani si vantavano che la loro repubblica fosse una

nazione di re. Se davvero camminassimo per un simile regno, potremmo

assai bene stancarci alla vista di una folla di re, di ogni uomo con

una corona d’oro sul capo o uno scettro d’avorio in mano. Ma è

sostenibile che non dovremmo stancarci della ripetizione di corone e

scettri, più di quanto ci stanchiamo della ripetizione di fiori e stelle. L’

intero sforzo immaginativo di Walt Whitman fu davvero uno sforzo per assorbire

e animare queste moltitudinarie ripetizioni moderne; e Walt Whitman

sarebbe stato benissimo capace d’includere nella sua lirica litania d’ottimismo un

elenco dei novecentonovantanove bagni identici. Non

irrido al generoso sforzo del gigante; benché io pensi, a conti fatti,

che sia una critica al macchinario moderno che lo sforzo debba

essere gigantesco oltre che generoso.

Mentre c’è tanta ripetizione c’è poca quiete. È il

motivo di un caleidoscopio più che di una carta da parati; un motivo di figure

che corrono e persino balzano come le figure in uno zootropio. Ma persino nei

gruppi dove non c’era foga c’era spesso qualcosa di

senza patria. Non intendo semplicemente che non cenassero a casa;

ma piuttosto che non fossero a casa nemmeno mentre cenavano, e cenavano nel

loro albergo preferito. Frequentemente sobbalzavano e schizzavano fuori dalla

sala a un richiamo del telefono. Può essere stata una fantasia, ma io

non potei fare a meno di sentire un soffio di patria, come da un lembo o uno sventolio della

Croce di San Giorgio, quando per la prima volta mi sedetti in un’osteria canadese, e

lessi l’annuncio che nessun richiamo telefonico o d’altro genere era

consentito nella sala da pranzo. Può essere stata una coincidenza, e ci

possono essere alberghi americani con questa misericordiosa clausola e alberghi canadesi

senza; ma la cosa era simbolica anche se non probante. Mi

sentii come se stessi davvero sul suolo inglese, in un luogo dove la gente

amava consumare i pasti in pace.

Il procedimento del richiamo si chiama ‘paging,’ e consiste nel mandare un

ragazzino con una gran voce per tutte le sale e i corridoi dell’

edificio, facendoli risuonare d’un nome. L’usanza è comune,

naturalmente, nei club e negli alberghi anche in Inghilterra; ma in Inghilterra è un mero

sussurro a paragone del lamento con cui il page americano ripete la

formula di ‘Si chiama il signor Tal dei Tali.’ Ricordo un parterre particolarmente affollato

nell’atmosfera alquanto fumosa e opprimente di Pittsburg,

per cui vagava un giovane con una voce la cui pari non ho

mai udito nella terra dei vivi, una voce come il grido d’uno spirito

perduto, che ripeteva ancora e ancora in eterno, ‘Si chiama il signor Anderson.’ Si

sentiva che non avrebbe mai trovato il signor Anderson. Forse non c’era mai stato

alcun signor Anderson da trovare. Forse egli e ogni altro vagavano in

un abisso di scetticismo senza fondo; ed egli era soltanto la vittima di uno fra

innumerevoli incubi dell’eternità, mentre vagava ombra fra

ombre e si lamentava presso fiumi invalicabili. Questa non è esattamente la mia

filosofia, ma sono certo che era la sua. Ed è uno stato d’animo che può

spesso visitare la mente nei centri di una civiltà industriale

altamente attiva e prospera.

Tali sono le prime oziose impressioni del grande albergo americano, ricavate

sedendo per la prima volta nella sua galleria e contemplandone le folle alla deriva

con pensieri egualmente alla deriva. La prima impressione è di

qualcosa di enorme e piuttosto innaturale, un’impressione che è gradualmente

temperata dall’esperienza della cortesia e persino della mansuetudine di gran

parte di quell’ordine sociale. Ma non registrerei le sensazioni

con sincerità, se non toccassi di sfuggita la nota di qualcosa

d’ultraterreno in quel vasto sistema per un viaggiatore insulare che lo vede per

la prima volta. È come se egli vagasse in un altro mondo fra le

stelle fisse; o peggio ancora, in un’ideale Utopia del futuro.

Eppure non sono certo; e forse la migliore di tutte le notizie è che nulla

è davvero nuovo. Ho talvolta la fantasia che molte di queste cose nuove in

paesi nuovi non siano che le resurrezioni di cose vecchie che sono state

wickedly killed or stupidly stunted in old countries. I have looked over

the sea of little tables in some light and airy open-air café; and my

thoughts have gone back to the plain wooden bench and wooden table that

stands solitary and weather-stained outside so many neglected English

inns. We talk of experimenting in the French café, as of some fresh and

almost impudent innovation. But our fathers had the French café, in the

sense of the free-and-easy table in the sun and air. The only difference

was that French democracy was allowed to develop its café, or multiply

its tables, while English plutocracy prevented any such popular growth.

Perhaps there are other examples of old types and patterns, lost in the

old oligarchy and saved in the new democracies. I am haunted with a hint

that the new structures are not so very new; and that they remind me of

something very old. As I look from the balcony floor the crowds seem to

float away and the colours to soften and grow pale, and I know I am in

one of the simplest and most ancestral of human habitations. I am

looking down from the old wooden gallery upon the courtyard of an inn.

This new architectural model, which I have described, is after all one

of the oldest European models, now neglected in Europe and especially in

England. It was the theatre in which were enacted innumerable picaresque

comedies and romantic plays, with figures ranging from Sancho Panza to

Sam Weller. It served as the apparatus, like some gigantic toy set up in

bricks and timber, for the ancient and perhaps eternal game of tennis.

The very terms of the original game were taken from the inn courtyard,

and the players scored accordingly as they hit the buttery-hatch or the

roof. Singular speculations hover in my mind as the scene darkens and

the quadrangle below begins to empty in the last hours of night. Some

day perhaps this huge structure will be found standing in a solitude

like a skeleton; and it will be the skeleton of the Spotted Dog or the

Blue Boar. It will wither and decay until it is worthy at last to be a

tavern. I do not know whether men will play tennis on its ground floor,

with various scores and prizes for hitting the electric fan, or the

lift, or the head waiter. Perhaps the very words will only remain as

part of some such rustic game. Perhaps the electric fan will no longer

be electric and the elevator will no longer elevate, and the waiter will

only wait to be hit. But at least it is only by the decay of modern

plutocracy, which seems already to have begun, that the secret of the

structure even of this plutocratic palace can stand revealed. And after

long years, when its lights are extinguished and only the long shadows

inhabit its halls and vestibules, there may come a new noise like

thunder; of D’Artagnan knocking at the door.

A Meditation in Broadway

When I had looked at the lights of Broadway by night, I made to my

American friends an innocent remark that seemed for some reason to amuse

them. I had looked, not without joy, at that long kaleidoscope of

coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks,

advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the

two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God; colour and fire. I

said to them, in my simplicity, ‘What a glorious garden of wonders this

would be, to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.’

Here it is but a text for a further suggestion. But let us suppose that

there does walk down this flaming avenue a peasant, of the sort called

scornfully an illiterate peasant; by those who think that insisting on

people reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies who

read in all languages and the forgers who write in all hands. On this

principle indeed, a peasant merely acquainted with things of little

practical use to mankind, such as ploughing, cutting wood, or growing

vegetables, would very probably be excluded; and it is not for us to

criticise from the outside the philosophy of those who would keep out

the farmer and let in the forger. But let us suppose, if only for the

sake of argument, that the peasant is walking under the artificial suns

and stars of this tremendous thoroughfare; that he has escaped to the

land of liberty upon some general rumour and romance of the story of

its liberation, but without being yet able to understand the arbitrary

signs of its alphabet. The soul of such a man would surely soar higher

than the sky-scrapers, and embrace a brotherhood broader than Broadway.

Realising that he had arrived on an evening of exceptional festivity,

worthy to be blazoned with all this burning heraldry, he would please

himself by guessing what great proclamation or principle of the Republic

hung in the sky like a constellation or rippled across the street like a

comet. He would be shrewd enough to guess that the three festoons

fringed with fiery words of somewhat similar pattern stood for

‘Government of the People, For the People, By the People’; for it must

obviously be that, unless it were ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.’ His

shrewdness would perhaps be a little shaken if he knew that the triad

stood for ‘Tang Tonic To-day; Tang Tonic To-morrow; Tang Tonic All the

Time.’ He will soon identify a restless ribbon of red lettering, red hot

and rebellious, as the saying, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ He

will fail to identify it as the equally famous saying, ‘Skyoline Has

Gout Beaten to a Frazzle.’ Therefore it was that I desired the peasant

to walk down that grove of fiery trees, under all that golden foliage,

and fruits like monstrous jewels, as innocent as Adam before the Fall.

He would see sights almost as fine as the flaming sword or the purple

and peacock plumage of the seraphim; so long as he did not go near the

malvagiamente uccise o stupidamente atrofizzate in paesi vecchi. Ho contemplato

il mare di tavolini in qualche luminoso e arioso caffè all’aperto; e i miei

pensieri sono tornati alla semplice panca di legno e al tavolo di legno che

sta solitario e intemperiato fuori da tante trascurate locande

inglesi. Parliamo di sperimentare col caffè francese, come di qualche fresca e

quasi sfrontata innovazione. Ma i nostri padri avevano il caffè francese, nel

senso del tavolo alla buona al sole e all’aria. L’unica differenza

era che alla democrazia francese fu concesso di sviluppare il suo caffè, o di moltiplicare

i suoi tavoli, mentre la plutocrazia inglese impedì ogni simile crescita popolare.

Forse ci sono altri esempi di tipi e modelli antichi, perduti nella

vecchia oligarchia e salvati nelle nuove democrazie. Mi perseguita un indizio

che le nuove strutture non siano poi così nuove; e che mi ricordino

qualcosa di molto antico. Mentre guardo dal piano del balcone le folle sembrano

fluttuare via e i colori ammorbidirsi e impallidire, e so d’essere in

una delle più semplici e ancestrali delle dimore umane. Sto

guardando giù dalla vecchia galleria di legno sul cortile di una locanda.

Questo nuovo modello architettonico, che ho descritto, è dopotutto uno

dei più antichi modelli europei, ora trascurato in Europa e specialmente in

Inghilterra. Era il teatro in cui venivano recitate innumerevoli commedie

picaresche e drammi romanzeschi, con figure che vanno da Sancho Panza a

Sam Weller. Serviva da apparato, come un gigantesco giocattolo eretto in

mattoni e legname, per l’antico e forse eterno gioco della pallacorda.

I termini stessi del gioco originario furono tratti dal cortile della locanda,

e i giocatori segnavano i punti a seconda che colpissero lo sportello della dispensa o il

tetto. Singolari congetture aleggiano nella mia mente mentre la scena si oscura e

il quadrilatero di sotto comincia a svuotarsi nelle ultime ore della notte. Un

giorno forse questa enorme struttura si troverà ritta in una solitudine

come uno skeleton; e sarà lo skeleton dello Spotted Dog o del

Blue Boar. Appassirà e decadrà finché non sarà degna infine d’essere una

taverna. Non so se gli uomini giocheranno a pallacorda al suo pianterreno,

con vari punteggi e premi per aver colpito il ventilatore elettrico, o il

lift, o il primo cameriere. Forse le parole stesse rimarranno soltanto come

parte di qualche siffatto gioco rustico. Forse il ventilatore elettrico non sarà più

elettrico e l’elevatore non eleverà più, e il cameriere

aspetterà soltanto d’essere colpito. Ma almeno è solo per il decadere della moderna

plutocrazia, che sembra già cominciato, che il segreto della

struttura persino di questo palazzo plutocratico può stare rivelato. E dopo

lunghi anni, quando le sue luci saranno spente e solo le lunghe ombre

abiteranno le sue sale e i suoi vestiboli, potrà giungere un nuovo rumore come

un tuono; di D’Artagnan che bussa alla porta.

Una meditazione a Broadway

Quando ebbi guardato le luci di Broadway di notte, feci ai miei

amici americani un’innocente osservazione che per qualche ragione parve

divertirli. Avevo guardato, non senza gioia, quel lungo caleidoscopio di

luci colorate disposte in grandi lettere e sbracati marchi di fabbrica,

che reclamizzavano ogni cosa, dal maiale ai pianoforti, mediante l’agenzia dei

due più vividi e mistici dei doni di Dio; il colore e il fuoco. Io

dissi loro, nella mia semplicità, ‘Che glorioso giardino di meraviglie sarebbe

questo, per chiunque avesse la fortuna d’essere incapace di leggere.’

Qui esso non è che un testo per un’ulteriore suggestione. Ma supponiamo che

davvero cammini giù per questa fiammeggiante avenue un contadino, del genere chiamato

con disprezzo un contadino analfabeta; da quanti pensano che insistere che la

gente legga e scriva sia il modo migliore per tenere fuori le spie che

leggono in tutte le lingue e i falsari che scrivono con tutte le calligrafie. Su questo

principio, in effetti, un contadino che conosce soltanto cose di poca

utilità pratica per l’umanità, come arare, tagliar legna, o coltivare

ortaggi, verrebbe assai probabilmente escluso; e non spetta a noi

criticare dall’esterno la filosofia di quanti terrebbero fuori

il contadino e lascerebbero entrare il falsario. Ma supponiamo, non fosse che per

amor di discussione, che il contadino stia camminando sotto i soli artificiali

e le stelle di questa tremenda arteria; che sia fuggito nella

terra della libertà per qualche vaga voce e leggenda della storia della

sua liberazione, ma senza essere ancora capace di comprendere gli arbitrari

segni del suo alfabeto. L’anima di un simile uomo si librerebbe certo più in alto

dei grattacieli, e abbraccerebbe una fratellanza più larga di Broadway.

Rendendosi conto d’essere arrivato in una sera d’eccezionale festa,

degna d’essere blasonata con tutta questa ardente araldica, egli si

compiacerebbe d’indovinare quale grande proclama o principio della Repubblica

pendesse nel cielo come una costellazione o s’increspasse per la via come una

cometa. Sarebbe abbastanza scaltro da indovinare che i tre festoni

orlati di parole di fuoco di foggia alquanto simile stessero per

‘Governo del Popolo, Per il Popolo, Dal Popolo’; poiché deve

ovviamente essere quello, se non fosse ‘Libertà, Uguaglianza, Fraternità.’ La sua

scaltrezza sarebbe forse un po’ scossa se sapesse che la triade

stava per ‘Tonico Tang Oggi; Tonico Tang Domani; Tonico Tang Tutto il

Tempo.’ Presto identificherà un’irrequieta striscia di lettere rosse, rovente

e ribelle, come il detto, ‘Datemi la libertà o datemi la morte.’ Non

riuscirà a identificarla come l’altrettanto famoso detto, ‘Skyoline Ha

Ridotto la Gotta a Brandelli.’ Fu perciò che desiderai il contadino

camminasse giù per quel boschetto d’alberi di fuoco, sotto tutto quel dorato fogliame,

e frutti come mostruosi gioielli, innocente come Adamo prima della Caduta.

Vedrebbe visioni quasi belle quanto la spada fiammeggiante o il purpureo

e pavonesco piumaggio dei serafini; purché non s’avvicinasse all’

Tree of Knowledge.

In other words, if once he went to school it would be all up; and indeed

I fear in any case he would soon discover his error. If he stood wildly

waving his hat for liberty in the middle of the road as Chunk Chutney

picked itself out in ruby stars upon the sky, he would impede the

excellent but extremely rigid traffic system of New York. If he fell on

his knees before a sapphire splendour, and began saying an Ave Maria

under a mistaken association, he would be conducted kindly but firmly by

an Irish policeman to a more authentic shrine. But though the foreign

simplicity might not long survive in New York, it is quite a mistake to

suppose that such foreign simplicity cannot enter New York. He may be

excluded for being illiterate, but he cannot be excluded for being

ignorant, nor for being innocent. Least of all can he be excluded for

being wiser in his innocence than the world in its knowledge. There is

here indeed more than one distinction to be made. New York is a

cosmopolitan city; but it is not a city of cosmopolitans. Most of the

masses in New York have a nation, whether or no it be the nation to

which New York belongs. Those who are Americanised are American, and

very patriotically American. Those who are not thus nationalised are not

in the least internationalised. They simply continue to be themselves;

the Irish are Irish; the Jews are Jewish; and all sorts of other tribes

carry on the traditions of remote European valleys almost untouched. In

short, there is a sort of slender bridge between their old country and

their new, which they either cross or do not cross, but which they

seldom simply occupy. They are exiles or they are citizens; there is no

moment when they are cosmopolitans. But very often the exiles bring with

them not only rooted traditions, but rooted truths.

Indeed it is to a great extent the thought of these strange souls in

crude American garb that gives a meaning to the masquerade of New York.

In the hotel where I stayed the head waiter in one room was a Bohemian;

and I am glad to say that he called himself a Bohemian. I have already

protested sufficiently, before American audiences, against the pedantry

of perpetually talking about Czecho-Slovakia. I suggested to my American

friends that the abandonment of the word Bohemian in its historical

sense might well extend to its literary and figurative sense. We might

be expected to say, ‘I’m afraid Henry has got into very Czecho-Slovakian

habits lately,’ or ‘Don’t bother to dress; it’s quite a Czecho-Slovakian

affair.’ Anyhow my Bohemian would have nothing to do with such nonsense;

he called himself a son of Bohemia, and spoke as such in his criticisms

of America, which were both favourable and unfavourable. He was a squat

man, with a sturdy figure and a steady smile; and his eyes were like

dark pools in the depth of a darker forest, but I do not think he had

ever been deceived by the lights of Broadway.

But I found something like my real innocent abroad, my real peasant

among the sky-signs, in another part of the same establishment. He was a

much leaner man, equally dark, with a hook nose, hungry face, and fierce

black moustaches. He also was a waiter, and was in the costume of a

waiter, which is a smarter edition of the costume of a lecturer. As he

was serving me with clam chowder or some such thing, I fell into speech

with him and he told me he was a Bulgar. I said something like, ‘I’m

afraid I don’t know as much as I ought to about Bulgaria. I suppose most

of your people are agricultural, aren’t they?’ He did not stir an inch

from his regular attitude, but he slightly lowered his low voice and

said, ‘Yes. From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when

people get away from that they are lost.’

To hear such a thing said by the waiter was alone an epoch in the life

of an unfortunate writer of fantastic novels. To see him clear away the

clam chowder like an automaton, and bring me more iced water like an

automaton or like nothing on earth except an American waiter (for piling

up ice is the cold passion of their lives), and all this after having

uttered something so dark and deep, so starkly incongruous and so

startlingly true, was an indescribable thing, but very like the picture

of the peasant admiring Broadway. So he passed, with his artificial

clothes and manners, lit up with all the ghastly artificial light of the

hotel, and all the ghastly artificial life of the city; and his heart

was like his own remote and rocky valley, where those unchanging words

were carved as on a rock.

I do not profess to discuss here at all adequately the question this

raises about the Americanisation of the Bulgar. It has many aspects, of

some of which most Englishmen and even some Americans are rather

unconscious. For one thing, a man with so rugged a loyalty to land could

not be Americanised in New York; but it is not so certain that he could

not be Americanised in America. We might almost say that a peasantry is

hidden in the heart of America. So far as our impressions go, it is a

secret. It is rather an open secret; covering only some thousand square

miles of open prairie. But for most of our countrymen it is something

invisible, unimagined, and unvisited; the simple truth that where all

those acres are there is agriculture, and where all that agriculture is

there is considerable tendency towards distributive or decently

equalised property, as in a peasantry. On the other hand, there are

those who say that the Bulgar will never be Americanised, that he only

comes to be a waiter in America that he may afford to return to be a

peasant in Bulgaria. I cannot decide this issue, and indeed I did not

introduce it to this end. I was led to it by a certain line of

Albero della Conoscenza.

In altre parole, se una volta andasse a scuola sarebbe tutto finito; e in verità

temo che in ogni caso scoprirebbe presto il suo errore. Se stesse follemente

sventolando il cappello per la libertà in mezzo alla strada mentre Chunk Chutney

si delineava in stelle di rubino sul cielo, intralcerebbe l’

eccellente ma estremamente rigido sistema di traffico di New York. Se cadesse in

ginocchio davanti a uno splendore di zaffiro, e cominciasse a dire un’Ave Maria

per una sbagliata associazione, verrebbe condotto con gentilezza ma con fermezza da

un poliziotto irlandese a un più autentico santuario. Ma per quanto la straniera

semplicità potrebbe non sopravvivere a lungo a New York, è proprio un errore

supporre che tale straniera semplicità non possa entrare a New York. Egli può essere

escluso per essere analfabeta, ma non può essere escluso per essere

ignorante, né per essere innocente. Meno che mai può essere escluso per

essere più saggio nella sua innocenza di quanto il mondo lo sia nel suo sapere. C’è

qui davvero più d’una distinzione da fare. New York è una

città cosmopolita; ma non è una città di cosmopoliti. La maggior parte delle

masse di New York ha una nazione, che sia o no la nazione a

cui New York appartiene. Coloro che sono americanizzati sono americani, e

molto patriotticamente americani. Coloro che non sono così nazionalizzati non sono

affatto internazionalizzati. Semplicemente continuano a essere se stessi;

gli Irlandesi sono irlandesi; gli Ebrei sono ebrei; e ogni sorta d’altre tribù

porta avanti le tradizioni di remote valli europee quasi intatte. In

breve, c’è una sorta di esile ponte fra il loro vecchio paese e il

nuovo, che essi o attraversano o non attraversano, ma che

di rado semplicemente occupano. Sono esuli o sono cittadini; non c’è

momento in cui siano cosmopoliti. Ma assai spesso gli esuli portano con

sé non solo tradizioni radicate, ma verità radicate.

In effetti è in gran parte il pensiero di queste strane anime in

rozza veste americana che dà un significato alla mascherata di New York.

Nell’albergo dove alloggiavo il primo cameriere di una sala era un Boemo;

e sono lieto di dire che si diceva Boemo. Ho già

protestato a sufficienza, davanti a pubblici americani, contro la pedanteria

del parlare perpetuamente di Cecoslovacchia. Suggerii ai miei amici

americani che l’abbandono della parola Boemo nel suo senso storico

potrebbe bene estendersi al suo senso letterario e figurato. Ci si potrebbe

aspettare che dicessimo, ‘Temo che Henry abbia preso di recente abitudini assai

cecoslovacche,’ o ‘Non disturbarti a vestirti in gala; è una faccenda del tutto

cecoslovacca.’ Comunque il mio Boemo non voleva saperne di simili sciocchezze;

si diceva figlio della Boemia, e come tale parlava nelle sue critiche

all’America, che erano tanto favorevoli quanto sfavorevoli. Era un uomo tarchiato,

di figura robusta e sorriso saldo; e i suoi occhi erano come

pozze scure nella profondità di una foresta più scura, ma non credo che egli

fosse mai stato ingannato dalle luci di Broadway.

Ma trovai qualcosa come il mio vero innocente all’estero, il mio vero contadino

fra le insegne del cielo, in un’altra parte dello stesso stabilimento. Era un uomo

assai più magro, egualmente scuro, con un naso adunco, viso affamato, e feroci

baffi neri. Anch’egli era cameriere, e portava il costume da

cameriere, che è un’edizione più elegante del costume da conferenziere. Mentre mi

serviva la zuppa di vongole o qualcosa del genere, attaccai discorso

con lui ed egli mi disse d’essere un Bulgaro. Dissi qualcosa come, ‘Temo

di non sapere sulla Bulgaria quanto dovrei. Suppongo che la maggior parte

della vostra gente sia agricola, non è vero?’ Non si scostò d’un pollice

dal suo abituale contegno, ma abbassò lievemente la sua bassa voce e

disse, ‘Sì. Dalla terra veniamo e alla terra torniamo; quando

la gente si allontana da questo è perduta.’

Udire una cosa simile detta dal cameriere fu da solo un’epoca nella vita

d’uno sventurato scrittore di romanzi fantastici. Vederlo sparecchiare la

zuppa di vongole come un automa, e portarmi altra acqua ghiacciata come un

automa o come nulla al mondo tranne un cameriere americano (poiché ammucchiare

ghiaccio è la fredda passione della loro vita), e tutto ciò dopo aver

proferito qualcosa di così scuro e profondo, così crudamente incongruo e così

sorprendentemente vero, fu cosa indescrivibile, ma assai simile all’immagine

del contadino che ammira Broadway. Così egli passò, coi suoi artificiali

abiti e modi, illuminato da tutta la spettrale luce artificiale dell’

albergo, e da tutta la spettrale vita artificiale della città; e il suo cuore

era come la sua remota e rocciosa valle, dove quelle immutabili parole

erano scolpite come su una roccia.

Non pretendo di discutere qui in modo adeguato la questione che questo

solleva sull’americanizzazione del Bulgaro. Ha molti aspetti, di

alcuni dei quali la maggior parte degli Inglesi e persino alcuni Americani sono piuttosto

inconsapevoli. Tanto per cominciare, un uomo con una così rude lealtà alla terra non poteva

essere americanizzato a New York; ma non è così certo che egli non potesse

essere americanizzato in America. Potremmo quasi dire che un contadiname è

nascosto nel cuore dell’America. Per quanto giungono le nostre impressioni, è un

segreto. È piuttosto un segreto di Pulcinella; che copre solo qualche migliaio di miglia

quadrate d’aperta prateria. Ma per la maggior parte dei nostri connazionali è qualcosa di

invisibile, inimmaginato e non visitato; la semplice verità che dove sono tutti

quegli acri c’è agricoltura, e dove è tutta quell’agricoltura

c’è considerevole tendenza verso una proprietà distributiva o decentemente

equalizzata, come in un contadiname. D’altra parte, ci sono

quanti dicono che il Bulgaro non sarà mai americanizzato, che egli viene solo

a fare il cameriere in America per potersi permettere di tornare a fare il

contadino in Bulgaria. Non posso decidere questa questione, e in verità non l’ho

introdotta a questo fine. Vi fui condotto da una certa linea di

reflection that runs along the Great White Way, and I will continue to

follow it. The criticism, if we could put it rightly, not only covers

more than New York but more than the whole New World. Any argument

against it is quite as valid against the largest and richest cities of

the Old World, against London or Liverpool or Frankfort or Belfast. But

it is in New York that we see the argument most clearly, because we see

the thing thus towering into its own turrets and breaking into its own

fireworks.

I disagree with the aesthetic condemnation of the modern city with its

sky-scrapers and sky-signs. I mean that which laments the loss of beauty

and its sacrifice to utility. It seems to me the very reverse of the

truth. Years ago, when people used to say the Salvation Army doubtless

had good intentions, but we must all deplore its methods, I pointed out

that the very contrary is the case. Its method, the method of drums and

democratic appeal, is that of the Franciscans or any other march of the

Church Militant. It was precisely its aims that were dubious, with their

dissenting morality and despotic finance. It is somewhat the same with

things like the sky-signs in Broadway. The aesthete must not ask me to

mingle my tears with his, because these things are merely useful and

ugly. For I am not specially inclined to think them ugly; but I am

strongly inclined to think them useless. As a matter of art for art’s

sake, they seem to me rather artistic. As a form of practical social

work they seem to me stark stupid waste. If Mr. Bilge is rich enough to

build a tower four hundred feet high and give it a crown of golden

crescents and crimson stars, in order to draw attention to his

manufacture of the Paradise Tooth Paste or The Seventh Heaven Cigar, I

do not feel the least disposition to thank him for any serious form of

social service. I have never tried the Seventh Heaven Cigar; indeed a

premonition moves me towards the belief that I shall go down to the dust

without trying it. I have every reason to doubt whether it does any

particular good to those who smoke it, or any good to anybody except

those who sell it. In short Mr. Bilge’s usefulness consists in being

useful to Mr. Bilge, and all the rest is illusion and sentimentalism.

But because I know that Bilge is only Bilge, shall I stoop to the

profanity of saying that fire is only fire? Shall I blaspheme crimson

stars any more than crimson sunsets, or deny that those moons are golden

any more than that this grass is green? If a child saw these coloured

lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other coloured

toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to

dance in respectful imitation of the child. Indeed I am in a mood of so

much sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city, that I

should be almost sorry to see social sanity and a sense of proportion

return to extinguish them. I fear the day is breaking, and the broad

daylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this

delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peasants and priests and all

sorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, and

their stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial,

useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh Heaven Cigar, even

when they see it shining as with stars in the seventh heaven. They will

not be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests and

peasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by advertisements.

Only a very soft-headed, sentimental, and rather servile generation of

men could possibly be affected by advertisements at all. People who are

a little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually independent, see

the rather simple joke; and are not impressed by this or any other form

of self-praise. Almost any other men in almost any other age would have

seen the joke. If you had said to a man in the Stone Age, ‘Ugg says Ugg

makes the best stone hatchets,’ he would have perceived a lack of

detachment and disinterestedness about the testimonial. If you had said

to a medieval peasant, ‘Robert the Bowyer proclaims, with three blasts

of a horn, that he makes good bows,’ the peasant would have said, ‘Well,

of course he does,’ and thought about something more important. It is

only among people whose minds have been weakened by a sort of mesmerism

that so transparent a trick as that of advertisement could ever have

been tried at all. And if ever we have again, as for other reasons I

cannot but hope we shall, a more democratic distribution of property and

a more agricultural basis of national life, it would seem at first sight

only too likely that all this beautiful superstition will perish, and

the fairyland of Broadway with all its varied rainbows fade away. For

such people the Seventh Heaven Cigar, like the nineteenth-century city,

will have ended in smoke. And even the smoke of it will have vanished.

But the next stage of reflection brings us back to the peasant looking

at the lights of Broadway. It is not true to say in the strict sense

that the peasant has never seen such things before. The truth is that he

has seen them on a much smaller scale, but for a much larger purpose.

Peasants also have their ritual and ornament, but it is to adorn more

real things. Apart from our first fancy about the peasant who could not

read, there is no doubt about what would be apparent to a peasant who

could read, and who could understand. For him also fire is sacred, for

him also colour is symbolic. But where he sets up a candle to light the

little shrine of St. Joseph, he finds it takes twelve hundred candles to

riflessione che corre lungo la Great White Way, e continuerò a

seguirla. La critica, se sapessimo formularla nel modo giusto, non copre soltanto

più di New York ma più dell’intero Nuovo Mondo. Qualunque argomento

contro di essa vale altrettanto contro le città più grandi e ricche

del Vecchio Mondo, contro Londra o Liverpool o Francoforte o Belfast. Ma

è a New York che vediamo l’argomento più chiaramente, perché vediamo

la cosa svettare così nelle proprie torri e prorompere nei propri

fuochi d’artificio.

Non condivido la condanna estetica della moderna città con i suoi

grattacieli e le sue insegne luminose. Intendo quella che lamenta la perdita della bellezza

e il suo sacrificio all’utilità. Mi sembra l’esatto contrario della

verità. Anni fa, quando si diceva che l’Esercito della Salvezza aveva senza dubbio

buone intenzioni, ma che tutti dovevamo deplorarne i metodi, io facevo notare

che è vero proprio il contrario. Il suo metodo, il metodo dei tamburi e

dell’appello democratico, è quello dei Francescani o di qualsiasi altra marcia della

Chiesa Militante. Erano precisamente i suoi fini a essere dubbi, con la loro

moralità dissenziente e la loro finanza dispotica. È un po’ lo stesso con

cose come le insegne luminose di Broadway. L’esteta non deve chiedermi di

mescolare le mie lacrime alle sue, perché queste cose sono soltanto utili e

brutte. Perché non sono particolarmente incline a ritenerle brutte; ma sono

fortemente incline a ritenerle inutili. Come questione d’arte per l’arte,

mi paiono piuttosto artistiche. Come forma di pratico lavoro sociale

mi paiono puro, stupido spreco. Se il signor Bilge è tanto ricco da

erigere una torre alta quattrocento piedi e darle una corona di falci

dorate e stelle cremisi, per attirare l’attenzione sulla sua

fabbricazione del Dentifricio Paradiso o del Sigaro Settimo Cielo, io

non provo la minima disposizione a ringraziarlo per una qualche seria forma di

servizio sociale. Non ho mai provato il Sigaro Settimo Cielo; anzi un

presentimento mi spinge a credere che scenderò nella polvere

senza averlo provato. Ho ogni ragione di dubitare che faccia alcun

bene particolare a chi lo fuma, o alcun bene a chiunque tranne

a chi lo vende. Insomma l’utilità del signor Bilge consiste nell’essere

utile al signor Bilge, e tutto il resto è illusione e sentimentalismo.

Ma poiché so che Bilge è soltanto Bilge, dovrò abbassarmi alla

empietà di dire che il fuoco è soltanto fuoco? Dovrò bestemmiare le

stelle cremisi più di quanto faccia coi tramonti cremisi, o negare che quelle lune siano d’oro

più di quanto lo sia questa erba verde? Se un bambino vedesse queste luci colorate,

danzerebbe con tanto diletto quanto davanti a qualsiasi altro

balocco colorato; ed è dovere di ogni poeta, e persino di ogni critico,

danzare in rispettosa imitazione del bambino. Anzi sono in uno stato d’animo di così

grande simpatia per le luci fatate di questa città da pantomima, che

quasi mi dispiacerebbe veder tornare il buon senso sociale e un senso della proporzione

a spegnerle. Temo che il giorno stia sorgendo, e che la piena

luce del giorno della tradizione e dell’antica verità stia per porre fine a tutto questo

delizioso incubo di New York di notte. Contadini e preti e ogni

sorta di gente pratica e assennata stanno tornando al potere, e

il loro severo realismo potrebbe far avvizzire tutte queste cose belle, inconsistenti,

inutili. Non crederanno nel Sigaro Settimo Cielo, nemmeno

quando lo vedranno splendere come con stelle nel settimo cielo. Non

si lasceranno influenzare dalla pubblicità, più di quanto i preti e

i contadini del Medioevo si sarebbero lasciati influenzare dalla pubblicità.

Soltanto una generazione di uomini molto sciocca, sentimentale, e piuttosto servile

potrebbe mai lasciarsi influenzare dalla pubblicità. Chi è

un po’ più concreto, spiritoso, e intellettualmente indipendente, coglie

la battuta piuttosto semplice; e non si lascia impressionare da questa o da qualsiasi altra forma

di auto-elogio. Quasi ogni altro uomo in quasi ogni altra epoca avrebbe

colto la battuta. Se aveste detto a un uomo dell’Età della Pietra, ‘Ugg dice che Ugg

fa le migliori asce di pietra,’ egli avrebbe percepito una mancanza di

distacco e disinteresse in quella testimonianza. Se aveste detto

a un contadino medievale, ‘Robert l’Arciere proclama, con tre squilli

di corno, che fa buoni archi,’ il contadino avrebbe detto, ‘Beh,

certo che li fa,’ e avrebbe pensato a qualcosa di più importante. È

soltanto tra gente la cui mente è stata indebolita da una sorta di mesmerismo

che un trucco tanto trasparente come quello della pubblicità abbia mai potuto

essere tentato. E se mai avremo di nuovo, come per altre ragioni non

posso che sperare avremo, una distribuzione più democratica della proprietà e

una base più agricola della vita nazionale, sembrerebbe a prima vista

fin troppo probabile che tutta questa bella superstizione perisca, e

che il paese delle fate di Broadway con tutti i suoi vari arcobaleni svanisca. Per

tale gente il Sigaro Settimo Cielo, come la città ottocentesca,

sarà finito in fumo. E persino il suo fumo sarà svanito.

Ma lo stadio successivo della riflessione ci riporta al contadino che guarda

le luci di Broadway. Non è vero, in senso stretto,

che il contadino non abbia mai visto simili cose prima. La verità è che le ha

viste su scala molto più piccola, ma per uno scopo molto più grande.

Anche i contadini hanno il loro rituale e ornamento, ma è per adornare cose più

reali. A parte la nostra prima fantasia sul contadino che non sapeva

leggere, non c’è alcun dubbio su ciò che apparirebbe a un contadino che

sapesse leggere, e sapesse comprendere. Anche per lui il fuoco è sacro, per

lui anche il colore è simbolico. Ma là dove egli accende una candela per illuminare il

piccolo sacrario di San Giuseppe, scopre che ci vogliono milleduecento candele per

light the Seventh Heaven Cigar. He is used to the colours in church

windows showing red for martyrs or blue for madonnas; but here he can

only conclude that all the colours of the rainbow belong to Mr. Bilge.

Now upon the aesthetic side he might well be impressed; but it is

exactly on the social and even scientific side that he has a right to

criticise. If he were a Chinese peasant, for instance, and came from a

land of fireworks, he would naturally suppose that he had happened to

arrive at a great firework display in celebration of something; perhaps

the Sacred Emperor’s birthday, or rather birthnight. It would gradually

dawn on the Chinese philosopher that the Emperor could hardly be born

every night. And when he learnt the truth the philosopher, if he was a

philosopher, would be a little disappointed … possibly a little

disdainful.

Compare, for instance, these everlasting fireworks with the damp squibs

and dying bonfires of Guy Fawkes Day. That quaint and even queer

national festival has been fading for some time out of English life.

Still, it was a national festival, in the double sense that it

represented some sort of public spirit pursued by some sort of popular

impulse. People spent money on the display of fireworks; they did not

get money by it. And the people who spent money were often those who had

very little money to spend. It had something of the glorious and

fanatical character of making the poor poorer. It did not, like the

advertisements, have only the mean and materialistic character of making

the rich richer. In short, it came from the people and it appealed to

the nation. The historical and religious cause in which it originated is

not mine; and I think it has perished partly through being tied to a

historical theory for which there is no future. I think this is

illustrated in the very fact that the ceremonial is merely negative and

destructive. Negation and destruction are very noble things as far as

they go, and when they go in the right direction; and the popular

expression of them has always something hearty and human about it. I

shall not therefore bring any fine or fastidious criticism, whether

literary or musical, to bear upon the little boys who drag about a

bolster and a paper mask, calling out

Guy Fawkes Guy

Hit him in the eye.

But I admit it is a disadvantage that they have not a saint or hero to

crown in effigy as well as a traitor to burn in effigy. I admit that

popular Protestantism has become too purely negative for people to

wreathe in flowers the statue of Mr. Kensit or even of Dr. Clifford. I

do not disguise my preference for popular Catholicism; which still has

statues that can be wreathed in flowers. I wish our national feast of

fireworks revolved round something positive and popular. I wish the

beauty of a Catherine Wheel were displayed to the glory of St.

Catherine. I should not especially complain if Roman candles were really

Roman candles. But this negative character does not destroy the national

character; which began at least in disinterested faith and has ended at

least in disinterested fun. There is nothing disinterested at all about

the new commercial fireworks. There is nothing so dignified as a dingy

guy among the lights of Broadway. In that thoroughfare, indeed, the very

word guy has another and milder significance. An American friend

congratulated me on the impression I produced on a lady interviewer,

observing, ‘She says you’re a regular guy.’ This puzzled me a little at

the time. ‘Her description is no doubt correct,’ I said, ‘but I confess

that it would never have struck me as specially complimentary.’ But it

appears that it is one of the most graceful of compliments, in the

original American. A guy in America is a colourless term for a human

being. All men are guys, being endowed by their Creator with certain …

but I am misled by another association. And a regular guy means, I

presume, a reliable or respectable guy. The point here, however, is that

the guy in the grotesque English sense does represent the dilapidated

remnant of a real human tradition of symbolising real historic ideals by

the sacramental mystery of fire. It is a great fall from the lowest of

these lowly bonfires to the highest of the modern sky-signs. The new

illumination does not stand for any national ideal at all; and what is

yet more to the point, it does not come from any popular enthusiasm at

all. That is where it differs from the narrowest national Protestantism

of the English institution. Mobs have risen in support of No Popery; no

mobs are likely to rise in defence of the New Puffery. Many a poor crazy

Orangeman has died saying, ‘To Hell with the Pope’; it is doubtful

whether any man will ever, with his last breath, frame the ecstatic

words, ‘Try Hugby’s Chewing Gum.’ These modern and mercantile legends

are imposed upon us by a mercantile minority, and we are merely passive

to the suggestion. The hypnotist of high finance or big business merely

writes his commands in heaven with a finger of fire. All men really are

guys, in the sense of dummies. We are only the victims of his

pyrotechnic violence; and it is he who hits us in the eye.

This is the real case against that modern society that is symbolised by

such art and architecture. It is not that it is toppling, but that it is

top-heavy. It is not that it is vulgar, but rather that it is not

popular. In other words, the democratic ideal of countries like America,

while it is still generally sincere and sometimes intense, is at issue

with another tendency, an industrial progress which is of all things on

earth the most undemocratic. America is not alone in possessing the

industrialism, but she is alone in emphasising the ideal that strives

illuminare il Sigaro Settimo Cielo. È abituato ai colori nelle vetrate

delle chiese, rosso per i martiri o azzurro per le madonne; ma qui non può

che concludere che tutti i colori dell’arcobaleno appartengono al signor Bilge.

Ora sul versante estetico potrebbe ben restare impressionato; ma è

esattamente sul versante sociale e persino scientifico che ha il diritto di

criticare. Se fosse un contadino cinese, per esempio, e venisse da una

terra di fuochi d’artificio, supporrebbe naturalmente di essere per caso

arrivato a un grande spettacolo pirotecnico in celebrazione di qualcosa; forse

il compleanno del Sacro Imperatore, o piuttosto la sua notte natale. A poco a poco

albeggerebbe nel filosofo cinese che l’Imperatore non poteva certo nascere

ogni notte. E quando apprendesse la verità il filosofo, se era un

filosofo, resterebbe un po’ deluso … forse un po’

sdegnoso.

Si confrontino, per esempio, questi fuochi d’artificio eterni con i mortaretti umidi

e i falò morenti del Guy Fawkes Day. Quella bizzarra e persino strana

festa nazionale va da qualche tempo svanendo dalla vita inglese.

Eppure era una festa nazionale, nel duplice senso che

rappresentava una sorta di spirito pubblico animato da una sorta di impulso

popolare. La gente spendeva denaro nello spettacolo dei fuochi; non ne

ricavava denaro. E chi spendeva denaro era spesso chi ne aveva

pochissimo da spendere. Aveva qualcosa del glorioso e

fanatico carattere di rendere il povero più povero. Non aveva, come le

pubblicità, soltanto il gretto e materialistico carattere di rendere

il ricco più ricco. Insomma, veniva dal popolo e si rivolgeva

alla nazione. La causa storica e religiosa in cui ebbe origine non è

la mia; e credo che sia perita in parte per essere legata a una

teoria storica che non ha futuro. Credo che ciò sia

illustrato dal fatto stesso che il cerimoniale è meramente negativo e

distruttivo. La negazione e la distruzione sono cose nobilissime nella misura in cui

vanno, e quando vanno nella direzione giusta; e la loro espressione

popolare ha sempre qualcosa di caloroso e umano. Non

porterò dunque alcuna critica fine o schizzinosa, letteraria

o musicale, contro i ragazzini che trascinano in giro un

cuscino e una maschera di carta, gridando

Guy Fawkes Guy

Colpiscilo nell’occhio.

Ma ammetto che è uno svantaggio non avere un santo o un eroe da

incoronare in effigie tanto quanto un traditore da bruciare in effigie. Ammetto che

il Protestantesimo popolare è diventato troppo puramente negativo perché si possano

cingere di fiori la statua del signor Kensit o persino del dottor Clifford. Non

nascondo la mia preferenza per il Cattolicesimo popolare; che ha ancora

statue che possono essere cinte di fiori. Vorrei che la nostra festa nazionale di

fuochi d’artificio ruotasse intorno a qualcosa di positivo e popolare. Vorrei che la

bellezza di una ruota di Caterina fosse esibita alla gloria di Santa

Caterina. Non mi lamenterei particolarmente se le candele romane fossero davvero

candele romane. Ma questo carattere negativo non distrugge il carattere

nazionale; che cominciò almeno in una fede disinteressata ed è finito

almeno in un divertimento disinteressato. Non c’è nulla di disinteressato

nei nuovi fuochi d’artificio commerciali. Non c’è nulla di così dignitoso come un lercio

guy tra le luci di Broadway. In quella via, anzi, la stessa

parola guy ha un altro e più mite significato. Un amico americano

si congratulò con me per l’impressione che avevo prodotto su una intervistatrice,

osservando, ‘Dice che sei un regular guy.’ Questo mi lasciò un po’ perplesso

sul momento. ‘La sua descrizione è senza dubbio corretta,’ dissi, ‘ma confesso

che non mi sarebbe mai parsa particolarmente lusinghiera.’ Ma

pare che sia uno dei più garbati complimenti, nell’

originale americano. Un guy in America è un termine incolore per un essere

umano. Tutti gli uomini sono guys, dotati dal loro Creatore di certi …

ma mi lascio sviare da un’altra associazione. E un regular guy significa,

presumo, un guy affidabile o rispettabile. Il punto qui, tuttavia, è che

il guy nel senso inglese grottesco rappresenta davvero il residuo

malandato di una reale tradizione umana di simboleggiare reali ideali storici mediante

il mistero sacramentale del fuoco. È una gran caduta dal più basso di

questi umili falò al più alto delle moderne insegne luminose. La nuova

illuminazione non sta affatto per alcun ideale nazionale; e ciò che è

ancor più al punto, non nasce affatto da alcun entusiasmo

popolare. Qui sta la differenza dal più angusto Protestantesimo nazionale

dell’istituzione inglese. Le folle sono insorte a sostegno del No Popery; nessuna

folla è probabile che insorga in difesa della New Puffery. Molti poveri pazzi

Orangisti sono morti dicendo, ‘Al diavolo il Papa’; è dubbio

che alcun uomo mai, col suo ultimo respiro, formi le estatiche

parole, ‘Provate la Gomma da masticare Hugby.’ Queste moderne e mercantili leggende

ci sono imposte da una minoranza mercantile, e noi siamo meramente passivi

alla suggestione. L’ipnotizzatore dell’alta finanza o dei grandi affari si limita a

scrivere i suoi comandi nel cielo con un dito di fuoco. Tutti gli uomini sono davvero

guys, nel senso di fantocci. Siamo solo le vittime della sua

violenza pirotecnica; ed è lui che ci colpisce nell’occhio.

Questa è la vera accusa contro quella società moderna che è simboleggiata da

tale arte e architettura. Non è che stia crollando, ma che è

sovraccarica in cima. Non è che sia volgare, ma piuttosto che non è

popolare. In altre parole, l’ideale democratico di paesi come l’America,

pur essendo ancora in genere sincero e talora intenso, è in contrasto

con un’altra tendenza, un progresso industriale che è la più antidemocratica

di tutte le cose sulla terra. L’America non è sola nel possedere

l’industrialismo, ma è sola nel dare risalto all’ideale che lotta

with industrialism. Industrial capitalism and ideal democracy are

everywhere in controversy; but perhaps only here are they in conflict.

France has a democratic ideal; but France is not industrial. England and

Germany are industrial; but England and Germany are not really

democratic. Of course when I speak here of industrialism I speak of

great industrial areas; there is, as will be noted later, another side

to all these countries; there is in America itself not only a great deal

of agricultural society, but a great deal of agricultural equality;

just as there are still peasants in Germany and may some day again be

peasants in England. But the point is that the ideal and its enemy the

reality are here crushed very close to each other in the high, narrow

city; and that the sky-scraper is truly named because its top, towering

in such insolence, is scraping the stars off the American sky, the very

heaven of the American spirit.

That seems to me the main outline of the whole problem. In the first

chapter of this book, I have emphasised the fact that equality is still

the ideal though no longer the reality of America. I should like to

conclude this one by emphasising the fact that the reality of modern

capitalism is menacing that ideal with terrors and even splendours that

might well stagger the wavering and impressionable modern spirit. Upon

the issue of that struggle depends the question of whether this new

great civilisation continues to exist, and even whether any one cares if

it exists or not. I have already used the parable of the American flag,

and the stars that stand for a multitudinous equality; I might here take

the opposite symbol of these artificial and terrestrial stars flaming on

the forehead of the commercial city; and note the peril of the last

illusion, which is that the artificial stars may seem to fill the

heavens, and the real stars to have faded from sight. But I am content

for the moment to reaffirm the merely imaginative pleasure of those

dizzy turrets and dancing fires. If those nightmare buildings were

really all built for nothing, how noble they would be! The fact that

they were really built for something need not unduly depress us for a

moment, or drag down our soaring fancies. There is something about these

vertical lines that suggests a sort of rush upwards, as of great

cataracts topsy-turvy. I have spoken of fireworks, but here I should

rather speak of rockets. There is only something underneath the mind

murmuring that nothing remains at last of a flaming rocket except a

falling stick. I have spoken of Babylonian perspectives, and of words

written with a fiery finger, like that huge unhuman finger that wrote on

Belshazzar’s wall… But what did it write on Belshazzar’s wall?… I

am content once more to end on a note of doubt and a rather dark

sympathy with those many-coloured solar systems turning so dizzily, far

up in the divine vacuum of the night.

‘From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when people get away

from that they are lost.’

Irish and other Interviewers

It is often asked what should be the first thing that a man sees when he

lands in a foreign country; but I think it should be the vision of his

own country. At least when I came into New York Harbour, a sort of grey

and green cloud came between me and the towers with multitudinous

windows, white in the winter sunlight; and I saw an old brown house

standing back among the beech-trees at home, the house of only one among

many friends and neighbours, but one somehow so sunken in the very heart

of England as to be unconscious of her imperial or international

position, and out of the sound of her perilous seas. But what made most

clear the vision that revisited me was something else. Before we touched

land the men of my own guild, the journalists and reporters, had already

boarded the ship like pirates. And one of them spoke to me in an accent

that I knew; and thanked me for all I had done for Ireland. And it was

at that moment that I knew most vividly that what I wanted was to do

something for England.

Then, as it chanced, I looked across at the statue of Liberty, and saw

that the great bronze was gleaming green in the morning light. I had

made all the obvious jokes about the statue of Liberty. I found it had a

soothing effect on earnest Prohibitionists on the boat to urge, as a

point of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to be given back to the

French, a vicious race abandoned to the culture of the vine. I proposed

that the last liquors on board should be poured out in a pagan libation

before it. And then I suddenly remembered that this Liberty was still in

some sense enlightening the world, or one part of the world; was a lamp

for one sort of wanderer, a star of one sort of seafarer. To one

persecuted people at least this land had really been an asylum; even if

recent legislation (as I have said) had made them think it a lunatic

asylum. They had made it so much their home that the very colour of the

country seemed to change with the infusion; as the bronze of the great

statue took on a semblance of the wearing of the green.

It is a commonplace that the Englishman has been stupid in his relations

with the Irish; but he has been far more stupid in his relations with

the Americans on the subject of the Irish. His propaganda has been worse

than his practice; and his defence more ill-considered than the most

indefensible things that it was intended to defend. There is in this

matter a curious tangle of cross-purposes, which only a parallel example

can make at all clear. And I will note the point here, because it is

some testimony to its vivid importance that it was really the first I

had to discuss on American soil with an American citizen. In a double

con l’industrialismo. Il capitalismo industriale e la democrazia ideale sono

ovunque in controversia; ma forse solo qui sono in conflitto.

La Francia ha un ideale democratico; ma la Francia non è industriale. L’Inghilterra e la

Germania sono industriali; ma l’Inghilterra e la Germania non sono davvero

democratiche. Naturalmente, quando parlo qui di industrialismo parlo di

grandi aree industriali; c’è, come si noterà più avanti, un altro lato

in tutti questi paesi; c’è nell’America stessa non solo una gran quantità

di società agricola, ma una gran quantità di uguaglianza agricola;

proprio come ci sono ancora contadini in Germania e un giorno potranno di nuovo esserci

contadini in Inghilterra. Ma il punto è che l’ideale e il suo nemico, la

realtà, sono qui schiacciati vicinissimi l’uno all’altro nell’alta, angusta

città; e che il grattacielo è ben chiamato così perché la sua cima, torreggiante

in tale insolenza, sta raschiando via le stelle dal cielo americano, il vero

cielo dello spirito americano.

Questo mi pare il tratto principale dell’intero problema. Nel primo

capitolo di questo libro, ho sottolineato il fatto che l’uguaglianza è ancora

l’ideale, benché non più la realtà dell’America. Vorrei

concludere questo sottolineando il fatto che la realtà del moderno

capitalismo sta minacciando quell’ideale con terrori e persino splendori che

potrebbero ben sconvolgere il vacillante e impressionabile spirito moderno. Dall’

esito di quella lotta dipende la questione se questa nuova

grande civiltà continuerà a esistere, e persino se a qualcuno importi che

esista o no. Ho già usato la parabola della bandiera americana,

e delle stelle che stanno per una moltitudinaria uguaglianza; potrei qui prendere

il simbolo opposto di queste stelle artificiali e terrestri fiammeggianti sulla

fronte della città commerciale; e notare il pericolo dell’ultima

illusione, che è che le stelle artificiali possano sembrare riempire i

cieli, e le vere stelle essere svanite dalla vista. Ma per il momento mi accontento

di riaffermare il piacere meramente immaginativo di quelle

vertiginose torri e di quei fuochi danzanti. Se quegli edifici da incubo fossero

stati davvero costruiti per nulla, come sarebbero nobili! Il fatto che

siano stati davvero costruiti per qualcosa non deve deprimerci indebitamente per un

momento, né trascinare in basso le nostre fantasie che si librano. C’è qualcosa in queste

linee verticali che suggerisce una sorta di slancio verso l’alto, come di grandi

cateratte capovolte. Ho parlato di fuochi d’artificio, ma qui dovrei

piuttosto parlare di razzi. C’è soltanto qualcosa sotto la mente che

mormora che nulla resta infine di un razzo fiammeggiante tranne un

bastone che cade. Ho parlato di prospettive babilonesi, e di parole

scritte con un dito di fuoco, come quell’enorme dito non umano che scrisse sul

muro di Baldassarre… Ma cosa scrisse sul muro di Baldassarre?… Mi

accontento ancora una volta di finire su una nota di dubbio e una simpatia piuttosto

oscura per quei sistemi solari dai molti colori che ruotano così vertiginosamente, lassù

nel divino vuoto della notte.

‘Dalla terra veniamo e alla terra torniamo; quando la gente si allontana

da questo, si perde.’

Intervistatori irlandesi e altri

Ci si chiede spesso quale dovrebbe essere la prima cosa che un uomo vede quando

sbarca in un paese straniero; ma io credo che dovrebbe essere la visione del suo

proprio paese. Almeno quando entrai nel porto di New York, una sorta di nuvola grigia

e verde si frappose tra me e le torri dalle molteplici

finestre, bianche nella luce del sole d’inverno; e vidi una vecchia casa bruna

che si ergeva arretrata tra i faggi a casa, la casa di uno soltanto tra

molti amici e vicini, ma uno in qualche modo così sprofondato nel cuore stesso

dell’Inghilterra da essere inconsapevole della sua posizione imperiale o

internazionale, e fuori dal suono dei suoi mari perigliosi. Ma ciò che rese più

chiara la visione che mi tornò fu qualcos’altro. Prima che toccassimo

terra gli uomini della mia stessa corporazione, i giornalisti e i cronisti, avevano già

abbordato la nave come pirati. E uno di loro mi parlò con un accento

che conoscevo; e mi ringraziò per tutto ciò che avevo fatto per l’Irlanda. E fu

in quel momento che seppi con più viva chiarezza che ciò che volevo era fare

qualcosa per l’Inghilterra.

Poi, per caso, guardai dall’altra parte verso la statua della Libertà, e vidi

che il grande bronzo luccicava verde nella luce del mattino. Avevo

fatto tutte le battute ovvie sulla statua della Libertà. Trovavo che avesse un

effetto calmante sui ferventi Proibizionisti a bordo insistere, come

punto di dignità e delicatezza, che dovesse essere restituita ai

Francesi, una razza viziosa abbandonata alla coltura della vite. Proposi

che gli ultimi liquori a bordo fossero versati in una libagione pagana

dinanzi a essa. E poi mi ricordai all’improvviso che questa Libertà stava ancora in

un certo senso illuminando il mondo, o una parte del mondo; era una lampada

per una certa specie di vagabondo, una stella per una certa specie di navigante. Per un

popolo perseguitato almeno questa terra era stata davvero un asilo; anche se

la recente legislazione (come ho detto) aveva fatto loro pensare che fosse un

manicomio. L’avevano resa così tanto la loro casa che il colore stesso del

paese sembrava mutare con l’infusione; come il bronzo della grande

statua assunse una parvenza del verde indossato.

È un luogo comune che l’inglese sia stato stupido nei suoi rapporti

con gli irlandesi; ma è stato assai più stupido nei suoi rapporti con

gli americani sul tema degli irlandesi. La sua propaganda è stata peggiore

della sua pratica; e la sua difesa più sconsiderata delle cose più

indifendibili che era intesa a difendere. C’è in questa

faccenda un curioso groviglio di contropropositi, che solo un esempio parallelo

può rendere davvero chiaro. E annoterò il punto qui, perché è

una qualche testimonianza della sua viva importanza il fatto che fu davvero il primo che

dovetti discutere su suolo americano con un cittadino americano. In un duplice

sense I touched Ireland before I came to America. I will take an

imaginary instance from another controversy; in order to show how the

apology can be worse than the action. The best we can say for ourselves

is worse than the worst that we can do.

There was a time when English poets and other publicists could always be

inspired with instantaneous indignation about the persecuted Jews in

Russia. We have heard less about them since we heard more about the

persecuting Jews in Russia. I fear there are a great many middle-class

Englishmen already who wish that Trotsky had been persecuted a little

more. But even in those days Englishmen divided their minds in a curious

fashion; and unconsciously distinguished between the Jews whom they had

never seen, in Warsaw, and the Jews whom they had often seen in

Whitechapel. It seemed to be assumed that, by a curious coincidence,

Russia possessed not only the very worst Anti-Semites but the very best

Semites. A moneylender in London might be like Judas Iscariot; but a

moneylender in Moscow must be like Judas Maccabaeus.

Nevertheless there remained in our common sense an unconscious but

fundamental comprehension of the unity of Israel; a sense that some

things could be said, and some could not be said, about the Jews as a

whole. Suppose that even in those days, to say nothing of these, an

English protest against Russian Anti-Semitism had been answered by the

Russian Anti-Semites, and suppose the answer had been somewhat as

follows:—

‘It is all very well for foreigners to complain of our denying civic

rights to our Jewish subjects; but we know the Jews better than they do.

They are a barbarous people, entirely primitive, and very like the

simple savages who cannot count beyond five on their fingers. It is

quite impossible to make them understand ordinary numbers, to say

nothing of simple economics. They do not realise the meaning or the

value of money. No Jew anywhere in the world can get into his stupid

head the notion of a bargain, or of exchanging one thing for another.

Their hopeless incapacity for commerce or finance would retard the

progress of our people, would prevent the spread of any sort of economic

education, would keep the whole country on a level lower than that of

the most prehistoric methods of barter. What Russia needs most is a

mercantile middle class; and it is unjust to ask us to swamp its small

beginnings in thousands of these rude tribesmen, who cannot do a sum of

simple addition, or understand the symbolic character of a threepenny

bit. We might as well be asked to give civic rights to cows and pigs as

to this unhappy, half-witted race who can no more count than the beasts

of the field. In every intellectual exercise they are hopelessly

incompetent; no Jew can play chess; no Jew can learn languages; no Jew

has ever appeared in the smallest part in any theatrical performance; no

Jew can give or take any pleasure connected with any musical instrument.

These people are our subjects; and we understand them. We accept full

responsibility for treating such troglodytes on our own terms.’

It would not be entirely convincing. It would sound a little far-fetched

and unreal. But it would sound exactly like our utterances about the

Irish, as they sound to all Americans, and rather especially to

Anti-Irish Americans. That is exactly the impression we produce on the

people of the United States when we say, as we do say in substance,

something like this: ‘We mean no harm to the poor dear Irish, so dreamy,

so irresponsible, so incapable of order or organisation. If we were to

withdraw from their country they would only fight among themselves; they

have no notion of how to rule themselves. There is something charming

about their unpracticability, about their very incapacity for the coarse

business of politics. But for their own sakes it is impossible to leave

these emotional visionaries to ruin themselves in the attempt to rule

themselves. They are like children; but they are our own children, and

we understand them. We accept full responsibility for acting as their

parents and guardians.’

Now the point is not only that this view of the Irish is false, but that

it is the particular view that the Americans know to be false. While we

are saying that the Irish could not organise, the Americans are

complaining, often very bitterly, of the power of Irish organisation.

While we say that the Irishman could not rule himself, the Americans are

saying, more or less humorously, that the Irishman rules them. A highly

intelligent professor said to me in Boston, ‘We have solved the Irish

problem here; we have an entirely independent Irish Government.’ While

we are complaining, in an almost passionate manner, of the impotence of

mere cliques of idealists and dreamers, they are complaining, often in a

very indignant manner, of the power of great gangs of bosses and

bullies. There are a great many Americans who pity the Irish, very

naturally and very rightly, for the historic martyrdom which their

patriotism has endured. But there are a great many Americans who do not

pity the Irish in the least. They would be much more likely to pity the

English; only this particular way of talking tends rather to make them

despise the English. Thus both the friends of Ireland and the foes of

Ireland tend to be the foes of England. We make one set of enemies by

our action, and another by our apology.

It is a thing that can from time to time be found in history; a

misunderstanding that really has a moral. The English excuse would carry

much more weight if it had more sincerity and more humility. There are

a considerable number of people in the United States who could

sympathise with us, if we would say frankly that we fear the Irish.

Those who thus despise our pity might possibly even respect our fear.

senso toccai l’Irlanda prima di giungere in America. Prenderò un

esempio immaginario da un’altra controversia; per mostrare come l’

apologia possa essere peggiore dell’azione. Il meglio che possiamo dire di noi stessi

è peggiore del peggio che possiamo fare.

Ci fu un tempo in cui i poeti inglesi e altri pubblicisti potevano sempre essere

ispirati a un’istantanea indignazione per gli ebrei perseguitati in

Russia. Ne abbiamo sentito parlare meno da quando abbiamo sentito di più degli

ebrei persecutori in Russia. Temo che ci siano già moltissimi inglesi della classe

media che vorrebbero che Trotsky fosse stato perseguitato un po’

di più. Ma persino in quei giorni gli inglesi dividevano la mente in un curioso

modo; e distinguevano inconsciamente tra gli ebrei che non avevano

mai visto, a Varsavia, e gli ebrei che avevano spesso visto a

Whitechapel. Sembrava si desse per scontato che, per una curiosa coincidenza,

la Russia possedesse non solo i peggiori Antisemiti ma anche i migliori

Semiti. Un usuraio a Londra poteva essere come Giuda Iscariota; ma un

usuraio a Mosca doveva essere come Giuda Maccabeo.

Ciononostante rimaneva nel nostro senso comune una comprensione inconscia ma

fondamentale dell’unità di Israele; il senso che alcune

cose si potevano dire, e altre non si potevano dire, sugli ebrei nel loro

insieme. Supponiamo che persino in quei giorni, per non dire di questi, una

protesta inglese contro l’Antisemitismo russo fosse stata risposta dagli

Antisemiti russi, e supponiamo che la risposta fosse stata più o meno la

seguente:—

‘Sta tutto molto bene che gli stranieri si lamentino del nostro negare diritti

civili ai nostri sudditi ebrei; ma noi conosciamo gli ebrei meglio di loro.

Sono un popolo barbaro, del tutto primitivo, e molto simile ai

semplici selvaggi che non sanno contare oltre il cinque sulle dita. È

del tutto impossibile far loro comprendere i numeri ordinari, per non

dire la semplice economia. Non colgono il significato né il

valore del denaro. Nessun ebreo al mondo riesce a ficcarsi nella sua stupida

testa la nozione di un affare, o di scambiare una cosa con un’altra.

La loro disperata incapacità per il commercio o la finanza ritarderebbe il

progresso del nostro popolo, impedirebbe la diffusione di ogni sorta di

educazione economica, terrebbe l’intero paese a un livello più basso di quello

dei più preistorici metodi di baratto. Ciò di cui la Russia ha più bisogno è una

classe media mercantile; ed è ingiusto chiederci di sommergerne i piccoli

inizi in migliaia di questi rozzi tribali, che non sanno fare una somma di

semplice addizione, né comprendere il carattere simbolico di una monetina da tre

penny. Tanto varrebbe chiederci di dare diritti civili a mucche e maiali quanto

a questa infelice razza mezza scema che non sa contare più delle bestie

dei campi. In ogni esercizio intellettuale sono irrimediabilmente

incompetenti; nessun ebreo sa giocare a scacchi; nessun ebreo sa imparare lingue; nessun ebreo

è mai apparso nella minima parte in alcuna rappresentazione teatrale; nessun

ebreo sa dare o ricevere alcun piacere legato ad alcuno strumento musicale.

Questa gente è nostra suddita; e noi la comprendiamo. Ci assumiamo piena

responsabilità di trattare simili trogloditi alle nostre condizioni.’

Non sarebbe del tutto convincente. Suonerebbe un po’ forzato

e irreale. Ma suonerebbe esattamente come le nostre affermazioni sugli

irlandesi, come suonano a tutti gli americani, e piuttosto specialmente agli

americani anti-irlandesi. Questa è esattamente l’impressione che produciamo sul

popolo degli Stati Uniti quando diciamo, come in sostanza diciamo,

qualcosa del genere: ‘Non vogliamo alcun male ai poveri cari irlandesi, così sognatori,

così irresponsabili, così incapaci di ordine o organizzazione. Se ci

ritirassimo dal loro paese si limiterebbero a combattersi tra loro; non

hanno alcuna nozione di come governarsi. C’è qualcosa di affascinante

nella loro impraticità, nella loro stessa incapacità per il rozzo

mestiere della politica. Ma per il loro stesso bene è impossibile lasciare

questi visionari emotivi a rovinarsi nel tentativo di governare

se stessi. Sono come bambini; ma sono i nostri stessi bambini, e

noi li comprendiamo. Ci assumiamo piena responsabilità di agire da loro

genitori e tutori.’

Ora il punto non è solo che questa visione degli irlandesi è falsa, ma che

è la particolare visione che gli americani sanno essere falsa. Mentre noi

diciamo che gli irlandesi non saprebbero organizzarsi, gli americani si

lamentano, spesso assai amaramente, del potere dell’organizzazione irlandese.

Mentre noi diciamo che l’irlandese non saprebbe governare se stesso, gli americani

dicono, più o meno scherzosamente, che l’irlandese governa loro. Un professore molto

intelligente mi disse a Boston, ‘Qui abbiamo risolto il problema

irlandese; abbiamo un Governo irlandese del tutto indipendente.’ Mentre

noi ci lamentiamo, in maniera quasi appassionata, dell’impotenza di

mere cricche di idealisti e sognatori, essi si lamentano, spesso in

maniera assai indignata, del potere di grandi bande di capi e

bulli. Ci sono moltissimi americani che compatiscono gli irlandesi, assai

naturalmente e assai giustamente, per lo storico martirio che il loro

patriottismo ha sopportato. Ma ci sono moltissimi americani che non

compatiscono affatto gli irlandesi. Sarebbero assai più propensi a compatire gli

inglesi; solo che questo particolare modo di parlare tende piuttosto a far loro

disprezzare gli inglesi. Così tanto gli amici dell’Irlanda quanto i nemici

dell’Irlanda tendono a essere i nemici dell’Inghilterra. Ci facciamo una schiera di nemici con

la nostra azione, e un’altra con la nostra apologia.

È una cosa che di tempo in tempo si può trovare nella storia; un

malinteso che ha davvero una morale. La scusa inglese avrebbe

molto più peso se avesse più sincerità e più umiltà. C’è

un numero considerevole di persone negli Stati Uniti che potrebbero

simpatizzare con noi, se dicessimo francamente che temiamo gli irlandesi.

Chi così disprezza la nostra pietà potrebbe forse persino rispettare la nostra paura.

The argument I have often used in other places comes back with

prodigious and redoubled force, after hearing anything of American

opinion; the argument that the only reasonable or reputable excuse for

the English is the excuse of a patriotic sense of peril; and that the

Unionist, if he must be a Unionist, should use that and no other. When

the Unionist has said that he dare not let loose against himself a

captive he has so cruelly wronged, he has said all that he has to say;

all that he has ever had to say; all that he will ever have to say. He

is like a man who has sent a virile and rather vindictive rival unjustly

to penal servitude; and who connives at the continuance of the sentence,

not because he himself is particularly vindictive, but because he is

afraid of what the convict will do when he comes out of prison. This is

not exactly a moral strength, but it is a very human weakness; and that

is the most that can be said for it. All other talk, about Celtic frenzy

or Catholic superstition, is cant invented to deceive himself or to

deceive the world. But the vital point to realise is that it is cant

that cannot possibly deceive the American world. In the matter of the

Irishman the American is not to be deceived. It is not merely true to

say that he knows better. It is equally true to say that he knows worse.

He knows vices and evils in the Irishman that are entirely hidden in the

hazy vision of the Englishman. He knows that our unreal slanders are

inconsistent even with the real sins. To us Ireland is a shadowy Isle of

Sunset, like Atlantis, about which we can make up legends. To him it is

a positive ward or parish in the heart of his huge cities, like

Whitechapel; about which even we cannot make legends but only lies. And,

as I have said, there are some lies we do not tell even about

Whitechapel. We do not say it is inhabited by Jews too stupid to count

or know the value of a coin.

The first thing for any honest Englishman to send across the sea is

this; that the English have not the shadow of a notion of what they are

up against in America. They have never even heard of the batteries of

almost brutal energy, of which I had thus touched a live wire even

before I landed. People talk about the hypocrisy of England in dealing

with a small nationality. What strikes me is the stupidity of England in

supposing that she is dealing with a small nationality; when she is

really dealing with a very large nationality. She is dealing with a

nationality that often threatens, even numerically, to dominate all the

other nationalities of the United States. The Irish are not decaying;

they are not unpractical; they are scarcely even scattered; they are not

even poor. They are the most powerful and practical world-combination

with whom we can decide to be friends or foes; and that is why I thought

first of that still and solid brown house in Buckinghamshire, standing

back in the shadow of the trees.

Among my impressions of America I have deliberately put first the figure

of the Irish-American interviewer, standing on the shore more symbolic

than the statue of Liberty. The Irish interviewer’s importance for the

English lay in the fact of his being an Irishman, but there was also

considerable interest in the circumstance of his being an interviewer.

And as certain wild birds sometimes wing their way far out to sea and

are the first signal of the shore, so the first Americans the traveller

meets are often American interviewers; and they are generally birds of a

feather, and they certainly flock together. In this respect, there is a

slight difference in the etiquette of the craft in the two countries,

which I was delighted to discuss with my fellow craftsmen. If I could at

that moment have flown back to Fleet Street I am happy to reflect that

nobody in the world would in the least wish to interview me. I should

attract no more attention than the stone griffin opposite the Law

Courts; both monsters being grotesque but also familiar. But supposing

for the sake of argument that anybody did want to interview me, it is

fairly certain that the fact of one paper publishing such an interview

would rather prevent the other papers from doing so. The repetition of

the same views of the same individual in two places would be considered

rather bad journalism; it would have an air of stolen thunder, not to

say stage thunder.

But in America the fact of my landing and lecturing was evidently

regarded in the same light as a murder or a great fire, or any other

terrible but incurable catastrophe, a matter of interest to all pressmen

concerned with practical events. One of the first questions I was asked

was how I should be disposed to explain the wave of crime in New York.

Naturally I replied that it might possibly be due to the number of

English lecturers who had recently landed. In the mood of the moment it

seemed possible that, if they had all been interviewed, regrettable

incidents might possibly have taken place. But this was only the mood of

the moment, and even as a mood did not last more than a moment. And

since it has reference to a rather common and a rather unjust conception

of American journalism, I think it well to take it first as a fallacy to

be refuted, though the refutation may require a rather longer approach.

I have generally found that the traveller 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

L’argomento che ho spesso usato in altri luoghi ritorna con

prodigiosa e raddoppiata forza, dopo aver udito qualcosa dell’opinione

americana; l’argomento che l’unica scusa ragionevole o rispettabile per

gli inglesi è la scusa di un patriottico senso di pericolo; e che l’

Unionista, se proprio deve essere Unionista, dovrebbe usare quella e nessun’altra. Quando

l’Unionista ha detto che non osa scatenare contro se stesso un

prigioniero cui ha fatto un torto così crudele, ha detto tutto ciò che ha da dire;

tutto ciò che abbia mai avuto da dire; tutto ciò che avrà mai da dire. È

come un uomo che ha mandato un rivale virile e piuttosto vendicativo ingiustamente

ai lavori forzati; e che è connivente col protrarsi della condanna,

non perché egli stesso sia particolarmente vendicativo, ma perché ha

paura di ciò che il condannato farà quando uscirà di prigione. Questa

non è esattamente una forza morale, ma è una debolezza molto umana; e questo

è il massimo che se ne può dire. Ogni altro discorso, sulla frenesia celtica

o la superstizione cattolica, è ipocrisia inventata per ingannare se stesso o per

ingannare il mondo. Ma il punto vitale da cogliere è che è un’ipocrisia

che non può in alcun modo ingannare il mondo americano. In materia di

irlandesi l’americano non si lascia ingannare. Non è soltanto vero

dire che egli ne sa di più. È altrettanto vero dire che ne sa di peggio.

Conosce nell’irlandese vizi e mali del tutto nascosti alla

nebbiosa visione dell’inglese. Sa che le nostre irreali calunnie sono

incoerenti persino coi peccati reali. Per noi l’Irlanda è una nebbiosa Isola del

Tramonto, come Atlantide, su cui possiamo inventare leggende. Per lui è

un vero e proprio rione o parrocchia nel cuore delle sue enormi città, come

Whitechapel; su cui neppure noi possiamo inventare leggende ma solo menzogne. E,

come ho detto, ci sono alcune menzogne che non diciamo nemmeno su

Whitechapel. Non diciamo che è abitata da ebrei troppo stupidi per contare

o conoscere il valore di una moneta.

La prima cosa che ogni onesto inglese dovrebbe mandare al di là del mare è

questa; che gli inglesi non hanno la minima ombra di idea di ciò con cui hanno

a che fare in America. Non hanno mai nemmeno sentito parlare delle batterie di

energia quasi brutale, di cui avevo così toccato un filo scoperto persino

prima di sbarcare. La gente parla dell’ipocrisia dell’Inghilterra nel trattare

con una piccola nazionalità. Ciò che mi colpisce è la stupidità dell’Inghilterra nel

supporre di avere a che fare con una piccola nazionalità; quando in realtà

ha a che fare con una nazionalità molto grande. Ha a che fare con una

nazionalità che spesso minaccia, persino numericamente, di dominare tutte le

altre nazionalità degli Stati Uniti. Gli irlandesi non stanno decadendo;

non sono impratici; non sono quasi nemmeno dispersi; non sono

nemmeno poveri. Sono la più potente e pratica combinazione mondiale

con cui possiamo decidere di essere amici o nemici; ed ecco perché pensai

per prima cosa a quella quieta e solida casa bruna nel Buckinghamshire, che si ergeva

arretrata nell’ombra degli alberi.

Tra le mie impressioni dell’America ho deliberatamente messo per prima la figura

dell’intervistatore irlandese-americano, ritto sulla riva più simbolico

della statua della Libertà. L’importanza dell’intervistatore irlandese per gli

inglesi stava nel fatto che era irlandese, ma c’era anche

considerevole interesse nella circostanza che fosse un intervistatore.

E come certi uccelli selvatici talvolta si spingono in volo lontano al largo e

sono il primo segnale della riva, così i primi americani che il viaggiatore

incontra sono spesso intervistatori americani; e sono in genere uccelli dello stesso

piumaggio, e di certo volano in stormo. A questo riguardo, c’è una

lieve differenza nell’etichetta del mestiere nei due paesi,

che fui lieto di discutere coi miei colleghi d’arte. Se in

quel momento avessi potuto volare indietro a Fleet Street sono felice di riflettere che

nessuno al mondo desidererebbe minimamente intervistarmi. Non

attirerei più attenzione del grifone di pietra di fronte al Palazzo di

Giustizia; entrambi i mostri essendo grotteschi ma anche familiari. Ma supponendo

per amor di discussione che qualcuno volesse davvero intervistarmi, è

abbastanza certo che il fatto che un giornale pubblicasse una tale intervista

impedirebbe piuttosto agli altri giornali di farlo. La ripetizione delle

stesse opinioni dello stesso individuo in due luoghi sarebbe considerata

un giornalismo piuttosto scadente; avrebbe un’aria di tuono rubato, per non

dire di tuono da palcoscenico.

Ma in America il fatto del mio sbarco e delle mie conferenze era evidentemente

considerato nella stessa luce di un omicidio o di un grande incendio, o di qualsiasi altra

terribile ma incurabile catastrofe, una faccenda d’interesse per tutti i giornalisti

che si occupano di eventi pratici. Una delle prime domande che mi furono poste

fu come fossi disposto a spiegare l’ondata di crimini a New York.

Naturalmente risposi che poteva forse essere dovuta al numero di

conferenzieri inglesi sbarcati di recente. Nell’umore del momento

sembrava possibile che, se fossero stati tutti intervistati, deprecabili

incidenti avrebbero forse potuto aver luogo. Ma questo era solo l’umore del

momento, e persino come umore non durò più di un momento. E

poiché ha attinenza con una concezione piuttosto comune e piuttosto ingiusta

del giornalismo americano, credo sia bene prenderla anzitutto come una fallacia da

confutare, benché la confutazione possa richiedere un approccio piuttosto più lungo.

Ho generalmente trovato che il viaggiatore non riesce a comprendere un paese

straniero, trattandolo come una tendenza e non come un equilibrio. Ma se

una cosa tendesse sempre in una sola direzione, tenderebbe presto alla

distruzione. Tutto ciò che meramente progredisce alla fine perisce. Ogni

nazione, come ogni famiglia, esiste su un compromesso, e comunemente un

compromesso piuttosto eccentrico; usando la parola ‘eccentrico’ nel senso di

qualcosa che è in qualche modo insieme folle e sano. Ora lo straniero

comunemente vede qualche tratto che gli pare fantastico senza vedere il

feature that balances it. The ordinary examples are obvious enough. An

Englishman dining inside a hotel on the boulevards 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 on to

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 Kent and 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 realise the sublime and starry paradox of the phrase, _vin

ordinaire_, 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 gap 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 the 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 over-abused 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 in a

very delicate social art; and I am 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. But 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. And 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 labour

troubles. I told them my general view of Labour in the very largest and

perhaps the vaguest historical outline; pointing out that the one great

truth 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 generalisation was most fairly and

tratto che lo bilancia. Gli esempi ordinari sono abbastanza ovvi. Un

inglese che pranza dentro un albergo sui boulevard trova i francesi

eccentrici nel rifiutarsi di aprire una finestra. Ma non trova gli

inglesi eccentrici nel rifiutarsi di portare sedie e tavoli fuori sul

marciapiede a Ludgate Circus. Un inglese va a curiosare in

piccoli villaggi svizzeri o italiani, tra selvagge montagne o in remote

isole, esigendo tè; e non riflette mai di essere come un cinese

che entrasse in tutte le osterie di strada nel Kent e nel Sussex ed

esigesse oppio. Ma il punto non è soltanto che esige ciò di cui non può

aspettarsi di godere; è che ignora persino ciò di cui gode. Non

coglie il sublime e stellato paradosso della locuzione, _vin

ordinaire_, che per lui dovrebbe essere una gloriosa facezia come la frase

‘oro comune’ o ‘diamanti quotidiani.’ Questi sono i semplici e autoevidenti

casi; ma ci sono molti casi più sottili della stessa cosa; della

tendenza a vedere che la nazione colma la propria lacuna con il proprio

surrogato; o corregge la propria stravaganza con la propria precauzione.

L’antidoto nazionale generalmente cresce spontaneo nei boschi fianco a fianco

col veleno nazionale. Se non fosse così, tutti i nativi sarebbero morti.

Perché è così, come ho detto, che le nazioni muoiono necessariamente del

veleno non diluito chiamato progresso.

È così in questo tanto abusato e sovra-abusato esempio del

giornalista americano. Gli intervistatori americani hanno davvero maniere estremamente

buone ai fini del loro mestiere, ammesso che sia necessario

esercitare il loro mestiere. E persino ciò che si chiama il loro metodo sbrigativo si può

davvero dire che taglia da entrambe le parti, o sbriga da entrambe le parti; perché se sbrigano

l’entrata, sbrigano anche l’uscita. Può non sembrare a prima vista il

più caloroso dei complimenti a un gentiluomo congratularsi con lui del fatto che

se ne va presto. Ma è davvero un tributo alla sua perfezione in una

arte sociale delicatissima; e dico sul serio quando dico che sotto questo

aspetto gli intervistatori sono artisti. Potrebbe essere più difficile per un

inglese venire al punto, in particolare quel genere di punto a cui

i giornalisti americani si suppone, con qualche esagerazione, mirino. Potrebbe

essere più difficile per un inglese chiedere a un perfetto sconosciuto su due

piedi l’esatta iscrizione sulla tomba di sua madre; ma

credo davvero che se un inglese arrivasse una volta a tanto andrebbe

molto più lontano, e di certo continuerebbe molto più a lungo. L’inglese

si avvicinerebbe al camposanto per un sentiero boschivo piuttosto più tortuoso;

ma se una volta fosse arrivato alla tomba credo che avrebbe molta più

disposizione, per così dire, a sedervisi sopra. Il nostro stesso temperamento

nazionale troverebbe decisamente più difficile staccarsi quando

le connessioni fossero davvero state stabilite. Forse è questa la ragione per cui

il nostro temperamento nazionale non le stabilisce. Sospetto che la

vera ragione per cui un inglese non parla sia che non riesce a smettere di

parlare. Sospetto che i miei solitari connazionali, nascosti in separati

scompartimenti ferroviari, non tanto si ritirino come una razza di Trappisti quanto

sfuggano a una razza di chiacchieroni.

Comunque sia, c’è ovviamente qualcosa di pratico vantaggio

nella facilità con cui la farfalla americana svolazza di fiore in

fiore. Egli può in un certo senso imporci la sua conoscenza, ma non

impone se stesso a noi. Persino quando, per i nostri pregiudizi, sembra insistere nel

conoscerci, almeno non insiste perché noi conosciamo lui. Può essere,

per certe sensibilità, una brutta cosa che un perfetto sconosciuto parli come

se fosse un amico, ma potrebbe forse essere peggio se insistesse nell’

essere un amico prima di parlare come tale. A gran parte dell’

intervistare, anzi la parte di gran lunga maggiore, persino questa critica

non si applica; non c’è nulla che persino un inglese di estrema

sensibilità potrebbe considerare particolarmente privato; le questioni in gioco

sono generalmente del tutto pubbliche, e trattate con non poco spirito

pubblico. Ma la mia sola ragione per dire qui ciò che si può dire persino per le

peggiori eccezioni è additare questo principio generale e trascurato;

che proprio la cosa di cui ci lamentiamo in uno straniero generalmente porta

con sé la propria cura straniera. L’intervistare americano è generalmente molto

ragionevole, ed è sempre molto rapido. E persino coloro per i quali parlare

a un’intelligente creatura simile è orribile quanto farsi cavare un dente

possono ancora ammettere che l’intervistare americano ha molte delle qualità dell’

odontoiatria americana.

Un altro effetto che ha dato origine a questa fallacia, questa esagerazione della

volgarità e curiosità della stampa, è la distinzione tra gli

articoli e i titoli; o piuttosto la tendenza a ignorare quella

distinzione. Le poche cose davvero false e senza scrupoli che ho visto

nelle ‘storie’ americane sono sempre state nei titoli. E i

titoli sono scritti da qualcun altro; qualche solitario e feroce cinico

rinchiuso nell’ufficio, che odia tutta l’umanità, e infuria e si vendica

a casaccio, mentre il giornalista lindo, cortese e razionale può

essere lasciato tranquillamente libero di vagare per la città.

Per esempio, parlai con due colleghi giornalisti decisamente riflessivi

immediatamente al mio arrivo in una città in cui c’erano stati alcuni disordini

operai. Esposi loro la mia visione generale del Lavoro nel più ampio e

forse più vago profilo storico; facendo notare che la sola grande

verità da insegnare alle classi medie era che il Capitalismo era esso stesso

una crisi, e una crisi passeggera; che non era tanto che stesse

crollando quanto che non si era mai davvero retto in piedi. Le schiavitù potevano

durare, e le società contadine potevano durare; ma le comunità salariate potevano

a stento persino vivere, e stavano già morendo.

Tutta questa generalizzazione morale e persino metafisica fu resa in modo più giusto e

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-barrows, and that they had desisted from the

beneficent activities. Any one 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 appeared that I had said,

‘Prohibition! All matter of dollar sign.’ This is almost avowed

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 Skelt and Stevenson Toy Theatre as ‘a cent plain, and two

cents coloured’ or condemned a 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 the surface for a 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 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 on to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore from

him replies to all sorts of bald 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 a faith

and docility unknown in any previous epoch of 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 clubman in private, and becomes a sort of

highway-robber in print.

e più fedelmente riprodotta dall’intervistatore, che l’aveva effettivamente udita

pronunciare casualmente e oziosamente. Ma in cima a questa colonna di

filosofia politica campeggiava lo straordinario annuncio in lettere enormi,

‘Chesterton Prende Posizione nello Sciopero dei Tram.’ Questo era inesatto. Quando

parlai non solo non sapevo che ci fosse alcuno sciopero dei tram, ma

non sapevo cosa fosse uno sciopero dei tram. Avrei avuto un’indistinta

idea che un gran numero di cittadini si guadagnasse da vivere trasportando

cose in giro su carriole a ruota, e che avessero desistito dalle

benefiche attività. Chiunque non fosse per caso un giornalista, o non

sapesse un po’ di giornalismo, americano e inglese, avrebbe

supposto che lo stesso uomo che scrisse l’articolo fosse d’improvviso impazzito

e avesse scritto il titolo. Ma so che abbiamo qui a che fare con due

tipi diversi di giornalisti; e l’uomo che scrive i titoli non

oserò descrivere; poiché non l’ho visto se non in sogno.

Un’altra innocente complicazione è che l’intervistatore talvolta

traduce le cose nella propria lingua madre. Non sembrerebbe strano che un

intervistatore francese le traducesse in francese; ed è certo

che l’intervistatore americano talvolta le traduce in americano.

Chi immagina che le due lingue siano la stessa è più innocente

di qualsiasi intervistatore. Per prendere uno dei venti esempi, alcuni dei

quali ho menzionato altrove, supponiamo che un intervistatore avesse detto che io

avevo la reputazione di essere un nut. Sarei lusingato ma lievemente

sorpreso da un simile tributo al mio abbigliamento e al mio brillante aspetto esteriore. Sarei

poi rinsavito e illuminato scoprendo che in America un

nut non significa un dandy ma una persona difettosa o imbecille. E poiché

devo qui tradurre la loro frase americana in inglese, può essere

assai difendibile che essi traducano le mie frasi inglesi in

americano. Comunque sia, spesso le traducono davvero in americano. In risposta

alla solita domanda sul Proibizionismo avevo dato la solita risposta,

ovvia fino alla noia per chi è in contatto quotidiano con

esso, che è una legge che i ricchi fanno sapendo di poterla sempre

infrangere. Dall’intervista stampata risultava che io avessi detto,

‘Proibizionismo! Tutta questione di dollar sign.’ Questa è quasi dichiarata

traduzione, come una traduzione francese. Nessuno può supporre che venga

naturale a un inglese parlare di un dollaro, ancor meno di un

dollar sign—qualunque cosa esso sia. È esattamente come se mi avesse fatto

parlare del Teatrino di Cartone Skelt e Stevenson come ‘un cent semplice, e due

cent colorato’ o condannato una politica parsimoniosa come saggia sui dime e

sciocca sui dollari. Un altro intervistatore una volta mi chiese chi fosse il più grande

scrittore americano. Ho dimenticato esattamente cosa dissi, ma dopo

aver menzionato diversi nomi, dissi che il più grande genio naturale e la più grande

forza artistica era probabilmente Walt Whitman. L’intervista stampata è più

precisa; e gli studiosi del mio stile letterario e conversazionale saranno

interessati a sapere che io dissi, ‘Ascolta qua, Walt Whitman era il vostro unico

vero uomo dal sangue rosso.’ Anche qui difficilmente credo che la traduzione possa

essere stata del tutto inconsapevole; la maggior parte dei miei intimi è invero consapevole che

io non parlo così, ma immagino che lo stesso fatto sarebbe

balenato al giornalista con cui avevo parlato. E persino questo

banale particolare porta con sé le due verità che devono essere, temo, la

morale piuttosto monotona di queste pagine. La prima è che l’America e

l’Inghilterra possono essere amiche assai migliori quando nettamente divise che quando

informemente amalgamate. Questi due giornalisti erano falsi cronisti, ma

erano veri traduttori. Non erano tanto intervistatori quanto

interpreti. E la seconda è che in ogni tale differenza è spesso

salutare cercare sotto la superficie una superiorità. Perché la capacità di

tradurre implica pur sempre la capacità di comprendere; e molti di questi

giornalisti comprendevano davvero. Credo ci siano molti giornalisti

inglesi che sarebbero più sconcertati da un’idea tanto semplice quanto il

plutocratico fondamento del Proibizionismo. Ma l’americano capì subito

che intendevo dire che era una questione di dollar sign; probabilmente perché sapeva

molto bene che lo è.

E poi ancora c’è una curiosa convenzione per cui l’intervistare americano

si fa apparire molto peggiore di quanto sia. I resoconti sono assai più turbolenti

e insolenti delle conversazioni. Questo è probabilmente parte del fatto

che una certa vivacità, che ad alcuni pare vitalità e ad alcuni

volgarità, non è solo un’ambizione ma un ideale. Si deve sempre

cogliere che questa volgarità è un ideale ancor più che una realtà.

È un ideale quando non è una realtà. Un giovane molto quieto e intelligente,

con un morbido cappello nero e occhiali di tartaruga, chiederà

un’intervista con ineccepibile cortesia, aspetterà il suo vivente

soggetto con ineccepibile pazienza, gli parlerà in modo assai sensato per

venti minuti, e se ne andrà senza far rumore. Poi sul giornale del mattino

seguente leggerete come sfondò la porta della camera da letto, e inseguì la sua

vittima fin sul tetto o la trascinò da sotto il letto, e le strappò

risposte a ogni sorta di crude e spietate domande stampate in grandi

lettere nere. Fui spesso intervistato di sera, e non avevo nozione

di quanto atrocemente fossi stato insultato finché non lo vidi sul giornale del mattino

seguente. Non avevo nozione di essere stato sulla ruota di un inquisitore finché non lo

vidi in nero su bianco; e allora naturalmente ci credetti, con una fede

e una docilità ignote in ogni precedente epoca della storia. Un interessante

saggio potrebbe essere scritto sui punti su cui le nazioni ostentano più vizi

di quanti ne possiedano; e potrebbe trattare più a fondo del

giornalista americano, che è un innocuo frequentatore di club in privato, e diventa una sorta di

brigante da strada nella stampa.

I have turned this chapter into something like a defence of

interviewers, 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 minimise 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 the modern world will not be righted by attributing the whole

disease to each of its symptoms in turn; first to the tavern and then to

the cinema and 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.

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 more

properly be 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 realises that

they always start it 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 whole 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 the 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 earth. If I could analyse 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 is 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 an unexhausted

artistic energy; but it is partly also that it is an 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 realise

something which gives it unity and marks its chief difference from the

climate and colours 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 shifty. 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 colours of varied

buildings against the equal colour of the sky. Strangely enough I found

myself repeating about this vista of the West two vivid lines in which

Mr. W. B. Yeats has called up a vision of the East:—

And coloured like the eastern birds

At evening in their rainless skies.

To invoke a somewhat less poetic parallel, even the untravelled

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

Ho trasformato questo capitolo in qualcosa come una difesa degli

intervistatori, perché credo davvero che si faccia loro portare troppo del

peso dei cattivi sviluppi del giornalismo moderno. Ma sono ben

lungi dal voler suggerire che quei cattivi sviluppi non siano assai

gravi. Tanto lungi dal voler minimizzare il male, in un senso reale

preferirei ingigantirlo. Direi che il male stesso è cosa assai più vasta

e più fondamentale; e che affrontarlo malmenando i poveri

giornalisti, che compiono il loro particolare e forse peculiare dovere, è come

curare una pestilenza strofinando una delle sue macchie. Ciò che non va

nel mondo moderno non si raddrizzerà attribuendo l’intera

malattia a ciascuno dei suoi sintomi a turno; prima alla taverna e poi

al cinema e poi alla sala dei cronisti. Il male del giornalismo non è

nei giornalisti. Non è nei poveri uomini ai livelli più bassi della

professione, ma nei ricchi al vertice della professione; o

piuttosto nei ricchi che stanno troppo al di sopra della professione perfino per

appartenervi. Il guaio dei giornali è il Newspaper Trust, come il

guaio potrebbe stare in un Wheat Trust, senza che ciò implichi la denigrazione di

tutti coloro che coltivano il grano. È la plutocrazia americana e non la

stampa americana. Ciò che c’è di sbagliato nel mondo moderno non sono i moderni

titoli o i moderni film o i moderni macchinari. Ciò che c’è di sbagliato

nel mondo moderno è il mondo moderno; e la cura verrà da

un altro.

Alcune città americane

C’è un punto, quasi da chiamarsi un paradosso, da notare a proposito di New

York; ed è che in un certo senso essa è davvero nuova. Il termine assai

di rado ha attinenza con la realtà. La New Forest è quasi altrettanto antica

quanto la Conquista, e la Nuova Teologia è quasi antica quanto il Credo.

Mi sono state offerte come nuovo pensiero cose che più

propriamente si direbbero vecchia sconsideratezza; e ciò che chiamiamo la

Nuova Legge sui Poveri è già abbastanza vecchia da dover saper fare di meglio. Ma c’è un senso

in cui New York è sempre nuova; nel senso che viene sempre

rinnovata. Un forestiero potrebbe ben dire che la principale industria dei

cittadini consiste nel distruggere la loro città; ma presto si accorge che

essi ricominciano sempre da capo con immutata energia e speranza.

Dapprima ebbi la fantasia che non finissero mai del tutto di innalzare un grande

edificio senza sentire che era tempo di abbatterlo di nuovo; e

che qualcuno cominciasse a scavare le prime fondamenta mentre qualcun altro

posava le ultime tegole. Questo riempie tutto questo brillante

e sconcertante luogo di un’aria affatto unica e senza pari di rapida

rovina. Le rovine spuntano così all’improvviso come funghi, che da noi sono

frutto dell’età come i muschi, tanto che quasi ci si aspetta di veder l’edera arrampicarsi

in fretta sulle mura infrante come nell’incubo della Macchina del Tempo, oppure

in qualche cinema incredibilmente accelerato.

Non v’è spettacolo in alcun paese che mi risollevi lo spirito quanto

un’impalcatura. È una tragedia che tolgano sempre l’impalcatura

e non ci lascino altro che un semplice edificio. Se solo togliessero

l’edificio e ci lasciassero una bella impalcatura, nella maggior parte

dei casi sarebbe un guadagno per la bellezza della terra. Se potessi analizzare ciò che

solleva il cuore nella leggerezza e limpidezza di un così bianco

e ligneo scheletro, potrei spiegare ciò che è davvero incantevole

in New York; nonostante il suo patire la maledizione del

cosmopolitismo e perfino la provinciale superstizione del progresso. È

in parte perché tutta questa distruzione e ricostruzione è un’inesausta

energia artistica; ma è anche in parte perché è un’energia artistica

che non si prende troppo sul serio. È anzitutto perché qui l’uomo è

un falegname; e in secondo luogo perché è un falegname di scena. Anzi v’è

in tutta la scena lo spirito del cambio di scena. Perciò

tocca quel nervo in noi che fin dall’infanzia ha fremuto per tutte

le cose teatrali. Ma il quadro resterà imperfetto se non ci rendiamo conto di

qualcosa che gli dà unità e segna la sua principale differenza dal

clima e dai colori dell’Europa occidentale. Possiamo dire che il fondale

resta il medesimo. Il cielo rimaneva, e nel cuore dell’inverno

sembrava azzurro d’estate; e così limpido che quasi mi

lusingavo che le nuvole fossero prodotti inglesi come le primule. Un americano

ribatterebbe probabilmente alla mia accusa di cambio di scena dicendo che

almeno lui sposta solo le torri e le cupole della terra; e che in

Inghilterra sono i cieli a essere mutevoli. E in verità abbiamo mutamenti

di giorno in giorno che a lui parrebbero distinti come diverse

diapositive di lanterna magica; una veduta mostra il Golfo di Napoli e la successiva

il Polo Nord. Non voglio dire, s’intende, che non vi siano mutamenti nel

tempo americano; ma quanto a proporzione è vero che la parte più

instabile del nostro scenario è la parte più stabile del loro. Anzi

quasi ci si potrebbe perdonare il vanto che la Britannia sola davvero

possiede quella nobile cosa chiamata tempo atmosferico; dovendo la maggior parte degli altri paesi

accontentarsi del clima. Bisogna però confessare che spesso

se ne accontentano. E la bellezza di New York, che è notevole,

si deve in gran parte alla limpidezza che fa risaltare i colori dei vari

edifici contro il colore uniforme del cielo. Stranamente mi

ritrovai a ripetere, davanti a questa veduta d’Occidente, due vividi versi in cui

il signor W. B. Yeats ha evocato una visione d’Oriente:—

E colorati come gli uccelli d’oriente

A sera nei loro cieli senza pioggia.

Per invocare un parallelo un po’ meno poetico, perfino l’inglese che non ha mai

viaggiato ha probabilmente visto manifesti e réclame commerciali americane

d’un genere chiazzato e sgargiante, in cui una bianca casa o un’automobile gialla

are cut out as in cardboard against a 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 colour. Colour runs through all our experience;

and we all know that our childhood found talismanic gems in the very

paints in the paint-box, 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 mediaeval

democracy. Now if one had the caprice of conceiving some city exactly

contrary to one thus seared and seasoned by fire, its colour 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 stewed umber. But

the colours 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 colours but of crayons. If the

Englishman returning to England is moved at the sight of a block of

white chalk, the American sees rather a bundle of chalks. Nor 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

coloured 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 edges 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 colour 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 reel. 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. ‘271

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

‘Pine Crest’ or ‘Heather Crag’ like any unobtrusive villa in Streatham.

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 the modern mind something paradoxical that can find peace in

change, it is here that it has indeed built its habitation or rather is

still building and unbuilding it. One 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

great American Republic contains very considerable varieties, and of

these varieties I necessarily saw far too little to allow me to

generalise. But from the little I did see, I should venture on the

generalisation 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 searchlight 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

sono ritagliate come nel cartone contro un cielo simile a marmo azzurro. Credevo

che fosse soltanto Arte Nuova, ma ho scoperto che è davvero New York.

Non per nulla la stessa natura del carattere locale si è guadagnata

il soprannome di colore locale. Il colore attraversa tutta la nostra esperienza;

e tutti sappiamo che la nostra infanzia trovava gemme talismaniche negli stessi

colori della scatola dei colori, o perfino nei loro stessi nomi. E come il

nome stesso di ‘lacca cremisi’ mi suggeriva davvero qualche sanguigno e

misterioso stagno, cupo eppure rosso come il sangue, così il nome stesso di ‘terra

di Siena bruciata’ si intricò poi nella mia mente con l’idea di

qualcosa di tradizionale e tragico; come se una simile aurea città italiana

fosse stata davvero annerita da molti incendi nelle guerre della medievale

democrazia. Ora, se si avesse il capriccio di concepire una città esattamente

contraria a una così bruciata e temprata dal fuoco, il suo colore potrebbe essere

evocato a una fantasia infantile dal solo nome di ‘terra d’ombra cruda’; e una

tale città è New York. Un tempo il nome di ‘terra d’ombra cruda’ mi lasciava perplesso,

non riuscendo a immaginare l’effetto di una terra d’ombra fritta o stufata. Ma

i colori di New York sono esattamente in quella tonalità; e potrebbero essere adombrati

da frasi come rosa crudo o giallo crudo. È davvero in un certo senso come

qualcosa di non cotto; o qualcosa che lo spirito satirico chiamerebbe

mezzo crudo. Eppure l’effetto non è solo bello, è perfino

delicato. Non avevo un nome per questa sfumatura; finché non vidi che qualcuno aveva

scritto delle ‘torri color pastello di New York’; e seppi che il

nome era stato trovato. Non ci sono colori abbastanza asciutti per descrivere tutta quella

luce asciutta; e non è una scatola di colori ma di pastelli. Se l’

inglese che torna in Inghilterra si commuove alla vista di un pezzo di

bianco gesso, l’americano vede piuttosto un fascio di gessetti. Né riesco a

immaginare nulla di più commovente. Si raccontano ai bambini fiabe di un

paese dove gli alberi sono come bastoncini di zucchero e i laghi come

melassa, ma la maggior parte dei bambini sarebbe quasi altrettanto ghiotta di un paese delle fate

dove gli alberi fossero come pennellate di vernice verde e le colline fossero di

gessetti colorati.

Ma qui ciò che accentua questa arida freschezza è l’aspetto frammentario della

continua ricostruzione e del continuo mutamento. La forte luce del giorno trova

ovunque i bordi spezzati delle cose, e quel genere di tinte che vediamo nella

terra appena rivoltata o nelle bianche sezioni degli alberi. Ed è in questo

senso che il colore locale può letteralmente essere preso come carattere locale.

Perché New York considerata in sé è anzitutto un luogo di inquietudine, e

coloro che sinceramente l’amano, come molti fanno, l’amano per il romanzesco della sua

irrequietezza. Un uomo quasi guarda un edificio passandovi accanto per domandarsi

se sarà ancora là quando tornerà dalla passeggiata; e il dubbio

è parte di una nozione indescrivibile, come di un bianco incubo di luce diurna,

accresciuto dalla stessa numerazione delle strade, col suo groviglio

di numeri che dapprima fa girare la testa a un inglese. Il dettaglio è

solo un simbolo; e quando vi si è abituato può vedere che esso è, come

le più monotone usanze umane, insieme peggiore e migliore delle proprie. ‘271

West 52nd Street’ è il più facile di tutti gli indirizzi da trovare, ma il

più difficile di tutti da ricordare. Chi è, come me, così

fatto da perdere immancabilmente ogni foglio di carta che ha particolare

ragione di conservare, si ritroverà a desiderare che il luogo si chiamasse

‘Pine Crest’ o ‘Heather Crag’ come una qualsiasi discreta villetta di Streatham.

Ma il suo senso di una sorta di calcoli incalcolabili, come della

visione di un matematico impazzito, ha radice in un’impressione più reale. La sua

prima sensazione che la testa gli giri è dovuta a qualcosa di davvero

vertiginoso nel movimento di una vita che gira vertiginosamente come una ruota. Se

c’è nella mente moderna qualcosa di paradossale che sa trovare pace nel

mutamento, è qui che essa ha davvero costruito la propria dimora o piuttosto la

sta ancora costruendo e disfacendo. Si potrebbe immaginare che essa muti in

ogni cosa e che nulla perduri se non il suo invisibile nome; e perfino il suo

nome, come ho detto, sembra vantarsi della novità.

Questa è pressappoco una sincera prima impressione dell’atmosfera di

New York. Coloro che credono sia quella l’atmosfera dell’America non sono mai

andati oltre New York. Potremmo quasi dire che non sono mai

entrati in America, non più che se fossero stati trattenuti come

stranieri indesiderabili a Ellis Island. E in verità vi sono parecchi

stranieri indesiderabili trattenuti anche nell’isola di Manhattan. Ma di ciò non

parlerò, essendo io stesso uno straniero senza particolari pretese di essere

desiderabile. Comunque, tale è New York; ma tale non è il Nuovo Mondo. La

grande Repubblica americana racchiude varietà assai considerevoli, e di

queste varietà ho necessariamente visto troppo poco per potermi

generalizzare. Ma dal poco che ho visto, azzarderei la

generalizzazione che la gran parte dell’America è singolarmente e perfino

sorprendentemente diversa da New York. Va da sé che New York è assai

diversa dalle vaste pianure agricole e dalle piccole cittadine agricole del

Middle West, che ho visto. Si può congetturare con una certa sicurezza

che essa sia assai diversa da ciò che si chiama il Wild e talvolta il Woolly

West, che non ho visto. Ma qui sto paragonando New York, non con

i più nuovi stati della prateria o delle montagne, ma con le altre

più antiche città della costa atlantica. E New York, a quanto mi pare, è

vitalmente diversa dalle altre città storiche dell’America. È

così diversa che per un momento le mostra tutte in una luce falsa, come

un lungo bianco riflettore getta una luce fantastica e

teatrale su antichi e quieti villaggi raccolti tra le eterne

colline. Filadelfia e Boston e Baltimora somigliano più a quei quieti

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 rather 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 as what was done yesterday makes some difference to-day, so

what is done to-day will make some difference to-morrow. 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

is satisfied in the 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 grey labyrinth of Philadelphia, great

Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had 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 advertisement 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 Penn and Franklin as for an

Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and of 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 favourite 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

priggish fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions have

illogically curtailed it. The Nonconformists 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 Stuarts. And the same is

true of the other city, yet more closely connected with the tolerant

experiment of the Stuarts. 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 teem. 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 Gibbons was dead.

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 the bases 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 that 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 ever go back to Baltimore

villaggi che a New York.

Se dovessi intitolare questo libro ‘Le Antichità dell’America’, darei

adito a fraintendimenti e forse a fastidio. Eppure il doppio

senso di simili parole è per esse una sventura immeritata. Parliamo di

Platone o del Partenone o della passione greca per la bellezza come di cose

antiche, ma non certo antiquate. Quando le diciamo antiche non è

perché siano perite, ma piuttosto perché sono sopravvissute.

Allo stesso modo udii alcuni newyorkesi riferirsi a Filadelfia o a

Baltimora come ‘città morte’. Intendono per città morta una città che ha avuto

l’impudenza di non morire. Simili persone si stupiscono di trovare viva una cosa

antica, proprio come ora si stupiscono, e sempre più si

stupiranno, di trovare la Polonia o il Papato o la nazione francese ancora

vivi. E ciò che intendo dicendo che Filadelfia e Baltimora sono vive è

precisamente ciò che questa gente intende dicendole morte; è continuità;

è la presenza della vita che vi fu insufflata all’inizio e dello

scopo del loro essere; è la benedizione dei fondatori delle

colonie e dei padri della repubblica. Questa tradizione va davvero

chiamata vita; poiché la vita sola può congiungere passato e futuro. Significa semplicemente

che come ciò che si fece ieri fa qualche differenza oggi, così

ciò che si fa oggi farà qualche differenza domani. A New York

è difficile sentire che un giorno qualsiasi farà differenza alcuna. Questi

moderni non fanno che morire ogni giorno senza potere di risorgere dai morti. Ma posso

dichiarare con verità che entrando in alcune di queste più stabili città degli

Stati provai qualcosa di assai sincero di quell’emozione storica che

trova appagamento nelle eterne città del Mediterraneo. Sentii in

America ciò che molti americani suppongono si possa sentire solo in Europa. Di rado

quel sentimento mi fu suscitato in modo più semplice e diretto che quando

vidi da lontano, sopra il vasto grigio labirinto di Filadelfia, il grande

Penn sul suo pinnacolo come la figura scolpita di un dio che avesse plasmato

un nuovo mondo; e ricordai che il suo corpo giaceva sepolto in un campo alla

svolta di un viottolo, a una lega dalla mia stessa porta.

Perché questo aspetto dell’America è piuttosto trascurato nei discorsi sull’

elettricità e sui titoli di giornale. Inutile dirlo, la moderna volgarità dell’

avarizia e della pubblicità si spande su tutta Filadelfia o Boston; ma

così fa anche su Winchester o Canterbury. Ma quasi tutti sanno che

c’è qualcos’altro da trovare a Canterbury o a Winchester; molti

sanno che è piuttosto più interessante; e alcuni sanno

che Alfredo può ancora camminare a Winchester e che san Tommaso a

Canterbury fu ucciso ma non morì. È almeno altrettanto possibile per un

abitante di Filadelfia sentire la presenza di Penn e Franklin quanto per un

inglese vedere i fantasmi di Alfredo e di Becket. La tradizione non

significa una città morta; non significa che i vivi siano morti ma che i

morti sono vivi. Significa che conta ancora ciò che Penn fece duecento

anni fa o ciò che Franklin fece cento anni fa; non riuscii mai a sentire

a New York che contasse ciò che qualcuno aveva fatto un’ora prima. E queste

cose contavano e contano. Il quaccherismo non è il mio credo prediletto; ma

quel giorno in cui William Penn stette disarmato su quel luogo e strinse il suo

trattato con i Pellirosse, il suo credo di umanità ebbe davvero un trionfo

e un trionfo che non è tornato indietro. La lode a lui tributata non è una

pedante finzione della nostra storia convenzionale, per quanto simili finzioni ne abbiano

illogicamente ridotto la portata. I Nonconformisti sono stati piuttosto ingiusti verso

Penn perfino nello scegliere le loro lodi; e in genere dimenticano che

la tolleranza taglia da entrambe le parti e che una mente aperta è aperta su tutti i lati.

Coloro che lo divinizzano per aver acconsentito a trattare con i selvaggi non possono

perdonargli di aver acconsentito a trattare con gli Stuart. E lo stesso

vale per l’altra città, ancor più strettamente legata al tollerante

esperimento degli Stuart. Lo stato del Maryland fu il primo

esperimento di libertà religiosa nella storia umana. Lord Baltimore e i suoi

cattolici erano di una lunga marcia avanti a William Penn e ai suoi quaccheri su

quella che oggi si chiama la via del progresso. Che la prima

tolleranza religiosa mai concessa al mondo sia stata concessa da cattolici romani è

uno di quei piccoli dettagli istruttivi di cui le nostre storie vittoriane

non esattamente abbondavano. Ma quando entrai nel mio albergo a Baltimora e

trovai due sacerdoti ad attendermi, fui commosso in un modo nuovo, perché

sentii di toccare l’estremità di una catena vivente. Né l’impressione fu

casuale; resterà sempre con me con un misto di gratitudine

e dolore, poiché mi recavano un messaggio di benvenuto da un grande americano

il cui nome conoscevo fin dall’infanzia e la cui carriera volgeva alla

fine; poiché furono solo pochi giorni dopo che lasciai la città che

seppi che il cardinale Gibbons era morto.

In cima a una collina da un lato della città sorgeva il primo monumento

eretto dopo la Rivoluzione a Washington. Oltre esso c’era un nuovo monumento

che salutava nel nome di Lafayette i soldati americani caduti

combattendo in Francia nella Grande Guerra. Tra essi c’erano gradini e sedili

di pietra, e mi sedetti su uno di essi e parlai a due bambini che

si arrampicavano attorno alle basi del monumento. Provai una profonda e

raggiante pace al pensiero che essi almeno non sarebbero venuti alla mia

conferenza. Mi rendeva felice che in quel colloquio né loro né io avessimo

nomi. Ero colmo di quell’indescrivibile visione a occhi aperti della stranezza

della vita, e specialmente della stranezza dei luoghi; di come troviamo

i luoghi e li perdiamo; e vediamo volti per un attimo in una terra lontana, ed

è egualmente misterioso se ricordiamo e misterioso se dimentichiamo. Avevo

perfino agitarmi in testa il suggerimento di certi versi che non

finirò mai—

Se mai tornerò a Baltimora

The city of Maryland.

But the poem 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 untouched (it may be said) by the fact

that a neighbouring 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 chapels and prayers in the ante-chambers, where 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 anti-types 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

travellers 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 antic 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

recognise 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 noted 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 a 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 Cabots 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 sympathies 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 it 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 glimpses of a man’s forgotten

childhood; and when I saw the long path with posts where the Autocrat

may be supposed to have walked with the schoolmistress, 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 it even about 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

La città del Maryland.

Ma la poesia dovrebbe contenere troppe cose; perché pensavo a

mille cose insieme; e mi domandavo come sarebbero stati i bambini

vent’anni dopo e se avrebbero commerciato in biancheria o si sarebbero

interessati al petrolio, e non ero insensibile (va detto) al fatto

che una bottega vicina avesse fornito l’unico campione della sostanza

chiamata ‘tè’ mai trovato sul continente americano; e davanti a me

si slanciava nel cielo su ali di pietra la colonna di tutte quelle alte

speranze dell’umanità di cento anni fa; e più in là c’erano candele

accese nelle cappelle e preghiere nelle anticamere, dove forse

già un Principe della Chiesa stava morendo. Solo in una pagina più avanti potrò

anche solo tentare di districare un simile groviglio di contrasti, che è invero il

groviglio dell’America e di questa vita mortale; ma seduto là su quel sedile

di pietra sotto quel cielo quieto, ebbi qualche esperienza dei

mille pensieri e cose viventi che si accalcano, chiassosi e innumerevoli come uccelli,

che danno la loro eterna vivacità e vitalità a una città morta.

Visitai altre due città che possiedono questo particolare tipo di

carattere tradizionale, l’una tipica del Nord e l’altra

del Sud. Posso almeno prendere come comodi contro-tipi le città di

Boston e St. Louis; e potremmo aggiungere Nashville come una sfumatura più

genuinamente meridionale di St. Louis. All’estremo Sud, nel senso di

ciò che si chiama la Black Belt, non andai affatto. Ora i viaggiatori

inglesi si aspettano che il Sud sia alquanto tradizionale; ma non sono

preparati agli aspetti di Boston nel Nord che lo sono ancor di più.

Se volessimo solo un bizzarro gioco d’antitesi, potremmo dire che da un

lato i luoghi sono più prosaici dei nomi e dall’altro i

nomi sono più prosaici dei luoghi. St. Louis è una bella città, e

riconosciamo un bell’istinto dell’immaginazione che pose sulla collina

che domina il fiume la statua di quel santo cavaliere che ha

battezzato la città. Ma la città non è bella quanto il suo nome; non

potrebbe esserlo. Anzi questi titoli fissano una misura cui le più

splendide guglie e torrette non potrebbero elevarsi, e sotto la quale i

commerciali camini e le insegne luminose vistosamente sprofondano. Ci parrebbe

strano se Belfast avesse portato il nome di Giovanna d’Arco. Saremmo lievemente

scandalizzati se la città di Johannesburg si trovasse a chiamarsi Gesù Cristo.

Ma pochi hanno notato una bestemmia, o anche una benedizione alquanto

provocatoria, da rinvenire nel nome stesso di San Francisco.

Ma d’altra parte un luogo come Boston è assai più bello del

suo nome. E, come ho accennato, la cultura generale di un inglese,

o mancanza di cultura, lo lascia in una certa ignoranza del tipo di

bellezza che affiora in quel tipo di luogo. Ha sentito tanto parlare del

Nord puramente commerciale in contrasto con il Sud agricolo e

aristocratico, e le tradizioni di Boston e Filadelfia sono

piuttosto troppo tenui e delicate per essere viste da oltre l’Atlantico. Ma

anche qui vi sono tradizioni e una gran dose di tradizionalismo. La

cerchia delle vecchie famiglie, che ancora si raduna con una certa esclusività

a Filadelfia, è il genere di cosa che noi in Inghilterra ci aspetteremmo

di trovare piuttosto a New Orleans. L’aristocrazia accademica di Boston, che

Oliver Wendell Holmes chiamava i Bramini, è ancora una realtà benché

sia stata sempre una minoranza e ora sia una minoranza assai esigua. Un epigramma,

inventato da Yale a spese di Harvard, la descrive come assai piccola

davvero:—

Ecco alla gaia vecchia Boston, patria del fagiolo e del merluzzo,

Dove i Cabot parlano solo ai Lowell, e i Lowell parlano solo a Dio.

Ma un’aristocrazia dev’essere una minoranza, ed è sostenibile che

quanto più è piccola tanto meglio è. Debbo però dire che il

distinto dottor Cabot, l’attuale rappresentante della famiglia, ruppe

ogni tabù che possa legare i suoi affetti al Creatore e a Miss

Amy Lowell, e allargò le sue simpatie così indiscriminatamente da mostrare

gentilezza e ospitalità a un essere così perduto come un conferenziere inglese. Ma

se la cosa è appena un limite, è assai viva come ricordo; e Boston

sotto questo aspetto è proprio un luogo di ricordi. Le renderei un

assai povero complimento dicendo soltanto che certe sue parti mi ricordavano l’

Inghilterra; perché in verità mi ricordavano cose inglesi che sono in gran parte

scomparse dall’Inghilterra. Vi sono vecchie case brune agli angoli di

piazze e strade che sono come sprazzi della dimenticata

infanzia di un uomo; e quando vidi il lungo sentiero con i pali dove l’Autocrate

si può supporre passeggiasse con la maestra, sentii di essere

giunto nella terra dove le vecchie storie si avverano.

Mi soffermo in questo luogo su questo particolare aspetto dell’America perché

esso sfugge assai in un mero contrasto con l’Inghilterra. Non c’è bisogno che dica che

se lo sentii perfino per esili figure della finzione, lo sentii ancor più

per solide figure della storia. Simili fantasmi parevano particolarmente solidi negli

Stati del Sud, proprio per la relativa quiete e

l’agio dell’atmosfera del Sud. Non mi fu mai più vivido

che entrando, in un’ora quieta della notte, nel

relativamente quieto albergo di Nashville nel Tennessee, e salendo a un

fioco e deserto piano superiore dove mi ritrovai davanti a un

quadro sbiadito; e dalla tela scura si affacciava il volto di Andrew

Jackson, vigile come un’aquila bianca.

In quel momento, forse, ero in più d’un senso solo. La maggior parte degli

inglesi conosce buona parte della narrativa americana, e nulla di nulla della

storia americana. Sanno più dell’autocrate della

tavola da colazione che dell’autocrate dell’esercito e del popolo, il

solo grande despota democratico dei tempi moderni; il Napoleone del Nuovo

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 realise that the energy of that

great man was largely directed towards saving us from the chief evil

which destroys the nations to-day. He sought to cut down, as with a

sword 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

sceptre 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 people who refuse 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

financiers. 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 in the

American mind for 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 criticising

foreigners, if only we would also criticise ourselves. In other words,

the world might need even less of its new charity, 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 magnates, we ought to remember that we paved the

way for it by allowing them all to accumulate in the possession of

English magnates. 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

idolatrise 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 lacking

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 banished. 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

Mondo. L’unica nozione che il pubblico inglese abbia mai avuto della politica

americana la trasse da un romanzo, La capanna dello zio Tom; e a dir

poco, non fece eccezione al prevalere della finzione sul fatto.

Centinaia di noi hanno sentito parlare di Tom Sawyer per uno che abbia sentito parlare di Charles

Sumner; ed è probabile che i più di noi supererebbero un esame più dettagliato

su Toddy e Budge che su Lincoln e Lee. Ma nel

caso di Andrew Jackson può darsi che provassi uno speciale senso di

isolamento individuale; poiché credo che siano perfino meno gli

inglesi che gli americani a rendersi conto che l’energia di quel

grande uomo fu in gran parte rivolta a salvarci dal male principale

che oggi distrugge le nazioni. Egli cercò di abbattere, come con una

spada di semplicità, la nuova e senza nome enormità della finanza; e

dovette sapere, come per un lampo di folgore, che il popolo era dietro

di lui, perché tutti i politici gli erano contro. La fine di quella

lotta non è ancora giunta; ma se la banca è più forte della spada o dello

scettro della sovranità popolare, la fine sarà la fine della democrazia. Essa

dovrà scegliere tra l’accettare un dittatore riconosciuto e

l’accettare una dettatura che non osa riconoscere. Il processo sarà

cominciato col dare potere a persone rifiutando di dar loro i titoli;

e sarà finito col dare il potere a persone che rifiutano di darci i loro

nomi.

Ma ho una speciale ragione per chiudere questo capitolo sul nome del

grande dittatore popolare che mosse guerra ai politici e ai

finanzieri. Questo capitolo non pretende di toccare una su venti delle

interessanti città dell’America, nemmeno in questo particolare aspetto della

loro relazione con la storia dell’America, così trascurata in

Inghilterra. Se così fosse, ci sarebbe molto da dire anche sulle

più nuove di esse; Chicago, per esempio, è certo qualcosa di più

del mero mattatoio di maiali che la tradizione inglese suggerisce; ed

ha costruito un viale non indegno della sua splendida posizione sul

suo splendido lago. Ma tutte queste città sono contaminate e perfino ammalate

d’industrialismo. È giusto verso gli americani ricordare che essi

hanno deliberatamente preservato una delle loro città da simile contaminazione e

simile malattia. E questa è la città presidenziale, che nella

mente americana rappresenta lo stesso ideale del Presidente; l’idea della

Repubblica che si eleva al di sopra del moderno accumulo di denaro e perdura. Vi è

stato davvero uno sforzo di mantenere bianca la Casa Bianca. Nessuna fabbrica è

permessa in quella città; non più dei negozi necessari vi si tollerano. È

una bella città; e conserva davvero qualcosa di quella classica

serenità del diciottesimo secolo in cui si muovevano i Padri della

Repubblica. Con tutto il rispetto per la località coloniale di quel nome, non

suppongo che Wellington somigli particolarmente a Wellington. Ma Washington

somiglia davvero a Washington.

In questo, come in tante cose, non c’è male nel criticare noi gli

stranieri, purché volessimo criticare anche noi stessi. In altre parole,

il mondo avrebbe forse bisogno di anche meno della sua nuova carità, se avesse un po’

più della vecchia umiltà. Quando ci lamentiamo dell’individualismo americano,

dimentichiamo di averlo alimentato avendo noi stessi assai meno di questo

ideale impersonale della Repubblica o del bene comune nel suo insieme. Quando ci

lamentiamo, assai giustamente, per esempio, di grandi quadri che passano in

possesso di magnati americani, dovremmo ricordare che aprimmo la

strada permettendo che tutti si accumulassero nel possesso di

magnati inglesi. È male che un tesoro pubblico sia in

possesso di un privato in America, ma noi facemmo il primo passo

lasciando con leggerezza che sparisse nella collezione privata di un uomo in

Inghilterra. So tutto della genuina tradizione nazionale che trattava

l’aristocrazia come costitutiva dello stato; ma proprio questi acquisti

stranieri provano che avremmo dovuto avere uno stato indipendente dall’

aristocrazia. È vero che i ricchi americani talvolta agognano i

monumenti della nostra cultura in un modo che a ragione ci ripugna come volgare

e irrazionale. Si dice che talvolta vogliano portarsi via interi edifici

con sé; e troppi di tali edifici sono privati e in vendita.

Correvano storie ancor più folli di un milionario che desiderava trapiantare

l’abbazia di Glastonbury e simili edifici come se fossero arbusti portatili

in vaso. È ovvio che sia tanto insensato quanto vandalico

separare l’abbazia di Glastonbury da Glastonbury. Posso capire un uomo

che la venera come rovina; e posso capire un uomo che la disprezza come un

mucchio di rifiuti. Ma è insensato insultare una cosa per

idolatrarla; è privo di senso profanare il santuario per

adorarne le pietre. Quella sorta di cose è il lato cattivo dell’

appetito e dell’ambizione americana; e abbiamo perfettamente ragione a vederla non solo come

una deliberata bestemmia ma come un’inconsapevole buffonaggine. Ma vi è

un altro lato nella tradizione americana, che manca davvero troppo

nella nostra tradizione. Ed è illustrato in questa idea di preservare

Washington come una sorta di paradiso di politica impersonale senza commercio

personale. Nessuno potrebbe comprare la Casa Bianca o il Washington Monument;

si può insinuare (come da un abitante di Glastonbury) che nessuno lo

voglia; ma nessuno potrebbe se pur lo volesse. C’è davvero una certa aria di

serenità e sicurezza attorno al luogo, che manca in ogni altra città

americana. È accresciuta, s’intende, dai limpidi cieli azzurri di quella

provincia mezzo meridionale, da cui il fumo è stato bandito. L’effetto

non sta tanto nei meri edifici, benché siano classici e

spesso belli. Ma qualunque altra cosa abbiano costruito, hanno costruito una

grande cupola azzurra, la più grande cupola del mondo. E il luogo

express something in the inconsistent idealism of this strange people;

and here at least they have lifted it higher than all the sky-scrapers,

and set it in a stainless sky.

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

esprime qualcosa nell’incoerente idealismo di questo strano popolo;

e qui almeno l’hanno innalzata più in alto di tutti i grattacieli,

e l’hanno posta in un cielo immacolato.

Nella campagna americana

Il piacere più acuto di un viaggiatore sta nel trovare le cose che

non si aspettava, ma che avrebbe potuto aspettarsi di aspettare. Intendo le

cose che sono a un tempo così strane e così ovvie che devono essere

state notate, eppure in qualche modo non sono state rilevate. Così avevo udito

mille cose su Gerusalemme prima ancora di vederla; avevo udito

rapsodie e denigrazioni d’ogni sorta. I moderni critici

razionalisti, con caratteristica coerenza, la biasimavano per il suo

accumulo di rifiuti e per il suo moderno restauro, per la sua antiquata

superstizione e la sua volgarità al passo coi tempi. Ma in qualche modo l’unica

impressione che non aveva mai trapassato le loro descrizioni era la

semplice e sola impressione di una città su una collina, con mura che giungono

fino all’orlo stesso di pendii quasi ripidi come mura; la turrita

città che corona una collina a forma di cono in tanti paesaggi medievali.

Si supporrebbe che questo fosse a un tempo il più evidente e più

pittoresco di tutti i fatti; eppure in qualche modo, nelle mie letture, l’avevo sempre

perduto in una massa di fatti minori che erano meri dettagli. Sappiamo

che una città posta su una collina non può rimanere nascosta; eppure parrebbe

che sia proprio la collina a rimanere nascosta; benché forse sia nascosta soltanto

ai saggi e agli intelligenti. Ebbi un’impressione simile e semplice

quando scoprii l’America. Non posso evitare la frase; perché

parrebbe davvero che ciascuno la scopra da sé.

Così avevo sentito parlare molto, prima di vederli, degli alti e

dominanti edifici di New York. Convengo che abbiano un effetto immediato

sull’immaginazione; effetto che credo accresciuto dalla posizione in cui

sorgono, e da cui si sono levati. Sono tanto più

imponenti perché la costruzione, pur essendo verticalmente così vasta, è

orizzontalmente quasi angusta. New York è un’isola, e ha tutto l’

intenso fascino di un’isola. È una cosa d’altezza quasi infinita

su fondamenta assai finite. È quasi come un alto faro su

una roccia solitaria. Ma questa storia dei grattacieli, che avevo spesso

udito, darebbe da sola un’impressione curiosamente falsa della più fresca

e curiosa caratteristica dell’architettura americana. Narrata solo in

termini di queste grandi torri di pietra e mattone nelle grandi città

industriali, la storia tenderebbe troppo a un’impressione di qualcosa di freddo

e colossale come i monumenti dell’Asia. Suggerirebbe una moderna

Babilonia del tutto troppo babilonese. Implicherebbe che un uomo del nuovo

mondo fosse una sorta di nuovo Faraone, che costruiva non tanto una piramide quanto una

pagoda di piramidi. Suggerirebbe case costruite da mammut a partire dalle

montagne; città erette da elefanti nella loro stessa elefantesca

scuola d’architettura. E New York richiama davvero il più celebre di tutti i

grattacieli—la torre di Babele. Lo richiama non di meno perché

non c’è dubbio sulla confusione delle lingue. Ma in verità è vero proprio il

contrario per la maggior parte degli edifici d’America. Non appena

fui uscito nei sobborghi di New York in viaggio verso Boston che

cominciai a vedere qualcos’altro affatto contrario e assai più curioso. Vidi

foreste su foreste di piccole case che si stendevano fino all’orizzonte come

fanno le foreste vere; villaggi e cittadine e città. Ed erano, in

un altro senso, letteralmente come foreste. Erano tutte fatte di legno. Era

quasi tanto fantastico a un occhio inglese come se fossero state tutte fatte

di cartone. Avevo da tempo superato la sciocca vecchia burla che dipingeva gli

americani come se vivessero tutti nelle foreste sperdute. Ma, in un certo senso, se

non vivono nei boschi, non ne sono ancora usciti.

Non lo dico in alcun senso come critica. Si dà il caso che io sia

particolarmente affezionato al legno. Di tutte le superstizioni che i nostri padri

presero con abbastanza leggerezza da amarle, la più naturale mi pare l’idea che

porti fortuna toccare il legno. Alcune di esse mi toccano meno come

superstizioni, perché le sento come simboli. Se l’umanità avesse davvero

ritenuto il venerdì sfortunato avrebbe parlato di cattivo venerdì invece che di

venerdì santo. E per quanto senta il brivido del tredici a tavola, non

sono così sicuro che sia la più misera di tutte le sorti umane occupare i

posti dei Dodici Apostoli. Ma l’idea che vi fosse qualcosa di

purificante o salutare nel toccare il legno mi pare una di

quelle idee che sono veramente popolari, perché sono veramente poetiche. È

abbastanza probabile che l’idea venisse in origine dalla salvezza

del legno della Croce; ma ciò non fa che suggellare la divina coincidenza.

È come quell’altra divina coincidenza che la Vittima fosse un

falegname, che quasi avrebbe potuto costruire la propria croce. Che si accolga la

spiegazione mistica o quella mitica, vi è ovviamente una assai profonda

connessione tra il lavoro umano del legno e un simile schietto e patetico

misticismo. Dà qualcosa come un tocco di santa fanciullaggine al

racconto, come se quel terribile ordigno potesse essere un giocattolo. Allo stesso modo

un bambino immagina quel misterioso e sinistro cavallo, che fu la

rovina di Troia, come qualcosa di schietto e appariscente, e forse pezzato,

come il suo cavallo a dondolo nella stanza dei bimbi.

Si potrebbe dire simbolicamente che gli americani hanno un gusto per i

cavalli a dondolo, come di certo hanno un gusto per le sedie a dondolo. Un

critico frivolo potrebbe insinuare che scelgono le sedie a dondolo affinché,

anche quando sono seduti, non debbano stare fermi.

Qualcosa di questa irrequietezza della razza può davvero essere implicato nella

faccenda; ma credo che il significato più profondo della sedia a dondolo

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

si possa ancora trovare nel più profondo simbolismo del cavallo a dondolo. Credo

che dietro tutto questo fresco e facile uso del legno vi sia un certo spirito

fanciullesco nel buon senso della parola; qualcosa di

innocente, e facile a contentarsi. Non è del tutto falso, e ancor meno

è ostile, dire che il paesaggio sembra punteggiato di case di

bambola. È la vera tragedia di ogni caduto figlio di Adamo l’esser

cresciuto troppo per abitare in una casa di bambola. Queste cose paiono in qualche modo

sfuggire all’ironia del tempo non sfidandola nemmeno; sono troppo

temporanee perfino per essere semplicemente temporali. Questa gente non costruisce

tombe; non sta, come nella bella immagine della poesia della signora Meynell, semplicemente

costruendo rovine. Non è facile immaginare le rovine di una casa di bambola;

ed è per questo che una casa di bambola è una dimora eterna. Fino a che punto

prometta una permanenza politica è materia da ulteriore discussione; sto

solo descrivendo lo stato d’animo della scoperta; in cui tutte queste casette costruite

di assicelle, come i palazzi di una pantomima, sembravano davvero colorate come

le nuvole del mattino; che sono a un tempo fuggevoli ed eterne.

V’è anche in tutto ciò un’atmosfera che viene, in un altro senso, dalla

stanza dei bimbi. Sentiamo dire molto che gli americani sono educati sulla letteratura

inglese; ma credo che pochi americani si rendano conto di quanto i bambini inglesi

siano stati educati sulla letteratura americana. È vero, ed è

inevitabile, che possano essere educati solo su una letteratura americana piuttosto

all’antica. Il signor Bernard Shaw, in una delle sue commedie, notò con verità

i limiti del giovane milionario americano, e specialmente la

stantìa della sua cultura inglese; ma c’è necessariamente un altro lato

della faccenda. Se l’americano parlava più di Macaulay che di Nietzsche, noi

probabilmente parleremmo più di Emerson che di Ezra Pound. Se questa

stantìa sia necessariamente uno svantaggio è, s’intende, un’altra

questione. Ma, in ogni caso, è vero che i vecchi libri americani erano

spesso i libri della nostra infanzia, perfino nel senso letterale dei libri

della nostra stanza dei bimbi. Conosco pochi uomini in Inghilterra che non abbiano lasciato la loro

fanciullezza in parte perduta e impigliata nelle foreste di _Huckleberry

Finn_. Conosco poche donne in Inghilterra, dalla più rivoluzionaria

suffragetta alla più accuratamente conservata early-vittoriana, che non

confessino d’aver trascorso una felice infanzia con le Piccole Donne di

Miss Alcott. Helen’s Babies fu il primo e di gran lunga il miglior libro nelle

moderne scritture del culto del neonato. E in tutta questa vecchia

letteratura americana all’antica c’era un indefinibile sapore che appagava, e

perfino nutriva, le nostre menti in crescita. Forse era l’odore delle cose che crescono;

ma sono ben lungi dall’esser certo che non fosse semplicemente l’odore del legno. Ora

che tutto il ricordo mi ritorna, sembra tornare greve in

cento forme con la fragranza e il tatto del legname. C’era il

perpetuo riferimento alla catasta di legna, il perpetuo sfondo dei

boschi. C’era qualcosa di crudo e pulito in ogni cosa; qualcosa di

fresco e strano in quelle case lontane, cui allora non potevo

dare un nome. Anzi, molte cose divengono chiare in questa landa selvaggia di

legno, che potevano esprimersi solo in simbolo e perfino in fantasia. Non

mi spingerò fino a dire che abbreviasse il passaggio dalla Log

Cabin alla Casa Bianca; come se la Casa Bianca fosse essa stessa fatta di bianco

legno (come disse Oliver Wendell Holmes), ‘che si taglia come formaggio, ma dura

come il ferro per cose come queste.’ Ma dirò che l’esperienza

illumina certi altri versi dello stesso Holmes:—

Poco chiedo, pochi sono i miei bisogni,

Chiedo soltanto una capanna di pietra.

Non avrei saputo, in Inghilterra, che stava già chiedendo

parecchio anche solo chiedendo quello. In presenza di questo mondo di legno

la combinazione stessa delle parole pare quasi una contraddizione, come una capanna

di marmo, o un tugurio d’oro.

Fu perciò con un piacere quasi infantile che guardai tutta

questa promettente distesa di legname fresco di taglio e pensai alla crisi degli

alloggi in patria. Non so per quale incongruo moto della mente

mi attraversò, nello stesso momento, il pensiero di cose

ancestrali e canute della luce di antiche albe. L’ultima guerra

ha riportato l’armatura del corpo; la prossima guerra potrebbe riportare archi e frecce.

E d’un tratto ebbi un ricordo di vecchie case di legno a Londra; e un modello

della città di Shakespeare.

È invero possibile che simili ricordi elisabettiani ricevano un freno

o un gelo quando il viaggiatore giunge, come talvolta accade, ai

margini di uno di questi strani borghi di nuove case a intelaiatura, e si

trova davanti a un cartello inscritto in enormi lettere, ‘Guardaci

Crescere.’ Può sempre immaginare di vedere le travature gonfiarsi davanti

ai suoi occhi come zucche in qualche super-tropicale estate. Ma può essersi

formato la convinzione che nessun tale proclama si potrebbe trovare fuori dalla

città di Shakespeare. E in verità c’è qui una seria critica, per chiunque

conosca la storia; poiché le cose che crescono non sono sempre le

cose che restano; e zucche di quella espansività hanno la tendenza

a scoppiare. Mi si è sempre detto che gli americani erano aspri, frenetici, piuttosto

rozzi e forse volgari; ma erano assai pratici e il futuro

apparteneva a loro. Confesso di aver sentito una sottile sfumatura di differenza; mi piacevano

gli americani; li trovavo cordiali, fantasiosi, e pieni di

nobili entusiasmi; l’unica cosa su cui non sempre riuscivo a sentirmi sicuro era il

loro futuro. Credo fossero più felici nelle loro case a intelaiatura di

quanto lo sia la maggior parte della gente nella maggior parte delle case; avendo democrazia, buona istruzione, e un

hobby del lavoro; l’unico dubbio che mi attraversò era qualcosa

come: ‘Tutto questo sarà ancora qui fra duecento anni?’ Quello era il

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.

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 in a leaking ship

under a lowering 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 dukes.

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

apologue about Jacques Bonhomme 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 neighbours. 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 screw-driver. It seems to me a harmless

request, but from the way people talked about it one might suppose he

prima impressione prodotta dalle case di legno che parevano i

carri degli zingari; è un’impressione seria, ma ad essa vi è una

risposta. È una risposta che si schiude al viaggiatore sempre più mentre egli

procede verso ovest, e trova le cittadine sparse per le vaste praterie

centrali. E la risposta è l’agricoltura. Le case di legno possono durare o no;

ma le fattorie dureranno; e il coltivare durerà sempre.

Le case possono sembrare carovane di zingari su una brughiera o un terreno comune; ma esse

non stanno su una brughiera o un terreno comune. Stanno sulla terra più produttiva e

prospera, forse, del mondo moderno. Le case potrebbero crollare

come baracche, ma i campi rimarrebbero; e chiunque lavori

quei campi conterà moltissimo nelle vicende dell’umanità.

Contano già moltissimo, e forse fin troppo,

nelle vicende dell’America. La vera critica al Middle West

riguarda due fatti, nessuno dei quali è stato finora adeguatamente

colto dalla classe istruita d’Inghilterra. Il primo è che è giunta la volta

del mondo, e con essa quella dei paesi agricoli.

Questo è il senso della risurrezione dell’Irlanda; questo è il

senso della resa pratica degli ebrei bolscevichi ai contadini

russi. L’altro è che nella maggior parte dei luoghi queste società contadine portano

avanti quella che si può chiamare la tradizione cattolica. Il Middle West è forse

l’unico luogo notevole in cui portano ancora avanti la tradizione

puritana. Ma la tradizione puritana era in origine una tradizione della

città; e la seconda verità sul Middle West dipende in gran parte dal suo

rapporto morale con la città. Come suggerirò tra poco, vi è molto

in comune tra questa società agricola dell’America e le grandi

società agricole d’Europa. Essa tende, come quasi sempre fa la società

agricola, a un certo dignitoso grado di democrazia. La società

agricola tende alla legge agraria. Ma nell’America puritana c’è un

problema in più, che a stento posso spiegare senza una perifrasi.

Vi fu un tempo in cui il progresso delle città sembrava schernire la

decadenza della campagna. È sempre più vero, credo, oggi, che è

piuttosto la decadenza delle città a sembrar avvelenare il progresso e la

promessa della campagna. Il cinema si vanta di essere un sostituto della

taverna, ma lo ritengo un pessimo sostituto. E lo penso del tutto a prescindere

dalla questione del liquore fermentato. Nessuno gode del cinema più

di me, ma per goderne all’uomo basta guardare e nemmeno ascoltare,

mentre in una taverna deve parlare. A volte, lo ammetto, deve battersi;

ma al cinema non ha mai bisogno di muoversi. Così nella vera locanda del villaggio sta

la vera politica del villaggio, mentre nell’altro c’è solo la remota e

irreale politica metropolitana. E quella politica della città centrale non è

solo politica cosmopolita ma politica corrotta. Corrompe tutto ciò

che tocca, e questo è il vero punto di molte spinose

questioni.

Per esempio, per quanto mi riguarda, è tutto il nocciolo della questione

del femminismo e della fabbrica. È in gran parte il nocciolo del femminismo

e di molte altre professioni, apparentemente più colte della fabbrica, come

il tribunale e la tribuna politica. Quando vedo donne così follemente

ansiose di legarsi a tutto questo macchinario della città moderna, il mio

primo sentimento non è indignazione, ma quella specie di pietà cupa e sinistra

con cui dovremmo guardare una folla che si precipita a imbarcarsi su una nave che fa acqua

sotto una tempesta incombente. Quando vedo mogli e madri darsi al

governo degli affari, non solo lo giudico un cattivo affare ma un affare

in bancarotta. Mi pare proprio come se le donne contadine,

poco prima della Rivoluzione francese, avessero insistito per esser fatte duchesse

o (come è del tutto altrettanto logico e probabile) per esser fatte duchi.

È come se quelle donne cenciose, invece di gridare per il pane, avessero

gridato per cipria e nei. Nel tempo in cui li avessero indossati

sarebbero state le uniche a indossarli. Perché cipria e nei presto

passarono di moda, ma il pane non passa di moda. Allo stesso

modo, se le donne abbandonano la famiglia per la fabbrica, potrebbero scoprire di averlo

fatto per una fabbrica abbandonata. Sarebbe stato assai imprudente da parte

dei ceti inferiori reclamare tutti i privilegi dei ceti superiori negli

ultimi giorni della monarchia francese. Sarebbe stato assai faticoso

imparare la scienza dell’araldica o le tavole di precedenza quando tutte queste

cose erano insieme complicatissime e più che moribonde. Sarebbe

stato tedioso farsi insegnare tutti quei trucchi proprio quando l’intero repertorio di trucchi

stava per finire. Un satirico francese avrebbe potuto scrivere un bell’

apologo su Jacques Bonhomme che sale a Parigi con i suoi zoccoli di legno

e pretende di esser fatto Bastone d’Oro in Attesa nel nome di Libertà,

Uguaglianza e Fraternità; ma temo che il bastone in attesa sarebbe

ancora in attesa.

Uno dei primi argomenti su cui sentii volgere la conversazione in America

fu quello di un libro molto interessante intitolato Main Street, che coinvolge

molte di queste questioni del moderno industriale e dell’eterno

femminino. È semplicemente la storia, o forse più lo studio che la

storia, di una giovane sposa in una delle innumerevoli cittadine

delle grandi pianure centrali dell’America; e di una sorta di lotta

tra la sua cultura più inquieta e la prosperità provinciale dei

suoi vicini. Vi sono parecchi suggerimenti veri ed eloquenti nel

libro, ma il tocco che trovai vibrante nella memoria di molti

lettori era l’ultima frase, in cui il padrone di casa, con

salda semplicità, chiede semplicemente dove sia un certo arnese

domestico; credo fosse un cacciavite. Mi pare una richiesta

innocua, ma dal modo in cui la gente ne parlava si potrebbe supporre che egli

had asked for a screw-driver to screw down the wife in her coffin. And a

great many advanced persons would tell us that wooden house in which

she lived really was like a wooden coffin. But this appears to me to be

taking a somewhat funereal 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 striven to

give to humanity. Revolutionists have treated it not only as the normal

but even as the ideal. Revolutionary wars have been waged to establish

this; revolutionary heroes have fought, and 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 screw-driver. For there is

here a fact about America that is almost entirely unknown in England.

The English have not in the least realised 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 realise 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 freeholders. 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 injustice

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 wits 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 screw-driver. 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 realised, 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 grey.

In this relative agricultural equality the Americans of the Middle West

are far in advance of the English of the twentieth century. It is not

their fault if they are still some centuries behind the English of the

twelfth 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 besides 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 a traveller passing from one patch of peasantry to

another, and finding women wearing strange head-dresses and men singing

new songs.

A traveller in America would be somewhat surprised if he found the

people in the city of St. Louis all wearing crowns and crusading armour

in honour 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 honour

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 mediaeval 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 vulgarised by sham squires, to sneer at such

colonists as merely crude and prosaic. They at least have really kept

something of the simplicity and, therefore, the dignity of democracy;

avesse chiesto un cacciavite per inchiodare la moglie nella sua bara. E

moltissime persone avanzate ci direbbero che la casa di legno in cui

ella viveva era davvero come una bara di legno. Ma questo mi pare

prendere una visione alquanto funerea della vita dell’umanità.

Perché, dopo tutto, almeno in apparenza, questa è semplicemente la vita

dell’umanità, e persino la vita che tutti gli umanitari si sono sforzati di

dare all’umanità. I rivoluzionari l’hanno trattata non solo come la norma

ma perfino come l’ideale. Guerre rivoluzionarie sono state combattute per instaurare

questo; eroi rivoluzionari hanno combattuto, e martiri rivoluzionari sono

morti, solo per costruire una tale casa di legno per una così degna famiglia. Uomini

hanno impugnato la spada e sono periti di spada affinché il povero

gentiluomo avesse la libertà di cercare il suo cacciavite. Perché qui c’è

un fatto sull’America quasi del tutto ignoto in Inghilterra.

Gli inglesi non hanno minimamente compreso la vera forza dell’America.

Noi in Inghilterra sentiamo parlare molto, sentiamo parlare fin troppo, dell’

energia economica dell’America industriale, del denaro di Mr. Morgan, o

dei macchinari di Mr. Edison. Non ci accorgiamo mai che, mentre noi in Inghilterra

soffriamo dello stesso genere di successi nel capitalismo e nel meccanismo, noi

non abbiamo ciò che gli americani hanno; qualcosa almeno che lo controbilanci

sotto forma di un’agricoltura libera, un vasto campo di libere fattorie disseminate

di piccoli proprietari. Per la ragione che dirò tra un momento, essi

non sono forse, nel senso più pieno e più fine, un contadinato. Ma essi

sono, nel senso pratico e politico, un contadinato puro, in quanto la loro

relativa uguaglianza è un vero contrappeso alla vacillante ingiustizia

delle città.

E, persino in luoghi come quello descritto come Main Street, quella relativa

uguaglianza si può sentire subito. Gli uomini saranno anche provinciali, ma sono

certamente cittadini; si consultano su una base comune. E ripeto

che in questo, dopo tutto, essi realizzano ciò per cui molti profeti e

uomini giusti sono morti. Questo semplice villaggio, discretamente

prospero, discretamente uguale, non tassato da tiranni e non turbato da guerre, è

dopo tutto il luogo che i riformatori hanno considerato come loro meta; ogniqualvolta

i riformatori abbiano usato l’ingegno a sufficienza per avere una meta. La marcia

verso l’Utopia, la marcia verso il Paradiso terrestre, la marcia verso la Nuova

Gerusalemme, è stata in gran parte la marcia verso Main Street. E l’

ultima sensazione moderna è un libro scritto per mostrare quanto sia miserabile

viverci.

Tutto ciò è vero, e credo che la signora potrebbe essere più contenta nella sua

bara, che è arredata più comodamente della maggior parte delle bare

in cui vivono i suoi simili. Nondimeno, vi è una risposta a

questo, o almeno una sua attenuazione. Vi sono ragioni a favore della signora e

ragioni contro il gentiluomo e il cacciavite. E quando avremo

notato che cosa esso sia davvero, avremo notato il vero svantaggio in una

situazione come quella dell’America moderna, e specialmente del Middle West.

E con ciò torniamo alla verità da cui ho preso le mosse in questa

speculazione; la verità che pochi hanno ancora colto, ma di cui io, per

conto mio, sono sempre più convinto: che l’industrialismo si diffonde perché

sta decadendo; che solo la polvere e le ceneri della sua dissoluzione

soffocano ovunque la crescita delle cose naturali e mutano in grigio il verde

del mondo.

In questa relativa uguaglianza agricola gli americani del Middle West

sono assai più avanti degli inglesi del ventesimo secolo. Non è

colpa loro se sono ancora alcuni secoli indietro rispetto agli inglesi del

dodicesimo secolo. Ma il difetto per cui non giungono a essere un vero

contadinato è che non producono il proprio cibo spirituale, nello

stesso senso in cui producono il proprio cibo materiale. Non creano, come alcuni

contadinati, altre specie di cultura oltre a quella chiamata

agricoltura. La loro cultura viene dalle grandi città; ed è di là

che viene tutto il male.

Se un uomo avesse attraversato l’Inghilterra nel Medioevo, o persino

l’Europa in tempi più recenti, avrebbe trovato una cultura che mostrava

la propria vitalità nella propria varietà. Conosciamo le avventure dei tre

fratelli nelle vecchie fiabe che attraversavano la pianura sconfinata da

città a città, e trovavano un regno governato da un mago e un altro devastato

da un drago, un popolo che viveva in castelli di cristallo e un altro seduto

presso fontane di vino. Questi non sono che ingrandimenti leggendari delle reali

avventure di un viaggiatore che passa da una zona di contadinato a

un’altra, e trova donne che portano strani copricapi e uomini che cantano

nuove canzoni.

Un viaggiatore in America sarebbe alquanto sorpreso se trovasse la

gente della città di St. Louis tutta con corone e armature crociate in

onore del loro santo patrono. Potrebbe persino provare qualche lieve sorpresa

se trovasse tutti i cittadini di Philadelphia vestiti di un costume

composito, che unisse quello di un quacchero a quello di un pellerossa, in onore

del nobile trattato di William Penn. Eppure queste sono il genere di cose locali e

tradizionali che davvero si troverebbero a dar varietà alle

valli dell’Europa medievale. Io stesso provai un’esaltazione perfettamente genuina e

generosa di libertà e di nuova intraprendenza in luoghi nuovi come

l’Oklahoma. Ma difficilmente si troverebbe in Oklahoma ciò che si trovava a

Oberammergau. Ciò che va in Oklahoma non è la sacra rappresentazione contadina, ma il

cinema. E l’obiezione al cinema non è tanto che esso va in

Oklahoma, quanto che non viene dall’Oklahoma. In altre parole, questa

gente ha, sul lato economico, un accesso molto più vicino del nostro alla

libertà economica. Non sta a noi, che abbiamo lasciato che la nostra terra fosse

rubata dagli squire e poi volgarizzata da falsi squire, sogghignare su tali

coloni come se fossero solo rozzi e prosaici. Essi almeno hanno davvero conservato

qualcosa della semplicità e, dunque, della dignità della democrazia;

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 centres,

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 screw-drivers. There

is no reason why the screw-driver that seemed such a trifle to the

author should not have been borne 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 and

piety that filled common life with something that is lacking in the

worthy and virile democracy of the West. Nor are Americans of

intelligence so ignorant of this as some may suppose. There is an

admirable society called the Mediaevalists in Chicago; whose name and

address will strike many as suggesting a certain struggle of the soul

against the environment. With the national heartiness they blazon their

note-paper with heraldry and the hues of Gothic windows; with the

national high spirits they assume the fancy dress of friars; but any one

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

mediaevalism; 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 and buildings of Yale,

deliberately modelled not on classical harmony but on Gothic

irregularity and surprise. The grace and energy of the mediaeval

architecture resurrected by a man like Mr. R. A. Cram of Boston has

behind it not merely artistic but historical and ethical enthusiasm; an

enthusiasm for the Catholic creed which made mediaeval civilisation.

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

epitaphs 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

in 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 plough 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 into 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 sights 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 grey vistas of shops full of rubber tyres and

metallic appliances; a man felt that 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 Pittsburg; the sky-signs might have

been New York. One looked up in a sort of despair at the sky, not for a

sky-sign but 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 men. 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 a forest of 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 Plough.

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

e quella democrazia potrà ancora salvare il loro paese perfino dalle calamità

della ricchezza e della scienza.

Ma, mentre questi agricoltori non hanno bisogno di diventare industriali per

diventare industriosi, essi tendono a diventare industriali nella misura in cui

diventano intellettuali. La loro cultura, e in gran parte anche il loro

credo, arrivano lungo le ferrovie dai grandi centri urbani moderni,

e portano con sé una raffica di morte e un lezzo di cose putrescenti. È

quell’influenza che sola impedisce al Middle West di progredire

verso il Medioevo.

Perché, dopo tutto, intrecciato in cento leggende del Medioevo, si può

trovare un motivo simbolico di martelli e chiodi e seghe; e non c’è

ragione perché non si dovessero anche santificare i cacciaviti. Non c’è

ragione perché il cacciavite che parve una tale inezia all’

autore non si dovesse portare in trionfo lungo Main Street come una

spada di stato, in qualche corteo della Gilda di San Giuseppe dei

Falegnami o di San Dunstano dei Fabbri. Fu la poesia e la pietà cattolica

a colmare la vita comune di qualcosa che manca alla

degna e virile democrazia dell’Occidente. Né gli americani

d’ingegno ne sono così ignari come alcuni potrebbero supporre. Vi è un’

ammirevole società chiamata i Medievalisti a Chicago; il cui nome e

indirizzo colpiranno molti come suggerimento di una certa lotta dell’anima

contro l’ambiente. Con la cordialità nazionale essi blasonano la loro

carta da lettere con l’araldica e le tinte delle vetrate gotiche; con l’

esuberanza nazionale assumono il costume in maschera dei frati; ma chiunque

tentasse di ridere di loro invece che con loro scoprirebbe

il proprio errore. Perché molti di loro sanno davvero moltissimo di

medievalismo; assai più di me, o della maggior parte degli altri uomini cresciuti su un’

isola che è affollata di cattedrali. Qualcosa dello stesso spirito

si può vedere nei bei nuovi progetti ed edifici di Yale,

deliberatamente modellati non sull’armonia classica ma sull’

irregolarità e la sorpresa gotiche. La grazia e l’energia dell’architettura

medievale risuscitata da un uomo come Mr. R. A. Cram di Boston ha

dietro di sé un entusiasmo non solo artistico ma storico ed etico; un

entusiasmo per il credo cattolico che fece la civiltà medievale.

Persino sulle immense pianure puritane del Middle West l’influenza si aggira

nel modo più strano. Ed è notevole che tra i pessimistici

epitaffi della Spoon River Anthology, in quel cimitero al cui confronto

la maggior parte dei cimiteri è allegra, tra i suicidi e i segreti

beoni e i monomaniaci e gli orridi ipocriti di quel felice villaggio,

quasi l’unico segno di rispetto e di riconoscimento di più ampie speranze è

dedicato al prete cattolico.

Ma Main Street è Main Street nel complesso. Main Street è Modern Street

nella sua molteplicità di persone blandamente semicolte; e tutte queste

cose storiche sono lontane mille miglia da loro. Essi non hanno udito l’

antico frastuono né delle arti né delle armi; la costruzione della cattedrale o

la marcia della crociata. Ma almeno non hanno deliberatamente

calunniato la crociata e sfregiato la cattedrale. E se non hanno

prodotto le arti contadine, possono ancora produrre i mestieri contadini.

Possono seminare e arare e mietere e vivere di queste cose eterne;

né saranno smosse le fondamenta del loro stato. E la memoria di

quei campi colossali, di quei fecondi deserti, mi tornò tanto più

prontamente alla mente perché terminai queste riflessioni nel cuore stesso

di una moderna città industriale, se si può dire che ne abbia uno. Era

in effetti una città industriale inglese, ma mi colpì che potesse

essere benissimo una americana. E mi colpì anche che noi cediamo piuttosto

troppo facilmente all’America la polverosa palma dell’impresa industriale, e proviamo

fin troppo poca apprensione per verdure più verdi e più fresche. C’è

una storia di un americano che studiò con cura tutte le attrattive di Londra

o di Roma o di Parigi, e giunse alla conclusione che ‘non aveva nulla in più di

Minneapolis.’ A me pare che Minneapolis non abbia nulla in più di Manchester.

Vi erano le stesse grigie prospettive di negozi pieni di pneumatici di gomma e

di apparecchi metallici; un uomo sentiva che avrebbe potuto camminare un giorno senza vedere

un filo d’erba; l’intero orizzonte era così infinito di efficienza. Le

ciminiere delle fabbriche potevano essere Pittsburg; le insegne luminose potevano

essere New York. Si alzava lo sguardo in una sorta di disperazione verso il cielo, non per un’

insegna luminosa ma, in un certo senso, per un segno, per qualche frase di significato

e giudizio; per quell’istinto che spinge ogni uomo in una tale scena a cercare

l’unica cosa che non sia stata fatta dagli uomini. Ma persino quello era

illogico, perché era notte, e potevo solo aspettarmi di vedere le stelle,

che avrebbero potuto ricordarmi Old Glory; ma non era quello il segno

che mi opprimeva. Tutto il suolo era un deserto di pietra e tutti gli

edifici una foresta di mattoni; ero addentro a un labirinto di

cose senza vita. Solo, guardando in alto, tra due nere ciminiere e un

palo del telegrafo, vidi vasto e lontano e fioco, come lo videro i primi uomini,

l’argenteo disegno del Grande Carro.

L’uomo d’affari americano

È un luogo comune che gli uomini siano tutti d’accordo nell’usare i simboli, e tutti

discordino sul significato dei simboli. È ovvio che un repubblicano russo

potrebbe arrivare a identificare l’aquila come uccello dell’impero e

perciò uccello da preda. Ma quando alla fine fosse fuggito nella terra

dei liberi, potrebbe trovare lo stesso uccello sulla moneta americana figurare

come uccello di libertà. Senza dubbio, potrebbe trovare molte altre cose

a sorprenderlo nella terra dei liberi, e molte calcolate per fargli

pensare che l’uccello, se non imperiale, era perlomeno piuttosto imperioso. Ma

non sto discutendo qui quei dettagli eccezionali. È del pari

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 Willesden 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 traveller should write about is the thing which he

has not read about. It may be a small or 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 here a

great deal of complication and controversy is 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 grey 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 commonplace and trivial objects of modern life—a walking stick and

a fur coat.

As it happened, I travelled 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 grey 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

foppery 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 flavour 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 beau with his

clouded cane; it does not suggest a town type, but rather specially 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

ovvio che un reazionario russo potrebbe attraversare il mondo con un voto di

vendetta contro la bandiera rossa. Ma quell’autoritario potrebbe avere qualche

difficoltà con le autorità, se sparasse a un uomo per aver usato la

bandiera rossa sulla ferrovia tra Willesden e Clapham Junction.

Ma, naturalmente, la difficoltà dei simboli è in genere molto più

sottile che in questi casi semplici. Ho osservato altrove che la

prima cosa di cui un viaggiatore dovrebbe scrivere è la cosa di cui

non ha letto. Può essere una cosa piccola o secondaria, ma è una

cosa che egli ha visto e non semplicemente si aspettava di vedere.

Ho fatto l’esempio della grande moltitudine di case di legno in America;

potremmo dire di città di legno e metropoli di legno. Ma dopo che ha visto

tali cose, il suo dovere seguente è vederne il significato; e qui è

possibile moltissima complicazione e controversia. La cosa

probabilmente non significa ciò che egli suppone da principio che significhi in

apparenza; ma anche in apparenza, potrebbe significare molte cose diverse e persino

opposte.

Per esempio, una casa di legno potrebbe suggerire una solitudine quasi selvaggia; una

rozza baracca messa insieme da un pioniere in una foresta; oppure potrebbe significare una

soluzione molto recente e rapida del problema abitativo, condotta a poco prezzo

e dunque su scala molto vasta. Una casa di legno potrebbe suggerire la

cosa più nuova in America o una delle cose più antiche in

Inghilterra. Potrebbe significare una grigia rovina a Stratford o una bianca esposizione a

Earl’s Court.

È quando giungiamo a questa interpretazione dei simboli internazionali che

commettiamo la maggior parte degli errori internazionali. Senza il minimo errore

di dettaglio, prometto di dimostrare che le donne orientali sono indipendenti

perché portano i pantaloni, o che gli uomini orientali sono soggetti perché portano

le gonne. Solo per applicarlo a questo caso, prenderò l’esempio di due

oggetti molto comuni e banali della vita moderna: un bastone da passeggio e

una pelliccia.

Come volle il caso, viaggiai per l’America con due bastoni, come un

nobile giapponese con le sue due spade. Temo che il paragone sia troppo solenne.

Rassomigliavo più a uno storpio con due stampelle o a una versione assai

inefficace del diavolo su due bastoni. Li portavo entrambi

perché entrambi mi erano cari, e non volevo rischiare di perdere l’uno o l’

altro nei miei viaggi erratici. Uno è un bastone grigio molto semplice, dei

boschi del Buckinghamshire, ma poiché lo portai con me in Palestina esso

partecipa del carattere del bastone di un pellegrino. Quando potrò dire di

aver portato lo stesso bastone a Gerusalemme e a Chicago, penso che il bastone

ed io potremo entrambi riposarci. L’altro, che ho ancor più caro, mi fu

donato dai Cavalieri di Columbus a Yale, e vorrei poter pensare

che il loro titolo cavalleresco mi consentisse di considerarlo una spada.

Ora, non so se gli americani che incontrai, colpiti dalla ricercata

civetteria del mio abito e del mio aspetto, conclusero che è usanza degli

eleganti dandy inglesi portare due bastoni da passeggio. Ma so bene che

è molto meno comune tra gli americani che tra gli inglesi portarne

anche uno solo. Il punto, tuttavia, non è semplicemente che più bastoni sono portati

dagli inglesi che dagli americani; è che i bastoni che sono portati

dagli americani stanno per qualcosa di interamente diverso.

In America un bastone è comunemente chiamato cane, e ha attorno a sé

qualcosa dell’atmosfera che il poeta descrisse come il garbato maneggio

del bastone screziato. Sarebbe un’esagerazione dire che quando i

cittadini degli Stati Uniti vedono un uomo che porta un bastone leggero,

ne deducono che se fa quello non fa nient’altro. Ma vi è attorno ad esso

un lieve sapore di lusso e di poltroneria, e la maggior parte degli energici

cittadini di questa energica società lo evita per istinto.

Ora, in un inglese come me, portare un bastone può implicare poltroneria,

ma non implica lusso, e posso dire con una certa fermezza che non

implica dandismo. In moltissimi inglesi significa proprio l’

opposto perfino della poltroneria. Per uno di quei fantastici paradossi che

sono il mistero della nazionalità, un bastone da passeggio spesso significa davvero

camminare. Suggerisce di frequente proprio il contrario del bello con il suo

bastone screziato; non suggerisce un tipo cittadino, ma piuttosto specialmente un

tipo campagnolo. Implica piuttosto quel genere d’inglese che va vagando

per viottoli e prati e decapita i cardi. Suggerisce

il tipo d’uomo che ha portato il bastone attraverso i suoi boschi natii, e

forse l’ha persino tagliato nei suoi boschi natii.

Vi sono in abbondanza questi vigorosi poltroni, senza dubbio, nelle parti

rurali dell’America, ma l’idea di un bastone da passeggio non li

suggerirebbe particolarmente agli americani; non evocherebbe tali figure come una

bacchetta fatata. Sarebbe facile far risalire la differenza a molte

origini inglesi, forse a origini aristocratiche, all’idea del

vecchio squire, un uomo vigoroso e persino rustico, ma addestrato a reggere un

inutile bastone piuttosto che un utile arnese. Si potrebbe suggerire che

i cittadini americani almeno amino la libertà al punto da gradire di avere

le mani libere. Si potrebbe suggerire, d’altra parte, che essi

tengano le mani per le manopole di molte macchine. E che la mano su

una manopola sia meno libera della mano su un bastone o persino su un arnese. Ma queste

sono di nuovo questioni controverse e io sto solo annotando un fatto.

Se un inglese volesse immaginare più o meno esattamente quale sia l’

impressione, e quanto sia fuorviante, potrebbe trovare qualcosa come un

parallelo in ciò che egli stesso prova riguardo a una pelliccia. Quando mi trovai per la prima volta

tra la folla al piano principale di un albergo di New York, la mia impressione piuttosto

esagerata del lusso del luogo era in gran parte prodotta

dal numero di uomini in pelliccia, e per giunta pellicce che considereremmo piuttosto

ostentate, con tutto il pelo all’esterno.

Ora un inglese ha una serie di associazioni atmosferiche ma in gran parte accidentali

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 a 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 traveller

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 icehouse outside and a

hothouse inside; so hot that he may be said to construct an icehouse

inside that. He turns himself into an icehouse 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 sybarite 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

plodder 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 impressions of a 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 symbolises. 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 its own 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 fact 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 Stoke Poges.

Doubtless there are statisticians capable of carefully 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 required medical

care and police coercion. And doubtless their calculations, like nearly

all such calculations, would leave out the only important point; as that

the street was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Zoo, or was yet

more happily situated under the benignant shadow of the Elephant and

Castle. And in the same way the mechanical 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

associazioni in rapporto a una pelliccia. Non dirò che egli

pensi che un uomo in pelliccia debba essere un uomo ricco e malvagio; ma dico

che nella sua stessa visione ideale e perfetta un uomo ricco e malvagio

indosserebbe una pelliccia. Così ebbi la sensazione di trovarmi in una tumultuosa

calca di milionari americani, o persino di milionari africani; perché i

milionari di Chicago devono essere come i Cavalieri della Tavola Rotonda

a confronto con i milionari di Johannesburg.

Ma, di fatto, l’uomo in pelliccia non era nemmeno un

milionario americano, ma semplicemente un americano. Non significava lusso,

ma piuttosto necessità, e persino una necessità dura e quasi eroica.

Orson probabilmente indossava una pelliccia; ed era stato allevato dagli orsi, ma non

dagli orsi di Wall Street. Gli eschimesi sono generalmente rappresentati come un popolo

peloso; ma non sono necessariamente impegnati in delicate operazioni

finanziarie, nemmeno nella tipica e appropriata occupazione chiamata

congelamento del rivale. E se l’americano non è esattamente un viaggiatore artico

che corre da polo a polo, almeno spesso fugge letteralmente da

ghiaccio a ghiaccio. Deve fare una distinzione molto estrema tra l’abbigliamento da esterno

e quello da interno. Deve vivere in una ghiacciaia all’esterno e in una

serra all’interno; così calda che si può dire costruisca una ghiacciaia

dentro di essa. Si trasforma in una ghiacciaia e si scalda contro

il freddo finché non è abbastanza caldo da mangiare gelati. Ma il punto è che la

stessa pelliccia che in Inghilterra indicherebbe la vita del sibarita può

qui benissimo indicare la vita strenua; proprio come lo stesso bastone

che qui suggerirebbe un poltrone in Inghilterra suggerirebbe un

arrancante e quasi un pellegrino.

E questi due nonnulla sono tipi che vorrei porre, a titolo di

clausola e scusa, proprio all’inizio di ogni tentativo di resoconto di

qualsiasi impressione di una società straniera. Servono soltanto a illustrare

l’impressione più importante di tutte, l’impressione di quanto false tutte le

impressioni possano essere. Sospetto che la maggior parte delle impressioni più false

sia venuta dall’accurata registrazione di fatti verissimi. Sono venute

dal fatale potere di osservare i fatti senza essere capaci di

osservare la verità. Sono venute dal vedere il simbolo con la più viva

chiarezza ed essere ciechi a tutto ciò che esso simboleggia. È come se un uomo che

non sapesse il greco immaginasse di poter leggere un’iscrizione greca

perché ha preso la R greca per una P inglese o la lunga E greca per un’

H inglese. Non menziono questo semplicemente come critica alle impressioni altrui

sull’America, ma come critica alle mie proprie. Desidero che si

comprenda che sono ben consapevole che tutte le mie vedute sono soggette a questa

sorta di potenziale critica, e che persino quando sono certo dei

fatti non pretendo di essere certo delle deduzioni.

In questo capitolo spero di mostrare come un fraintendimento di questo genere

influenzi l’impressione comune, non del tutto infondata, che gli

americani parlino di dollari. Ma per il momento sono soltanto ansioso di

evitare un simile fraintendimento quando parlo degli americani. Sui

dogmi della democrazia, sul diritto di un popolo ai propri simboli,

siano essi monete o costumi, sono convinto, e non più da

smuovere. Ma sul significato di quei simboli, in argento o altre

sostanze, sono sempre aperto alla correzione. Quell’errore è il prezzo che

paghiamo per la grande gloria della nazionalità. E in questo senso sono del tutto

pronto, fin dall’inizio, a mettere in guardia i miei stessi lettori contro le mie stesse opinioni.

Il fatto senza la verità è futile; anzi il fatto senza la verità

è falso. Ho già notato che questo è particolarmente vero riguardo alle nostre

osservazioni di un paese straniero; ed è certamente vero riguardo a un

piccolo fatto che si è gonfiato in una grande favola. Intendo la favola sull’

America comunemente riassunta nella frase sull’Onnipotente Dollaro. Non

penso che il dollaro sia onnipotente in America; immagino che molte cose siano

più potenti, compresi molti ideali e alcuni ideali piuttosto folli. Ma

penso che si potrebbe sostenere che il dollaro ha un altro degli

attributi della divinità. Se non è onnipotente è in un certo senso

onnipresente. Qualunque cosa gli americani pensino dei dollari, è, credo,

relativamente vero che parlano di dollari. Se un mero registro

meccanico potesse essere colto dai moderni macchinari dei dittafoni e della

stenografia, non penso sia probabile che la mera parola ‘dollari’

ricorrerebbe più spesso in un dato numero di conversazioni americane

di quanto la mera parola ‘sterline’ o ‘scellini’ in un numero simile di

conversazioni inglesi. E queste statistiche, come quasi tutte le statistiche,

sarebbero del tutto inutili e persino fondamentalmente false. È come se

dovessimo calcolare che la parola ‘elefante’ è stata menzionata un certo

numero di volte in una particolare strada di Londra, o così tante volte più

spesso di quanto la parola ‘fulmine’ sia stata usata a Stoke Poges.

Senza dubbio vi sono statistici capaci di raccogliere con cura anche quelle

statistiche; e senza dubbio vi sono scientifici riformatori sociali

capaci di legiferare sulla loro base. Probabilmente argomenterebbero

dall’immaginario elefantesco della strada di Londra che una tale e tale

percentuale dei capifamiglia erano megalomani e richiedevano cure

mediche e coercizione poliziesca. E senza dubbio i loro calcoli, come quasi

tutti tali calcoli, tralascerebbero l’unico punto importante; come che

la strada fosse nell’immediata vicinanza dello Zoo, o fosse per giunta

più felicemente situata sotto la benigna ombra dell’Elephant and

Castle. E allo stesso modo il calcolo meccanico sulla menzione

dei dollari è del tutto inutile a meno che non abbiamo qualche comprensione morale

del perché siano menzionati. Certamente non significa semplicemente un amore per il

denaro; e se lo significasse, un amore per il denaro può significare moltissime cose

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 business men

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 American, 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 200-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 mistier and more

impressionist scenery. It is also connected perhaps with something more

boyish about the younger civilisation; and corresponds to the passionate

particularity with which a boy will distinguish the uniforms of

regiments, the rigs of ships, or even the colours of tram tickets. It is

a certain godlike appetite for things, as distinct from thoughts.

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 business men 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 business men 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 labour 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 Welsh

rarebit or an Irish stew. And 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 day-dream of

leisure, and one which the American spirit tends to miss. It may be

expressed in the word ‘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 centre 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 a butcher paints,

A baker rhymes for his pursuit,

Candlestick-maker much acquaints

His soul with song, or haply 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 traveller 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 traveller 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 golf, 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

diverse e persino contrarie. L’amore per il denaro è molto diverso

in un contadino o in un pirata, in un avaro o in un giocatore, in un grande

finanziere o in un uomo che fa qualche lavoro pratico e produttivo. Ora questa

differenza nella conversazione degli uomini d’affari americani e inglesi

nasce, credo, da certe cose molto più profonde nell’americano che

generalmente non sono comprese dall’inglese. Nasce anche da cose molto

più profonde nell’inglese, delle quali l’inglese è ancor più

ignaro.

Tanto per cominciare, immagino che l’americano, del tutto a prescindere da ogni amore per il

denaro, abbia un grande amore per la misurazione. Menzionerà l’esatta dimensione

o il peso delle cose, in un modo che a noi appare irrilevante. È

come se dovessimo dire che un uomo è venuto a trovarci portando tre piedi di

bastone da passeggio e quattro pollici di sigaro. È così in casi che non hanno alcun

possibile legame con qualsivoglia avarizia o avidità di guadagno. Un americano

loderà la prodiga generosità di qualche altro uomo nel cedere la propria

tenuta per il bene dei poveri. Ma generalmente dirà che il

filantropo ha donato loro un parco di 200 acri, dove un inglese

riterrebbe del tutto sufficiente dire che ha donato loro un parco. Vi è

qualcosa in questa precisione che pare adatto all’atmosfera

americana; alla dura luce del sole, e ai cieli senza nubi, e allo

scintillante dettaglio dell’architettura e del paesaggio; proprio come la

più vaga versione inglese è consona al nostro scenario più nebuloso e più

impressionista. È anche connesso forse con qualcosa di più

fanciullesco nella civiltà più giovane; e corrisponde all’appassionata

particolarità con cui un ragazzo distingue le uniformi dei

reggimenti, l’attrezzatura delle navi, o persino i colori dei biglietti del tram. È

un certo appetito divino per le cose, in quanto distinte dai pensieri.

Ma vi è anche, naturalmente, una causa molto più profonda della differenza; e

la si può facilmente dedurre notando la vera natura della differenza

stessa. Quando due uomini d’affari su un treno parlano di dollari non sono

così sciocco da aspettarmi che parlino della filosofia di

san Tommaso d’Aquino. Ma se fossero due uomini d’affari inglesi non mi

aspetterei che parlino di affari. Probabilmente sarebbe di

qualche sport; e molto probabilmente qualche sport a cui essi stessi non

sognarono mai di dedicarsi. La differenza approssimativa è che l’americano

parla del suo lavoro e l’inglese delle sue vacanze. Il suo ideale non è

il lavoro ma l’ozio. Come ogni altra caratteristica nazionale, questa

non è primariamente un motivo di lode o di biasimo; in essenza non implica

né l’uno né l’altro e in effetti implica entrambi. È certamente connessa con

quello snobismo che è il grande peccato della società inglese. L’

inglese ama concepirsi come una sorta di gentiluomo di campagna;

e i suoi castelli in aria sono tutti castelli in Scozia piuttosto che in

Spagna. Perché, come ideale, un castello scozzese è tanto inglese quanto un rarebit

gallese o uno stufato irlandese. E se parla meno di denaro temo sia

talvolta perché in un certo senso ne pensa di più. Il denaro è un mistero

nel senso antico e letterale di qualcosa di troppo sacro per la parola. L’oro è

un dio; e come il dio di certi agnostici non ha nome ed è adorato

solo nelle sue opere. È vero in un certo senso che il gentiluomo inglese

desidera avere denaro a sufficienza per poterlo dimenticare. Ma si può

mettere in dubbio che lo dimentichi interamente. Contro questa debolezza

l’americano è riuscito, al prezzo di moltissima rozzezza e

frastuono, a rendere generale un rispetto molto reale per il lavoro. Ha in parte

disincantato il pericoloso fascino del gentiluomo, e in quel senso

ha raggiunto un certo grado di democrazia; che è la conquista più difficile

del mondo.

D’altra parte, vi è un lato buono nel sogno a occhi aperti dell’inglese sull’

ozio, e uno che lo spirito americano tende a mancare. Lo si può

esprimere nella parola ‘vacanza’ o meglio ancora nella parola ‘hobby.’ L’

inglese, nel suo carattere di Robin Hood, ha davvero due corde

al suo arco. Anzi l’inglese è davvero ben rappresentato da Robin

Hood; perché vi è sempre qualcosa in lui che si può letteralmente

dire fuorilegge, nel senso di essere extra-legale o fuori dalle regole.

Un francese disse di Browning che il suo centro non era nel mezzo; e

si può dire di più di un inglese che il suo cuore non è dove è il suo

tesoro. Browning espresse un sentimento molto inglese quando disse:—

Mi piace sapere che un macellaio dipinge,

un fornaio verseggia per suo diletto,

il fabbricante di candelieri molto avvezza

la sua anima al canto, o forse muto

si fa saltare le cervella sul flauto.

Stevenson toccò lo stesso sentimento insulare quando disse che molti

uomini che conosceva, che erano venditori di carne all’occhio esterno, potrebbero nella

vita della contemplazione sedere con i santi. Ora lo straordinario

risultato del venditore di carne americano è che il suo entusiasmo poetico

può davvero essere per le vendite di carne; non per il denaro ma per la carne. Un

commesso viaggiatore americano mi chiese, con un fuoco religioso negli occhi,

se non pensassi che il commercio potesse essere un’arte. In Inghilterra

vi sono molti venditori sinceramente appassionati d’arte; ma di rado dell’

arte del vendere. Per loro l’arte è un hobby; una cosa di ozio e

libertà. Ecco perché il viaggiatore inglese parla, se non d’arte, allora di

sport. Ecco perché i due uomini della City sul treno di Londra, se non

parlano di golf, potrebbero parlare di giardinaggio. Se non

parlano di dollari, o dell’equivalente dei dollari, la ragione sta

molto più in profondità di qualsiasi superficiale lode o biasimo che tocchi il desiderio di

ricchezza. Nel caso inglese, almeno, sta molto in profondità nello spirito

inglese. Molte delle più grandi cose inglesi hanno avuto questo carattere più leggero e

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 wastepaper 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 as Pickwick is

almost a kind of accident; it began as something secondary and grew into

something primary and pre-eminent. 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 weakness; 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 who

drops because he stops working. It is the great achievement of American

civilisation that in that country it really is not cant to talk about

the dignity of labour. There is something that might almost be called

the sanctity of labour; but it is subject to the profound law that when

anything less than the highest becomes a 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 business men, behaving in many ways in a fashion very

different from that of the swarms of London city men who go up every day

to the city. They sit about in groups with Red-Indian gravity, as if

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 merely

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 look rather alike, because they all like

to make their faces hard. And with the mention of their mental attitude

we realise 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 a mystic than a materialist. The

Frenchman who retires from business when he has money enough to drink

his wine and eat his omelette 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 omelette, even a coin is itself a

counter. The Yankee cannot eat chips as the Frenchman can eat chipped

potatoes; but neither can he swallow red cents 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 honour in the old duelling days. There is

not a material but a distinctly moral savour 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

favours the needless interlarding of English with scraps of foreign

languages. But though it means nothing in English, it means something

very particular in American. 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 duellist’s honour was insincere when it

e più sciolto carattere di un hobby o di un esperimento delle vacanze. Persino un capolavoro

è stato spesso un sottoprodotto. Le opere di Shakespeare vengono fuori così

casualmente che possono essere attribuite alle persone più improbabili; persino

a Bacone. I sonetti di Shakespeare vengono raccolti in seguito come se da

un cestino della carta straccia. L’immortalità del dottor Johnson non poggia sulle

pagine scritte che raccolse, ma interamente sulle parole che sprecò,

le parole che disperse ai venti. Una cosa tanto grande quanto il Pickwick è

quasi una sorta di incidente; cominciò come qualcosa di secondario e crebbe in

qualcosa di primario e preminente. Cominciò con mere parole scritte per

illustrare le immagini di qualcun altro; e si gonfiò come un poema epico dilatato

da un epigramma. Si potrebbe quasi dire che nel caso del Pickwick

l’autore cominciò come il servo dell’artista. Ma, come nella stessa storia

del Pickwick, il servo divenne più grande del padrone. Questa

incalcolabile e accidentale qualità, come tutte le qualità nazionali, ha

la sua forza e la sua debolezza; ma rappresenta davvero un certo fondo di riserva

di interessi nella vita dell’inglese; e lo distingue dall’

altro tipo estremo, del milionario che lavora fino a crollare, o che

crolla perché smette di lavorare. È il grande merito della civiltà

americana che in quel paese non è davvero ipocrisia parlare

della dignità del lavoro. Vi è qualcosa che potrebbe quasi chiamarsi

la santità del lavoro; ma è soggetta alla profonda legge che quando

qualcosa di meno che il sommo diviene una santità, tende anche a

diventare una superstizione. Quando il fabbricante di candelieri non si fa saltare le

cervella sul flauto vi è sempre il pericolo che se le faccia saltare

altrove, a causa delle condizioni depresse nel mercato dei candelieri.

Ora certamente una delle prime impressioni dell’America, o in ogni caso

di New York, che non è affatto la stessa cosa dell’America, è quella di

una sorta di calca di uomini d’affari, che si comportano in molti modi in una foggia molto

diversa da quella degli sciami di uomini della City di Londra che ogni giorno salgono

alla City. Se ne stanno seduti in gruppi con gravità da pellerossa, come se

si passassero la pipa della pace; benché, di fatto, la maggior parte di loro stia fumando

sigari e alcuni di loro stiano mangiando sigari. Quest’ultima cosa mi colpisce come uno

dei più peculiari gusti transatlantici, più peculiare di quello del

masticare gomma. Un uomo se ne starà seduto per ore consumando un sigaro come se fosse un

bastoncino di zucchero; ma lo immaginerei un bastoncino di zucchero molto

sgradevole. Perché tenti di godersi un sigaro senza accenderlo non lo

so; se sia un modo più economico di portare un mero simbolo

di conversazione commerciale; o se qualcosa della stessa strana

e bizzarra moralità che traccia una tale distinzione tra la birra e la

ginger beer tracci una distinzione altrettanto etica tra il toccare il

tabacco e l’accenderlo. Per il resto, sarebbe facile fare un semplice

schizzo esteriore pieno di cose ugualmente strane; perché questo si può sempre

fare in un paese straniero. Tengo conto del fatto che tutti gli stranieri

si somigliano; ma immagino che tutte quelle facce dai lineamenti duri, con

occhiali e mascelle rasate, si somiglino piuttosto, perché a tutti loro piace

rendere dure le proprie facce. E con la menzione del loro atteggiamento mentale

ci rendiamo conto della futilità di ogni tale schizzo esteriore. Se non riusciamo a vedere

che questi sono qualcosa di più che uomini che fumano sigari e parlano di

dollari faremmo molto meglio a non vederli affatto.

È consuetudine condannare l’americano come materialista a causa del suo

culto del successo. Ma in verità proprio questo culto, come ogni culto,

persino il culto del diavolo, lo dimostra piuttosto un mistico che un materialista. Il

francese che si ritira dagli affari quando ha denaro a sufficienza per bere

il suo vino e mangiare la sua omelette in pace potrebbe assai più plausibilmente essere

chiamato materialista da coloro che non preferiscono chiamarlo un uomo di

buon senso. Ma gli americani adorano davvero il successo nell’astratto, come una sorta di

visione ideale. Seguono il successo piuttosto che il denaro; seguono il denaro

piuttosto che il cibo e la bevanda. Se la loro vita nazionale in un senso è una

perpetua partita a poker, essi giocano eccitati per fiche o

gettoni tanto quanto per monete. E secondo la prova ultima del godimento

materiale, come il godimento di un’omelette, persino una moneta è essa stessa un

gettone. Lo yankee non può mangiare le fiche come il francese può mangiare le patatine

fritte; ma nemmeno può inghiottire rossi centesimi come il francese inghiotte

rosso vino. Così quando la gente dice di uno yankee che adora il dollaro,

gli fanno un complimento alla sua fine spiritualità più vero e delicato

di quanto immaginino. Il dollaro è un idolo perché è un’immagine; ma è

un’immagine di successo e non di godimento.

Che questo romanzo sia anche una religione è mostrato dal fatto che vi è

una strana sorta di moralità connessa ad esso. Il parallelo più prossimo ad esso è

qualcosa come il senso dell’onore negli antichi giorni dei duelli. Vi è

non un sapore materiale ma un sapore distintamente morale nell’implicito

obbligo di raccogliere dollari o di raccogliere fiche. Sentiamo troppo in

Inghilterra la frase sul ‘making good’; perché nessun inglese assennato

favorisce il superfluo infarcire l’inglese di frammenti di lingue

straniere. Ma benché non significhi nulla in inglese, significa qualcosa

di molto particolare in americano. Vi è una fine sfumatura di distinzione

tra il riuscire e il making good, precisamente perché deve sempre esservi

una sorta di eco etica nella parola good. L’America sente vagamente un

uomo che fa good come qualcosa di analogo a un uomo che è buono o a un uomo

che fa il bene. È connesso con il suo serio rispetto di sé e con il suo senso

di essere degno di coloro che ama. Né questo curioso e rozzo idealismo è

del tutto insincero anche quando lo spinge a ciò che alcuni di noi chiamerebbero

rubare; non più di quanto l’onore del duellante fosse insincero quando

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 to, 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 businesslike. 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 point at issue. Of course there is 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

although 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 Montenegrin

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 generalisation; 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 favourable or unfavourable, 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 the 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.

For instance, Americans are very unpunctual. That is the last thing that

a critic expects who comes to condemn them for hustling and haggling and

vulgar ambition. But it is almost the first fact that strikes the

spectator on the spot. The chief difference between the humdrum English

business man and the hustling American business man is that the hustling

American business man is always late. Of course there is a great deal of

difference between coming late and coming too late. But I noticed the

fashion first in connection with my own lectures; touching which I

could heartily recommend the habit of coming too late. I could easily

understand a crowd of commercial Americans not coming to my lectures at

all; but there was something odd about their coming in a crowd, and the

crowd being expected to turn up some time after the appointed hour. The

managers of these lectures (I continue to call them lectures out of

courtesy to myself) often explained to me that it was quite useless to

begin properly until about half an hour after time. Often people were

still coming in three-quarters of an hour or even an hour after time.

Not that I objected to that, as some lecturers are said to do; it seemed

to me an agreeable break in the monotony; but as a characteristic of a

people mostly engaged in practical business, it struck me as curious and

interesting. I have grown accustomed to being the most unbusinesslike

person in any given company; and it gave me a sort of dizzy exaltation

to find I was not the most unpunctual person in that company. I was

afterwards told by many Americans that my impression was quite correct;

that American unpunctuality was really very prevalent, and extended to

lo spinse a ciò che alcuni chiamerebbero omicidio. Una commedia americana assai arguta

che una volta vidi rappresentata conteneva un modello compiuto e funzionante di questa

moralità. Una fanciulla era fedele, ma tormentata, al suo fidanzamento con un

giovane sul quale gravava una sorta di nube d’umiliazione. L’

atmosfera era esattamente quella che sarebbe stata in Inghilterra se egli fosse stato

accusato di codardia o di baro alle carte. E non c’era assolutamente nulla

che non andasse nel povero giovane, salvo che una qualche pessima miniera

in Arizona non aveva ‘fatto fortuna.’ Ora in Inghilterra noi saremmo o al di sotto

o al di sopra di quell’ideale del bene. Se fossimo snob, ci accontenteremmo di

sapere che era un gentiluomo di buone parentele, forse troppo

avvezzo alle rendite private perché ci si aspettasse da lui spirito d’affari. Se

fossimo persone di mente un po’ più larga, sapremmo che egli poteva essere tanto

saggio quanto Socrate e splendido quanto Baiardo, e tuttavia inadatto, anzi forse

si dovrebbe dire proprio perciò inadatto, al gioco tetro e sudicio

del commercio moderno. Ma sia che fossimo abbastanza snob da ammirarlo

perché ozioso, sia che fossimo abbastanza cavallereschi da ammirarlo perché

fuorilegge, in nessuno dei due casi lo disprezzeremmo mai davvero, in cuor nostro,

per essere un fallito. Poiché è questo verdetto interiore d’un istintivo

idealismo il punto in questione. Certo non v’è nulla di nuovo, o

di peculiare al nuovo mondo, nel fatto che il fidanzamento d’un uomo naufraghi

per il suo fallimento finanziario. Una ragazza inglese potrebbe facilmente lasciare un uomo

perché povero, oppure restargli accanto fedelmente e con orgogliosa sfida

benché fosse povero. Il punto è che questa ragazza era fedele ma

non sfidante; vale a dire, non era fiera. Tutta la psicologia della

situazione stava nel fatto che ella condivideva lo strambo idealismo mondano della sua famiglia,

e ne era ferita come il suo patriottismo sarebbe stato ferito se egli avesse

tradito il proprio paese. A voler render loro giustizia, nulla mostrava che

avrebbero nutrito un vero rispetto per un duca reale che avesse ereditato

milioni; ciò che quei semplici barbari volevano era un uomo capace di ‘far

fortuna.’ Che il processo del far fortuna probabilmente lo trascinasse attraverso

il fango d’ogni sorta di male, che egli avrebbe fatto fortuna bluffando, mentendo,

truffando e macinando i volti dei poveri, non pareva turbarli

minimamente. Contro questo fanatismo sta questa ombra di verità

perfino nella finzione dell’aristocrazia; che a un gentiluomo sia almeno

concesso d’essere buono senza doversi affannare a renderlo tale.

Un’altra obiezione alla frase sull’onnipotente dollaro è che essa è

una frase onnipotente, e perciò una seccatura onnipotente. Voglio dire che essa

è fatta per spiegare tutto, e per spiegare tutto fin troppo bene;

vale a dire, fin troppo facilmente. In realtà non aiuta la gente a capire un

paese straniero; ma le dà la fatale illusione di

capirlo. I dollari stavano per l’America come le rane stavano per la Francia;

perché era necessario collegare determinati stranieri a

qualcosa, altrimenti sarebbe stato fin troppo facile confondere un moro con un montenegrino

o un russo con un pellerossa. L’unica cura per questa sorta di soddisfatta

familiarità è l’urto di qualcosa di davvero estraneo. Quando la gente non riesce a

vedere nulla nella democrazia americana se non uno yankee che corre dietro a un

dollaro, allora l’unica cosa da fare è farla inciampare mentre corre dietro

allo yankee, o mandare a monte la sua nozione dello yankee, con l’ostacolo

di certi fatti strani e ostinati che non hanno alcun rapporto con quella nozione.

E, di fatto, vi sono parecchi ostacoli del genere a qualsiasi

simile generalizzazione; parecchi fatti notevoli che devono in qualche modo essere

conciliati con le nostre nozioni precedenti. A questo scopo non importa

se i fatti siano favorevoli o sfavorevoli, o se le

qualità siano meriti o difetti; tanto più che non li comprendiamo neppure

abbastanza da dire quale delle due cose siano. Il punto è che siamo

costretti a una sosta, e obbligati a tentare di comprenderli un po’

meglio di quanto facciamo. Abbiamo trovato l’unica cosa che non ci aspettavamo;

e perciò l’unica cosa che non sappiamo spiegare. E siamo spinti a

uno sforzo, probabilmente vano, per spiegarla.

Per esempio, gli americani sono assai poco puntuali. È l’ultima cosa che

s’aspetta un critico venuto a condannarli per la loro fretta, il loro mercanteggiare e la loro

volgare ambizione. Eppure è quasi il primo fatto che colpisce lo

spettatore sul posto. La differenza principale tra il monotono uomo d’affari inglese

e il frenetico uomo d’affari americano è che il frenetico

uomo d’affari americano è sempre in ritardo. Certo, v’è una gran

differenza tra l’arrivare in ritardo e l’arrivare troppo tardi. Ma notai questa

usanza dapprima a proposito delle mie conferenze; riguardo alle quali

potrei di gran cuore raccomandare l’abitudine di arrivare troppo tardi. Potevo facilmente

capire che una folla di americani d’affari non venisse affatto

alle mie conferenze; ma c’era qualcosa di strano nel loro venire in folla, e nel fatto che la

folla dovesse presentarsi un certo tempo dopo l’ora fissata. I

gestori di queste conferenze (continuo a chiamarle conferenze per

cortesia verso me stesso) mi spiegavano spesso che era del tutto inutile

cominciare sul serio prima di circa mezz’ora dopo l’ora. Spesso la gente

arrivava ancora tre quarti d’ora o perfino un’ora dopo l’ora stabilita.

Non che io me ne dolessi, come si dice facciano certi conferenzieri; mi pareva

una gradevole rottura della monotonia; ma come tratto caratteristico d’un

popolo dedito per lo più agli affari pratici, mi colpiva come cosa curiosa e

interessante. Mi sono abituato a essere la persona meno pratica negli affari

in qualunque compagnia mi trovi; e mi diede una sorta di vertiginosa esaltazione

scoprire di non essere la persona meno puntuale di quella compagnia. Mi fu

poi detto da molti americani che la mia impressione era del tutto esatta;

che l’impuntualità americana era davvero assai diffusa, e si estendeva a

much more important things. But at least I was not content to lump this

along with all sorts of contrary things that I did not happen to like,

and call it America. I am not sure of what it really means, but I rather

fancy that though it may seem the very reverse of the hustling, it has

the same origin as the hustling. The American is not punctual because he

is not punctilious. He is impulsive, and has an impulse to stay as well

as an impulse to go. For, after all, punctuality belongs to the same

order of ideas as punctuation; and there is no punctuation in

telegrams. The order of clocks and set hours which English business has

always observed is a good thing in its own way; indeed I think that in a

larger sense it is better than the other way. But it is better because

it is a protection against hustling, not a promotion of it. In other

words, it is better because it is more civilised; as a great Venetian

merchant prince clad in cloth of gold was more civilised; or an old

English merchant drinking port in an oak-panelled room was more

civilised; or a little French shopkeeper shutting up his shop to play

dominoes is more civilised. And the reason is that the American has the

romance of business and is monomaniac, while the Frenchman has the

romance of life and is sane. But the romance of business really is a

romance, and the Americans are really romantic about it. And that

romance, though it revolves round pork or petrol, is really like a

love-affair in this; that it involves not only rushing but also

lingering.

The American is too busy to have business habits. He is also too much in

earnest to have business rules. If we wish to understand him, we must

compare him not with the French shopkeeper when he plays dominoes, but

with the same French shopkeeper when he works the guns or mans the

trenches as a conscript soldier. Everybody used to the punctilious

Prussian standard of uniform and parade has noticed the roughness and

apparent laxity of the French soldier, the looseness of his clothes, the

unsightliness of his heavy knapsack, in short his inferiority in every

detail of the business of war except fighting. There he is much too

swift to be smart. He is much too practical to be precise. By a strange

illusion which can lift pork-packing almost to the level of patriotism,

the American has the same free rhythm in his romance of business. He

varies his conduct not to suit the clock but to suit the case. He gives

more time to more important and less time to less important things; and

he makes up his time-table as he goes along. Suppose he has three

appointments; the first, let us say, is some mere trifle of erecting a

tower twenty storeys high and exhibiting a sky-sign on the top of it;

the second is a business discussion about the possibility of printing

advertisements of soft drinks on the table-napkins at a restaurant; the

third is attending a conference to decide how the populace can be

prevented from using chewing-gum and the manufacturers can still manage

to sell it. He will be content merely to glance at the sky-sign as he

goes by in a trolley-car or an automobile; he will then settle down to

the discussion with his partner about the table-napkins, each speaker

indulging in long monologues in turn; a peculiarity of much American

conversation. Now if in the middle of one of these monologues, he

suddenly thinks that the vacant space of the waiter’s shirt-front might

also be utilised to advertise the Gee Whiz Ginger Champagne, he will

instantly follow up the new idea in all its aspects and possibilities,

in an even longer monologue; and will never think of looking at his

watch while he is rapturously looking at his waiter. The consequence is

that he will come late into the great social movement against

chewing-gum, where an Englishman would probably have arrived at the

proper hour. But though the Englishman’s conduct is more proper, it need

not be in all respects more practical. The Englishman’s rules are better

for the business of life, but not necessarily for the life of business.

And it is true that for many of these Americans business is the

business of life. It is really also, as I have said, the romance of

life. We shall admire or deplore this spirit, accordingly as we are glad

to see trade irradiated with so much poetry, or sorry to see so much

poetry wasted on trade. But it does make many people happy, like any

other hobby; and one is disposed to add that it does fill their

imaginations like any other delusion. For the true criticism of all this

commercial romance would involve a criticism of this historic phase of

commerce. These people are building on the sand, though it shines like

gold, and for them like fairy gold; but the world will remember the

legend about fairy gold. Half the financial operations they follow deal

with things that do not even exist; for in that sense all finance is a

fairy tale. Many of them are buying and selling things that do nothing

but harm; but it does them good to buy and sell them. The claim of the

romantic salesman is better justified than he realises. Business really

is romance; for it is not reality.

There is one real advantage that America has over England, largely due

to its livelier and more impressionable ideal. America does not think

that stupidity is practical. It does not think that ideas are merely

destructive things. It does not think that a genius is only a person to

be told to go away and blow his brains out; rather it would open all its

machinery to the genius and beg him to blow his brains in. It might

attempt to use a natural force like Blake or Shelley for very ignoble

purposes; it would be quite capable of asking Blake to take his tiger

and his golden lions round as a sort of Barnum’s Show, or Shelley to

a cose molto più importanti. Ma almeno non mi accontentai di ammucchiare questo

insieme a ogni sorta di cose contrarie che per caso non mi piacevano,

e chiamarlo America. Non son certo di che cosa significhi davvero, ma piuttosto

sospetto che, per quanto possa sembrare l’esatto contrario della frenesia, esso abbia

la medesima origine della frenesia. L’americano non è puntuale perché

non è puntiglioso. È impulsivo, e ha tanto un impulso a restare quanto

un impulso ad andarsene. Poiché, dopo tutto, la puntualità appartiene al medesimo

ordine di idee della punteggiatura; e non c’è punteggiatura nei

telegrammi. L’ordine degli orologi e delle ore fisse che gli affari inglesi hanno

sempre osservato è una buona cosa a suo modo; anzi credo che in un

senso più ampio sia migliore dell’altro modo. Ma è migliore perché

è una protezione contro la frenesia, non una sua promozione. In altre

parole, è migliore perché è più civile; come era più civile un grande

principe mercante veneziano vestito di drappo d’oro; o come un vecchio

mercante inglese che sorseggia porto in una stanza rivestita di quercia era più

civile; o come è più civile un piccolo bottegaio francese che chiude bottega per giocare

a domino. E la ragione è che l’americano ha il

romanzesco degli affari ed è monomaniaco, mentre il francese ha il

romanzesco della vita ed è sano di mente. Ma il romanzesco degli affari è davvero un

romanzo, e gli americani ne sono davvero romantici. E quel

romanzesco, per quanto ruoti attorno al maiale o alla benzina, è davvero simile a una

storia d’amore in questo: che comporta non solo lo slancio ma anche

l’indugio.

L’americano è troppo indaffarato per avere abitudini d’affari. È anche troppo

in ardore per avere regole d’affari. Se vogliamo comprenderlo, dobbiamo

paragonarlo non al bottegaio francese quando gioca a domino, ma

allo stesso bottegaio francese quando serve i cannoni o presidia le

trincee come soldato di leva. Chiunque sia avvezzo al puntiglioso

standard prussiano di uniforme e parata ha notato la rozzezza e

l’apparente trascuratezza del soldato francese, la sciatteria delle sue vesti, la

goffaggine del suo pesante zaino, in breve la sua inferiorità in ogni

dettaglio del mestiere della guerra, tranne che nel combattere. Lì è troppo

rapido per essere elegante. È troppo pratico per essere preciso. Per una strana

illusione che può innalzare l’inscatolamento del maiale quasi al livello del patriottismo,

l’americano ha il medesimo ritmo libero nel suo romanzesco degli affari. Egli

varia la sua condotta non per adattarsi all’orologio ma al caso. Egli dà

più tempo alle cose più importanti e meno tempo a quelle meno importanti; e

si costruisce l’orario del proprio tempo man mano che procede. Supponiamo abbia tre

appuntamenti; il primo, diciamo, è una mera inezia: erigere una

torre alta venti piani ed esibirne un’insegna luminosa in cima;

il secondo è una discussione d’affari sulla possibilità di stampare

réclame di bibite sui tovaglioli di un ristorante; il

terzo è partecipare a un congresso per decidere come si possa impedire alla plebe di

usare la gomma da masticare e come i fabbricanti possano ciononostante riuscire

a venderla. Si accontenterà di gettare un’occhiata all’insegna luminosa mentre

passa in tram o in automobile; poi si dedicherà

alla discussione col suo socio sui tovaglioli, ciascun oratore

indulgendo a turno in lunghi monologhi; una peculiarità di gran parte della conversazione

americana. Ora, se nel bel mezzo di uno di questi monologhi egli

pensa a un tratto che lo spazio vuoto sullo sparato del cameriere potrebbe

anch’esso servire a reclamizzare lo Gee Whiz Ginger Champagne, egli

seguirà all’istante la nuova idea in tutti i suoi aspetti e possibilità,

in un monologo ancor più lungo; e non penserà mai a guardare l’

orologio mentre contempla estasiato il suo cameriere. La conseguenza è

che arriverà in ritardo al grande movimento sociale contro

la gomma da masticare, dove un inglese sarebbe probabilmente giunto all’

ora giusta. Ma per quanto la condotta dell’inglese sia più corretta, non per questo

è per forza più pratica sotto ogni riguardo. Le regole dell’inglese sono migliori

per gli affari della vita, ma non necessariamente per la vita degli affari.

Ed è vero che per molti di questi americani gli affari sono gli

affari della vita. Sono davvero anche, come ho detto, il romanzesco della

vita. Ammireremo o deploreremo questo spirito, a seconda che ci rallegri

vedere il commercio irradiato di tanta poesia, o ci rincresca vedere tanta

poesia sprecata nel commercio. Ma esso rende felici molti, come qualunque

altro passatempo; e si è propensi ad aggiungere che riempie le loro

immaginazioni come qualunque altra illusione. Poiché la vera critica di tutto questo

romanzesco commerciale comporterebbe una critica di questa fase storica del

commercio. Costoro costruiscono sulla sabbia, per quanto essa splenda come

oro, e per loro come oro fatato; ma il mondo ricorderà la

leggenda dell’oro fatato. Metà delle operazioni finanziarie che seguono trattano

cose che nemmeno esistono; poiché in tal senso ogni finanza è una

fiaba. Molti di loro comprano e vendono cose che non fanno altro che

danno; ma fa loro bene comprarle e venderle. La pretesa del

venditore romantico è meglio giustificata di quanto egli creda. Gli affari sono davvero

romanzo; poiché non sono realtà.

V’è un reale vantaggio che l’America ha sull’Inghilterra, dovuto in gran parte

al suo ideale più vivace e più impressionabile. L’America non pensa

che la stupidità sia pratica. Non pensa che le idee siano meramente

cose distruttive. Non pensa che un genio sia soltanto una persona a cui

dire di andarsene e di farsi saltar fuori le cervella; anzi aprirebbe tutti i suoi

macchinari al genio e lo pregherebbe di farsele saltar dentro. Potrebbe

tentare di usare una forza naturale come Blake o Shelley per fini assai

ignobili; sarebbe capacissima di chiedere a Blake di portare in giro la sua tigre

e i suoi leoni d’oro come una sorta di baraccone alla Barnum, o a Shelley di

hang his stars and haloed clouds among the lights of Broadway. But it

would not assume that a natural force is useless, any more than that

Niagara is useless. And there is a very definite distinction here

touching the intelligence of the trader, whatever we may think of either

course touching the intelligence of the artist. It is one thing that

Apollo should be employed by Admetus, although he is a god. It is quite

another thing that Apollo should always be sacked by Admetus, because he

is a god. Now in England, largely owing to the accident of a rivalry and

therefore a comparison with France, there arose about the end of the

eighteenth century an extraordinary notion that there was some sort of

connection between dullness and success. What the Americans call a

bonehead became what the English call a hard-headed man. The merchants

of London evinced their contempt for the fantastic logicians of Paris by

living in a permanent state of terror lest somebody should set the

Thames on fire. In this as in much else it is much easier to understand

the Americans if we connect them with the French who were their allies

than with the English who were their enemies. There are a great many

Franco-American resemblances which the practical Anglo-Saxons are of

course too hard-headed (or boneheaded) to see. American history is

haunted with the shadow of the Plebiscitary President; they have a

tradition of classical architecture for public buildings. Their cities

are planned upon the squares of Paris and not upon the labyrinth of

London. They call their cities Corinth and Syracuse, as the French

called their citizens Epaminondas and Timoleon. Their soldiers wore the

French kepi; and they make coffee admirably, and do not make tea at all.

But of all the French elements in America the most French is this real

practicality. They know that at certain times the most businesslike of

all qualities is ‘l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de

l’audace.’ The publisher may induce the poet to do a pot-boiler; but the

publisher would cheerfully allow the poet to set the Mississippi on

fire, if it would boil his particular pot. It is not so much that

Englishmen are stupid as that they are afraid of being clever; and it is

not so much that Americans are clever as that they do not try to be any

stupider than they are. The fire of French logic has burnt that out of

America as it has burnt it out of Europe, and of almost every place

except England. This is one of the few points on which English

insularity really is a disadvantage. It is the fatal notion that the

only sort of commonsense is to be found in compromise, and that the only

sort of compromise is to be found in confusion. This must be clearly

distinguished from the commonplace about the utilitarian world not

rising to the invisible values of genius. Under this philosophy the

utilitarian does not see the utility of genius, even when it is quite

visible. He does not see it, not because he is a utilitarian, but

because he is an idealist whose ideal is dullness. For some time the

English aspired to be stupid, prayed and hoped with soaring spiritual

ambition to be stupid. But with all their worship of success, they did

not succeed in being stupid. The natural talents of a great and

traditional nation were always breaking out in spite of them. In spite

of the merchants of London, Turner did set the Thames on fire. In spite

of our repeatedly explained preference for realism to romance, Europe

persisted in resounding with the name of Byron. And just when we had

made it perfectly clear to the French that we despised all their

flamboyant tricks, that we were a plain prosaic people and there was no

fantastic glory or chivalry about us, the very shaft we sent against

them shone with the name of Nelson, a shooting and a falling star.

Presidents and Problems

All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen.

All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen.

This difference, deep and perhaps ineradicable in the temperaments of

the two peoples, explains a thousand things in their literature and

their laws. The American national poet praised his people for their

readiness ‘to rise against the never-ending audacity of elected

persons.’ The English national anthem is content to say heartily, but

almost hastily, ‘Confound their politics,’ and then more cheerfully, as

if changing the subject, ‘God Save the King.’ For this is especially the

secret of the monarch or chief magistrate in the two countries. They arm

the President with the powers of a King, that he may be a nuisance in

politics. We deprive the King even of the powers of a President, lest he

should remind us of a politician. We desire to forget the never-ending

audacity of elected persons; and with us therefore it really never does

end. That is the practical objection to our own habit of changing the

subject, instead of changing the ministry. The King, as the Irish wit

observed, is not a subject; but in that sense the English crowned head

is not a King. He is a popular figure intended to remind us of the

England that politicians do not remember; the England of horses and

ships and gardens and good fellowship. The Americans have no such

purely social symbol; and it is rather the root than the result of this

that their social luxury, and especially their sport, are a little

lacking in humanity and humour. It is the American, much more than the

Englishman, who takes his pleasures sadly, not to say savagely.

The genuine popularity of constitutional monarchs, in parliamentary

countries, can be explained by any practical example. Let us suppose

that great social reform, The Compulsory Haircutting Act, has just begun

appendere le sue stelle e le sue nubi aureolate tra le luci di Broadway. Ma non

presumerebbe che una forza naturale sia inutile, non più di quanto

il Niagara sia inutile. E qui v’è una distinzione ben precisa

riguardo all’intelligenza del mercante, qualunque cosa si possa pensare dell’una o dell’altra

via riguardo all’intelligenza dell’artista. Una cosa è che

Apollo sia impiegato da Admeto, benché sia un dio. È tutt’

altra cosa che Apollo venga sempre licenziato da Admeto, perché

è un dio. Ora in Inghilterra, in gran parte per l’accidente di una rivalità e

quindi di un confronto con la Francia, sorse verso la fine del

diciottesimo secolo una nozione straordinaria: che vi fosse una sorta di

connessione tra l’ottusità e il successo. Ciò che gli americani chiamano un

testa di legno divenne ciò che gli inglesi chiamano un uomo dalla testa dura. I mercanti

di Londra manifestarono il loro disprezzo per i fantasiosi logici di Parigi

vivendo in un permanente stato di terrore che qualcuno potesse dar

fuoco al Tamigi. In questo come in molto altro è assai più facile comprendere

gli americani se li accostiamo ai francesi, che furono loro alleati,

anziché agli inglesi, che furono loro nemici. Vi sono moltissime

somiglianze franco-americane che i pratici anglosassoni sono

naturalmente troppo di testa dura (o di legno) per vedere. La storia americana è

infestata dall’ombra del Presidente plebiscitario; essi hanno una

tradizione di architettura classica per gli edifici pubblici. Le loro città

sono disegnate sulle piazze di Parigi e non sul labirinto di

Londra. Chiamano le loro città Corinto e Siracusa, come i francesi

chiamavano i loro cittadini Epaminonda e Timoleone. I loro soldati portavano il

kepì francese; e fanno il caffè in modo ammirevole, e non fanno affatto il tè.

Ma di tutti gli elementi francesi in America il più francese è questa reale

concretezza. Sanno che in certi momenti la più pratica di

tutte le qualità è ‘l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de

l’audace.’ L’editore può indurre il poeta a scrivere un’opera alimentare; ma l’

editore permetterebbe di buon grado al poeta di dar

fuoco al Mississippi, se ciò facesse bollire la sua particolare pentola. Non è tanto che

gli inglesi siano stupidi, quanto che hanno paura d’essere intelligenti; e non è

tanto che gli americani siano intelligenti, quanto che non cercano d’essere più

stupidi di quanto siano. Il fuoco della logica francese l’ha bruciato via dall’

America come l’ha bruciato via dall’Europa, e da quasi ogni luogo

tranne l’Inghilterra. Questo è uno dei pochi punti su cui l’insularità

inglese è davvero uno svantaggio. È la fatale nozione che l’

unica specie di buonsenso si trovi nel compromesso, e che l’unica

specie di compromesso si trovi nella confusione. Ciò va nettamente

distinto dal luogo comune secondo cui il mondo utilitario non

s’innalza ai valori invisibili del genio. Sotto questa filosofia l’

utilitarista non vede l’utilità del genio, anche quando è del tutto

visibile. Non la vede, non perché sia un utilitarista, ma

perché è un idealista il cui ideale è l’ottusità. Per un certo tempo gli

inglesi aspirarono a essere stupidi, pregarono e sperarono con svettante

ambizione spirituale d’essere stupidi. Ma con tutto il loro culto del successo, non

riuscirono a essere stupidi. I talenti naturali di una grande e

tradizionale nazione irrompevano sempre a loro dispetto. A dispetto

dei mercanti di Londra, Turner diede davvero fuoco al Tamigi. A dispetto

della nostra più volte spiegata preferenza per il realismo anziché il romanzesco, l’Europa

seguitò a risuonare del nome di Byron. E proprio quando avevamo

reso perfettamente chiaro ai francesi che disprezzavamo tutti i loro

sgargianti artifici, che eravamo un popolo schietto e prosaico e che non v’era

in noi alcuna gloria fantastica o cavalleria, il dardo stesso che scagliammo contro

di loro brillò del nome di Nelson, una stella cadente e fulgente.

Presidenti e problemi

Tutti i bravi americani desiderano combattere i rappresentanti che hanno scelto.

Tutti i bravi inglesi desiderano dimenticare i rappresentanti che hanno scelto.

Questa differenza, profonda e forse ineradicabile nei temperamenti dei

due popoli, spiega mille cose nella loro letteratura e nelle

loro leggi. Il poeta nazionale americano lodò il suo popolo per la sua

prontezza a ‘insorgere contro l’incessante audacia delle persone

elette.’ L’inno nazionale inglese si accontenta di dire con calore, ma

quasi in fretta, ‘Sconvolgi la loro politica,’ e poi, più allegramente, come

cambiando argomento, ‘Dio salvi il Re.’ Poiché questo è specialmente il

segreto del monarca o primo magistrato nei due paesi. Essi armano

il Presidente dei poteri di un Re, affinché sia una seccatura in

politica. Noi priviamo il Re persino dei poteri di un Presidente, per timore che

ci rammenti un politico. Noi desideriamo dimenticare l’incessante

audacia delle persone elette; e da noi perciò essa davvero non ha mai

fine. Questa è l’obiezione pratica alla nostra abitudine di cambiare

argomento, invece di cambiare il ministero. Il Re, come osservò il motto

irlandese, non è un suddito; ma in tal senso la testa coronata inglese

non è un Re. È una figura popolare destinata a rammentarci l’

Inghilterra che i politici non ricordano; l’Inghilterra dei cavalli e delle

navi e dei giardini e della buona compagnia. Gli americani non hanno un

simile simbolo puramente sociale; ed è piuttosto la radice che il risultato di questo

il fatto che il loro lusso sociale, e specialmente il loro sport, manchino un poco

di umanità e di umorismo. È l’americano, assai più dell’

inglese, a prendersi i suoi piaceri tristemente, per non dire selvaggiamente.

La genuina popolarità dei monarchi costituzionali, nei paesi

parlamentari, può spiegarsi con qualsiasi esempio pratico. Supponiamo

che quella grande riforma sociale, la Legge sul Taglio Obbligatorio dei Capelli, abbia appena cominciato

to be enforced. The Compulsory Haircutting Act, as every good citizen

knows, is a statute which permits any person to grow his hair to any

length, in any wild or wonderful shape, so long as he is registered with

a hairdresser who charges a shilling. But it imposes a universal

close-shave (like that which is found so hygienic during a curative

detention at Dartmoor) on all who are registered only with a barber who

charges threepence. Thus, while the ornamental classes can continue to

ornament the street with Piccadilly weepers or chin-beards if they

choose, the working classes demonstrate the care with which the State

protects them by going about in a fresher, cooler, and cleaner

condition; a condition which has the further advantage of revealing at a

glance that outline of the criminal skull, which is so common among

them. The Compulsory Haircutting Act is thus in every way a compact and

convenient example of all our current laws about education, sport,

liquor and liberty in general. Well, the law has passed and the masses,

insensible to its scientific value, are still murmuring against it. The

ignorant peasant maiden is averse to so extreme a fashion of bobbing her

hair; and does not see how she can even be a flapper with nothing to

flap. Her father, his mind already poisoned by Bolshevists, begins to

wonder who the devil does these things, and why. In proportion as he

knows the world of to-day, he guesses that the real origin may be quite

obscure, or the real motive quite corrupt. The pressure may have come

from anybody who has gained power or money anyhow. It may come from the

foreign millionaire who owns all the expensive hairdressing saloons; it

may come from some swindler in the cutlery trade who has contracted to

sell a million bad razors. Hence the poor man looks about him with

suspicion in the street; knowing that the lowest sneak or the loudest

snob he sees may be directing the government of his country. Anybody may

have to do with politics; and this sort of thing is politics. Suddenly

he catches sight of a crowd, stops, and begins wildly to cheer a

carriage that is passing. The carriage contains the one person who has

certainly not originated any great scientific reform. He is the only

person in the commonwealth who is not allowed to cut off other people’s

hair, or to take away other people’s liberties. He at least is kept out

of politics; and men hold him up as they did an unspotted victim to

appease the wrath of the gods. He is their King, and the only man they

know is not their ruler. We need not be surprised that he is popular,

knowing how they are ruled.

The popularity of a President in America is exactly the opposite. The

American Republic is the last mediaeval monarchy. It is intended that

the President shall rule, and take all the risks of ruling. If the hair

is cut he is the haircutter, the magistrate that bears not the razor in

vain. All the popular Presidents, Jackson and Lincoln and Roosevelt,

have acted as democratic despots, but emphatically not as

constitutional monarchs. In short, the names have become curiously

interchanged; and as a historical reality it is the President who ought

to be called a King.

But it is not only true that the President could correctly be called a

King. It is also true that the King might correctly be called a

President. We could hardly find a more exact description of him than to

call him a President. What is expected in modern times of a modern

constitutional monarch is emphatically that he should preside. We expect

him to take the throne exactly as if he were taking the chair. The

chairman does not move the motion or resolution, far less vote it; he is

not supposed even to favour it. He is expected to please everybody by

favouring nobody. The primary essentials of a President or Chairman are

that he should be treated with ceremonial respect, that he should be

popular in his personality and yet impersonal in his opinions, and that

he should actually be a link between all the other persons by being

different from all of them. This is exactly what is demanded of the

constitutional monarch in modern times. It is exactly the opposite to

the American position; in which the President does not preside at all.

He moves; and the thing he moves may truly be called a motion; for the

national idea is perpetual motion. Technically it is called a message;

and might often actually be called a menace. Thus we may truly say that

the King presides and the President reigns. Some would prefer to say

that the President rules; and some Senators and members of Congress

would prefer to say that he rebels. But there is no doubt that he moves;

he does not take the chair or even the stool, but rather the stump.

Some people seem to suppose that the fall of President Wilson was a

denial of this almost despotic ideal in America. As a matter of fact it

was the strongest possible assertion of it. The idea is that the

President shall take responsibility and risk; and responsibility means

being blamed, and risk means the risk of being blamed. The theory is

that things are done by the President; and if things go wrong, or are

alleged to go wrong, it is the fault of the President. This does not

invalidate, but rather ratifies the comparison with true monarchs such

as the mediaeval monarchs. Constitutional princes are seldom deposed;

but despots were often deposed. In the simpler races of sunnier lands,

such as Turkey, they were commonly assassinated. Even in our own history

a King often received the same respectful tribute to the responsibility

and reality of his office. But King John was attacked because he was

strong, not because he was weak. Richard the Second lost the crown

because the crown was a trophy, not because it was a trifle. And

President Wilson was deposed because he had used a power which is such,

a essere applicata. La Legge sul Taglio Obbligatorio dei Capelli, come ogni buon cittadino

sa, è uno statuto che permette a chiunque di farsi crescere i capelli a qualsiasi

lunghezza, in qualsiasi foggia bizzarra o meravigliosa, purché sia iscritto presso

un parrucchiere che chiede uno scellino. Ma impone una universale

rasatura a zero (come quella ritenuta tanto igienica durante una curativa

detenzione a Dartmoor) a tutti coloro che sono iscritti soltanto presso un barbiere che

chiede tre pence. Così, mentre le classi ornamentali possono continuare a

ornare la strada con favoriti alla Piccadilly o barbe al mento, se così

scelgono, le classi lavoratrici dimostrano la cura con cui lo Stato

le protegge andando in giro in una condizione più fresca, più ariosa e più

pulita; una condizione che ha l’ulteriore vantaggio di rivelare a colpo

d’occhio quel profilo del cranio criminale, così comune fra

loro. La Legge sul Taglio Obbligatorio dei Capelli è così, sotto ogni aspetto, un compatto e

comodo esempio di tutte le nostre leggi correnti sull’istruzione, lo sport,

gli alcolici e la libertà in generale. Ebbene, la legge è passata e le masse,

insensibili al suo valore scientifico, ancora mormorano contro di essa. L’

ignorante fanciulla contadina è avversa a una moda così estrema di accorciarsi i

capelli; e non vede come possa perfino fare la ragazza svolazzante alla moda senza aver nulla da

sventolare. Suo padre, la mente già avvelenata dai bolscevichi, comincia a

chiedersi chi diavolo faccia queste cose, e perché. Nella misura in cui

conosce il mondo d’oggi, indovina che la vera origine può essere del tutto

oscura, o il vero movente del tutto corrotto. La pressione può essere venuta

da chiunque abbia in qualche modo acquisito potere o denaro. Può venire dal

milionario straniero che possiede tutti i costosi saloni di parrucchiere;

può venire da qualche truffatore nel commercio della coltelleria che s’è impegnato a

vendere un milione di cattivi rasoi. Perciò il poveretto si guarda intorno con

sospetto per la strada; sapendo che il più vile furfante o il più sguaiato

snob che vede potrebbe dirigere il governo del suo paese. Chiunque può

aver a che fare con la politica; e cose di questo genere sono politica. All’improvviso

scorge una folla, si ferma, e comincia ad acclamare freneticamente una

carrozza che passa. La carrozza contiene l’unica persona che

di certo non ha dato origine ad alcuna grande riforma scientifica. È l’unica

persona nel commonwealth a cui non è permesso tagliare i capelli

altrui, o togliere le libertà altrui. Egli almeno è tenuto fuori

dalla politica; e gli uomini lo levano in alto come facevano con una vittima immacolata per

placare l’ira degli dèi. Egli è il loro Re, e l’unico uomo che essi

sappiano non essere il loro governante. Non dobbiamo stupirci che sia popolare,

sapendo come vengono governati.

La popolarità di un Presidente in America è esattamente l’opposto. La

Repubblica americana è l’ultima monarchia medievale. Si vuole che

il Presidente governi, e si assuma tutti i rischi del governare. Se i capelli

vengono tagliati, è lui il tagliacapelli, il magistrato che non porta invano il

rasoio. Tutti i Presidenti popolari, Jackson e Lincoln e Roosevelt,

hanno agito da despoti democratici, ma decisamente non da

monarchi costituzionali. In breve, i nomi si sono curiosamente

scambiati; e come realtà storica è il Presidente che dovrebbe

essere chiamato Re.

Ma non è vero soltanto che il Presidente potrebbe correttamente essere chiamato

Re. È anche vero che il Re potrebbe correttamente essere chiamato

Presidente. Difficilmente potremmo trovare di lui una descrizione più esatta che

chiamarlo Presidente. Ciò che ai tempi moderni ci si aspetta da un moderno

monarca costituzionale è decisamente che egli presieda. Ci aspettiamo

che egli assuma il trono esattamente come se assumesse la presidenza d’assemblea. Il

presidente d’assemblea non propone la mozione o la risoluzione, tanto meno la vota; non

dovrebbe nemmeno favorirla. Ci si aspetta che accontenti tutti

non favorendo nessuno. I requisiti primari di un Presidente o Presidente d’assemblea sono

che sia trattato con rispetto cerimoniale, che sia

popolare nella sua persona e tuttavia impersonale nelle sue opinioni, e che

sia effettivamente un anello di congiunzione fra tutte le altre persone proprio per l’essere

diverso da tutte loro. Questo è esattamente ciò che si richiede al

monarca costituzionale ai tempi moderni. È esattamente l’opposto della

posizione americana; in cui il Presidente non presiede affatto.

Egli muove; e la cosa che muove può davvero chiamarsi una mozione; poiché l’

idea nazionale è il moto perpetuo. Tecnicamente si chiama messaggio;

e potrebbe spesso a buon diritto chiamarsi minaccia. Così possiamo davvero dire che

il Re presiede e il Presidente regna. Alcuni preferirebbero dire

che il Presidente governa; e alcuni Senatori e membri del Congresso

preferirebbero dire che si ribella. Ma non v’è alcun dubbio che egli si muova;

egli non prende la sedia né lo sgabello, ma piuttosto il palco del comizio.

Certuni paiono supporre che la caduta del Presidente Wilson fosse una

negazione di questo ideale quasi dispotico in America. In realtà

ne fu la più forte affermazione possibile. L’idea è che il

Presidente si assuma responsabilità e rischio; e responsabilità significa

essere biasimato, e rischio significa il rischio d’essere biasimato. La teoria è

che le cose sono fatte dal Presidente; e se le cose vanno male, o si

sostiene che vadano male, è colpa del Presidente. Ciò non

invalida, ma piuttosto ratifica il confronto con i veri monarchi, quali

i monarchi medievali. I principi costituzionali sono di rado deposti;

ma i despoti erano spesso deposti. Fra le razze più semplici di terre più assolate,

come la Turchia, venivano comunemente assassinati. Anche nella nostra storia

un Re riceveva spesso il medesimo rispettoso tributo alla responsabilità

e alla realtà della sua carica. Ma Re Giovanni fu attaccato perché era

forte, non perché fosse debole. Riccardo II perse la corona

perché la corona era un trofeo, non perché fosse un’inezia. E

il Presidente Wilson fu deposto perché aveva usato un potere che è tale,

in its nature, that a man must use it at the risk of deposition. As a

matter of fact, of course, it is easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson’s real

unpopularity, and still more easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson’s real

failure. There are a great many people in America who justify and

applaud him; and what is yet more interesting, who justify him not on

pacifist and idealistic, but on patriotic and even military grounds. It

is especially insisted by some that his demonstration, which seemed

futile as a threat against Mexico, was a very far-sighted preparation

for the threat against Prussia. But in so far as the democracy did

disagree with him, it was but the occasional and inevitable result of

the theory by which the despot has to anticipate the democracy.

Thus the American King and the English President are the very opposite

of each other; yet they are both the varied and very national

indications of the same contemporary truth. It is the great weariness

and contempt that have fallen upon common politics in both countries. It

may be answered, with some show of truth, that the new American

President represents a return to common politics; and that in that sense

he marks a real rebuke to the last President and his more uncommon

politics. And it is true that many who put Mr. Harding in power regard

him as the symbol of something which they call normalcy; which may

roughly be translated into English by the word normality. And by this

they do mean, more or less, the return to the vague capitalist

conservatism of the nineteenth century. They might call Mr. Harding a

Victorian if they had ever lived under Victoria. Perhaps these people do

entertain the extraordinary notion that the nineteenth century was

normal. But there are very few who think so, and even they will not

think so long. The blunder is the beginning of nearly all our present

troubles. The nineteenth century was the very reverse of normal. It

suffered a most unnatural strain in the combination of political

equality in theory with extreme economic inequality in practice.

Capitalism was not a normalcy but an abnormalcy. Property is normal, and

is more normal in proportion as it is universal. Slavery may be normal

and even natural, in the sense that a bad habit may be second nature.

But Capitalism was never anything so human as a habit; we may say it was

never anything so good as a bad habit. It was never a custom; for men

never grew accustomed to it. It was never even conservative; for before

it was even created wise men had realised that it could not be

conserved. It was from the first a problem; and those who will not even

admit the Capitalist problem deserve to get the Bolshevist solution. All

things considered, I cannot say anything worse of them than that.

The recent Presidential election preserved some trace of the old Party

System of America; but its tradition has very nearly faded like that of

the Party System of England. It is easy for an Englishman to confess

that he never quite understood the American Party System. It would

perhaps be more courageous in him, and more informing, to confess that

he never really understood the British Party System. The planks in the

two American platforms may easily be exhibited as very disconnected and

ramshackle; but our own party was as much of a patchwork, and indeed I

think even more so. Everybody knows that the two American factions were

called ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican.’ It does not at all cover the case to

identify the former with Liberals and the latter with Conservatives. The

Democrats are the party of the South and have some true tradition from

the Southern aristocracy and the defence of Secession and State Rights.

The Republicans rose in the North as the party of Lincoln, largely

condemning slavery. But the Republicans are also the party of Tariffs,

and are at least accused of being the party of Trusts. The Democrats are

the party of Free Trade; and in the great movement of twenty years ago

the party of Free Silver. The Democrats are also the party of the Irish;

and the stones they throw at Trusts are retorted by stones thrown at

Tammany. It is easy to see all these things as curiously sporadic and

bewildering; but I am inclined to think that they are as a whole more

coherent and rational than our own old division of Liberals and

Conservatives. There is even more doubt nowadays about what is the

connecting link between the different items in the old British party

programmes. I have never been able to understand why being in favour of

Protection should have anything to do with being opposed to Home Rule;

especially as most of the people who were to receive Home Rule were

themselves in favour of Protection. I could never see what giving people

cheap bread had to do with forbidding them cheap beer; or why the party

which sympathises with Ireland cannot sympathise with Poland. I cannot

see why Liberals did not liberate public-houses or Conservatives

conserve crofters. I do not understand the principle upon which the

causes were selected on both sides; and I incline to think that it was

with the impartial object of distributing nonsense equally on both

sides. Heaven knows there is enough nonsense in American politics too;

towering and tropical nonsense like a cyclone or an earthquake. But when

all is said, I incline to think that there was more spiritual and

atmospheric cohesion in the different parts of the American party than

in those of the English party; and I think this unity was all the more

real because it was more difficult to define. The Republican party

originally stood for the triumph of the North, and the North stood for

the nineteenth century; that is for the characteristic commercial

expansion of the nineteenth century; for a firm faith in the profit and

progress of its great and growing cities, its division of labour, its

per sua natura, che un uomo deve usarlo a rischio di deposizione. In

verità, naturalmente, è facile esagerare la reale impopolarità del

signor Wilson, e ancor più facile esagerare il reale fallimento del

signor Wilson. Vi sono moltissime persone in America che lo giustificano e

lo applaudono; e, cosa ancor più interessante, che lo giustificano non su

basi pacifiste e idealistiche, ma su basi patriottiche e persino militari.

Alcuni insistono in particolare che la sua dimostrazione, che parve

futile come minaccia contro il Messico, fu una preparazione assai lungimirante

per la minaccia contro la Prussia. Ma nella misura in cui la democrazia

dissentì da lui, ciò fu soltanto il risultato occasionale e inevitabile della

teoria per cui il despota deve anticipare la democrazia.

Così il Re americano e il Presidente inglese sono l’esatto opposto

l’uno dell’altro; eppure sono entrambi le svariate e assai nazionali

manifestazioni della medesima verità contemporanea. È la grande stanchezza

e il disprezzo che sono caduti sulla politica ordinaria in entrambi i paesi. Si

potrebbe rispondere, con una certa parvenza di verità, che il nuovo Presidente

americano rappresenta un ritorno alla politica ordinaria; e che in tal senso

egli segna un vero rimprovero all’ultimo Presidente e alla sua politica più

fuori dal comune. Ed è vero che molti di quelli che portarono al potere il signor Harding lo considerano

il simbolo di qualcosa che chiamano normalcy; che si può

grossolanamente tradurre in inglese con la parola normalità. E con ciò

intendono, più o meno, il ritorno al vago conservatorismo capitalista

del diciannovesimo secolo. Potrebbero definire il signor Harding un

vittoriano, se solo avessero mai vissuto sotto Vittoria. Forse costoro

coltivano davvero la straordinaria nozione che il diciannovesimo secolo fosse

normale. Ma son pochissimi a pensarlo, e anche quei pochi non lo

penseranno a lungo. Lo sbaglio è l’origine di quasi tutti i nostri presenti

guai. Il diciannovesimo secolo fu l’esatto contrario del normale. Esso

patì una tensione assai innaturale nella combinazione dell’uguaglianza politica

in teoria con l’estrema disuguaglianza economica in pratica.

Il capitalismo non era una normalità ma un’anormalità. La proprietà è normale, ed

è tanto più normale quanto più è universale. La schiavitù può essere normale

e perfino naturale, nel senso in cui un cattivo vizio può essere una seconda natura.

Ma il capitalismo non fu mai qualcosa di tanto umano come un’abitudine; possiamo dire che non fu

mai qualcosa di tanto buono come un cattivo vizio. Non fu mai una consuetudine; poiché gli uomini

non vi si abituarono mai. Non fu mai nemmeno conservatore; poiché prima ancora

che fosse creato uomini saggi avevano compreso che non poteva essere

conservato. Fu fin dal principio un problema; e coloro che non vogliono nemmeno

ammettere il problema capitalista meritano di ottenere la soluzione bolscevica. Tutto

considerato, non so dire di loro nulla di peggio.

La recente elezione presidenziale conservò qualche traccia del vecchio Sistema

dei Partiti d’America; ma la sua tradizione s’è quasi del tutto sbiadita come quella

del Sistema dei Partiti d’Inghilterra. È facile per un inglese confessare

di non aver mai ben capito il Sistema dei Partiti americano. Sarebbe

forse più coraggioso da parte sua, e più istruttivo, confessare che

non ha mai davvero capito il Sistema dei Partiti britannico. Gli assi delle

due piattaforme americane possono facilmente apparire assai sconnessi e

sgangherati; ma il nostro stesso partito era altrettanto rappezzato, anzi

credo persino di più. Tutti sanno che le due fazioni americane erano

chiamate ‘Democratica’ e ‘Repubblicana.’ Non rende affatto conto della situazione

identificare la prima coi Liberali e la seconda coi Conservatori. I

Democratici sono il partito del Sud e hanno una certa autentica tradizione derivante dall’

aristocrazia meridionale e dalla difesa della Secessione e dei Diritti degli Stati.

I Repubblicani sorsero nel Nord come il partito di Lincoln, condannando in gran parte

la schiavitù. Ma i Repubblicani sono anche il partito delle Tariffe,

e sono quantomeno accusati d’essere il partito dei Trust. I Democratici sono

il partito del Libero Scambio; e, nel grande movimento di vent’anni fa,

il partito dell’Argento Libero. I Democratici sono anche il partito degli irlandesi;

e le pietre che scagliano contro i Trust ricevono in risposta pietre scagliate contro

Tammany. È facile vedere tutte queste cose come curiosamente sporadiche e

sconcertanti; ma sono incline a pensare che nel complesso siano più

coerenti e razionali della nostra vecchia divisione tra Liberali e

Conservatori. V’è oggi ancor più dubbio su quale sia il

nesso che collega i diversi punti dei vecchi programmi dei partiti

britannici. Non sono mai riuscito a capire perché l’essere a favore della

Protezione dovesse aver qualcosa a che fare con l’essere contrari all’Home Rule;

tanto più che la maggior parte delle persone che avrebbero ricevuto l’Home Rule erano

esse stesse a favore della Protezione. Non ho mai capito che cosa avesse a che fare il dare alla gente

pane a buon mercato col proibirle la birra a buon mercato; o perché il partito

che simpatizza con l’Irlanda non possa simpatizzare con la Polonia. Non riesco

a capire perché i Liberali non liberassero le osterie o i Conservatori

non conservassero i piccoli fittavoli. Non comprendo il principio secondo cui le

cause venivano scelte da entrambe le parti; e sono incline a pensare che fosse

con l’imparziale scopo di distribuire equamente le assurdità da entrambe le

parti. Il cielo sa che c’è abbastanza assurdità anche nella politica americana;

assurdità torreggiante e tropicale come un ciclone o un terremoto. Ma quando

tutto è detto, sono incline a pensare che vi fosse maggiore coesione spirituale e

atmosferica nelle diverse parti del partito americano che

in quelle del partito inglese; e credo che questa unità fosse tanto più

reale in quanto più difficile da definire. Il partito repubblicano

in origine rappresentava il trionfo del Nord, e il Nord rappresentava

il diciannovesimo secolo; vale a dire la caratteristica espansione commerciale

del diciannovesimo secolo; una ferma fede nel profitto e nel

progresso delle sue grandi e crescenti città, nella sua divisione del lavoro, nella sua

industrial science, and its evolutionary reform. The Democratic party

stood more loosely for all the elements that doubted whether this

development was democratic or was desirable; all that looked back to

Jeffersonian idealism and the serene abstractions of the eighteenth

century, or forward to Bryanite idealism and some simplified Utopia

founded on grain rather than gold. Along with this went, not at all

unnaturally, the last and lingering sentiment of the Southern squires,

who remembered a more rural civilisation that seemed by comparison

romantic. Along with this went, quite logically, the passions and the

pathos of the Irish, themselves a rural civilisation, whose basis is a

religion or what the nineteenth century tended to call a superstition.

Above all, it was perfectly natural that this tone of thought should

favour local liberties, and even a revolt on behalf of local liberties,

and should distrust the huge machine of centralised power called the

Union. In short, something very near the truth was said by a suicidally

silly Republican orator, who was running Blaine for the Presidency, when

he denounced the Democratic party as supported by ‘Rome, rum, and

rebellion.’ They seem to me to be three excellent things in their place;

and that is why I suspect that I should have belonged to the Democratic

party, if I had been born in America when there was a Democratic party.

But I fancy that by this time even this general distinction has become

very dim. If I had been an American twenty years ago, in the time of the

great Free Silver campaign, I should certainly never have hesitated for

an instant about my sympathies or my side. My feelings would have been

exactly those that are nobly expressed by Mr. Vachell Lindsay, in a poem

bearing the characteristic title of ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan.’ And,

by the way, nobody can begin to sympathise with America whose soul does

not to some extent begin to swing and dance to the drums and gongs of

Mr. Vachell Lindsay’s great orchestra; which has the note of his whole

nation in this: that a refined person can revile it a hundred times over

as violent and brazen and barbarous and absurd, but not as insincere;

there is something in it, and that something is the soul of many million

men. But the poet himself, in the political poem referred to, speaks of

Bryan’s fall over Free Silver as ‘defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my

dream’; and it is only too probable that the cause has fallen as well as

the candidate. The William Jennings Bryan of later years is not the man

whom I should have seen in my youth, with the visionary eyes of Mr.

Vachell Lindsay. He has become a commonplace Pacifist, which is in its

nature the very opposite of a revolutionist; for if men will fight

rather than sacrifice humanity on a golden cross, it cannot be wrong for

them to resist its being sacrificed to an iron cross. I came into very

indirect contact with Mr. Bryan when I was in America, in a fashion that

made me realise how hard it has become to recover the illusions of a

Bryanite. I believe that my lecture agent was anxious to arrange a

debate, and I threw out a sort of loose challenge to the effect that

woman’s suffrage had weakened the position of woman; and while I was

away in the wilds of Oklahoma my lecture agent (a man of blood-curdling

courage and enterprise) asked Mr. Bryan to debate with me. Now Mr. Bryan

is one of the greatest orators of modern history, and there is no

conceivable reason why he should trouble to debate with a wandering

lecturer. But as a matter of fact he expressed himself in the most

magnanimous and courteous terms about my personal position, but said (as

I understood) that it would be improper to debate on female suffrage as

it was already a part of the political system. And when I heard that, I

could not help a sigh; for I recognised something that I knew only too

well on the front benches of my own beloved land. The great and glorious

demagogue had degenerated into a statesman. I had never expected for a

moment that the great orator could be bothered to debate with me at all;

but it had never occurred to me, as a general moral principle, that two

educated men were for ever forbidden to talk sense about a particular

topic, because a lot of other people had already voted on it. What is

the matter with that attitude is the loss of the freedom of the mind.

There can be no liberty of thought unless it is ready to unsettle what

has recently been settled, as well as what has long been settled. We are

perpetually being told in the papers that what is wanted is a strong man

who will do things. What is wanted is a strong man who will undo things;

and that will be a real test of strength.

Anyhow, we could have believed, in the time of the Free Silver fight,

that the Democratic party was democratic with a small d. In Mr. Wilson

it was transfigured, his friends would say into a higher and his foes

into a hazier thing. And the Republican reaction against him, even where

it has been healthy, has also been hazy. In fact, it has been not so

much the victory of a political party as a relapse into repose after

certain political passions; and in that sense there is a truth in the

strange phrase about normalcy; in the sense that there is nothing more

normal than going to sleep. But an even larger truth is this; it is most

likely that America is no longer concentrated on these faction fights at

all, but is considering certain large problems upon which those factions

hardly troubled to take sides. They are too large even to be classified

as foreign policy distinct from domestic policy. They are so large as to

be inside as well as outside the state. From an English standpoint the

scienza industriale, e nella sua riforma evolutiva. Il partito democratico

rappresentava più vagamente tutti gli elementi che dubitavano se questo

sviluppo fosse democratico o desiderabile; tutto ciò che guardava indietro all’

idealismo jeffersoniano e alle serene astrazioni del diciottesimo

secolo, o avanti all’idealismo bryaniano e a qualche Utopia semplificata

fondata sul grano piuttosto che sull’oro. Con ciò andava, per nulla

innaturalmente, l’ultimo e persistente sentimento degli squire meridionali,

che ricordavano una civiltà più rurale che al confronto pareva

romantica. Con ciò andavano, del tutto logicamente, le passioni e il

pathos degli irlandesi, essi stessi una civiltà rurale, la cui base è una

religione o ciò che il diciannovesimo secolo tendeva a chiamare una superstizione.

Soprattutto, era perfettamente naturale che questo modo di pensare

favorisse le libertà locali, e persino una rivolta in nome delle libertà locali,

e diffidasse dell’enorme macchina di potere centralizzato chiamata l’

Unione. In breve, qualcosa di assai vicino alla verità fu detto da un oratore repubblicano

suicidamente sciocco, che sosteneva Blaine per la Presidenza, quando

denunciò il partito democratico come sostenuto da ‘Roma, rum e

ribellione.’ Mi paiono tre cose eccellenti, ciascuna al suo posto;

ed è per questo che sospetto che sarei appartenuto al partito

democratico, se fossi nato in America quando c’era un partito democratico.

Ma immagino che col tempo anche questa distinzione generale sia divenuta

assai fioca. Se fossi stato un americano vent’anni fa, al tempo della

grande campagna dell’Argento Libero, di certo non avrei esitato per

un istante circa le mie simpatie o la mia parte. I miei sentimenti sarebbero stati

esattamente quelli nobilmente espressi dal signor Vachell Lindsay, in una poesia

che porta il caratteristico titolo di ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan.’ E,

a proposito, nessuno può cominciare a simpatizzare con l’America se la sua anima non

comincia in qualche misura a oscillare e a danzare al ritmo dei tamburi e dei gong della

grande orchestra del signor Vachell Lindsay; la quale ha la nota della sua intera

nazione in questo: che una persona raffinata può ingiuriarla cento volte

come violenta e sfrontata e barbara e assurda, ma non come insincera;

c’è qualcosa in essa, e quel qualcosa è l’anima di molti milioni di

uomini. Ma il poeta stesso, nella poesia politica cui si è accennato, parla della

caduta di Bryan sull’Argento Libero come della ‘sconfitta della mia fanciullezza, sconfitta del mio

sogno’; ed è fin troppo probabile che la causa sia caduta tanto quanto

il candidato. Il William Jennings Bryan degli anni successivi non è l’uomo

che avrei visto nella mia giovinezza, con gli occhi visionari del signor

Vachell Lindsay. È divenuto un banale Pacifista, il che è per sua

natura l’esatto opposto di un rivoluzionario; poiché se gli uomini combattono

piuttosto che sacrificare l’umanità su una croce d’oro, non può essere sbagliato per

loro resistere al suo essere sacrificata a una croce di ferro. Venni in

contatto assai indiretto col signor Bryan quando ero in America, in un modo che

mi fece capire quanto sia divenuto difficile ricuperare le illusioni di un

bryaniano. Credo che il mio agente per le conferenze fosse ansioso di organizzare un

dibattito, e lanciai una sorta di vaga sfida nel senso che

il suffragio femminile aveva indebolito la posizione della donna; e mentre ero

via nelle terre selvagge dell’Oklahoma il mio agente (un uomo di sangue freddo, di un

coraggio agghiacciante e intraprendenza) chiese al signor Bryan di dibattere con me. Ora il signor Bryan

è uno dei più grandi oratori della storia moderna, e non v’è

concepibile ragione per cui dovrebbe scomodarsi a dibattere con un conferenziere

girovago. Ma in realtà si espresse nei termini più

magnanimi e cortesi riguardo alla mia posizione personale, ma disse (per

quanto capii) che sarebbe stato sconveniente dibattere sul suffragio femminile giacché

era già parte del sistema politico. E quando udii ciò, non

potei trattenere un sospiro; poiché riconobbi qualcosa che conoscevo fin troppo

bene sui banchi di prima fila della mia stessa amata terra. Il grande e glorioso

demagogo era degenerato in uno statista. Non mi ero mai aspettato per un

istante che il grande oratore si scomodasse minimamente a dibattere con me;

ma non mi era mai venuto in mente, come principio morale generale, che due

uomini colti fossero per sempre proibiti dal ragionare con senno su un particolare

argomento, perché un mucchio d’altre persone vi aveva già votato sopra. Ciò che

non va in quell’atteggiamento è la perdita della libertà della mente.

Non può esservi libertà di pensiero se non è pronta a rimettere in discussione ciò che

è stato deciso di recente, tanto quanto ciò che è stato deciso da tempo. Ci viene

perpetuamente detto sui giornali che ciò che serve è un uomo forte

che faccia le cose. Ciò che serve è un uomo forte che disfaccia le cose;

e quella sarà una vera prova di forza.

Comunque, avremmo potuto credere, al tempo della lotta per l’Argento Libero,

che il partito democratico fosse democratico con la d minuscola. Nel signor Wilson

esso fu trasfigurato, direbbero i suoi amici in qualcosa di più alto e i suoi nemici

in qualcosa di più nebuloso. E la reazione repubblicana contro di lui, anche dove

è stata salutare, è stata anche nebulosa. Anzi, è stata non tanto

la vittoria di un partito politico quanto una ricaduta nel riposo dopo

certe passioni politiche; e in tal senso v’è una verità nella

strana frase sulla normalcy; nel senso che non v’è nulla di più

normale dell’andare a dormire. Ma una verità ancor più grande è questa: è assai

probabile che l’America non sia più affatto concentrata su queste lotte tra fazioni,

ma stia considerando certi grandi problemi sui quali quelle fazioni

s’erano a stento date pena di schierarsi. Sono troppo grandi persino per essere classificati

come politica estera distinta dalla politica interna. Sono così grandi da

essere dentro tanto quanto fuori dello Stato. Da un punto di vista inglese il

most obvious example is the Irish; for the Irish problem is not a

British problem, but also an American problem. And this is true even of

the great external enigma of Japan. The Japanese question may be a part

of foreign policy for America, but it is a part of domestic policy for

California. And the same is true of that other intense and intelligent

Eastern people, the genius and limitations of which have troubled the

world so much longer. What the Japs are in California, the Jews are in

America. That is, they are a piece of foreign policy that has become

imbedded in domestic policy; something which is found inside but still

has to be regarded from the outside. On these great international

matters I doubt if Americans got much guidance from their party system;

especially as most of these questions have grown very recently and

rapidly to enormous size. Men are left free to judge of them with fresh

minds. And that is the truth in the statement that the Washington

Conference has opened the gates of a new world.

On the relations to England and Ireland I will not attempt to dwell

adequately here. I have already noted that my first interview was with

an Irishman, and my first impression from that interview a vivid sense

of the importance of Ireland in Anglo-American relations; and I have

said something of the Irish problem, prematurely and out of its proper

order, under the stress of that sense of urgency. Here I will only add

two remarks about the two countries respectively. A great many British

journalists have recently imagined that they were pouring oil upon the

troubled waters, when they were rather pouring out oil to smooth the

downward path; and to turn the broad road to destruction into a

butter-slide. They seem to have no notion of what to do, except to say

what they imagine the very stupidest of their readers would be pleased

to hear, and conceal whatever the most intelligent of their readers

would probably like to know. They therefore informed the public that

‘the majority of Americans’ had abandoned all sympathy with Ireland,

because of its alleged sympathy with Germany; and that this majority of

Americans was now ardently in sympathy with its English brothers across

the sea. Now to begin with, such critics have no notion of what they are

saying when they talk about the majority of Americans. To anybody who

has happened to look in, let us say, on the city of Omaha, Nebraska, the

remark will have something enormous and overwhelming about it. It is

like saying that the majority of the inhabitants of China would agree

with the Chinese Ambassador in a preference for dining at the Savoy

rather than the Ritz. There are millions and millions of people living

in those great central plains of the North American Continent of whom

it would be nearer the truth to say that they have never heard of

England, or of Ireland either, than to say that their first emotional

movement is a desire to come to the rescue of either of them. It is

perfectly true that the more monomaniac sort of Sinn Feiner might

sometimes irritate this innocent and isolated American spirit by being

pro-Irish. It is equally true that a traditional Bostonian or Virginian

might irritate it by being pro-English. The only difference is that

large numbers of pure Irishmen are scattered in those far places, and

large numbers of pure Englishmen are not. But it is truest of all to say

that neither England nor Ireland so much as crosses the mind of most of

them once in six months. Painting up large notices of ‘Watch Us Grow,’

making money by farming with machinery, together with an occasional

hold-up with six-shooters and photographs of a beautiful murderess or

divorcée, fill up the round of their good and happy lives, and fleet the

time carelessly as in the golden age.

But putting aside all this vast and distant democracy, which is the real

‘majority of Americans,’ and confining ourselves to that older culture

on the eastern coast which the critics probably had in mind, we shall

find the case more comforting but not to be covered with cheap and false

comfort. Now it is perfectly true that any Englishman coming to this

eastern coast, as I did, finds himself not only most warmly welcomed as

a guest, but most cordially complimented as an Englishman. Men recall

with pride the branches of their family that belong to England or the

English counties where they were rooted; and there are enthusiasms for

English literature and history which are as spontaneous as patriotism

itself. Something of this may be put down to a certain promptitude and

flexibility in all American kindness, which is never sufficiently stodgy

to be called good nature. The Englishman does sometimes wonder whether

if he had been a Russian, his hosts would not have remembered remote

Russian aunts and uncles and disinterred a Muscovite great-grandmother;

or whether if he had come from Iceland, they would not have known as

much about Icelandic sagas and been as sympathetic about the absence of

Icelandic snakes. But with a fair review of the proportions of the case

he will dismiss this conjecture, and come to the conclusion that a

number of educated Americans are very warmly and sincerely sympathetic

with England.

What I began to feel, with a certain creeping chill, was that they were

only too sympathetic with England. The word sympathetic has sometimes

rather a double sense. The impression I received was that all these

chivalrous Southerners and men mellow with Bostonian memories were

rallying to England. They were on the defensive; and it was poor old

England that they were defending. Their attitude implied that somebody

or something was leaving her undefended, or finding her indefensible.

The burden of that hearty chorus was that England was not so black as

esempio più ovvio è quello irlandese; poiché il problema irlandese non è un

problema britannico, ma anche un problema americano. E ciò vale perfino per

il grande enigma esterno del Giappone. La questione giapponese può essere parte

della politica estera per l’America, ma è parte della politica interna per la

California. E lo stesso vale per quell’altro intenso e intelligente

popolo orientale, il cui genio e i cui limiti hanno turbato il

mondo tanto più a lungo. Ciò che i giapponesi sono in California, gli ebrei lo sono in

America. Vale a dire, sono un pezzo di politica estera che è divenuto

incastonato nella politica interna; qualcosa che si trova dentro ma che pur

sempre va guardato dall’esterno. Su queste grandi questioni

internazionali dubito che gli americani abbiano avuto molta guida dal loro sistema dei partiti;

tanto più che la maggior parte di queste questioni è cresciuta assai di recente e

rapidamente fino a dimensioni enormi. Gli uomini sono lasciati liberi di giudicarle con menti

fresche. Ed è questa la verità contenuta nell’affermazione che la Conferenza

di Washington ha aperto le porte di un mondo nuovo.

Sui rapporti con l’Inghilterra e l’Irlanda non tenterò di soffermarmi

adeguatamente qui. Ho già osservato che il mio primo colloquio fu con

un irlandese, e che la mia prima impressione da quel colloquio fu un vivo senso

dell’importanza dell’Irlanda nei rapporti anglo-americani; e ho

detto qualcosa del problema irlandese, prematuramente e fuori dal suo giusto

ordine, sotto l’assillo di quel senso d’urgenza. Qui aggiungerò soltanto

due osservazioni sui due paesi rispettivamente. Moltissimi giornalisti

britannici hanno di recente immaginato di versare olio sulle

acque agitate, mentre piuttosto versavano olio per rendere più liscia la

china discendente; e per mutare l’ampia strada verso la perdizione in uno

scivolo di burro. Paiono non avere alcuna nozione di che cosa fare, se non dire

ciò che immaginano il più stupido dei loro lettori sarebbe lieto

di udire, e nascondere tutto ciò che il più intelligente dei loro lettori

vorrebbe probabilmente sapere. Informarono perciò il pubblico che

‘la maggioranza degli americani’ aveva abbandonato ogni simpatia per l’Irlanda,

a causa della sua presunta simpatia per la Germania; e che questa maggioranza di

americani ora provava un’ardente simpatia per i suoi fratelli inglesi di là

dal mare. Ora, tanto per cominciare, simili critici non hanno alcuna nozione di ciò che

dicono quando parlano della maggioranza degli americani. A chiunque

abbia avuto occasione di fare un salto, mettiamo, nella città di Omaha, nel Nebraska, l’

osservazione avrà in sé qualcosa di enorme e schiacciante. È

come dire che la maggioranza degli abitanti della Cina concorderebbe

con l’Ambasciatore cinese nel preferire di cenare al Savoy

piuttosto che al Ritz. Vi sono milioni e milioni di persone che vivono

in quelle grandi pianure centrali del Continente nordamericano delle quali

sarebbe più vicino alla verità dire che non hanno mai sentito parlare dell’

Inghilterra, né dell’Irlanda, che dire che il loro primo moto

emotivo sia un desiderio di correre in soccorso dell’una o dell’altra. È

perfettamente vero che il tipo più monomaniaco di Sinn Feiner potrebbe

talvolta irritare questo spirito americano innocente e isolato con l’essere

filo-irlandese. È altrettanto vero che un tradizionale bostoniano o virginiano

potrebbe irritarlo con l’essere filo-inglese. L’unica differenza è che

gran numero di puri irlandesi sono sparsi in quei luoghi lontani, e

gran numero di puri inglesi non lo sono. Ma la cosa più vera di tutte è dire

che né l’Inghilterra né l’Irlanda sfiorano nemmeno la mente della maggior parte di

loro una volta ogni sei mesi. Dipingere grandi insegne di ‘Guardateci Crescere,’

far denaro coltivando coi macchinari, insieme a un’occasionale

rapina a mano armata con revolver a sei colpi e fotografie di una bella assassina o

divorziata, riempiono il giro delle loro buone e felici esistenze, e fanno scorrere il

tempo spensieratamente come nell’età dell’oro.

Ma lasciando da parte tutta questa vasta e lontana democrazia, che è la vera

‘maggioranza degli americani,’ e limitandoci a quella cultura più antica

della costa orientale che i critici probabilmente avevano in mente,

troveremo il caso più confortante ma non tale da ammantarsi di un conforto vile e

falso. Ora è perfettamente vero che qualunque inglese giunga a questa

costa orientale, come feci io, si trova non solo accolto assai calorosamente come

ospite, ma assai cordialmente complimentato in quanto inglese. Gli uomini rammentano

con orgoglio i rami della propria famiglia che appartengono all’Inghilterra o alle

contee inglesi in cui affondavano le radici; e vi sono entusiasmi per la

letteratura inglese e la storia inglese che sono spontanei quanto il patriottismo

stesso. Qualcosa di ciò può attribuirsi a una certa prontezza e

flessibilità propria di ogni cortesia americana, che non è mai abbastanza greve

da potersi chiamare buona natura. L’inglese talvolta si chiede se,

fosse stato un russo, i suoi ospiti non avrebbero rammentato remoti

zii e zie russi e non avrebbero riesumato una bisnonna moscovita;

oppure se, fosse venuto dall’Islanda, non avrebbero saputo altrettanto

delle saghe islandesi e non si sarebbero mostrati altrettanto solidali circa l’assenza di

serpenti in Islanda. Ma con un equo esame delle proporzioni del caso

egli scarterà questa congettura, e giungerà alla conclusione che un

certo numero di americani colti si mostrano assai calorosamente e sinceramente solidali

con l’Inghilterra.

Ciò che cominciai a sentire, con un certo brivido strisciante, fu che essi erano

fin troppo solidali con l’Inghilterra. La parola solidale ha talvolta

piuttosto un doppio senso. L’impressione che ricevetti fu che tutti questi

cavallereschi meridionali e uomini raddolciti da memorie bostoniane si stessero

stringendo attorno all’Inghilterra. Erano sulla difensiva; ed era la povera vecchia

Inghilterra che difendevano. Il loro atteggiamento sottintendeva che qualcuno

o qualcosa la lasciava indifesa, o la trovava indifendibile.

Il ritornello di quel caloroso coro era che l’Inghilterra non era così nera come

she was painted; it seemed clear that somewhere or other she was being

painted pretty black. But there was something else that made me

uncomfortable; it was not only the sense of being somewhat boisterously

forgiven; it was also something involving questions of power as well as

morality. Then it seemed to me that a new sensation turned me hot and

cold; and I felt something I have never before felt in a foreign land.

Never had my father or my grandfather known that sensation; never during

the great and complex and perhaps perilous expansion of our power and

commerce in the last hundred years had an Englishman heard exactly that

note in a human voice. England was being pitied. I, as an Englishman,

was not only being pardoned but pitied. My country was beginning to be

an object of compassion, like Poland or Spain. My first emotion, full of

the mood and movement of a hundred years, was one of furious anger. But

the anger has given place to anxiety; and the anxiety is not yet at an

end.

It is not my business here to expound my view of English politics, still

less of European politics or the politics of the world; but to put down

a few impressions of American travel. On many points of European

politics the impression will be purely negative; I am sure that most

Americans have no notion of the position of France or the position of

Poland. But if English readers want the truth, I am sure this is the

truth about their notion of the position of England. They are wondering,

or those who are watching are wondering, whether the term of her success

is come and she is going down the dark road after Prussia. Many are

sorry if this is so; some are glad if it is so; but all are seriously

considering the probability of its being so. And herein lay especially

the horrible folly of our Black-and-Tan terrorism over the Irish people.

I have noted that the newspapers told us that America had been chilled

in its Irish sympathies by Irish detachment during the war. It is the

painful truth that any advantage we might have had from this we

ourselves immediately proceeded to destroy. Ireland might have put

herself wrong with America by her attitude about Belgium, if England had

not instantly proceeded to put herself more wrong by her attitude

towards Ireland. It is quite true that two blacks do not make a white;

but you cannot send a black to reproach people with tolerating

blackness; and this is quite as true when one is a Black Brunswicker and

the other a Black-and-Tan. It is true that since then England has made

surprisingly sweeping concessions; concessions so large as to increase

the amazement that the refusal should have been so long. But

unfortunately the combination of the two rather clinches the conception

of our decline. If the concession had come before the terror, it would

have looked like an attempt to emancipate, and would probably have

succeeded. Coming so abruptly after the terror, it looked only like an

attempt to tyrannise, and an attempt that failed. It was partly an

inheritance from a stupid tradition, which tried to combine what it

called firmness with what it called conciliation; as if when we made up

our minds to soothe a man with a five-pound note, we always took care to

undo our own action by giving him a kick as well. The English politician

has often done that; though there is nothing to be said of such a fool,

except that he has wasted a fiver. But in this case he gave the kick

first, received a kicking in return, and then gave up the money; and

it was hard for the bystanders to say anything except that he had been

badly beaten. The combination and sequence of events seems almost as if

it were arranged to suggest the dark and ominous parallel. The first

action looked only too like the invasion of Belgium, and the second like

the evacuation of Belgium. So that vast and silent crowd in the West

looked at the British Empire, as men look at a great tower that has

begun to lean. Thus it was that while I found real pleasure, I could not

find unrelieved consolation in the sincere compliments paid to my

country by so many cultivated Americans; their memories of homely

corners of historic counties from which their fathers came, of the

cathedral that dwarfs the town, or the inn at the turning of the road.

There was something in their voices and the look in their eyes which

from the first disturbed me. So I have heard good Englishmen, who died

afterwards the death of soldiers, cry aloud in 1914, ‘It seems

impossible, of those jolly Bavarians!’ or, ‘I will never believe it,

when I think of the time I had at Heidelberg!’

But there are other things besides the parallel of Prussia or the

problem of Ireland. The American press is much freer than our own; the

American public is much more familiar with the discussion of corruption

than our own; and it is much more conscious of the corruption of our

politics than we are. Almost any man in America may speak of the Marconi

Case; many a man in England does not even know what it means. Many

imagine that it had something to do with the propriety of politicians

speculating on the Stock Exchange. So that it means a great deal to

Americans to say that one figure in that drama is ruling India and

another is ruling Palestine. And this brings me to another problem,

which is also dealt with much more openly in America than in England. I

mention it here only because it is a perfect model of the

misunderstandings in the modern world. If any one asks for an example

of exactly how the important part of every story is left out, and even

the part that is reported is not understood, he could hardly have a

stronger case than the story of Henry Ford of Detroit.

When I was in Detroit I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ford, and it

really was a pleasure. He is a man quite capable of views which I think

veniva dipinta; sembrava chiaro che in un modo o nell’altro la si stava

dipingendo piuttosto di nero. Ma c’era qualcos’altro che mi metteva a

disagio; non era soltanto la sensazione di essere alquanto chiassosamente

perdonato; era anche qualcosa che chiamava in causa questioni di potere oltre che di

moralità. Poi mi parve che una sensazione nuova mi facesse avvampare e

raggelare; e provai qualcosa che mai prima avevo provato in terra straniera.

Mai mio padre o mio nonno avevano conosciuto quella sensazione; mai, durante

la grande e complessa e forse perigliosa espansione della nostra potenza e del nostro

commercio negli ultimi cent’anni, un inglese aveva udito esattamente quella

nota in una voce umana. L’Inghilterra era compatita. Io, come inglese,

non solo venivo perdonato, ma compatito. Il mio paese cominciava a essere

un oggetto di compassione, come la Polonia o la Spagna. La mia prima emozione, colma

dell’umore e dello slancio di cent’anni, fu di collera furiosa. Ma

la collera ha ceduto il posto all’inquietudine; e l’inquietudine non è ancora giunta al suo

termine.

Non è mio compito qui esporre la mia visione della politica inglese, e ancor

meno della politica europea o della politica del mondo; ma mettere per iscritto

qualche impressione di viaggio in America. Su molti punti della politica

europea l’impressione sarà puramente negativa; sono certo che la maggior parte degli

americani non ha alcuna nozione della posizione della Francia o della posizione della

Polonia. Ma se i lettori inglesi vogliono la verità, sono certo che questa è la

verità sulla loro nozione della posizione dell’Inghilterra. Si domandano,

o coloro che osservano si domandano, se il termine del suo successo

sia giunto e se ella stia scendendo per l’oscura strada dietro la Prussia. Molti sono

dispiaciuti se è così; alcuni sono lieti se è così; ma tutti stanno seriamente

considerando la probabilità che sia così. E in ciò stava specialmente

l’orribile follia del nostro terrorismo dei Black-and-Tan sul popolo irlandese.

Ho osservato che i giornali ci dicevano che l’America si era raffreddata

nelle sue simpatie irlandesi a causa del distacco irlandese durante la guerra. È la

dolorosa verità che qualunque vantaggio avremmo potuto trarne, noi

stessi procedemmo subito a distruggerlo. L’Irlanda avrebbe potuto mettersi

dalla parte del torto con l’America per il suo atteggiamento sul Belgio, se l’Inghilterra non

avesse subito proceduto a mettersi ancor più dalla parte del torto col suo atteggiamento

verso l’Irlanda. È verissimo che due neri non fanno un bianco;

ma non si può mandare un nero a rimproverare la gente perché tollera il

nero; e ciò è altrettanto vero quando l’uno è un Black Brunswicker e

l’altro un Black-and-Tan. È vero che da allora l’Inghilterra ha fatto

concessioni sorprendentemente ampie; concessioni così vaste da accrescere

lo stupore che il rifiuto fosse durato tanto a lungo. Ma

sfortunatamente la combinazione delle due cose piuttosto suggella l’idea

del nostro declino. Se la concessione fosse venuta prima del terrore, sarebbe

sembrata un tentativo di emancipare, e probabilmente sarebbe

riuscita. Venendo così bruscamente dopo il terrore, sembrò soltanto un

tentativo di tiranneggiare, e un tentativo fallito. Era in parte un’

eredità di una stupida tradizione, che cercava di combinare ciò che essa

chiamava fermezza con ciò che chiamava conciliazione; come se, quando ci

risolvevamo a placare un uomo con un biglietto da cinque sterline, avessimo sempre cura di

disfare la nostra stessa azione dandogli pure un calcio. Il politico inglese

ha spesso fatto proprio questo; benché di un tale sciocco non ci sia nulla da dire,

se non che ha sprecato cinque sterline. Ma in questo caso egli diede prima il

calcio, ne ricevette uno in cambio, e poi cedette il denaro; e

agli astanti era difficile dire alcunché, se non che era stato

malamente battuto. La combinazione e la sequenza degli eventi sembra quasi come se

fosse disposta a suggerire l’oscuro e sinistro parallelo. La prima

azione somigliava fin troppo all’invasione del Belgio, e la seconda

all’evacuazione del Belgio. Sicché quella vasta e silenziosa folla dell’Ovest

guardava l’Impero Britannico, come si guarda una grande torre che ha

cominciato a pendere. Fu così che, pur provando un piacere sincero, non potei

trovare piena consolazione nei sinceri complimenti rivolti al mio

paese da tanti americani colti; nei loro ricordi di angoli

familiari di contee storiche dalle quali venivano i loro padri, della

cattedrale che rimpicciolisce la città, o della locanda alla svolta della strada.

C’era qualcosa nelle loro voci e nello sguardo dei loro occhi che

fin dal principio mi turbava. Così ho udito bravi inglesi, che poi

morirono della morte dei soldati, esclamare ad alta voce nel 1914: ‘Sembra

impossibile, di quei gioviali bavaresi!’ oppure: ‘Non lo crederò mai,

quando penso al tempo che passai a Heidelberg!’

Ma vi sono altre cose oltre al parallelo con la Prussia o al

problema dell’Irlanda. La stampa americana è assai più libera della nostra; il

pubblico americano ha assai più dimestichezza con la discussione della corruzione

del nostro; ed è assai più consapevole della corruzione della nostra

politica di quanto lo siamo noi. Quasi ogni uomo in America può parlare del Caso

Marconi; molti uomini in Inghilterra non sanno nemmeno che cosa significhi. Molti

immaginano che avesse a che fare con la liceità per i politici di

speculare in Borsa. Cosicché significa moltissimo, per gli

americani, dire che una figura di quel dramma governa l’India e

un’altra governa la Palestina. E questo mi conduce a un altro problema,

anch’esso trattato assai più apertamente in America che in Inghilterra. Lo

menziono qui solo perché è un modello perfetto dei

malintesi del mondo moderno. Se qualcuno chiede un esempio

di come esattamente la parte importante di ogni storia venga tralasciata, e persino

la parte riferita non venga compresa, difficilmente potrebbe trovare un

caso più forte della storia di Henry Ford di Detroit.

Quando ero a Detroit ebbi il piacere di incontrare il signor Ford, e fu

davvero un piacere. È un uomo del tutto capace di opinioni che io ritengo

silly to the point of insanity; but he is not the vulgar benevolent

boss. It must be admitted that he is a millionaire; but he cannot really

be convicted of being a philanthropist. He is not a man who merely wants

to run people; it is rather his views that run him, and perhaps run away

with him. He has a distinguished and sensitive face; he really invented

things himself, unlike most men who profit by inventions; he is

something of an artist and not a little of a fighter. A man of that type

is always capable of being wildly wrong, especially in the sectarian

atmosphere of America; and Mr. Ford has been wrong before and may be

wrong now. He is chiefly known in England for a project which I think

very preposterous; that of the Peace Ship, which came to Europe during

the war. But he is not known in England at all in connection with a much

more important campaign, which he has conducted much more recently and

with much more success; a campaign against the Jews like one of the

Anti-Semitic campaigns of the Continent. Now any one who knows anything

of America knows exactly what the Peace Ship would be like. It was a

national combination of imagination and ignorance, which has at least

some of the beauty of innocence. Men living in those huge, hedgeless

inland plains know nothing about frontiers or the tragedy of a fight for

freedom; they know nothing of alarum and armaments or the peril of a

high civilisation poised like a precious statue within reach of a mailed

fist. They are accustomed to a cosmopolitan citizenship, in which men of

all bloods mingle and in which men of all creeds are counted equal.

Their highest moral boast is humanitarianism; their highest mental boast

is enlightenment. In a word, they are the very last men in the world who

would seem likely to pride themselves on a prejudice against the Jews.

They have no religion in particular, except a sincere sentiment which

they would call ‘true Christianity,’ and which specially forbids an

attack on the Jews. They have a patriotism which prides itself on

assimilating all types, including the Jews. Mr. Ford is a pure product

of this pacific world, as was sufficiently proved by his pacifism. If a

man of that sort has discovered that there is a Jewish problem, it is

because there is a Jewish problem. It is certainly not because there is

an Anti-Jewish prejudice. For if there had been any amount of such

racial and religious prejudice, he would have been about the very last

sort of man to have it. His particular part of the world would have been

the very last place to produce it. We may well laugh at the Peace Ship,

and its wild course and inevitable shipwreck; but remember that its very

wildness was an attempt to sail as far as possible from the castle of

Front-de-Boeuf. Everything that made him Anti-War should have

prevented him from being Anti-Semite. We may mock him for being mad on

peace; but we cannot say that he was so mad on peace that he made war on

Israel.

It happened that, when I was in America, I had just published some

studies on Palestine; and I was besieged by Rabbis lamenting my

‘prejudice.’ I pointed out that they would have got hold of the wrong

word, even if they had not got hold of the wrong man. As a point of

personal autobiography, I do not happen to be a man who dislikes Jews;

though I believe that some men do. I have had Jews among my most

intimate and faithful friends since my boyhood, and I hope to have them

till I die. But even if I did have a dislike of Jews, it would be

illogical to call that dislike a prejudice. Prejudice is a very lucid

Latin word meaning the bias which a man has before he considers a case.

I might be said to be prejudiced against a Hairy Ainu because of his

name, for I have never been on terms of such intimacy with him as to

correct my preconceptions. But if after moving about in the modern world

and meeting Jews, knowing Jews, doing business with Jews, and reading

and hearing about Jews, I came to the conclusion that I did not like

Jews, my conclusion certainly would not be a prejudice. It would simply

be an opinion; and one I should be perfectly entitled to hold; though as

a matter of fact I do not hold it. No extravagance of hatred merely

following on experience of Jews can properly be called a prejudice.

Now the point is that this new American Anti-Semitism springs from

experience and nothing but experience. There is no prejudice for it to

spring from. Or rather the prejudice is all the other way. All the

traditions of that democracy, and very creditable traditions too, are in

favour of toleration and a sort of idealistic indifference. The

sympathies in which these nineteenth-century people were reared were all

against Front-de-Boeuf and in favour of Rebecca. They inherited a

prejudice against Anti-Semitism; a prejudice of Anti-Anti-Semitism.

These people of the plains have found the Jewish problem exactly as they

might have struck oil; because it is there, and not even because they

were looking for it. Their view of the problem, like their use of the

oil, is not always satisfactory; and with parts of it I entirely

disagree. But the point is that the thing which I call a problem, and

others call a prejudice, has now appeared in broad daylight in a new

country where there is no priestcraft, no feudalism, no ancient

superstition to explain it. It has appeared because it is a problem;

and those are the best friends of the Jews, including many of the Jews

themselves, who are trying to find a solution. That is the meaning of

the incident of Mr. Henry Ford of Detroit; and you will hardly hear an

intelligible word about it in England.

The talk of prejudice against the Japs is not unlike the talk of

prejudice against the Jews. Only in this case our indifference has

sciocche fino alla follia; ma non è il volgare benevolo

padrone. Bisogna ammettere che è un milionario; ma non lo si può davvero

accusare di essere un filantropo. Non è un uomo che voglia semplicemente

dirigere la gente; sono piuttosto le sue idee a dirigere lui, e forse a trascinarlo

via con sé. Ha un volto distinto e sensibile; ha davvero inventato

cose lui stesso, a differenza della maggior parte di chi lucra sulle invenzioni; è

in parte un artista e non poco un combattente. Un uomo di quel tipo

è sempre capace di sbagliarsi clamorosamente, specie nell’atmosfera settaria

dell’America; e il signor Ford si è sbagliato in passato e può

sbagliarsi ora. È noto in Inghilterra soprattutto per un progetto che ritengo

assai assurdo; quello della Nave della Pace, che venne in Europa durante

la guerra. Ma non è affatto noto in Inghilterra in relazione a una

campagna assai più importante, che ha condotto assai più di recente e

con assai maggior successo; una campagna contro gli ebrei simile a una delle

campagne antisemite del Continente. Ora, chiunque conosca qualcosa

dell’America sa esattamente come dovesse essere la Nave della Pace. Fu una

combinazione nazionale di immaginazione e ignoranza, che possiede almeno

un po’ della bellezza dell’innocenza. Gli uomini che vivono in quelle immense, disadorne

pianure interne non sanno nulla di frontiere o della tragedia di una lotta per la

libertà; non sanno nulla di allarmi e armamenti o del pericolo di un’

alta civiltà librata come una preziosa statua a portata di un pugno

corazzato. Sono avvezzi a una cittadinanza cosmopolita, in cui uomini di

ogni sangue si mescolano e in cui uomini di ogni credo sono considerati uguali.

Il loro più alto vanto morale è l’umanitarismo; il loro più alto vanto intellettuale

è l’illuminismo. In una parola, sono gli ultimi uomini al mondo che

sembrerebbero disposti a vantarsi di un pregiudizio contro gli ebrei.

Non hanno una religione in particolare, tranne un sincero sentimento che

chiamerebbero ‘vero cristianesimo,’ e che vieta in modo speciale un

attacco agli ebrei. Hanno un patriottismo che si vanta di

assimilare ogni tipo, ebrei compresi. Il signor Ford è un puro prodotto

di questo mondo pacifico, come fu sufficientemente provato dal suo pacifismo. Se un

uomo di tal fatta ha scoperto che esiste un problema ebraico, è

perché un problema ebraico esiste. Non è certo perché vi sia

un pregiudizio antiebraico. Poiché se vi fosse stata una qualsiasi misura di tale

pregiudizio razziale e religioso, egli sarebbe stato pressoché l’ultimo

tipo d’uomo ad averlo. La sua particolare parte del mondo sarebbe stata

l’ultimo luogo a produrlo. Possiamo pure ridere della Nave della Pace,

della sua rotta folle e del suo inevitabile naufragio; ma si ricordi che proprio quella

follia era un tentativo di navigare quanto più lontano possibile dal castello di

Front-de-Boeuf. Tutto ciò che lo rendeva contro la guerra avrebbe dovuto

impedirgli di essere antisemita. Possiamo deriderlo perché folle per la

pace; ma non possiamo dire che fosse tanto folle per la pace da muovere guerra a

Israele.

Accadde che, quando ero in America, avevo appena pubblicato alcuni

studi sulla Palestina; e fui assediato da rabbini che lamentavano il mio

‘pregiudizio.’ Feci notare che avevano afferrato la parola

sbagliata, anche se non avevano afferrato l’uomo sbagliato. Come punto di

autobiografia personale, non mi trovo a essere un uomo che detesta gli ebrei;

benché creda che alcuni lo facciano. Ho avuto ebrei tra i miei più

intimi e fedeli amici sin dalla fanciullezza, e spero di averli

finché non morrò. Ma anche se provassi avversione per gli ebrei, sarebbe

illogico chiamare quell’avversione un pregiudizio. Pregiudizio è una parola latina assai

lucida che designa l’inclinazione che un uomo ha prima di esaminare un caso.

Si potrebbe dire che io ho un pregiudizio contro un Ainu peloso a causa del suo

nome, poiché non ho mai avuto con lui un’intimità tale da

correggere i miei preconcetti. Ma se, dopo essermi aggirato per il mondo moderno

e aver incontrato ebrei, conosciuto ebrei, trattato affari con ebrei, e aver letto

e sentito parlare di ebrei, giungessi alla conclusione che gli ebrei non mi

piacciono, la mia conclusione non sarebbe di certo un pregiudizio. Sarebbe semplicemente

un’opinione; e per giunta un’opinione che avrei pienamente diritto di avere; anche se in

verità non la sostengo. Nessuna stravaganza d’odio che segua semplicemente

all’esperienza degli ebrei può propriamente chiamarsi pregiudizio.

Ora, il punto è che questo nuovo antisemitismo americano scaturisce

dall’esperienza e da null’altro che dall’esperienza. Non c’è pregiudizio da cui esso possa

scaturire. O piuttosto il pregiudizio va tutto nel senso opposto. Tutte le

tradizioni di quella democrazia, e tradizioni assai lodevoli per giunta, sono a

favore della tolleranza e di una sorta di idealistica indifferenza. Le

simpatie nelle quali questa gente ottocentesca fu allevata erano tutte

contro Front-de-Boeuf e in favore di Rebecca. Ereditarono un

pregiudizio contro l’antisemitismo; un pregiudizio di anti-antisemitismo.

Questa gente delle pianure ha trovato il problema ebraico esattamente come

avrebbe potuto trovare il petrolio; perché è lì, e nemmeno perché lo

cercasse. La loro visione del problema, come il loro uso del

petrolio, non è sempre soddisfacente; e con parti di essa sono in totale

disaccordo. Ma il punto è che la cosa che io chiamo problema, e che

altri chiamano pregiudizio, è ora comparsa alla piena luce del giorno in un nuovo

paese dove non c’è clericalismo, né feudalesimo, né antica

superstizione a spiegarla. È comparsa perché è un problema;

e i migliori amici degli ebrei, compresi molti ebrei

stessi, sono coloro che cercano di trovare una soluzione. Questo è il significato

dell’episodio del signor Henry Ford di Detroit; e difficilmente ne udrete una

parola intelligibile in Inghilterra.

Il discorso del pregiudizio contro i giapponesi non è dissimile dal discorso del

pregiudizio contro gli ebrei. Solo che in questo caso la nostra indifferenza ha

really the excuse of ignorance. We used to lecture the Russians for

oppressing the Jews, before we heard the word Bolshevist and began to

lecture them for being oppressed by the Jews. In the same way we have

long lectured the Californians for oppressing the Japs, without allowing

for the possibility of their foreseeing that the oppression may soon be

the other way. As in the other case, it may be a persecution but it is

not a prejudice. The Californians know more about the Japanese than we

do; and our own colonists when they are placed in the same position

generally say the same thing. I will not attempt to deal adequately here

with the vast international and diplomatic problems which arise with the

name of the new power in the Far East. It is possible that Japan, having

imitated European militarism, may imitate European pacifism. I cannot

honestly pretend to know what the Japanese mean by the one any more than

by the other. But when Englishmen, especially English Liberals like

myself, take a superior and censorious attitude towards Americans and

especially Californians, I am moved to make a final remark. When a

considerable number of Englishmen talk of the grave contending claims of

our friendship with Japan and our friendship with America, when they

finally tend in a sort of summing up to dwell on the superior virtues of

Japan, I may be permitted to make a single comment.

We are perpetually boring the world and each other with talk about the

bonds that bind us to America. We are perpetually crying aloud that

England and America are very much alike, especially England. We are

always insisting that the two are identical in all the things in which

they most obviously differ. We are always saying that both stand for

democracy, when we should not consent to stand their democracy for half

a day. We are always saying that at least we are all Anglo-Saxons, when

we are descended from Romans and Normans and Britons and Danes, and they

are descended from Irishmen and Italians and Slavs and Germans. We tell

a people whose very existence is a revolt against the British Crown that

they are passionately devoted to the British Constitution. We tell a

nation whose whole policy has been isolation and independence that with

us she can bear safely the White Man’s Burden of universal empire. We

tell a continent crowded with Irishmen to thank God that the Saxon can

always rule the Celt. We tell a populace whose very virtues are lawless

that together we uphold the Reign of Law. We recognise our own

law-abiding character in people who make laws that neither they nor

anybody else can abide. We congratulate them on clinging to all they

have cast away, and on imitating everything which they came into

existence to insult. And when we have established all these nonsensical

analogies with a nonexistent nation, we wait until there is a crisis in

which we really are at one with America, and then we falter and threaten

to fail her. In a battle where we really are of one blood, the blood of

the great white race throughout the world, when we really have one

language, the fundamental alphabet of Cadmus and the script of Rome,

when we really do represent the same reign of law, the common conscience

of Christendom and the morals of men baptized, when we really have an

implicit faith and honour and type of freedom to summon up our souls as

with trumpets—then many of us begin to weaken and waver and wonder

whether there is not something very nice about little yellow men, whose

heroic stories revolve round polygamy and suicide, and whose heroes wore

two swords and worshipped the ancestors of the Mikado.

Prohibition in Fact and Fancy

I went to America with some notion of not discussing Prohibition. But I

soon found that well-to-do Americans were only too delighted to discuss

it over the nuts and wine. They were even willing, if necessary, to

dispense with the nuts. I am far from sneering at this; having a general

philosophy which need not here be expounded, but which may be symbolised

by saying that monkeys can enjoy nuts but only men can enjoy wine. But

if I am to deal with Prohibition, there is no doubt of the first thing

to be said about it. The first thing to be said about it is that it does

not exist. It is to some extent enforced among the poor; at any rate it

was intended to be enforced among the poor; though even among them I

fancy it is much evaded. It is certainly not enforced among the rich;

and I doubt whether it was intended to be. I suspect that this has

always happened whenever this negative notion has taken hold of some

particular province or tribe. Prohibition never prohibits. It never has

in history; not even in Moslem history; and it never will. Mahomet at

least had the argument of a climate and not the interest of a class. But

if a test is needed, consider what part of Moslem culture has passed

permanently into our own modern culture. You will find the one Moslem

poem that has really pierced is a Moslem poem in praise of wine. The

crown of all the victories of the Crescent is that nobody reads the

Koran and everybody reads the Rubaiyat.

Most of us remember with satisfaction an old picture in Punch,

representing a festive old gentleman in a state of collapse on the

pavement, and a philanthropic old lady anxiously calling the attention

of a cabman to the calamity. The old lady says, ‘I’m sure this poor

gentleman is ill,’ and the cabman replies with fervour, ‘Ill! I wish I

‘ad ‘alf ‘is complaint.’

We talk about unconscious humour; but there is such a thing as

unconscious seriousness. Flippancy is a flower whose roots are often

underground in the subconsciousness. Many a man talks sense when he

davvero la scusa dell’ignoranza. Un tempo facevamo prediche ai russi perché

opprimevano gli ebrei, prima di udire la parola bolscevico e cominciare a

far loro prediche perché oppressi dagli ebrei. Allo stesso modo abbiamo

a lungo fatto prediche ai californiani perché opprimevano i giapponesi, senza tener conto

della possibilità che essi prevedano che l’oppressione presto potrebbe volgersi

nel verso opposto. Come nell’altro caso, può essere una persecuzione ma non è

un pregiudizio. I californiani sanno dei giapponesi più di quanto ne sappiamo

noi; e i nostri stessi coloni, quando si trovano nella medesima posizione,

generalmente dicono la stessa cosa. Non tenterò di trattare adeguatamente qui

i vasti problemi internazionali e diplomatici che sorgono col

nome della nuova potenza dell’Estremo Oriente. È possibile che il Giappone, avendo

imitato il militarismo europeo, imiti il pacifismo europeo. Non posso

onestamente pretendere di sapere che cosa i giapponesi intendano con l’uno più di quanto sappia

con l’altro. Ma quando degli inglesi, specialmente liberali inglesi come

me, assumono un atteggiamento superiore e censorio verso gli americani e

specialmente i californiani, mi sento spinto a fare un’ultima osservazione. Quando un

considerevole numero di inglesi parla delle gravi e contrastanti ragioni della

nostra amicizia col Giappone e della nostra amicizia con l’America, quando

alla fine tendono, in una sorta di conclusione, a soffermarsi sulle superiori virtù del

Giappone, mi sia permesso fare un solo commento.

Annoiamo perpetuamente il mondo e noi stessi con discorsi sui

legami che ci uniscono all’America. Proclamiamo perpetuamente ad alta voce che

l’Inghilterra e l’America si somigliano moltissimo, specialmente l’Inghilterra. Noi

insistiamo sempre che le due sono identiche in tutte le cose in cui

più palesemente differiscono. Diciamo sempre che entrambe rappresentano la

democrazia, quando non acconsentiremmo a sopportare la loro democrazia per mezza

giornata. Diciamo sempre che almeno siamo tutti anglosassoni, quando

noi discendiamo da romani e normanni e britanni e danesi, ed essi

discendono da irlandesi e italiani e slavi e tedeschi. Diciamo a

un popolo la cui stessa esistenza è una rivolta contro la Corona britannica che

esso è appassionatamente devoto alla Costituzione britannica. Diciamo a una

nazione la cui intera politica è stata isolamento e indipendenza che con

noi essa può portare sicura il Fardello dell’Uomo Bianco dell’impero universale. Diciamo

a un continente gremito di irlandesi di ringraziare Dio che il sassone possa

sempre governare il celta. Diciamo a una popolazione le cui stesse virtù sono senza legge

che insieme sosteniamo il Regno della Legge. Riconosciamo il nostro

carattere rispettoso della legge in gente che fa leggi che né essi né

chiunque altro può sopportare. Ci congratuliamo con loro per l’aggrapparsi a tutto ciò che

hanno gettato via, e per l’imitare tutto ciò che vennero al mondo per

insultare. E quando abbiamo stabilito tutte queste insensate

analogie con una nazione inesistente, aspettiamo finché non c’è una crisi in

cui siamo davvero tutt’uno con l’America, e allora vacilliamo e minacciamo

di venirle meno. In una battaglia in cui siamo davvero di un solo sangue, il sangue della

grande razza bianca in tutto il mondo, quando abbiamo davvero una sola

lingua, l’alfabeto fondamentale di Cadmo e la scrittura di Roma,

quando rappresentiamo davvero lo stesso regno della legge, la comune coscienza

della Cristianità e la morale di uomini battezzati, quando abbiamo davvero una

fede implicita e un onore e un tipo di libertà tali da chiamare a raccolta le nostre anime come

a suon di trombe—allora molti di noi cominciano a indebolirsi e a esitare e a domandarsi

se non ci sia qualcosa di assai grazioso negli omini gialli, le cui

storie eroiche ruotano attorno alla poligamia e al suicidio, e i cui eroi portavano

due spade e adoravano gli antenati del Mikado.

Il proibizionismo tra realtà e fantasia

Andai in America con una certa intenzione di non discutere del proibizionismo. Ma

presto scoprii che gli americani agiati erano fin troppo lieti di discuterne

davanti alle noci e al vino. Erano persino disposti, se necessario, a

fare a meno delle noci. Sono ben lungi dal deridere ciò; avendo una generale

filosofia che qui non occorre esporre, ma che può essere simboleggiata

col dire che le scimmie possono godere delle noci ma solo gli uomini possono godere del vino. Ma

se devo occuparmi del proibizionismo, non v’è dubbio su quale sia la prima cosa

da dirne. La prima cosa da dirne è che esso non

esiste. È in una certa misura applicato tra i poveri; in ogni caso

si intendeva applicarlo tra i poveri; benché anche tra loro

immagini che venga molto eluso. Non è di certo applicato tra i ricchi;

e dubito che lo si intendesse. Sospetto che ciò sia

sempre accaduto ogni volta che questa nozione negativa si è impadronita di qualche

particolare provincia o tribù. Il proibizionismo non proibisce mai. Non l’ha mai fatto

nella storia; nemmeno nella storia musulmana; e mai lo farà. Maometto

aveva almeno l’argomento di un clima e non l’interesse di una classe. Ma

se occorre una prova, si consideri quale parte della cultura musulmana sia passata

stabilmente nella nostra stessa cultura moderna. Troverete che l’unico

poema musulmano che ha davvero fatto breccia è un poema musulmano in lode del vino. La

corona di tutte le vittorie della Mezzaluna è che nessuno legge il

Corano e tutti leggono le Rubaiyat.

Molti di noi ricordano con soddisfazione una vecchia vignetta di Punch,

che raffigura un festoso vecchio signore in stato di collasso sul

marciapiede, e una filantropica vecchia signora che con ansia richiama l’attenzione

di un vetturino sulla calamità. La vecchia signora dice: ‘Sono certa che questo povero

signore è malato,’ e il vetturino risponde con fervore: ‘Malato! Magari avessi io

la metà del suo malanno.’

Parliamo di umorismo inconscio; ma esiste anche una cosa quale la

serietà inconscia. La leggerezza è un fiore le cui radici sono spesso

sepolte nel subconscio. Molti dicono cose sensate quando

thinks he is talking nonsense; touches on a conflict of ideas as if it

were only a contradiction of language, or really makes a parallel when

he means only to make a pun. Some of the Punch jokes of the best

period are examples of this; and that quoted above is a very strong

example of it. The cabman meant what he said; but he said a great deal

more than he meant. His utterance contained fine philosophical doctrines

and distinctions of which he was not perhaps entirely conscious. The

spirit of the English language, the tragedy and comedy of the condition

of the English people, spoke through him as the god spoke through a

teraph-head or brazen mask of oracle. And the oracle is an omen; and in

some sense an omen of doom.

Observe, to begin with, the sobriety of the cabman. Note his measure,

his moderation; or to use the yet truer term, his temperance. He only

wishes to have half the old gentleman’s complaint. The old gentleman is

welcome to the other half, along with all the other pomps and luxuries

of his superior social station. There is nothing Bolshevist or even

Communist about the temperance cabman. He might almost be called

Distributist, in the sense that he wishes to distribute the old

gentleman’s complaint more equally between the old gentleman and

himself. And, of course, the social relations there represented are very

much truer to life than it is fashionable to suggest. By the realism of

this picture Mr. Punch made amends for some more snobbish pictures, with

the opposite social moral. It will remain eternally among his real

glories that he exhibited a picture in which the cabman was sober and

the gentleman was drunk. Despite many ideas to the contrary, it was

emphatically a picture of real life. The truth is subject to the

simplest of all possible tests. If the cabman were really and truly

drunk he would not be a cabman, for he could not drive a cab. If he had

the whole of the old gentleman’s complaint, he would be sitting happily

on the pavement beside the old gentleman; a symbol of social equality

found at last, and the levelling of all classes of mankind. I do not say

that there has never been such a monster known as a drunken cabman; I do

not say that the driver may not sometimes have approximated imprudently

to three-quarters of the complaint, instead of adhering to his severe

but wise conception of half of it. But I do say that most men of the

world, if they spoke sincerely, could testify to more examples of

helplessly drunken gentlemen put inside cabs than of helplessly drunken

drivers on top of them. Philanthropists and officials, who never look at

people but only at papers, probably have a mass of social statistics to

the contrary; founded on the simple fact that cabmen can be

cross-examined about their habits and gentlemen cannot. Social workers

probably have the whole thing worked out in sections and compartments,

showing how the extreme intoxication of cabmen compares with the

parallel intoxication of costermongers; or measuring the drunkenness of

a dustman against the drunkenness of a crossing-sweeper. But there is

more practical experience embodied in the practical speech of the

English; and in the proverb that says ‘as drunk as a lord.’

Now Prohibition, whether as a proposal in England or a pretence in

America, simply means that the man who has drunk less shall have no

drink, and the man who has drunk more shall have all the drink. It means

that the old gentleman shall be carried home in the cab drunker than

ever; but that, in order to make it quite safe for him to drink to

excess, the man who drives him shall be forbidden to drink even in

moderation. That is what it means; that is all it means; that is all it

ever will mean. It tends to that in Moslem countries; where the

luxurious and advanced drink champagne, while the poor and fanatical

drink water. It means that in modern America; where the wealthy are all

at this moment sipping their cocktails, and discussing how much harder

labourers can be made to work if only they can be kept from festivity.

This is what it means and all it means; and men are divided about it

according to whether they believe in a certain transcendental concept

called ‘justice,’ expressed in a more mystical paradox as the equality

of men. So long as you do not believe in justice, and so long as you are

rich and really confident of remaining so, you can have Prohibition and

be as drunk as you choose.

I see that some remarks by the Rev. R. J. Campbell, dealing with social

conditions in America, are reported in the press. They include some

observations about Sinn Fein in which, as in most of Mr. Campbell’s

allusions to Ireland, it is not difficult to detect his dismal origin,

or the acrid smell of the smoke of Belfast. But the remarks about

America are valuable in the objective sense, over and above their

philosophy. He believes that Prohibition will survive and be a success,

nor does he seem himself to regard the prospect with any special

disfavour. But he frankly and freely testifies to the truth I have

asserted; that Prohibition does not prohibit, so far as the wealthy are

concerned. He testifies to constantly seeing wine on the table, as will

any other grateful guest of the generous hospitality of America; and he

implies humorously that he asked no questions about the story told him

of the old stocks in the cellars. So there is no dispute about the

facts; and we come back as before to the principles. Is Mr. Campbell

content with a Prohibition which is another name for Privilege? If so,

he has simply absorbed along with his new theology a new morality which

is different from mine. But he does state both sides of the inequality

with equal logic and clearness; and in these days of intellectual fog

that alone is like a ray of sunshine.

crede di dire sciocchezze; sfiora un conflitto di idee come se

fosse solo una contraddizione di linguaggio, o traccia davvero un parallelo quando

intende solo fare un gioco di parole. Alcune delle battute di Punch del miglior

periodo ne sono esempi; e quella citata sopra ne è un fortissimo

esempio. Il vetturino intendeva ciò che disse; ma disse assai

più di quanto intendesse. Le sue parole contenevano sottili dottrine filosofiche

e distinzioni delle quali forse non era del tutto consapevole. Lo

spirito della lingua inglese, la tragedia e la commedia della condizione

del popolo inglese, parlarono attraverso di lui come il dio parlava attraverso una

testa di teraphìm o bronzea maschera d’oracolo. E l’oracolo è un presagio; e in

un certo senso un presagio di rovina.

Si osservi, per cominciare, la sobrietà del vetturino. Si noti la sua misura,

la sua moderazione; o per usare il termine ancor più veritiero, la sua temperanza. Egli

desidera solo avere metà del malanno del vecchio signore. Al vecchio signore è

lasciata volentieri l’altra metà, insieme a tutte le altre pompe e lussi

della sua superiore condizione sociale. Non c’è nulla di bolscevico e nemmeno di

comunista nel temperante vetturino. Lo si potrebbe quasi definire

distributista, nel senso che egli desidera distribuire il malanno del vecchio

signore più equamente tra il vecchio signore e

sé stesso. E, naturalmente, i rapporti sociali ivi rappresentati sono assai

più fedeli alla realtà di quanto sia di moda ammettere. Col realismo di

questa vignetta il signor Punch fece ammenda di alcune vignette più snob, dalla

morale sociale opposta. Resterà in eterno tra le sue vere

glorie l’aver esibito una vignetta in cui il vetturino era sobrio e

il signore era ubriaco. Malgrado molte idee contrarie, era

enfaticamente una scena di vita reale. La verità è soggetta al

più semplice di tutti i possibili criteri. Se il vetturino fosse davvero e veramente

ubriaco non sarebbe un vetturino, poiché non saprebbe guidare la carrozza. Se avesse

l’intero malanno del vecchio signore, siederebbe beato

sul marciapiede accanto al vecchio signore; simbolo di un’eguaglianza sociale

finalmente raggiunta, e del livellamento di tutte le classi dell’umanità. Non dico

che non sia mai esistito un tale mostro quale un vetturino ubriaco; non

dico che il conducente non possa talvolta essersi imprudentemente avvicinato

ai tre quarti del malanno, invece di attenersi alla sua severa

ma saggia concezione della metà di esso. Ma dico che la maggior parte degli uomini di

mondo, se parlassero con sincerità, potrebbe testimoniare più esempi di

signori disperatamente ubriachi messi dentro le carrozze che di disperatamente ubriachi

conducenti a cassetta. I filantropi e i funzionari, che non guardano mai le

persone ma solo le carte, hanno probabilmente una massa di statistiche sociali a

riprova del contrario; fondate sul semplice fatto che i vetturini possono essere

controinterrogati sulle loro abitudini mentre i signori no. Gli assistenti sociali

hanno probabilmente l’intera faccenda elaborata in sezioni e compartimenti,

che mostrano come l’estrema ebbrezza dei vetturini si raffronti con la

parallela ebbrezza dei fruttivendoli ambulanti; o che misurano l’ubriachezza di uno

spazzino contro l’ubriachezza di uno scopino di incroci. Ma vi è

più esperienza pratica racchiusa nel parlare pratico degli

inglesi; e nel proverbio che dice ‘ubriaco come un lord.’

Ora il proibizionismo, sia come proposta in Inghilterra sia come finzione in

America, significa semplicemente che l’uomo che ha bevuto meno non avrà da

bere, e l’uomo che ha bevuto di più avrà tutto da bere. Significa

che il vecchio signore sarà portato a casa in carrozza più ubriaco che

mai; ma che, per rendere del tutto sicuro per lui bere fino all’

eccesso, all’uomo che lo conduce sarà proibito bere anche con

moderazione. Questo è ciò che significa; è tutto ciò che significa; è tutto ciò che

mai significherà. Tende a ciò nei paesi musulmani; dove i

gaudenti e progrediti bevono champagne, mentre i poveri e fanatici

bevono acqua. Significa ciò nell’America moderna; dove i ricchi stanno tutti

in questo momento sorseggiando i loro cocktail, e discutendo di quanto più duramente

si possano far lavorare gli operai purché li si tenga lontani dalla festa.

Questo è ciò che significa e tutto ciò che significa; e gli uomini si dividono su di esso

a seconda che credano o no in un certo concetto trascendentale

chiamato ‘giustizia,’ espresso in un più mistico paradosso come l’eguaglianza

degli uomini. Finché non credete nella giustizia, e finché siete

ricchi e davvero sicuri di restarlo, potete avere il proibizionismo ed

essere ubriachi quanto vi pare.

Vedo che alcune osservazioni del reverendo R. J. Campbell, riguardanti le condizioni sociali

in America, sono riferite dalla stampa. Comprendono alcune

osservazioni sul Sinn Féin nelle quali, come nella maggior parte delle allusioni del signor Campbell

all’Irlanda, non è difficile scorgere la sua tetra origine,

o l’acre odore del fumo di Belfast. Ma le osservazioni sull’

America sono preziose in senso oggettivo, al di là della loro

filosofia. Egli crede che il proibizionismo sopravvivrà e sarà un successo,

né egli stesso pare guardare a tale prospettiva con particolare

sfavore. Ma egli attesta francamente e liberamente la verità che ho

affermato; che il proibizionismo non proibisce, per quanto riguarda i

ricchi. Egli attesta di vedere costantemente vino in tavola, come

attesterà ogni altro grato ospite della generosa ospitalità dell’America; ed

egli lascia intendere con umorismo di non aver fatto domande sulla storia raccontatagli

delle vecchie scorte nelle cantine. Dunque non v’è disputa sui

fatti; e torniamo come prima ai principi. Il signor Campbell è

soddisfatto di un proibizionismo che è un altro nome per privilegio? Se è così,

egli ha semplicemente assorbito insieme alla sua nuova teologia una nuova moralità che

è diversa dalla mia. Ma egli espone entrambi i lati della disuguaglianza

con eguale logica e chiarezza; e in questi giorni di nebbia intellettuale

ciò soltanto è come un raggio di sole.

Now my primary objection to Prohibition is not based on any arguments

against it, but on the one argument for it. I need nothing more for its

condemnation than the only thing that is said in its defence. It is said

by capitalists all over America; and it is very clearly and correctly

reported by Mr. Campbell himself. The argument is that employees work

harder, and therefore employers get richer. That this idea should be

taken calmly, by itself, as the test of a problem of liberty, is in

itself a final testimony to the presence of slavery. It shows that

people have completely forgotten that there is any other test except the

servile test. Employers are willing that workmen should have exercise,

as it may help them to do more work. They are even willing that workmen

should have leisure; for the more intelligent capitalists can see that

this also really means that they can do more work. But they are not in

any way willing that workmen should have fun; for fun only increases the

happiness and not the utility of the worker. Fun is freedom; and in that

sense is an end in itself. It concerns the man not as a worker but as a

citizen, or even as a soul; and the soul in that sense is an end in

itself. That a man shall have a reasonable amount of comedy and poetry

and even fantasy in his life is part of his spiritual health, which is

for the service of God; and not merely for his mechanical health, which

is now bound to the service of man. The very test adopted has all the

servile implication; the test of what we can get out of him, instead of

the test of what he can get out of life.

Mr. Campbell is reported to have suggested, doubtless rather as a

conjecture than a prophecy, that England may find it necessary to become

teetotal in order to compete commercially with the efficiency and

economy of teetotal America. Well, in the eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries there was in America one of the most economical and

efficient of all forms of labour. It did not happen to be feasible for

the English to compete with it by copying it. There were so many

humanitarian prejudices about in those days. But economically there

seems to be no reason why a man should not have prophesied that England

would be forced to adopt American Slavery then, as she is urged to adopt

American Prohibition now. Perhaps such a prophet would have prophesied

rightly. Certainly it is not impossible that universal Slavery might

have been the vision of Calhoun as universal Prohibition seems to be the

vision of Campbell. The old England of 1830 would have said that such a

plea for slavery was monstrous; but what would it have said of a plea

for enforced water-drinking? Nevertheless, the nobler Servile State of

Calhoun collapsed before it could spread to Europe. And there is always

the hope that the same may happen to the far more materialistic Utopia

of Mr. Campbell and Soft Drinks.

Abstract morality is very important; and it may well clear the mind to

consider what would be the effect of Prohibition in America, if it were

introduced there. It would, of course, be a decisive departure from the

tradition of the Declaration of Independence. Those who deny that are

hardly serious enough to demand attention. It is enough to say that they

are reduced to minimising that document in defence of Prohibition,

exactly as the slave-owners were reduced to minimising it in defence of

Slavery. They are reduced to saying that the Fathers of the Republic

meant no more than that they would not be ruled by a king. And they are

obviously open to the reply which Lincoln gave to Douglas on the slavery

question; that if that great charter was limited to certain events in

the eighteenth century, it was hardly worth making such a fuss about in

the nineteenth—or in the twentieth. But they are also open to another

reply which is even more to the point, when they pretend that

Jefferson’s famous preamble only means to say that monarchy is wrong.

They are maintaining that Jefferson only meant to say something that he

does not say at all. The great preamble does not say that all

monarchical government must be wrong; on the contrary, it rather implies

that most government is right. It speaks of human governments in general

as justified by the necessity of defending certain personal rights. I

see no reason whatever to suppose that it would not include any royal

government that does defend those rights. Still less do I doubt what it

would say of a republican government that does destroy those rights.

But what are those rights? Sophists can always debate about their

degree; but even sophists cannot debate about their direction. Nobody in

his five wits will deny that Jeffersonian democracy wished to give the

law a general control in more public things, but the citizens a more

general liberty in private things. Wherever we draw the line, liberty

can only be personal liberty; and the most personal liberties must at

least be the last liberties we lose. But to-day they are the first

liberties we lose. It is not a question of drawing the line in the right

place, but of beginning at the wrong end. What are the rights of man, if

they do not include the normal right to regulate his own health, in

relation to the normal risks of diet and daily life? Nobody can pretend

that beer is a poison as prussic acid is a poison; that all the millions

of civilised men who drank it all fell down dead when they had touched

it. Its use and abuse is obviously a matter of judgment; and there can

be no personal liberty, if it is not a matter of private judgment. It

is not in the least a question of drawing the line between liberty and

licence. If this is licence, there is no such thing as liberty. It is

Ora la mia obiezione principale al proibizionismo non si fonda su alcun argomento

contro di esso, ma sull’unico argomento a suo favore. Non mi occorre nulla di più per la sua

condanna della sola cosa che si dice in sua difesa. È detta

dai capitalisti in tutta l’America; ed è riferita in modo assai chiaro e corretto

dallo stesso signor Campbell. L’argomento è che i dipendenti lavorano

più duramente, e perciò i datori di lavoro si arricchiscono. Che questa idea sia

accolta con calma, di per sé, come il criterio di un problema di libertà, è di

per sé una prova definitiva della presenza della schiavitù. Mostra che la

gente ha completamente dimenticato che esista un qualsiasi altro criterio all’infuori di quello

servile. I datori di lavoro sono disposti a che gli operai facciano esercizio,

poiché ciò può aiutarli a fare più lavoro. Sono persino disposti a che gli operai

abbiano tempo libero; poiché i capitalisti più intelligenti vedono che

anche questo in realtà significa che possono fare più lavoro. Ma non sono in

alcun modo disposti a che gli operai si divertano; poiché il divertimento accresce solo la

felicità e non l’utilità del lavoratore. Il divertimento è libertà; e in tal

senso è un fine in sé. Riguarda l’uomo non come lavoratore ma come

cittadino, o persino come anima; e l’anima in tal senso è un fine in

sé. Che un uomo abbia una ragionevole quantità di commedia e poesia

e persino di fantasia nella sua vita è parte della sua salute spirituale, che è

al servizio di Dio; e non soltanto della sua salute meccanica, che

ora è vincolata al servizio dell’uomo. Il criterio stesso adottato ha tutta l’

implicazione servile; il criterio di ciò che possiamo cavare da lui, invece di

quello di ciò che egli può cavare dalla vita.

Si riferisce che il signor Campbell abbia suggerito, senza dubbio più come una

congettura che come una profezia, che l’Inghilterra possa trovar necessario divenire

astemia per competere commercialmente con l’efficienza e

l’economia dell’America astemia. Ebbene, nel Settecento e nei primi

decenni dell’Ottocento vi era in America una delle più economiche ed

efficienti di tutte le forme di lavoro. Non risultò essere praticabile per

gli inglesi competere con essa copiandola. C’erano tanti

pregiudizi umanitari in giro a quei tempi. Ma economicamente

non sembra esserci ragione per cui un uomo non avrebbe potuto profetizzare che l’Inghilterra

sarebbe stata costretta ad adottare la schiavitù americana allora, come è esortata ad adottare

il proibizionismo americano ora. Forse un tal profeta avrebbe profetizzato

giustamente. Di certo non è impossibile che la schiavitù universale possa

essere stata la visione di Calhoun come il proibizionismo universale sembra essere la

visione di Campbell. La vecchia Inghilterra del 1830 avrebbe detto che una tale

difesa della schiavitù era mostruosa; ma che cosa avrebbe detto di una difesa

del bere acqua imposto per legge? Nondimeno, il più nobile Stato Servile di

Calhoun crollò prima di potersi diffondere in Europa. E c’è sempre

la speranza che lo stesso possa accadere alla ben più materialistica Utopia

del signor Campbell e delle bibite analcoliche.

La moralità astratta è assai importante; e può bene schiarire la mente

considerare quale sarebbe l’effetto del proibizionismo in America, se vi fosse

introdotto. Sarebbe, naturalmente, una decisa deviazione dalla

tradizione della Dichiarazione d’Indipendenza. Coloro che lo negano non sono

abbastanza seri da meritare attenzione. Basti dire che essi

sono ridotti a sminuire quel documento in difesa del proibizionismo,

esattamente come i proprietari di schiavi furono ridotti a sminuirlo in difesa della

schiavitù. Sono ridotti a dire che i Padri della Repubblica

non intendevano altro se non che non sarebbero stati governati da un re. E sono

ovviamente esposti alla risposta che Lincoln diede a Douglas sulla schiavitù

questione; che se quella grande carta era limitata a certi eventi del

Settecento, non valeva granché la pena di farne tanto scalpore nell’

Ottocento—o nel Novecento. Ma sono anche esposti a un’altra

risposta ancor più pertinente, quando pretendono che

il famoso preambolo di Jefferson intenda dire soltanto che la monarchia è un male.

Sostengono che Jefferson intendesse dire soltanto qualcosa che egli

non dice affatto. Il grande preambolo non dice che ogni

governo monarchico debba essere ingiusto; al contrario, esso piuttosto implica

che la maggior parte dei governi sia giusta. Esso parla dei governi umani in generale

come giustificati dalla necessità di difendere certi diritti personali. Non

vedo alcuna ragione al mondo per supporre che non includerebbe qualsiasi regio

governo che difenda davvero quei diritti. Ancor meno dubito di ciò che esso

direbbe di un governo repubblicano che distrugga quei diritti.

Ma quali sono quei diritti? I sofisti possono sempre discutere del loro

grado; ma nemmeno i sofisti possono discutere della loro direzione. Nessuno che sia

in sé negherà che la democrazia jeffersoniana volesse dare alla

legge un controllo generale nelle cose più pubbliche, ma ai cittadini una più

generale libertà nelle cose private. Ovunque tracciamo il confine, la libertà

può essere solo libertà personale; e le libertà più personali devono almeno

essere le ultime libertà che perdiamo. Ma oggi sono le prime

libertà che perdiamo. Non è questione di tracciare il confine nel posto

giusto, ma di cominciare dal capo sbagliato. Quali sono i diritti dell’uomo, se

non includono il normale diritto di regolare la propria salute, in

relazione ai normali rischi della dieta e della vita quotidiana? Nessuno può pretendere

che la birra sia un veleno come l’acido prussico è un veleno; che tutti i milioni

di uomini civili che la bevvero caddero tutti morti stecchiti non appena l’ebbero

toccata. Il suo uso e abuso è ovviamente questione di giudizio; e non può

esservi libertà personale, se non è questione di giudizio privato. Non

è affatto una questione di tracciare il confine tra libertà e

licenza. Se questa è licenza, allora la libertà non esiste. È

plainly impossible to find any right more individual or intimate. To say

that a man has a right to a vote, but not a right to a voice about the

choice of his dinner, is like saying that he has a right to his hat but

not a right to his head.

Prohibition, therefore, plainly violates the rights of man, if there are

any rights of man. What its supporters really mean is that there are

none. And in suggesting this, they have all the advantages that every

sceptic has when he supports a negation. That sort of ultimate

scepticism can only be retorted upon itself, and we can point out to

them that they can no more prove the right of the city to be oppressive

than we can prove the right of the citizen to be free. In the primary

metaphysics of such a claim, it would surely be easier to make it out

for a single conscious soul than for an artificial social combination.

If there are no rights of men, what are the rights of nations? Perhaps a

nation has no claim to self-government. Perhaps it has no claim to good

government. Perhaps it has no claim to any sort of government or any

sort of independence. Perhaps they will say that is not implied in the

Declaration of Independence. But without going deep into my reasons for

believing in natural rights, or rather in supernatural rights (and

Jefferson certainly states them as supernatural), I am content here to

note that a man’s treatment of his own body, in relation to traditional

and ordinary opportunities for bodily excess, is as near to his

self-respect as social coercion can possibly go; and that when that is

gone there is nothing left. If coercion applies to that, it applies to

everything; and in the future of this controversy it obviously will

apply to everything. When I was in America, people were already applying

it to tobacco. I never can see why they should not apply it to talking.

Talking often goes with tobacco as it goes with beer; and what is more

relevant, talking may often lead both to beer and tobacco. Talking often

drives a man to drink, both negatively in the form of nagging and

positively in the form of bad company. If the American Puritan is so

anxious to be a censor morum, he should obviously put a stop to the

evil communications that really corrupt good manners. He should

reintroduce the Scold’s Bridle among the other Blue Laws for a land of

blue devils. He should gag all gay deceivers and plausible cynics; he

should cut off all flattering lips and the tongue that speaketh proud

things. Nobody can doubt that nine-tenths of the harm in the world is

done simply by talking. Jefferson and the old democrats allowed people

to talk, not because they were unaware of this fact, but because they

were fettered by this old fancy of theirs about freedom and the rights

of man. But since we have already abandoned that doctrine in a final

fashion, I cannot see why the new principle should not be applied

intelligently; and in that case it would be applied to the control of

conversation. The State would provide us with forms already filled up

with the subjects suitable for us to discuss at breakfast; perhaps

allowing us a limited number of epigrams each. Perhaps we should have to

make a formal application in writing, to be allowed to make a joke that

had just occurred to us in conversation. And the committee would

consider it in due course. Perhaps it would be effected in a more

practical fashion, and the private citizens would be shut up as the

public-houses were shut up. Perhaps they would all wear gags, which the

policeman would remove at stated hours; and their mouths would be opened

from one to three, as now in England even the public-houses are from

time to time accessible to the public. To some this will sound

fantastic; but not so fantastic as Jefferson would have thought

Prohibition. But there is one sense in which it is indeed fantastic, for

by hypothesis it leaves out the favouritism that is the fundamental of

the whole matter. The only sense in which we can say that logic will

never go so far as this is that logic will never go the length of

equality. It is perfectly possible that the same forces that have

forbidden beer may go on to forbid tobacco. But they will in a special

and limited sense forbid tobacco—but not cigars. Or at any rate not

expensive cigars. In America, where large numbers of ordinary men smoke

rather ordinary cigars, there would be doubtless a good opportunity of

penalising a very ordinary pleasure. But the Havanas of the millionaire

will be all right. So it will be if ever the Puritans bring back the

Scold’s Bridle and the statutory silence of the populace. It will only

be the populace that is silent. The politicians will go on talking.

These I believe to be the broad facts of the problem of Prohibition; but

it would not be fair to leave it without mentioning two other causes

which, if not defences, are at least excuses. The first is that

Prohibition was largely passed in a sort of fervour or fever of

self-sacrifice, which was a part of the passionate patriotism of America

in the war. As I have remarked elsewhere, those who have any notion of

what that national unanimity was like will smile when they see America

made a model of mere international idealism. Prohibition was partly a

sort of patriotic renunciation; for the popular instinct, like every

poetic instinct, always tends at great crises to great gestures of

renunciation. But this very fact, while it makes the inhumanity far more

human, makes it far less final and convincing. Men cannot remain

standing stiffly in such symbolical attitudes; nor can a permanent

policy be founded on something analogous to flinging a gauntlet or

uttering a battle-cry. We might as well expect all the Yale students to

palesemente impossibile trovare un diritto più individuale o intimo. Dire

che un uomo ha diritto a un voto, ma non a una voce nella

scelta della propria cena, è come dire che ha diritto al proprio cappello ma

non alla propria testa.

Il proibizionismo, dunque, viola palesemente i diritti dell’uomo, ammesso che vi siano

diritti dell’uomo. Ciò che i suoi sostenitori intendono davvero è che non ve ne sono

affatto. E nel suggerire ciò, essi hanno tutti i vantaggi che ogni

scettico ha quando sostiene una negazione. Quella sorta di scetticismo

estremo può solo essere ritorto su sé stesso, e possiamo far notare

loro che essi non possono provare il diritto della città di essere oppressiva

più di quanto noi possiamo provare il diritto del cittadino di essere libero. Nella metafisica

primaria di una tale pretesa, sarebbe di certo più facile dimostrarla

per una singola anima consapevole che per un’artificiale combinazione sociale.

Se non vi sono diritti degli uomini, quali sono i diritti delle nazioni? Forse una

nazione non ha diritto all’autogoverno. Forse non ha diritto a un buon

governo. Forse non ha diritto a nessun tipo di governo o a nessun

tipo di indipendenza. Forse diranno che ciò non è implicito nella

Dichiarazione d’Indipendenza. Ma senza addentrarmi nelle mie ragioni per

credere nei diritti naturali, o piuttosto nei diritti soprannaturali (e

Jefferson di certo li enuncia come soprannaturali), mi accontento qui di

notare che il modo in cui un uomo tratta il proprio corpo, in relazione alle tradizionali

e ordinarie occasioni di eccesso corporeo, è vicino al suo

rispetto di sé quanto più la coercizione sociale possa spingersi; e che quando ciò è

venuto meno non resta nulla. Se la coercizione si applica a ciò, si applica a

tutto; e nel futuro di questa controversia ovviamente si

applicherà a tutto. Quando ero in America, la gente già lo applicava

al tabacco. Non riesco proprio a vedere perché non dovrebbero applicarlo al parlare.

Il parlare spesso accompagna il tabacco come accompagna la birra; e ciò che più

conta, il parlare può spesso condurre sia alla birra sia al tabacco. Il parlare spesso

spinge un uomo a bere, sia negativamente sotto forma di brontolii sia

positivamente sotto forma di cattive compagnie. Se il puritano americano è tanto

ansioso di fare il censor morum, dovrebbe ovviamente porre fine alle

malvage comunicazioni che davvero corrompono i buoni costumi. Dovrebbe

reintrodurre la Briglia della Bisbetica tra le altre Leggi Blu per una terra di

diavoli blu. Dovrebbe imbavagliare tutti gli allegri ingannatori e i plausibili cinici;

dovrebbe recidere tutte le labbra adulatrici e la lingua che proferisce cose

superbe. Nessuno può dubitare che nove decimi del male nel mondo si

facciano semplicemente parlando. Jefferson e i vecchi democratici lasciavano che la gente

parlasse, non perché ignorassero questo fatto, ma perché

erano incatenati a quella loro vecchia fantasia sulla libertà e sui diritti

dell’uomo. Ma poiché abbiamo già abbandonato quella dottrina in modo

definitivo, non vedo perché il nuovo principio non debba essere applicato

intelligentemente; e in tal caso sarebbe applicato al controllo della

conversazione. Lo Stato ci fornirebbe moduli già compilati

con gli argomenti a noi consoni da discutere a colazione; forse

concedendo a ciascuno un numero limitato di epigrammi. Forse dovremmo

inoltrare una formale domanda scritta, per poterci permettere una battuta che

ci fosse appena venuta in mente durante la conversazione. E il comitato la

esaminerebbe a tempo debito. Forse la cosa si attuerebbe in modo più

pratico, e i privati cittadini verrebbero chiusi come venivano chiuse le

osterie. Forse porterebbero tutti dei bavagli, che il

poliziotto rimuoverebbe a ore stabilite; e le loro bocche verrebbero aperte

dall’una alle tre, come ora in Inghilterra persino le osterie sono di

tempo in tempo accessibili al pubblico. Ad alcuni ciò suonerà

fantastico; ma non tanto fantastico quanto Jefferson avrebbe ritenuto il

proibizionismo. Ma vi è un senso in cui è davvero fantastico, poiché

per ipotesi esso tralascia il favoritismo che è il fondamento dell’

intera faccenda. L’unico senso in cui possiamo dire che la logica non

si spingerà mai fin qui è che la logica non arriverà mai al punto dell’

eguaglianza. È perfettamente possibile che le stesse forze che hanno

proibito la birra proseguano proibendo il tabacco. Ma esse, in un senso speciale

e limitato, proibiranno il tabacco—ma non i sigari. O comunque non i

sigari costosi. In America, dove gran numero di uomini comuni fuma

sigari piuttosto comuni, vi sarebbe senza dubbio una buona occasione per

penalizzare un piacere assai comune. Ma gli avana del milionario

andranno benissimo. Così sarà se mai i puritani riporteranno la

Briglia della Bisbetica e il silenzio imposto per legge alla plebe. Sarà solo

la plebe a tacere. I politici continueranno a parlare.

Questi credo siano i fatti generali del problema del proibizionismo; ma

non sarebbe leale lasciarlo senza menzionare due altre cause

che, se non difese, sono almeno scuse. La prima è che

il proibizionismo fu in gran parte approvato in una sorta di fervore o febbre di

abnegazione, che era parte dell’appassionato patriottismo dell’America

nella guerra. Come ho osservato altrove, coloro che hanno una qualche nozione di

come fosse quell’unanimità nazionale sorrideranno nel vedere l’America

eretta a modello di mero idealismo internazionale. Il proibizionismo fu in parte una

sorta di patriottica rinuncia; poiché l’istinto popolare, come ogni

istinto poetico, tende sempre nelle grandi crisi a grandi gesti di

rinuncia. Ma questo stesso fatto, se rende l’inumanità assai più

umana, la rende assai meno definitiva e convincente. Gli uomini non possono restare

impettiti in tali atteggiamenti simbolici; né una politica permanente può

fondarsi su qualcosa di analogo al gettare un guanto di sfida o al

lanciare un grido di battaglia. Tanto varrebbe pure aspettarci che tutti gli studenti di Yale

remain through life with their mouths open, exactly as they were when

they uttered the college yell. It would be as reasonable as to expect

them to remain through life with their mouths shut, while the wine-cup

which has been the sacrament of all poets and lovers passed round among

all the youth of the world. This point appeared very plainly in a

discussion I had with a very thoughtful and sympathetic American critic,

a clergyman writing in an Anglo-Catholic magazine. He put the sentiment

of these healthier Prohibitionists, which had so much to do with the

passing of Prohibition, by asking, ‘May not a man who is asked to give

up his blood for his country be asked to give up his beer for his

country?’ And this phrase clearly illuminates all the limitations of the

case. I have never denied, in principle, that it might in some abnormal

crisis be lawful for a government to lock up the beer, or to lock up the

bread. In that sense I am quite prepared to treat the sacrifice of beer

in the same way as the sacrifice of blood. But is my American critic

really ready to treat the sacrifice of blood in the same way as the

sacrifice of beer? Is bloodshed to be as prolonged and protracted as

Prohibition? Is the normal noncombatant to shed his gore as often as he

misses his drink? I can imagine people submitting to a special

regulation, as I can imagine them serving in a particular war. I do

indeed despise the political knavery that deliberately passes drink

regulations as war measures and then preserves them as peace measures.

But that is not a question of whether drink and drunkenness are wrong,

but of whether lying and swindling are wrong. But I never denied that

there might need to be exceptional sacrifices for exceptional occasions;

and war is in its nature an exception. Only, if war is the exception,

why should Prohibition be the rule? If the surrender of beer is worthy

to be compared to the shedding of blood, why then blood ought to be

flowing for ever like a fountain in the public squares of Philadelphia

and New York. If my critic wants to complete his parallel, he must draw

up rather a remarkable programme for the daily life of the ordinary

citizens. He must suppose that, through all their lives, they are

paraded every day at lunch time and prodded with bayonets to show that

they will shed their blood for their country. He must suppose that every

evening, after a light repast of poison gas and shrapnel, they are made

to go to sleep in a trench under a permanent drizzle of shell-fire. It

is surely obvious that if this were the normal life of the citizen, the

citizen would have no normal life. The common sense of the thing is that

sacrifices of this sort are admirable but abnormal. It is not normal for

the State to be perpetually regulating our days with the discipline of a

fighting regiment; and it is not normal for the State to be perpetually

regulating our diet with the discipline of a famine. To say that every

citizen must be subject to control in such bodily things is like saying

that every Christian ought to tear himself with red-hot pincers because

the Christian martyrs did their duty in time of persecution. A man has a

right to control his body, though in a time of martyrdom he may give his

body to be burned; and a man has a right to control his bodily health,

though in a state of siege he may give his body to be starved. Thus,

though the patriotic defence was a sincere defence, it is a defence that

comes back on the defenders like a boomerang. For it proves only that

Prohibition ought to be ephemeral, unless war ought to be eternal.

The other excuse is much less romantic and much more realistic. I have

already said enough of the cause which is really realistic. The real

power behind Prohibition is simply the plutocratic power of the pushing

employers who wish to get the last inch of work out of their workmen.

But before the progress of modern plutocracy had reached this stage,

there was a predetermining cause for which there was a much better case.

The whole business began with the problem of black labour. I have not

attempted in this book to deal adequately with the question of the

negro. I have refrained for a reason that may seem somewhat sensational;

that I do not think I have anything particularly valuable to say or

suggest. I do not profess to understand this singularly dark and

intricate matter; and I see no use in men who have no solution filling

up the gap with sentimentalism. The chief thing that struck me about the

coloured people I saw was their charming and astonishing cheerfulness.

My sense of pathos was appealed to much more by the Red Indians; and

indeed I wish I had more space here to do justice to the Red Indians.

They did heroic service in the war; and more than justified their

glorious place in the day-dreams and nightmares of our boyhood. But the

negro problem certainly demands more study than a sight-seer could give

it; and this book is controversial enough about things that I have

really considered, without permitting it to exhibit me as a sight-seer

who shoots at sight. But I believe that it was always common ground to

people of common sense that the enslavement and importation of negroes

had been the crime and catastrophe of American history. The only

difference was originally that one side thought that, the crime once

committed, the only reparation was their freedom; while the other

thought that, the crime once committed, the only safety was their

slavery. It was only comparatively lately, by a process I shall have to

indicate elsewhere, that anything like a positive case for slavery

became possible. Now among the many problems of the presence of an alien

restino per tutta la vita con la bocca aperta, esattamente come erano quando

lanciarono il grido del college. Sarebbe altrettanto ragionevole aspettarci

che restino per tutta la vita con la bocca chiusa, mentre la coppa di vino

che è stata il sacramento di tutti i poeti e gli amanti passa di mano tra

tutta la gioventù del mondo. Questo punto apparve assai chiaramente in una

discussione che ebbi con un critico americano assai riflessivo e cordiale,

un ecclesiastico che scriveva in una rivista anglo-cattolica. Egli espose il sentimento

di questi più sani proibizionisti, che tanto ebbe a che fare con l’

approvazione del proibizionismo, domandando: ‘Non si può forse chiedere a un uomo cui si chiede di dare

il suo sangue per la patria di rinunciare alla sua birra per la

patria?’ E questa frase illumina chiaramente tutti i limiti del

caso. Non ho mai negato, in linea di principio, che in qualche anomala

crisi possa essere lecito per un governo mettere sotto chiave la birra, o mettere sotto chiave il

pane. In tal senso sono del tutto pronto a trattare il sacrificio della birra

allo stesso modo del sacrificio del sangue. Ma il mio critico americano è

davvero pronto a trattare il sacrificio del sangue allo stesso modo del

sacrificio della birra? Lo spargimento di sangue dev’essere tanto prolungato e protratto quanto il

proibizionismo? Il normale non combattente deve versare il suo sangue tanto spesso quanto

si priva del suo bere? Posso immaginare gente che si sottomette a una speciale

regolamentazione, come posso immaginarla servire in una particolare guerra. Disprezzo

davvero la furfanteria politica che deliberatamente approva le regolamentazioni sulle bevande

come misure di guerra e poi le conserva come misure di pace.

Ma questa non è una questione se il bere e l’ubriachezza siano un male,

bensì se il mentire e il truffare siano un male. Ma non ho mai negato che

possa esservi bisogno di sacrifici eccezionali per occasioni eccezionali;

e la guerra è per sua natura un’eccezione. Solo che, se la guerra è l’eccezione,

perché il proibizionismo dovrebbe essere la regola? Se la rinuncia alla birra è degna

di essere paragonata allo spargimento del sangue, allora il sangue dovrebbe

scorrere per sempre come una fontana nelle pubbliche piazze di Filadelfia

e New York. Se il mio critico vuole completare il suo parallelo, deve stilare

un programma piuttosto notevole per la vita quotidiana dei comuni

cittadini. Deve supporre che, per tutta la loro vita, essi vengano

schierati ogni giorno all’ora di pranzo e pungolati con le baionette per dimostrare che

verseranno il loro sangue per la patria. Deve supporre che ogni

sera, dopo un leggero pasto di gas velenoso e shrapnel, vengano

mandati a dormire in una trincea sotto una permanente pioggerella di fuoco d’artiglieria. È

di certo ovvio che se questa fosse la vita normale del cittadino, il

cittadino non avrebbe vita normale. Il buon senso della cosa è che

sacrifici di tal sorta sono ammirevoli ma anomali. Non è normale che

lo Stato regolamenti perpetuamente le nostre giornate con la disciplina di un

reggimento in battaglia; e non è normale che lo Stato regolamenti perpetuamente

la nostra dieta con la disciplina di una carestia. Dire che ogni

cittadino debba essere soggetto a controllo in tali cose corporee è come dire

che ogni cristiano dovrebbe dilaniarsi con tenaglie roventi perché

i martiri cristiani fecero il loro dovere in tempo di persecuzione. Un uomo ha

diritto di controllare il proprio corpo, benché in tempo di martirio possa dare il proprio

corpo alle fiamme; e un uomo ha diritto di controllare la propria salute corporea,

benché in stato d’assedio possa dare il proprio corpo alla fame. Così,

benché la difesa patriottica fosse una difesa sincera, è una difesa che

ricade sui difensori come un boomerang. Poiché prova soltanto che

il proibizionismo dovrebbe essere effimero, a meno che la guerra non debba essere eterna.

L’altra scusa è assai meno romantica e assai più realistica. Ho

già detto abbastanza della causa che è davvero realistica. Il vero

potere dietro il proibizionismo è semplicemente il potere plutocratico degli intraprendenti

datori di lavoro che vogliono cavare l’ultimo centimetro di lavoro dai loro operai.

Ma prima che il progresso della moderna plutocrazia raggiungesse questo stadio,

vi era una causa predeterminante per la quale c’era un caso assai migliore.

L’intera faccenda cominciò col problema del lavoro dei neri. Non ho

tentato in questo libro di trattare adeguatamente la questione del

negro. Me ne sono astenuto per una ragione che può sembrare alquanto sensazionale;

e cioè che non credo di avere nulla di particolarmente valido da dire o

suggerire. Non pretendo di comprendere questa faccenda singolarmente oscura e

intricata; e non vedo alcuna utilità in uomini che, non avendo soluzione, colmino

il vuoto col sentimentalismo. La cosa principale che mi colpì delle

persone di colore che vidi fu la loro incantevole e sorprendente allegria.

Il mio senso del pathos fu toccato assai più dai Pellerossa; e

in verità vorrei avere qui più spazio per rendere giustizia ai Pellerossa.

Prestarono eroico servizio nella guerra; e più che giustificarono il loro

glorioso posto nei sogni a occhi aperti e negli incubi della nostra fanciullezza. Ma il

problema del negro esige di certo più studio di quanto un turista potesse

dedicargli; e questo libro è già abbastanza polemico sulle cose che ho

davvero ponderato, senza permettergli di esibirmi come un turista

che spara a vista. Ma credo che sia sempre stato terreno comune per le

persone di buon senso che l’asservimento e l’importazione dei negri

fossero stati il crimine e la catastrofe della storia americana. L’unica

differenza era in origine che una parte pensava che, commesso il

crimine, l’unica riparazione fosse la loro libertà; mentre l’altra

pensava che, commesso il crimine, l’unica sicurezza fosse la loro

schiavitù. Fu solo relativamente di recente, per un processo che dovrò

indicare altrove, che qualcosa come un caso positivo a favore della schiavitù

divenne possibile. Ora, tra i molti problemi della presenza di un elemento alieno

and at least recently barbaric figure among the citizens, there was a

very real problem of drink. Drink certainly has a very exceptionally

destructive effect upon negroes in their native countries; and it was

alleged to have a peculiarly demoralising effect upon negroes in the

United States; to call up the passions that are the particular

temptation of the race and to lead to appalling outrages that are

followed by appalling popular vengeance. However this may be, many of

the states of the American Union, which first forbade liquor to

citizens, meant simply to forbid it to negroes. But they had not the

moral courage to deny that negroes are citizens. About all their

political expedients necessarily hung the load that hangs so heavy on

modern politics; hypocrisy. The superior race had to rule by a sort of

secret society organised against the inferior. The American politicians

dared not disfranchise the negroes; so they coerced everybody in theory

and only the negroes in practice. The drinking of the white men became

as much a conspiracy as the shooting by the white horsemen of the

Ku-Klux Klan. And in that connection, it may be remarked in passing that

the comparison illustrates the idiocy of supposing that the moral sense

of mankind will ever support the prohibition of drinking as if it were

something like the prohibition of shooting. Shooting in America is

liable to take a free form, and sometimes a very horrible form; as when

private bravos were hired to kill workmen in the capitalistic interests

of that pure patron of disarmament, Carnegie. But when some of the rich

Americans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered with,

because they are only using up their existing stocks of wine, we may

well be disposed to smile. When I was there, at any rate, they were

using them up very fast; and with no apparent fears about the supply.

But if the Ku-Klux Klan had started suddenly shooting everybody they

didn’t like in broad daylight, and had blandly explained that they were

only using up the stocks of their ammunition, left over from the Civil

War, it seems probable that there would at least have been a little

curiosity about how much they had left. There might at least have been

occasional inquiries about how long it was likely to go on. It is even

conceivable that some steps might have been taken to stop it.

No steps are taken to stop the drinking of the rich, chiefly because

the rich now make all the rules and therefore all the exceptions, but

partly because nobody ever could feel the full moral seriousness of this

particular rule. And the truth is, as I have indicated, that it was

originally established as an exception and not as a rule. The

emancipated negro was an exception in the community, and a certain plan

was, rightly or wrongly, adopted to meet his case. A law was made

professedly for everybody and practically only for him. Prohibition is

only important as marking the transition by which the trick, tried

successfully on black labour, could be extended to all labour. We in

England have no right to be Pharisaic at the expense of the Americans in

this matter; for we have tried the same trick in a hundred forms. The

true philosophical defence of the modern oppression of the poor would be

to say frankly that we have ruled them so badly that they are unfit to

rule themselves. But no modern oligarch is enough of a man to say this.

For like all virile cynicism it would have an element of humility; which

would not mix with the necessary element of hypocrisy. So we proceed,

just as the Americans do, to make a law for everybody and then evade it

for ourselves. We have not the honesty to say that the rich may bet

because they can afford it; so we forbid any man to bet in any place;

and then say that a place is not a place. It is exactly as if there were

an American law allowing a negro to be murdered because he is not a man

within the meaning of the Act. We have not the honesty to drive the poor

to school because they are ignorant; so we pretend to drive everybody;

and then send inspectors to the slums but not to the smart streets. We

apply the same ingenuous principle; and are quite as undemocratic as

Western democracy. Nevertheless there is an element in the American case

which cannot be present in ours; and this chapter may well conclude upon

so important a change.

America can now say with pride that she has abolished the colour bar. In

this matter the white labourer and the black labourer have at last been

put upon an equal social footing. White labour is every bit as much

enslaved as black labour; and is actually enslaved by a method and a

model only intended for black labour. We might think it rather odd if

the exact regulations about flogging negroes were reproduced as a plan

for punishing strikers; or if industrial arbitration issued its reports

in the precise terminology of the Fugitive Slave Law. But this is in

essentials what has happened; and one could almost fancy some negro orgy

of triumph, with the beating of gongs and all the secret violence of

Voodoo, crying aloud to some ancestral Mumbo Jumbo that the Poor White

Trash was being treated according to its name.

Fads and Public Opinion

A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He is

perfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in a

reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. I was a

foreigner in America; and I can truly claim that the sense of my own

laughable position never left me. But when the native and the foreigner

have finished with seeing the fun of each other in things that are meant

to be serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dangerous

ground of things that are meant to be funny. The sense of humour is

generally very national; perhaps that is why the internationalists are

e figura almeno di recente barbara tra i cittadini, esisteva un

problema assai reale, quello del bere. Il bere ha certamente un effetto eccezionalmente

distruttivo sui negri nei loro paesi d’origine; e si sosteneva che avesse

un effetto particolarmente demoralizzante sui negri negli

Stati Uniti; che ridestasse le passioni che sono la particolare

tentazione della razza e conducesse a delitti spaventosi seguiti

da spaventose vendette popolari. Comunque stiano le cose, molti

degli stati dell’Unione americana, che per primi proibirono i liquori ai

cittadini, intendevano semplicemente proibirli ai negri. Ma non ebbero il

coraggio morale di negare che i negri siano cittadini. Su tutti i loro

espedienti politici gravava necessariamente il fardello che pesa così greve sulla

politica moderna: l’ipocrisia. La razza superiore doveva governare per mezzo di una sorta di

società segreta organizzata contro l’inferiore. I politici americani

non osavano privare del voto i negri; e così costrinsero tutti in teoria

e solo i negri in pratica. Il bere degli uomini bianchi divenne

una cospirazione non meno delle sparatorie dei cavalieri bianchi del

Ku-Klux Klan. E a questo proposito si può osservare di sfuggita che

il paragone illustra l’idiozia di supporre che il senso morale

del genere umano appoggerà mai la proibizione del bere come se fosse

qualcosa di simile alla proibizione dello sparare. Sparare in America è

soggetto ad assumere una forma libera, e talora una forma orribilissima; come quando

furono assoldati bravi prezzolati per uccidere operai negli interessi capitalistici

di quel puro patrono del disarmo, Carnegie. Ma quando alcuni dei ricchi

americani ci dicono gravemente che nel loro bere non si può interferire,

perché stanno soltanto esaurendo le scorte di vino già esistenti, possiamo

bene essere disposti a sorridere. Quando io ero là, in ogni caso, le stavano

esaurendo assai in fretta; e senza apparenti timori circa l’approvvigionamento.

Ma se il Ku-Klux Klan avesse cominciato improvvisamente a sparare a chiunque

non gli piacesse in pieno giorno, e avesse blandamente spiegato che stava

soltanto esaurendo le scorte delle sue munizioni, avanzate dalla Guerra

Civile, sembra probabile che vi sarebbe stata almeno un po’ di

curiosità su quante ne fossero rimaste. Vi sarebbero state almeno

occasionali indagini su quanto a lungo la cosa sarebbe probabilmente durata. È perfino

concepibile che si sarebbero presi dei provvedimenti per fermarla.

Nessun provvedimento si prende per fermare il bere dei ricchi, principalmente perché

i ricchi ora fanno tutte le regole e quindi tutte le eccezioni, ma

in parte perché nessuno poté mai sentire la piena gravità morale di questa

particolare regola. E la verità è, come ho accennato, che essa fu

originariamente istituita come eccezione e non come regola. Il

negro emancipato era un’eccezione nella comunità, e un certo piano

fu, a torto o a ragione, adottato per far fronte al suo caso. Una legge fu fatta

dichiaratamente per tutti e in pratica solo per lui. Il Proibizionismo è

importante solo in quanto segna la transizione mediante la quale il trucco, sperimentato

con successo sul lavoro nero, poteva estendersi a tutto il lavoro. Noi in

Inghilterra non abbiamo alcun diritto di fare i farisei a spese degli americani in

questa faccenda; perché abbiamo tentato lo stesso trucco in cento forme. La

vera difesa filosofica della moderna oppressione dei poveri sarebbe

dire francamente che li abbiamo governati così male da renderli inadatti a

governare se stessi. Ma nessun oligarca moderno è abbastanza uomo da dire questo.

Poiché, come ogni virile cinismo, avrebbe un elemento di umiltà; il quale

non si mescolerebbe col necessario elemento d’ipocrisia. E così procediamo,

proprio come fanno gli americani, a fare una legge per tutti e poi a eluderla

per noi stessi. Non abbiamo l’onestà di dire che i ricchi possono scommettere

perché possono permetterselo; e così proibiamo a ogni uomo di scommettere in qualsiasi luogo;

e poi diciamo che un luogo non è un luogo. È esattamente come se vi fosse

una legge americana che consente di assassinare un negro perché non è un uomo

ai sensi dell’Atto. Non abbiamo l’onestà di spingere i poveri

a scuola perché sono ignoranti; e così fingiamo di spingervi tutti;

e poi mandiamo ispettori nei bassifondi ma non nelle vie eleganti. Noi

applichiamo lo stesso ingenuo principio; e siamo altrettanto antidemocratici quanto

la democrazia occidentale. Nondimeno vi è un elemento nel caso americano

che non può essere presente nel nostro; e questo capitolo può bene concludersi su

un mutamento tanto importante.

L’America può ora dire con orgoglio di aver abolito la barriera del colore. In

questa faccenda il lavoratore bianco e il lavoratore nero sono stati finalmente

posti su un piede sociale d’uguaglianza. Il lavoro bianco è schiavizzato tanto quanto

il lavoro nero; ed è di fatto schiavizzato da un metodo e da un

modello destinati solo al lavoro nero. Potremmo trovare piuttosto strano se

le precise norme sulla fustigazione dei negri fossero riprodotte come piano

per punire gli scioperanti; o se l’arbitrato industriale emettesse i suoi rapporti

nella precisa terminologia della Legge sugli Schiavi Fuggitivi. Ma questo è in

sostanza ciò che è accaduto; e si potrebbe quasi immaginare una qualche orgia negra

di trionfo, col battere dei gong e tutta la segreta violenza del

Voodoo, che grida a gran voce a qualche ancestrale Mumbo Jumbo che la Poor White

Trash veniva trattata secondo il suo nome.

Mode e opinione pubblica

Uno straniero è un uomo che ride di ogni cosa tranne che delle facezie. Egli è

perfettamente in diritto di ridere di qualsiasi cosa, purché si renda conto, in

spirito riverente e religioso, che egli stesso è ridicolo. Io ero uno

straniero in America; e posso affermare con verità che il senso della mia

ridicola posizione non mi abbandonò mai. Ma quando l’indigeno e lo straniero

hanno finito di vedere il buffo l’uno dell’altro in cose che vogliono

essere serie, entrambi si accostano al terreno assai più delicato e pericoloso

delle cose che vogliono essere buffe. Il senso dell’umorismo è

generalmente molto nazionale; forse è per questo che gli internazionalisti sono

so careful to purge themselves of it. I had occasion during the war to

consider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to have

arisen between the English and American soldiers at the front. And,

rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that they arose from the

failure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he is

humorous. And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be

the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke.

The English and the American types of humour are in one way directly

contrary. The most American sort of fun involves a soaring imagination,

piling one house on another in a tower like that of a sky-scraper. The

most English humour consists of a sort of bathos, of a man returning to

the earth his mother in a homely fashion; as when he sits down suddenly

on a butter-slide. English farce describes a man as being in a hole.

American fantasy, in its more aspiring spirit, describes a man as being

up a tree. The former is to be found in the cockney comic songs that

concern themselves with hanging out the washing or coming home with the

milk. The latter is to be found in those fantastic yarns about machines

that turn live pigs into pig-skin purses or burning cities that serve to

hatch an egg. But it will be inevitable, when the two come first into

contact, that the bathos will sound like vulgarity and the extravagance

will sound like boasting.

Suppose an American soldier said to an English soldier in the trenches,

‘The Kaiser may want a place in the sun; I reckon he won’t have a place

in the solar system when we begin to hustle.’ The English soldier will

very probably form the impression that this is arrogance; an impression

based on the extraordinary assumption that the American means what he

says. The American has merely indulged in a little art for art’s sake,

and abstract adventure of the imagination; he has told an American short

story. But the Englishman, not understanding this, will think the other

man is boasting, and reflecting on the insufficiency of the English

effort. The English soldier is very likely to say something like, ‘Oh,

you’ll be wanting to get home to your old woman before that, and asking

for a kipper with your tea.’ And it is quite likely that the American

will be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of abstract beauty

answered in so personal a fashion. Being an American, he will probably

have a fine and chivalrous respect for his wife; and may object to her

being called an old woman. Possibly he in turn may be under the

extraordinary delusion that talking of the old woman really means that

the woman is old. Possibly he thinks the mysterious demand for a kipper

carries with it some charge of ill-treating his wife; which his national

sense of honour swiftly resents. But the real cross-purposes come from

the contrary direction of the two exaggerations, the American making

life more wild and impossible than it is, and the Englishman making it

more flat and farcical than it is; the one escaping from the house of

life by a skylight and the other by a trap-door.

This difficulty of different humours is a very practical one for

practical people. Most of those who profess to remove all international

differences are not practical people. Most of the phrases offered for

the reconciliation of severally patriotic peoples are entirely serious

and even solemn phrases. But human conversation is not conducted in

those phrases. The normal man on nine occasions out of ten is rather a

flippant man. And the normal man is almost always the national man.

Patriotism is the most popular of all the virtues. The drier sort of

democrats who despise it have the democracy against them in every

country in the world. Hence their international efforts seldom go any

farther than to effect an international reconciliation of all

internationalists. But we have not solved the normal and popular problem

until we have an international reconciliation of all nationalists.

It is very difficult to see how humour can be translated at all. When

Sam Weller is in the Fleet Prison and Mrs. Weller and Mr. Stiggins sit

on each side of the fireplace and weep and groan with sympathy, old Mr.

Weller observes, ‘Vell, Sammy, I hope you find your spirits rose by this

‘ere lively visit.’ I have never looked up this passage in the popular

and successful French version of Pickwick; but I confess I am curious

as to what French past-participle conveys the precise effect of the word

‘rose.’ A translator has not only to give the right translation of the

right word but the right translation of the wrong word. And in the same

way I am quite prepared to suspect that there are English jokes which an

Englishman must enjoy in his own rich and romantic solitude, without

asking for the sympathy of an American. But Englishmen are generally

only too prone to claim this fine perception, without seeing that the

fine edge of it cuts both ways. I have begun this chapter on the note of

national humour because I wish to make it quite clear that I realise how

easily a foreigner may take something seriously that is not serious.

When I think something in America is really foolish, it may be I that am

made a fool of. It is the first duty of a traveller to allow for this;

but it seems to be the very last thing that occurs to some travellers.

But when I seek to say something of what may be called the fantastic

side of America, I allow beforehand that some of it may be meant to be

fantastic. And indeed it is very difficult to believe that some of it is

meant to be serious. But whether or no there is a joke, there is

così attenti a purgarsene. Ebbi occasione durante la guerra di

considerare i torti e le ragioni di certi contrasti che si diceva fossero

sorti tra i soldati inglesi e americani al fronte. E,

a torto o a ragione, giunsi alla conclusione che nascessero dall’

incapacità di capire quando uno straniero è serio e quando è

faceto. Ed è nella natura stessa della migliore specie di scherzo essere

la peggiore specie d’insulto se non è preso come uno scherzo.

I tipi d’umorismo inglese e americano sono per un verso direttamente

opposti. La specie più americana di comicità implica un’immaginazione che spicca il volo,

impilando una casa sull’altra in una torre come quella d’un grattacielo. Il

più inglese umorismo consiste in una sorta di bathos, d’un uomo che ritorna alla

terra sua madre in maniera casalinga; come quando si siede all’improvviso

su una scivolata di burro. La farsa inglese descrive un uomo come cacciato in un buco.

La fantasia americana, nel suo spirito più ambizioso, descrive un uomo come arrampicato

su un albero. La prima si trova nelle canzoni comiche cockney che

si occupano di stendere il bucato o di tornare a casa col

latte. La seconda si trova in quelle fantastiche fandonie su macchine

che trasformano maiali vivi in borsette di pelle di maiale o su città in fiamme che servono a

covare un uovo. Ma sarà inevitabile, quando i due entrano per la prima volta in

contatto, che il bathos suoni come volgarità e la stravaganza

suoni come vanteria.

Supponiamo che un soldato americano dicesse a un soldato inglese nelle trincee:

«Il Kaiser vorrà magari un posto al sole; ma scommetto che non avrà un posto

nel sistema solare quando cominceremo a darci da fare». Il soldato inglese

si formerà assai probabilmente l’impressione che questa sia arroganza; un’impressione

fondata sullo straordinario presupposto che l’americano intenda ciò che

dice. L’americano si è semplicemente concesso un po’ d’arte per l’arte,

e un’astratta avventura dell’immaginazione; ha raccontato un breve racconto

americano. Ma l’inglese, non capendo ciò, penserà che l’altro

si stia vantando, e faccia dell’ironia sull’insufficienza dello sforzo

inglese. È assai probabile che il soldato inglese dica qualcosa come: «Oh,

prima di allora vorrai tornare a casa dalla tua vecchia, e chiedere

un’aringa affumicata col tè». Ed è assai probabile che l’americano

si offenda a sua volta nel vedere il suo arabesco d’astratta bellezza

corrisposto in maniera così personale. Essendo americano, avrà probabilmente

un fine e cavalleresco rispetto per la moglie; e potrà avere da ridire nel sentirla

chiamare una vecchia. Forse a sua volta sarà in preda allo

straordinario inganno che parlare della vecchia significhi davvero che

la donna è vecchia. Forse pensa che la misteriosa richiesta d’un’aringa

rechi con sé qualche accusa di maltrattare la moglie; cosa che il suo nazionale

senso dell’onore risente prontamente. Ma i veri equivoci vengono

dalla direzione contraria delle due esagerazioni: l’americano rende

la vita più selvaggia e impossibile di quanto sia, e l’inglese la rende

più piatta e farsesca di quanto sia; l’uno evadendo dalla casa della

vita da un lucernario e l’altro da una botola.

Questa difficoltà dei diversi umori è assai pratica per la

gente pratica. La maggior parte di coloro che professano di rimuovere tutte le

differenze internazionali non sono gente pratica. La maggior parte delle frasi offerte per

la riconciliazione di popoli separatamente patriottici sono frasi del tutto serie

e perfino solenni. Ma la conversazione umana non si conduce in

quelle frasi. L’uomo normale in nove casi su dieci è piuttosto un

uomo frivolo. E l’uomo normale è quasi sempre l’uomo nazionale.

Il patriottismo è la più popolare di tutte le virtù. La specie più arida di

democratici che lo disprezzano ha contro di sé la democrazia in ogni

paese del mondo. Perciò i loro sforzi internazionali di rado vanno più in

là dell’effettuare una riconciliazione internazionale di tutti gli

internazionalisti. Ma non abbiamo risolto il problema normale e popolare

finché non avremo una riconciliazione internazionale di tutti i nazionalisti.

È molto difficile vedere come l’umorismo possa in genere essere tradotto. Quando

Sam Weller è nella Prigione della Fleet e la signora Weller e il signor Stiggins siedono

ai due lati del focolare e piangono e gemono di compassione, il vecchio signor

Weller osserva: «Bè, Sammy, spero che tu trovi i tuoi spiriti risollevati da questa

vispa visitina». Non ho mai cercato questo passo nella popolare

e fortunata versione francese di Pickwick; ma confesso d’esser curioso

di sapere quale participio passato francese renda il preciso effetto della parola

«rose». Un traduttore deve dare non solo la giusta traduzione della

parola giusta ma la giusta traduzione della parola sbagliata. E allo stesso

modo sono ben disposto a sospettare che vi siano scherzi inglesi di cui un

inglese deve godere nella propria ricca e romantica solitudine, senza

chiedere la compassione d’un americano. Ma gli inglesi sono generalmente

fin troppo inclini a rivendicare questa fine percezione, senza vedere che il

suo filo tagliente taglia da entrambe le parti. Ho cominciato questo capitolo sulla nota dell’

umorismo nazionale perché desidero rendere ben chiaro che mi rendo conto di quanto

facilmente uno straniero possa prendere sul serio qualcosa che non è serio.

Quando penso che qualcosa in America sia davvero sciocco, può darsi che sia io a esser

reso sciocco. È il primo dovere d’un viaggiatore tenerne conto;

ma sembra essere l’ultimissima cosa che venga in mente a certi viaggiatori.

Ma quando cerco di dire qualcosa di quello che si può chiamare il lato

fantastico dell’America, ammetto in anticipo che parte di esso può essere voluto

fantastico. E in verità è assai difficile credere che parte di esso sia

voluto serio. Ma che vi sia o no uno scherzo, vi è

certainly an inconsistency; and it is an inconsistency in the moral

make-up of America which both puzzles and amuses me.

The danger of democracy is not anarchy but convention. There is even a

sort of double meaning in the word ‘convention’; for it is also used for

the most informal and popular sort of parliament; a parliament not

summoned by any king. The Americans come together very easily without

any king; but their coming together is in every sense a convention, and

even a very conventional convention. In a democracy riot is rather the

exception and respectability certainly the rule. And though a

superficial sight-seer should hesitate about all such generalisations,

and certainly should allow for enormous exceptions to them, he does

receive a general impression of unity verging on uniformity. Thus

Americans all dress well; one might almost say that American women all

look well; but they do not, as compared with Europeans, look very

different. They are in the fashion; too much in the fashion even to be

conspicuously fashionable. Of course there are patches, both Bohemian

and Babylonian, of which this is not true, but I am talking of the

general tone of a whole democracy. I have said there is more

respectability than riot; but indeed in a deeper sense the same spirit

is behind both riot and respectability. It is the same social force that

makes it possible for the respectable to boycott a man and for the

riotous to lynch him. I do not object to it being called ‘the herd

instinct,’ so long as we realise that it is a metaphor and not an

explanation.

Public opinion can be a prairie fire. It eats up everything that opposes

it; and there is the grandeur as well as the grave disadvantages of a

natural catastrophe in that national unity. Pacifists who complained in

England of the intolerance of patriotism have no notion of what

patriotism can be like. If they had been in America, after America had

entered the war, they would have seen something which they have always

perhaps subconsciously dreaded, and would then have beyond all their

worst dreams detested; and the name of it is democracy. They would have

found that there are disadvantages in birds of a feather flocking

together; and that one of them follows on a too complacent display of

the white feather. The truth is that a certain flexible sympathy with

eccentrics of this kind is rather one of the advantages of an

aristocratic tradition. The imprisonment of Mr. Debs, the American

Pacifist, which really was prolonged and oppressive, would probably have

been shortened in England where his opinions were shared by aristocrats

like Mr. Bertrand Russell and Mr. Ponsonby. A man like Lord Hugh Cecil

could be moved to the defence of conscientious objectors, partly by a

true instinct of chivalry; but partly also by the general feeling that a

gentleman may very probably have aunts and uncles who are quite as mad.

He takes the matter personally, in the sense of being able to imagine

the psychology of the persons. But democracy is no respecter of persons.

It is no respecter of them, either in the bad and servile or in the good

and sympathetic sense. And Debs was nothing to democracy. He was but one

of the millions. This is a real problem, or question in the balance,

touching different forms of government; which is, of course, quite

neglected by the idealists who merely repeat long words. There was

during the war a society called the Union of Democratic Control, which

would have been instantly destroyed anywhere where democracy had any

control, or where there was any union. And in this sense the United

States have most emphatically got a union. Nevertheless I think there is

something rather more subtle than this simple popular solidity behind

the assimilation of American citizens to each other. There is something

even in the individual ideals that drives towards this social sympathy.

And it is here that we have to remember that biological fancies like the

herd instinct are only figures of speech, and cannot really cover

anything human. For the Americans are in some ways a very self-conscious

people. To compare their social enthusiasm to a stampede of cattle is to

ask us to believe in a bull writing a diary or a cow looking in a

looking-glass. Intensely sensitive by their very vitality, they are

certainly conscious of criticism and not merely of a blind and brutal

appetite. But the peculiar point about them is that it is this very

vividness in the self that often produces the similarity. It may be that

when they are unconscious they are like bulls and cows. But it is when

they are self-conscious that they are like each other.

Individualism is the death of individuality. It is so, if only because

it is an ‘ism.’ Many Americans become almost impersonal in their worship

of personality. Where their natural selves might differ, their ideal

selves tend to be the same. Anybody can see what I mean in those strong

self-conscious photographs of American business men that can be seen in

any American magazine. Each may conceive himself to be a solitary

Napoleon brooding at St. Helena; but the result is a multitude of

Napoleons brooding all over the place. Each of them must have the eyes

of a mesmerist; but the most weak-minded person cannot be mesmerised by

more than one millionaire at a time. Each of the millionaires must

thrust forward his jaw, offering (if I may say so) to fight the world

with the same weapon as Samson. Each of them must accentuate the length

of his chin, especially, of course, by always being completely

clean-shaven. It would be obviously inconsistent with Personality to

certamente un’incoerenza; ed è un’incoerenza nella struttura morale

dell’America che al tempo stesso mi sconcerta e mi diverte.

Il pericolo della democrazia non è l’anarchia ma la convenzione. Vi è perfino una

sorta di doppio senso nella parola «convenzione»; poiché essa è usata anche per

la specie più informale e popolare di parlamento; un parlamento non

convocato da alcun re. Gli americani si riuniscono assai facilmente senza

alcun re; ma il loro riunirsi è in ogni senso una convenzione, e

perfino una convenzione assai convenzionale. In una democrazia il tumulto è piuttosto

l’eccezione e la rispettabilità certamente la regola. E benché un

superficiale turista debba esitare dinanzi a tutte queste generalizzazioni,

e certamente debba fare la tara di enormi eccezioni ad esse, egli riceve

davvero un’impressione generale di unità rasente l’uniformità. Così

gli americani vestono tutti bene; si potrebbe quasi dire che le donne americane tutte

appaiono bene; ma non appaiono, in confronto agli europei, molto

diverse. Sono alla moda; troppo alla moda perfino per essere

vistosamente alla moda. Naturalmente vi sono chiazze, tanto boemienne

quanto babiloniche, per cui ciò non è vero, ma sto parlando del

tono generale d’un’intera democrazia. Ho detto che c’è più

rispettabilità che tumulto; ma in verità, in un senso più profondo, lo stesso spirito

sta dietro sia il tumulto sia la rispettabilità. È la stessa forza sociale che

rende possibile ai rispettabili di boicottare un uomo e ai

tumultuosi di linciarlo. Non ho nulla in contrario che la si chiami «l’istinto

del gregge», purché ci rendiamo conto che è una metafora e non una

spiegazione.

L’opinione pubblica può essere un incendio di prateria. Divora tutto ciò che le si

oppone; e vi è tanto la grandiosità quanto i gravi svantaggi d’una

catastrofe naturale in quella unità nazionale. I pacifisti che si lamentavano in

Inghilterra dell’intolleranza del patriottismo non hanno idea di ciò che

il patriottismo possa essere. Se fossero stati in America, dopo che l’America era

entrata in guerra, avrebbero visto qualcosa che hanno sempre

forse inconsciamente temuto, e che allora, al di là di tutti i loro

peggiori sogni, avrebbero detestato; e il suo nome è democrazia. Avrebbero

scoperto che vi sono svantaggi nel radunarsi insieme degli uccelli dello stesso

piumaggio; e che uno di essi segue a un troppo compiaciuto sventolare della

penna bianca. La verità è che una certa flessibile simpatia verso

gli eccentrici di questa specie è piuttosto uno dei vantaggi d’una

tradizione aristocratica. La carcerazione del signor Debs, il

pacifista americano, che davvero fu prolungata e oppressiva, sarebbe probabilmente stata

abbreviata in Inghilterra, dove le sue opinioni erano condivise da aristocratici

come il signor Bertrand Russell e il signor Ponsonby. Un uomo come Lord Hugh Cecil

poteva essere spinto alla difesa degli obiettori di coscienza, in parte da un

vero istinto di cavalleria; ma in parte anche dal sentimento generale che un

gentiluomo può assai probabilmente avere zie e zii altrettanto matti.

Egli prende la cosa personalmente, nel senso d’essere capace d’immaginare

la psicologia delle persone. Ma la democrazia non ha riguardo per le persone.

Non ne ha riguardo, né nel senso cattivo e servile né in quello buono

e comprensivo. E Debs non era nulla per la democrazia. Non era che uno

dei milioni. Questo è un problema reale, o questione in bilico,

che tocca diverse forme di governo; la quale è, naturalmente, del tutto

trascurata dagli idealisti che si limitano a ripetere paroloni. Vi fu

durante la guerra una società chiamata Union of Democratic Control, la quale

sarebbe stata istantaneamente distrutta ovunque la democrazia avesse un qualche

controllo, o dove vi fosse una qualsiasi unione. E in questo senso gli Stati

Uniti hanno assai enfaticamente un’unione. Nondimeno penso che vi sia

qualcosa di piuttosto più sottile di questa semplice solidità popolare dietro

l’assimilazione dei cittadini americani gli uni agli altri. Vi è qualcosa

perfino negli ideali individuali che spinge verso questa simpatia sociale.

Ed è qui che dobbiamo ricordare che le fantasie biologiche come l’

istinto del gregge sono soltanto figure retoriche, e non possono davvero coprire

nulla di umano. Poiché gli americani sono per certi versi un popolo assai consapevole di sé.

Paragonare il loro entusiasmo sociale a una fuga precipitosa di bestiame è

chiederci di credere in un toro che scrive un diario o in una vacca che si guarda in uno

specchio. Intensamente sensibili per la loro stessa vitalità, essi sono

certamente consci della critica e non solo d’un cieco e brutale

appetito. Ma il punto peculiare che li riguarda è che è proprio questa

vividezza nel sé a produrre spesso la somiglianza. Può darsi che

quando sono inconsapevoli siano simili a tori e vacche. Ma è quando

sono consapevoli di sé che sono simili l’uno all’altro.

L’individualismo è la morte dell’individualità. Lo è, non fosse che perché

è un «ismo». Molti americani divengono quasi impersonali nel loro culto

della personalità. Là dove i loro io naturali potrebbero differire, i loro io

ideali tendono a essere identici. Chiunque può vedere ciò che intendo in quelle vigorose

fotografie consapevoli di sé di uomini d’affari americani che si vedono in

qualsiasi rivista americana. Ciascuno può concepirsi come un solitario

Napoleone che medita a Sant’Elena; ma il risultato è una moltitudine di

Napoleoni che meditano dappertutto. Ciascuno di essi deve avere gli occhi

d’un mesmerista; ma la persona più debole di mente non può essere mesmerizzata da

più d’un milionario alla volta. Ciascuno dei milionari deve

protendere in avanti la mascella, offrendosi (se posso dir così) di combattere il mondo

con la stessa arma di Sansone. Ciascuno di essi deve accentuare la lunghezza

del proprio mento, specialmente, si capisce, mostrandosi sempre completamente

sbarbato. Sarebbe evidentemente incoerente con la Personalità

prefer to wear a beard. These are of course fantastic examples on the

fringe of American life; but they do stand for a certain assimilation,

not through brute gregariousness, but rather through isolated dreaming.

And though it is not always carried so far as this, I do think it is

carried too far. There is not quite enough unconsciousness to produce

real individuality. There is a sort of worship of will-power in the

abstract, so that people are actually thinking about how they can will,

more than about what they want. To this I do think a certain corrective

could be found in the nature of English eccentricity. Every man in his

humour is most interesting when he is unconscious of his humour; or at

least when he is in an intermediate stage between humour in the old

sense of oddity and in the new sense of irony. Much is said in these

days against negative morality; and certainly most Americans would show

a positive preference for positive morality. The virtues they venerate

collectively are very active virtues; cheerfulness and courage and vim,

otherwise zip, also pep and similar things. But it is sometimes

forgotten that negative morality is freer than positive morality.

Negative morality is a net of a larger and more open pattern, of which

the lines or cords constrict at longer intervals. A man like Dr. Johnson

could grow in his own way to his own stature in the net of the Ten

Commandments; precisely because he was convinced there were only ten of

them. He was not compressed into the mould of positive beauty, like

that of the Apollo Belvedere or the American citizen.

This criticism is sometimes true even of the American woman, who is

certainly a much more delightful person than the mesmeric millionaire

with his shaven jaw. Interviewers in the United States perpetually asked

me what I thought of American women, and I confessed a distaste for such

generalisations which I have not managed to lose. The Americans, who are

the most chivalrous people in the world, may perhaps understand me; but

I can never help feeling that there is something polygamous about

talking of women in the plural at all; something unworthy of any

American except a Mormon. Nevertheless, I think the exaggeration I

suggest does extend in a less degree to American women, fascinating as

they are. I think they too tend too much to this cult of impersonal

personality. It is a description easy to exaggerate even by the faintest

emphasis; for all these things are subtle and subject to striking

individual exceptions. To complain of people for being brave and bright

and kind and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. And

yet there is something in the background that can only be expressed by a

symbol, something that is not shallowness but a neglect of the

subconsciousness and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that can

be missed amid all that laughter and light, under those starry

candelabra of the ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came over

me, in a wordless wave, that I should like to see a sulky woman. How she

would walk in beauty like the night, and reveal more silent spaces full

of older stars! These things cannot be conveyed in their delicate

proportion even in the most detached description. But the same thing

was in the mind of a white-bearded old man I met in New York, an Irish

exile and a wonderful talker, who stared up at the tower of gilded

galleries of the great hotel, and said with that spontaneous movement of

style which is hardly heard except from Irish talkers: ‘And I have been

in a village in the mountains where the people could hardly read or

write; but all the men were like soldiers, and all the women had pride.’

It sounds like a poem about an Earthly Paradise to say that in this land

the old women can be more beautiful than the young. Indeed, I think Walt

Whitman, the national poet, has a line somewhere almost precisely to

that effect. It sounds like a parody upon Utopia, and the image of the

lion lying down with the lamb, to say it is a place where a man might

almost fall in love with his mother-in-law. But there is nothing in

which the finer side of American gravity and good feeling does more

honourably exhibit itself than in a certain atmosphere around the older

women. It is not a cant phrase to say that they grow old gracefully; for

they do really grow old. In this the national optimism really has in it

the national courage. The old women do not dress like young women; they

only dress better. There is another side to this feminine dignity in the

old, sometimes a little lost in the young, with which I shall deal

presently. The point for the moment is that even Whitman’s truly poetic

vision of the beautiful old women suffers a little from that bewildering

multiplicity and recurrence that is indeed the whole theme of Whitman.

It is like the green eternity of Leaves of Grass. When I think of the

eccentric spinsters and incorrigible grandmothers of my own country, I

cannot imagine that any one of them could possibly be mistaken for

another, even at a glance. And in comparison I feel as if I had been

travelling in an Earthly Paradise of more decorative harmonies; and I

remember only a vast cloud of grey and pink as of the plumage of

cherubim in an old picture. But on second thoughts, I think this may be

only the inevitable effect of visiting any country in a swift and

superficial fashion; and that the grey and pink cloud is probably an

illusion, like the spinning prairies scattered by the wheel of the

train.

Anyhow there is enough of this equality, and of a certain social unity

favourable to sanity, to make the next point about America very much of

a puzzle. It seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never seen

preferire di portare la barba. Questi sono naturalmente esempi fantastici ai

margini della vita americana; ma stanno pur sempre per una certa assimilazione,

non attraverso la bruta gregarietà, ma piuttosto attraverso il sognare isolato.

E benché non sempre sia spinto tanto oltre quanto questo, penso proprio che sia

spinto troppo oltre. Non c’è abbastanza inconsapevolezza per produrre

una vera individualità. C’è una sorta di culto della forza di volontà nell’

astratto, tanto che la gente pensa davvero a come possa volere,

più che a ciò che vuole. A questo penso proprio che un certo correttivo

si potrebbe trovare nella natura dell’eccentricità inglese. Ogni uomo nel suo

umore è più interessante quando è inconsapevole del suo umore; o almeno

quando è in uno stadio intermedio tra l’umore nel vecchio

senso di stranezza e in quello nuovo di ironia. Molto si dice in questi

giorni contro la morale negativa; e certamente la maggior parte degli americani mostrerebbe

una positiva preferenza per la morale positiva. Le virtù che venerano

collettivamente sono virtù assai attive; allegria e coraggio e vim,

ossia zip, e anche pep e cose simili. Ma talora si

dimentica che la morale negativa è più libera della morale positiva.

La morale negativa è una rete d’un disegno più ampio e più aperto, di cui

le linee o le corde stringono a intervalli più lunghi. Un uomo come il Dr. Johnson

poteva crescere a modo suo fino alla propria statura nella rete dei Dieci

Comandamenti; proprio perché era convinto che ce ne fossero soltanto dieci

in tutto. Non era compresso nello stampo della bellezza positiva, come

quello dell’Apollo del Belvedere o del cittadino americano.

Questa critica è talora vera anche della donna americana, che è

certamente una persona assai più deliziosa del mesmerico milionario

con la sua mascella rasata. Gli intervistatori negli Stati Uniti mi chiedevano di continuo

cosa pensassi delle donne americane, e confessavo un’avversione per tali

generalizzazioni che non sono riuscito a perdere. Gli americani, che sono

il popolo più cavalleresco del mondo, forse potranno capirmi; ma

non posso fare a meno di sentire che c’è qualcosa di poligamo nel

parlare affatto delle donne al plurale; qualcosa d’indegno d’ogni

americano tranne un mormone. Nondimeno, penso che l’esagerazione che

suggerisco si estenda in minor grado alle donne americane, per quanto affascinanti

esse siano. Penso che anch’esse tendano troppo a questo culto dell’impersonale

personalità. È una descrizione facile a esagerarsi anche col più tenue

accento; poiché tutte queste cose sono sottili e soggette a notevoli

eccezioni individuali. Lagnarsi della gente perché è coraggiosa e brillante

e gentile e intelligente può non irragionevolmente apparire irragionevole. E

eppure c’è qualcosa sullo sfondo che può essere espresso soltanto da un

simbolo, qualcosa che non è superficialità ma una trascuratezza del

subconscio e degli impulsi più vaghi e più lenti; qualcosa che può

andar perduto in mezzo a tutta quella risata e quella luce, sotto quei

candelabri stellati degli ideali delle virtù felici. Talora mi assaliva,

in un’ondata senza parole, il desiderio di vedere una donna imbronciata. Come

camminerebbe in bellezza come la notte, e rivelerebbe più silenziosi spazi colmi

di più antiche stelle! Queste cose non si possono trasmettere nella loro delicata

proporzione nemmeno nella più distaccata descrizione. Ma la stessa cosa

era nella mente d’un vecchio dalla barba bianca che incontrai a New York, un

esule irlandese e un meraviglioso parlatore, che fissava in alto la torre di gallerie dorate

del grande albergo, e diceva con quel movimento spontaneo di

stile che a stento si ode se non dai parlatori irlandesi: «E io sono stato

in un villaggio sui monti dove la gente sapeva a stento leggere o

scrivere; ma tutti gli uomini erano come soldati, e tutte le donne avevano orgoglio».

Suona come una poesia su un Paradiso Terrestre dire che in questa terra

le vecchie possono essere più belle delle giovani. Anzi, penso che Walt

Whitman, il poeta nazionale, abbia da qualche parte un verso quasi precisamente in

tal senso. Suona come una parodia dell’Utopia, e l’immagine del

leone che si corica accanto all’agnello, dire che è un luogo dove un uomo potrebbe

quasi provare amore per la propria suocera. Ma non c’è nulla in

cui il lato più fine della gravità e del buon sentimento americani si esibisca più

onorevolmente che in una certa atmosfera intorno alle donne più

anziane. Non è una frase fatta dire che invecchiano con grazia; poiché

invecchiano davvero. In questo l’ottimismo nazionale ha davvero in sé

il coraggio nazionale. Le vecchie non vestono come le giovani; si

vestono soltanto meglio. C’è un altro lato di questa dignità femminile nelle

vecchie, talora un poco perduto nelle giovani, di cui mi occuperò

fra poco. Il punto per il momento è che perfino la visione veramente poetica

che Whitman ha delle belle vecchie soffre un poco di quella sconcertante

molteplicità e ricorrenza che è invero l’intero tema di Whitman.

È come la verde eternità di Leaves of Grass. Quando penso alle

eccentriche zitelle e alle incorreggibili nonne del mio stesso paese, io

non riesco a immaginare che una qualsiasi di esse possa mai essere scambiata per

un’altra, anche a un’occhiata. E in confronto mi sento come se avessi

viaggiato in un Paradiso Terrestre di armonie più decorative; e

ricordo soltanto una vasta nube di grigio e di rosa come il piumaggio di

cherubini in un vecchio quadro. Ma ripensandoci, penso che ciò possa essere

soltanto l’inevitabile effetto del visitare un qualsiasi paese in modo rapido e

superficiale; e che la nube grigia e rosa sia probabilmente un’

illusione, come le praterie roteanti disperse dalla ruota del

treno.

Comunque c’è abbastanza di questa uguaglianza, e d’una certa unità sociale

favorevole alla sanità mentale, da fare del prossimo punto sull’America un vero e proprio

rompicapo. Mi sembra un problema assai reale, al quale non ho mai visto

an answer even such as I shall attempt here, why a democracy should

produce fads; and why, where there is so genuine a sense of human

dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny. I am

not referring solely or even specially to Prohibition, which I discuss

elsewhere. Prohibition is at least a superstition, and therefore next

door to a religion; it has some imaginable connection with moral

questions, as have slavery or human sacrifice. But those who ask us to

model ourselves on the States which punish the sin of drink forget that

there are States which punish the equally shameless sin of smoking a

cigarette in the open air. The same American atmosphere that permits

Prohibition permits of people being punished for kissing each other. In

other words, there are States psychologically capable of making a man a

convict for wearing a blue neck-tie or having a green front-door, or

anything else that anybody chooses to fancy. There is an American

atmosphere in which people may some day be shot for shaking hands, or

hanged for writing a post-card.

As for the sort of thing to which I refer, the American newspapers are

full of it and there is no name for it but mere madness. Indeed it is

not only mad, but it calls itself mad. To mention but one example out of

many, it was actually boasted that some lunatics were teaching children

to take care of their health. And it was proudly added that the children

were ‘health-mad.’ That it is not exactly the object of all mental

hygiene to make people mad did not occur to them; and they may still be

engaged in their earnest labours to teach babies to be valetudinarians

and hypochondriacs in order to make them healthy. In such cases, we may

say that the modern world is too ridiculous to be ridiculed. You cannot

caricature a caricature. Imagine what a satirist of saner days would

have made of the daily life of a child of six, who was actually admitted

to be mad on the subject of his own health. These are not days in which

that great extravaganza could be written; but I dimly see some of its

episodes like uncompleted dreams. I see the child pausing in the middle

of a cart-wheel, or when he has performed three-quarters of a

cart-wheel, and consulting a little note-book about the amount of

exercise per diem. I see him pausing half-way up a tree, or when he has

climbed exactly one-third of a tree; and then producing a clinical

thermometer to take his own temperature. But what would be the good of

imaginative logic to prove the madness of such people, when they

themselves praise it for being mad?

There is also the cult of the Infant Phenomenon, of which Dickens made

fun and of which educationalists make fusses. When I was in America

another newspaper produced a marvellous child of six who had the

intellect of a child of twelve. The only test given, and apparently one

on which the experiment turned, was that she could be made to understand

and even to employ the word ‘annihilate.’ When asked to say something

proving this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism, ‘When

common sense comes in, superstition is annihilated.’ In reply to which,

by way of showing that I also am as intelligent as a child of twelve,

and there is no arrested development about me, I will say in the same

elegant diction, ‘When psychological education comes in, common sense is

annihilated.’ Everybody seems to be sitting round this child in an

adoring fashion. It did not seem to occur to anybody that we do not

particularly want even a child of twelve to talk about annihilating

superstition; that we do not want a child of six to talk like a child of

twelve, or a child of twelve to talk like a man of fifty, or even a man

of fifty to talk like a fool. And on the principle of hoping that a

little girl of six will have a massive and mature brain, there is every

reason for hoping that a little boy of six will grow a magnificent and

bushy beard.

Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American

cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce

psychoanalysis—that is, enforce confession without absolution. And I

confess I cannot connect this feature with the genuine democratic spirit

of the mass. I can only suggest, in concluding this chapter, two

possible causes rather peculiar to America, which may have made this

great democracy so unlike all other democracies, and in this so

manifestly hostile to the whole democratic idea.

The first historical cause is Puritanism; but not Puritanism merely in

the sense of Prohibitionism. The truth is that prohibitions might have

done far less harm as prohibitions, if a vague association had not

arisen, on some dark day of human unreason, between prohibition and

progress. And it was the progress that did the harm, not the

prohibition. Men can enjoy life under considerable limitations, if they

can be sure of their limited enjoyments; but under Progressive

Puritanism we can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is not

limitation; it is unlimited limitation. The evil is not in the

restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever restrict the

restriction. The prohibitions are bound to progress point by point; more

and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for

it is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of

the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thus

the worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so much

Puritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but

by subdivision. It not only broke religion into small pieces, but it was

una risposta nemmeno quale quella che tenterò qui, del perché una democrazia debba

produrre manie; e perché, dove c’è un senso tanto genuino della dignità

umana, debba esservi tanta impossibile piccola tirannide. Io non

mi riferisco unicamente o nemmeno specialmente al Proibizionismo, che discuto

altrove. Il Proibizionismo è almeno una superstizione, e perciò a un passo

da una religione; ha una qualche immaginabile connessione con questioni

morali, come l’hanno la schiavitù o il sacrificio umano. Ma coloro che ci chiedono di

modellarci sugli Stati che puniscono il peccato del bere dimenticano che

vi sono Stati che puniscono l’egualmente svergognato peccato di fumare una

sigaretta all’aria aperta. La stessa atmosfera americana che permette

il Proibizionismo permette che le persone siano punite per essersi baciate. In

altre parole, vi sono Stati psicologicamente capaci di rendere un uomo un

detenuto per aver portato una cravatta blu o avuto una porta d’ingresso verde, o

qualsiasi altra cosa che a chiunque salti in mente. Vi è un’atmosfera

americana in cui le persone potranno un giorno essere fucilate per essersi strette la mano, o

impiccate per aver scritto una cartolina.

Quanto alla specie di cose cui mi riferisco, i giornali americani ne sono

pieni e non c’è altro nome per essa se non pura follia. Anzi, essa non è

soltanto folle, ma si proclama folle. Per menzionare un solo esempio fra

molti, ci si vantava davvero che certi pazzi insegnassero ai bambini

a prendersi cura della propria salute. E si aggiungeva con orgoglio che i bambini

erano «pazzi per la salute». Che non sia esattamente lo scopo di ogni

igiene mentale rendere folli le persone non venne loro in mente; e possono essere ancora

impegnati nelle loro serie fatiche a insegnare ai lattanti a essere valetudinari

e ipocondriaci allo scopo di renderli sani. In casi simili, possiamo

dire che il mondo moderno è troppo ridicolo per essere ridicolizzato. Non si può

fare la caricatura d’una caricatura. Immaginate cosa avrebbe fatto un satirico di giorni più sani

della vita quotidiana d’un bambino di sei anni, che era davvero ammesso

essere pazzo sul tema della propria salute. Questi non sono giorni in cui

quella grande stravaganza potrebbe essere scritta; ma ne intravedo confusamente alcuni

episodi come sogni incompiuti. Vedo il bambino che s’arresta nel mezzo

d’una ruota, o quando ne ha eseguiti tre quarti d’una

ruota, e consulta un taccuino circa la quantità di

esercizio per diem. Lo vedo che s’arresta a metà d’un albero, o quando ne ha

scalato esattamente un terzo; e poi tira fuori un termometro

clinico per misurarsi la temperatura. Ma a che gioverebbe una

logica fantasiosa a provare la follia di tali persone, quando esse

stesse la lodano per essere folle?

C’è anche il culto del Fenomeno Infantile, di cui Dickens si fece

beffe e di cui i pedagoghi fanno gran chiasso. Quando ero in America

un altro giornale presentò un meraviglioso bambino di sei anni che aveva l’

intelletto d’un bambino di dodici. L’unica prova fornita, e apparentemente quella

su cui verteva l’esperimento, era che le si poteva far comprendere

e perfino impiegare la parola «annientare». Richiesta di dire qualcosa

che lo provasse, la felice infante offrì il forbito aforisma: «Quando

entra il buon senso, la superstizione è annientata». In risposta a ciò,

per mostrare che anch’io sono intelligente quanto un bambino di dodici anni,

e che non c’è in me alcuno sviluppo arrestato, dirò nella stessa

elegante dizione: «Quando entra l’educazione psicologica, il buon senso è

annientato». Tutti sembrano sedere attorno a questo bambino in maniera

adorante. A nessuno sembrò venire in mente che noi non

desideriamo particolarmente che nemmeno un bambino di dodici anni parli d’annientare la

superstizione; che non desideriamo che un bambino di sei parli come un bambino di

dodici, o un bambino di dodici parli come un uomo di cinquanta, o perfino un uomo

di cinquanta parli come uno sciocco. E sul principio di sperare che una

bambina di sei anni abbia un cervello massiccio e maturo, c’è ogni

ragione di sperare che un bambino di sei anni faccia crescere una magnifica e

folta barba.

Ora, c’è ogni quantità di questa insensatezza che spunta tra gli esaltati

americani. Chiunque può proporre d’istituire un’eugenetica coercitiva; o d’imporre

la psicoanalisi — cioè imporre la confessione senza l’assoluzione. E

confesso di non poter collegare questo tratto col genuino spirito democratico

della massa. Posso solo suggerire, concludendo questo capitolo, due

possibili cause piuttosto peculiari all’America, che possono aver reso questa

grande democrazia così diversa da tutte le altre democrazie, e in ciò così

manifestamente ostile all’intera idea democratica.

La prima causa storica è il puritanesimo; ma non il puritanesimo soltanto nel

senso del Proibizionismo. La verità è che le proibizioni avrebbero potuto

fare assai meno danno come proibizioni, se un vago legame non fosse

sorto, in qualche cupo giorno dell’irragionevolezza umana, tra proibizione e

progresso. E fu il progresso a fare il danno, non la

proibizione. Gli uomini possono godere della vita sotto considerevoli limitazioni, se

possono essere certi dei loro piaceri limitati; ma sotto il

puritanesimo progressista non possiamo mai essere certi di nulla. La sua maledizione non è la

limitazione; è la limitazione illimitata. Il male non sta nella

restrizione; ma nel fatto che nulla può mai restringere la

restrizione. Le proibizioni sono destinate a progredire punto per punto; sempre

più diritti e piaceri umani devono per necessità essere tolti; poiché

è nella natura di questo futurismo che l’ultima mania sia la fede del

futuro, e la mania più fantastica inevitabilmente detta il passo. Così

la cosa peggiore nell’aberrazione del diciassettesimo secolo non fu tanto

il puritanesimo quanto il settarismo. Cercava la verità non per sintesi ma

per suddivisione. Non solo spezzava la religione in piccoli pezzi, ma era

bound to choose the smallest piece. There is in America, I believe, a

large religious body that has felt it right to separate itself from

Christendom because it cannot believe in the morality of wearing

buttons. I do not know how the schism arose; but it is easy to suppose,

for the sake of argument, that there had originally existed some Puritan

body which condemned the frivolity of ribbons though not of buttons. I

was going to say of badges but not buttons; but on reflection I cannot

bring myself to believe that any American, however insane, would object

to wearing badges. But the point is that as the holy spirit of

progressive prophesy rested on the first sect because it had invented a

new objection to ribbons, so that holy spirit would then pass from it to

the new sect who invented a further objection to buttons. And from them

it must inevitably pass to any rebel among them who shall choose to rise

and say that he disapproves of trousers because of the existence of

trouser-buttons. Each secession in turn must be right because it is

recent, and progress must progress by growing smaller and smaller. That

is the progressive theory, the legacy of seventeenth-century

sectarianism, the dogma implied in much modern politics, and the evident

enemy of democracy. Democracy is reproached with saying that the

majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always

right. Progressives are prophets; and fortunately not all the people are

prophets. Thus in the atmosphere of this slowly dying sectarianism

anybody who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannise over the

people. If he chooses to say that drinking is always wrong, or that

kissing is always wrong, or that wearing buttons is always wrong, people

are afraid to contradict him for fear they should be contradicting their

own great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion of the

ancestor-worship of China; and instead of vainly appealing to something

that is dead, they appeal to something that may never be born.

There is another cause of this strange servile disease in American

democracy. It is to be found in American feminism, and feminist America

is an entirely different thing from feminine America. I should say that

the overwhelming majority of American girls laugh at their female

politicians at least as much as the majority of American men despise

their male politicians. But though the aggressive feminists are a

minority, they are in this atmosphere which I have tried to analyse; the

atmosphere in which there is a sort of sanctity about the minority. And

it is this superstition of seriousness that constitutes the most solid

obstacle and exception to the general and almost conventional pressure

of public opinion. When a fad is frankly felt to be anti-national, as

was Abolitionism before the Civil War, or Pro-Germanism in the Great

War, or the suggestion of racial admixture in the South at all times,

then the fad meets far less mercy than anywhere else in the world; it is

snowed under and swept away. But when it does not thus directly

challenge patriotism or popular ideas, a curious halo of hopeful

solemnity surrounds it, merely because it is a fad, but above all if it

is a feminine fad. The earnest lady-reformer who really utters a warning

against the social evil of beer or buttons is seen to be walking clothed

in light, like a prophetess. Perhaps it is something of the holy aureole

which the East sees shining around an idiot.

But I think there is another explanation, feminine rather than feminist,

and proceeding from normal women and not from abnormal idiots. It is

something that involves an old controversy, but one upon which I have

not, like so many politicians, changed my opinion. It concerns the

particular fashion in which women tend to regard, or rather to

disregard, the formal and legal rights of the citizen. In so far as this

is a bias, it is a bias in the directly opposite direction from that now

lightly alleged. There is a sort of underbred history going about,

according to which women in the past have always been in the position of

slaves. It is much more to the point to note that women have always been

in the position of despots. They have been despotic because they ruled

in an area where they had too much common sense to attempt to be

constitutional. You cannot grant a constitution to a nursery; nor can

babies assemble like barons and extort a Great Charter. Tommy cannot

plead a Habeas Corpus against going to bed; and an infant cannot be

tried by twelve other infants before he is put in the corner. And as

there can be no laws or liberties in a nursery, the extension of

feminism means that there shall be no more laws or liberties in a state

than there are in a nursery. The woman does not really regard men as

citizens but as children. She may, if she is a humanitarian, love all

mankind; but she does not respect it. Still less does she respect its

votes. Now a man must be very blind nowadays not to see that there is a

danger of a sort of amateur science or pseudo-science being made the

excuse for every trick of tyranny and interference. Anybody who is not

an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street;

but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down

the chimney or even under the bed. In other words, it is a danger of

turning the policeman into a sort of benevolent burglar. Against this

protests are already being made, and will increasingly be made, if men

retain any instinct of independence or dignity at all. But to complain

of the woman interfering in the home will always sound like complaining

of the oyster intruding into the oyster-shell. To object that she has

too much power over education will seem like objecting to a hen having

too much to do with eggs. She has already been given an almost

costretto a scegliere il pezzo più piccolo. C’è in America, credo, un

grande corpo religioso che ha ritenuto giusto separarsi dalla

Cristianità perché non può credere nella moralità del portare

bottoni. Non so come sorse lo scisma; ma è facile supporre,

per amor d’argomento, che fosse originariamente esistito qualche

corpo puritano che condannava la frivolezza dei nastri sebbene non dei bottoni. Io

stavo per dire dei distintivi ma non dei bottoni; ma a ben riflettere non

riesco a indurmi a credere che un qualsiasi americano, per quanto folle, obietterebbe

a portare distintivi. Ma il punto è che come lo spirito santo della

profezia progressista posava sulla prima setta perché aveva inventato una

nuova obiezione ai nastri, così quello spirito santo passerebbe poi da essa alla

nuova setta che inventò un’ulteriore obiezione ai bottoni. E da essi

deve inevitabilmente passare a ogni ribelle fra loro che scelga d’alzarsi

e a dire che disapprova i pantaloni per via dell’esistenza dei

bottoni dei pantaloni. Ogni secessione a sua volta deve aver ragione perché è

recente, e il progresso deve progredire facendosi sempre più piccolo. Questa

è la teoria progressista, il lascito del settarismo del diciassettesimo

secolo, il dogma implicito in molta politica moderna, ed il palese

nemico della democrazia. La democrazia è rimproverata di dire che la

maggioranza ha sempre ragione. Ma il progresso dice che la minoranza ha sempre

ragione. I progressisti sono profeti; e per fortuna non tutte le persone sono

profeti. Così nell’atmosfera di questo settarismo che lentamente muore

chiunque scelga di profetare e proibire può tiranneggiare il

popolo. Se sceglie di dire che il bere è sempre male, o che

il baciarsi è sempre male, o che portare bottoni è sempre male, le persone

hanno paura di contraddirlo per timore di contraddire il loro

stesso pronipote. Poiché la loro superstizione è un’inversione del

culto degli antenati della Cina; e invece di appellarsi invano a qualcosa

che è morto, si appellano a qualcosa che potrebbe non nascere mai.

C’è un’altra causa di questa strana malattia servile nella

democrazia americana. La si trova nel femminismo americano, e l’America femminista

è cosa del tutto diversa dall’America femminile. Direi che

la stragrande maggioranza delle ragazze americane ride delle proprie

politiche donne almeno quanto la maggioranza degli uomini americani disprezza

i propri politici uomini. Ma benché le femministe aggressive siano una

minoranza, esse sono in questa atmosfera che ho cercato d’analizzare; l’

atmosfera in cui c’è una sorta di santità attorno alla minoranza. Ed

è questa superstizione della serietà a costituire il più solido

ostacolo ed eccezione alla generale e quasi convenzionale pressione

dell’opinione pubblica. Quando una mania è francamente sentita come antinazionale, come

lo fu l’Abolizionismo prima della Guerra Civile, o il Germanofilismo nella Grande

Guerra, o l’idea della mescolanza razziale nel Sud in ogni tempo,

allora la mania incontra assai minor pietà che in qualsiasi altro luogo del mondo; è

sepolta sotto la neve e spazzata via. Ma quando essa non sfida così direttamente

il patriottismo o le idee popolari, un curioso alone di speranzosa

solennità la circonda, semplicemente perché è una mania, ma soprattutto se è

una mania femminile. La zelante dama-riformatrice che davvero pronuncia un ammonimento

contro il male sociale della birra o dei bottoni è vista camminare vestita

di luce, come una profetessa. Forse è qualcosa della santa aureola

che l’Oriente vede risplendere attorno a un idiota.

Ma penso che vi sia un’altra spiegazione, femminile piuttosto che femminista,

e che proviene da donne normali e non da idiote anormali. È

qualcosa che implica una vecchia controversia, ma una su cui io

non ho, come tanti politici, cambiato opinione. Riguarda il

particolare modo in cui le donne tendono a considerare, o piuttosto a

trascurare, i formali e legali diritti del cittadino. Nella misura in cui questo

è una tendenza, è una tendenza nella direzione direttamente opposta a quella ora

leggermente asserita. C’è in giro una sorta di storia malcreata,

secondo la quale le donne in passato sono sempre state nella posizione di

schiave. È assai più pertinente notare che le donne sono sempre state

nella posizione di despoti. Sono state dispotiche perché regnavano

in un ambito dove avevano troppo buon senso per tentare d’essere

costituzionali. Non si può concedere una costituzione a una stanza dei bambini; né i

lattanti possono radunarsi come baroni ed estorcere una Magna Charta. Tommy non può

invocare un Habeas Corpus contro l’andare a letto; e un neonato non può essere

giudicato da altri dodici neonati prima d’essere messo in castigo nell’angolo. E poiché

non possono esservi leggi né libertà in una stanza dei bambini, l’estensione del

femminismo significa che non vi saranno più leggi o libertà in uno stato

di quante ve ne siano in una stanza dei bambini. La donna non considera davvero gli uomini come

cittadini ma come bambini. Ella può, se è una filantropa, amare tutta

l’umanità; ma non la rispetta. Ancor meno rispetta i suoi

voti. Ora, un uomo dev’essere assai cieco al giorno d’oggi per non vedere che c’è un

pericolo che una sorta di scienza dilettantesca o pseudoscienza sia fatta

scusa per ogni trucco di tirannide e ingerenza. Chiunque non sia

un anarchico è d’accordo nell’avere un poliziotto all’angolo della strada;

ma il pericolo al presente è quello di trovare il poliziotto a metà

del camino o perfino sotto il letto. In altre parole, è un pericolo di

trasformare il poliziotto in una sorta di benevolo scassinatore. Contro ciò

già si levano proteste, e sempre più se ne leveranno, se gli uomini

conservano un qualsiasi istinto d’indipendenza o di dignità. Ma lagnarsi

della donna che s’immischia nella casa suonerà sempre come lagnarsi

dell’ostrica che s’intrude nel guscio dell’ostrica. Obiettare che ella ha

troppo potere sull’educazione parrà come obiettare che una gallina abbia

troppo a che fare con le uova. Le è già stato dato un quasi

irresponsible power over a limited region in these things; and if that

power is made infinite it will be even more irresponsible. If she adds

to her own power in the family all these alien fads external to the

family, her power will not only be irresponsible but insane. She will be

something which may well be called a nightmare of the nursery; a mad

mother. But the point is that she will be mad about other nurseries as

well as her own, or possibly instead of her own. The results will be

interesting; but at least it is certain that under this softening

influence government of the people, by the people, for the people, will

most assuredly perish from the earth.

But there is always another possibility. Hints of it may be noted here

and there like muffled gongs of doom. The other day some people

preaching some low trick or other, for running away from the glory of

motherhood, were suddenly silenced in New York; by a voice of deep and

democratic volume. The prigs who potter about the great plains are

pygmies dancing round a sleeping giant. That which sleeps, so far as

they are concerned, is the huge power of human unanimity and intolerance

in the soul of America. At present the masses in the Middle West are

indifferent to such fancies or faintly attracted by them, as fashions of

culture from the great cities. But any day it may not be so; some

lunatic may cut across their economic rights or their strange and buried

religion; and then he will see something. He will find himself running

like a nigger who has wronged a white woman or a man who has set the

prairie on fire. He will see something which the politicians fan in its

sleep and flatter with the name of the people, which many reactionaries

have cursed with the name of the mob, but which in any case has had

under its feet the crowns of many kings. It was said that the voice of

the people is the voice of God; and this at least is certain, that it

can be the voice of God to the wicked. And the last antics of their

arrogance shall stiffen before something enormous, such as towers in the

last words that Job heard out of the whirlwind; and a voice they never

knew shall tell them that his name is Leviathan, and he is lord over all

the children of pride.

The Extraordinary American

When I was in America I had the feeling that it was far more foreign

than France or even than Ireland. And by foreign I mean fascinating

rather than repulsive. I mean that element of strangeness which marks

the frontier of any fairyland, or gives to the traveller himself the

almost eerie title of the stranger. And I saw there more clearly than in

countries counted as more remote from us, in race or religion, a paradox

that is one of the great truths of travel.

We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found

something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character

easy to read, we are reading into it our own character. If when we see

an event we can promptly provide an explanation, we may be pretty

certain that we had ourselves prepared the explanation before we saw the

event. It follows from this that the best picture of a foreign people

can probably be found in a puzzle picture. If we can find an event of

which the meaning is really dark to us, it will probably throw some

light on the truth. I will therefore take from my American experiences

one isolated incident, which certainly could not have happened in any

other country I have ever clapped eyes on. I have really no notion of

what it meant. I have heard even from Americans about five different

conjectures about its meaning. But though I do not understand it, I do

sincerely believe that if I did understand it, I should understand

America.

It happened in the city of Oklahoma, which would require a book to

itself, even considered as a background. The State of Oklahoma is a

district in the south-west recently reclaimed from the Red Indian

territory. What many, quite incorrectly, imagine about all America is

really true of Oklahoma. It is proud of having no history. It is glowing

with the sense of having a great future—and nothing else. People are

just as likely to boast of an old building in Nashville as in Norwich;

people are just as proud of old families in Boston as in Bath. But in

Oklahoma the citizens do point out a colossal structure, arrogantly

affirming that it wasn’t there last week. It was against the colours of

this crude stage scenery, as of a pantomime city of pasteboard, that the

fantastic figure appeared which still haunts me like a walking note of

interrogation. I was strolling down the main street of the city, and

looking in at a paper-stall vivid with the news of crime, when a

stranger addressed me; and asked me, quite politely but with a curious

air of having authority to put the question, what I was doing in that

city.

He was a lean brown man, having rather the look of a shabby tropical

traveller, with a grey moustache and a lively and alert eye. But the

most singular thing about him was that the front of his coat was covered

with a multitude of shining metallic emblems made in the shape of stars

and crescents. I was well accustomed by this time to Americans adorning

the lapels of their coats with little symbols of various societies; it

is a part of the American passion for the ritual of comradeship. There

is nothing that an American likes so much as to have a secret society

and to make no secret of it. But in this case, if I may put it so, the

rash of symbolism seemed to have broken out all over the man, in a

fashion that indicated that the fever was far advanced. Of this minor

mystery, however, his first few sentences offered a provisional

explanation. In answer to his question, touching my business in

irresponsabile potere su una regione limitata in queste cose; e se quel

potere è reso infinito sarà ancor più irresponsabile. Se ella aggiunge

al proprio potere nella famiglia tutte queste manie aliene esterne alla

famiglia, il suo potere non solo sarà irresponsabile ma folle. Ella sarà

qualcosa che può bene essere chiamato un incubo della stanza dei bambini; una

madre folle. Ma il punto è che sarà folle per le altre stanze dei bambini così

come per la propria, o forse invece della propria. I risultati saranno

interessanti; ma almeno è certo che sotto questa influenza

ammorbidente il governo del popolo, da parte del popolo, per il popolo,

assai sicuramente perirà dalla terra.

Ma c’è sempre un’altra possibilità. Se ne possono notare cenni qua

e là come attutiti gong del fato. L’altro giorno certe persone

che predicavano un qualche basso espediente, per fuggire dalla gloria della

maternità, furono improvvisamente zittite a New York; da una voce di profondo e

democratico volume. I saccenti che gironzolano per le grandi pianure sono

pigmei che danzano intorno a un gigante addormentato. Ciò che dorme, per quanto

li riguarda, è l’immane potere dell’unanimità e dell’intolleranza umane

nell’anima dell’America. Al presente le masse del Middle West sono

indifferenti a tali fantasie o debolmente attratte da esse, come mode di

cultura provenienti dalle grandi città. Ma un giorno qualsiasi può non essere così; qualche

pazzo può tagliare attraverso i loro diritti economici o la loro strana e sepolta

religione; e allora egli vedrà qualcosa. Si troverà a correre

come un negro che ha fatto torto a una donna bianca o un uomo che ha dato

fuoco alla prateria. Vedrà qualcosa che i politici attizzano nel suo

sonno e lusingano col nome di popolo, che molti reazionari

hanno maledetto col nome di plebaglia, ma che in ogni caso ha avuto

sotto i piedi le corone di molti re. Fu detto che la voce del

popolo è la voce di Dio; e questo almeno è certo, che essa

può essere la voce di Dio ai malvagi. E le ultime buffonate della loro

arroganza s’irrigidiranno dinanzi a qualcosa d’enorme, come torreggia nelle

ultime parole che Giobbe udì dal turbine; e una voce che essi mai

conobbero dirà loro che il suo nome è Leviatano, ed egli è signore su tutti

i figli dell’orgoglio.

Lo straordinario americano

Quando ero in America avevo la sensazione che fosse assai più straniera

della Francia o perfino dell’Irlanda. E per straniera intendo affascinante

piuttosto che ripugnante. Intendo quell’elemento di stranezza che segna

la frontiera d’ogni fiaba, o dà al viaggiatore stesso il

titolo quasi inquietante di straniero. E vi vidi più chiaramente che in

paesi ritenuti più remoti da noi, per razza o religione, un paradosso

che è una delle grandi verità del viaggio.

Non abbiamo mai nemmeno cominciato a capire un popolo finché non abbiamo trovato

qualcosa che non capiamo. Finché troviamo il carattere

facile da leggere, vi stiamo leggendo il nostro proprio carattere. Se, quando vediamo

un evento, sappiamo prontamente fornire una spiegazione, possiamo essere quasi

certi d’aver noi stessi preparato la spiegazione prima di vedere l’

evento. Ne consegue che il miglior ritratto d’un popolo straniero

si può probabilmente trovare in un quadro-rebus. Se riusciamo a trovare un evento di

cui il significato ci è davvero oscuro, esso probabilmente getterà un po’ di

luce sulla verità. Prenderò perciò dalle mie esperienze americane

un incidente isolato, che di certo non sarebbe potuto accadere in alcun

altro paese su cui abbia mai posato gli occhi. Non ho davvero idea di

cosa significasse. Ho udito perfino da americani circa cinque diverse

congetture sul suo significato. Ma benché io non lo capisca,

credo sinceramente che se lo capissi, capirei

l’America.

Accadde nella città di Oklahoma, che richiederebbe un libro a sé,

anche considerata solo come sfondo. Lo Stato dell’Oklahoma è un

distretto nel sud-ovest da poco strappato al territorio dei Pellirosse

indiani. Ciò che molti, del tutto scorrettamente, immaginano di tutta l’America è

davvero vero dell’Oklahoma. Va fiera di non avere storia. Risplende

del senso d’avere un grande futuro — e nient’altro. Le persone sono

propense a vantarsi d’un vecchio edificio a Nashville quanto a Norwich;

la gente è fiera delle vecchie famiglie a Boston quanto a Bath. Ma in

Oklahoma i cittadini indicano davvero una struttura colossale, affermando con arroganza

che la settimana scorsa non c’era. Fu contro i colori di

questa rozza scenografia, come d’una città da pantomima di cartone, che la

fantastica figura apparve che ancora mi perseguita come un ambulante punto

interrogativo. Passeggiavo lungo la via principale della città, e

guardavo un’edicola viva delle notizie di delitti, quando uno

straniero mi rivolse la parola; e mi chiese, assai educatamente ma con un curioso

piglio d’aver l’autorità di porre la domanda, cosa facessi in quella

città.

Era un uomo magro e abbronzato, con piuttosto l’aria d’uno sciatto viaggiatore

tropicale, coi baffi grigi e un occhio vivace e attento. Ma la

cosa più singolare in lui era che il davanti della sua giacca era coperto

d’una moltitudine di lucenti emblemi metallici foggiati a forma di stelle

e mezzelune. Ero bene avvezzo a questo punto agli americani che ornano

i risvolti delle giacche con piccoli simboli di varie società; è

parte della passione americana per il rituale del cameratismo. Non

c’è nulla che un americano ami tanto quanto avere una società segreta

e non farne mistero. Ma in questo caso, se posso dir così, l’

eruzione di simbolismo pareva essere scoppiata su tutto l’uomo, in una

maniera che indicava come la febbre fosse assai avanzata. Di questo minore

mistero, tuttavia, le sue prime poche frasi offrirono una provvisoria

spiegazione. In risposta alla sua domanda, circa i miei affari in

Oklahoma, I replied with restraint that I was lecturing. To which he

replied without restraint, but rather with an expansive and radiant

pride, ‘I also am lecturing. I am lecturing on astronomy.’

So far a certain wild rationality seemed to light up the affair. I knew

it was unusual, in my own country, for the Astronomer Royal to walk down

the Strand with his coat plastered all over with the Solar System.

Indeed, it was unusual for any English astronomical lecturer to

advertise the subject of his lectures in this fashion. But though it

would be unusual, it would not necessarily be unreasonable. In fact, I

think it might add to the colour and variety of life, if specialists did

adopt this sort of scientific heraldry. I should like to be able to

recognise an entomologist at sight by the decorative spiders and

cockroaches crawling all over his coat and waistcoat. I should like to

see a conchologist in a simple costume of shells. An osteopath, I

suppose, would be agreeably painted so as to resemble a skeleton, while

a botanist would enliven the street with the appearance of a

Jack-in-the-Green. So while I regarded the astronomical lecturer in the

astronomical coat as a figure distinguishable, by a high degree of

differentiation, from the artless astronomers of my island home (enough

their simple loveliness for me) I saw in him nothing illogical, but

rather an imaginative extreme of logic. And then came another turn of

the wheel of topsy-turvydom, and all the logic was scattered to the

wind.

Expanding his starry bosom and standing astraddle, with the air of one

who owned the street, the strange being continued, ‘Yes, I am lecturing

on astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, palaeontology, embryology,

eschatology,’ and so on in a thunderous roll of theoretical sciences

apparently beyond the scope of any single university, let alone any

single professor. Having thus introduced himself, however, he got to

business. He apologised with true American courtesy for having

questioned me at all, and excused it on the ground of his own exacting

responsibilities. I imagined him to mean the responsibility of

simultaneously occupying the chairs of all the faculties already

mentioned. But these apparently were trifles to him, and something far

more serious was clouding his brow.

‘I feel it to be my duty,’ he said, ‘to acquaint myself with any

stranger visiting this city; and it is an additional pleasure to welcome

here a member of the Upper Ten.’ I assured him earnestly that I knew

nothing about the Upper Ten, except that I did not belong to them; I

felt, not without alarm, that the Upper Ten might be another secret

society. He waved my abnegation aside and continued, ‘I have a great

responsibility in watching over this city. My friend the mayor and I

have a great responsibility.’ And then an extraordinary thing happened.

Suddenly diving his hand into his breast-pocket, he flashed something

before my eyes like a hand-mirror; something which disappeared again

almost as soon as it appeared. In that flash I could only see that it

was some sort of polished metal plate, with some letters engraved on it

like a monogram. But the reward of a studious and virtuous life, which

has been spent chiefly in the reading of American detective stories,

shone forth for me in that hour of trial; I received at last the prize

of a profound scholarship in the matter of imaginary murders in

tenth-rate magazines. I remembered who it was who in the Yankee

detective yarn flashes before the eyes of Slim Jim or the Lone Hand

Crook a badge of metal sometimes called a shield. Assuming all the

desperate composure of Slim Jim himself, I replied, ‘You mean you are

connected with the police authorities here, don’t you? Well, if I commit

a murder here, I’ll let you know.’ Whereupon that astonishing man waved

a hand in deprecation, bowed in farewell with the grace of a dancing

master; and said, ‘Oh, those are not things we expect from members of

the Upper Ten.’

Then that moving constellation moved away, disappearing in the dark

tides of humanity, as the vision passed away down the dark tides from

Sir Galahad and, starlike, mingled with the stars.

That is the problem I would put to all Americans, and to all who claim

to understand America. Who and what was that man? Was he an astronomer?

Was he a detective? Was he a wandering lunatic? If he was a lunatic who

thought he was an astronomer, why did he have a badge to prove he was a

detective? If he was a detective pretending to be an astronomer, why did

he tell a total stranger that he was a detective two minutes after

saying he was an astronomer? If he wished to watch over the city in a

quiet and unobtrusive fashion, why did he blazon himself all over with

all the stars of the sky, and profess to give public lectures on all the

subjects of the world? Every wise and well-conducted student of murder

stories is acquainted with the notion of a policeman in plain clothes.

But nobody could possibly say that this gentleman was in plain clothes.

Why not wear his uniform, if he was resolved to show every stranger in

the street his badge? Perhaps after all he had no uniform; for these

lands were but recently a wild frontier rudely ruled by vigilance

committees. Some Americans suggested to me that he was the Sheriff; the

regular hard-riding, free-shooting Sheriff of Bret Harte and my

boyhood’s dreams. Others suggested that he was an agent of the Ku-Klux

Klan, that great nameless revolution of the revival of which there were

rumours at the time; and that the symbol he exhibited was theirs. But

whether he was a sheriff acting for the law, or a conspirator against

the law, or a lunatic entirely outside the law, I agree with the former

Oklahoma, risposi con ritegno che tenevo conferenze. Al che egli

rispose senza alcun ritegno, ma piuttosto con un espansivo e raggiante

orgoglio, «Anch’io tengo conferenze. Tengo conferenze di astronomia.»

Fin qui una certa selvaggia razionalità pareva illuminare la faccenda. Sapevo

che era insolito, nel mio paese, che l’Astronomo Reale passeggiasse lungo

lo Strand con la giacca tutta ricoperta del Sistema Solare.

In verità, era insolito che un qualunque conferenziere astronomico inglese

reclamizzasse il soggetto delle sue conferenze in tal foggia. Ma per quanto

fosse insolito, non sarebbe necessariamente irragionevole. Anzi,

penso potrebbe aggiungere colore e varietà alla vita, se gli specialisti

adottassero questa sorta di araldica scientifica. Mi piacerebbe poter

riconoscere a colpo d’occhio un entomologo dai ragni decorativi e dagli

scarafaggi che gli brulicano sulla giacca e sul panciotto. Mi piacerebbe

vedere un conchigliologo in un semplice costume di conchiglie. Un osteopata,

immagino, sarebbe gradevolmente dipinto così da somigliare a uno scheletro, mentre

un botanico ravviverebbe la strada con l’aspetto di un

Jack-in-the-Green. Così, mentre consideravo il conferenziere astronomico dalla

giacca astronomica come una figura distinguibile, per un alto grado di

differenziazione, dagli ingenui astronomi della mia isolana patria (basta

a me la loro semplice avvenenza) non vedevo in lui nulla di illogico, ma

piuttosto un immaginoso estremo di logica. E poi venne un altro giro

della ruota del capovolgimento, e tutta la logica fu dispersa al

vento.

Dilatando il petto stellato e piantandosi a gambe larghe, con l’aria di chi

possedeva la strada, lo strano essere proseguì: «Sì, tengo conferenze

di astronomia, antropologia, archeologia, paleontologia, embriologia,

escatologia,» e così via in un rullo tonante di scienze teoriche

apparentemente al di là della portata di una singola università, per non dire di un singolo

professore. Essendosi così presentato, tuttavia, venne al

dunque. Si scusò con genuina cortesia americana per avermi

interrogato affatto, e lo giustificò adducendo le proprie esigenti

responsabilità. Immaginai intendesse la responsabilità di

occupare simultaneamente le cattedre di tutte le facoltà già

menzionate. Ma queste erano evidentemente inezie per lui, e qualcosa di ben

più serio gli rannuvolava la fronte.

«Sento che è mio dovere,» disse, «prendere conoscenza di ogni

forestiero che visiti questa città; ed è un piacere ulteriore dare il benvenuto

qui a un membro degli Upper Ten.» Gli assicurai con fervore che non sapevo

nulla degli Upper Ten, salvo che non ne facevo parte; mi

parve, non senza allarme, che gli Upper Ten potessero essere un’altra società

segreta. Egli scartò con un gesto la mia negazione e proseguì: «Ho una grande

responsabilità nel vegliare su questa città. Il mio amico sindaco ed io

abbiamo una grande responsabilità.» E allora accadde una cosa straordinaria.

Tuffando d’improvviso la mano nel taschino del petto, mi fece balenare qualcosa

davanti agli occhi come uno specchietto a mano; qualcosa che scomparve di nuovo

quasi non appena apparve. In quel bagliore potei solo vedere che

era una sorta di piastra di metallo lucido, con certe lettere incise sopra

come un monogramma. Ma la ricompensa di una vita studiosa e virtuosa, spesa

principalmente nella lettura di storie poliziesche americane,

rifulse per me in quell’ora di prova; ricevetti finalmente il premio

di una profonda erudizione in materia di omicidi immaginari su

riviste di decim’ordine. Ricordai chi fosse colui che, nel racconto

poliziesco yankee, fa balenare davanti agli occhi di Slim Jim o del Lone Hand

Crook un distintivo di metallo talvolta chiamato scudo. Assumendo tutta la

disperata compostezza di Slim Jim in persona, risposi: «Vuoi dire che sei

collegato con le autorità di polizia qui, non è così? Ebbene, se commetto

un omicidio qui, te lo farò sapere.» Al che quell’uomo sbalorditivo agitò

una mano in segno di dissenso, s’inchinò in congedo con la grazia di un maestro

di ballo; e disse: «Oh, quelle non sono cose che ci aspettiamo dai membri

degli Upper Ten.»

Poi quella costellazione semovente si allontanò, sparendo nelle oscure

maree dell’umanità, come la visione svanì giù per le oscure maree da

Sir Galahad e, simile a stella, si mescolò con le stelle.

Questo è il problema che porrei a tutti gli americani, e a tutti coloro che pretendono

di comprendere l’America. Chi e che cosa era quell’uomo? Era un astronomo?

Era un investigatore? Era un lunatico errante? Se era un lunatico che

si credeva astronomo, perché aveva un distintivo a provare che era un

investigatore? Se era un investigatore che fingeva d’essere astronomo, perché

disse a un perfetto sconosciuto d’essere un investigatore due minuti dopo

aver detto d’essere astronomo? Se desiderava vegliare sulla città in modo

quieto e discreto, perché si blasonava tutto quanto con

tutte le stelle del cielo, e professava di tenere conferenze pubbliche su tutte le

materie del mondo? Ogni saggio e ben educato studioso di storie

di omicidi conosce la nozione del poliziotto in borghese.

Ma nessuno potrebbe mai dire che questo signore fosse in borghese.

Perché non indossare l’uniforme, se era risoluto a mostrare a ogni forestiero per

strada il suo distintivo? Forse dopotutto non aveva uniforme; poiché queste

terre erano fino a poco fa una selvaggia frontiera rozzamente governata da comitati

di vigilanza. Alcuni americani mi suggerirono che fosse lo Sceriffo; il

classico Sceriffo cavalcatore accanito e sparatore libero di Bret Harte e dei

sogni della mia fanciullezza. Altri suggerirono che fosse un agente del Ku-Klux

Klan, quella grande innominata rivoluzione della cui rinascita correvano

voci in quel tempo; e che il simbolo da lui esibito fosse il loro. Ma

che fosse uno sceriffo operante per la legge, o un cospiratore contro

la legge, o un lunatico interamente al di fuori della legge, concordo con le prime

conjectures upon one point. I am perfectly certain he had something else

in his pocket besides a badge. And I am perfectly certain that under

certain circumstances he would have handled it instantly, and shot me

dead between the gay bookstall and the crowded trams. And that is the

last touch to the complexity; for though in that country it often seems

that the law is made by a lunatic, you never know when the lunatic may

not shoot you for keeping it. Only in the presence of that citizen of

Oklahoma I feel I am confronted with the fullness and depth of the

mystery of America. Because I understand nothing, I recognise the thing

that we call a nation; and I salute the flag.

But even in connection with this mysterious figure there is a moral

which affords another reason for mentioning him. Whether he was a

sheriff or an outlaw, there was certainly something about him that

suggested the adventurous violence of the old border life of America;

and whether he was connected with the police or no, there was certainly

violence enough in his environment to satisfy the most ardent policeman.

The posters in the paper-shop were placarded with the verdict in the

Hamon trial; a cause célèbre which reached its crisis in Oklahoma

while I was there. Senator Hamon had been shot by a girl whom he had

wronged, and his widow demanded justice, or what might fairly be called

vengeance. There was very great excitement culminating in the girl’s

acquittal. Nor did the Hamon case appear to be entirely exceptional in

that breezy borderland. The moment the town had received the news that

Clara Smith was free, newsboys rushed down the street shouting, ‘Double

stabbing outrage near Oklahoma,’ or ‘Banker’s throat cut on Main

Street,’ or otherwise resuming their regular mode of life. It seemed as

much as to say, ‘Do not imagine that our local energies are exhausted in

shooting a Senator,’ or ‘Come, now, the world is young, even if Clara

Smith is acquitted, and the enthusiasm of Oklahoma is not yet cold.’

But my particular reason for mentioning the matter is this. Despite my

friend’s mystical remarks about the Upper Ten, he lived in an atmosphere

of something that was at least the very reverse of a respect for

persons. Indeed, there was something in the very crudity of his social

compliment that smacked, strangely enough, of that egalitarian soil. In

a vaguely aristocratic country like England, people would never dream

of telling a total stranger that he was a member of the Upper Ten. For

one thing, they would be afraid that he might be. Real snobbishness is

never vulgar; for it is intended to please the refined. Nobody licks the

boots of a duke, if only because the duke does not like his boots

cleaned in that way. Nobody embraces the knees of a marquis, because it

would embarrass that nobleman. And nobody tells him he is a member of

the Upper Ten, because everybody is expected to know it. But there is a

much more subtle kind of snobbishness pervading the atmosphere of any

society trial in England. And the first thing that struck me was the

total absence of that atmosphere in the trial at Oklahoma. Mr. Hamon was

presumably a member of the Upper Ten, if there is such a thing. He was a

member of the Senate or Upper House in the American Parliament; he was a

millionaire and a pillar of the Republican party, which might be called

the respectable party; he is said to have been mentioned as a possible

President. And the speeches of Clara Smith’s counsel, who was known by

the delightfully Oklahomite title of Wild Bill McLean, were wild enough

in all conscience; but they left very little of my friend’s illusion

that members of the Upper Ten could not be accused of crimes. Nero and

Borgia were quite presentable people compared with Senator Hamon when

Wild Bill McLean had done with him. But the difference was deeper, and

even in a sense more delicate than this. There is a certain tone about

English trials, which does at least begin with a certain scepticism

about people prominent in public life being abominable in private life.

People do vaguely doubt the criminality of ‘a man in that position’;

that is, the position of the Marquise de Brinvilliers or the Marquis de

Sade. Prima facie, it would be an advantage to the Marquis de Sade

that he was a marquis. But it was certainly against Hamon that he was a

millionaire. Wild Bill did not minimise him as a bankrupt or an

adventurer; he insisted on the solidity and size of his fortune, he made

mountains out of the ‘Hamon millions,’ as if they made the matter much

worse; as indeed I think they do. But that is because I happen to share

a certain political philosophy with Wild Bill and other wild buffaloes

of the prairies. In other words, there is really present here a

democratic instinct against the domination of wealth. It does not

prevent wealth from dominating; but it does prevent the domination from

being regarded with any affection or loyalty. Despite the man in the

starry coat, the Americans have not really any illusions about the Upper

Ten. McLean was appealing to an implicit public opinion when he pelted

the Senator with his gold.

But something more is involved. I became conscious, as I have been

conscious in reading the crime novels of America, that the millionaire

was taken as a type and not an individual. This is the great difference;

that America recognises rich crooks as a class. Any Englishman might

recognise them as individuals. Any English romance may turn on a crime

in high life; in which the baronet is found to have poisoned his wife,

or the elusive burglar turns out to be the bishop. But the English are

not always saying, either in romance or reality, ‘What’s to be done, if

our food is being poisoned by all these baronets?’ They do not murmur in

indignation, ‘If bishops will go on burgling like this, something must

congetture su un punto. Sono perfettamente certo che avesse qualcos’altro

in tasca oltre a un distintivo. E sono perfettamente certo che in

certe circostanze l’avrebbe impugnato all’istante, e mi avrebbe abbattuto

tra l’allegra bancarella di libri e i tram affollati. Ed è questo il

tocco finale alla complessità; poiché, sebbene in quel paese spesso paia

che la legge sia fatta da un lunatico, non sai mai quando il lunatico possa

spararti per averla rispettata. Solo alla presenza di quel cittadino di

Oklahoma sento di trovarmi di fronte alla pienezza e alla profondità del

mistero dell’America. Poiché nulla comprendo, riconosco la cosa

che chiamiamo nazione; e saluto la bandiera.

Ma anche a proposito di questa misteriosa figura c’è una morale

che offre un’altra ragione per menzionarlo. Che fosse uno

sceriffo o un fuorilegge, c’era certamente qualcosa in lui che

suggeriva l’avventurosa violenza dell’antica vita di frontiera dell’America;

e che fosse collegato o no con la polizia, c’era certamente

violenza a sufficienza nel suo ambiente da soddisfare il più ardente poliziotto.

I manifesti nell’edicola erano tappezzati del verdetto del

processo Hamon; una cause célèbre che raggiunse il suo culmine in Oklahoma

mentre mi trovavo là. Il senatore Hamon era stato ucciso da una ragazza a cui aveva

fatto torto, e la sua vedova reclamava giustizia, o ciò che a buon diritto si potrebbe chiamare

vendetta. Vi fu grandissima eccitazione culminante nell’assoluzione

della ragazza. Né il caso Hamon pareva essere del tutto eccezionale in

quella ventosa terra di confine. Nel momento in cui la città ebbe ricevuto la notizia che

Clara Smith era libera, gli strilloni si precipitarono per la strada gridando: «Duplice

accoltellamento efferato presso Oklahoma,» oppure «Banchiere sgozzato in Main

Street,» riprendendo altrimenti il loro consueto modo di vivere. Era quasi

come dire: «Non immaginate che le nostre energie locali si esauriscano nello

sparare a un senatore,» oppure «Suvvia, il mondo è giovane, anche se Clara

Smith è assolta, e l’entusiasmo dell’Oklahoma non si è ancora raffreddato.»

Ma la mia particolare ragione per menzionare la faccenda è questa. Nonostante le

mistiche osservazioni del mio amico sugli Upper Ten, egli viveva in un’atmosfera

di qualcosa che era per lo meno l’esatto contrario di un rispetto delle

persone. Anzi, c’era qualcosa nella rozzezza stessa del suo complimento

sociale che sapeva, per quanto strano, di quel suolo egualitario. In

un paese vagamente aristocratico come l’Inghilterra, la gente non si sognerebbe mai

di dire a un perfetto sconosciuto che è membro degli Upper Ten. Per

prima cosa, avrebbero paura che potesse esserlo. Il vero snobismo non è

mai volgare; poiché è inteso a compiacere i raffinati. Nessuno lecca gli

stivali di un duca, non foss’altro perché al duca non piace che i suoi stivali

vengano puliti a quel modo. Nessuno abbraccia le ginocchia di un marchese, perché

ciò imbarazzerebbe quel nobile. E nessuno gli dice che è membro

degli Upper Ten, perché ci si aspetta che tutti lo sappiano. Ma c’è una

specie di snobismo assai più sottile che pervade l’atmosfera di qualunque

processo mondano in Inghilterra. E la prima cosa che mi colpì fu la

totale assenza di quell’atmosfera nel processo in Oklahoma. Il signor Hamon era

presumibilmente membro degli Upper Ten, ammesso che una tal cosa esista. Era

membro del Senato ovvero Camera Alta del Parlamento americano; era un

milionario e un pilastro del partito repubblicano, che si potrebbe chiamare

il partito rispettabile; si dice fosse stato menzionato come possibile

presidente. E le arringhe del difensore di Clara Smith, noto col

titolo deliziosamente oklahomita di Wild Bill McLean, furono abbastanza selvagge

in tutta coscienza; ma lasciarono ben poco dell’illusione del mio amico

che i membri degli Upper Ten non potessero essere accusati di delitti. Nerone e

il Borgia erano persone assai presentabili al confronto col senatore Hamon quando

Wild Bill McLean ebbe finito con lui. Ma la differenza era più profonda, e

persino in un certo senso più delicata di questo. C’è un certo tono nei

processi inglesi, che almeno esordisce con un certo scetticismo

sul fatto che persone eminenti nella vita pubblica siano abominevoli nella vita privata.

La gente vagamente dubita della criminalità di «un uomo in quella posizione»;

vale a dire, la posizione della marchesa de Brinvilliers o del marchese de

Sade. Prima facie, sarebbe un vantaggio per il marchese de Sade

l’essere un marchese. Ma andava certamente contro Hamon l’essere un

milionario. Wild Bill non lo sminuì come un fallito o un

avventuriero; insistette sulla solidità e la mole della sua fortuna, fece

montagne dei «milioni Hamon,» come se rendessero la cosa assai

peggiore; come in effetti credo facciano. Ma ciò è perché mi accade di condividere

una certa filosofia politica con Wild Bill e altri bufali selvaggi

delle praterie. In altre parole, è realmente presente qui un

istinto democratico contro il dominio della ricchezza. Non

impedisce alla ricchezza di dominare; ma impedisce che il dominio sia

riguardato con un qualche affetto o lealtà. Nonostante l’uomo dalla

giacca stellata, gli americani non hanno in realtà alcuna illusione sugli Upper

Ten. McLean si appellava a un’implicita opinione pubblica quando tempestava

il senatore col suo oro.

Ma c’è di più in gioco. Divenni consapevole, come lo sono stato

leggendo i romanzi criminali d’America, che il milionario

era preso come un tipo e non come un individuo. Questa è la grande differenza;

che l’America riconosce i furfanti ricchi come una classe. Ogni inglese potrebbe

riconoscerli come individui. Ogni romanzo inglese può imperniarsi su un delitto

nell’alta società; in cui si scopre che il baronetto ha avvelenato la moglie,

o che l’inafferrabile scassinatore risulta essere il vescovo. Ma gli inglesi non

vanno sempre dicendo, sia nel romanzo sia nella realtà: «Che si deve fare, se

il nostro cibo viene avvelenato da tutti questi baronetti?» Non mormorano con

indignazione: «Se i vescovi continueranno a scassinare così, qualcosa deve

be done.’ The whole point of the English romance is the exceptional

character of a crime in high life. That is not the tone of American

novels or American newspapers or American trials like the trial in

Oklahoma. Americans may be excited when a millionaire crook is caught,

as when any other crook is caught; but it is at his being caught, not at

his being discovered. To put the matter shortly, England recognises a

criminal class at the bottom of the social scale. America also

recognises a criminal class at the top of the social scale. In both, for

various reasons, it may be difficult for the criminals to be convicted;

but in America the upper class of criminals is recognised. In both

America and England, of course, it exists.

This is an assumption at the back of the American mind which makes a

great difference in many ways; and in my opinion a difference for the

better. I wrote merely fancifully just now about bishops being burglars;

but there is a story in New York, illustrating this, which really does

in a sense attribute a burglary to a bishop. The story was that an

Anglican Lord Spiritual, of the pompous and now rather antiquated

school, was pushing open the door of a poor American tenement with all

the placid patronage of the squire and rector visiting the cottagers,

when a gigantic Irish policeman came round the corner and hit him a

crack over the head with a truncheon on the assumption that he was a

house-breaker. I hope that those who laugh at the story see that the

laugh is not altogether against the policeman; and that it is not only

the policeman, but rather the bishop, who had failed to recognise some

fine logical distinctions. The bishop, being a learned man, might well

be called upon (when he had sufficiently recovered from the knock on

the head) to define what is the exact difference between a house-breaker

and a home-visitor; and why the home-visitor should not be regarded as a

house-breaker when he will not behave as a guest. An impartial

intelligence will be much less shocked at the policeman’s disrespect for

the home-visitor than by the home-visitor’s disrespect for the home.

But that story smacks of the western soil, precisely because of the

element of brutality there is in it. In England snobbishness and social

oppression are much subtler and softer; the manifestations of them at

least are more mellow and humane. In comparison there is indeed

something which people call ruthless about the air of America,

especially the American cities. The bishop may push open the door

without an apology, but he would not break open the door with a

truncheon; but the Irish policeman’s truncheon hits both ways. It may be

brutal to the tenement dweller as well as to the bishop; but the

difference and distinction is that it might really be brutal to the

bishop. It is because there is after all, at the back of all that

barbarism, a sort of a negative belief in the brotherhood of men, a dark

democratic sense that men are really men and nothing more, that the

coarse and even corrupt bureaucracy is not resented exactly as

oligarchic bureaucracies are resented. There is a sense in which

corruption is not so narrow as nepotism. It is upon this queer cynical

charity, and even humility, that it has been possible to rear so high

and uphold so long that tower of brass, Tammany Hall. The modern police

system is in spirit the most inhuman in history, and its evil belongs

to an age and not to a nation. But some American police methods are evil

past all parallel; and the detective can be more crooked than a hundred

crooks. But in the States it is not only possible that the policeman is

worse than the convict, it is by no means certain that he thinks that he

is any better. In the popular stories of O. Henry there are light

allusions to tramps being kicked out of hotels which will make any

Christian seek relief in strong language and a trust in heaven—not to

say in hell. And yet books even more popular than O. Henry’s are those

of the ‘sob-sisterhood’ who swim in lachrymose lakes after love-lorn

spinsters, who pass their lives in reclaiming and consoling such tramps.

There are in this people two strains of brutality and sentimentalism

which I do not understand, especially where they mingle; but I am fairly

sure they both work back to the dim democratic origin. The Irish

policeman does not confine himself fastidiously to bludgeoning bishops;

his truncheon finds plenty of poor people’s heads to hit; and yet I

believe on my soul he has a sort of sympathy with poor people not to be

found in the police of more aristocratic states. I believe he also reads

and weeps over the stories of the spinsters and the reclaimed tramps; in

fact, there is much of such pathos in an American magazine (my sole

companion on many happy railway journeys) which is not only devoted to

detective stories, but apparently edited by detectives. In these stories

also there is the honest, popular astonishment at the Upper Ten

expressed by the astronomical detective, if indeed he was a detective

and not a demon from the dark Red-Indian forests that faded to the

horizon behind him. But I have set him as the head and text of this

chapter because with these elements of the Third Degree of devilry and

the Seventh Heaven of sentimentalism I touch on elements that I do not

understand; and when I do not understand, I say so.

The Republican in the Ruins

The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone; especially to

a wood-cut or a lithographic stone. Modern people put their trust in

pictures, especially scientific pictures, as much as the most

superstitious ever put it in religious pictures. They publish a portrait

of the Missing Link as if he were the Missing Man, for whom the police

fare.» L’intero punto del romanzo inglese è il carattere eccezionale

di un delitto nell’alta società. Non è questo il tono dei romanzi

americani, né dei giornali americani, né dei processi americani come il processo in

Oklahoma. Gli americani possono eccitarsi quando un furfante milionario viene catturato,

come quando qualunque altro furfante viene catturato; ma è per la sua cattura, non per

la sua scoperta. Per dirla in breve, l’Inghilterra riconosce una

classe criminale in fondo alla scala sociale. Anche l’America

riconosce una classe criminale in cima alla scala sociale. In entrambe, per

varie ragioni, può essere difficile che i criminali vengano condannati;

ma in America la classe alta dei criminali è riconosciuta. In entrambe,

America e Inghilterra, naturalmente, essa esiste.

Questo è un presupposto sul fondo della mente americana che fa una

gran differenza in molti modi; e a mio parere una differenza in

meglio. Poc’anzi scrivevo solo per fantasia di vescovi scassinatori;

ma c’è una storia a New York, che lo illustra, la quale davvero

in un certo senso attribuisce uno scasso a un vescovo. La storia era che un

Lord Spirituale anglicano, della scuola pomposa e ormai piuttosto antiquata,

stava spingendo la porta di un povero casamento americano con tutta

la placida degnazione dello squire e del rettore in visita ai contadini,

quando un gigantesco poliziotto irlandese svoltò l’angolo e gli assestò una

manganellata in capo nel presupposto che fosse uno

scassinatore. Spero che coloro i quali ridono della storia vedano che la

risata non è del tutto contro il poliziotto; e che non è solo

il poliziotto, ma piuttosto il vescovo, ad aver mancato di riconoscere certe

sottili distinzioni logiche. Il vescovo, essendo un dotto, potrebbe bene

essere chiamato (quando si fosse sufficientemente ripreso dal colpo in

testa) a definire quale sia l’esatta differenza tra uno scassinatore

e un visitatore domiciliare; e perché il visitatore domiciliare non debba essere considerato uno

scassinatore quando non vuol comportarsi da ospite. Un’intelligenza

imparziale sarà assai meno scandalizzata dalla mancanza di rispetto del poliziotto verso

il visitatore domiciliare che dalla mancanza di rispetto del visitatore domiciliare verso la casa.

Ma quella storia sa del suolo occidentale, precisamente a causa dell’

elemento di brutalità che vi è in essa. In Inghilterra lo snobismo e l’oppressione

sociale sono assai più sottili e morbidi; le loro manifestazioni per lo

meno sono più pacate e umane. Al confronto c’è davvero

qualcosa che la gente chiama spietato nell’aria dell’America,

specialmente delle città americane. Il vescovo può spingere la porta

senza scusarsi, ma non sfonderebbe la porta con un

manganello; ma il manganello del poliziotto irlandese colpisce in entrambi i sensi. Può essere

brutale con l’inquilino del casamento così come col vescovo; ma la

differenza e distinzione è che potrebbe davvero essere brutale col

vescovo. È perché c’è dopotutto, sul fondo di tutta quella

barbarie, una sorta di negativa fede nella fratellanza degli uomini, un oscuro

senso democratico che gli uomini sono davvero uomini e nulla più, che la

burocrazia rozza e persino corrotta non è detestata esattamente come

sono detestate le burocrazie oligarchiche. C’è un senso in cui

la corruzione non è così angusta come il nepotismo. È su questa strana cinica

carità, e persino umiltà, che è stato possibile innalzare così in alto

e sorreggere così a lungo quella torre di bronzo, Tammany Hall. Il moderno sistema

di polizia è nello spirito il più disumano della storia, e il suo male appartiene

a un’epoca e non a una nazione. Ma certi metodi della polizia americana sono malvagi

oltre ogni paragone; e l’investigatore può essere più storto di cento

furfanti. Ma negli Stati non solo è possibile che il poliziotto sia

peggiore del condannato, non è affatto certo che egli pensi di essere

in qualcosa migliore. Nei racconti popolari di O. Henry vi sono leggere

allusioni a vagabondi cacciati a calci dagli alberghi che indurranno ogni

cristiano a cercar sollievo in un linguaggio forte e in una fiducia nel cielo… per non

dire nell’inferno. Eppure libri ancor più popolari di quelli di O. Henry sono quelli

della «confraternita del singhiozzo» che nuota in laghi lacrimosi dietro le amorosamente derelitte

zitelle, le quali passano la vita a recuperare e consolare tali vagabondi.

Vi sono in questo popolo due filoni di brutalità e sentimentalismo

che non comprendo, specie là dove si mescolano; ma sono abbastanza

sicuro che entrambi risalgano alla fosca origine democratica. Il poliziotto

irlandese non si limita schizzinosamente a bastonare vescovi;

il suo manganello trova molte teste di povera gente da colpire; eppure

credo sulla mia anima che egli abbia una sorta di simpatia per i poveri non riscontrabile

nella polizia di stati più aristocratici. Credo che egli legga anche

e pianga sulle storie delle zitelle e dei vagabondi redenti; anzi,

c’è molto di tale pathos in una rivista americana (mia unica

compagna in molti felici viaggi in ferrovia) che non è solo dedicata a

storie poliziesche, ma a quanto pare curata da investigatori. In queste storie

vi è pure l’onesto, popolare stupore verso gli Upper Ten

espresso dall’astronomico investigatore, se davvero era un investigatore

e non un demone delle oscure foreste dei Pellirosse che sfumavano verso

l’orizzonte alle sue spalle. Ma l’ho posto a capo e a tema di questo

capitolo perché con questi elementi del Terzo Grado di diavoleria e

del Settimo Cielo di sentimentalismo tocco elementi che non

comprendo; e quando non comprendo, lo dico.

Il repubblicano tra le rovine

Il pagano nella sua cecità si prostra al legno e alla pietra; specialmente a

una xilografia o a una pietra litografica. La gente moderna ripone la sua fiducia nelle

immagini, specie le immagini scientifiche, quanto i più

superstiziosi la riposero mai nelle immagini religiose. Pubblicano un ritratto

dell’Anello Mancante come se fosse l’Uomo Scomparso, per cui la polizia

are always advertising; for all the world as if the anthropoid had been

photographed before he absconded. The scientific diagram may be a

hypothesis; it may be a fancy; it may be a forgery. But it is always an

idol in the true sense of an image; and an image in the true sense of a

thing mastering the imagination and not the reason. The power of these

talismanic pictures is almost hypnotic to modern humanity. We can never

forget that we have seen a portrait of the Missing Link; though we

should instantly detect the lapse of logic into superstition, if we were

told that the old Greek agnostics had made a statue of the Unknown God.

But there is a still stranger fashion in which we fall victims to the

same trick of fancy. We accept in a blind and literal spirit, not only

images of speculation, but even figures of speech. The nineteenth

century prided itself on having lost its faith in myths, and proceeded

to put all its faith in metaphors. It dismissed the old doctrines about

the way of life and the light of the world; and then it proceeded to

talk as if the light of truth were really and literally a light, that

could be absorbed by merely opening our eyes; or as if the path of

progress were really and truly a path, to be found by merely following

our noses. Thus the purpose of God is an idea, true or false; but the

purpose of Nature is merely a metaphor; for obviously if there is no God

there is no purpose. Yet while men, by an imaginative instinct, spoke of

the purpose of God with a grand agnosticism, as something too large to

be seen, something reaching out to worlds and to eternities, they speak

of the purpose of Nature in particular and practical problems of curing

babies or cutting up rabbits. This power of the modern metaphor must be

understood, by way of an introduction, if we are to understand one of

the chief errors, at once evasive and pervasive, which perplex the

problem of America.

America is always spoken of as a young nation; and whether or no this be

a valuable and suggestive metaphor, very few people notice that it is a

metaphor at all. If somebody said that a certain deserving charity had

just gone into trousers, we should recognise that it was a figure of

speech, and perhaps a rather surprising figure of speech. If somebody

said that a daily paper had recently put its hair up, we should know it

could only be a metaphor, and possibly a rather strained metaphor. Yet

these phrases would mean the only thing that can possibly be meant by

calling a corporate association of all sorts of people ‘young’; that is,

that a certain institution has only existed for a certain time. I am not

now denying that such a corporate nationality may happen to have a

psychology comparatively analogous to the psychology of youth. I am not

even denying that America has it. I am only pointing out, to begin with,

that we must free ourselves from the talismanic tyranny of a metaphor

which we do not recognise as a metaphor. Men realised that the old

mystical doctrines were mystical; they do not realise that the new

metaphors are metaphorical. They have some sort of hazy notion that

American society must be growing, must be promising, must have the

virtues of hope or the faults of ignorance, merely because it has only

had a separate existence since the eighteenth century. And that is

exactly like saying that a new chapel must be growing taller, or that a

limited liability company will soon have its second teeth.

Now in truth this particular conception of American hopefulness would be

anything but hopeful for America. If the argument really were, as it is

still vaguely supposed to be, that America must have a long life before

it, because it only started in the eighteenth century, we should find a

very fatal answer by looking at the other political systems that did

start in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was called the

Age of Reason; and there is a very real sense in which the other systems

were indeed started in a spirit of reason. But starting from reason has

not saved them from ruin. If we survey the Europe of to-day with real

clarity and historic comprehension, we shall see that it is precisely

the most recent and the most rationalistic creations that have been

ruined. The two great States which did most definitely and emphatically

deserve to be called modern states were Prussia and Russia. There was no

real Prussia before Frederick the Great; no real Russian Empire before

Peter the Great. Both those innovators recognised themselves as

rationalists bringing a new reason and order into an indeterminate

barbarism; and doing for the barbarians what the barbarians could not do

for themselves. They did not, like the kings of England or France or

Spain or Scotland, inherit a sceptre that was the symbol of a historic

and patriotic people. In this sense there was no Russia but only an

Emperor of Russia. In this sense Prussia was a kingdom before it was a

nation; if it ever was a nation. But anyhow both men were particularly

modern in their whole mood and mind. They were modern to the extent of

being not only anti-traditional, but almost anti-patriotic. Peter forced

the science of the West on Russia to the regret of many Russians.

Frederick talked the French of Voltaire and not the German of Luther.

The two experiments were entirely in the spirit of Voltairean

rationalism; they were built in broad daylight by men who believed in

nothing but the light of common day; and already their day is done.

If then the promise of America were in the fact that she is one of the

latest births of progress, we should point out that it is exactly the

latest born that were the first to die. If in this sense she is praised

as young, it may be answered that the young have died young, and have

sta sempre lanciando appelli; proprio come se l’antropoide fosse stato

fotografato prima di darsi alla macchia. Il diagramma scientifico può essere un’

ipotesi; può essere una fantasia; può essere un falso. Ma è sempre un

idolo nel vero senso di un’immagine; e un’immagine nel vero senso di una

cosa che soggioga l’immaginazione e non la ragione. Il potere di queste

immagini talismaniche è quasi ipnotico per l’umanità moderna. Non possiamo mai

dimenticare d’aver visto un ritratto dell’Anello Mancante; benché

coglieremmo all’istante la ricaduta della logica nella superstizione, se ci

dicessero che gli antichi agnostici greci avevano fatto una statua del Dio Ignoto.

Ma c’è un modo ancor più strano in cui cadiamo vittime dello

stesso inganno della fantasia. Accettiamo in uno spirito cieco e letterale, non solo

immagini di speculazione, ma persino figure retoriche. Il diciannovesimo

secolo si vantava d’aver perduto la sua fede nei miti, e procedette

a riporre tutta la sua fede nelle metafore. Congedò le antiche dottrine sulla

via della vita e la luce del mondo; e poi procedette a

parlare come se la luce della verità fosse realmente e letteralmente una luce, che

potesse essere assorbita col semplice aprire gli occhi; o come se il sentiero del

progresso fosse realmente e veramente un sentiero, da trovarsi semplicemente seguendo

il proprio naso. Così il fine di Dio è un’idea, vera o falsa; ma il

fine della Natura è soltanto una metafora; poiché ovviamente se non c’è Dio

non c’è fine. Eppure, mentre gli uomini, per istinto immaginativo, parlavano del

fine di Dio con un grandioso agnosticismo, come di qualcosa troppo grande per

essere visto, qualcosa che si protende verso mondi e verso eternità, parlano

del fine della Natura in problemi particolari e pratici come curare

i neonati o sezionare i conigli. Questo potere della metafora moderna deve essere

compreso, a mo’ d’introduzione, se vogliamo comprendere uno dei

principali errori, insieme evasivi e pervasivi, che intricano il

problema dell’America.

Dell’America si parla sempre come di una nazione giovane; e che questa sia o no

una metafora preziosa e suggestiva, pochissimi notano che è una

metafora affatto. Se qualcuno dicesse che una certa meritevole opera benefica avesse

appena messo i pantaloni, riconosceremmo che si tratta di una figura

retorica, e forse una figura retorica piuttosto sorprendente. Se qualcuno

dicesse che un quotidiano si è di recente raccolto i capelli in su, sapremmo che

può essere solo una metafora, e forse una metafora piuttosto forzata. Eppure

queste frasi significherebbero l’unica cosa che possa mai intendersi

chiamando «giovane» un’associazione collettiva di ogni sorta di persone; ossia,

che una certa istituzione è esistita solo per un certo tempo. Non sto

ora negando che una tale nazionalità collettiva possa per caso avere una

psicologia comparativamente analoga alla psicologia della giovinezza. Non

nego neppure che l’America la abbia. Faccio solo notare, tanto per cominciare,

che dobbiamo liberarci dalla tirannia talismanica di una metafora

che non riconosciamo come metafora. Gli uomini si resero conto che le antiche

dottrine mistiche erano mistiche; non si rendono conto che le nuove

metafore sono metaforiche. Hanno una sorta di vaga nozione che

la società americana debba essere in crescita, debba essere promettente, debba avere le

virtù della speranza o i difetti dell’ignoranza, semplicemente perché ha avuto

un’esistenza separata solo dal diciottesimo secolo. E ciò

equivale esattamente a dire che una cappella nuova debba crescere in altezza, o che una

società a responsabilità limitata metterà presto i denti da adulto.

Ora, in verità, questa particolare concezione della speranzosità americana sarebbe

tutt’altro che promettente per l’America. Se l’argomento fosse davvero, come si

suppone ancora vagamente, che l’America debba avere una lunga vita dinanzi

a sé, perché iniziò solo nel diciottesimo secolo, troveremmo una

risposta assai fatale guardando agli altri sistemi politici che

iniziarono nel diciottesimo secolo. Il diciottesimo secolo fu chiamato l’

Età della Ragione; e c’è un senso assai reale in cui gli altri sistemi

furono davvero avviati in uno spirito di ragione. Ma il partire dalla ragione non li ha

salvati dalla rovina. Se osserviamo l’Europa di oggi con vera

chiarezza e comprensione storica, vedremo che sono precisamente

le creazioni più recenti e più razionalistiche a essere state

rovinate. I due grandi Stati che più decisamente ed enfaticamente

meritarono d’esser chiamati stati moderni furono la Prussia e la Russia. Non vi fu

una vera Prussia prima di Federico il Grande; nessun vero Impero Russo prima di

Pietro il Grande. Entrambi quegli innovatori si riconoscevano come

razionalisti che recavano una nuova ragione e un nuovo ordine in un’indeterminata

barbarie; e facevano per i barbari ciò che i barbari non sapevano fare

da sé. Essi non ereditarono, come i re d’Inghilterra o di Francia o di

Spagna o di Scozia, uno scettro che era il simbolo di un popolo storico

e patriottico. In questo senso non vi era una Russia ma solo un

Imperatore di Russia. In questo senso la Prussia fu un regno prima d’essere una

nazione; ammesso che sia mai stata una nazione. Ma comunque entrambi gli uomini erano particolarmente

moderni nell’intero umore e nella mente. Erano moderni al punto di

essere non solo anti-tradizionali, ma quasi anti-patriottici. Pietro impose

la scienza dell’Occidente alla Russia con rammarico di molti russi.

Federico parlava il francese di Voltaire e non il tedesco di Lutero.

I due esperimenti furono interamente nello spirito del razionalismo

volterriano; furono edificati in pieno giorno da uomini che non credevano in

nulla se non nella luce del giorno comune; e già il loro giorno è concluso.

Se dunque la promessa dell’America stesse nel fatto che essa è una delle

ultime nate del progresso, faremmo notare che sono esattamente i

nati per ultimi a essere i primi a morire. Se in questo senso essa è lodata

come giovane, si può rispondere che i giovani sono morti giovani, e non hanno

not lived to be old. And if this be confused with the argument that she

came in an age of clarity and scepticism, uncontaminated by old

superstitions, it could still be retorted that the works of superstition

have survived the works of scepticism. But the truth is, of course, that

the real quality of America is much more subtle and complex than this;

and is mixed not only of good and bad, and rational and mystical, but

also of old and new. That is what makes the task of tracing the true

proportions of American life so interesting and so impossible.

To begin with, such a metaphor is always as distracting as a mixed

metaphor. It is a double-edged tool that cuts both ways; and

consequently opposite ways. We use the same word ‘young’ to mean two

opposite extremes. We mean something at an early stage of growth, and

also something having the latest fruits of growth. We might call a

commonwealth young if it conducted all its daily conversation by

wireless telegraphy; meaning that it was progressive. But we might also

call it young if it conducted all its industry with chipped flints;

meaning that it was primitive. These two meanings of youth are

hopelessly mixed up when the word is applied to America. But what is

more curious, the two elements really are wildly entangled in America.

America is in some ways what is called in advance of the times, and in

some ways what is called behind the times; but it seems a little

confusing to convey both notions by the same word.

On the one hand, Americans often are successful in the last inventions.

And for that very reason they are often neglectful of the last but one.

It is true of men in general, dealing with things in general, that while

they are progressing in one thing, such as science, they are going back

in another thing, such as art. What is less fully realised is that this

is true even as between different methods of science. The perfection of

wireless telegraphy might well be followed by the gross imperfection of

wires. The very enthusiasm of American science brings this out very

vividly. The telephone in New York works miracles all day long. Replies

from remote places come as promptly as in a private talk; nobody cuts

anybody off; nobody says, ‘Sorry you’ve been troubled.’ But then the

postal service of New York does not work at all. At least I could never

discover it working. Letters lingered in it for days and days, as in

some wild village of the Pyrenees. When I asked a taxi-driver to drive

me to a post-office, a look of far-off vision and adventure came into

his eyes, and he said he had once heard of a post-office somewhere near

West Ninety-Seventh Street. Men are not efficient in everything, but

only in the fashionable thing. This may be a mark of the march of

science; it does certainly in one sense deserve the description of

youth. We can imagine a very young person forgetting the old toy in the

excitement of a new one.

But on the other hand, American manners contain much that is called

young in the contrary sense; in the sense of an earlier stage of

history. There are whole patches and particular aspects that seem to me

quite Early Victorian. I cannot help having this sensation, for

instance, about the arrangement for smoking in the railway carriages.

There are no smoking carriages, as a rule; but a corner of each of the

great cars is curtained off mysteriously, that a man may go behind the

curtain and smoke. Nobody thinks of a woman doing so. It is regarded as

a dark, bohemian, and almost brutally masculine indulgence; exactly as

it was regarded by the dowagers in Thackeray’s novels. Indeed, this is

one of the many such cases in which extremes meet; the extremes of

stuffy antiquity and cranky modernity. The American dowager is sorry

that tobacco was ever introduced; and the American suffragette and

social reformer is considering whether tobacco ought not to be

abolished. The tone of American society suggests some sort of

compromise, by which women will be allowed to smoke, but men forbidden

to do so.

In one respect, however, America is very old indeed. In one respect

America is more historic than England; I might almost say more

archaeological than England. The record of one period of the past,

morally remote and probably irrevocable, is there preserved in a more

perfect form as a pagan city is preserved at Pompeii. In a more general

sense, of course, it is easy to exaggerate the contrast as a mere

contrast between the old world and the new. There is a superficial

satire about the millionaire’s daughter who has recently become the wife

of an aristocrat; but there is a rather more subtle satire in the

question of how long the aristocrat has been aristocratic. There is

often much misplaced mockery of a marriage between an upstart’s daughter

and a decayed relic of feudalism; when it is really a marriage between

an upstart’s daughter and an upstart’s grandson. The sentimental

socialist often seems to admit the blue blood of the nobleman, even when

he wants to shed it; just as he seems to admit the marvellous brains of

the millionaire, even when he wants to blow them out. Unfortunately (in

the interests of social science, of course) the sentimental socialist

never does go so far as bloodshed or blowing out brains; otherwise the

colour and quality of both blood and brains would probably be a

disappointment to him. There are certainly more American families that

really came over in the Mayflower than English families that really

came over with the Conqueror; and an English county family clearly

dating from the time of the Mayflower would be considered a very

traditional and historic house. Nevertheless, there are ancient things

in England, though the aristocracy is hardly one of them. There are

buildings, there are institutions, there are even ideas in England which

do preserve, as in a perfect pattern, some particular epoch of the past,

and even of the remote past. A man could study the Middle Ages in

Lincoln as well as in Rouen; in Canterbury as well as in Cologne. Even

of the Renaissance the same is true, at least on the literary side; if

Shakespeare was later he was also greater than Ronsard. But the point is

that the spirit and philosophy of the periods were present in fullness

and in freedom. The guildsmen were as Christian in England as they were

anywhere; the poets were as pagan in England as they were anywhere.

Personally I do not admit that the men who served patrons were freer

than those who served patron saints. But each fashion had its own kind

of freedom; and the point is that the English, in each case, had the

fullness of that kind of freedom. But there was another ideal of freedom

which the English never had at all; or, anyhow, never expressed at all.

There was another ideal, the soul of another epoch, round which we built

no monuments and wrote no masterpieces. You will find no traces of it in

England; but you will find them in America.

The thing I mean was the real religion of the eighteenth century. Its

religion, in the more defined sense, was generally Deism, as in

Robespierre or Jefferson. In the more general way of morals and

atmosphere it was rather Stoicism, as in the suicide of Wolfe Tone. It

had certain very noble and, as some would say, impossible ideals; as

that a politician should be poor, and should be proud of being poor. It

knew Latin; and therefore insisted on the strange fancy that the

Republic should be a public thing. Its Republican simplicity was

anything but a silly pose; unless all martyrdom is a silly pose. Even of

the prigs and fanatics of the American and French Revolutions we can

often say, as Stevenson said of an American, that ‘thrift and courage

glowed in him.’ And its virtue and value for us is that it did remember

the things we now most tend to forget; from the dignity of liberty to

the danger of luxury. It did really believe in self-determination, in

the self-determination of the self, as well as of the state. And its

determination was really determined. In short, it believed in

self-respect; and it is strictly true even of its rebels and regicides

that they desired chiefly to be respectable. But there were in it the

marks of religion as well as respectability; it had a creed; it had a

crusade. Men died singing its songs; men starved rather than write

against its principles. And its principles were liberty, equality, and

fraternity, or the dogmas of the Declaration of Independence. This was

the idea that redeemed the dreary negations of the eighteenth century;

and there are still corners of Philadelphia or Boston or Baltimore where

we can feel so suddenly in the silence its plain garb and formal

manners, that the walking ghost of Jefferson would hardly surprise us.

There is not the ghost of such a thing in England. In England the real

religion of the eighteenth century never found freedom or scope. It

never cleared a space in which to build that cold and classic building

called the Capitol. It never made elbow-room for that free if sometimes

frigid figure called the Citizen.

In eighteenth-century England he was crowded out, partly perhaps by the

relics of better things of the past, but largely at least by the

presence of much worse things in the present. The worst things kept out

the best things of the eighteenth century. The ground was occupied by

legal fictions; by a godless Erastian church and a powerless Hanoverian

king. Its realities were an aristocracy of Regency dandies, in costumes

made to match Brighton Pavilion; a paganism not frigid but florid. It

was a touch of this aristocratic waste in Fox that prevented that great

man from being a glorious exception. It is therefore well for us to

realise that there is something in history which we did not experience;

and therefore probably something in Americans that we do not understand.

There was this idealism at the very beginning of their individualism.

There was a note of heroic publicity and honourable poverty which

lingers in the very name of Cincinnati.

But I have another and special reason for noting this historical fact;

the fact that we English never made anything upon the model of a

capitol, while we can match anybody with the model of a cathedral. It is

far from improbable that the latter model may again be a working model.

For I have myself felt, naturally and for a long time, a warm sympathy

with both those past ideals, which seem to some so incompatible. I have

felt the attraction of the red cap as well as the red cross, of the

Marseillaise as well as the Magnificat. And even when they were in

furious conflict I have never altogether lost my sympathy for either.

But in the conflict between the Republic[1] and the Church, the point

often made against the Church seems to me much more of a point against

the Republic. It is emphatically the Republic and not the Church that I

venerate as something beautiful but belonging to the past. In fact I

feel exactly the same sort of sad respect for the republican ideal that

many mid-Victorian free-thinkers felt for the religious ideal. The most

sincere poets of that period were largely divided between those who

insisted, like Arnold and Clough, that Christianity might be a ruin, but

after all it must be treated as a picturesque ruin; and those, like

Swinburne, who insisted that it might be a picturesque ruin, but after

all it must be treated as a ruin. But surely their own pagan temple of

political liberty is now much more of a ruin than the other; and I fancy

conservano, come in un modello perfetto, qualche particolare epoca del passato,

e persino del passato remoto. Si potrebbe studiare il Medioevo a

Lincoln così come a Rouen; a Canterbury così come a Colonia. Persino

del Rinascimento lo stesso è vero, almeno sul versante letterario; se

Shakespeare fu più tardo fu anche più grande di Ronsard. Ma il punto è

che lo spirito e la filosofia di quelle epoche erano presenti in pienezza

e in libertà. I membri delle corporazioni erano cristiani in Inghilterra tanto quanto lo erano

ovunque; i poeti erano pagani in Inghilterra tanto quanto lo erano ovunque.

Personalmente non ammetto che gli uomini che servirono i mecenati fossero più liberi

di quelli che servirono i santi patroni. Ma ogni foggia aveva la sua propria specie

di libertà; e il punto è che gli inglesi, in ciascun caso, ebbero la

pienezza di quella specie di libertà. Ma vi era un altro ideale di libertà

che gli inglesi non ebbero mai affatto; o, comunque, non espressero mai affatto.

Vi era un altro ideale, l’anima di un’altra epoca, attorno a cui non erigemmo

monumenti e non scrivemmo capolavori. Non ne troverete traccia in

Inghilterra; ma le troverete in America.

La cosa che intendo era la vera religione del diciottesimo secolo. La sua

religione, nel senso più definito, era generalmente il Deismo, come in

Robespierre o Jefferson. Nel modo più generale della morale e dell’

atmosfera era piuttosto lo Stoicismo, come nel suicidio di Wolfe Tone. Aveva

certi ideali assai nobili e, come alcuni direbbero, impossibili; come

che un politico dovrebbe essere povero, e dovrebbe essere fiero d’essere povero. Esso

conosceva il latino; e perciò insisteva sulla strana fantasia che la

Repubblica dovesse essere una cosa pubblica. La sua repubblicana semplicità era

tutt’altro che una posa sciocca; a meno che ogni martirio non sia una posa sciocca. Persino

dei presuntuosi e dei fanatici delle Rivoluzioni americana e francese possiamo

spesso dire, come Stevenson disse di un americano, che «la parsimonia e il coraggio

ardevano in lui.» E la sua virtù e il suo valore per noi sta nell’aver ricordato

le cose che ora più tendiamo a dimenticare; dalla dignità della libertà al

pericolo del lusso. Credeva davvero nell’autodeterminazione, nell’

autodeterminazione dell’io, così come dello stato. E la sua

determinazione era davvero determinata. In breve, credeva nel

rispetto di sé; ed è rigorosamente vero anche dei suoi ribelli e regicidi

che desideravano soprattutto essere rispettabili. Ma vi erano in esso i

segni della religione così come della rispettabilità; aveva un credo; aveva una

crociata. Uomini morirono cantando i suoi canti; uomini si lasciarono morire di fame piuttosto che scrivere

contro i suoi principi. E i suoi principi erano libertà, uguaglianza e

fraternità, ovvero i dogmi della Dichiarazione d’Indipendenza. Questa fu

l’idea che riscattò le tetre negazioni del diciottesimo secolo;

e vi sono ancora angoli di Philadelphia o Boston o Baltimora dove

possiamo sentire così d’improvviso nel silenzio la sua semplice veste e i suoi formali

modi, che il fantasma errante di Jefferson difficilmente ci sorprenderebbe.

Non c’è nemmeno l’ombra di una tal cosa in Inghilterra. In Inghilterra la vera

religione del diciottesimo secolo non trovò mai libertà o spazio. Non

sgombrò mai uno spazio in cui edificare quel freddo e classico edificio

chiamato il Campidoglio. Non fece mai posto a quella libera se pur talvolta

frigida figura chiamata il Cittadino.

Nell’Inghilterra del diciottesimo secolo egli fu spinto fuori, in parte forse dalle

reliquie di cose migliori del passato, ma in gran parte almeno dalla

presenza di cose assai peggiori nel presente. Le cose peggiori tenevano fuori

le cose migliori del diciottesimo secolo. Il terreno era occupato da

finzioni giuridiche; da una chiesa erastiana senza Dio e da un impotente re

hannoveriano. Le sue realtà erano un’aristocrazia di dandy della Reggenza, in costumi

fatti per intonarsi al Padiglione di Brighton; un paganesimo non frigido ma florido. Fu

un tocco di questo spreco aristocratico in Fox a impedire a quel grand’

uomo d’essere una gloriosa eccezione. È perciò bene per noi

renderci conto che c’è qualcosa nella storia che non sperimentammo;

e perciò probabilmente qualcosa negli americani che non comprendiamo.

Vi era questo idealismo al principio stesso del loro individualismo.

Vi era una nota di eroica pubblicità e onorevole povertà che

indugia nel nome stesso di Cincinnati.

Ma ho un’altra e speciale ragione per notare questo fatto storico;

il fatto che noi inglesi non facemmo mai nulla sul modello di un

campidoglio, mentre possiamo rivaleggiare con chiunque col modello di una cattedrale. È

tutt’altro che improbabile che quest’ultimo modello possa di nuovo essere un modello operante.

Poiché io stesso ho provato, naturalmente e per lungo tempo, una calda simpatia

per entrambi quegli ideali del passato, che ad alcuni paiono così incompatibili. Ho

sentito l’attrazione del berretto rosso così come della croce rossa, della

Marsigliese così come del Magnificat. E anche quando erano in

furioso conflitto non ho mai del tutto perduto la mia simpatia per l’uno o per l’altro.

Ma nel conflitto tra la Repubblica[1] e la Chiesa, il punto

spesso sollevato contro la Chiesa mi sembra assai più un punto contro

la Repubblica. È enfaticamente la Repubblica e non la Chiesa ciò che io

venero come qualcosa di bello ma appartenente al passato. Anzi,

provo esattamente la stessa sorta di triste rispetto per l’ideale repubblicano che

molti liberi pensatori medio-vittoriani provavano per l’ideale religioso. I più

sinceri poeti di quel periodo erano in gran parte divisi tra coloro che

insistevano, come Arnold e Clough, che il Cristianesimo potesse essere una rovina, ma

che dopotutto andasse trattato come una rovina pittoresca; e coloro, come

Swinburne, che insistevano che potesse essere una rovina pittoresca, ma che

dopotutto andasse trattato come una rovina. Ma sicuramente il loro proprio tempio pagano della

libertà politica è ora assai più una rovina dell’altro; e immagino

I am one of the few who still take off their hats in that ruined temple.

That is why I went about looking for the fading traces of that lost

cause, in the old-world atmosphere of the new world.

But I do not, as a fact, feel that the cathedral is a ruin; I doubt if I

should feel it even if I wished to lay it in ruins. I doubt if Mr.

M’Cabe really thinks that Catholicism is dying, though he might deceive

himself into saying so. Nobody could be naturally moved to say that the

crowded cathedral of St. Patrick in New York was a ruin, or even that

the unfinished Anglo-Catholic cathedral at Washington was a ruin, though

it is not yet a church; or that there is anything lost or lingering

about the splendid and spirited Gothic churches springing up under the

inspiration of Mr. Cram of Boston. As a matter of feeling, as a matter

of fact, as a matter quite apart from theory or opinion, it is not in

the religious centres that we now have the feeling of something

beautiful but receding, of something loved but lost. It is exactly in

the spaces cleared and levelled by America for the large and sober

religion of the eighteenth century; it is where an old house in

Philadelphia contains an old picture of Franklin, or where the men of

Maryland raised above their city the first monument of Washington. It is

there that I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted,

whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead, and all save he departed. It

is then that I feel as if I were the last Republican.

But when I say that the Republic of the Age of Reason is now a ruin, I

should rather say that at its best it is a ruin. At its worst it has

collapsed into a death-trap or is rotting like a dunghill. What is the

real Republic of our day as distinct from the ideal Republic of our

fathers, but a heap of corrupt capitalism crawling with worms; with

those parasites, the professional politicians? I was re-reading

Swinburne’s bitter but not ignoble poem, ‘Before a Crucifix,’ in which

he bids Christ, or the ecclesiastical image of Christ, stand out of the

way of the onward march of a political idealism represented by United

Italy or the French Republic. I was struck by the strange and ironic

exactitude with which every taunt he flings at the degradation of the

old divine ideal would now fit the degradation of his own human ideal.

The time has already come when we can ask his Goddess of Liberty, as

represented by the actual Liberals, ‘Have you filled full men’s

starved-out souls; have you brought freedom on the earth?’ For every

engine in which these old free-thinkers firmly and confidently trusted

has itself become an engine of oppression and even of class oppression.

Its free parliament has become an oligarchy. Its free press has become a

monopoly. If the pure Church has been corrupted in the course of two

thousand years, what about the pure Republic that has rotted into a

filthy plutocracy in less than a hundred?

O, hidden face of man, whereover

The years have woven a viewless veil,

If thou wert verily man’s lover

What did thy love or blood avail?

Thy blood the priests make poison of;

And in gold shekels coin thy love.

Which has most to do with shekels to-day, the priests or the

politicians? Can we say in any special sense nowadays that clergymen, as

such, make a poison out of the blood of the martyrs? Can we say it in

anything like the real sense, in which we do say that yellow journalists

make a poison out of the blood of the soldiers?

But I understand how Swinburne felt when confronted by the image of the

carven Christ, and, perplexed by the contrast between its claims and its

consequences, he said his strange farewell to it, hastily indeed, but

not without regret, not even really without respect. I felt the same

myself when I looked for the last time on the Statue of Liberty.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] In the conclusion of this chapter I mean by the Republic

not merely the American Republic, but the whole modern representative

system, as in France or even in England.

Is the Atlantic Narrowing?

A certain kind of question is asked very earnestly in our time. Because

of a certain logical quality in it, connected with premises and data, it

is very difficult to answer. Thus people will ask what is the hidden

weakness in the Celtic race that makes them everywhere fail or fade

away; or how the Germans contrived to bring all their organisation into

a state of such perfect efficiency; and what was the significance of the

recent victory of Prussia. Or they will ask by what stages the modern

world has abandoned all belief in miracles; and the modern newspapers

ceased to print any news of murders. They will ask why English politics

are free from corruption; or by what mental and moral training certain

millionaires were enabled to succeed by sheer force of character; in

short, they will ask why plutocrats govern well and how it is that pigs

fly, spreading their pink pinions to the breeze or delighting us as they

twitter and flutter from tree to tree. The logical difficulty of

answering these questions is connected with an old story about Charles

the Second and a bowl of goldfish, and with another anecdote about a

gentleman who was asked, ‘When did you leave off beating your wife?’ But

there is something analogous to it in the present discussions about the

forces drawing England and America together. It seems as if the

reasoners hardly went far enough back in their argument, or took

trouble enough to disentangle their assumptions. They are still moving

with the momentum of the peculiar nineteenth-century notion of progress;

of certain very simple tendencies perpetually increasing and needing no

sono uno dei pochi che ancora si tolgono il cappello in quel tempio in rovina.

Ecco perché andai in giro in cerca delle sbiadenti tracce di quella causa

perduta, nell’atmosfera d’antico mondo del nuovo mondo.

Ma non sento, di fatto, che la cattedrale sia una rovina; dubito che lo

sentirei anche se desiderassi ridurla in rovine. Dubito che il signor

M’Cabe pensi davvero che il Cattolicesimo stia morendo, benché possa illudersi

fino a dirlo. Nessuno potrebbe essere naturalmente indotto a dire che la

affollata cattedrale di San Patrizio a New York sia una rovina, o persino che

l’incompiuta cattedrale anglo-cattolica a Washington sia una rovina, benché

non sia ancora una chiesa; o che ci sia alcunché di perduto o di attardato

nelle splendide e animose chiese gotiche che sorgono sotto l’

ispirazione del signor Cram di Boston. Come questione di sentimento, come questione

di fatto, come questione del tutto a parte dalla teoria o dall’opinione, non è nei

centri religiosi che ora abbiamo la sensazione di qualcosa

di bello ma che recede, di qualcosa di amato ma perduto. È esattamente negli

spazi sgombrati e spianati dall’America per la vasta e sobria

religione del diciottesimo secolo; è là dove una vecchia casa a

Philadelphia racchiude un vecchio ritratto di Franklin, o dove gli uomini del

Maryland innalzarono sopra la loro città il primo monumento a Washington. È

là che mi sento come chi calca solitario una sala del banchetto deserta,

le cui luci sono fuggite, le cui ghirlande sono morte, e tutti tranne lui partiti. È

allora che mi sento come se fossi l’ultimo Repubblicano.

Ma quando dico che la Repubblica dell’Età della Ragione è ora una rovina,

dovrei piuttosto dire che nel suo meglio è una rovina. Nel suo peggio è

crollata in una trappola mortale o marcisce come un letamaio. Che cos’è la

reale Repubblica dei nostri giorni distinta dalla ideale Repubblica dei nostri

padri, se non un mucchio di capitalismo corrotto brulicante di vermi; con

quei parassiti, i politici di professione? Stavo rileggendo

l’amara ma non ignobile poesia di Swinburne, «Davanti a un Crocifisso,» in cui

egli intima al Cristo, o all’immagine ecclesiastica del Cristo, di togliersi di

mezzo alla marcia in avanti di un idealismo politico rappresentato dall’

Italia unita o dalla Repubblica francese. Fui colpito dalla strana e ironica

esattezza con cui ogni frecciata che egli scaglia contro la degradazione del

vecchio ideale divino si attaglierebbe ora alla degradazione del suo proprio ideale umano.

Il tempo è già venuto in cui possiamo chiedere alla sua Dea della Libertà, quale

rappresentata dagli attuali liberali: «Hai tu colmato le

anime affamate degli uomini; hai tu portato la libertà sulla terra?» Poiché ogni

congegno in cui questi vecchi liberi pensatori fermamente e fiduciosamente confidarono

è esso stesso divenuto un congegno di oppressione e persino di oppressione di classe.

Il suo libero parlamento è divenuto un’oligarchia. La sua libera stampa è divenuta un

monopolio. Se la pura Chiesa è stata corrotta nel corso di due

mila anni, che dire della pura Repubblica che è marcita in una

lurida plutocrazia in meno di cento?

O nascosto volto dell’uomo, su cui

gli anni hanno tessuto un velo invisibile,

se davvero fosti amante dell’uomo,

a che valse il tuo amore o il tuo sangue?

Del tuo sangue i sacerdoti fanno veleno;

e in aurei sicli coniano il tuo amore.

Chi ha più a che fare coi sicli oggigiorno, i sacerdoti o i

politici? Possiamo dire in qualche senso speciale al giorno d’oggi che gli ecclesiastici, in quanto

tali, facciano un veleno del sangue dei martiri? Possiamo dirlo in

un senso simile a quello reale, in cui diciamo che i giornalisti scandalistici

fanno un veleno del sangue dei soldati?

Ma comprendo come si sentì Swinburne di fronte all’immagine del

Cristo scolpito e, perplesso dinanzi al contrasto tra le sue pretese e le sue

conseguenze, gli rivolse il suo strano addio, in fretta invero, ma

non senza rammarico, e nemmeno davvero senza rispetto. Provai lo stesso

io stesso quando guardai per l’ultima volta la Statua della Libertà.

NOTA:

[1] Nella conclusione di questo capitolo intendo per Repubblica

non solo la Repubblica americana, ma l’intero moderno sistema

rappresentativo, come in Francia o persino in Inghilterra.

L’Atlantico si sta restringendo?

Un certo tipo di domanda viene posta assai seriamente ai nostri tempi. A causa

di una certa qualità logica in essa, connessa con premesse e dati,

è assai difficile rispondervi. Così la gente chiederà quale sia la nascosta

debolezza nella razza celtica che la fa dappertutto fallire o dileguarsi

via; oppure come i tedeschi siano riusciti a portare tutta la loro organizzazione in

uno stato di così perfetta efficienza; e quale fosse il significato della

recente vittoria della Prussia. Oppure chiederanno per quali stadi il mondo

moderno abbia abbandonato ogni fede nei miracoli; e i giornali moderni

abbiano cessato di stampare qualsiasi notizia di omicidi. Chiederanno perché la politica inglese

sia libera dalla corruzione; o attraverso quale addestramento mentale e morale certi

milionari siano stati messi in grado di riuscire per pura forza di carattere; in

breve, chiederanno perché i plutocrati governino bene e come mai i porci

volino, spiegando le loro rosee ali alla brezza o deliziandoci mentre

cinguettano e svolazzano d’albero in albero. La difficoltà logica di

rispondere a queste domande è connessa con una vecchia storia su Carlo

Secondo e una boccia di pesci rossi, e con un altro aneddoto su un

gentiluomo a cui fu chiesto: «Quando ha smesso di picchiare sua moglie?» Ma

c’è qualcosa di analogo a ciò nelle presenti discussioni sulle

forze che avvicinano Inghilterra e America. Sembra quasi che i

ragionatori non risalgano abbastanza indietro nel loro argomento, o non si diano

abbastanza pena di districare i loro presupposti. Si muovono ancora

con lo slancio della peculiare nozione ottocentesca di progresso;

di certe tendenze assai semplici che aumentano perpetuamente e non abbisognano di

special analysis. It is so with the international rapprochement I have

to consider here.

In other places I have ventured to express a doubt about whether nations

can be drawn together by an ancient rumour about races; by a sort of

prehistoric chit-chat or the gossip of the Stone Age. I have ventured

farther; and even expressed a doubt about whether they ought to be drawn

together, or rather dragged together, by the brute violence of the

engines of science and speed. But there is yet another horrible doubt

haunting my morbid mind, which it will be better for my constitution to

confess frankly. And that is the doubt about whether they are being

drawn together at all.

It has long been a conversational commonplace among the enlightened that

all countries are coming closer and closer to each other. It was a

conversational commonplace among the enlightened, somewhere about the

year 1913, that all wars were receding farther and farther into a

barbaric past. There is something about these sayings that seems simple

and familiar and entirely satisfactory when we say them; they are of

that consoling sort which we can say without any of the mental pain of

thinking what we are saying. But if we turn our attention from the

phrases we use to the facts that we talk about, we shall realise at

least that there are a good many facts on the other side and examples

pointing the other way. For instance, it does happen occasionally, from

time to time, that people talk about Ireland. He would be a very

hilarious humanitarian who should maintain that Ireland and England have

been more and more assimilated during the last hundred years. The very

name of Sinn Fein is an answer to it, and the very language in which

that phrase is spoken. Curran and Sheil would no more have dreamed of

uttering the watchword of ‘Repeal’ in Gaelic than of uttering it in

Zulu. Grattan could hardly have brought himself to believe that the real

repeal of the Union would actually be signed in London in the strange

script as remote as the snaky ornament of the Celtic crosses. It would

have seemed like Washington signing the Declaration of Independence in

the picture-writing of the Red Indians. Ireland has clearly grown away

from England; and her language, literature, and type of patriotism are

far less English than they were. On the other hand, no one will pretend

that the mass of modern Englishmen are much nearer to talking Gaelic or

decorating Celtic crosses. A hundred years ago it was perfectly natural

that Byron and Moore should walk down the street arm in arm. Even the

sight of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. W. B. Yeats walking down the street

arm in arm would now arouse some remark.

I could give any number of other examples of the same new estrangement

of nations. I could cite the obvious facts that Norway and Sweden parted

company not very long ago, that Austria and Hungary have again become

separate states. I could point to the mob of new nations that have

started up after the war; to the fact that the great empires are now

nearly all broken up; that the Russian Empire no longer directs Poland,

that the Austrian Empire no longer directs Bohemia, that the Turkish

Empire no longer directs Palestine. Sinn Fein is the separatism of the

Irish. Zionism is the separatism of the Jews. But there is one simple

and sufficing example, which is here more to my purpose, and is at least

equally sufficient for it. And that is the deepening national difference

between the Americans and the English.

Let me test it first by my individual experience in the matter of

literature. When I was a boy I read a book like _The Autocrat of the

Breakfast-Table_ exactly as I read another book like _The Book of

Snobs_. I did not think of it as an American book, but simply as a book.

Its wit and idiom were like those of the English literary tradition; and

its few touches of local colour seemed merely accidental, like those of

an Englishman who happened to be living in Switzerland or Sweden. My

father and my father’s friends were rightly enthusiastic for the book;

so that it seemed to come to me by inheritance like Gulliver’s Travels

or Tristram Shandy. Its language was as English as Ruskin, and a great

deal more English than Carlyle. Well, I have seen in later years an

almost equally wide and well-merited popularity of the stories of O.

Henry. But never for one moment could I or any one else reading them

forget that they were stories by an American about America. The very

first fact about them is that they are told with an American accent,

that is, in the unmistakable tones of a brilliant and fascinating

foreigner. And the same is true of every other recent work of which the

fame has managed to cross the Atlantic. We did not say that _The Spoon

River Anthology_ was a new book, but that it was a new book from

America. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported

from Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the

‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard.’ People in England who heard of Main

Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street; with the

principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire or

Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I practically identified the

boarding-house of the Autocrat with any boarding-house I happened to

know in Brompton or Brighton. No doubt there were differences; but the

point is that the differences did not pierce the consciousness or prick

the illusion. I said to myself, ‘People are like this in

boarding-houses,’ not ‘People are like this in Boston.’

This can be seen even in the simple matter of language, especially in

the sense of slang. Take, for instance, the delightful sketch in the

causerie of Oliver Wendell Holmes; the character of the young man called

analisi speciale. Così è per il rapprochement internazionale che devo

considerare qui.

Altrove mi sono azzardato a esprimere un dubbio sul fatto che le nazioni

possano essere unite da un’antica diceria sulle razze; da una sorta di

chiacchiericcio preistorico o dai pettegolezzi dell’Età della Pietra. Mi sono spinto

oltre; e ho perfino espresso un dubbio sul fatto che debbano essere unite,

o piuttosto trascinate insieme, dalla bruta violenza dei

congegni della scienza e della velocità. Ma c’è ancora un altro orribile dubbio

che infesta la mia mente morbosa, e che per la mia costituzione sarà meglio

confessare francamente. Ed è il dubbio sul fatto che esse siano davvero

avvicinate le une alle altre.

È da tempo un luogo comune da conversazione fra le persone illuminate che

tutti i paesi si avvicinino sempre di più gli uni agli altri. Era un

luogo comune da conversazione fra le persone illuminate, all’incirca intorno

all’anno 1913, che tutte le guerre si ritirassero sempre più lontano in un

passato barbarico. C’è qualcosa in questi detti che sembra semplice

e familiare e del tutto soddisfacente quando li pronunciamo; sono di

quella sorta consolante che possiamo pronunciare senza alcuna pena mentale nel

pensare a ciò che stiamo dicendo. Ma se volgiamo la nostra attenzione dalle

frasi che usiamo ai fatti di cui parliamo, ci accorgeremo almeno

che vi sono parecchi fatti dall’altra parte ed esempi

che indicano la direzione opposta. Per esempio, capita di tanto in tanto, di

tempo in tempo, che si parli dell’Irlanda. Sarebbe un umanitario assai

ilare colui che sostenesse che l’Irlanda e l’Inghilterra si sono

sempre più assimilate nel corso degli ultimi cent’anni. Il nome stesso

di Sinn Fein ne è una risposta, e la lingua stessa in cui

quella frase è pronunciata. Curran e Sheil non avrebbero mai sognato di

pronunciare la parola d’ordine del ‘Repeal’ in gaelico, come non l’avrebbero pronunciata in

zulù. Grattan a stento avrebbe potuto convincersi che il vero

repeal dell’Unione sarebbe stato firmato a Londra in una strana

grafia remota quanto l’ornamento serpentino delle croci celtiche. Sarebbe

parso come Washington che firma la Dichiarazione d’Indipendenza nella

scrittura pittografica dei Pellerossa. L’Irlanda si è chiaramente allontanata

dall’Inghilterra; e la sua lingua, la sua letteratura e il suo tipo di patriottismo sono

assai meno inglesi di quanto fossero. D’altro canto, nessuno pretenderà

che la massa degli inglesi moderni sia molto più vicina a parlare gaelico o

a decorare croci celtiche. Cent’anni fa era perfettamente naturale

che Byron e Moore passeggiassero per strada a braccetto. Persino la

vista del signor Rudyard Kipling e del signor W. B. Yeats che passeggiano per strada

a braccetto susciterebbe oggi qualche commento.

Potrei fornire un numero qualsiasi di altri esempi dello stesso nuovo straniamento

fra le nazioni. Potrei citare i fatti evidenti che la Norvegia e la Svezia si sono

separate non molto tempo fa, che l’Austria e l’Ungheria sono di nuovo divenute

stati separati. Potrei indicare la folla di nuove nazioni che sono

sorte dopo la guerra; il fatto che i grandi imperi sono ormai

quasi tutti smembrati; che l’Impero russo non dirige più la Polonia,

che l’Impero austriaco non dirige più la Boemia, che l’Impero turco

non dirige più la Palestina. Sinn Fein è il separatismo degli

irlandesi. Il sionismo è il separatismo degli ebrei. Ma c’è un esempio semplice

e bastevole, che qui è più consono al mio scopo, ed è almeno

altrettanto sufficiente. Ed è la sempre più profonda differenza nazionale

fra gli americani e gli inglesi.

Lasciatemi verificarlo anzitutto con la mia esperienza personale in materia di

letteratura. Da ragazzo leggevo un libro come _The Autocrat of the

Breakfast-Table_ esattamente come leggevo un altro libro come _The Book of

Snobs_. Non lo consideravo un libro americano, ma semplicemente un libro.

Il suo spirito e il suo idioma erano come quelli della tradizione letteraria inglese; e

i suoi pochi tocchi di colore locale parevano meramente accidentali, come quelli di

un inglese che si trovasse a vivere in Svizzera o in Svezia. Mio

padre e gli amici di mio padre erano giustamente entusiasti del libro;

sicché mi pareva pervenirmi per eredità come Gulliver’s Travels

o Tristram Shandy. La sua lingua era inglese quanto Ruskin, e assai

più inglese di Carlyle. Ebbene, negli anni successivi ho visto una

popolarità quasi altrettanto vasta e ben meritata dei racconti di O.

Henry. Ma mai per un solo istante io, o chiunque altro leggendoli, avrei potuto

dimenticare che erano racconti di un americano sull’America. Il

primo fatto che li riguarda è che sono narrati con accento americano,

vale a dire, negli inconfondibili toni di un affascinante e brillante

straniero. E lo stesso vale per ogni altra opera recente la cui

fama sia riuscita a varcare l’Atlantico. Non dicevamo che _The Spoon

River Anthology_ fosse un libro nuovo, ma che fosse un libro nuovo dall’

America. Era esattamente come se un notevole romanzo realistico venisse riferito

dalla Russia o dall’Italia. Non correvamo il rischio di confonderlo con l’

‘Elegia in un cimitero di campagna.’ Chi in Inghilterra sentiva parlare di Main

Street non era portato a identificarla con una High Street; con la

arteria principale di una qualsiasi cittadina del Berkshire o del

Buckinghamshire. Ma da ragazzo io identificavo praticamente la

pensione dell’Autocrat con una qualsiasi pensione che mi capitasse di

conoscere a Brompton o Brighton. Senza dubbio c’erano differenze; ma il

punto è che le differenze non trafiggevano la coscienza né pungevano

l’illusione. Dicevo a me stesso: ‘La gente è così nelle

pensioni’, non ‘La gente è così a Boston.’

Ciò si può vedere anche nella semplice questione della lingua, specialmente nel

senso dello slang. Si prenda, per esempio, il delizioso schizzo nella

causerie di Oliver Wendell Holmes; il personaggio del giovane chiamato

John. He is the very modern type in every modern country who does

specialise in slang. He is the young fellow who is something in the

City; the everyday young man of the Gilbertian song, with a stick and a

pipe and a half-bred black-and-tan. In every country he is at once witty

and commonplace. In every country, therefore, he tends both to the

vivacity and the vulgarity of slang. But when he appeared in Holmes’s

book, his language was not very different from what it would have been

in a Brighton instead of a Boston boarding-house; or, in short, if the

young man called John had more commonly been called ‘Arry. If he had

appeared in a modern American book, his language would have been almost

literally unintelligible. At the least an Englishman would have had to

read some of the best sentences twice, as he sometimes has to read the

dizzy and involved metaphors of O. Henry. Nor is it an answer that this

depended on the personalities of the particular writers. A comparison

between the real journalism of the time of Holmes and the real

journalism of the time of Henry reveals the same thing. It is the

expansion of a slight difference of style into a luxuriant difference of

idiom; and the process continued indefinitely would certainly produce a

totally different language. After a few centuries the signatures of

American ambassadors would look as fantastic as Gaelic, and the very

name of the Republic be as strange as Sinn Fein.

It is true that there has been on the surface a certain amount of give

and take; or at least, as far as the English are concerned, of take

rather than give. But it is true that it was once all the other way; and

indeed the one thing is something like a just nemesis of the other.

Indeed, the story of the reversal is somewhat singular, when we come to

think of it. It began in a certain atmosphere and spirit of certain

well-meaning people who talked about the English-speaking race; and were

apparently indifferent to how the English was spoken, whether in the

accent of a Jamaican negro or a convict from Botany Bay. It was their

logical tendency to say that Dante was a Dago. It was their logical

punishment to say that Disraeli was an Englishman. Now there may have

been a period when this Anglo-American amalgamation included more or

less equal elements from England and America. It never included the

larger elements, or the more valuable elements of either. But, on the

whole, I think it true to say that it was not an allotment but an

interchange of parts; and that things first went all one way and then

all the other. People began by telling the Americans that they owed all

their past triumphs to England; which was false. They ended up by

telling the English that they would owe all their future triumphs to

America; which is if possible still more false. Because we chose to

forget that New York had been New Amsterdam, we are now in danger of

forgetting that London is not New York. Because we insisted that Chicago

was only a pious imitation of Chiswick, we may yet see Chiswick an

inferior imitation of Chicago. Our Anglo-Saxon historians attempted that

conquest in which Howe and Burgoyne had failed, and with infinitely less

justification on their side. They attempted the great crime of the

Anglicisation of America. They have called down the punishment of the

Americanisation of England. We must not murmur; but it is a heavy

punishment.

It may lift a little of its load, however, if we look at it more

closely; we shall then find that though it is very much on top of us, it

is only on top. In that sense such Americanisation as there is is very

superficial. For instance, there is a certain amount of American slang

picked up at random; it appears in certain pushing types of journalism

and drama. But we may easily dwell too much on this tragedy; of people

who have never spoken English beginning to speak American. I am far from

suggesting that American, like any other foreign language, may not

frequently contribute to the common culture of the world phrases for

which there is no substitute; there are French phrases so used in

England and English phrases in France. The word ‘high-brow,’ for

instance, is a real discovery and revelation, a new and necessary name

for something that walked nameless but enormous in the modern world, a

shaft of light and a stroke of lightning. That comes from America and

belongs to the world, as much as ‘The Raven’ or The Scarlet Letter or

the novels of Henry James belong to the world. In fact, I can imagine

Henry James originating it in the throes of self-expression, and

bringing out a word like ‘high-browed,’ with a sort of gentle jerk, at

the end of searching sentences which groped sensitively until they found

the phrase. But most of the American slang that is borrowed seems to be

borrowed for no particular reason. It either has no point or the point

is lost by translation into another context and culture. It is either

something which does not need any grotesque and exaggerative

description, or of which there already exists a grotesque and

exaggerative description more native to our tongue and soil. For

instance, I cannot see that the strong and simple expression ‘Now it is

for you to pull the police magistrate’s nose’ is in any way strengthened

by saying, ‘Now it is up to you to pull the police magistrate’s nose.’

When Tennyson says of the men of the Light Brigade ‘Theirs but to do and

die,’ the expression seems to me perfectly lucid. ‘Up to them to do and

die’ would alter the metre without especially clarifying the meaning.

This is an example of ordinary language being quite adequate; but there

is a further difficulty that even wild slang comes to sound like

John. È il tipo assai moderno che in ogni paese moderno si

specializza nello slang. È il giovanotto che è qualcosa nella

City; il giovane di tutti i giorni della canzone gilbertiana, con un bastone e una

pipa e un bastardino black-and-tan. In ogni paese è insieme arguto

e banale. In ogni paese, perciò, tende sia alla

vivacità sia alla volgarità dello slang. Ma quando comparve nel libro di Holmes,

il suo linguaggio non era molto diverso da quello che sarebbe stato

in una pensione di Brighton anziché di Boston; o, in breve, se il

giovane chiamato John fosse stato più comunemente chiamato ‘Arry. Se fosse

comparso in un libro americano moderno, il suo linguaggio sarebbe stato quasi

letteralmente incomprensibile. Come minimo un inglese avrebbe dovuto

leggere due volte alcune delle frasi migliori, come talvolta deve leggere le

vertiginose e contorte metafore di O. Henry. Né vale come risposta che questo

dipendesse dalle personalità dei singoli scrittori. Un confronto

fra il giornalismo reale del tempo di Holmes e il giornalismo reale

del tempo di Henry rivela la stessa cosa. È l’

espansione di una lieve differenza di stile in una lussureggiante differenza di

idioma; e il processo, protratto indefinitamente, produrrebbe di certo una

lingua totalmente diversa. Dopo qualche secolo le firme degli

ambasciatori americani apparirebbero fantastiche quanto il gaelico, e il nome stesso

della Repubblica strano quanto Sinn Fein.

È vero che in superficie c’è stato un certo dare

e avere; o almeno, per quanto riguarda gli inglesi, un avere

più che un dare. Ma è vero che un tempo era tutto il contrario; e

in effetti l’una cosa è qualcosa come una giusta nemesi dell’altra.

Invero, la storia del capovolgimento è alquanto singolare, se ci mettiamo a

pensarci. Cominciò in una certa atmosfera e in un certo spirito di certe

persone ben intenzionate che parlavano della razza di lingua inglese; ed erano

apparentemente indifferenti a come l’inglese fosse parlato, se con l’

accento di un negro giamaicano o di un galeotto di Botany Bay. Era loro

logica tendenza dire che Dante era un Dago. Era loro logica

punizione dire che Disraeli era un inglese. Ora, può esservi stato

un periodo in cui questa amalgama anglo-americana includeva elementi più o

meno paritari dall’Inghilterra e dall’America. Non incluse mai gli

elementi più grandi, o gli elementi più preziosi, dell’una o dell’altra. Ma, nel

complesso, credo sia vero dire che non fu una spartizione bensì uno

scambio di parti; e che le cose andarono dapprima tutte in un senso e poi

tutte nell’altro. La gente cominciò col dire agli americani che dovevano tutti

i loro passati trionfi all’Inghilterra; il che era falso. Finirono col

dire agli inglesi che avrebbero dovuto tutti i loro futuri trionfi all’

America; il che è, se possibile, ancora più falso. Poiché scegliemmo di

dimenticare che New York era stata New Amsterdam, corriamo ora il rischio di

dimenticare che Londra non è New York. Poiché insistemmo che Chicago

era solo una pia imitazione di Chiswick, potremmo ancora vedere Chiswick

inferiore imitazione di Chicago. I nostri storici anglosassoni tentarono quella

conquista in cui Howe e Burgoyne avevano fallito, e con infinitamente minor

giustificazione dalla loro parte. Tentarono il grande crimine dell’

anglicizzazione dell’America. Hanno attirato su di sé la punizione dell’

americanizzazione dell’Inghilterra. Non dobbiamo mormorare; ma è una pesante

punizione.

Può tuttavia alleggerire un poco il suo carico, se la guardiamo più da

vicino; scopriremo allora che, per quanto ci stia molto addosso,

sta soltanto in cima. In tal senso questa americanizzazione, per quanto ve ne sia, è assai

superficiale. Per esempio, c’è una certa quantità di slang americano

raccolto a casaccio; compare in certi tipi di giornalismo intraprendente

e nel teatro. Ma potremmo facilmente indugiare troppo su questa tragedia; di gente

che non ha mai parlato inglese e comincia a parlare americano. Sono ben lungi dal

suggerire che l’americano, come ogni altra lingua straniera, non possa

spesso contribuire alla cultura comune del mondo con frasi per

le quali non c’è sostituto; vi sono frasi francesi così usate in

Inghilterra e frasi inglesi in Francia. La parola ‘high-brow’, per

esempio, è una vera scoperta e rivelazione, un nome nuovo e necessario

per qualcosa che camminava senza nome ma enorme nel mondo moderno, un

fascio di luce e un colpo di fulmine. Viene dall’America e

appartiene al mondo, tanto quanto ‘The Raven’ o The Scarlet Letter o

i romanzi di Henry James appartengono al mondo. Anzi, posso immaginare

Henry James che la conia negli spasimi dell’auto-espressione, e

tira fuori una parola come ‘high-browed’, con una sorta di gentile scatto, alla

fine di frasi indaganti che brancolavano sensibilmente finché trovavano

la frase giusta. Ma la maggior parte dello slang americano che viene preso in prestito pare essere

presa in prestito senza alcun motivo particolare. O non ha alcun senso, o il senso

va perduto nella traduzione in un altro contesto e cultura. O è

qualcosa che non ha bisogno di alcuna descrizione grottesca ed esagerata,

o di cui esiste già una descrizione grottesca ed

esagerata più nativa alla nostra lingua e al nostro suolo. Per

esempio, non vedo come la forte e semplice espressione ‘Now it is

for you to pull the police magistrate’s nose’ sia in alcun modo rafforzata

dal dire ‘Now it is up to you to pull the police magistrate’s nose.’

Quando Tennyson dice degli uomini della Light Brigade ‘Theirs but to do and

die’, l’espressione mi pare perfettamente limpida. ‘Up to them to do and

die’ altererebbe il metro senza chiarire granché il significato.

Questo è un esempio di linguaggio ordinario del tutto adeguato; ma c’è

un’ulteriore difficoltà, che perfino lo slang più sfrenato finisce col suonare come

ordinary language. Very often the English have already as humorous and

fanciful idiom of their own, only that through habit it has lost its

humour. When Keats wrote the line, ‘What pipes and timbrels, what wild

ecstasy!’ I am willing to believe that the American humorist would have

expressed the same sentiment by beginning the sentence with ‘Some

pipe!’ When that was first said, somewhere in the wilds of Colorado, it

was really funny; involving a powerful understatement and the suggestion

of a mere sample. If a spinster has informed us that she keeps a bird,

and we find it is an ostrich, there will be considerable point in the

Colorado satirist saying inquiringly, ‘Some bird?’ as if he were

offering us a small slice of a small plover. But if we go back to this

root and rationale of a joke, the English language already contains

quite as good a joke. It is not necessary to say, ‘Some bird’; there is

a far finer irony in the old expression, ‘Something like a bird.’ It

suggests that the speaker sees something faintly and strangely birdlike

about a bird; that it remotely and almost irrationally reminds him of a

bird; and that there is about ostrich plumes a yard long something like

the faint and delicate traces of a feather. It has every quality of

imaginative irony, except that nobody even imagines it to be ironical.

All that happens is that people get tired of that turn of phrase, take

up a foreign phrase and get tired of that, without realising the point

of either. All that happens is that a number of weary people who used to

say, ‘Something like a bird,’ now say, ‘Some bird,’ with undiminished

weariness. But they might just as well use dull and decent English; for

in both cases they are only using jocular language without seeing the

joke.

There is indeed a considerable trade in the transplantation of these

American jokes to England just now. They generally pine and die in our

climate, or they are dead before their arrival; but we cannot be certain

that they were never alive. There is a sort of unending frieze or

scroll of decorative designs unrolled ceaselessly before the British

public, about a hen-pecked husband, which is indistinguishable to the

eye from an actual self-repeating pattern like that of the Greek Key,

but which is imported as if it were as precious and irreplaceable as the

Elgin Marbles. Advertisement and syndication make mountains out of the

most funny little mole-hills; but no doubt the mole-hills are

picturesque enough in their own landscape. In any case there is nothing

so national as humour; and many things, like many people, can be

humorous enough when they are at home. But these American jokes are

boomed as solemnly as American religions; and their supporters gravely

testify that they are funny, without seeing the fun of it for a moment.

This is partly perhaps the spirit of spontaneous institutionalism in

American democracy, breaking out in the wrong place. They make humour an

institution; and a man will be set to tell an anecdote as if to play the

violin. But when the story is told in America it really is amusing; and

when these jokes are reprinted in England they are often not even

intelligible. With all the stupidity of the millionaire and the

monopolist, the enterprising proprietor prints jokes in England which

are necessarily unintelligible to nearly every English person; jokes

referring to domestic and local conditions quite peculiar to America. I

saw one of these narrative caricatures the other day in which the whole

of the joke (what there was of it) turned on the astonishment of a

housewife at the absurd notion of not having an ice-box. It is perfectly

true that nearly every ordinary American housewife possesses an ice-box.

An ordinary English housewife would no more expect to possess an

ice-box than to possess an iceberg. And it would be about as sensible to

tow an iceberg to an English port all the way from the North Pole, as to

trail that one pale and frigid joke to Fleet Street all the way from the

New York papers. It is the same with a hundred other advertisements and

adaptations. I have already confessed that I took a considerable delight

in the dancing illuminations of Broadway—in Broadway. Everything there

is suitable to them, the vast interminable thoroughfare, the toppling

houses, the dizzy and restless spirit of the whole city. It is a city of

dissolving views, and one may almost say a city in everlasting

dissolution. But I do not especially admire a burning fragment of

Broadway stuck up opposite the old Georgian curve of Regent Street. I

would as soon express sympathy with the Republic of Switzerland by

erecting a small Alp, with imitation snow, in the middle of St. James’s

Park.

But all this commercial copying is very superficial; and above all, it

never copies anything that is really worth copying. Nations never

learn anything from each other in this way. We have many things to

learn from America; but we only listen to those Americans who have still

to learn them. Thus, for instance, we do not import the small farm but

only the big shop. In other words, we hear nothing of the democracy of

the Middle West, but everything of the plutocracy of the middleman, who

is probably as unpopular in the Middle West as the miller in the Middle

Ages. If Mr. Elihu K. Pike could be transplanted bodily from the

neighbourhood of his home town of Marathon, Neb., with his farm and his

frame-house and all its fittings, and they could be set down exactly in

the spot now occupied by Selfridge’s (which could be easily cleared away

for the purpose), I think we could really get a great deal of good by

watching him, even if the watching were inevitably a little too like

watching a wild beast in a cage or an insect under a glass case. Urban

linguaggio ordinario. Assai spesso gli inglesi hanno già un idioma altrettanto umoristico e

fantasioso, salvo che per abitudine ha perduto il suo

umorismo. Quando Keats scrisse il verso ‘What pipes and timbrels, what wild

ecstasy!’ sono disposto a credere che l’umorista americano avrebbe

espresso lo stesso sentimento cominciando la frase con ‘Some

pipe!’ Quando lo si disse per la prima volta, da qualche parte fra le terre selvagge del Colorado,

era davvero buffo; implicava un potente understatement e il suggerimento

di un semplice campione. Se una zitella ci ha informati di tenere un uccello,

e scopriamo che è uno struzzo, ci sarà notevole arguzia nel

satirico del Colorado che chiede, indagatore, ‘Some bird?’ come se ci

offrisse una piccola fetta di un piccolo piviere. Ma se torniamo a questa

radice e ragione di una battuta, la lingua inglese contiene già

una battuta altrettanto buona. Non è necessario dire ‘Some bird’; c’è

un’ironia assai più fine nella vecchia espressione ‘Something like a bird.’ Essa

suggerisce che chi parla scorge qualcosa di debolmente e stranamente uccellesco

in un uccello; che gli ricorda remotamente e quasi irrazionalmente un

uccello; e che nelle piume di struzzo lunghe una iarda c’è qualcosa come

le tenui e delicate tracce di una piuma. Ha ogni qualità dell’

ironia immaginativa, salvo che nessuno immagina nemmeno che sia ironica.

Tutto ciò che accade è che la gente si stanca di quella locuzione, adotta

una frase straniera e si stanca anche di quella, senza cogliere il senso

dell’una o dell’altra. Tutto ciò che accade è che un certo numero di persone stanche che usavano

dire ‘Something like a bird’ ora dicono ‘Some bird’, con immutata

stanchezza. Ma potrebbero altrettanto bene usare un inglese scialbo e dignitoso; poiché

in entrambi i casi stanno solo usando un linguaggio scherzoso senza cogliere la

battuta.

C’è invero un considerevole commercio nel trapianto di queste

battute americane in Inghilterra, di questi tempi. Generalmente languono e muoiono nel nostro

clima, oppure sono già morte prima di arrivare; ma non possiamo essere certi

che non siano mai state vive. C’è una sorta di fregio senza fine o

rotolo di motivi decorativi srotolato incessantemente davanti al pubblico

britannico, su un marito succube della moglie, che all’occhio è indistinguibile

da un vero motivo auto-ripetentesi come quello della greca,

ma che viene importato come se fosse prezioso e insostituibile quanto i

Marmi di Elgin. La pubblicità e la sindacazione fanno montagne dei

più buffi piccoli monticelli; ma senza dubbio i monticelli sono

abbastanza pittoreschi nel loro paesaggio. In ogni caso non c’è nulla

di tanto nazionale quanto l’umorismo; e molte cose, come molte persone, possono essere

abbastanza divertenti quando sono a casa loro. Ma queste battute americane vengono

strombazzate con la stessa solennità delle religioni americane; e i loro sostenitori gravemente

testimoniano che sono divertenti, senza coglierne il divertimento nemmeno per un istante.

Questo è forse in parte lo spirito dell’istituzionalismo spontaneo della

democrazia americana, che erompe nel posto sbagliato. Fanno dell’umorismo un’

istituzione; e un uomo verrà messo a raccontare un aneddoto come a suonare il

violino. Ma quando la storia è raccontata in America è davvero spassosa; e

quando queste battute vengono ristampate in Inghilterra spesso non sono nemmeno

intelligibili. Con tutta la stupidità del milionario e del

monopolista, l’intraprendente proprietario stampa in Inghilterra battute che

sono necessariamente incomprensibili a quasi ogni inglese; battute

che si riferiscono a condizioni domestiche e locali del tutto peculiari all’America. Ne

vidi l’altro giorno una di queste caricature narrative in cui l’intera

battuta (per quel poco che c’era) verteva sullo stupore di una

casalinga davanti all’assurda idea di non avere una ghiacciaia. È perfettamente

vero che quasi ogni comune casalinga americana possiede una ghiacciaia.

Una comune casalinga inglese non si aspetterebbe di possedere una

ghiacciaia più di quanto si aspetterebbe di possedere un iceberg. E sarebbe sensato press’a poco quanto

rimorchiare un iceberg fino a un porto inglese tutto il tragitto dal Polo Nord,

trascinare quell’unica pallida e gelida battuta fino a Fleet Street tutto il tragitto dai

giornali di New York. Lo stesso vale per un centinaio di altre pubblicità e

adattamenti. Ho già confessato di aver provato notevole diletto

nelle danzanti illuminazioni di Broadway—a Broadway. Là tutto

è adatto ad esse, la vasta e interminabile arteria, le case

traballanti, lo spirito vertiginoso e irrequieto dell’intera città. È una città di

vedute che si dissolvono, e si può quasi dire una città in perpetua

dissoluzione. Ma non ammiro in modo particolare un ardente frammento di

Broadway appiccicato di fronte alla vecchia curva georgiana di Regent Street. Esprimerei

altrettanto volentieri la mia simpatia per la Repubblica di Svizzera

erigendo una piccola Alpe, con neve d’imitazione, in mezzo a St. James’s

Park.

Ma tutta questa imitazione commerciale è assai superficiale; e soprattutto,

non copia mai nulla che valga davvero la pena di copiare. Le nazioni non

imparano mai nulla l’una dall’altra in questo modo. Abbiamo molte cose da

imparare dall’America; ma diamo ascolto solo a quegli americani che devono ancora

impararle. Così, per esempio, non importiamo la piccola fattoria bensì

solo il grande negozio. In altre parole, non udiamo nulla della democrazia del

Middle West, ma tutto della plutocrazia dell’intermediario, che

è probabilmente tanto impopolare nel Middle West quanto il mugnaio nel

Medioevo. Se il signor Elihu K. Pike potesse essere trapiantato di peso dai

dintorni della sua città natale di Marathon, Neb., con la sua fattoria e la sua

casa di legno e tutti i suoi arredi, e li si potesse collocare esattamente nel

punto ora occupato da Selfridge’s (che si potrebbe facilmente sgomberare

allo scopo), credo che potremmo trarne davvero gran giovamento

osservandolo, anche se l’osservazione somiglierebbe inevitabilmente un po’ troppo all’

osservare una bestia feroce in gabbia o un insetto sotto una teca di vetro. Folle

crowds could collect every day behind a barrier or railing, and gaze at

Mr. Pike pottering about all day in his ancient and autochthonous

occupations. We could see him growing Indian corn with all the gravity

of an Indian; though it is impossible to imagine Mrs. Pike blessing the

cornfield in the manner of Minnehaha. As I have said, there is a certain

lack of humane myth and mysticism about this Puritan peasantry. But we

could see him transforming the maize into pop-corn, which is a very

pleasant domestic ritual and pastime, and is the American equivalent of

the glory of roasting chestnuts. Above all, many of us would learn for

the first time that a man can really live and walk about upon something

more productive than a pavement; and that when he does so he can really

be a free man, and have no lord but the law. Instead of that, America

can give nothing to London but those multiple modern shops, of which it

has too many already. I know that many people entertain the innocent

illusion that big shops are more efficient than small ones; but that is

only because the big combinations have the monopoly of advertisement as

well as trade. The big shop is not in the least remarkable for

efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency. It is

secure in its reputation for always sacking the wrong man. A big shop,

considered as a place to shop in, is simply a village of small shops

roofed in to keep out the light and air; and one in which none of the

shopkeepers is really responsible for his shop. If any one has any

doubts on this matter, since I have mentioned it, let him consider this

fact: that in practice we never do apply this method of commercial

combination to anything that matters very much. We do not go to the

surgical department of the Stores to have a portion of our brain removed

by a delicate operation; and then pass on to the advocacy department to

employ one or any of its barristers, when we are in temporary danger of

being hanged. We go to men who own their own tools and are responsible

for the use of their own talents. And the same truth applies to that

other modern method of advertisement, which has also so largely fallen

across us like the gigantic shadow of America. Nations do not arm

themselves for a mortal struggle by remembering which sort of submarine

they have seen most often on the hoardings. They can do it about

something like soap, precisely because a nation will not perish by

having a second-rate sort of soap, as it might by having a second-rate

sort of submarine. A nation may indeed perish slowly by having a

second-rate sort of food or drink or medicine; but that is another and

much longer story, and the story is not ended yet. But nobody wins a

great battle at a great crisis because somebody has told him that

Cadgerboy’s Cavalry Is the Best. It may be that commercial enterprise

will eventually cover these fields also, and advertisement-agents will

provide the instruments of the surgeon and the weapons of the soldier.

When that happens, the armies will be defeated and the patients will

die. But though we modern people are indeed patients, in the sense of

being merely receptive and accepting things with astonishing patience,

we are not dead yet; and we have lingering gleams of sanity.

For the best things do not travel. As I appear here as a traveller, I

may say with all modesty that the best people do not travel either. Both

in England and America the normal people are the national people; and I

repeat that I think they are growing more and more national. I do not

think the abyss is being bridged by cosmopolitan theories; and I am sure

I do not want it bridged by all this slang journalism and blatant

advertisement. I have called all that commercial publicity the gigantic

shadow of America. It may be the shadow of America, but it is not the

light of America. The light lies far beyond, a level light upon the

lands of sunset, where it shines upon wide places full of a very simple

and a very happy people; and those who would see it must seek for it.

Lincoln and Lost Causes

It has already been remarked here that the English know a great deal

about past American literature, but nothing about past American history.

They do not know either, of course, as well as they know the present

American advertising, which is the least important of the three. But it

is worth noting once more how little they know of the history, and how

illogically that little is chosen. They have heard, no doubt, of the

fame and the greatness of Henry Clay. He is a cigar. But it would be

unwise to cross-examine any Englishman, who may be consuming that luxury

at the moment, about the Missouri Compromise or the controversies with

Andrew Jackson. And just as the statesman of Kentucky is a cigar, so the

state of Virginia is a cigarette. But there is perhaps one exception, or

half-exception, to this simple plan. It would perhaps be an exaggeration

to say that Plymouth Rock is a chicken. Any English person keeping

chickens, and chiefly interested in Plymouth Rocks considered as

chickens, would nevertheless have a hazy sensation of having seen the

word somewhere before. He would feel subconsciously that the Plymouth

Rock had not always been a chicken. Indeed, the name connotes something

not only solid but antiquated; and is not therefore a very tactful name

for a chicken. There would rise up before him something memorable in

the haze that he calls his history; and he would see the history books

of his boyhood and old engravings of men in steeple-crowned hats

struggling with sea-waves or Red Indians. The whole thing would suddenly

become clear to him if (by a simple reform) the chickens were called

Pilgrim Fathers.

Then he would remember all about it. The Pilgrim Fathers were champions

urbane potrebbero radunarsi ogni giorno dietro una barriera o una ringhiera, e osservare

il signor Pike che gironzola tutto il giorno nelle sue antiche e autoctone

occupazioni. Potremmo vederlo coltivare il granturco con tutta la gravità

di un indiano; benché sia impossibile immaginare la signora Pike che benedice il

campo di mais alla maniera di Minnehaha. Come ho detto, c’è una certa

mancanza di mito e misticismo umani in questo contadinato puritano. Ma

potremmo vederlo trasformare il mais in pop-corn, che è un rituale e passatempo

domestico assai piacevole, ed è l’equivalente americano

della gloria di arrostire le castagne. Soprattutto, molti di noi imparerebbero per

la prima volta che un uomo può davvero vivere e camminare su qualcosa

di più produttivo di un marciapiede; e che quando lo fa può davvero

essere un uomo libero, e non avere altro signore che la legge. Invece, l’America

non può dare a Londra altro che quei molteplici negozi moderni, di cui essa

ne ha già troppi. So che molti coltivano l’innocente

illusione che i grandi negozi siano più efficienti dei piccoli; ma questo

solo perché le grandi combinazioni hanno il monopolio della pubblicità oltre

che del commercio. Il grande negozio non è affatto notevole per

efficienza; è solo troppo grande per essere biasimato per la sua inefficienza. È

sicuro della sua fama di licenziare sempre l’uomo sbagliato. Un grande negozio,

considerato come luogo in cui fare acquisti, è semplicemente un villaggio di piccoli negozi

coperti da un tetto per tenere fuori la luce e l’aria; e in cui nessuno dei

negozianti è davvero responsabile del proprio negozio. Se qualcuno nutre

dubbi in proposito, dato che l’ho menzionato, consideri questo

fatto: che in pratica non applichiamo mai questo metodo di combinazione

commerciale a nulla che importi molto. Non ci rechiamo al

reparto di chirurgia dei Grandi Magazzini per farci asportare una porzione di cervello

con una delicata operazione; per poi passare al reparto di avvocatura per

assoldare uno qualsiasi dei suoi legali, quando siamo in temporaneo pericolo di

essere impiccati. Ci rivolgiamo a uomini che possiedono i propri strumenti e sono responsabili

dell’uso dei propri talenti. E la stessa verità vale per quell’

altro moderno metodo pubblicitario, che pure è calato così ampiamente

su di noi come la gigantesca ombra dell’America. Le nazioni non si

armano per una lotta mortale ricordando quale tipo di sommergibile

abbiano visto più spesso sui cartelloni. Possono farlo con

qualcosa come il sapone, proprio perché una nazione non perirà per il

fatto di avere un tipo di sapone di second’ordine, come potrebbe per un tipo di

sommergibile di second’ordine. Una nazione può invero perire lentamente per il fatto di avere un

tipo di cibo o bevanda o medicina di second’ordine; ma questa è un’altra e

assai più lunga storia, e la storia non è ancora finita. Ma nessuno vince una

grande battaglia in una grande crisi perché qualcuno gli ha detto che

Cadgerboy’s Cavalry Is the Best. Può darsi che l’impresa commerciale

finisca col coprire anche questi campi, e gli agenti pubblicitari

forniscano gli strumenti del chirurgo e le armi del soldato.

Quando ciò accadrà, gli eserciti saranno sconfitti e i pazienti

moriranno. Ma per quanto noi gente moderna siamo davvero pazienti, nel senso di

essere meramente ricettivi e di accettare le cose con stupefacente pazienza,

non siamo ancora morti; e abbiamo persistenti barlumi di sanità mentale.

Perché le cose migliori non viaggiano. Poiché qui mi presento come viaggiatore,

posso dire con ogni modestia che nemmeno le persone migliori viaggiano. Sia

in Inghilterra sia in America le persone normali sono le persone nazionali; e

ripeto che le ritengo sempre più nazionali. Non

credo che l’abisso venga colmato da teorie cosmopolite; e sono certo

di non volerlo colmato da tutto questo giornalismo slang e da questa sfacciata

pubblicità. Ho chiamato tutta quella pubblicità commerciale la gigantesca

ombra dell’America. Sarà pure l’ombra dell’America, ma non è la

luce dell’America. La luce giace assai più lontano, una luce piana sulle

terre del tramonto, dove risplende su ampi spazi pieni di un popolo assai semplice

e assai felice; e chi vorrebbe vederla deve cercarla.

Lincoln e le cause perdute

È già stato osservato qui che gli inglesi sanno moltissimo

della letteratura americana del passato, ma nulla della storia americana del passato.

Non conoscono nemmeno l’una, s’intende, così bene come conoscono l’attuale

pubblicità americana, che è la meno importante delle tre. Ma

vale la pena di notare ancora una volta quanto poco conoscano della storia, e con quanta

illogicità quel poco sia scelto. Hanno sentito, senza dubbio, della

fama e della grandezza di Henry Clay. È un sigaro. Ma sarebbe

imprudente interrogare a fondo un inglese, che potrebbe consumare quel lusso

in quel momento, sul Compromesso del Missouri o sulle controversie con

Andrew Jackson. E proprio come lo statista del Kentucky è un sigaro, così lo

stato della Virginia è una sigaretta. Ma c’è forse un’eccezione, o

mezza eccezione, a questo semplice schema. Sarebbe forse un’esagerazione

dire che la Plymouth Rock è un pollo. Qualsiasi inglese che allevi

polli, ed è interessato soprattutto alle Plymouth Rock considerate come

polli, avrebbe nondimeno una vaga sensazione di aver visto la

parola da qualche parte in precedenza. Sentirebbe, nel subconscio, che la Plymouth

Rock non era sempre stata un pollo. Invero, il nome connota qualcosa

non solo di solido ma di antiquato; e non è perciò un nome molto delicato

per un pollo. Sorgerebbe davanti a lui qualcosa di memorabile nella

foschia che egli chiama la sua storia; e vedrebbe i libri di storia

della sua fanciullezza e vecchie incisioni di uomini con cappelli a punta

alle prese con le onde del mare o coi Pellerossa. L’intera faccenda gli diverrebbe d’un tratto

chiara se (con una semplice riforma) i polli venissero chiamati

Padri Pellegrini.

Allora ricorderebbe tutto. I Padri Pellegrini erano campioni

of religious liberty; and they discovered America. It is true that he

has also heard of a man called Christopher Columbus; but that was in

connection with an egg. He has also heard of somebody known as Sir

Walter Raleigh; and though his principal possession was a cloak, it is

also true that he had a potato, not to mention a pipe of tobacco. Can it

be possible that he brought it from Virginia, where the cigarettes come

from? Gradually the memories will come back and fit themselves together

for the average hen-wife who learnt history at the English elementary

schools, and who has now something better to do. Even when the narrative

becomes consecutive, it will not necessarily become correct. It is not

strictly true to say that the Pilgrim Fathers discovered America. But it

is quite as true as saying that they were champions of religious

liberty. If we said that they were martyrs who would have died

heroically in torments rather than tolerate any religious liberty, we

should be talking something like sense about them, and telling the real

truth that is their due. The whole Puritan movement, from the Solemn

League and Covenant to the last stand of the last Stuarts, was a

struggle against religious toleration, or what they would have called

religious indifference. The first religious equality on earth was

established by a Catholic cavalier in Maryland. Now there is nothing in

this to diminish any dignity that belongs to any real virtues and

virilities in the Pilgrim Fathers; on the contrary, it is rather to the

credit of their consistency and conviction. But there is no doubt that

the note of their whole experiment in New England was intolerance, and

even inquisition. And there is no doubt that New England was then only

the newest and not the oldest of these colonial experiments. At least

two Cavaliers had been in the field before any Puritans. And they had

carried with them much more of the atmosphere and nature of the normal

Englishman than any Puritan could possibly carry. They had established

it especially in Virginia, which had been founded by a great Elizabethan

and named after the great Elizabeth. Before there was any New England in

the North, there was something very like Old England in the South.

Relatively speaking, there is still.

Whenever the anniversary of the Mayflower comes round, there is a

chorus of Anglo-American congratulation and comradeship, as if this at

least were a matter on which all can agree. But I knew enough about

America, even before I went there, to know that there are a good many

people there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote a

protest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state of

Virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; and

why a few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to erase a record

that begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includes

Washington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of America

until it was broken in the Civil War. From Virginia came the first great

Presidents and most of the Fathers of the Republic. Its adherence to

the Southern side in the war made it a great war, and for a long time a

doubtful war. And in the leader of the Southern armies it produced what

is perhaps the one modern figure that may come to shine like St. Louis

in the lost battle, or Hector dying before holy Troy.

Again, it is characteristic that while the modern English know nothing

about Lee they do know something about Lincoln; and nearly all that they

know is wrong. They know nothing of his Southern connections, nothing of

his considerable Southern sympathy, nothing of the meaning of his

moderation in face of the problem of slavery, now lightly treated as

self-evident. Above all, they know nothing about the respect in which

Lincoln was quite un-English, was indeed the very reverse of English;

and can be understood better if we think of him as a Frenchman, since it

seems so hard for some of us to believe that he was an American. I mean

his lust for logic for its own sake, and the way he kept mathematical

truths in his mind like the fixed stars. He was so far from being a

merely practical man, impatient of academic abstractions, that he

reviewed and revelled in academic abstractions, even while he could not

apply them to practical life. He loved to repeat that slavery was

intolerable while he tolerated it, and to prove that something ought to

be done while it was impossible to do it. This was probably very

bewildering to his brother-politicians; for politicians always whitewash

what they do not destroy. But for all that this inconsistent consistency

beat the politicians at their own game, and this abstracted logic proved

the most practical of all. For when the chance did come to do something,

there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell

from the clear heights of heaven; it had not been tossed about and lost

like a common missile in the market-place. The matter is worth

mentioning, because it has a moral for a much larger modern question. A

wise man’s attitude towards industrial capitalism will be very like

Lincoln’s attitude towards slavery. That is, he will manage to endure

capitalism; but he will not endure a defence of capitalism. He will

recognise the value, not only of knowing what he is doing, but of

knowing what he would like to do. He will recognise the importance of

having a thing clearly labelled in his own mind as bad, long before the

opportunity comes to abolish it. He may recognise the risk of even worse

things in immediate abolition, as Lincoln did in abolitionism. He will

not call all business men brutes, any more than Lincoln would call all

della libertà religiosa; ed essi scoprirono l’America. È vero che egli

ha anche sentito di un uomo chiamato Cristoforo Colombo; ma questo in

connessione con un uovo. Ha anche sentito di qualcuno noto come Sir

Walter Raleigh; e benché il suo principale possesso fosse un mantello, è

anche vero che aveva una patata, per non dire una pipa di tabacco. È

possibile che l’abbia portata dalla Virginia, da dove vengono le sigarette?

Gradualmente i ricordi torneranno e si comporranno insieme

per la comune pollivendola che imparò la storia nelle scuole elementari

inglesi, e che ora ha qualcosa di meglio da fare. Anche quando la narrazione

diventa consequenziale, non diventerà necessariamente corretta. Non è

strettamente vero dire che i Padri Pellegrini scoprirono l’America. Ma è

altrettanto vero quanto dire che erano campioni della libertà

religiosa. Se dicessimo che erano martiri che sarebbero morti

eroicamente fra i tormenti piuttosto che tollerare una qualsiasi libertà religiosa, staremmo

dicendo qualcosa di sensato su di loro, e raccontando la vera

verità che è loro dovuta. L’intero movimento puritano, dal Solemn

League and Covenant all’ultima resistenza degli ultimi Stuart, fu una

lotta contro la tolleranza religiosa, o ciò che essi avrebbero chiamato

indifferenza religiosa. La prima uguaglianza religiosa sulla terra fu

stabilita da un cavaliere cattolico nel Maryland. Ora, non c’è nulla in

questo che diminuisca la dignità che spetta a qualsiasi reale virtù e

virilità dei Padri Pellegrini; al contrario, va piuttosto a

credito della loro coerenza e convinzione. Ma non c’è dubbio che

la nota del loro intero esperimento nel New England fosse l’intolleranza, e

perfino l’Inquisizione. E non c’è dubbio che il New England fosse allora solo

il più nuovo e non il più antico di questi esperimenti coloniali. Almeno

due Cavalieri erano stati in campo prima di qualsiasi puritano. Ed essi avevano

portato con sé assai più dell’atmosfera e della natura del normale

inglese di quanto qualsiasi puritano potesse mai portare. L’avevano stabilita

specialmente in Virginia, che era stata fondata da un grande elisabettiano

e chiamata così in onore della grande Elisabetta. Prima che vi fosse un New England al

Nord, c’era qualcosa di molto simile alla Vecchia Inghilterra al Sud.

Relativamente parlando, c’è ancora.

Ogni volta che ricorre l’anniversario del Mayflower, c’è un

coro di congratulazioni e cameratismo anglo-americani, come se questa almeno

fosse una questione su cui tutti possono concordare. Ma sapevo abbastanza dell’

America, persino prima di andarci, da sapere che vi sono parecchie

persone laggiù che comunque non vi concordano. Molto tempo fa scrissi una

protesta in cui chiedevo perché gli inglesi avessero dimenticato il grande stato della

Virginia, il primo per fondazione e a lungo il primo per leadership; e

perché pochi arcigni anticonformisti dovessero avere il diritto di cancellare un annale

che comincia con Raleigh e finisce con Lee, e per inciso include

Washington. Il grande stato della Virginia fu la spina dorsale dell’America

finché non fu spezzato nella Guerra Civile. Dalla Virginia vennero i primi grandi

Presidenti e la maggior parte dei Padri della Repubblica. La sua adesione

alla parte meridionale nella guerra la rese una grande guerra, e per lungo tempo una

guerra dall’esito incerto. E nel condottiero degli eserciti del Sud produsse quella che

è forse l’unica figura moderna che possa giungere a splendere come San Luigi

nella battaglia perduta, o come Ettore morente davanti alla sacra Troia.

Di nuovo, è caratteristico che, mentre gli inglesi moderni non sanno nulla

di Lee, sappiano qualcosa di Lincoln; e quasi tutto ciò che

sanno è sbagliato. Non sanno nulla dei suoi legami con il Sud, nulla della

sua considerevole simpatia per il Sud, nulla del significato della sua

moderazione di fronte al problema della schiavitù, ora leggermente trattato come

auto-evidente. Soprattutto, non sanno nulla dell’aspetto per cui

Lincoln era del tutto non inglese, era anzi l’esatto rovescio dell’inglese;

e lo si può comprendere meglio se lo pensiamo come un francese, poiché

pare così arduo per alcuni di noi credere che fosse un americano. Intendo

la sua brama di logica fine a se stessa, e il modo in cui teneva le verità

matematiche nella mente come le stelle fisse. Era così lungi dall’essere un

uomo meramente pratico, insofferente delle astrazioni accademiche, che

passava in rassegna e si crogiolava nelle astrazioni accademiche, pur non potendo

applicarle alla vita pratica. Amava ripetere che la schiavitù era

intollerabile mentre la tollerava, e dimostrare che qualcosa andava

fatto mentre era impossibile farlo. Questo era probabilmente assai

sconcertante per i suoi confratelli politici; poiché i politici imbiancano sempre

ciò che non distruggono. Ma nonostante tutto questa incoerente coerenza

batté i politici al loro stesso gioco, e questa astratta logica si rivelò

la più pratica di tutte. Perché quando l’occasione venne davvero di fare qualcosa,

non ci fu dubbio su ciò che andava fatto. La folgore cadde

dalle limpide altezze del cielo; non era stata sballottata e smarrita

come un comune proiettile nella piazza del mercato. La questione merita

di essere menzionata, perché ha una morale per una questione moderna assai più ampia. L’

atteggiamento di un uomo saggio verso il capitalismo industriale sarà molto simile

all’atteggiamento di Lincoln verso la schiavitù. Ossia, riuscirà a sopportare

il capitalismo; ma non sopporterà una difesa del capitalismo. Egli

riconoscerà il valore non solo del sapere ciò che sta facendo, ma

del sapere ciò che vorrebbe fare. Riconoscerà l’importanza di

avere una cosa chiaramente etichettata nella propria mente come cattiva, molto prima che

giunga l’occasione di abolirla. Potrà riconoscere il rischio di cose ancora

peggiori in un’abolizione immediata, come Lincoln fece con l’abolizionismo. Non

chiamerà bruti tutti gli uomini d’affari, non più di quanto Lincoln chiamerebbe tutti

planters demons; because he knows they are not. He will regard many

alternatives to capitalism as crude and inhuman, as Lincoln regarded

John Brown’s raid; because they are. But he will clear his mind from

cant about capitalism; he will have no doubt of what is the truth about

Trusts and Trade Combines and the concentration of capital; and it is

the truth that they endure under one of the ironic silences of heaven,

over the pageants and the passing triumphs of hell.

But the name of Lincoln has a more immediate reference to the

international matters I am considering here. His name has been much

invoked by English politicians and journalists in connection with the

quarrel with Ireland. And if we study the matter, we shall hardly admire

the tact and sagacity of those journalists and politicians.

History is an eternal tangle of cross-purposes; and we could not take a

clearer case, or rather a more complicated case, of such a tangle, than

the facts lying behind a political parallel recently mentioned by many

politicians. I mean the parallel between the movement for Irish

independence and the attempted secession of the Southern Confederacy in

America. Superficially any one might say that the comparison is natural

enough; and that there is much in common between the quarrel of the

North and South in Ireland and the quarrel of the North and South in

America. In both cases the South was on the whole agricultural, the

North on the whole industrial. True, the parallel exaggerates the

position of Belfast; to complete it we must suppose the whole Federal

system to have consisted of Pittsburg. In both the side that was more

successful was felt by many to be less attractive. In both the same

political terms were used, such as the term ‘Union’ and ‘Unionism.’ An

ordinary Englishman comes to America, knowing these main lines of

American history, and knowing that the American knows the similar main

lines of Irish history. He knows that there are strong champions of

Ireland in America; possibly he also knows that there are very genuine

champions of England in America. By every possible historical analogy,

he would naturally expect to find the pro-Irish in the South and the

pro-English in the North. As a matter of fact, he finds almost exactly

the opposite. He finds Boston governed by Irishmen, and Nashville

containing people more pro-English than Englishmen. He finds Virginians

not only of British blood, like George Washington, but of British

opinions almost worthy of George the Third.

But I do not say this, as will be seen in a moment, as a criticism of

the comparative Toryism of the South. I say it as a criticism of the

superlative stupidity of English propaganda. On another page I remark on

the need for a new sort of English propaganda; a propaganda that should

be really English and have some remote reference to England. Now if it

were a matter of making foreigners feel the real humours and humanities

of England, there are no Americans so able or willing to do it as the

Americans of the Southern States. As I have already hinted, some of them

are so loyal to the English humanities, that they think it their duty to

defend even the English inhumanities. New England is turning into New

Ireland. But Old England can still be faintly traced in Old Dixie. It

contains some of the best things that England herself has had, and

therefore (of course) the things that England herself has lost, or is

trying to lose. But above all, as I have said, there are people in these

places whose historic memories and family traditions really hold them to

us, not by alliance but by affection. Indeed, they have the affection in

spite of the alliance. They love us in spite of our compliments and

courtesies and hands across the sea; all our ambassadorial salutations

and speeches cannot kill their love. They manage even to respect us in

spite of the shady Jew stockbrokers we send them as English envoys, or

the ‘efficient’ men, who are sent out to be tactful with foreigners

because they have been too tactless with trades unionists. This type of

traditional American, North or South, really has some traditions

connecting him with England; and though he is now in a very small

minority, I cannot imagine why England should wish to make it smaller.

England once sympathised with the South. The South still sympathises

with England. It would seem that the South, or some elements in the

South, had rather the advantage of us in political firmness and

fidelity; but it does not follow that that fidelity will stand every

shock. And at this moment, and in this matter, of all things in the

world, our political propagandists must try to bolster British

Imperialism up, by kicking Southern Secession when it is down. The

English politicians eagerly point out that we shall be justified in

crushing Ireland exactly as Sumner and Stevens crushed the most English

part of America. It does not seem to occur to them that this comparison

between the Unionist triumph in America and a Unionist triumph in

Britain is rather hard upon our particular sympathisers, who did not

triumph. When England exults in Lincoln’s victory over his foes, she is

exulting in his victory over her own friends. If her diplomacy continues

as delicate and chivalrous as it is at present, they may soon be her

only friends. England will be defending herself at the expense of her

only defenders. But however this may be, it is as well to bear witness

to some of the elements of my own experience; and I can answer for it,

at least, that there are some people in the South who will not be

pleased at being swept into the rubbish heap of history as rebels and

ruffians; and who will not, I regret to say, by any means enjoy even

being classed with Fenians and Sinn Feiners.

demoni tutti i piantatori; perché sa che non lo sono. Considererà molte

alternative al capitalismo come rozze e disumane, come Lincoln considerava

l’incursione di John Brown; perché lo sono. Ma ripulirà la sua mente dalle

ipocrisie sul capitalismo; non avrà alcun dubbio su quale sia la verità riguardo ai

Trust e ai Cartelli Commerciali e alla concentrazione del capitale; ed è

la verità che essi perdurano sotto uno degli ironici silenzi del cielo,

al di sopra dei fasti e dei fugaci trionfi dell’inferno.

Ma il nome di Lincoln ha un riferimento più immediato alle

questioni internazionali che qui sto considerando. Il suo nome è stato molto

invocato da politici e giornalisti inglesi in connessione con la

contesa con l’Irlanda. E se studiamo la questione, difficilmente ammireremo

il tatto e la saggezza di quei giornalisti e politici.

La storia è un eterno groviglio di equivoci; e non potremmo prendere un

caso più chiaro, o piuttosto un caso più complicato, di un simile groviglio, dei

fatti che stanno dietro un parallelo politico recentemente menzionato da molti

politici. Intendo il parallelo tra il movimento per l’indipendenza

irlandese e il tentativo di secessione della Confederazione del Sud in

America. Superficialmente chiunque potrebbe dire che il paragone è abbastanza

naturale; e che c’è molto in comune tra la contesa del

Nord e del Sud in Irlanda e la contesa del Nord e del Sud in

America. In entrambi i casi il Sud era nel complesso agricolo, il

Nord nel complesso industriale. Vero, il parallelo esagera la

posizione di Belfast; per completarlo dobbiamo supporre che l’intero sistema Federale

sia consistito in Pittsburg. In entrambi la parte che ebbe più

successo fu avvertita da molti come meno attraente. In entrambi si usarono gli stessi

termini politici, come il termine ‘Unione’ e ‘Unionismo.’ Un

inglese comune giunge in America, conoscendo queste linee principali della

storia americana, e sapendo che l’americano conosce le simili linee principali

della storia irlandese. Sa che vi sono strenui campioni dell’

Irlanda in America; forse sa anche che vi sono campioni assai genuini

dell’Inghilterra in America. Per ogni possibile analogia storica,

si aspetterebbe naturalmente di trovare i filo-irlandesi al Sud e i

filo-inglesi al Nord. Di fatto, trova quasi esattamente

l’opposto. Trova Boston governata da irlandesi, e Nashville

abitata da gente più filo-inglese degli inglesi. Trova virginiani

non solo di sangue britannico, come George Washington, ma di opinioni britanniche

quasi degne di Giorgio III.

Ma non dico questo, come si vedrà tra un istante, come critica del

comparativo torismo del Sud. Lo dico come critica della

superlativa stupidità della propaganda inglese. In un’altra pagina osservo

la necessità di un nuovo tipo di propaganda inglese; una propaganda che sia

davvero inglese e abbia qualche remoto riferimento all’Inghilterra. Ora, se si

trattasse di far sentire agli stranieri i veri umori e le vere umanità

dell’Inghilterra, non ci sono americani tanto capaci o disposti a farlo quanto gli

americani degli Stati del Sud. Come ho già accennato, alcuni di loro

sono così leali verso le umanità inglesi, che ritengono loro dovere

difendere perfino le disumanità inglesi. Il New England si sta trasformando in Nuova

Irlanda. Ma la Vecchia Inghilterra può ancora essere debolmente rintracciata nella Vecchia Dixie. Essa

contiene alcune delle cose migliori che l’Inghilterra stessa ha avuto, e

perciò (naturalmente) le cose che l’Inghilterra stessa ha perduto, o sta

cercando di perdere. Ma soprattutto, come ho detto, vi sono persone in questi

luoghi le cui memorie storiche e tradizioni familiari le legano davvero a

noi, non per alleanza ma per affetto. Anzi, hanno l’affetto

a dispetto dell’alleanza. Ci amano a dispetto dei nostri complimenti e

delle nostre cortesie e delle mani tese oltre il mare; tutti i nostri saluti e discorsi

ambasciatoriali non possono uccidere il loro amore. Riescono perfino a rispettarci

a dispetto dei loschi agenti di cambio ebrei che mandiamo loro come inviati inglesi, o

degli uomini ‘efficienti’, che vengono spediti a essere diplomatici con gli stranieri

perché sono stati troppo indiplomatici con i sindacalisti. Questo tipo di

americano tradizionale, del Nord o del Sud, ha davvero alcune tradizioni

che lo legano all’Inghilterra; e benché sia ora in una piccolissima

minoranza, non riesco a immaginare perché l’Inghilterra dovrebbe voler renderla più piccola.

L’Inghilterra un tempo simpatizzò con il Sud. Il Sud simpatizza ancora

con l’Inghilterra. Sembrerebbe che il Sud, o alcuni elementi del

Sud, avessero piuttosto un vantaggio su di noi in fermezza e fedeltà

politica; ma non ne consegue che quella fedeltà reggerà ogni

urto. E in questo momento, e in questa faccenda, tra tutte le cose al

mondo, i nostri propagandisti politici devono cercare di puntellare l’Imperialismo

britannico prendendo a calci la Secessione del Sud ora che è a terra. I

politici inglesi fanno ansiosamente notare che saremo giustificati nello

schiacciare l’Irlanda esattamente come Sumner e Stevens schiacciarono la parte più inglese

dell’America. Non pare venir loro in mente che questo paragone

tra il trionfo unionista in America e un trionfo unionista in

Gran Bretagna è piuttosto duro verso i nostri particolari simpatizzanti, che non

trionfarono. Quando l’Inghilterra esulta per la vittoria di Lincoln sui suoi nemici, sta

esultando per la sua vittoria sui propri amici. Se la sua diplomazia continua

delicata e cavalleresca com’è al presente, essi potrebbero presto essere i suoi

soli amici. L’Inghilterra si starà difendendo a spese dei suoi

soli difensori. Ma comunque stiano le cose, è bene recare testimonianza

di alcuni elementi della mia stessa esperienza; e posso garantire almeno

questo, che vi sono alcune persone nel Sud che non saranno

liete di essere spazzate nel mucchio d’immondizia della storia come ribelli e

furfanti; e che non gradiranno affatto, mi rincresce dirlo, nemmeno

l’essere classificate con i Feniani e i Sinn Feiner.

Now touching the actual comparison between the conquest of the

Confederacy and the conquest of Ireland, there are, of course, a good

many things to be said which politicians cannot be expected to

understand. Strange to say, it is not certain that a lost cause was

never worth winning; and it would be easy to argue that the world lost

very much indeed when that particular cause was lost. These are not days

in which it is exactly obvious that an agricultural society was more

dangerous than an industrial one. And even Southern slavery had this one

moral merit, that it was decadent; it has this one historic advantage,

that it is dead. The Northern slavery, industrial slavery, or what is

called wage slavery, is not decaying but increasing; and the end of it

is not yet. But in any case, it would be well for us to realise that the

reproach of resembling the Confederacy does not ring in all ears as an

unanswerable condemnation. It is scarcely a self-evident or sufficient

argument, to some hearers, even to prove that the English are as

delicate and philanthropic as Sherman, still less that the Irish are as

criminal and lawless as Lee. Nor will it soothe every single soul on the

American continent to say that the English victory in Ireland will be

followed by a reconstruction, like the reconstruction exhibited in the

film called ‘The Birth of a Nation.’ And, indeed, there is a further

inference from that fine panorama of the exploits of the Ku-Klux Klan.

It would be easy, as I say, to turn the argument entirely in favour of

the Confederacy. It would be easy to draw the moral, not that the

Southern Irish are as wrong as the Southern States, but that the

Southern States were as right as the Southern Irish. But upon the whole,

I do not incline to accept the parallel in that sense any more than in

the opposite sense. For reasons I have already given elsewhere, I do

believe that in the main Abraham Lincoln was right. But right in what?

If Lincoln was right, he was right in guessing that there was not

really a Northern nation and a Southern nation, but only one American

nation. And if he has been proved right, he has been proved right by the

fact that men in the South, as well as the North, do now feel a

patriotism for that American nation. His wisdom, if it really was

wisdom, was justified not by his opponents being conquered, but by their

being converted. Now, if the English politicians must insist on this

parallel, they ought to see that the parallel is fatal to themselves.

The very test which proved Lincoln right has proved them wrong. The very

judgment which may have justified him quite unquestionably condemns

them. We have again and again conquered Ireland, and have never come an

inch nearer to converting Ireland. We have had not one Gettysburg, but

twenty Gettysburgs; but we have had no Union. And that is where, as I

have remarked, it is relevant to remember that flying fantastic vision

on the films that told so many people what no histories have told them.

I heard when I was in America rumours of the local reappearance of the

Ku-Klux Klan; but the smallness and mildness of the manifestation, as

compared with the old Southern or the new Irish case, is alone a

sufficient example of the exception that proves the rule. To approximate

to any resemblance to recent Irish events, we must imagine the Ku-Klux

Klan riding again in more than the terrors of that vision, wild as the

wind, white as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. If there were

really such a revival of the Southern action, there would equally be a

revival of the Southern argument. It would be clear that Lee was right

and Lincoln was wrong; that the Southern States were national and were

as indestructible as nations. If the South were as rebellious as

Ireland, the North would be as wrong as England.

But I desire a new English diplomacy that will exhibit, not the things

in which England is wrong but the things in which England is right. And

England is right in England, just as she is wrong in Ireland; and it is

exactly that rightness of a real nation in itself that it is at once

most difficult and most desirable to explain to foreigners. Now the

Irishman, and to some extent the American, has remained alien to

England, largely because he does not truly realise that the Englishman

loves England, still less can he really imagine why the Englishman loves

England. That is why I insist on the stupidity of ignoring and insulting

the opinions of those few Virginians and other Southerners who really

have some inherited notion of why Englishmen love England; and even love

it in something of the same fashion themselves. Politicians who do not

know the English spirit when they see it at home, cannot of course be

expected to recognise it abroad. Publicists are eloquently praising

Abraham Lincoln, for all the wrong reasons; but fundamentally for that

worst and vilest of all reasons—that he succeeded. None of them seems

to have the least notion of how to look for England in England; and they

would see something fantastic in the figure of a traveller who found it

elsewhere, or anywhere but in New England. And it is well, perhaps, that

they have not yet found England where it is hidden in England; for if

they found it, they would kill it.

All I am concerned to consider here is the inevitable failure of this

sort of Anglo-American propaganda to create a friendship. To praise

Lincoln as an Englishman is about as appropriate as if we were praising

Lincoln as an English town. We are talking about something totally

different. And indeed the whole conversation is rather like some such

cross-purposes about some such word as ‘Lincoln’; in which one party

Ora, quanto all’effettivo paragone tra la conquista della

Confederazione e la conquista dell’Irlanda, vi sono, naturalmente, parecchie

cose da dire che non ci si può aspettare che i politici

comprendano. Strano a dirsi, non è certo che una causa perduta non

valesse mai la pena di essere vinta; e sarebbe facile sostenere che il mondo perse

moltissimo invero quando quella particolare causa fu perduta. Non sono giorni, questi,

in cui sia proprio ovvio che una società agricola fosse più

pericolosa di una industriale. E persino la schiavitù del Sud aveva questo unico

merito morale, di essere decadente; ha questo unico vantaggio storico,

di essere morta. La schiavitù del Nord, la schiavitù industriale, o ciò che si

chiama schiavitù salariale, non sta decadendo ma aumentando; e la sua fine

non è ancora giunta. Ma in ogni caso, sarebbe bene che ci rendessimo conto che il

rimprovero di somigliare alla Confederazione non risuona in tutte le orecchie come una

condanna inconfutabile. È a stento un argomento auto-evidente o sufficiente,

per alcuni ascoltatori, anche solo a dimostrare che gli inglesi sono tanto

delicati e filantropici quanto Sherman, e ancor meno che gli irlandesi sono tanto

criminali e senza legge quanto Lee. Né placherà ogni singola anima sul

continente americano dire che la vittoria inglese in Irlanda sarà

seguita da una ricostruzione, come la ricostruzione mostrata nel

film intitolato ‘The Birth of a Nation.’ E, invero, c’è un’ulteriore

deduzione da quel bel panorama delle imprese del Ku-Klux Klan.

Sarebbe facile, come dico, volgere l’argomento interamente a favore della

Confederazione. Sarebbe facile trarne la morale, non che gli

irlandesi del Sud abbiano torto quanto gli Stati del Sud, ma che gli

Stati del Sud avessero ragione quanto gli irlandesi del Sud. Ma nel complesso,

non sono incline ad accettare il parallelo in quel senso più di quanto lo accetti nel

senso opposto. Per ragioni che ho già dato altrove,

credo che nel complesso Abraham Lincoln avesse ragione. Ma ragione in che cosa?

Se Lincoln aveva ragione, aveva ragione nell’intuire che non c’era

davvero una nazione del Nord e una nazione del Sud, ma solo un’unica nazione

americana. E se gli è stata data ragione, gli è stata data ragione dal

fatto che gli uomini del Sud, come pure quelli del Nord, provano ora un

patriottismo per quella nazione americana. La sua saggezza, se davvero fu

saggezza, fu giustificata non dal fatto che i suoi avversari furono conquistati, ma dal loro

essere convertiti. Ora, se i politici inglesi devono insistere su questo

parallelo, dovrebbero vedere che il parallelo è fatale a loro stessi.

La prova stessa che diede ragione a Lincoln ha dato loro torto. Il giudizio

stesso che può averlo giustificato, senza dubbio li condanna

senza appello. Abbiamo conquistato l’Irlanda ancora e ancora, e non ci siamo mai avvicinati di un

pollice a convertire l’Irlanda. Non abbiamo avuto una sola Gettysburg, ma

venti Gettysburg; ma non abbiamo avuto alcuna Unione. Ed è qui che, come ho

osservato, è pertinente ricordare quella volante fantastica visione

sulla pellicola che disse a tante persone ciò che nessuna storia ha detto loro.

Udii, quando ero in America, voci della locale ricomparsa del

Ku-Klux Klan; ma la piccolezza e mitezza della manifestazione,

paragonata al vecchio caso del Sud o al nuovo caso irlandese, è da sola un

esempio sufficiente dell’eccezione che conferma la regola. Per avvicinarsi

a una qualche somiglianza con i recenti eventi irlandesi, dobbiamo immaginare il Ku-Klux

Klan che cavalca di nuovo in più dei terrori di quella visione, selvaggio come il

vento, bianco come la luna, terribile come un esercito con le sue insegne. Se ci fosse

davvero un simile risorgere dell’azione del Sud, ci sarebbe del pari un

risorgere dell’argomento del Sud. Sarebbe chiaro che Lee aveva ragione

e Lincoln torto; che gli Stati del Sud erano nazionali ed erano

indistruttibili quanto le nazioni. Se il Sud fosse tanto ribelle quanto

l’Irlanda, il Nord avrebbe torto quanto l’Inghilterra.

Ma io desidero una nuova diplomazia inglese che esibisca, non le cose

in cui l’Inghilterra ha torto, ma le cose in cui l’Inghilterra ha ragione. E

l’Inghilterra ha ragione in Inghilterra, proprio com’ha torto in Irlanda; ed è

esattamente quella rettitudine di una vera nazione in se stessa che è insieme

più difficile e più desiderabile spiegare agli stranieri. Ora l’

irlandese, e in una certa misura l’americano, è rimasto estraneo all’

Inghilterra, in gran parte perché non comprende davvero che l’inglese

ama l’Inghilterra, e ancor meno può davvero immaginare perché l’inglese ami

l’Inghilterra. Ecco perché insisto sulla stupidità dell’ignorare e insultare

le opinioni di quei pochi virginiani e altri meridionali che davvero

hanno una qualche nozione ereditata del perché gli inglesi amino l’Inghilterra; e la amino

perfino essi stessi in qualcosa dello stesso modo. I politici che non

riconoscono lo spirito inglese quando lo vedono in patria, non ci si può naturalmente

aspettare che lo riconoscano all’estero. I pubblicisti stanno eloquentemente lodando

Abraham Lincoln, per tutte le ragioni sbagliate; ma fondamentalmente per quella

peggiore e più vile di tutte le ragioni—che ebbe successo. Nessuno di loro pare

avere la minima nozione di come cercare l’Inghilterra in Inghilterra; ed

vedrebbero qualcosa di fantastico nella figura di un viaggiatore che la trovasse

altrove, o ovunque tranne che nel New England. Ed è bene, forse, che

non abbiano ancora trovato l’Inghilterra là dov’è nascosta in Inghilterra; poiché se

la trovassero, la ucciderebbero.

Tutto ciò di cui mi preme trattare qui è l’inevitabile fallimento di questo

genere di propaganda anglo-americana nel creare un’amicizia. Lodare

Lincoln come inglese è più o meno appropriato quanto se lodassimo

Lincoln come una città inglese. Stiamo parlando di qualcosa di totalmente

diverso. E invero l’intera conversazione somiglia piuttosto a un qualche simile

equivoco su una qualche simile parola come ‘Lincoln’; in cui una parte

should be talking about the President and the other about the cathedral.

It is like some wild bewilderment in a farce, with one man wondering how

a President could have a church-spire, and the other wondering how a

church could have a chin-beard. And the moral is the moral on which I

would insist everywhere in this book; that the remedy is to be found in

disentangling the two and not in entangling them further. You could not

produce a democrat of the logical type of Lincoln merely out of the

moral materials that now make up an English cathedral town, like that on

which Old Tom of Lincoln looks down. But on the other hand, it is quite

certain that a hundred Abraham Lincolns, working for a hundred years,

could not build Lincoln Cathedral. And the farcical allegory of an

attempt to make Old Tom and Old Abe embrace to the glory of the

illogical Anglo-Saxon language is but a symbol of something that is

always being attempted, and always attempted in vain. It is not by

mutual imitation that the understanding can come. It is not by erecting

New York sky-scrapers in London that New York can learn the sacred

significance of the towers of Lincoln. It is not by English dukes

importing the daughters of American millionaires that England can get

any glimpse of the democratic dignity of American men. I have the best

of all reasons for knowing that a stranger can be welcomed in America;

and just as he is courteously treated in the country as a stranger, so

he should always be careful to treat it as a strange land. That sort of

imaginative respect, as for something different and even distant, is the

only beginning of any attachment between patriotic peoples. The English

traveller may carry with him at least one word of his own great language

and literature; and whenever he is inclined to say of anything ‘This is

passing strange,’ he may remember that it was no inconsiderable

Englishman who appended to it the answer, ‘And therefore as a stranger

give it welcome.’

Wells and the World State

There was recently a highly distinguished gathering to celebrate the

past, present, and especially future triumphs of aviation. Some of the

most brilliant men of the age, such as Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. J. L.

Garvin, made interesting and important speeches, and many scientific

aviators luminously discussed the new science. Among their graceful

felicitations and grave and quiet analyses a word was said, or a note

was struck, which I myself can never hear, even in the most harmless

after-dinner speech, without an impulse to leap up and yell, and smash

the decanters and wreck the dinner-table.

Long ago, when I was a boy, I heard it with fury; and never since have I

been able to understand any free man hearing it without fury. I heard it

when Bloch, and the old prophets of pacifism by panic, preached that war

would become too horrible for patriots to endure. It sounded to me like

saying that an instrument of torture was being prepared by my dentist,

that would finally cure me of loving my dog. And I felt it again when

all these wise and well-meaning persons began to talk about the

inevitable effect of aviation in bridging the Atlantic, and establishing

alliance and affection between England and America.

I resent the suggestion that a machine can make me bad. But I resent

quite equally the suggestion that a machine can make me good. It might

be the unfortunate fact that a coolness had arisen between myself and

Mr. Fitzarlington Blenkinsop, inhabiting the suburban villa and garden

next to mine; and I might even be largely to blame for it. But if

somebody told me that a new kind of lawn-mower had just been invented,

of so cunning a structure that I should be forced to become a

bosom-friend of Mr. Blenkinsop whether I liked it or not, I should be

very much annoyed. I should be moved to say that if that was the only

way of cutting my grass I would not cut my grass, but continue to cut my

neighbour. Or suppose the difference were even less defensible; suppose

a man had suffered from a trifling shindy with his wife. And suppose

somebody told him that the introduction of an entirely new

vacuum-cleaner would compel him to a reluctant reconciliation with his

wife. It would be found, I fancy, that human nature abhors that vacuum.

Reasonably spirited human beings will not be ordered about by bicycles

and sewing-machines; and a sane man will not be made good, let alone

bad, by the things he has himself made. I have occasionally dictated to

a typewriter, but I will not be dictated to by a typewriter, even of the

newest and most complicated mechanism; nor have I ever met a typewriter,

however complex, that attempted such a tyranny.

Yet this and nothing else is what is implied in all such talk of the

aeroplane annihilating distinctions as well as distances; and an

international aviation abolishing nationalities. This and nothing else

was really implied in one speaker’s prediction that such aviation will

almost necessitate an Anglo-American friendship. Incidentally, I may

remark, it is not a true suggestion even in the practical and

materialistic sense; and the speaker’s phrase refuted the speaker’s

argument. He said that international relations must be more friendly

when men can get from England to America in a day. Well, men can already

get from England to Germany in a day; and the result was a mutual

invitation of which the formalities lasted for five years. Men could get

from the coast of England to the coast of France very quickly, through

nearly all the ages during which those two coasts were bristling with

arms against each other. They could get there very quickly when Nelson

went down by that Burford Inn to embark for Trafalgar; they could get

dovrebbe parlare del Presidente e l’altro della cattedrale.

È come un delirante smarrimento da farsa, con un uomo che si domanda come

un Presidente possa avere una guglia di chiesa, e l’altro che si domanda come una

chiesa possa avere un pizzetto. E la morale è la morale sulla quale io

insisterei ovunque in questo libro; che il rimedio si trova nel

districare i due e non nell’ingarbugliarli ulteriormente. Non si potrebbe

produrre un democratico del tipo logico di Lincoln semplicemente con i

materiali morali che oggi compongono una città con cattedrale inglese, come quella su

cui Old Tom di Lincoln volge lo sguardo. Ma d’altro canto, è del tutto

certo che cento Abraham Lincoln, lavorando per cento anni,

non potrebbero costruire la cattedrale di Lincoln. E la farsesca allegoria di un

tentativo di far abbracciare Old Tom e Old Abe alla gloria della

illogica lingua anglosassone non è che un simbolo di qualcosa che viene

sempre tentato, e sempre tentato invano. Non è tramite

la reciproca imitazione che può nascere la comprensione. Non è erigendo

grattacieli di New York a Londra che New York può apprendere il sacro

significato delle torri di Lincoln. Non è tramite duchi inglesi

che importano le figlie dei milionari americani che l’Inghilterra può cogliere

un qualche barlume della dignità democratica degli uomini americani. Ho le migliori

di tutte le ragioni per sapere che uno straniero può essere accolto in America;

e proprio come in quel paese viene trattato con cortesia in quanto straniero, così

egli dovrebbe sempre aver cura di trattarlo come una terra straniera. Quella sorta di

rispetto immaginativo, come per qualcosa di diverso e persino distante, è il

solo inizio di qualsiasi legame tra popoli patriottici. Il

viaggiatore inglese può portare con sé almeno una parola della propria grande lingua

e letteratura; e ogni volta che è incline a dire di qualcosa ‘Questo è

oltremodo strano’, può ricordare che fu un non trascurabile

inglese ad apporvi la risposta, ‘E dunque come a uno straniero

dàgli il benvenuto.’

Wells e lo Stato Mondiale

Vi fu di recente un consesso assai illustre per celebrare i

passati, presenti e soprattutto futuri trionfi dell’aviazione. Alcuni tra gli

uomini più brillanti dell’epoca, come il signor H. G. Wells e il signor J. L.

Garvin, tennero discorsi interessanti e importanti, e molti scienziati

aviatori discussero luminosamente la nuova scienza. Tra le loro garbate

felicitazioni e le loro gravi e pacate analisi fu detta una parola, o suonata una nota

che io stesso non riesco mai a udire, nemmeno nel più innocuo

discorso da dopocena, senza l’impulso di balzare in piedi e urlare, e fracassare

le caraffe e devastare la tavola.

Molto tempo fa, quando ero ragazzo, la udii con furia; e mai da allora sono

riuscito a capire come un uomo libero possa udirla senza furia. La udii

quando Bloch, e i vecchi profeti del pacifismo per panico, predicavano che la guerra

sarebbe divenuta troppo orribile perché i patrioti la sopportassero. Mi suonava come

il dire che uno strumento di tortura veniva preparato dal mio dentista,

tale da guarirmi finalmente dall’amare il mio cane. E lo provai di nuovo quando

tutte queste persone sagge e bene-intenzionate cominciarono a parlare dell’

inevitabile effetto dell’aviazione nel gettare un ponte sull’Atlantico, e stabilire

alleanza e affetto tra l’Inghilterra e l’America.

Mi indispone l’idea che una macchina possa rendermi cattivo. Ma mi indispone

in egual misura l’idea che una macchina possa rendermi buono. Potrebbe

essere l’infelice fatto che un raffreddamento fosse sorto tra me e

il signor Fitzarlington Blenkinsop, che abita la villa suburbana e il giardino

accanto ai miei; e potrei persino esserne in gran parte colpevole. Ma se

qualcuno mi dicesse che un nuovo tipo di tosaerba è appena stato inventato,

di struttura tanto ingegnosa da costringermi a diventare un

amico del cuore del signor Blenkinsop, che mi garbasse o no, ne sarei

molto seccato. Sarei spinto a dire che, se quello fosse l’unico

modo di tagliare la mia erba, non taglierei la mia erba, ma continuerei a tagliare il mio

vicino. O si supponga che il dissidio fosse ancor meno difendibile; si supponga

che un uomo avesse patito un banale battibecco con la moglie. E si supponga

che qualcuno gli dicesse che l’introduzione di un aspirapolvere

del tutto nuovo lo costringerebbe a una riluttante riconciliazione con la

moglie. Si scoprirebbe, immagino, che la natura umana aborre quel vuoto.

Esseri umani ragionevolmente animosi non si lasceranno comandare da biciclette

e macchine da cucire; e un uomo sano di mente non sarà reso buono, e tanto meno

cattivo, dalle cose che egli stesso ha fatto. Ho talvolta dettato a

una macchina da scrivere, ma non mi farò dettar legge da una macchina da scrivere, foss’anche del

più nuovo e complicato meccanismo; né ho mai incontrato una macchina da scrivere,

per quanto complessa, che tentasse una simile tirannia.

Eppure questo e null’altro è ciò che è sottinteso in tutti questi discorsi sull’

aeroplano che annienta le distinzioni così come le distanze; e su un’

aviazione internazionale che abolisce le nazionalità. Questo e null’altro

era davvero sottinteso nella previsione di un oratore, secondo cui tale aviazione

renderà quasi necessaria un’amicizia anglo-americana. Per inciso, posso

osservare, non è un’affermazione vera nemmeno in senso pratico e

materialistico; e la frase dell’oratore confutava l’argomento

dell’oratore. Egli disse che le relazioni internazionali devono essere più amichevoli

quando gli uomini possono andare dall’Inghilterra all’America in un giorno. Ebbene, gli uomini possono già

andare dall’Inghilterra alla Germania in un giorno; e il risultato fu un reciproco

invito le cui formalità durarono cinque anni. Gli uomini potevano andare

dalla costa dell’Inghilterra alla costa della Francia molto rapidamente, attraverso

quasi tutte le epoche durante le quali quelle due coste erano irte di

armi l’una contro l’altra. Potevano arrivarci molto rapidamente quando Nelson

scese fino a quella locanda Burford per imbarcarsi verso Trafalgar; potevano arrivare

there very quickly when Napoleon sat in his tent in that camp at

Boulogne that filled England with alarums of invasion. Are these the

amiable and pacific relations which will unite England and America, when

Englishmen can get to America in a day? The shortening of the distance

seems quite as likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate that

endless guerilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas in the

Middle Ages; when French invaders carried away the bells of Rye, and the

men of those flats of East Sussex gloriously pursued and recovered them.

I do not know whether American privateers, landing at Liverpool, would

carry away a few of the more elegant factory chimneys as a substitute

for the superstitious symbols of the past. I know not if the English, on

ripe reflection, would essay with any enthusiasm to get them back. But

anyhow it is anything but self-evident that people cannot fight each

other because they are near to each other; and if it were true, there

would never have been any such thing as border warfare in the world. As

a fact, border warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which it

was most difficult to bring under control. And our own traditional

position in face of this new logic is somewhat disconcerting. We have

always supposed ourselves safer because we were insular and therefore

isolated. We have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on having

enjoyed peace because we were cut off from our neighbours. And now they

are telling us that we shall only enjoy peace when we are joined up with

our neighbours. We have pitied the poor nations with frontiers, because

a frontier only produces fighting; and now we are trusting to a frontier

as the only thing that will produce friendship. But, as a matter of

fact, and for a far deeper and more spiritual reason, a frontier will

not produce friendship. Only friendliness produces friendship. And we

must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces

friendliness.

But apart from this fallacy about the facts, I feel, as I say, a strong

abstract anger against the idea, or what some would call the ideal. If

it were true that men could be taught and tamed by machines, even if

they were taught wisdom or tamed to amiability, I should think it the

most tragic truth in the world. A man so improved would be, in an

exceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to save it. But in truth he

cannot be so completely coerced into good; and in so far as he is

incompletely coerced, he is quite as likely to be coerced into evil. Of

the financial characters who figure as philanthropists and philosophers

in such cases, it is strictly true to say that their good is evil. The

light in their bodies is darkness, and the highest objects of such men

are the lowest objects of ordinary men. Their peace is mere safety,

their friendship is mere trade; their international friendship is mere

international trade. The best we can say of that school of capitalism is

that it will be unsuccessful. It has every other vice, but it is not

practical. It has at least the impossibility of idealism; and so far as

remoteness can carry it, that Inferno is indeed a Utopia. All the

visible manifestations of these men are materialistic; but at least

their visions will not materialise. The worst we suffer; but the best we

shall at any rate escape. We may continue to endure the realities of

cosmopolitan capitalism; but we shall be spared its ideals.

But I am not primarily interested in the plutocrats whose vision takes

so vulgar a form. I am interested in the same thing when it takes a far

more subtle form, in men of genius and genuine social enthusiasm like

Mr. H. G. Wells. It would be very unfair to a man like Mr. Wells to

suggest that in his vision the Englishman and the American are to

embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. He is a

man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the

motley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruction which he

proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of

necessitarianism. He tells us that our national dignities and

differences must be melted into the huge mould of a World State, or else

(and I think these are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed by

the instruments and machinery we have ourselves made. In effect, men

must abandon patriotism or they will be murdered by science. After this,

surely no one can accuse Mr. Wells of an undue tenderness for scientific

over other types of training. Greek may be a good thing or no; but

nobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried past a certain point,

everybody will be torn in pieces like Orpheus, or burned up like Semele,

or poisoned like Socrates. Philosophy, theology and logic may or may not

be idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the study of

philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately forces its students to

manufacture racks and thumb-screws against their will; or that even

logicians need be so alarmingly logical as all that. Science seems to be

the only branch of study in which people have to be waved back from

perfection as from a pestilence. But my business is not with the

scientific dangers which alarm Mr. Wells, but with the remedy he

proposes for them; or rather with the relation of that remedy to the

foundation and the future of America. Now it is not too much to say that

Mr. Wells finds his model in America. The World State is to be the

United States of the World. He answers almost all objections to the

practicability of such a peace among states, by pointing out that the

American States have such a peace, and by adding, truly enough, that

another turn of history might easily have seen them broken up by war.

arrivarci molto rapidamente quando Napoleone sedeva nella sua tenda in quel campo a

Boulogne che riempì l’Inghilterra di allarmi d’invasione. Sono queste le

amabili e pacifiche relazioni che uniranno l’Inghilterra e l’America, quando

gli inglesi potranno raggiungere l’America in un giorno? L’accorciarsi della distanza

sembra altrettanto probabile, per quel che vale quell’argomento, che agevoli quell’

interminabile guerriglia che infuriava attraverso gli stretti mari nel

Medioevo; quando gli invasori francesi portarono via le campane di Rye, e gli

uomini di quelle pianure dell’East Sussex gloriosamente li inseguirono e le recuperarono.

Non so se i corsari americani, sbarcando a Liverpool,

porterebbero via qualcuna delle più eleganti ciminiere di fabbrica in sostituzione

dei simboli superstiziosi del passato. Non so se gli inglesi, dopo

matura riflessione, si cimenterebbero con qualche entusiasmo nel riaverle. Ma

in ogni caso è tutt’altro che auto-evidente che i popoli non possano combattersi

l’un l’altro perché sono vicini l’un l’altro; e se fosse vero, non vi

sarebbe mai stata al mondo una cosa come la guerra di confine. Di

fatto, la guerra di confine è stata spesso l’unica specie di guerra che

era più difficile tenere sotto controllo. E la nostra stessa tradizionale

posizione di fronte a questa nuova logica è alquanto sconcertante. Ci siamo

sempre creduti più sicuri perché eravamo insulari e quindi

isolati. Ci siamo congratulati con noi stessi per secoli di aver

goduto la pace perché eravamo tagliati fuori dai nostri vicini. E ora essi

ci dicono che godremo la pace solo quando saremo congiunti ai

nostri vicini. Abbiamo compatito le povere nazioni con frontiere, perché

una frontiera produce solo scontri; e ora ci affidiamo a una frontiera

come all’unica cosa che produrrà amicizia. Ma, a dire il

vero, e per una ragione assai più profonda e spirituale, una frontiera non

produrrà amicizia. Solo la cordialità produce amicizia. E dobbiamo

guardare assai più a fondo nell’anima dell’uomo per ciò che produce

la cordialità.

Ma a parte questa fallacia sui fatti, provo, come dico, una forte

collera astratta contro l’idea, o ciò che alcuni chiamerebbero l’ideale. Se

fosse vero che gli uomini possono essere istruiti e ammansiti dalle macchine, anche

se fossero istruiti alla saggezza o ammansiti all’amabilità, lo riterrei la

più tragica verità del mondo. Un uomo così migliorato starebbe, in un

senso oltremodo brutto, perdendo la propria anima per salvarla. Ma in verità egli

non può essere così completamente costretto al bene; e nella misura in cui è

costretto in modo incompleto, è altrettanto probabile che sia costretto al male. Dei

personaggi della finanza che figurano come filantropi e filosofi

in casi simili, è rigorosamente vero dire che il loro bene è male. La

luce nei loro corpi è tenebra, e i più alti fini di tali uomini

sono i più bassi fini degli uomini comuni. La loro pace è mera sicurezza,

la loro amicizia è mero commercio; la loro amicizia internazionale è mero

commercio internazionale. Il meglio che possiamo dire di quella scuola di capitalismo è

che fallirà. Ha ogni altro vizio, ma non è

pratica. Ha almeno l’impossibilità dell’idealismo; e per quanto

la lontananza possa portarla, quell’Inferno è davvero un’Utopia. Tutte le

manifestazioni visibili di questi uomini sono materialistiche; ma almeno

le loro visioni non si materializzeranno. Il peggio lo patiamo; ma il meglio

in ogni caso lo scamperemo. Possiamo continuare a sopportare le realtà del

capitalismo cosmopolita; ma ci saranno risparmiati i suoi ideali.

Ma non è dei plutocrati che m’interesso in primo luogo, la cui visione assume

una forma tanto volgare. M’interesso della stessa cosa quando assume una forma assai

più sottile, in uomini di genio e di genuino entusiasmo sociale come

il signor H. G. Wells. Sarebbe assai ingiusto verso un uomo come il signor Wells

insinuare che nella sua visione l’inglese e l’americano debbano

abbracciarsi soltanto nel senso di aggrapparsi l’uno all’altro nel terrore. È un

uomo che comprende che cosa sia l’amicizia, e che sa godere dei

variopinti umori dell’umanità. Ma la ricostruzione politica che egli

propone è troppo determinata da questo vecchio incubo del

necessitarismo. Ci dice che le nostre dignità e differenze

nazionali devono essere fuse nell’enorme stampo di uno Stato Mondiale, oppure

(e credo siano quasi le sue stesse parole) saremo distrutti dagli

strumenti e dai macchinari che noi stessi abbiamo fatto. In effetti, gli uomini

devono abbandonare il patriottismo o saranno assassinati dalla scienza. Dopo di ciò,

certo nessuno può accusare il signor Wells di un’indebita tenerezza verso l’istruzione scientifica

rispetto ad altri tipi d’istruzione. Il greco può essere una buona cosa o no; ma

nessuno dice che se l’erudizione greca è spinta oltre un certo punto,

tutti saranno fatti a pezzi come Orfeo, o arsi come Semele,

o avvelenati come Socrate. La filosofia, la teologia e la logica possono o meno

essere oziosi studi accademici; ma nessuno suppone che lo studio della

filosofia, o persino della teologia, costringa in ultimo i suoi studenti a

fabbricare cavalletti e schiacciapollici contro la loro volontà; o che persino

i logici debbano essere così allarmantemente logici. La scienza sembra essere

l’unico ramo del sapere in cui si deve respingere la gente dalla

perfezione come da una pestilenza. Ma non è dei pericoli scientifici

che allarmano il signor Wells che mi occupo, bensì del rimedio che egli

propone per essi; o piuttosto della relazione di quel rimedio con il

fondamento e il futuro dell’America. Ora non è troppo dire che

il signor Wells trova il suo modello nell’America. Lo Stato Mondiale dev’essere gli

Stati Uniti del Mondo. Egli risponde a quasi tutte le obiezioni sulla

praticabilità di una simile pace tra Stati, facendo notare che gli

Stati americani hanno una simile pace, e aggiungendo, abbastanza veracemente, che

un altro corso della storia avrebbe potuto facilmente vederli disgregati dalla guerra.

The pattern of the World State is to be found in the New World.

Oddly enough, as it seems to me, he proposes almost cosmic conquests for

the American Constitution, while leaving out the most successful thing

in that Constitution. The point appeared in answer to a question which

many, like myself, must have put in this matter; the question of

despotism and democracy. I cannot understand any democrat not seeing the

danger of so distant and indirect a system of government. It is hard

enough anywhere to get representatives to represent. It is hard enough

to get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little town,

even when the townsmen meet the town councillors every day in the

street, and could kick them down the street if they liked. What the same

town councillors would be like if they were ruling all their

fellow-creatures from the North Pole or the New Jerusalem, is a vision

of Oriental despotism beyond the towering fancies of Tamberlane. This

difficulty in all representative government is felt everywhere, and not

least in America. But I think that if there is one truth apparent in

such a choice of evils, it is that monarchy is at least better than

oligarchy; and that where we have to act on a large scale, the most

genuine popularity can gather round a particular person like a Pope or a

President of the United States, or even a dictator like Caesar or

Napoleon, rather than round a more or less corrupt committee which can

only be defined as an obscure oligarchy. And in that sense any oligarchy

is obscure. For people to continue to trust twenty-seven men it is

necessary, as a preliminary formality, that people should have heard of

them. And there are no twenty-seven men of whom everybody has heard as

everybody in France had heard of Napoleon, as all Catholics have heard

of the Pope or all Americans have heard of the President. I think the

mass of ordinary Americans do really elect their President; and even

where they cannot control him at least they watch him, and in the long

run they judge him. I think, therefore, that the American Constitution

has a real popular institution in the Presidency. But Mr. Wells would

appear to want the American Constitution without the Presidency. If I

understand his words rightly, he seems to want the great democracy

without its popular institution. Alluding to this danger, that the

World State might be a world tyranny, he seems to take tyranny entirely

in the sense of autocracy. He asks whether the President of the World

State would not be rather too tremendous a person, and seems to suggest

in answer that there need not even be any such person. He seems to imply

that the committee controlling the planet could meet almost without any

one in the chair, certainly without any one on the throne. I cannot

imagine anything more manifestly made to be a tyranny than such an

acephalous aristocracy. But while Mr. Wells’s decision seems to me

strange, his reason for it seems to me still more extraordinary.

He suggests that no such dictator will be needed in his World State

because ‘there will be no wars and no diplomacy.’ A World State ought

doubtless to go round the world; and going round the world seems to be a

good training for arguing in a circle. Obviously there will be no wars

and no war-diplomacy if something has the power to prevent them; and we

cannot deduce that the something will not want any power. It is rather

as if somebody, urging that the Germans could only be defeated by

uniting the Allied commands under Marshal Foch, had said that after all

it need not offend the British Generals because the French supremacy

need only be a fiction, the Germans being defeated. We should naturally

say that the German defeat would only be a reality because the Allied

command was not a fiction. So the universal peace would only be a

reality if the World State were not a fiction. And it could not be even

a state if it were not a government. This argument amounts to saying,

first that the World State will be needed because it is strong, and

then that it may safely be weak because it will not be needed.

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy. I do not say it is

incompatible with it; but any combination of the two will be a

compromise between the two. The only purely popular government is local,

and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because

they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen

who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote

and altogether alien cities. All Irishmen may know roughly the same sort

of things about Ireland; but it is absurd to say they all know the same

things about Iceland, when they may include a scholar steeped in

Icelandic sagas or a sailor who has been to Iceland. To make all

politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If

your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend

of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have

been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more

select minority who have come back.

Given this difficulty about quite direct democracy over large areas, I

think the nearest thing to democracy is despotism. At any rate I think

it is some sort of more or less independent monarchy, such as Andrew

Jackson created in America. And I believe it is true to say that the two

men whom the modern world really and almost reluctantly regards with

impersonal respect, as clothed by their office with something historic

and honourable, are the Pope and the President of the United States.

But to admire the United States as the United States is one thing. To

admire them as the World State is quite another. The attempt of Mr.

Wells to make America a sort of model for the federation of all the free

Il modello dello Stato Mondiale è da rinvenirsi nel Nuovo Mondo.

Stranamente, a quanto mi pare, egli propone conquiste quasi cosmiche per

la Costituzione americana, tralasciando la cosa di maggior successo

in quella Costituzione. Il punto emerse in risposta a una domanda che

molti, come me, devono aver posto in questa faccenda; la questione del

dispotismo e della democrazia. Non riesco a capire un democratico che non veda il

pericolo di un sistema di governo tanto distante e indiretto. È già

abbastanza difficile ovunque far sì che i rappresentanti rappresentino. È già abbastanza difficile

far sì che un piccolo consiglio comunale esaudisca i desideri di una piccola città,

anche quando i cittadini incontrano i consiglieri comunali ogni giorno per

strada, e potrebbero prenderli a calci giù per la strada se volessero. Come sarebbero gli stessi

consiglieri comunali se governassero tutti i loro

simili dal Polo Nord o dalla Nuova Gerusalemme, è una visione

di dispotismo orientale al di là delle torreggianti fantasie di Tamerlano. Questa

difficoltà in ogni governo rappresentativo si avverte dappertutto, e non

meno che in America. Ma credo che se c’è una verità evidente in

una simile scelta di mali, è che la monarchia è almeno migliore dell’

oligarchia; e che dove dobbiamo agire su vasta scala, la più

genuina popolarità può raccogliersi attorno a una persona particolare come un Papa o un

Presidente degli Stati Uniti, o persino un dittatore come Cesare o

Napoleone, piuttosto che attorno a un comitato più o meno corrotto che

può solo definirsi un’oscura oligarchia. E in tal senso ogni oligarchia

è oscura. Perché la gente continui a fidarsi di ventisette uomini è

necessario, come formalità preliminare, che la gente abbia sentito parlare di

loro. E non vi sono ventisette uomini di cui tutti abbiano sentito parlare come

tutti in Francia avevano sentito parlare di Napoleone, come tutti i cattolici hanno sentito parlare

del Papa o tutti gli americani hanno sentito parlare del Presidente. Credo che la

massa degli americani comuni elegga davvero il proprio Presidente; e anche

dove non possono controllarlo almeno lo sorvegliano, e alla

lunga lo giudicano. Credo, dunque, che la Costituzione americana

abbia una vera istituzione popolare nella Presidenza. Ma il signor Wells

parrebbe volere la Costituzione americana senza la Presidenza. Se

comprendo bene le sue parole, sembra volere la grande democrazia

senza la sua istituzione popolare. Alludendo a questo pericolo, che lo

Stato Mondiale possa essere una tirannia mondiale, egli sembra intendere la tirannia interamente

nel senso di autocrazia. Chiede se il Presidente dello Stato

Mondiale non sarebbe una persona piuttosto troppo formidabile, e sembra suggerire

in risposta che non occorra nemmeno una simile persona. Sembra sottintendere

che il comitato che controlla il pianeta possa riunirsi quasi senza alcuno

alla presidenza, di certo senza alcuno sul trono. Non riesco a

immaginare nulla di più manifestamente fatto per essere una tirannia di una simile

aristocrazia acefala. Ma per quanto la decisione del signor Wells mi paia

strana, la sua ragione per essa mi pare ancor più straordinaria.

Egli suggerisce che nessun simile dittatore sarà necessario nel suo Stato Mondiale

perché ‘non vi saranno guerre né diplomazia.’ Uno Stato Mondiale dovrebbe

senza dubbio girare attorno al mondo; e girare attorno al mondo sembra essere un

buon esercizio per argomentare in circolo. Ovviamente non vi saranno guerre

né diplomazia di guerra se qualcosa ha il potere d’impedirle; e non

possiamo dedurne che quel qualcosa non vorrà alcun potere. È piuttosto

come se qualcuno, sostenendo che i tedeschi potessero essere sconfitti solo

unendo i comandi alleati sotto il maresciallo Foch, avesse detto che dopotutto

ciò non doveva offendere i generali britannici perché la supremazia francese

sarebbe stata solo una finzione, essendo i tedeschi sconfitti. Diremmo naturalmente

che la sconfitta tedesca sarebbe stata una realtà solo perché il comando

alleato non era una finzione. Così la pace universale sarebbe una

realtà solo se lo Stato Mondiale non fosse una finzione. E non potrebbe essere nemmeno

uno Stato se non fosse un governo. Questo argomento equivale a dire,

primo che lo Stato Mondiale sarà necessario perché è forte, e

poi che può tranquillamente essere debole perché non sarà necessario.

L’internazionalismo è in ogni caso ostile alla democrazia. Non dico che sia

incompatibile con essa; ma qualunque combinazione dei due sarà un

compromesso tra i due. L’unico governo puramente popolare è locale,

e fondato sulla conoscenza locale. I cittadini possono governare la città perché

conoscono la città; ma sarà sempre un tipo eccezionale di cittadino

colui che ha o pretende il diritto di governare dieci città, e queste remote

e del tutto estranee città. Tutti gli irlandesi conoscono grosso modo lo stesso genere

di cose sull’Irlanda; ma è assurdo dire che conoscano tutti le stesse

cose sull’Islanda, quando tra loro vi possono essere uno studioso imbevuto di

saghe islandesi o un marinaio che è stato in Islanda. Rendere tutta la

politica cosmopolita significa creare un’aristocrazia di giramondo. Se

la tua visione politica abbraccia davvero le Isole dei Cannibali, dipendi

di necessità da una minoranza superiore e scelta di coloro che sono

stati alle Isole dei Cannibali; o piuttosto dalla minoranza ancora più piccola e più

selezionata di coloro che ne sono tornati.

Data questa difficoltà riguardo a una democrazia del tutto diretta su vaste aree,

penso che la cosa più vicina alla democrazia sia il dispotismo. In ogni caso penso

che sia una sorta di monarchia più o meno indipendente, come quella che Andrew

Jackson creò in America. E credo sia vero dire che i due

uomini che il mondo moderno davvero e quasi con riluttanza guarda con

rispetto impersonale, come rivestiti dalla loro carica di qualcosa di storico

e onorevole, sono il Papa e il Presidente degli Stati Uniti.

Ma ammirare gli Stati Uniti come gli Stati Uniti è una cosa. Ammirarli

come lo Stato Mondiale è tutt’altra. Il tentativo del signor

Wells di fare dell’America una sorta di modello per la federazione di tutte le libere

nations of the earth, though it is international in intention, is really

as narrowly national, in the bad sense, as the desire of Mr. Kipling to

cover the world with British Imperialism, or of Professor Treitschke to

cover it with Prussian Pan-Germanism. Not being schoolboys, we no longer

believe that everything can be settled by painting the map red. Nor do I

believe it can be done by painting it blue with white spots, even if

they are called stars. The insufficiency of British Imperialism does not

lie in the fact that it has always been applied by force of arms. As a

matter of fact, it has not. It has been effected largely by commerce, by

colonisation of comparatively empty places, by geographical discovery

and diplomatic bargain. Whether it be regarded as praise or blame, it is

certainly the truth that among all the things that have called

themselves empires, the British has been perhaps the least purely

military, and has least both of the special guilt and the special glory

that goes with militarism. The insufficiency of British Imperialism is

not that it is imperial, let alone military. The insufficiency of

British Imperialism is that it is British; when it is not merely Jewish.

It is that just as a man is no more than a man, so a nation is no more

than a nation; and any nation is inadequate as an international model.

Any state looks small when it occupies the whole earth. Any polity is

narrow as soon as it is as wide as the world. It would be just the same

if Ireland began to paint the map green or Montenegro were to paint it

black. The objection to spreading anything all over the world is that,

among other things, you have to spread it very thin.

But America, which Mr. Wells takes as a model, is in another sense

rather a warning. Mr. Wells says very truly that there was a moment in

history when America might well have broken up into independent states

like those of Europe. He seems to take it for granted that it was in all

respects an advantage that this was avoided. Yet there is surely a case,

however mildly we put it, for a certain importance in the world still

attaching to Europe. There are some who find France as interesting as

Florida; and who think they can learn as much about history and humanity

in the marble cities of the Mediterranean as in the wooden towns of the

Middle West. Europe may have been divided, but it was certainly not

destroyed; nor has its peculiar position in the culture of the world

been destroyed. Nothing has yet appeared capable of completely eclipsing

it, either in its extension in America or its imitation in Japan. But

the immediate point here is perhaps a more important one. There is now

no creed accepted as embodying the common sense of all Europe, as the

Catholic creed was accepted as embodying it in mediaeval times. There is

no culture broadly superior to all others, as the Mediterranean culture

was superior to that of the barbarians in Roman times. If Europe were

united in modern times, it would probably be by the victory of one of

its types over others, possibly over all the others. And when America

was united finally in the nineteenth century, it was by the victory of

one of its types over others. It is not yet certain that this victory

was a good thing. It is not yet certain that the world will be better

for the triumph of the North over the Southern traditions of America.

It may yet turn out to be as unfortunate as a triumph of the North

Germans over the Southern traditions of Germany and of Europe.

The men who will not face this fact are men whose minds are not free.

They are more crushed by Progress than any pietists by Providence. They

are not allowed to question that whatever has recently happened was all

for the best. Now Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a

theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It

is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far

more miraculous than a miracle. If there be no purpose, or if the

purpose permits of human free will, then in either case it is almost

insanely unlikely that there should be in history a period of steady and

uninterrupted progress; or in other words a period in which poor

bewildered humanity moves amid a chaos of complications, without making

a single mistake. What has to be hammered into the heads of most normal

newspaper-readers to-day is that Man has made a great many mistakes.

Modern Man has made a great many mistakes. Indeed, in the case of that

progressive and pioneering character, one is sometimes tempted to say

that he has made nothing but mistakes. Calvinism was a mistake, and

Capitalism was a mistake, and Teutonism and the flattery of the Northern

tribes were mistakes. In the French the persecution of Catholicism by

the politicians was a mistake, as they found out in the Great War; when

the memory gave Irish or Italian Catholics an excuse for hanging back.

In England the loss of agriculture and therefore of food-supply in war,

and the power to stand a siege, was a mistake. And in America the

introduction of the negroes was a mistake; but it may yet be found that

the sacrifice of the Southern white man to them was even more of a

mistake.

The reason of this doubt is in one word. We have not yet seen the end of

the whole industrial experiment; and there are already signs of it

coming to a bad end. It may end in Bolshevism. It is more likely to end

in the Servile State. Indeed, the two things are not so different as

some suppose, and they grow less different every day. The Bolshevists

have already called in Capitalists to help them to crush the free

peasants. The Capitalists are quite likely to call in Labour Leaders to

whitewash their compromise as social reform or even Socialism. The

nazioni della terra, benché internazionale nell’intenzione, è in realtà

tanto grettamente nazionale, nel senso cattivo, quanto il desiderio del signor Kipling di

coprire il mondo con l’imperialismo britannico, o del professor Treitschke di

coprirlo con il pangermanesimo prussiano. Non essendo scolaretti, non

crediamo più che tutto si possa risolvere dipingendo di rosso la carta geografica. Né

credo si possa fare dipingendola di blu con macchie bianche, anche se

le chiamano stelle. L’insufficienza dell’imperialismo britannico non

risiede nel fatto che sia sempre stato applicato con la forza delle armi. Di

fatto, non lo è stato. È stato realizzato in gran parte dal commercio, dalla

colonizzazione di luoghi comparativamente vuoti, dalla scoperta geografica

e dal patto diplomatico. Che lo si consideri lode o biasimo, è

certamente la verità che fra tutte le cose che si sono

chiamate imperi, quello britannico è stato forse il meno puramente

militare, e ha meno tanto della speciale colpa quanto della speciale gloria

che accompagnano il militarismo. L’insufficienza dell’imperialismo britannico

non è che sia imperiale, e tanto meno militare. L’insufficienza dell’

imperialismo britannico è che è britannico; quando non è meramente ebraico.

È che proprio come un uomo non è più di un uomo, così una nazione non è più

di una nazione; e nessuna nazione è adeguata come modello internazionale.

Ogni Stato appare piccolo quando occupa l’intera terra. Ogni ordinamento è

angusto non appena è largo quanto il mondo. Sarebbe esattamente lo stesso

se l’Irlanda cominciasse a dipingere di verde la carta o il Montenegro la dipingesse

di nero. L’obiezione allo spargere qualcosa su tutto il mondo è che,

tra le altre cose, si è costretti a spanderla assai sottile.

Ma l’America, che il signor Wells prende come modello, è in un altro senso

piuttosto un monito. Il signor Wells dice con molta verità che vi fu un momento nella

storia in cui l’America avrebbe ben potuto disgregarsi in Stati indipendenti

come quelli d’Europa. Sembra dare per scontato che sia stato per ogni

riguardo un vantaggio che ciò sia stato evitato. Eppure vi è di certo un argomento,

per quanto blandamente lo poniamo, a favore di una certa importanza nel mondo che ancora

si annette all’Europa. Vi è chi trova la Francia interessante quanto la

Florida; e chi pensa di poter apprendere altrettanto sulla storia e sull’umanità

nelle città di marmo del Mediterraneo quanto nelle città di legno del

Medio West. L’Europa sarà stata divisa, ma non fu certamente

distrutta; né la sua peculiare posizione nella cultura del mondo è stata

distrutta. Nulla è ancora comparso capace di eclissarla completamente,

né nella sua estensione in America né nella sua imitazione in Giappone. Ma

il punto immediato qui è forse più importante. Non vi è oggi

alcun credo accolto come incarnazione del senso comune di tutta l’Europa, come il

credo cattolico era accolto come sua incarnazione nei tempi medievali. Non vi è

alcuna cultura largamente superiore a tutte le altre, come la cultura mediterranea

era superiore a quella dei barbari in epoca romana. Se l’Europa fosse

unificata in tempi moderni, sarebbe probabilmente per la vittoria di uno dei

suoi tipi sugli altri, forse su tutti gli altri. E quando l’America

fu unificata infine nel diciannovesimo secolo, lo fu per la vittoria di

uno dei suoi tipi sugli altri. Non è ancora certo che questa vittoria

sia stata una buona cosa. Non è ancora certo che il mondo starà meglio

per il trionfo del Nord sulle tradizioni del Sud dell’America.

Potrebbe ancora rivelarsi tanto infausto quanto un trionfo dei

tedeschi del Nord sulle tradizioni del Sud della Germania e d’Europa.

Gli uomini che non vogliono affrontare questo fatto sono uomini le cui menti non sono libere.

Sono più schiacciati dal Progresso di qualsiasi pietista dalla Provvidenza. Non

è loro concesso di dubitare che tutto quel che è recentemente accaduto fosse tutto

per il meglio. Ora il Progresso è la Provvidenza senza Dio. Cioè, è una

teoria secondo cui tutto è sempre perpetuamente andato per il verso giusto per caso. È

una sorta di ottimismo ateo, fondato su una coincidenza perenne assai

più miracolosa di un miracolo. Se non vi è alcun disegno, o se il

disegno consente il libero arbitrio umano, allora in entrambi i casi è quasi

follemente improbabile che vi sia nella storia un periodo di costante e

ininterrotto progresso; ovvero, in altre parole, un periodo in cui la povera

sconcertata umanità si muove in un caos di complicazioni, senza commettere

un solo errore. Ciò che va martellato nella testa della maggior parte dei normali

lettori di giornali oggi è che l’Uomo ha commesso moltissimi errori.

L’Uomo moderno ha commesso moltissimi errori. Anzi, nel caso di quel

carattere progressista e pioniere, si è talvolta tentati di dire

che non ha commesso altro che errori. Il calvinismo fu un errore, e

il capitalismo fu un errore, e il teutonismo e l’adulazione delle tribù

nordiche furono errori. Nei francesi la persecuzione del cattolicesimo da parte

dei politici fu un errore, come scoprirono nella Grande Guerra; quando

il ricordo diede ai cattolici irlandesi o italiani un pretesto per tirarsi indietro.

In Inghilterra la perdita dell’agricoltura e quindi dell’approvvigionamento alimentare in guerra,

e della capacità di sostenere un assedio, fu un errore. E in America l’

introduzione dei negri fu un errore; ma potrebbe ancora scoprirsi che

il sacrificio dell’uomo bianco del Sud in loro favore fu un errore ancora

maggiore.

La ragione di questo dubbio è in una parola. Non abbiamo ancora visto la fine dell’

intero esperimento industriale; e vi sono già segni che esso

va a finir male. Può finire nel bolscevismo. È più probabile che finisca

nello Stato Servile. Anzi, le due cose non sono così diverse come

alcuni suppongono, e diventano meno diverse ogni giorno. I bolscevichi

hanno già chiamato i capitalisti ad aiutarli a schiacciare i liberi

contadini. È assai probabile che i capitalisti chiamino i leader sindacali a

imbiancare il loro compromesso come riforma sociale o persino socialismo. I

cosmopolitan Jews who are the Communists in the East will not find it so

very hard to make a bargain with the cosmopolitan Jews who are

Capitalists in the West. The Western Jews would be willing to admit a

nominal Socialism. The Eastern Jews have already admitted that their

Socialism is nominal. It was the Bolshevist leader himself who said,

‘Russia is again a Capitalist country.’ But whoever makes the bargain,

and whatever is its precise character, the substance of it will be

servile. It will be servile in the only rational and reliable sense;

that is, an arrangement by which a mass of men are ensured shelter and

livelihood, in return for being subjected to a law which obliges them to

continue to labour. Of course it will not be called the Servile State;

it is very probable that it will be called the Socialist State. But

nobody seems to realise how very near all the industrial countries are

to it. At any moment it may appear in the simple form of compulsory

arbitration; for compulsory arbitration dealing with private employers

is by definition slavery. When workmen receive unemployment pay, and at

the same time arouse more and more irritation by going on strike, it may

seem very natural to give them the unemployment pay for good and forbid

them the strike for good; and the combination of those two things is by

definition slavery. And Trotsky can beat any Trust magnate as a

strike-breaker; for he does not even pretend that his compulsory labour

is a free bargain. If Trotsky and the Trust magnate come to a working

compromise, that compromise will be a Servile State. But it will also be

the supreme and by far the most constructive and conclusive result of

the industrial movement in history; of the power of machinery or money;

of the huge populations of the modern cities; of scientific inventions

and resources; of all the things before which the agricultural society

of the Southern Confederacy went down. But even those who cannot see

that commercialism may end in the triumph of slavery can see that the

Northern victory has to a great extent ended in the triumph of

commercialism. And the point at the moment is that this did definitely

mean, even at the time, the triumph of one American type over another

American type; just as much as any European war might mean the triumph

of one European type over another. A victory of England over France

would be a victory of merchants over peasants; and the victory of

Northerners over Southerners was a victory of merchants over squires. So

that that very unity, which Mr. Wells contrasts so favourably with war,

was not only itself due to a war, but to a war which had one of the most

questionable and even perilous of the results of war. That result was a

change in the balance of power, the predominance of a particular

partner, the exaltation of a particular example, the eclipse of

excellent traditions when the defeated lost their international

influence. In short, it made exactly the same sort of difference of

which we speak when we say that 1870 was a disaster to Europe, or that

it was necessary to fight Prussia lest she should Prussianise the whole

world. America would have been very different if the leadership had

remained with Virginia. The world would have been very different if

America had been very different. It is quite reasonable to rejoice that

the issue went as it did; indeed, as I have explained elsewhere, for

other reasons I do on the whole rejoice in it. But it is certainly not

self-evident that it is a matter for rejoicing. One type of American

state conquered and subjugated another type of American state; and the

virtues and value of the latter were very largely lost to the world. So

if Mr. Wells insists on the parallel of a United States of Europe, he

must accept the parallel of a Civil War of Europe. He must suppose that

the peasant countries crush the industrial countries or vice versa; and

that one or other of them becomes the European tradition to the neglect

of the other. The situation which seems to satisfy him so completely in

America is, after all, the situation which would result in Europe if the

Germanic Empires, let us say, had entirely arrested the special

development of the Slavs; or if the influence of France had really

broken off short under a blow from Britain. The Old South had qualities

of humane civilisation which have not sufficiently survived; or at any

rate have not sufficiently spread. It is true that the decline of the

agricultural South has been considerably balanced by the growth of the

agricultural West. It is true, as I have occasion to emphasise in

another place, that the West does give the New America something that is

nearly a normal peasantry, as a pendant to the industrial towns. But

this is not an answer; it is rather an augmentation of the argument. In

so far as America is saved it is saved by being patchy; and would be

ruined if the Western patch had the same fate as the Southern patch.

When all is said, therefore, the advantages of American unification are

not so certain that we can apply them to a world unification. The doubt

could be expressed in a great many ways and by a great many examples.

For that matter, it is already being felt that the supremacy of the

Middle West in politics is inflicting upon other localities exactly the

sort of local injustice that turns provinces into nations struggling to

be free. It has already inflicted what amounts to religious persecution,

or the imposition of an alien morality, on the wine-growing civilisation

of California. In a word, the American system is a good one as

governments go; but it is too large, and the world will not be improved

by making it larger. And for this reason alone I should reject this

second method of uniting England and America; which is not only

ebrei cosmopoliti che sono i comunisti in Oriente non troveranno poi così

difficile venire a patti con gli ebrei cosmopoliti che sono

capitalisti in Occidente. Gli ebrei occidentali sarebbero disposti ad ammettere un

socialismo nominale. Gli ebrei orientali hanno già ammesso che il loro

socialismo è nominale. Fu lo stesso capo bolscevico a dire,

‘La Russia è di nuovo un paese capitalista.’ Ma chiunque stipuli il patto,

e qualunque ne sia il preciso carattere, la sua sostanza sarà

servile. Sarà servile nell’unico senso razionale e attendibile;

vale a dire, un accordo per cui a una massa di uomini sono assicurati riparo e

sostentamento, in cambio dell’essere sottoposti a una legge che li obbliga a

continuare a lavorare. Naturalmente non sarà chiamato lo Stato Servile;

è assai probabile che sarà chiamato lo Stato Socialista. Ma

nessuno pare rendersi conto di quanto tutti i paesi industriali gli siano

vicini. In qualsiasi momento può presentarsi nella semplice forma dell’arbitrato

obbligatorio; poiché l’arbitrato obbligatorio applicato a datori di lavoro privati

è per definizione schiavitù. Quando gli operai ricevono un sussidio di disoccupazione, e nel

medesimo tempo suscitano sempre maggiore irritazione scioperando, può

sembrare naturalissimo dar loro il sussidio di disoccupazione per sempre e vietar

loro lo sciopero per sempre; e la combinazione di queste due cose è per

definizione schiavitù. E Trockij può battere qualsiasi magnate dei trust come un

crumiro; poiché non pretende nemmeno che il suo lavoro obbligatorio

sia un libero patto. Se Trockij e il magnate dei trust giungono a un compromesso

operante, quel compromesso sarà uno Stato Servile. Ma sarà anche

il supremo e di gran lunga il più costruttivo e conclusivo risultato del

movimento industriale nella storia; del potere del macchinario o del denaro;

delle enormi popolazioni delle città moderne; delle invenzioni scientifiche

e delle risorse; di tutte le cose davanti a cui la società agricola

della Confederazione del Sud crollò. Ma anche coloro che non riescono a vedere

che il commercialismo possa finire nel trionfo della schiavitù possono vedere che la

vittoria del Nord è in gran parte finita nel trionfo del

commercialismo. E il punto al momento è che ciò significò senza dubbio,

anche al tempo, il trionfo di un tipo americano su un altro

tipo americano; proprio quanto qualsiasi guerra europea potrebbe significare il trionfo

di un tipo europeo su un altro. Una vittoria dell’Inghilterra sulla Francia

sarebbe una vittoria di mercanti su contadini; e la vittoria dei

nordisti sui sudisti fu una vittoria di mercanti su possidenti terrieri. Cosicché

quella stessa unità, che il signor Wells contrappone così favorevolmente alla guerra,

non solo era essa stessa dovuta a una guerra, ma a una guerra che ebbe uno dei più

discutibili e persino perigliosi risultati della guerra. Quel risultato fu un

mutamento nell’equilibrio di potere, la predominanza di un particolare

socio, l’esaltazione di un particolare esempio, l’eclissi di

eccellenti tradizioni quando gli sconfitti persero la loro influenza

internazionale. In breve, fece esattamente lo stesso genere di differenza di

cui parliamo quando diciamo che il 1870 fu un disastro per l’Europa, o che

fu necessario combattere la Prussia affinché non prussianizzasse il mondo

intero. L’America sarebbe stata assai diversa se la guida fosse

rimasta alla Virginia. Il mondo sarebbe stato assai diverso se

l’America fosse stata assai diversa. È del tutto ragionevole rallegrarsi che

la questione sia andata come è andata; anzi, come ho spiegato altrove, per

altre ragioni me ne rallegro nel complesso. Ma non è certo

auto-evidente che sia un motivo di gioia. Un tipo di Stato

americano conquistò e soggiogò un altro tipo di Stato americano; e le

virtù e il valore di quest’ultimo andarono in gran parte perduti per il mondo. Così

se il signor Wells insiste sul parallelo di uno Stati Uniti d’Europa,

deve accettare il parallelo di una Guerra Civile d’Europa. Deve supporre che

i paesi contadini schiaccino i paesi industriali o viceversa; e

che l’uno o l’altro di essi diventi la tradizione europea a scapito

dell’altro. La situazione che pare soddisfarlo così pienamente in

America è, dopotutto, la situazione che risulterebbe in Europa se gli

Imperi germanici, poniamo, avessero interamente arrestato lo speciale

sviluppo degli slavi; o se l’influenza della Francia si fosse davvero

spezzata di netto sotto un colpo della Britannia. Il Vecchio Sud aveva qualità

di umana civiltà che non sono sopravvissute a sufficienza; o in ogni

caso non si sono diffuse a sufficienza. È vero che il declino del

Sud agricolo è stato considerevolmente bilanciato dalla crescita dell’

West agricolo. È vero, come ho occasione di sottolineare in

un altro luogo, che il West dà davvero alla Nuova America qualcosa che è

quasi un contadinato normale, come contrappeso alle città industriali. Ma

questa non è una risposta; è piuttosto un rafforzamento dell’argomento. Nella

misura in cui l’America è salva, è salva per il suo essere a chiazze; e sarebbe

rovinata se la chiazza occidentale avesse la stessa sorte della chiazza meridionale.

Tutto sommato, dunque, i vantaggi dell’unificazione americana non sono

così certi da poterli applicare a un’unificazione mondiale. Il dubbio

potrebbe esprimersi in moltissimi modi e con moltissimi esempi.

Del resto, si avverte già che la supremazia del

Medio West in politica sta infliggendo ad altre località esattamente il

genere d’ingiustizia locale che trasforma le province in nazioni che lottano per

essere libere. Ha già inflitto ciò che equivale a una persecuzione religiosa,

ovvero l’imposizione di una moralità estranea, alla civiltà vinicola

della California. In una parola, il sistema americano è buono per quel che

sono i governi; ma è troppo grande, e il mondo non sarà migliorato

rendendolo più grande. E per questa ragione soltanto respingerei questo

secondo metodo di unire l’Inghilterra e l’America; che non solo

Americanising England, but Americanising everything else.

But the essential reason is that a type of culture came out on top in

America and England in the nineteenth century, which cannot and would

not be tolerated on top of the world. To unite all the systems at the

top, without improving and simplifying their social organisation below,

would be to tie all the tops of the trees together where they rise

above a dense and poisonous jungle, and make the jungle darker than

before. To create such a cosmopolitan political platform would be to

build a roof above our own heads to shut out the sunlight, on which only

usurers and conspirators clad in gold could walk about in the sun. This

is no moment when industrial intellectualism can inflict such an

artificial oppression upon the world. Industrialism itself is coming to

see dark days, and its future is very doubtful. It is split from end to

end with strikes and struggles for economic life, in which the poor not

only plead that they are starving, but even the rich can only plead that

they are bankrupt. The peasantries are growing not only more prosperous

but more politically effective; the Russian moujik has held up the

Bolshevist Government of Moscow and Petersburg; a huge concession has

been made by England to Ireland; the League of Nations has decided for

Poland against Prussia. It is not certain that industrialism will not

wither even in its own field; it is certain that its intellectual ideas

will not be allowed to cover every field; and this sort of cosmopolitan

culture is one of its ideas. Industrialism itself may perish; or on the

other hand industrialism itself may survive, by some searching and

scientific reform that will really guarantee economic security to all.

It may really purge itself of the accidental maladies of anarchy and

famine; and continue as a machine, but at least as a comparatively clean

and humanely shielded machine; at any rate no longer as a man-eating

machine. Capitalism may clear itself of its worst corruptions by such

reform as is open to it; by creating humane and healthy conditions for

labour, and setting the labouring classes to work under a lucid and

recognised law. It may make Pittsburg one vast model factory for all who

will model themselves upon factories; and may give to all men and women

in its employment a clear social status in which they can be contented

and secure. And on the day when that social security is established for

the masses, when industrial capitalism has achieved this larger and more

logical organisation and found peace at last, a strange and shadowy and

ironic triumph, like an abstract apology, will surely hover over all

those graves in the Wilderness where lay the bones of so many gallant

gentlemen; men who had also from their youth known and upheld such a

social stratification, who had the courage to call a spade a spade and a

slave a slave.

A New Martin Chuzzlewit

The aim of this book, if it has one, is to suggest this thesis; that the

very worst way of helping Anglo-American friendship is to be an

Anglo-American. There is only one thing lower, of course, which is being

an Anglo-Saxon. It is lower, because at least Englishmen do exist and

Americans do exist; and it may be possible, though repulsive, to imagine

an American and an Englishman in some way blended together. But if

Angles and Saxons ever did exist, they are all fortunately dead now; and

the wildest imagination cannot form the weakest idea of what sort of

monster would be made by mixing one with the other. But my thesis is

that the whole hope, and the only hope, lies not in mixing two things

together, but rather in cutting them very sharply asunder. That is the

only way in which two things can succeed sufficiently in getting outside

each other to appreciate and admire each other. So long as they are

different and yet supposed to be the same, there can be nothing but a

divided mind and a staggering balance. It may be that in the first

twilight of time man and woman walked about as one quadruped. But if

they did, I am sure it was a quadruped that reared and bucked and kicked

up its heels. Then the flaming sword of some angel divided them, and

they fell in love with each other.

Should the reader require an example a little more within historical

range, or a little more subject to critical tests, than the above

prehistoric anecdote (which I need not say was revealed to me in a

vision) it would be easy enough to supply them both in a hypothetical

and a historical form. It is obvious enough in a general way that if we

begin to subject diverse countries to an identical test, there will not

only be rivalry, but what is far more deadly and disastrous,

superiority. If we institute a competition between Holland and

Switzerland as to the relative grace and agility of their mountain

guides, it will be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy;

it will also be clear that certain facts about the configuration of

Holland have escaped our international eye. If we establish a comparison

between them in skill and industry in the art of building dykes against

the sea, it will be equally clear that the injustice falls the other

way; it will also be clear that the situation of Switzerland on the map

has received insufficient study. In both cases there will not only be

rivalry but very unbalanced and unjust rivalry; in both cases,

therefore, there will not only be enmity but very bitter or insolent

enmity. But so long as the two are sharply divided there can be no

enmity because there can be no rivalry. Nobody can argue about whether

the Swiss climb mountains better than the Dutch build dykes; just as

nobody can argue about whether a triangle is more triangular than a

americanizza l’Inghilterra, ma americanizza ogni altra cosa.

Ma la ragione essenziale è che un tipo di cultura ebbe la meglio in

America e in Inghilterra nel diciannovesimo secolo, che non può e non

sarebbe tollerato al vertice del mondo. Unire tutti i sistemi al

vertice, senza migliorare e semplificare la loro organizzazione sociale in basso,

sarebbe legare insieme tutte le cime degli alberi là dove si levano

sopra una giungla fitta e velenosa, e rendere la giungla più buia di

prima. Creare una simile piattaforma politica cosmopolita significherebbe

costruire un tetto sopra le nostre teste per escludere la luce del sole, sul quale solo

usurai e cospiratori vestiti d’oro potrebbero passeggiare al sole. Questo

non è un momento in cui l’intellettualismo industriale possa infliggere al mondo una simile

artificiale oppressione. L’industrialismo stesso comincia a

vedere giorni cupi, e il suo futuro è assai incerto. È spaccato da un capo all’

altro da scioperi e lotte per la vita economica, in cui i poveri non

solo lamentano di morire di fame, ma persino i ricchi possono solo lamentare di

essere in bancarotta. I contadinati diventano non solo più prosperi

ma più efficaci politicamente; il mužik russo ha tenuto in scacco il

Governo bolscevico di Mosca e Pietroburgo; un’enorme concessione è

stata fatta dall’Inghilterra all’Irlanda; la Società delle Nazioni ha deciso a favore della

Polonia contro la Prussia. Non è certo che l’industrialismo non

appassisca persino nel suo stesso campo; è certo che le sue idee intellettuali

non saranno lasciate coprire ogni campo; e questa sorta di cultura

cosmopolita è una delle sue idee. L’industrialismo stesso può perire; oppure

d’altro canto l’industrialismo stesso può sopravvivere, mediante qualche profonda e

scientifica riforma che garantisca davvero la sicurezza economica a tutti.

Può davvero purgarsi dei mali accidentali dell’anarchia e della

carestia; e continuare come macchina, ma almeno come una comparativamente pulita

e umanamente protetta macchina; in ogni caso non più come una mangia-uomini

macchina. Il capitalismo può liberarsi delle sue peggiori corruzioni con quella

riforma che gli è accessibile; creando condizioni umane e salubri per il

lavoro, e ponendo le classi lavoratrici a operare sotto una legge lucida e

riconosciuta. Può fare di Pittsburgh una vasta fabbrica modello per tutti coloro che

si modelleranno sulle fabbriche; e può dare a tutti gli uomini e le donne

alle sue dipendenze uno status sociale chiaro in cui possano essere contenti

e sicuri. E nel giorno in cui quella sicurezza sociale sarà stabilita per

le masse, quando il capitalismo industriale avrà conseguito questa più ampia e più

logica organizzazione e trovato pace alfine, uno strano, ombroso e

ironico trionfo, come una scusa astratta, aleggerà di certo su tutte

quelle tombe nella Wilderness dove giacevano le ossa di tanti valorosi

gentiluomini; uomini che avevano anch’essi conosciuto e sostenuto fin dalla giovinezza una simile

stratificazione sociale, che ebbero il coraggio di chiamare una vanga una vanga e uno

schiavo uno schiavo.

Un nuovo Martin Chuzzlewit

Lo scopo di questo libro, se ne ha uno, è suggerire questa tesi; che il

modo peggiore in assoluto di favorire l’amicizia anglo-americana è essere un

anglo-americano. Vi è una sola cosa più bassa, naturalmente, ossia essere

un anglosassone. È più bassa, perché almeno gli inglesi esistono e

gli americani esistono; ed è forse possibile, benché ripugnante, immaginare

un americano e un inglese in qualche modo fusi insieme. Ma se

gli Angli e i Sassoni mai esistettero, sono tutti fortunatamente morti ora; e

la più sfrenata immaginazione non può formarsi la più debole idea di che sorta di

mostro risulterebbe dal mescolare l’uno con l’altro. Ma la mia tesi è

che tutta la speranza, e l’unica speranza, sta non nel mescolare due cose

insieme, ma piuttosto nel reciderle nettamente l’una dall’altra. Questo è il

solo modo in cui due cose possono riuscire sufficientemente a uscire l’una fuori dall’

altra per apprezzarsi e ammirarsi a vicenda. Finché sono

diverse e tuttavia si presumono uguali, non può esservi altro che una

mente divisa e un equilibrio vacillante. Può darsi che nel primo

crepuscolo del tempo l’uomo e la donna andassero attorno come un solo quadrupede. Ma se

così fu, sono certo che era un quadrupede che s’impennava e scalciava e sparava

calci in aria. Poi la fiammeggiante spada di qualche angelo li divise, ed

essi si innamorarono l’uno dell’altra.

Qualora il lettore richieda un esempio un po’ più entro la portata

storica, o un po’ più soggetto a verifiche critiche, del suddetto

aneddoto preistorico (che, inutile dirlo, mi fu rivelato in una

visione) sarebbe abbastanza facile fornirne sia in forma ipotetica

sia in forma storica. È abbastanza ovvio in generale che se

cominciamo a sottoporre paesi diversi a una prova identica, non vi sarà

solo rivalità, ma ciò che è assai più letale e disastroso,

superiorità. Se istituiamo una gara tra l’Olanda e la

Svizzera quanto alla relativa grazia e agilità delle loro guide

alpine, sarà chiaro che il verdetto è sproporzionatamente facile;

sarà anche chiaro che certi fatti sulla configurazione dell’

Olanda sono sfuggiti al nostro occhio internazionale. Se stabiliamo un confronto

tra esse quanto ad abilità e operosità nell’arte di costruire dighe contro

il mare, sarà egualmente chiaro che l’ingiustizia cade dall’altra

parte; sarà anche chiaro che la posizione della Svizzera sulla carta

ha ricevuto uno studio insufficiente. In entrambi i casi non vi sarà solo

rivalità ma una rivalità assai squilibrata e ingiusta; in entrambi i casi,

dunque, non vi sarà solo inimicizia ma un’inimicizia assai aspra o insolente

inimicizia. Ma finché i due sono nettamente divisi non può esservi

inimicizia perché non può esservi rivalità. Nessuno può disputare se

gli svizzeri scalino le montagne meglio di quanto gli olandesi costruiscano dighe; proprio come

nessuno può disputare se un triangolo sia più triangolare di quanto un

circle is round.

This fancy example is alphabetically and indeed artificially simple;

but, having used it for convenience, I could easily give similar

examples not of fancy but of fact. I had occasion recently to attend the

Christmas festivity of a club in London for the exiles of one of the

Scandinavian nations. When I entered the room the first thing that

struck my eye, and greatly raised my spirits, was that the room was

dotted with the colours of peasant costumes and the specimens of peasant

craftsmanship. There were, of course, other costumes and other crafts in

evidence; there were men dressed like myself (only better) in the garb

of the modern middle classes; there was furniture like the furniture of

any other room in London. Now, according to the ideal formula of the

ordinary internationalist, these things that we had in common ought to

have moved me to a sense of the kinship of all civilisation. I ought to

have felt that as the Scandinavian gentleman wore a collar and tie, and

I also wore a collar and tie, we were brothers and nothing could come

between us. I ought to have felt that we were standing for the same

principles of truth because we were wearing the same pair of trousers;

or rather, to speak with more precision, similar pairs of trousers.

Anyhow, the pair of trousers, that cloven pennon, ought to have floated

in fancy over my head as the banner of Europe or the League of Nations.

I am constrained to confess that no such rush of emotions overcame me;

and the topic of trousers did not float across my mind at all. So far as

those things were concerned, I might have remained in a mood of mortal

enmity, and cheerfully shot or stabbed the best dressed gentleman in the

room. Precisely what did warm my heart with an abrupt affection for that

northern nation was the very thing that is utterly and indeed lamentably

lacking in my own nation. It was something corresponding to the one

great gap in English history, corresponding to the one great blot on

English civilisation. It was the spiritual presence of a peasantry,

dressed according to its own dignity, and expressing itself by its own

creations.

The sketch of America left by Charles Dickens is generally regarded as

something which is either to be used as a taunt or covered with an

apology. Doubtless it was unduly critical, even of the America of that

day; yet curiously enough it may well be the text for a true

reconciliation at the present day. It is true that in this, as in other

things, the Dickensian exaggeration is itself exaggerated. It is also

true that, while it is over-emphasised, it is not allowed for. Dickens

tended too much to describe the United States as a vast lunatic asylum;

but partly because he had a natural inspiration and imagination suited

to the description of lunatic asylums. As it was his finest poetic fancy

that created a lunatic over the garden wall, so it was his fancy that

created a lunatic over the western sea. To read some of the complaints,

one would fancy that Dickens had deliberately invented a low and

farcical America to be a contrast to his high and exalted England. It is

suggested that he showed America as full of rowdy bullies like Hannibal

Chollop, or ridiculous wind-bags like Elijah Pogram, while England was

full of refined and sincere spirits like Jonas Chuzzlewit, Chevy Slime,

Montague Tigg, and Mr. Pecksniff. If Martin Chuzzlewit makes America a

lunatic asylum, what in the world does it make England? We can only say

a criminal lunatic asylum. The truth is, of course, that Dickens so

described them because he had a genius for that sort of description; for

the making of almost maniacal grotesques of the same type as Quilp or

Fagin. He made these Americans absurd because he was an artist in

absurdity; and no artist can help finding hints everywhere for his own

peculiar art. In a word, he created a laughable Pogram for the same

reason that he created a laughable Pecksniff; and that was only because

no other creature could have created them.

It is often said that we learn to love the characters in romances as if

they were characters in real life. I wish we could sometimes love the

characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are

a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even

appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a

story. Martin Chuzzlewit is itself indeed an unsatisfactory and even

unfortunate example; for it is, among its author’s other works, a rather

unusually harsh and hostile story. I do not suggest that we should feel

towards an American friend that exact shade or tint of tenderness that

we feel towards Mr. Hannibal Chollop. Our enjoyment of the foreigner

should rather resemble our enjoyment of Pickwick than our enjoyment of

Pecksniff. But there is this amount of appropriateness even in the

particular example; that Dickens did show in both countries how men can

be made amusing to each other. So far the point is not that he made fun

of America, but that he got fun out of America. And, as I have already

pointed out, he applied exactly the same method of selection and

exaggeration to England. In the other English stories, written in a more

amiable mood, he applied it in a more amiable manner; but he could apply

it to an American too, when he was writing in that mood and manner. We

can see it in the witty and withering criticism delivered by the Yankee

traveller in the musty refreshment room of Mugby Junction; a genuine

example of a genuinely American fun and freedom satirising a genuinely

British stuffiness and snobbery. Nobody expects the American traveller

to admire the refreshments at Mugby Junction; but he might admire the

refreshment at one of the Pickwickian inns, especially if it contained

cerchio sia rotondo.

Questo esempio di fantasia è alfabeticamente e in verità artificiosamente semplice;

ma, avendolo usato per comodità, potrei facilmente addurre esempi simili

non di fantasia ma di fatto. Ebbi occasione di recente di presenziare alla

festività natalizia di un club a Londra per gli esuli di una delle

nazioni scandinave. Quando entrai nella sala la prima cosa che

mi colpì l’occhio, e mi risollevò grandemente lo spirito, fu che la sala era

punteggiata dai colori dei costumi contadini e dagli esemplari dell’artigianato

contadino. Vi erano, s’intende, altri costumi e altri manufatti in

vista; vi erano uomini vestiti come me (solo meglio) nell’abbigliamento

delle moderne classi medie; vi erano mobili come i mobili di

qualsiasi altra sala di Londra. Ora, secondo la formula ideale dell’

internazionalista comune, queste cose che avevamo in comune avrebbero dovuto

commuovermi a un senso della parentela di tutta la civiltà. Avrei dovuto

sentire che, poiché il gentiluomo scandinavo portava colletto e cravatta, e

anch’io portavo colletto e cravatta, eravamo fratelli e nulla poteva frapporsi

tra noi. Avrei dovuto sentire che sostenevamo gli stessi

princìpi di verità perché indossavamo lo stesso paio di pantaloni;

o piuttosto, per parlare con più precisione, paia di pantaloni simili.

Comunque sia, il paio di pantaloni, quel vessillo biforcuto, avrebbe dovuto sventolare

nella fantasia sopra il mio capo come il gonfalone d’Europa o della Società delle Nazioni.

Sono costretto a confessare che nessuna simile ondata di emozioni mi sopraffece;

e il tema dei pantaloni non mi attraversò affatto la mente. Per quel che

riguardava quelle cose, sarei potuto rimanere in uno stato d’animo di mortale

inimicizia, e allegramente aver sparato o pugnalato il gentiluomo meglio vestito della

sala. Ciò che invece mi scaldò il cuore con un’improvvisa tenerezza per quella

nazione nordica fu proprio la cosa che manca del tutto e invero lamentevolmente

alla mia stessa nazione. Era qualcosa che corrispondeva all’unica

grande lacuna nella storia inglese, corrispondente all’unica grande macchia sulla

civiltà inglese. Era la presenza spirituale di un contadinato,

vestito secondo la propria dignità, ed esprimentesi mediante le proprie

creazioni.

Lo schizzo dell’America lasciato da Charles Dickens è generalmente considerato

qualcosa da usare come scherno oppure da coprire con una

scusa. Senza dubbio fu indebitamente critico, persino verso l’America di quel

tempo; eppure, per quanto curioso, potrebbe ben essere il testo per una vera

riconciliazione ai giorni nostri. È vero che in questo, come in altre

cose, l’esagerazione dickensiana è essa stessa esagerata. È anche

vero che, mentre è sovraccentuata, non se ne tiene conto. Dickens

tendeva troppo a descrivere gli Stati Uniti come un vasto manicomio;

ma in parte perché aveva un’ispirazione naturale e un’immaginazione adatte

alla descrizione dei manicomi. Come fu la sua più fine fantasia poetica

a creare un pazzo oltre il muro del giardino, così fu la sua fantasia a

creare un pazzo oltre il mare occidentale. A leggere alcune delle lagnanze,

si penserebbe che Dickens avesse deliberatamente inventato una bassa e

farsesca America come contrasto alla sua alta ed esaltata Inghilterra. Si

sostiene che egli mostrò l’America come piena di turbolenti prepotenti come Hannibal

Chollop, o ridicoli sacchi di vento come Elijah Pogram, mentre l’Inghilterra era

piena di spiriti raffinati e sinceri come Jonas Chuzzlewit, Chevy Slime,

Montague Tigg, e il signor Pecksniff. Se Martin Chuzzlewit fa dell’America un

manicomio, che cosa mai fa dell’Inghilterra? Possiamo solo dire

un manicomio criminale. La verità è, naturalmente, che Dickens li

descrisse così perché aveva un genio per quel genere di descrizione; per

la creazione di grotteschi quasi maniacali dello stesso tipo di Quilp o

Fagin. Rese questi americani assurdi perché era un artista dell’

assurdo; e nessun artista può fare a meno di trovare ovunque spunti per la propria

peculiare arte. In una parola, creò un Pogram risibile per la stessa

ragione per cui creò un Pecksniff risibile; e ciò fu solo perché

nessun’altra creatura avrebbe potuto crearli.

Si dice spesso che impariamo ad amare i personaggi dei romanzi come se

fossero personaggi della vita reale. Vorrei che talvolta potessimo amare i

personaggi della vita reale come amiamo i personaggi dei romanzi. Vi sono

moltissime anime umane che accetteremmo più benevolmente, e persino

apprezzeremmo più chiaramente, se semplicemente le pensassimo come persone di una

storia. Martin Chuzzlewit è di per sé invero un esempio insoddisfacente e persino

infelice; poiché è, tra le altre opere del suo autore, una storia piuttosto

insolitamente aspra e ostile. Non suggerisco che dovremmo provare

verso un amico americano quell’esatta sfumatura o tinta di tenerezza che

proviamo verso il signor Hannibal Chollop. Il nostro godimento dello straniero

dovrebbe somigliare più al nostro godimento di Pickwick che al nostro godimento di

Pecksniff. Ma vi è questa dose di pertinenza persino nel

particolare esempio; che Dickens mostrò davvero in entrambi i paesi come gli uomini possano

essere resi divertenti l’uno per l’altro. Fin qui il punto non è che si fece beffe

dell’America, ma che trasse divertimento dall’America. E, come ho già

fatto notare, applicò esattamente lo stesso metodo di selezione ed

esagerazione all’Inghilterra. Nelle altre storie inglesi, scritte in uno stato d’animo più

amabile, lo applicò in modo più amabile; ma poteva applicarlo

anche a un americano, quando scriveva in quello stato d’animo e in quel modo. Possiamo

vederlo nella critica arguta e fulminante pronunciata dal viaggiatore

yankee nella stantia sala ristoro di Mugby Junction; un genuino

esempio di un genuinamente americano brio e libertà che satireggia una genuinamente

britannica sussiegosità e snobismo. Nessuno si aspetta che il viaggiatore americano

ammiri i ristori di Mugby Junction; ma potrebbe ammirare i

ristori di una delle locande pickwickiane, specialmente se contenessero

Pickwick. Nobody expects Pickwick to like Pogram; but he might like the

American who made fun of Mugby Junction. But the point is that, while he

supported him in making fun, he would also think him funny. The two

comic characters could admire each other, but they would also be amused

at each other. And the American would think the Englishman funny because

he was English; and a very good reason too. The Englishman would think

the American amusing because he was American; nor can I imagine a better

ground for his amusement.

Now many will debate on the psychological possibility of such a

friendship founded on reciprocal ridicule, or rather on a comedy of

comparisons. But I will say of this harmony of humours what Mr. H. G.

Wells says of his harmony of states in the unity of his World State. If

it be truly impossible to have such a peace, then there is nothing

possible except war. If we cannot have friends in this fashion, then we

shall sooner or later have enemies in some other fashion. There is no

hope in the pompous impersonalities of internationalism.

And this brings us to the real and relevant mistake of Dickens. It was

not in thinking his Americans funny, but in thinking them foolish

because they were funny. In this sense it will be noticed that Dickens’s

American sketches are almost avowedly superficial; they are descriptions

of public life and not private life. Mr. Jefferson Brick had no private

life. But Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit undoubtedly had a private life; and even

kept some parts of it exceeding private. Mr. Pecksniff was also a

domestic character; so was Mr. Quilp. Mr. Pecksniff and Mr. Quilp had

slightly different ways of surprising their families; Mr. Pecksniff by

playfully observing ‘Boh!’ when he came home; Mr. Quilp by coming home

at all. But we can form no picture of how Mr. Hannibal Chollop playfully

surprised his family; possibly by shooting at them; possibly by not

shooting at them. We can only say that he would rather surprise us by

having a family at all. We do not know how the Mother of the Modern

Gracchi managed the Modern Gracchi; for her maternity was rather a

public than a private office. We have no romantic moonlit scenes of the

love-making of Elijah Pogram, to balance against the love story of Seth

Pecksniff. These figures are all in a special sense theatrical; all

facing one way and lit up by a public limelight. Their ridiculous

characters are detachable from their real characters, if they have any

real characters. And the author might perfectly well be right about what

is ridiculous, and wrong about what is real. He might be as right in

smiling at the Pograms and the Bricks as in smiling at the Pickwicks and

the Boffins. And he might still be as wrong in seeing Mr. Pogram as a

hypocrite as the great Buzfuz was wrong in seeing Mr. Pickwick as a

monster of revolting heartlessness and systematic villainy. He might

still be as wrong in thinking Jefferson Brick a charlatan and a cheat as

was that great disciple of Lavater, Mrs. Wilfer, in tracing every

wrinkle of evil cunning in the face of Mrs. Boffin. For Mr. Pickwick’s

spectacles and gaiters and Mrs. Boffin’s bonnets and boudoir are after

all superficial jokes; and might be equally well seen whatever we saw

beneath them. A man may smile and smile and be a villain; but a man may

also make us smile and not be a villain. He may make us smile and not

even be a fool. He may make us roar with laughter and be an exceedingly

wise man.

Now that is the paradox of America which Dickens never discovered.

Elijah Pogram was far more fantastic than his satirist thought; and the

most grotesque feature of Brick and Chollop was hidden from him. The

really strange thing was that Pogram probably did say, ‘Rough he may be.

So air our bars. Wild he may be. So air our buffalers,’ and yet was a

perfectly intelligent and public-spirited citizen while he said it. The

extraordinary thing is that Jefferson Brick may really have said, ‘The

libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood,’ and yet

Jefferson Brick may have served freedom, resisting unto blood. There

really has been a florid school of rhetoric in the United States which

has made it quite possible for serious and sensible men to say such

things. It is amusing simply as a difference of idiom or costume is

always amusing; just as English idiom and English costume are amusing to

Americans. But about this kind of difference there can be no kind of

doubt. So sturdy not to say stuffy a materialist as Ingersoll could say

of so shoddy not to say shady a financial politician as Blaine, ‘Like an

arméd warrior, like a pluméd knight, James G. Blaine strode down the

hall of Congress, and flung his spear full and true at the shield of

every enemy of his country and every traducer of his fair name.’

Compared with that, the passage about bears and buffaloes, which Mr.

Pogram delivered in defence of the defaulting post-master, is really a

very reasonable and appropriate statement. For bears and buffaloes are

wild and rough and in that sense free; while pluméd knights do not throw

their lances about like the assegais of Zulus. And the defaulting

post-master was at least as good a person to praise in such a fashion as

James G. Blaine of the Little Rock Railway. But anybody who had treated

Ingersoll or Blaine merely as a fool and a figure of fun would have very

rapidly found out his mistake. But Dickens did not know Brick or Chollop

long enough to find out his mistake. It need not be denied that, even

after a full understanding, he might still have found things to smile at

or to criticise. I do not insist on his admitting that Hannibal Chollop

was as great a hero as Hannibal, or that Elijah Pogram was as true a

Pickwick. Nessuno si aspetta che Pickwick simpatizzi con Pogram; ma potrebbe piacergli l’

Americano che si fece beffe di Mugby Junction. Ma il punto è che, mentre lo

sosteneva nel farsi beffe, lo troverebbe anche buffo. I due

personaggi comici potrebbero ammirarsi a vicenda, ma si divertirebbero anche

l’uno dell’altro. E l’Americano troverebbe l’Inglese buffo perché

era inglese; e per un’ottima ragione, per giunta. L’Inglese troverebbe

l’Americano divertente perché era americano; né riesco a immaginare miglior

motivo per il suo divertimento.

Ora, molti discuteranno sulla possibilità psicologica di una simile

amicizia fondata sul ridicolo reciproco, o piuttosto su una commedia di

confronti. Ma di questa armonia di umori dirò ciò che il signor H. G.

Wells dice della sua armonia di stati nell’unità del suo Stato Mondiale. Se

è davvero impossibile avere una simile pace, allora non c’è nulla di

possibile se non la guerra. Se non possiamo avere amici a questo modo, allora

prima o poi avremo nemici in qualche altro modo. Non c’è alcuna

speranza nelle pompose impersonalità dell’internazionalismo.

E questo ci conduce all’errore reale e pertinente di Dickens. Non stava

nel ritenere buffi i suoi Americani, ma nel ritenerli sciocchi

perché erano buffi. In questo senso si noterà che gli schizzi americani

di Dickens sono quasi dichiaratamente superficiali; sono descrizioni

della vita pubblica e non della vita privata. Il signor Jefferson Brick non aveva vita

privata. Ma il signor Jonas Chuzzlewit aveva senza dubbio una vita privata; e ne

teneva perfino alcune parti oltremodo private. Anche il signor Pecksniff era un

personaggio domestico; così pure il signor Quilp. Il signor Pecksniff e il signor Quilp avevano

modi leggermente diversi di sorprendere le proprie famiglie; il signor Pecksniff

osservando scherzosamente ‘Boh!’ quando tornava a casa; il signor Quilp col tornare a casa

affatto. Ma non riusciamo a farci un’idea di come il signor Hannibal Chollop sorprendesse

scherzosamente la sua famiglia; forse sparando loro; forse non

sparando loro. Possiamo solo dire che ci sorprenderebbe piuttosto

per l’avere una famiglia. Non sappiamo come la Madre dei Gracchi Moderni

gestisse i Gracchi Moderni; giacché la sua maternità era un ufficio piuttosto

pubblico che privato. Non abbiamo romantiche scene al chiaro di luna del

corteggiamento di Elijah Pogram, da contrapporre alla storia d’amore di Seth

Pecksniff. Queste figure sono tutte, in senso speciale, teatrali; tutte

rivolte in un’unica direzione e illuminate da una ribalta pubblica. I loro caratteri

ridicoli sono staccabili dai loro caratteri reali, ammesso che abbiano

caratteri reali. E l’autore potrebbe benissimo aver ragione su ciò che

è ridicolo, e torto su ciò che è reale. Potrebbe aver tanta ragione nel

sorridere dei Pogram e dei Brick quanta nel sorridere dei Pickwick e dei

Boffin. E potrebbe pur sempre aver tanto torto nel vedere il signor Pogram come un

ipocrita quanto il grande Buzfuz ebbe torto nel vedere il signor Pickwick come un

mostro di rivoltante insensibilità e sistematica scelleratezza. Potrebbe

pur avere tanto torto nel credere Jefferson Brick un ciarlatano e un truffatore quanto

l’ebbe quella grande discepola di Lavater, la signora Wilfer, nel rintracciare ogni

ruga di malvagia astuzia sul volto della signora Boffin. Poiché gli occhiali e le ghette

del signor Pickwick e le cuffie e il boudoir della signora Boffin sono in fin dei conti

scherzi superficiali; e potrebbero vedersi altrettanto bene qualunque cosa vedessimo

sotto di essi. Un uomo può sorridere e sorridere ed essere un malvagio; ma un uomo può

anche farci sorridere e non essere un malvagio. Può farci sorridere e non

essere neppure uno sciocco. Può farci scoppiare a ridere ed essere un uomo straordinariamente

saggio.

Ora, questo è il paradosso dell’America che Dickens non scoprì mai.

Elijah Pogram era assai più fantastico di quanto il suo satireggiatore credesse; e il

tratto più grottesco di Brick e Chollop gli restava celato. La

cosa davvero strana era che Pogram probabilmente diceva sul serio: ‘Rozzo sarà pure.

Così son pure i nostri orsi. Selvaggio sarà pure. Così son pure i nostri bufali,’ e tuttavia era un

cittadino perfettamente intelligente e animato da spirito civico mentre lo diceva. La

cosa straordinaria è che Jefferson Brick può davvero aver detto: ‘La

libagione della Libertà deve talvolta tracannarsi nel sangue,’ e tuttavia

Jefferson Brick può aver servito la libertà, resistendo fino al sangue. C’è

stata davvero una florida scuola di retorica negli Stati Uniti che

ha reso del tutto possibile che uomini seri e assennati dicessero simili

cose. È divertente semplicemente come è sempre divertente una differenza

di idioma o di costume; proprio come l’idioma inglese e il costume inglese sono divertenti per gli

Americani. Ma su questo genere di differenza non può esservi alcun genere di

dubbio. Un materialista tanto robusto per non dire greve come Ingersoll poté dire

di un politico finanziario tanto scadente per non dire losco come Blaine: ‘Come un

guerriero in armi, come un cavaliere dal pennacchio, James G. Blaine avanzò a grandi passi lungo la

sala del Congresso, e scagliò la sua lancia piena e diritta contro lo scudo di

ogni nemico del suo paese e di ogni calunniatore del suo buon nome.’

In confronto a ciò, il passo sugli orsi e i bufali, che il signor

Pogram pronunciò in difesa del direttore delle poste inadempiente, è davvero una

dichiarazione assai ragionevole e appropriata. Poiché gli orsi e i bufali sono

selvaggi e rozzi e in quel senso liberi; mentre i cavalieri dal pennacchio non scagliano

le loro lance in giro come gli assegai degli Zulù. E il direttore delle poste

inadempiente era almeno una persona altrettanto degna di lode a quel modo quanto

James G. Blaine della Little Rock Railway. Ma chiunque avesse trattato

Ingersoll o Blaine semplicemente come uno sciocco e uno zimbello si sarebbe assai

rapidamente accorto del proprio errore. Ma Dickens non conobbe Brick o Chollop

abbastanza a lungo da accorgersi del proprio errore. Non occorre negare che, perfino

dopo una piena comprensione, avrebbe potuto pur sempre trovare cose su cui sorridere

o da criticare. Non insisto perché ammetta che Hannibal Chollop

fosse un eroe tanto grande quanto Annibale, o che Elijah Pogram fosse un vero

prophet as Elijah. But I do say very seriously that they had something

about their atmosphere and situation that made possible a sort of

heroism and even a sort of prophecy that were really less natural at

that period in that Merry England whose comedy and common sense we sum

up under the name of Dickens. When we joke about the name of Hannibal

Chollop, we might remember of what nation was the general who dismissed

his defeated soldiers at Appomatox with words which the historian has

justly declared to be worthy of Hannibal: ‘We have fought through this

war together. I have done my best for you.’ It is not fair to forget

Jefferson, or even Jefferson Davis, entirely in favour of Jefferson

Brick.

For all these three things, good, bad, and indifferent, go together to

form something that Dickens missed, merely because the England of his

time most disastrously missed it. In this case, as in every case, the

only way to measure justly the excess of a foreign country is to measure

the defect of our own country. For in this matter the human mind is the

victim of a curious little unconscious trick, the cause of nearly all

international dislikes. A man treats his own faults as original sin and

supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes

that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple

foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realise

that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his

vices as well as his virtues. His own faults are things with which he is

so much at home that he at once forgets and assumes them abroad. He is

so faintly conscious of them in himself that he is not even conscious of

the absence of them in other people. He assumes that they are there so

that he does not see that they are not there. The Englishman takes it

for granted that a Frenchman will have all the English faults. Then he

goes on to be seriously angry with the Frenchman for having dared to

complicate them by the French faults. The notion that the Frenchman has

the French faults and not the English faults is a paradox too wild to

cross his mind.

He is like an old Chinaman who should laugh at Europeans for wearing

ludicrous top-hats and curling up their pig-tails inside them; because

obviously all men have pig-tails, as all monkeys have tails. Or he is

like an old Chinese lady who should justly deride the high-heeled shoes

of the West, considering them a needless addition to the sufficiently

tight and secure bandaging of the foot; for, of course, all women bind

up their feet, as all women bind up their hair. What these Celestial

thinkers would not think of, or allow for, is the wild possibility that

we do not have pig-tails although we do have top-hats, or that our

ladies are not silly enough to have Chinese feet, though they are silly

enough to have high-heeled shoes. Nor should we necessarily have come an

inch nearer to the Chinese extravagances even if the chimney-pot hat

rose higher than a factory chimney or the high heels had evolved into a

sort of stilts. By the same fallacy the Englishman will not only curse

the French peasant as a miser, but will also try to tip him as a beggar.

That is, he will first complain of the man having the surliness of an

independent man, and then accuse him of having the servility of a

dependent one. Just as the hypothetical Chinaman cannot believe that we

have top-hats but not pig-tails, so the Englishman cannot believe that

peasants are not snobs even when they are savages. Or he sees that a

Paris paper is violent and sensational; and then supposes that some

millionaire owns twenty such papers and runs them as a newspaper trust.

Surely the Yellow Press is present everywhere to paint the map yellow,

as the British Empire to paint it red. It never occurs to such a critic

that the French paper is violent because it is personal, and personal

because it belongs to a real and responsible person, and not to a ring

of nameless millionaires. It is a pamphlet, and not an anonymous

pamphlet. In a hundred other cases the same truth could be illustrated;

the situation in which the black man first assumes that all mankind is

black, and then accuses the rest of the artificial vice of painting

their faces red and yellow, or the hypocrisy of white-washing

themselves after the fashion of whited sepulchres. The particular case

of it now before us is that of the English misunderstanding of America;

and it is based, as in all these cases, on the English misunderstanding

of England.

For the truth is that England has suffered of late from not having

enough of the free shooting of Hannibal Chollop; from not understanding

enough that the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood.

The prosperous Englishman will not admit this; but then the prosperous

Englishman will not admit that he has suffered from anything. That is

what he is suffering from. Until lately at least he refused to realise

that many of his modern habits had been bad habits, the worst of them

being contentment. For all the real virtue in contentment evaporates,

when the contentment is only satisfaction and the satisfaction is only

self-satisfaction. Now it is perfectly true that America and not England

has seen the most obvious and outrageous official denials of liberty.

But it is equally true that it has seen the most obvious flouting of

such official nonsense, far more obvious than any similar evasions in

England. And nobody who knows the subconscious violence of the American

character would ever be surprised if the weapons of Chollop began to be

used in that most lawful lawlessness. It is perfectly true that the

libation of freedom must sometimes be drunk in blood, and never more

profeta tanto autentico quanto Elia. Ma dico assai seriamente che avevano qualcosa

nella loro atmosfera e situazione che rendeva possibile una sorta di

eroismo e perfino una sorta di profezia che erano davvero meno naturali in

quel periodo in quella Allegra Inghilterra la cui commedia e il cui buon senso riassumiamo

sotto il nome di Dickens. Quando scherziamo sul nome di Hannibal

Chollop, dovremmo ricordare di quale nazione fosse il generale che congedò

i suoi soldati sconfitti ad Appomattox con parole che lo storico ha

giustamente dichiarato degne di Annibale: ‘Abbiamo combattuto insieme questa

guerra fino in fondo. Ho fatto del mio meglio per voi.’ Non è giusto dimenticare

Jefferson, e neppure Jefferson Davis, interamente a favore di Jefferson

Brick.

Poiché tutte e tre queste cose, buona, cattiva e indifferente, concorrono a

formare qualcosa che Dickens non colse, semplicemente perché l’Inghilterra del suo

tempo la mancava nel modo più disastroso. In questo caso, come in ogni caso, l’

unico modo di misurare con giustizia l’eccesso di un paese straniero è misurare

il difetto del nostro paese. Poiché in questa materia la mente umana è la

vittima di un curioso piccolo trucco inconscio, causa di quasi tutte le

antipatie internazionali. Un uomo tratta i propri difetti come peccato originale e

li suppone sparsi ovunque insieme al seme di Adamo. Suppone

che gli uomini abbiano poi aggiunto i propri vizi stranieri al solido e semplice

fondamento dei propri vizi privati. Lo sbalordirebbe rendersi conto

che essi hanno in realtà, per il loro strano cammino erratico, evitato i suoi

vizi non meno che le sue virtù. I propri difetti sono cose con cui egli si trova

tanto a casa che a un tempo li dimentica e li presuppone all’estero. Ne è

così debolmente consapevole in sé che non è nemmeno consapevole

della loro assenza nelle altre persone. Presume che siano lì al punto

che non vede che non ci sono. L’Inglese dà

per scontato che un Francese abbia tutti i difetti inglesi. Poi

si adira seriamente col Francese per aver osato

complicarli coi difetti francesi. L’idea che il Francese abbia

i difetti francesi e non i difetti inglesi è un paradosso troppo folle per

attraversargli la mente.

È come un vecchio Cinese che ridesse degli Europei per il fatto che portano

ridicoli cilindri e vi arrotolano dentro il codino; perché

ovviamente tutti gli uomini hanno il codino, come tutte le scimmie hanno la coda. Oppure è

come una vecchia dama cinese che giustamente deridesse le scarpe col tacco alto

dell’Occidente, considerandole un’aggiunta superflua alla già sufficientemente

stretta e sicura fasciatura del piede; poiché, naturalmente, tutte le donne si fasciano

i piedi, come tutte le donne si legano i capelli. Ciò a cui questi Celesti

pensatori non penserebbero, né darebbero credito, è la folle possibilità che

noi non abbiamo il codino benché abbiamo i cilindri, o che le nostre

dame non siano tanto sciocche da avere piedi cinesi, benché siano abbastanza sciocche

da avere scarpe col tacco alto. Né ci saremmo necessariamente avvicinati di un

pollice alle stravaganze cinesi anche se il cappello a cilindro

si innalzasse più di una ciminiera di fabbrica o i tacchi alti si fossero evoluti in una

sorta di trampoli. Per la stessa fallacia l’Inglese non soltanto maledirà

il contadino francese come un avaro, ma cercherà anche di dargli la mancia come a un mendicante.

Vale a dire, dapprima si lagnerà che l’uomo abbia la scontrosità di un

uomo indipendente, e poi lo accuserà di avere la servilità di un

uomo dipendente. Proprio come il Cinese ipotetico non riesce a credere che noi

abbiamo i cilindri ma non il codino, così l’Inglese non riesce a credere che i

contadini non siano snob anche quando sono selvaggi. Oppure vede che un

giornale di Parigi è violento e scandalistico; e allora suppone che qualche

milionario possieda venti giornali simili e li gestisca come un trust della stampa.

Di certo la Stampa Gialla è presente ovunque a tingere di giallo la mappa,

come l’Impero Britannico a tingerla di rosso. A un simile critico non viene mai in mente

che il giornale francese è violento perché è personale, e personale

perché appartiene a una persona reale e responsabile, e non a una consorteria

di milionari senza nome. È un libello, e non un libello

anonimo. In cento altri casi si potrebbe illustrare la stessa verità;

la situazione in cui l’uomo nero dapprima presume che tutta l’umanità sia

nera, e poi accusa gli altri del vizio artificiale di tingersi

il volto di rosso e giallo, o dell’ipocrisia di imbiancarsi

alla maniera dei sepolcri imbiancati. Il caso particolare

che ora abbiamo davanti è quello del fraintendimento inglese dell’America;

ed esso si fonda, come in tutti questi casi, sul fraintendimento inglese

dell’Inghilterra.

Poiché la verità è che l’Inghilterra ha sofferto di recente per non aver avuto

abbastanza della libera sparatoria di Hannibal Chollop; per non aver compreso

abbastanza che la libagione della Libertà deve talvolta tracannarsi nel sangue.

L’Inglese prospero non vorrà ammetterlo; ma d’altronde l’Inglese prospero

non vorrà ammettere di aver sofferto di alcunché. È di questo

che egli soffre. Almeno fino a poco fa si rifiutava di rendersi conto

che molte delle sue abitudini moderne erano state cattive abitudini, la peggiore

delle quali era l’appagamento. Poiché ogni reale virtù nell’appagamento evapora,

quando l’appagamento è solo soddisfazione e la soddisfazione è solo

autocompiacimento. Ora è perfettamente vero che l’America e non l’Inghilterra

ha visto le più palesi e oltraggiose negazioni ufficiali della libertà.

Ma è altrettanto vero che ha visto il più palese sbeffeggiamento di

simili assurdità ufficiali, assai più palese di qualsiasi analoga elusione in

Inghilterra. E nessuno che conosca la violenza subconscia del carattere

americano si stupirebbe mai se le armi di Chollop cominciassero a essere

usate in quella legalissima illegalità. È perfettamente vero che la

libagione della Libertà deve talvolta bersi nel sangue, e mai più

(one would think) than when mad millionaires forbid it to be drunk in

beer. But America, as compared with England, is the country where one

can still fancy men obtaining the libation of beer by the libation of

blood. Vulgar plutocracy is almost omnipotent in both countries; but I

think there is now more kick of reaction against it in America than in

England. The Americans may go mad when they make laws; but they recover

their reason when they disobey them. I wish I could believe that there

was as much of that destructive repentance in England; as indeed there

certainly was when Cobbett wrote. It faded gradually like a dying fire

through the Victorian era; and it was one of the very few realities that

Dickens did not understand. But any one who does understand it will know

that the days of Cobbett saw the last lost fight for English democracy;

and that if he had stood at that turning of the historic road, he would

have wished a better fate to the frame-breakers and the fury against the

first machinery, and luck to the Luddite fires.

Anyhow, what is wanted is a new Martin Chuzzlewit, told by a wiser Mark

Tapley. It is typical of something sombre and occasionally stale in the

mood of Dickens when he wrote that book, that the comic servant is not

really very comic. Mark Tapley is a very thin shadow of Sam Weller. But

if Dickens had written it in a happier mood, there might have been a

truer meaning in Mark Tapley’s happiness. For it is true that this

illogical good humour amid unreason and disorder is one of the real

virtues of the English people. It is the real advantage they have in

that adventure all over the world, which they were recently and

reluctantly induced to call an Empire. That receptive ridicule remains

with them as a secret pleasure when they are colonists—or convicts.

Dickens might have written another version of the great romance, and one

in which America was really seen gaily by Mark instead of gloomily by

Martin. Mark Tapley might really have made the best of America. Then

America would have lived and danced before us like Pickwick’s England, a

fairyland of happy lunatics and lovable monsters, and we might still

have sympathised as much with the rhetoric of Lafayette Kettle as with

the rhetoric of Wilkins Micawber, or with the violence of Chollop as

with the violence of Boythorn. That new Martin Chuzzlewit will never be

written; and the loss of it is more tragic than the loss of _Edwin

Drood_. But every man who has travelled in America has seen glimpses and

episodes in that untold tale; and far away on the Red-Indian frontiers

or in the hamlets in the hills of Pennsylvania, there are people whom I

met for a few hours or for a few moments, whom I none the less sincerely

like and respect because I cannot but smile as I think of them. But the

converse is also true; they have probably forgotten me; but if they

remember they laugh.

The Spirit of America

I suggest that diplomatists of the internationalist school should spend

some of their money on staging farces and comedies of cross-purposes,

founded on the curious and prevalent idea that England and America have

the same language. I know, of course, that we both inherit the glorious

tongue of Shakespeare, not to mention the tune of the musical glasses;

but there have been moments when I thought that if we spoke Greek and

they spoke Latin we might understand each other better. For Greek and

Latin are at least fixed, while American at least is still very fluid. I

do not know the American language, and therefore I do not claim to

distinguish between the American language and the American slang. But I

know that highly theatrical developments might follow on taking the

words as part of the English slang or the English language. I have

already given the example of calling a person ‘a regular guy,’ which in

the States is a graceful expression of respect and esteem, but which on

the stage, properly handled, might surely lead the way towards a divorce

or duel or something lively. Sometimes coincidence merely clinches a

mistake, as it so often clinches a misprint. Every proof-reader knows

that the worst misprint is not that which makes nonsense but that which

makes sense; not that which is obviously wrong but that which is

hideously right. He who has essayed to write ‘he got the book,’ and has

found it rendered mysteriously as ‘he got the boob’ is pensively

resigned. It is when it is rendered quite lucidly as ‘he got the boot’

that he is moved to a more passionate mood of regret. I have had

conversations in which this sort of accident would have wholly misled

me, if another accident had not come to the rescue. An American friend

of mine was telling me of his adventures as a cinema-producer down in

the south-west where real Red Indians were procurable. He said that

certain Indians were ‘very bad actors.’ It passed for me as a very

ordinary remark on a very ordinary or natural deficiency. It would

hardly seem a crushing criticism to say that some wild Arab chieftain

was not very good at imitating a farmyard; or that the Grand Llama of

Thibet was rather clumsy at making paper boats. But the remark might be

natural in a man travelling in paper boats, or touring with an invisible

farmyard for his menagerie. As my friend was a cinema-producer, I

supposed he meant that the Indians were bad cinema actors. But the

phrase has really a high and austere moral meaning, which my levity had

wholly missed. A bad actor means a man whose actions are bad or morally

reprehensible. So that I might have embraced a Red Indian who was

dripping with gore, or covered with atrocious crimes, imagining there

was nothing the matter with him beyond a mistaken choice of the

theatrical profession. Surely there are here the elements of a play, not

(verrebbe da pensare) di quando dei milionari folli proibiscono che si beva nella

birra. Ma l’America, in confronto all’Inghilterra, è il paese in cui si

può ancora immaginare uomini che ottengono la libagione della birra per mezzo della libagione del

sangue. La volgare plutocrazia è quasi onnipotente in entrambi i paesi; ma

credo che ora vi sia più scatto di reazione contro di essa in America che in

Inghilterra. Gli Americani possono impazzire quando fanno le leggi; ma recuperano

la ragione quando le disobbediscono. Vorrei poter credere che vi

fosse altrettanto di quel pentimento distruttivo in Inghilterra; come in effetti ve ne

fu certamente quando scriveva Cobbett. Sbiadì gradualmente come un fuoco morente

attraverso l’era vittoriana; e fu una delle pochissime realtà che

Dickens non comprese. Ma chiunque la comprenda saprà

che i giorni di Cobbett videro l’ultima battaglia perduta per la democrazia inglese;

e che se fosse stato a quella svolta della strada storica, avrebbe

augurato una sorte migliore ai distruttori di telai e al furore contro le

prime macchine, e fortuna ai fuochi luddisti.

Comunque, ciò che occorre è un nuovo Martin Chuzzlewit, narrato da un Mark

Tapley più saggio. È tipico di qualcosa di cupo e a tratti stantìo nell’

umore di Dickens quando scrisse quel libro, che il servo comico non sia

in realtà molto comico. Mark Tapley è un’ombra assai esile di Sam Weller. Ma

se Dickens l’avesse scritto in un umore più lieto, vi sarebbe potuto essere un

significato più vero nella felicità di Mark Tapley. Poiché è vero che questo

illogico buon umore tra irragionevolezza e disordine è una delle reali

virtù del popolo inglese. È il reale vantaggio che essi hanno in

quell’avventura per tutto il mondo, che di recente e

con riluttanza furono indotti a chiamare Impero. Quel ridicolo ricettivo rimane

con loro come un piacere segreto quando sono coloni—o forzati.

Dickens avrebbe potuto scrivere un’altra versione del grande romanzo, e una

in cui l’America fosse vista davvero allegramente da Mark anziché tetramente da

Martin. Mark Tapley avrebbe potuto davvero trarre il meglio dall’America. Allora

l’America avrebbe vissuto e danzato dinanzi a noi come l’Inghilterra di Pickwick, un

paese delle fate di lieti folli e mostri amabili, e avremmo potuto pur

simpatizzare tanto con la retorica di Lafayette Kettle quanto con

la retorica di Wilkins Micawber, o con la violenza di Chollop quanto

con la violenza di Boythorn. Quel nuovo Martin Chuzzlewit non sarà mai

scritto; e la sua perdita è più tragica della perdita di _Edwin

Drood_. Ma ogni uomo che abbia viaggiato in America ha visto scorci ed

episodi di quel racconto non narrato; e lontano, sulle frontiere dei Pellirosse

o nei villaggi tra le colline della Pennsylvania, vi sono persone che

ho incontrato per poche ore o per pochi istanti, che ciò nondimeno sinceramente

apprezzo e rispetto pur non potendo fare a meno di sorridere pensando a loro. Ma il

contrario è pure vero; probabilmente mi hanno dimenticato; ma se

mi ricordano, ridono.

Lo spirito d’America

Suggerisco che i diplomatici della scuola internazionalista dovrebbero spendere

parte del loro denaro nel mettere in scena farse e commedie di intenti contrastanti,

fondate sulla curiosa e diffusa idea che l’Inghilterra e l’America abbiano

la stessa lingua. So, naturalmente, che entrambi ereditiamo la gloriosa

lingua di Shakespeare, per non parlare dell’aria dei bicchieri musicali;

ma vi sono stati momenti in cui ho pensato che se noi parlassimo greco e

loro parlassero latino ci intenderemmo meglio. Poiché il greco e il

latino sono almeno fissi, mentre l’americano almeno è ancora assai fluido. Non

conosco la lingua americana, e perciò non pretendo di

distinguere tra la lingua americana e lo slang americano. Ma

so che sviluppi altamente teatrali potrebbero seguire dal prendere le

parole come parte dello slang inglese o della lingua inglese. Ho

già fatto l’esempio del chiamare una persona ‘a regular guy,’ che negli

Stati Uniti è una garbata espressione di rispetto e stima, ma che sulla

scena, ben manovrata, potrebbe di certo aprire la strada a un divorzio

o a un duello o a qualcosa di vivace. Talvolta la coincidenza non fa che suggellare un

errore, come tanto spesso suggella un refuso. Ogni correttore di bozze sa

che il peggior refuso non è quello che produce un nonsenso ma quello che

produce senso; non quello che è palesemente errato ma quello che è

orribilmente giusto. Chi ha tentato di scrivere ‘he got the book,’ e l’ha

visto reso misteriosamente come ‘he got the boob’ si rassegna

pensieroso. È quando viene reso assai lucidamente come ‘he got the boot’

che egli è spinto a un più appassionato stato di rammarico. Ho avuto

conversazioni in cui questo genere di incidente mi avrebbe interamente

sviato, se un altro incidente non fosse venuto in soccorso. Un amico americano

mi raccontava delle sue avventure come produttore cinematografico giù nel

sud-ovest dove veri Pellirosse erano reperibili. Disse che

certi Indiani erano ‘very bad actors.’ A me parve un’osservazione assai

ordinaria su una deficienza assai ordinaria o naturale. Non

sembrerebbe una critica schiacciante dire che qualche selvaggio capo arabo

non fosse molto bravo a imitare un’aia; o che il Gran Lama del

Tibet fosse piuttosto maldestro nel fare barchette di carta. Ma l’osservazione potrebbe essere

naturale in un uomo che viaggia su barchette di carta, o gira in tournée con un’aia

invisibile per serraglio. Poiché il mio amico era un produttore cinematografico,

supposi che intendesse dire che gli Indiani erano cattivi attori cinematografici. Ma la

frase ha in realtà un alto e austero significato morale, che la mia leggerezza aveva

interamente mancato. Un ‘bad actor’ indica un uomo le cui azioni sono cattive o moralmente

riprovevoli. Cosicché avrei potuto abbracciare un Pellerossa che grondava

sangue, o coperto di crimini atroci, immaginando che non ci

fosse nulla di male in lui oltre a una scelta sbagliata della

professione teatrale. Di certo qui vi sono gli elementi di una commedia, per non

to mention a cinema play. Surely a New England village maiden might find

herself among the wigwams in the power of the formidable and fiendish

‘Little Blue Bison,’ merely through her mistaken sympathy with his

financial failure as a Film Star. The notion gives me glimpses of all

sorts of dissolving views of primeval forests and flamboyant theatres;

but this impulse of irrelevant theatrical production must be curbed.

There is one example, however, of this complication of language actually

used in contrary senses, about which the same figure can be used to

illustrate a more serious fact.

Suppose that, in such an international interlude, an English girl and an

American girl are talking about the fiancé of the former, who is coming

to call. The English girl will be haughty and aristocratic (on the

stage), the American girl will of course have short hair and skirts and

will be cynical; Americans being more completely free from cynicism than

any people in the world. It is the great glory of Americans that they

are not cynical; for that matter, English aristocrats are hardly ever

haughty; they understand the game much better than that. But on the

stage, anyhow, the American girl may say, referring to her friend’s

fiancé, with a cynical wave of the cigarette, ‘I suppose he’s bound to

come and see you.’ And at this the blue blood of the Vere de Veres will

boil over; the English lady will be deeply wounded and insulted at the

suggestion that her lover only comes to see her because he is forced to

do so. A staggering stage quarrel will then ensue, and things will go

from bad to worse; until the arrival of an Interpreter who can talk both

English and American. He stands between the two ladies waving two pocket

dictionaries, and explains the error on which the quarrel turns. It is

very simple; like the seed of all tragedies. In English ‘he is bound to

come and see you’ means that he is obliged or constrained to come and

see you. In American it does not. In American it means that he is bent

on coming to see you, that he is irrevocably resolved to do so, and will

surmount any obstacle to do it. The two young ladies will then embrace

as the curtain falls.

Now when I was lecturing in America I was often told, in a radiant and

congratulatory manner, that such and such a person was bound to come and

hear me lecture. It seemed a very cruel form of conscription, and I

could not understand what authority could have made it compulsory. In

the course of discovering my error, however, I thought I began to

understand certain American ideas and instincts that lie behind this

American idiom. For as I have urged before, and shall often urge again,

the road to international friendship is through really understanding

jokes. It is in a sense through taking jokes seriously. It is quite

legitimate to laugh at a man who walks down the street in three white

hats and a green dressing gown, because it is unfamiliar; but after all

the man has some reason for what he does; and until we know the reason

we do not understand the story, or even understand the joke. So the

outlander will always seem outlandish in custom or costume; but serious

relations depend on our getting beyond the fact of difference to the

things wherein it differs. A good symbolical figure for all this may be

found among the people who say, perhaps with a self-revealing

simplicity, that they are bound to go to a lecture.

If I were asked for a single symbolic figure summing up the whole of

what seems eccentric and interesting about America to an Englishman, I

should be satisfied to select that one lady who complained of Mrs.

Asquith’s lecture and wanted her money back. I do not mean that she was

typically American in complaining; far from it. I, for one, have a great

and guilty knowledge of all that amiable American audiences will endure

without complaint. I do not mean that she was typically American in

wanting her money; quite the contrary. That sort of American spends

money rather than hoards it; and when we convict them of vulgarity we

acquit them of avarice. Where she was typically American, summing up a

truth individual and indescribable in any other way, is that she used

these words: ‘I’ve risen from a sick-bed to come and hear her, and I

want my money back.’

The element in that which really amuses an Englishman is precisely the

element which, properly analysed, ought to make him admire an American.

But my point is that only by going through the amusement can he reach

the admiration. The amusement is in the vision of a tragic sacrifice for

what is avowedly a rather trivial object. Mrs. Asquith is a candid lady

of considerable humour; and I feel sure she does not regard the

experience of hearing her read her diary as an ecstasy for which the

sick should thus suffer martyrdom. She also is English; and had no other

claim but to amuse Americans and possibly to be amused by them. This

being so, it is rather as if somebody said, ‘I have risked my life in

fire and pestilence to find my way to the music hall,’ or, ‘I have

fasted forty days in the wilderness sustained by the hope of seeing

Totty Toddles do her new dance.’ And there is something rather more

subtle involved here. There is something in an Englishman which would

make him feel faintly ashamed of saying that he had fasted to hear

Totty Toddles, or risen from a sick-bed to hear Mrs. Asquith. He would

feel that it was undignified to confess that he had wanted mere

amusement so much; and perhaps that he had wanted anything so much. He

would not like, so to speak, to be seen rushing down the street after

Totty Toddles, or after Mrs. Asquith, or perhaps after anybody. But

there is something in it distinct from a mere embarrassment at admitting

enthusiasm. He might admit the enthusiasm if the object seemed to

parlare di un film. Di certo una fanciulla di villaggio del New England potrebbe trovarsi

tra i wigwam in balìa del formidabile e diabolico

‘Piccolo Bisonte Azzurro,’ semplicemente per la sua malriposta simpatia verso il suo

fallimento finanziario come Star del Cinema. L’idea mi offre scorci d’ogni

sorta di vedute in dissolvenza di foreste primeve e teatri fiammeggianti;

ma questo impulso a una produzione teatrale irrilevante va frenato.

Vi è tuttavia un esempio di questa complicazione della lingua realmente

usata in sensi contrari, a proposito del quale si può usare la stessa figura per

illustrare un fatto più serio.

Supponiamo che, in un simile intermezzo internazionale, una ragazza inglese e una

ragazza americana parlino del fidanzato della prima, che sta per venire

in visita. La ragazza inglese sarà altera e aristocratica (sulla

scena), la ragazza americana avrà naturalmente i capelli e le gonne corti e

sarà cinica; essendo gli Americani più completamente immuni dal cinismo di

qualunque popolo al mondo. È la grande gloria degli Americani che essi

non siano cinici; del resto, gli aristocratici inglesi non sono quasi mai

alteri; comprendono il gioco assai meglio di così. Ma sulla

scena, comunque, la ragazza americana potrà dire, riferendosi al

fidanzato dell’amica, con un cinico gesto della sigaretta: ‘Suppongo che sia bound to

come and see you.’ E a ciò il sangue blu dei Vere de Vere

ribollirà; la dama inglese sarà profondamente ferita e offesa dall’

insinuazione che il suo innamorato venga a trovarla solo perché è costretto a

farlo. Ne seguirà allora uno strabiliante litigio scenico, e le cose andranno

di male in peggio; fino all’arrivo di un Interprete che sa parlare tanto

inglese quanto americano. Sta tra le due dame agitando due

dizionari tascabili, e spiega l’errore su cui verte il litigio. È

molto semplice; come il seme di tutte le tragedie. In inglese ‘he is bound to

come and see you’ significa che è obbligato o costretto a venire a

trovarti. In americano no. In americano significa che è deciso

a venire a trovarti, che è irrevocabilmente risoluto a farlo, e

supererà ogni ostacolo per riuscirci. Le due giovani dame allora si abbracceranno

mentre cala il sipario.

Ora, quando tenevo conferenze in America mi si diceva spesso, in modo radioso e

congratulatorio, che questa o quella persona era bound to come and

hear me lecture. Sembrava una forma assai crudele di coscrizione, e non

riuscivo a capire quale autorità potesse averla resa obbligatoria. Nel

corso dello scoprire il mio errore, tuttavia, mi parve di cominciare a

comprendere certe idee e istinti americani che stanno dietro questo

idiotismo americano. Poiché, come ho sostenuto prima, e sosterrò spesso ancora,

la strada verso l’amicizia internazionale passa per la reale comprensione

delle facezie. In un certo senso passa per il prendere sul serio le facezie. È del tutto

legittimo ridere di un uomo che cammina per la strada con tre cappelli bianchi

e una vestaglia verde, perché è insolito; ma in fin dei conti

l’uomo ha qualche ragione per ciò che fa; e finché non conosciamo la ragione

non comprendiamo la storia, né comprendiamo la facezia. Così

lo straniero sembrerà sempre strambo nell’uso o nel costume; ma le relazioni

serie dipendono dal nostro andare oltre il fatto della differenza fino alle

cose in cui essa differisce. Una buona figura simbolica di tutto ciò si può

trovare tra la gente che dice, forse con una auto-rivelatrice

semplicità, che sono bound to andare a una conferenza.

Se mi si chiedesse una singola figura simbolica che riassuma tutto ciò

che sembra eccentrico e interessante dell’America a un Inglese,

mi accontenterei di scegliere quella dama che si lagnò della conferenza

della signora Asquith e rivoleva indietro i suoi soldi. Non intendo che fosse

tipicamente americana nel lagnarsi; tutt’altro. Io, per parte mia, ho una grande

e colpevole conoscenza di tutto ciò che gli amabili pubblici americani sopportano

senza lamentarsi. Non intendo che fosse tipicamente americana nel

volere i suoi soldi; tutt’al contrario. Quel genere di Americano spende

il denaro anziché accumularlo; e quando li condanniamo per volgarità li

assolviamo dall’avarizia. Là dove era tipicamente americana, riassumendo una

verità individuale e indescrivibile in ogni altro modo, è che usò

queste parole: ‘Mi sono alzata da un letto di malata per venire a sentirla, e

rivoglio i miei soldi.’

L’elemento in ciò che davvero diverte un Inglese è precisamente quello

che, analizzato a dovere, dovrebbe indurlo ad ammirare un Americano.

Ma il mio punto è che solo attraversando il divertimento egli può giungere

all’ammirazione. Il divertimento sta nella visione di un tragico sacrificio per

quello che è dichiaratamente un oggetto piuttosto insignificante. La signora Asquith è una dama candida

e di considerevole spirito; e sono certo che non consideri l’

esperienza di sentirla leggere il suo diario un’estasi per la quale i

malati dovrebbero così patire il martirio. Anch’essa è inglese; e non aveva altra

pretesa se non divertire gli Americani ed eventualmente essere divertita da loro. Stando

così le cose, è piuttosto come se qualcuno dicesse: ‘Ho rischiato la vita tra

fuoco e pestilenza per farmi strada fino al music hall,’ oppure: ‘Ho

digiunato quaranta giorni nel deserto sostenuto dalla speranza di vedere

Totty Toddles eseguire il suo nuovo ballo.’ E vi è qualcosa di piuttosto più

sottile qui in gioco. Vi è qualcosa in un Inglese che lo

farebbe sentire vagamente in imbarazzo a dire di aver digiunato per sentire

Totty Toddles, o essersi alzato da un letto di malato per sentire la signora Asquith. Egli

sentirebbe indegno confessare di aver desiderato un mero

divertimento così tanto; e forse di aver desiderato qualsiasi cosa così tanto. Egli

non gradirebbe, per così dire, essere visto precipitarsi per la strada dietro

Totty Toddles, o dietro la signora Asquith, o forse dietro chiunque. Ma

vi è in ciò qualcosa di distinto da un mero imbarazzo nell’ammettere

l’entusiasmo. Potrebbe ammettere l’entusiasmo se l’oggetto sembrasse

justify it; he might perfectly well be serious about a serious thing.

But he cannot understand a person being proud of serious sacrifices for

what is not a serious thing. He does not like to admit that a little

thing can excite him; that he can lose his breath in running, or lose

his balance in reaching, after something that might be called silly.

Now that is where the American is fundamentally different. To him the

enthusiasm itself is meritorious. To him the excitement itself is

dignified. He counts it a part of his manhood to fast or fight or rise

from a bed of sickness for something, or possibly for anything. His

ideal is not to be a lock that only a worthy key can open, but a ‘live

wire’ that anything can touch or anybody can use. In a word, there is a

difference in the very definition of virility and therefore of virtue. A

live wire is not only active, it is also sensitive. Thus sensibility

becomes actually a part of virility. Something more is involved than the

vulgar simplification of the American as the irresistible force and the

Englishman as the immovable post. As a fact, those who speak of such

things nowadays generally mean by something irresistible something

simply immovable, or at least something unalterable, motionless even in

motion, like a cannon ball; for a cannon ball is as dead as a cannon.

Prussian militarism was praised in that way—until it met a French force

of about half its size on the banks of the Marne. But that is not what

an American means by energy; that sort of Prussian energy is only

monotony without repose. American energy is not a soulless machine; for

it is the whole point that he puts his soul into it. It is a very small

box for so big a thing; but it is not an empty box. But the point is

that he is not only proud of his energy, he is proud of his excitement.

He is not ashamed of his emotion, of the fire or even the tear in his

manly eye, when he tells you that the great wheel of his machine breaks

four billion butterflies an hour.

That is the point about American sport; that it is not in the least

sportive. It is because it is not very sportive that we sometimes say it

is not very sporting. It has the vices of a religion. It has all the

paradox of original sin in the service of aboriginal faith. It is

sometimes untruthful because it is sincere. It is sometimes treacherous

because it is loyal. Men lie and cheat for it as they lied for their

lords in a feudal conspiracy, or cheated for their chieftains in a

Highland feud. We may say that the vassal readily committed treason; but

it is equally true that he readily endured torture. So does the American

athlete endure torture. Not only the self-sacrifice but the solemnity of

the American athlete is like that of the American Indian. The athletes

in the States have the attitude of the athletes among the Spartans, the

great historical nation without a sense of humour. They suffer an

ascetic régime not to be matched in any monasticism and hardly in any

militarism. If any tradition of these things remains in a saner age,

they will probably be remembered as a mysterious religious order of

fakirs or dancing dervishes, who shaved their heads and fasted in honour

of Hercules or Castor and Pollux. And that is really the spiritual

atmosphere though the gods have vanished; and the religion is

subconscious and therefore irrational. For the problem of the modern

world is that it has continued to be religious when it has ceased to be

rational. Americans really would starve to win a cocoa-nut shy. They

would fast or bleed to win a race of paper boats on a pond. They would

rise from a sick-bed to listen to Mrs. Asquith.

But it is the real reason that interests me here. It is certainly not

that Americans are so stupid as not to know that cocoa-nuts are only

cocoa-nuts and paper boats only made of paper. Americans are, on an

average, rather more intelligent than Englishmen; and they are well

aware that Hercules is a myth and that Mrs. Asquith is something of a

mythologist. It is not that they do not know that the object is small in

itself; it is that they do really believe that the enthusiasm is great

in itself. They admire people for being impressionable. They admire

people for being excited. An American so struggling for some

disproportionate trifle (like one of my lectures) really feels in a

mystical way that he is right, because it is his whole morality to be

keen. So long as he wants something very much, whatever it is, he feels

he has his conscience behind him, and the common sentiment of society

behind him, and God and the whole universe behind him. Wedged on one leg

in a hot crowd at a trivial lecture, he has self-respect; his dignity

is at rest. That is what he means when he says he is bound to come to

the lecture.

Now the Englishman is fond of occasional larks. But these things are not

larks; nor are they occasional. It is the essential of the Englishman’s

lark that he should think it a lark; that he should laugh at it even

when he does it. Being English myself, I like it; but being English

myself, I know it is connected with weaknesses as well as merits. In its

irony there is condescension and therefore embarrassment. This patronage

is allied to the patron, and the patron is allied to the aristocratic

tradition of society. The larks are a variant of laziness because of

leisure; and the leisure is a variant of the security and even supremacy

of the gentleman. When an undergraduate at Oxford smashes half a hundred

windows he is well aware that the incident is merely a trifle. He can be

trusted to explain to his parents and guardians that it was merely a

trifle. He does not say, even in the American sense, that he was bound

to smash the windows. He does not say that he had risen from a sick-bed

giustificarlo; potrebbe benissimo essere serio riguardo a una cosa seria.

Ma non riesce a capire che una persona sia orgogliosa di seri sacrifici per

ciò che non è una cosa seria. Non gli piace ammettere che una piccola

cosa possa eccitarlo; che possa perdere il fiato correndo, o perdere

l’equilibrio nel protendersi verso qualcosa che si potrebbe dire sciocco.

Ora, è qui che l’Americano è fondamentalmente diverso. Per lui l’

entusiasmo stesso è meritorio. Per lui l’eccitazione stessa è

dignitosa. Reputa parte della sua virilità digiunare o combattere o alzarsi

da un letto di malattia per qualcosa, o magari per qualsiasi cosa. Il suo

ideale non è essere una serratura che solo una chiave degna può aprire, ma un ‘filo

scoperto’ che qualsiasi cosa può toccare e chiunque può usare. In una parola, vi è una

differenza nella definizione stessa di virilità e perciò di virtù. Un

filo scoperto non è solo attivo, è anche sensibile. Così la sensibilità

diventa in effetti una parte della virilità. È in gioco qualcosa di più della

volgare semplificazione dell’Americano come forza irresistibile e dell’

Inglese come palo inamovibile. Di fatto, coloro che parlano di simili

cose oggigiorno intendono generalmente per qualcosa di irresistibile qualcosa di

semplicemente inamovibile, o almeno qualcosa di inalterabile, immoto perfino nel

moto, come una palla di cannone; poiché una palla di cannone è morta quanto un cannone.

Il militarismo prussiano fu lodato a quel modo—finché non incontrò una forza francese

grande circa la metà sulle rive della Marna. Ma non è questo ciò che

un Americano intende per energia; quel genere di energia prussiana è solo

monotonia senza riposo. L’energia americana non è una macchina senz’anima; poiché

il punto è tutto qui, che egli vi mette la sua anima. È una scatola assai

piccola per una cosa tanto grande; ma non è una scatola vuota. Ma il punto è

che egli non è solo orgoglioso della sua energia, è orgoglioso della sua eccitazione.

Non si vergogna della sua emozione, del fuoco o perfino della lacrima nel suo

virile occhio, quando ti racconta che la grande ruota della sua macchina frantuma

quattro miliardi di farfalle all’ora.

È questo il punto dello sport americano; che non è per nulla

giocoso. È perché non è molto giocoso che talvolta diciamo che non è

molto sportivo. Ha i vizi di una religione. Ha tutto il

paradosso del peccato originale al servizio di una fede aborigena. È

talvolta menzognero perché è sincero. È talvolta infido

perché è leale. Gli uomini mentono e imbrogliano per esso come mentivano per i loro

signori in una congiura feudale, o imbrogliavano per i loro capi in una

faida delle Highland. Possiamo dire che il vassallo prontamente commetteva tradimento; ma

è altrettanto vero che prontamente sopportava la tortura. Così fa l’atleta

americano nel sopportare la tortura. Non solo l’abnegazione ma la solennità dell’

atleta americano è come quella dell’Indiano d’America. Gli atleti

negli Stati Uniti hanno l’atteggiamento degli atleti tra gli Spartani, la

grande nazione storica priva di senso dell’umorismo. Si sottopongono a un

regime ascetico non eguagliabile in alcun monachesimo e a stento in alcun

militarismo. Se qualche tradizione di queste cose sopravvivrà in un’età più sana,

essi saranno probabilmente ricordati come un misterioso ordine religioso di

fachiri o dervisci danzanti, che si rasavano il capo e digiunavano in onore

di Ercole o di Castore e Polluce. E questa è davvero l’atmosfera

spirituale benché gli dèi siano svaniti; e la religione è

subconscia e perciò irrazionale. Poiché il problema del mondo

moderno è che ha continuato a essere religioso quando ha cessato di essere

razionale. Gli Americani davvero digiunerebbero per vincere a un tiro alle noci di cocco. Essi

digiunerebbero o sanguinerebbero per vincere una gara di barchette di carta su uno stagno. Si

alzerebbero da un letto di malato per ascoltare la signora Asquith.

Ma è la vera ragione che qui m’interessa. Non è certo

che gli Americani siano tanto stupidi da non sapere che le noci di cocco sono solo

noci di cocco e le barchette di carta fatte solo di carta. Gli Americani sono, in

media, piuttosto più intelligenti degli Inglesi; e sono ben

consapevoli che Ercole è un mito e che la signora Asquith è una specie di

mitologa. Non è che non sappiano che l’oggetto è piccolo in

sé; è che credono davvero che l’entusiasmo sia grande

in sé. Ammirano le persone per la loro impressionabilità. Ammirano

le persone per la loro eccitazione. Un Americano che così si affanna per qualche

sproporzionata inezia (come una delle mie conferenze) sente davvero in modo

mistico di aver ragione, perché tutta la sua moralità consiste nell’essere

ardente. Finché desidera qualcosa intensamente, qualunque cosa sia, sente

di avere la sua coscienza dalla sua parte, e il comune sentimento della società

dalla sua parte, e Dio e l’intero universo dalla sua parte. Incastrato su una gamba

in una calca soffocante a una conferenza insignificante, ha rispetto di sé; la sua dignità

è in pace. È questo che intende quando dice di essere bound to venire alla

conferenza.

Ora, l’Inglese è amante delle occasionali bravate. Ma queste cose non sono

bravate; né sono occasionali. È l’essenza della bravata dell’Inglese

che egli la ritenga una bravata; che ne rida perfino

mentre la compie. Essendo io stesso inglese, mi piace; ma essendo io stesso inglese,

so che è connessa a debolezze non meno che a meriti. Nella sua

ironia vi è condiscendenza e perciò imbarazzo. Questa protezione

è imparentata col patrono, e il patrono è imparentato con la tradizione

aristocratica della società. Le bravate sono una variante della pigrizia dovuta all’

ozio; e l’ozio è una variante della sicurezza e perfino della supremazia

del gentiluomo. Quando uno studente di Oxford fracassa una cinquantina di

finestre è ben consapevole che l’incidente è una mera inezia. Ci si può

fidare che spieghi ai genitori e ai tutori che era una mera

inezia. Non dice, nemmeno nel senso americano, di essere stato bound

to fracassare le finestre. Non dice di essersi alzato da un letto di malato

to smash the windows. He does not especially think he has risen at all;

he knows he has descended (though with delight, like one diving or

sliding down the banisters) to something flat and farcical and full of

the English taste for the bathos. He has collapsed into something

entirely commonplace; though the owners of the windows may possibly not

think so. This rather indescribable element runs through a hundred

English things, as in the love of bathos shown even in the sound of

proper names; so that even the yearning lover in a lyric yearns for

somebody named Sally rather than Salome, and for a place called Wapping

rather than a place called Westermain. Even in the relapse into

rowdiness there is a sort of relapse into comfort. There is also what is

so large a part of comfort; carelessness. The undergraduate breaks

windows because he does not care about windows, not because he does care

about more fresh air like a hygienist, or about more light like a German

poet. Still less does he heroically smash a hundred windows because they

come between him and the voice of Mrs. Asquith. But least of all does he

do it because he seriously prides himself on the energy apart from its

aim, and on the will-power that carries it through. He is not ‘bound’ to

smash the windows, even in the sense of being bent upon it. He is not

bound at all but rather relaxed; and his violence is not only a

relaxation but a laxity. Finally, this is shown in the fact that he only

smashes windows when he is in the mood to smash windows; when some

fortunate conjunction of stars and all the tints and nuances of nature

whisper to him that it would be well to smash windows. But the American

is always ready, at any moment, to waste his energies on the wilder and

more suicidal course of going to lectures. And this is because to him

such excitement is not a mood but a moral ideal. As I note in another

connection, much of the English mystery would be clear to Americans if

they understood the word ‘mood.’ Englishmen are very moody, especially

when they smash windows. But I doubt if many Americans understand

exactly what we mean by the mood; especially the passive mood.

It is only by trying to get some notion of all this that an Englishman

can enjoy the final crown and fruit of all international friendship;

which is really liking an American to be American. If we only think that

parts of him are excellent because parts of him are English, it would be

far more sensible to stop at home and possibly enjoy the society of a

whole complete Englishman. But anybody who does understand this can take

the same pleasure in an American being American that he does in a

thunderbolt being swift and a barometer being sensitive. He can see that

a vivid sensibility and vigilance really radiate outwards through all

the ramifications of machinery and even of materialism. He can see that

the American uses his great practical powers upon very small

provocation; but he can also see that there is a kind of sense of

honour, like that of a duellist, in his readiness to be provoked.

Indeed, there is some parallel between the American man of action,

however vulgar his aims, and the old feudal idea of the gentleman with a

sword at his side. The gentleman may have been proud of being strong or

sturdy; he may too often have been proud of being thick-headed; but he

was not proud of being thick-skinned. On the contrary, he was proud of

being thin-skinned. He also seriously thought that sensitiveness was a

part of masculinity. It may be very absurd to read of two Irish

gentlemen trying to kill each other for trifles, or of two

Irish-American millionaires trying to ruin each other for trash. But the

very pettiness of the pretext and even the purpose illustrates the same

conception; which may be called the virtue of excitability. And it is

really this, and not any rubbish about iron will-power and masterful

mentality, that redeems with romance their clockwork cosmos and its

industrial ideals. Being a live wire does not mean that the nerves

should be like wires; but rather that the very wires should be like

nerves.

Another approximation to the truth would be to say that an American is

really not ashamed of curiosity. It is not so simple as it looks. Men

will carry off curiosity with various kinds of laughter and bravado,

just as they will carry off drunkenness or bankruptcy. But very few

people are really proud of lying on a door-step, and very few people are

really proud of longing to look through a key-hole. I do not speak of

looking through it, which involves questions of honour and self-control;

but few people feel that even the desire is dignified. Now I fancy the

American, at least by comparison with the Englishman, does feel that his

curiosity is consistent with his dignity, because dignity is consistent

with vivacity. He feels it is not merely the curiosity of Paul Pry, but

the curiosity of Christopher Columbus. He is not a spy but an explorer;

and he feels his greatness rather grow with his refusal to turn back, as

a traveller might feel taller and taller as he neared the source of the

Nile or the North-West Passage. Many an Englishman has had that feeling

about discoveries in dark continents; but he does not often have it

about discoveries in daily life. The one type does believe in the

indignity and the other in the dignity of the detective. It has nothing

to do with ethics in the merely external sense. It involves no

particular comparison in practical morals and manners. It is something

in the whole poise and posture of the self; of the way a man carries

himself. For men are not only affected by what they are; but still more,

when they are fools, by what they think they are; and when they are

per fracassare le finestre. Non pensa affatto, in particolare, di essersi alzato;

sa di essere disceso (benché con diletto, come chi si tuffa o

scivola giù dal corrimano) a qualcosa di piatto e farsesco e pieno del

gusto inglese per il bathos. È crollato in qualcosa di

interamente banale; benché i proprietari delle finestre forse non la

pensino così. Questo elemento piuttosto indescrivibile attraversa cento

cose inglesi, come nell’amore per il bathos mostrato perfino nel suono dei

nomi propri; sicché perfino l’innamorato anelante in una lirica anela a

una di nome Sally piuttosto che Salomè, e a un luogo chiamato Wapping

piuttosto che a un luogo chiamato Westermain. Perfino nella ricaduta nella

turbolenza vi è una sorta di ricaduta nella comodità. Vi è anche ciò che è

parte tanto grande della comodità; la noncuranza. Lo studente rompe le

finestre perché non gli importa delle finestre, non perché gli importi

di più aria fresca come un igienista, o di più luce come un poeta

tedesco. Ancor meno fracassa eroicamente cento finestre perché

si frappongono tra lui e la voce della signora Asquith. Ma meno di tutto lo

fa perché si vanti seriamente dell’energia a prescindere dal suo

scopo, e della forza di volontà che la porta a termine. Non è ‘bound’ a

fracassare le finestre, neppure nel senso di esservi deciso. Non è

affatto vincolato ma piuttosto rilassato; e la sua violenza non è solo un

rilassamento ma un allentamento. Infine, ciò si mostra nel fatto che egli fracassa le

finestre soltanto quando è in vena di fracassare finestre; quando qualche

fortunata congiunzione di astri e tutte le tinte e sfumature della natura

gli sussurrano che sarebbe bene fracassare finestre. Ma l’Americano

è sempre pronto, in qualsiasi momento, a sprecare le sue energie nell’impresa più folle e

più suicida di andare alle conferenze. E questo perché per lui

tale eccitazione non è una vena ma un ideale morale. Come noto in un altro

contesto, gran parte del mistero inglese sarebbe chiara agli Americani se

comprendessero la parola ‘mood.’ Gli Inglesi sono molto lunatici, specialmente

quando fracassano finestre. Ma dubito che molti Americani comprendano

esattamente ciò che intendiamo per ‘mood’; specialmente il mood passivo.

È solo cercando di farsi un’idea di tutto ciò che un Inglese

può godere della corona finale e del frutto di ogni amicizia internazionale;

che è il gradire davvero che un Americano sia americano. Se pensiamo soltanto che

parti di lui sono eccellenti perché parti di lui sono inglesi, sarebbe

assai più sensato restare a casa e magari godere della compagnia di un

Inglese intero e completo. Ma chiunque comprenda ciò può trarre

lo stesso piacere dal fatto che un Americano sia americano quanto ne trae dal fatto che un

fulmine sia rapido e un barometro sia sensibile. Può vedere che

una viva sensibilità e vigilanza si irradiano davvero verso l’esterno attraverso tutte le

ramificazioni del macchinario e perfino del materialismo. Può vedere che

l’Americano usa i suoi grandi poteri pratici per pochissima

provocazione; ma può anche vedere che vi è una sorta di senso dell’

onore, come quello di un duellante, nella sua prontezza a lasciarsi provocare.

In effetti, vi è un certo parallelo tra l’uomo d’azione americano,

per quanto volgari i suoi scopi, e l’antica idea feudale del gentiluomo con la

spada al fianco. Il gentiluomo poteva essere fiero di essere forte o

robusto; poteva troppo spesso essere fiero di essere ottuso; ma non

era fiero di essere insensibile. Al contrario, era fiero di essere

suscettibile. Anch’egli riteneva seriamente che la sensibilità fosse una

parte della mascolinità. Può essere assai assurdo leggere di due gentiluomini

irlandesi che cercano di uccidersi a vicenda per delle inezie, o di due

milionari irlandesi-americani che cercano di rovinarsi a vicenda per delle cianfrusaglie. Ma la

meschinità stessa del pretesto e perfino dello scopo illustra la stessa

concezione; che si può chiamare la virtù dell’eccitabilità. Ed è

davvero questa, e non qualche fandonia sulla ferrea forza di volontà e la mentalità

dominatrice, a riscattare con la poesia il loro cosmo a orologeria e i suoi

ideali industriali. Essere un filo scoperto non significa che i nervi

debbano essere come fili; ma piuttosto che i fili stessi debbano essere come

nervi.

Un’altra approssimazione alla verità sarebbe dire che un Americano

davvero non si vergogna della curiosità. Non è così semplice come sembra. Gli

uomini mascherano la curiosità con vari tipi di risate e spavalderia,

proprio come mascherano l’ubriachezza o la bancarotta. Ma pochissime

persone sono davvero fiere di giacere su una soglia, e pochissime persone sono

davvero fiere di bramare di guardare attraverso un buco della serratura. Non parlo del

guardarci attraverso, che coinvolge questioni d’onore e di autocontrollo;

ma poche persone sentono che perfino il desiderio sia dignitoso. Ora, immagino che l’

Americano, almeno in confronto all’Inglese, senta davvero che la sua

curiosità è coerente con la sua dignità, perché la dignità è coerente

con la vivacità. Sente che non è meramente la curiosità di Paul Pry, ma

la curiosità di Cristoforo Colombo. Non è una spia ma un esploratore;

e sente la sua grandezza crescere piuttosto col suo rifiuto di tornare indietro, come

un viaggiatore potrebbe sentirsi sempre più alto man mano che si avvicina alla sorgente del

Nilo o al Passaggio a Nord-Ovest. Più d’un Inglese ha provato quella sensazione

riguardo a scoperte in continenti oscuri; ma non l’ha spesso

riguardo a scoperte nella vita quotidiana. L’un tipo crede nell’

indegnità e l’altro nella dignità dell’investigatore. Non ha nulla

a che fare con l’etica nel senso meramente esteriore. Non implica alcun

particolare confronto in fatto di morale e maniere pratiche. È qualcosa

nell’intero portamento e postura del sé; nel modo in cui un uomo si

comporta. Poiché gli uomini non sono influenzati solo da ciò che sono; ma ancor più,

quando sono sciocchi, da ciò che credono di essere; e quando sono

wise, by what they wish to be.

There are truths that have almost become untrue by becoming untruthful.

There are statements so often stale and insincere that one hesitates to

use them, even when they stand for something more subtle. This point

about curiosity is not the conventional complaint against the American

interviewer. It is not the ordinary joke against the American child. And

in the same way I feel the danger of it being identified with the cant

about ‘a young nation’ if I say that it has some of the attractions, not

of American childhood, but of real childhood. There is some truth in the

tradition that the children of wealthy Americans tend to be too

precocious and luxurious. But there is a sense in which we can really

say that if the children are like adults, the adults are like children.

And that sense is in the very best sense of childhood. It is something

which the modern world does not understand. It is something that modern

Americans do not understand, even when they possess it; but I think they

do possess it.

The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture

which he now most commonly quotes is, ‘The kingdom of heaven is within

you.’ That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and

prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in

creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace

that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it

is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a

little child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit; but

the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It

is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is

outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his

appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that

the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it

somewhere else.

The Spirit of England

Nine times out of ten a man’s broad-mindedness is necessarily the

narrowest thing about him. This is not particularly paradoxical; it is,

when we come to think of it, quite inevitable. His vision of his own

village may really be full of varieties; and even his vision of his own

nation may have a rough resemblance to the reality. But his vision of

the world is probably smaller than the world. His vision of the universe

is certainly much smaller than the universe. Hence he is never so

inadequate as when he is universal; he is never so limited as when he

generalises. This is the fallacy in the many modern attempts at a

creedless creed, at something variously described as essential

Christianity or undenominational religion or a world faith to embrace

all the faiths in the world. It is that every sectarian is more

sectarian in his unsectarianism than he is in his sect. The emancipation

of a Baptist is a very Baptist emancipation. The charity of a Buddhist

is a very Buddhist charity, and very different from Christian charity.

When a philosophy embraces everything it generally squeezes everything,

and squeezes it out of shape; when it digests it necessarily

assimilates. When a theosophist absorbs Christianity it is rather as a

cannibal absorbs Christian missionaries. In this sense it is even

possible for the larger thing to be swallowed by the smaller; and for

men to move about not only in a Clapham sect but in a Clapham cosmos

under Clapham moon and stars.

But if this danger exists for all men, it exists especially for the

Englishman. The Englishman is never so insular as when he is imperial;

except indeed when he is international. In private life he is a good

friend and in practical politics generally a good ally. But theoretical

politics are more practical than practical politics. And in theoretical

politics the Englishman is the worst ally the world ever saw. This is

all the more curious because he has passed so much of his historical

life in the character of an ally. He has been in twenty great alliances

and never understood one of them. He has never been farther away from

European politics than when he was fighting heroically in the thick of

them. I myself think that this splendid isolation is sometimes really

splendid; so long as it is isolation and does not imagine itself to be

imperialism or internationalism. With the idea of being international,

with the idea of being imperial, comes the frantic and farcical idea of

being impartial. Generally speaking, men are never so mean and false and

hypocritical as when they are occupied in being impartial. They are

performing the first and most typical of all the actions of the devil;

they are claiming the throne of God. Even when it is not hypocrisy but

only mental confusion, it is always a confusion worse and worse

confounded. We see it in the impartial historians of the Victorian Age,

who now seem far more Victorian than the partial historians. Hallam

wrote about the Middle Ages; but Hallam was far less mediaeval than

Macaulay; for Macaulay was at least a fighter. Huxley had more mediaeval

sympathies than Herbert Spencer for the same reason; that Huxley was a

fighter. They both fought in many ways for the limitations of their own

rationalistic epoch; but they were nearer the truth than the men who

simply assumed those limitations as rational. The war of the

controversionalists was a wider thing than the peace of the arbiters.

And in the same way the Englishman never cuts a less convincing figure

before other nations than when he tries to arbitrate between them.

I have by this time heard a great deal about the necessity of saving

Anglo-American friendship, a necessity which I myself feel rather too

saggi, da ciò che desiderano essere.

Vi sono verità che sono quasi divenute false col divenire menzognere.

Vi sono affermazioni tanto spesso stantìe e insincere che si esita a

usarle, anche quando stanno per qualcosa di più sottile. Questo punto

sulla curiosità non è la convenzionale lagnanza contro l’intervistatore

americano. Non è la solita facezia contro il bambino americano. E

allo stesso modo sento il pericolo che venga identificato col luogo comune

sulla ‘giovane nazione’ se dico che possiede alcune delle attrattive, non

dell’infanzia americana, ma della vera infanzia. Vi è qualche verità nella

tradizione secondo cui i figli degli Americani facoltosi tendono a essere troppo

precoci e sfarzosi. Ma vi è un senso in cui possiamo davvero

dire che se i bambini sono come adulti, gli adulti sono come bambini.

E quel senso è nel senso migliore in assoluto dell’infanzia. È qualcosa

che il mondo moderno non comprende. È qualcosa che gli Americani

moderni non comprendono, anche quando lo possiedono; ma credo che lo

possiedano davvero.

Il diavolo sa citare le Scritture a suo vantaggio; e il testo delle Scritture

che ora cita più comunemente è: ‘Il regno dei cieli è dentro

di voi.’ Quel testo è stato il sostegno e l’appoggio di più Farisei e

presuntuosi e prepotenti spirituali compiaciuti di sé di quanti tutti i dogmi del

creato; è servito a identificare l’auto-compiacimento con la pace

che sorpassa ogni intendimento. E il testo da citare in risposta a esso

è quello che dichiara che nessun uomo può ricevere il regno se non come un

piccolo bambino. Ciò che dobbiamo avere dentro è lo spirito fanciullesco; ma

lo spirito fanciullesco non si cura interamente di ciò che è dentro. È

il primo segno del possederlo che ci si interessi a ciò che è

fuori. La cosa più fanciullesca in un bambino è la sua curiosità e il suo

appetito e la sua capacità di meravigliarsi del mondo. Potremmo quasi dire che

l’intero vantaggio dell’avere il regno dentro è che lo cerchiamo

altrove.

Lo spirito d’Inghilterra

Nove volte su dieci l’apertura mentale di un uomo è necessariamente la cosa

più angusta di lui. Ciò non è particolarmente paradossale; è,

a ben pensarci, del tutto inevitabile. La sua visione del proprio

villaggio può davvero essere piena di varietà; e perfino la sua visione della propria

nazione può avere una grossolana somiglianza con la realtà. Ma la sua visione del

mondo è probabilmente più piccola del mondo. La sua visione dell’universo

è certamente assai più piccola dell’universo. Quindi non è mai tanto

inadeguato come quando è universale; non è mai tanto limitato come quando

generalizza. Questa è la fallacia nei molti tentativi moderni di un

credo senza credo, di qualcosa variamente descritto come cristianesimo

essenziale o religione aconfessionale o una fede mondiale che abbracci

tutte le fedi del mondo. È che ogni settario è più

settario nel suo antisettarismo di quanto lo sia nella sua setta. L’emancipazione

di un Battista è un’emancipazione assai battista. La carità di un Buddista

è una carità assai buddista, e assai diversa dalla carità cristiana.

Quando una filosofia abbraccia tutto generalmente stritola tutto,

e lo stritola deformandolo; quando digerisce necessariamente

assimila. Quando un teosofo assorbe il cristianesimo è piuttosto come un

cannibale che assorbe i missionari cristiani. In questo senso è perfino

possibile che la cosa più grande sia inghiottita dalla più piccola; e che gli

uomini si muovano non solo in una setta di Clapham ma in un cosmo di Clapham

sotto una luna e stelle di Clapham.

Ma se questo pericolo esiste per tutti gli uomini, esiste specialmente per l’

Inglese. L’Inglese non è mai tanto insulare come quando è imperiale;

salvo, invero, quando è internazionale. Nella vita privata è un buon

amico e nella politica pratica generalmente un buon alleato. Ma la politica

teorica è più pratica della politica pratica. E nella politica teorica

l’Inglese è il peggior alleato che il mondo abbia mai visto. Ciò è

tanto più curioso in quanto ha trascorso gran parte della sua vita storica

nel ruolo di alleato. È stato in venti grandi alleanze

e non ne ha mai compresa una. Non è mai stato tanto lontano dalla

politica europea come quando combatteva eroicamente nel fitto di

essa. Io stesso penso che questo splendido isolamento sia talvolta davvero

splendido; finché è isolamento e non s’immagina di essere

imperialismo o internazionalismo. Con l’idea di essere internazionale,

con l’idea di essere imperiale, giunge la frenetica e farsesca idea di

essere imparziale. In generale, gli uomini non sono mai tanto meschini e falsi e

ipocriti come quando sono occupati a essere imparziali. Stanno

compiendo la prima e più tipica di tutte le azioni del diavolo;

rivendicano il trono di Dio. Anche quando non è ipocrisia ma

solo confusione mentale, è sempre una confusione sempre più

confusa. Lo vediamo negli storici imparziali dell’Età Vittoriana,

che ora sembrano assai più vittoriani degli storici parziali. Hallam

scrisse del Medioevo; ma Hallam era assai meno medievale di

Macaulay; poiché Macaulay era almeno un combattente. Huxley aveva più simpatie

medievali di Herbert Spencer per la stessa ragione; che Huxley era un

combattente. Entrambi combatterono in molti modi per i limiti della propria

epoca razionalistica; ma erano più vicini alla verità degli uomini che

semplicemente assumevano quei limiti come razionali. La guerra dei

polemisti era cosa più ampia della pace degli arbitri.

E allo stesso modo l’Inglese non fa mai una figura meno convincente

dinanzi alle altre nazioni di quando cerca di arbitrare tra di esse.

A questo punto ho sentito parlare a lungo della necessità di salvare

l’amicizia anglo-americana, una necessità che io stesso avverto piuttosto troppo

strongly to be satisfied with the ambassadorial and editorial style of

achieving it. I have already said that the worst style of all is to be

Anglo-American; or, as the more illiterate would express, to be

Anglo-Saxon. I am more and more convinced that the way for the

Englishman to do it is to be English; but to know that he is English and

not everything else as well. Thus the only sincere answer to Irish

nationalism is English nationalism, which is a reality; and not English

imperialism, which is a reactionary fiction, or English

internationalism, which is a revolutionary one.

For the English are reviled for their imperialism because they are not

imperialistic. They dislike it, which is the real reason why they do it

badly; and they do it badly, which is the real reason why they are

disliked when they do it. Nobody calls France imperialistic because she

has absorbed Brittany. But everybody calls England imperialistic because

she has not absorbed Ireland. The Englishman is fixed and frozen for

ever in the attitude of a ruthless conqueror; not because he has

conquered such people, but because he has not conquered them; but he is

always trying to conquer them with a heroism worthy of a better cause.

For the really native and vigorous part of what is unfortunately called

the British Empire is not an empire at all, and does not consist of

these conquered provinces at all. It is not an empire but an adventure;

which is probably a much finer thing. It was not the power of making

strange countries similar to our own, but simply the pleasure of seeing

strange countries because they were different from our own. The

adventurer did indeed, like the third son, set out to seek his fortune,

but not primarily to alter other people’s fortunes; he wished to trade

with people rather than to rule them. But as the other people remained

different from him, so did he remain different from them. The adventurer

saw a thousand strange things and remained a stranger. He was the

Robinson Crusoe on a hundred desert islands; and on each he remained as

insular as on his own island.

What is wanted for the cause of England to-day is an Englishman with

enough imagination to love his country from the outside as well as the

inside. That is, we need somebody who will do for the English what has

never been done for them, but what is done for any outlandish peasantry

or even any savage tribe. We want people who can make England

attractive; quite apart from disputes about whether England is strong or

weak. We want somebody to explain, not that England is everywhere, but

what England is anywhere; not that England is or is not really dying,

but why we do not want her to die. For this purpose the official and

conventional compliments or claims can never get any farther than

pompous abstractions about Law and Justice and Truth; the ideals which

England accepts as every civilised state accepts them, and violates as

every civilised state violates them. That is not the way in which the

picture of any people has ever been painted on the sympathetic

imagination of the world. Enthusiasts for old Japan did not tell us that

the Japs recognised the existence of abstract morality; but that they

lived in paper houses or wrote letters with paint-brushes. Men who

wished to interest us in Arabs did not confine themselves to saying that

they are monotheists or moralists; they filled our romances with the

rush of Arab steeds or the colours of strange tents or carpets. What we

want is somebody who will do for the Englishman with his front garden

what was done for the Jap and his paper house; who shall understand the

Englishman with his dog as well as the Arab with his horse. In a word,

what nobody has really tried to do is the one thing that really wants

doing. It is to make England attractive as a nationality, and even as a

small nationality.

For it is a wild folly to suppose that nations will love each other

because they are alike. They will never really do that unless they are

really alike; and then they will not be nations. Nations can love each

other as men and women love each other, not because they are alike but

because they are different. It can easily be shown, I fancy, that in

every case where a real public sympathy was aroused for some unfortunate

foreign people, it has always been accompanied with a particular and

positive interest in their most foreign customs and their most foreign

externals. The man who made a romance of the Scotch High-lander made a

romance of his kilt and even of his dirk; the friend of the Red Indians

was interested in picture writing and had some tendency to be

interested in scalping. To take a more serious example, such nations as

Serbia had been largely commended to international consideration by the

study of Serbian epics, or Serbian songs. The epoch of negro

emancipation was also the epoch of negro melodies. Those who wept over

Uncle Tom also laughed over Uncle Remus. And just as the admiration for

the Redskin almost became an apology for scalping, the mysterious

fascination of the African has sometimes almost led us into the fringes

of the black forest of Voodoo. But the sort of interest that is felt

even in the scalp-hunter and the cannibal, the torturer and the

devil-worshipper, that sort of interest has never been felt in the

Englishman.

And this is the more extraordinary because the Englishman is really very

interesting. He is interesting in a special degree in this special

manner; he is interesting because he is individual. No man in the world

is more misrepresented by everything official or even in the ordinary

sense national. A description of English life must be a description of

private life. In that sense there is no public life. In that sense there

profondamente per accontentarsi dello stile ambasciatorio ed editoriale con cui

conseguirlo. Ho già detto che lo stile peggiore di tutti è quello di essere

anglo-americani; o, come si esprimerebbero i più illetterati, di essere

anglosassoni. Sono sempre più convinto che il modo in cui l’

inglese deve farlo è essere inglese; ma sapere di essere inglese e

non anche tutto il resto del pari. Così l’unica risposta sincera al nazionalismo

irlandese è il nazionalismo inglese, che è una realtà; e non l’

imperialismo inglese, che è una finzione reazionaria, né l’

internazionalismo inglese, che ne è una rivoluzionaria.

Perché gli inglesi sono vituperati per il loro imperialismo proprio perché non sono

imperialisti. Esso non piace loro, ed è la vera ragione per cui lo fanno

male; e lo fanno male, ed è la vera ragione per cui sono

malvisti quando lo fanno. Nessuno chiama imperialista la Francia perché ha

assorbito la Bretagna. Ma tutti chiamano imperialista l’Inghilterra perché

non ha assorbito l’Irlanda. L’inglese è fissato e congelato per

sempre nell’atteggiamento di un conquistatore spietato; non perché abbia

conquistato quei popoli, ma perché non li ha conquistati; eppure sta

sempre tentando di conquistarli con un eroismo degno di causa migliore.

Perché la parte davvero autoctona e vigorosa di ciò che purtroppo si chiama

Impero Britannico non è affatto un impero, e non consiste affatto di

queste province conquistate. Non è un impero ma un’avventura;

che è probabilmente cosa assai più bella. Non era il potere di rendere

paesi stranieri simili al nostro, ma semplicemente il piacere di vedere

paesi stranieri perché erano diversi dal nostro. L’

avventuriero infatti, come il terzo figlio, partiva in cerca di fortuna,

ma non anzitutto per mutare le fortune altrui; desiderava commerciare

con la gente piuttosto che governarla. Ma come gli altri popoli rimanevano

diversi da lui, così egli rimaneva diverso da loro. L’avventuriero

vedeva mille cose strane e restava uno straniero. Era il

Robinson Crusoe su cento isole deserte; e su ciascuna restava tanto

insulare quanto sulla propria isola.

Ciò che occorre oggi alla causa dell’Inghilterra è un inglese con

abbastanza immaginazione da amare il proprio paese dal di fuori non meno che dal di

dentro. Vale a dire, ci serve qualcuno che faccia per gli inglesi ciò che non è

mai stato fatto per loro, ma che si fa per qualunque contadinanza esotica

o perfino per qualunque tribù selvaggia. Vogliamo gente capace di rendere l’Inghilterra

attraente; del tutto a prescindere dalle dispute se l’Inghilterra sia forte o

debole. Vogliamo qualcuno che spieghi, non che l’Inghilterra sia dappertutto, ma

che cosa sia l’Inghilterra in qualsiasi luogo; non se l’Inghilterra stia davvero morendo o no,

ma perché non vogliamo che muoia. A tal fine i complimenti ufficiali e

convenzionali, o le rivendicazioni, non possono mai andare oltre

pompose astrazioni sulla Legge e la Giustizia e la Verità; gli ideali che l’

Inghilterra accetta come ogni stato civile li accetta, e viola come

ogni stato civile li viola. Non è questo il modo in cui il

ritratto di un popolo sia mai stato dipinto sulla partecipe

immaginazione del mondo. Gli entusiasti del vecchio Giappone non ci dicevano che

i giapponesi riconoscevano l’esistenza di una moralità astratta; ma che

vivevano in case di carta o scrivevano lettere col pennello. Gli uomini che

volevano interessarci agli arabi non si limitavano a dire che

sono monoteisti o moralisti; riempivano i nostri romanzi con l’

impeto dei destrieri arabi o i colori di strane tende o tappeti. Ciò che

vogliamo è qualcuno che faccia per l’inglese col suo giardinetto d’ingresso

ciò che si è fatto per il giapponese e la sua casa di carta; che comprenda l’

inglese col suo cane non meno dell’arabo col suo cavallo. In una parola,

ciò che nessuno ha davvero tentato di fare è l’unica cosa che davvero va

fatta. È rendere l’Inghilterra attraente come nazionalità, e perfino come

piccola nazionalità.

Perché è pura follia supporre che le nazioni si ameranno a vicenda

perché sono simili. Non lo faranno mai davvero se non sono

davvero identiche; e allora non saranno nazioni. Le nazioni possono amarsi a

vicenda come si amano uomini e donne, non perché sono simili ma

perché sono diverse. Si può facilmente dimostrare, credo, che in

ogni caso in cui una vera simpatia pubblica si è destata per qualche sventurato

popolo straniero, essa si è sempre accompagnata a un interesse particolare e

positivo per i loro costumi più estranei e i loro più estranei

aspetti esteriori. Chi fece un romanzo del montanaro scozzese fece un

romanzo del suo kilt e perfino del suo pugnale; l’amico dei Pellirosse

s’interessava alla scrittura per immagini e aveva una certa tendenza a

interessarsi allo scotennamento. Per fare un esempio più serio, nazioni come

la Serbia erano state raccomandate all’attenzione internazionale in gran parte dallo

studio delle epopee serbe, o dei canti serbi. L’epoca dell’emancipazione

dei negri fu anche l’epoca delle melodie negre. Chi pianse su

Zio Tom rise anche su Zio Remo. E come l’ammirazione per il

Pellerossa quasi divenne un’apologia dello scotennamento, la misteriosa

fascinazione dell’africano talora quasi ci ha condotti ai margini

della nera foresta del Voodoo. Ma quella specie di interesse che si prova

perfino per il cacciatore di scalpi e il cannibale, il torturatore e l’

adoratore del diavolo, quella specie di interesse non è mai stata provata per l’

inglese.

E ciò è tanto più straordinario perché l’inglese è davvero molto

interessante. È interessante in grado speciale in questo speciale

modo; è interessante perché è individuale. Nessun uomo al mondo

è più travisato da tutto ciò che è ufficiale o anche nel senso ordinario

nazionale. Una descrizione della vita inglese dev’essere una descrizione della

vita privata. In quel senso non c’è vita pubblica. In quel senso non c’è

is no public opinion. There have never been those prairie fires of

public opinion in England which often sweep over America. At any rate,

there have never been any such popular revolutions since the popular

revolutions of the Middle Ages. The English are a nation of amateurs;

they are even a nation of eccentrics. An Englishman is never more

English than when he is considered a lunatic by the other Englishmen.

This can be clearly seen in a figure like Dr. Johnson, who has become

national not by being normal but by being extraordinary. To express this

mysterious people, to explain or suggest why they like tall hedges and

heavy breakfasts and crooked roads and small gardens with large fences,

and why they alone among Christians have kept quite consistently the

great Christian glory of the open fireplace, here would be a strange and

stimulating opportunity for any of the artists in words, who study the

souls of strange peoples. That would be the true way to create a

friendship between England and America, or between England and anything

else; yes, even between England and Ireland. For this justice at least

has already been done to Ireland; and as an indignant patriot I demand a

more equal treatment for the two nations.

I have already noted the commonplace that in order to teach

internationalism we must talk nationalism. We must make the nations as

nations less odious or mysterious to each other. We do not make men love

each other by describing a monster with a million arms and legs, but by

describing the men as men, with their separate and even solitary

emotions. As this has a particular application to the emotions of the

Englishman, I will return to the topic once more. Now Americans have a

power that is the soul and success of democracy, the power of

spontaneous social organisation. Their high spirits, their humane ideals

are really creative, they abound in unofficial institutions; we might

almost say in unofficial officialism. Nobody who has felt the presence

of all the leagues and guilds and college clubs will deny that Whitman

was national when he said he would build states and cities out of the

love of comrades. When all this communal enthusiasm collides with the

Englishman, it too often seems literally to leave him cold. They say he

is reserved; they possibly think he is rude. And the Englishman, having

been taught his own history all wrong, is only too likely to take the

criticism as a compliment. He admits that he is reserved because he is

stern and strong; or even that he is rude because he is shrewd and

candid. But as a fact he is not rude and not especially reserved; at

least reserve is not the meaning of his reluctance. The real difference

lies, I think, in the fact that American high spirits are not only high

but level; that the hilarious American spirit is like a plateau, and the

humorous English spirit like a ragged mountain range.

The Englishman is moody; which does not in the least mean that the

Englishman is morose. Dickens, as we all feel in reading his books, was

boisterously English. Dickens was moody when he wrote Oliver Twist;

but he was also moody when he wrote Pickwick. That is, he was in

another and much healthier mood. The mood was normal to him in the sense

that nine times out of ten he felt and wrote in that humorous and

hilarious mood. But he was, if ever there was one, a man of moods; and

all the more of a typical Englishman for being a man of moods. But it

was because of this, almost entirely, that he had a misunderstanding

with America.

In America there are no moods, or there is only one mood. It is the same

whether it is called hustle or uplift; whether we regard it as the

heroic love of comrades or the last hysteria of the herd instinct. It

has been said of the typical English aristocrats of the Government

offices that they resemble certain ornamental fountains and play from

ten till four; and it is true that an Englishman, even an English

aristocrat, is not always inclined to play any more than to work. But

American sociability is not like the Trafalgar fountains. It is like

Niagara. It never stops, under the silent stars or the rolling storms.

There seems always to be the same human heat and pressure behind it; it

is like the central heating of hotels as explained in the advertisements

and announcements. The temperature can be regulated; but it is not. And

it is always rather overpowering for an Englishman, whose mood changes

like his own mutable and shifting sky. The English mood is very like the

English weather; it is a nuisance and a national necessity.

If any one wishes to understand the quarrel between Dickens and the

Americans, let him turn to that chapter in Martin Chuzzlewit, in which

young Martin has to receive endless defiles and deputations of total

strangers each announced by name and demanding formal salutation. There

are several things to be noticed about this incident. To begin with, it

did not happen to Martin Chuzzlewit; but it did happen to Charles

Dickens. Dickens is incorporating almost without alteration a passage

from a diary in the middle of a story; as he did when he included the

admirable account of the prison petition of John Dickens as the prison

petition of Wilkins Micawber. There is no particular reason why even the

gregarious Americans should so throng the portals of a perfectly obscure

steerage passenger like young Chuzzlewit. There was every reason why

they should throng the portals of the author of Pickwick and _Oliver

Twist_. And no doubt they did. If I may be permitted the aleatory image,

you bet they did. Similar troops of sociable human beings have visited

much more insignificant English travellers in America, with some of whom

I am myself acquainted. I myself have the luck to be a little more

non c’è opinione pubblica. Non ci sono mai stati quegli incendi di prateria dell’

opinione pubblica in Inghilterra che spesso dilagano per l’America. In ogni caso,

non ci sono mai state simili rivoluzioni popolari dalle rivoluzioni

popolari del Medioevo. Gli inglesi sono una nazione di dilettanti;

sono perfino una nazione di eccentrici. Un inglese non è mai più

inglese di quando è considerato un pazzo dagli altri inglesi.

Lo si vede chiaramente in una figura come il dottor Johnson, che è divenuto

nazionale non per essere normale ma per essere straordinario. Esprimere questo

popolo misterioso, spiegare o suggerire perché amino le siepi alte e le

colazioni abbondanti e le strade tortuose e i piccoli giardini con grandi steccati,

e perché essi soli fra i cristiani abbiano conservato con piena coerenza la

grande gloria cristiana del focolare aperto, ecco che sarebbe una strana e

stimolante occasione per uno qualunque degli artisti della parola, che studiano le

anime dei popoli strani. Quello sarebbe il vero modo di creare un’

amicizia tra l’Inghilterra e l’America, o tra l’Inghilterra e qualunque

altra cosa; sì, perfino tra l’Inghilterra e l’Irlanda. Perché questa giustizia almeno

è già stata resa all’Irlanda; e da patriota indignato esigo un

trattamento più equo per le due nazioni.

Ho già rilevato il luogo comune secondo cui per insegnare l’

internazionalismo dobbiamo parlare di nazionalismo. Dobbiamo rendere le nazioni in quanto

nazioni meno odiose o misteriose le une alle altre. Non si fa amare gli uomini

tra loro descrivendo un mostro con un milione di braccia e gambe, ma

descrivendo gli uomini come uomini, con le loro emozioni distinte e perfino

solitarie. Poiché ciò si applica in particolare alle emozioni dell’

inglese, tornerò ancora una volta sull’argomento. Ora, gli americani hanno un

potere che è l’anima e il successo della democrazia, il potere dell’

organizzazione sociale spontanea. Il loro brio, i loro ideali umanitari

sono davvero creativi, abbondano di istituzioni ufficiose; potremmo

quasi dire di un ufficialismo ufficioso. Nessuno che abbia sentito la presenza

di tutte quelle leghe e corporazioni e circoli universitari negherà che Whitman

fosse nazionale quando disse che avrebbe costruito stati e città con l’

amore dei compagni. Quando tutto questo entusiasmo comunitario si scontra con l’

inglese, troppo spesso sembra letteralmente lasciarlo freddo. Dicono che sia

riservato; forse pensano che sia scortese. E l’inglese, essendogli stata

insegnata tutta sbagliata la propria storia, è fin troppo incline a prendere la

critica come un complimento. Ammette d’essere riservato perché è

severo e forte; o perfino d’essere scortese perché è accorto e

schietto. Ma di fatto non è scortese né particolarmente riservato;

almeno il riserbo non è il senso della sua ritrosia. La vera differenza

sta, credo, nel fatto che il brio americano non è solo alto

ma piano; che lo spirito ilare americano è come un altopiano, e lo

spirito umoristico inglese come una frastagliata catena di monti.

L’inglese è lunatico; il che non significa affatto che l’

inglese sia tetro. Dickens, come tutti sentiamo leggendo i suoi libri, era

chiassosamente inglese. Dickens era d’umore quando scrisse Oliver Twist;

ma era d’umore anche quando scrisse Pickwick. Cioè, era in

un altro e assai più sano umore. Quell’umore gli era normale nel senso

che nove volte su dieci sentiva e scriveva in quell’umore umoristico e

ilare. Ma era, se mai ve ne fu uno, un uomo d’umori; e

tanto più un inglese tipico proprio per essere uomo d’umori. Ma fu

per questo, quasi interamente, che ebbe un malinteso

con l’America.

In America non ci sono umori, o c’è un solo umore. È lo stesso

che lo si chiami frenesia o elevazione; che lo si consideri come l’

eroico amore dei compagni o l’ultima isteria dell’istinto del gregge. È

stato detto dei tipici aristocratici inglesi degli uffici del Governo

che somigliano a certe fontane ornamentali e zampillano dalle

dieci alle quattro; ed è vero che un inglese, perfino un

aristocratico inglese, non è sempre incline a divertirsi più di quanto lo sia a lavorare. Ma

la socievolezza americana non è come le fontane di Trafalgar. È come il

Niagara. Non si ferma mai, sotto le silenziose stelle o le tempeste rombanti.

Pare esserci sempre lo stesso calore e la stessa pressione umana dietro; è

come il riscaldamento centralizzato degli alberghi quale è spiegato nelle réclame

e negli avvisi. La temperatura può essere regolata; ma non lo è. Ed

è sempre piuttosto soverchiante per un inglese, il cui umore muta

come il suo stesso cielo mutevole e cangiante. L’umore inglese assomiglia molto al

tempo inglese; è una seccatura e una necessità nazionale.

Se qualcuno vuole comprendere la lite tra Dickens e gli

americani, si volga a quel capitolo di Martin Chuzzlewit, in cui il

giovane Martin deve ricevere interminabili sfilate e delegazioni di perfetti

sconosciuti ciascuno annunciato per nome ed esigente un saluto formale. Vi

sono parecchie cose da notare su questo episodio. Tanto per cominciare, esso

non accadde a Martin Chuzzlewit; ma accadde davvero a Charles

Dickens. Dickens incorpora quasi senza alterazione un passo

di un diario nel mezzo di una storia; come fece quando incluse l’

ammirevole resoconto della supplica dalla prigione di John Dickens come la supplica dalla prigione

di Wilkins Micawber. Non c’è ragione particolare perché anche i

gregari americani affollino tanto le porte di un passeggero di terza classe del tutto

oscuro come il giovane Chuzzlewit. C’era ogni ragione perché

affollassero le porte dell’autore di Pickwick e di _Oliver

Twist_. E senza dubbio lo fecero. Se mi è concessa l’immagine aleatoria,

ci scommetti che lo fecero. Simili schiere di socievoli esseri umani hanno visitato

viaggiatori inglesi assai più insignificanti in America, con alcuni dei quali

io stesso ho conoscenza. Io stesso ho la fortuna di essere un po’ più

stodgy and less sensitive than many of my countrymen; and certainly less

sensitive than Dickens. But I know what it was that annoyed him about

that unending and unchanging stream of American visitors; it was the

unending and unchanging stream of American sociability and high spirits.

A people living on such a lofty but level tableland do not understand

the ups and downs of the English temperament; the temper of a nation of

eccentrics or (as they used to be called) of humorists. There is

something very national in the very name of the old play of _Every Man

in His Humour_. But the play more often acted in real life is ‘Every Man

Out of His Humour.’ It is true, as Matthew Arnold said, that an

Englishman wants to do as he likes; but it is not always true even that

he likes what he likes. An Englishman can be friendly and yet not feel

friendly. Or he can be friendly and yet not feel hospitable. Or he can

feel hospitable and yet not welcome those whom he really loves. He can

think, almost with tears of tenderness, about people at a distance who

would be bores if they came in at the door.

American sociability sweeps away any such subtlety. It cannot be

expected to understand the paradox or perversity of the Englishman, who

thus can feel friendly and avoid friends. That is the truth in the

suggestion that Dickens was sentimental. It means that he probably felt

most sociable when he was solitary. In all these attempts to describe

the indescribable, to indicate the real but unconscious differences

between the two peoples, I have tried to balance my words without the

irrelevant bias of praise and blame. Both characteristics always cut

both ways. On one side this comradeship makes possible a certain

communal courage, a democratic derision of rich men in high places,

that is not easy in our smaller and more stratified society. On the

other hand the Englishman has certainly more liberty, if less equality

and fraternity. But the richest compensation of the Englishman is not

even in the word ‘liberty,’ but rather in the word ‘poetry.’ That humour

of escape or seclusion, that genial isolation, that healing of wounded

friendship by what Christian Science would call absent treatment, that

is the best atmosphere of all for the creation of great poetry; and out

of that came ‘bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang’ and

‘Thou wast not made for death, immortal bird.’ In this sense it is

indeed true that poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity; which may

be extended to mean affection remembered in loneliness. There is in it a

spirit not only of detachment but even of distance; a spirit which does

desire, as in the old English rhyme, to be not only over the hills but

also far away. In other words, in so far as it is true that the

Englishman is an exception to the great truth of Aristotle, it is

because he is not so near to Aristotle as he is to Homer. In so far as

he is not by nature a political animal, it is because he is a poetical

animal. We see it in his relations to the other animals; his quaint and

almost illogical love of dogs and horses and dependants whose political

rights cannot possibly be defined in logic. Many forms of hunting or

fishing are but an excuse for the same thing which the shameless

literary man does without any excuse. Sport is speechless poetry. It

would be easy for a foreigner, by taking a few liberties with the facts,

to make a satire about the sort of silent Shelley who decides ultimately

to shoot the skylark. It would be easy to answer these poetic

suggestions by saying that he himself might be responsible for ruining

the choirs where late the sweet birds sang, or that the immortal bird

was likely to be mortal when he was out with his gun. But these

international satires are never just; and the real relations of an

Englishman and an English bird are far more delicate. It would be

equally easy and equally unjust to suggest a similar satire against

American democracy; and represent Americans merely as birds of a feather

who can do nothing but flock together. But this would leave out the fact

that at least it is not the white feather; that democracy is capable of

defiance and of death for an idea. Touching the souls of great nations,

these criticisms are generally false because they are critical.

But when we are quite sure that we rejoice in a nation’s strength, then

and not before we are justified in judging its weakness. I am quite sure

that I rejoice in any democratic success without arrière pensée; and

nobody who knows me will credit me with a covert sneer at civic

equality. And this being granted, I do think there is a danger in the

gregariousness of American society. The danger of democracy is not

anarchy; on the contrary, it is monotony. And it is touching this that

all my experience has increased my conviction that a great deal that is

called female emancipation has merely been the increase of female

convention. Now the males of every community are far too conventional;

it was the females who were individual and criticised the conventions of

the tribe. If the females become conventional also, there is a danger of

individuality being lost. This indeed is not peculiar to America; it is

common to the whole modern industrial world, and to everything which

substitutes the impersonal atmosphere of the State for the personal

atmosphere of the home. But it is emphasised in America by the curious

contradiction that Americans do in theory value and even venerate the

individual. But individualism is still the foe of individuality. Where

men are trying to compete with each other they are trying to copy each

greve e meno sensibile di molti miei connazionali; e certamente meno

sensibile di Dickens. Ma so cosa fu a irritarlo in

quel flusso incessante e immutabile di visitatori americani; fu il

flusso incessante e immutabile di socievolezza e brio americani.

Un popolo che vive su un tavolato tanto elevato ma piano non comprende

gli alti e bassi del temperamento inglese; l’indole di una nazione di

eccentrici o (come si diceva un tempo) di umoristi. C’è

qualcosa di molto nazionale nel titolo stesso della vecchia commedia _Every Man

in His Humour_. Ma la commedia più spesso recitata nella vita reale è ‘Every Man

Out of His Umore.’ È vero, come disse Matthew Arnold, che un

inglese vuol fare come gli pare; ma non è sempre vero neppure che

gli piaccia ciò che gli pare. Un inglese può essere cordiale e tuttavia non sentirsi

cordiale. O può essere cordiale e tuttavia non sentirsi ospitale. O può

sentirsi ospitale e tuttavia non accogliere coloro che davvero ama. Può

pensare, quasi con lacrime di tenerezza, a persone lontane che

sarebbero noiose se entrassero dalla porta.

La socievolezza americana spazza via ogni simile sottigliezza. Non le si può

chiedere di comprendere il paradosso o la perversità dell’inglese, che

così può sentirsi cordiale ed evitare gli amici. Ecco la verità contenuta nell’

insinuazione che Dickens fosse sentimentale. Significa che probabilmente si sentiva

più socievole quando era solitario. In tutti questi tentativi di descrivere

l’indescrivibile, di indicare le differenze reali ma inconsce

tra i due popoli, ho cercato di bilanciare le mie parole senza il

pregiudizio irrilevante della lode e del biasimo. Entrambi i caratteri tagliano sempre da

due lati. Da un lato questo cameratismo rende possibile un certo

coraggio comunitario, una derisione democratica dei ricchi ai posti alti,

che non è facile nella nostra più piccola e più stratificata società. D’

altro canto l’inglese ha certamente più libertà, se meno uguaglianza

e fratellanza. Ma la più ricca compensazione dell’inglese non sta

nemmeno nella parola ‘libertà’, bensì nella parola ‘poesia’. Quell’umore

di fuga o di ritiro, quella geniale solitudine, quel risanamento dell’

amicizia ferita mediante ciò che la Scienza Cristiana chiamerebbe cura a distanza, ecco

l’atmosfera migliore di tutte per la creazione di grande poesia; e da

quella vennero ‘nudi cori in rovina dove un tempo i dolci uccelli cantavano’ e

‘Tu non fosti fatto per la morte, uccello immortale’. In questo senso è

davvero vero che la poesia è emozione ricordata nella tranquillità; il che si può

estendere fino a significare affetto ricordato nella solitudine. Vi è in essa uno

spirito non solo di distacco ma perfino di distanza; uno spirito che

desidera, come nella vecchia filastrocca inglese, essere non solo oltre i colli ma

anche lontano lontano. In altre parole, nella misura in cui è vero che l’

inglese è un’eccezione alla grande verità di Aristotele, ciò è

perché non è tanto vicino ad Aristotele quanto lo è a Omero. Nella misura in cui

non è per natura un animale politico, è perché è un animale

poetico. Lo vediamo nei suoi rapporti con gli altri animali; il suo bizzarro e

quasi illogico amore per i cani e i cavalli e i dipendenti i cui diritti politici

non possono in alcun modo essere definiti dalla logica. Molte forme di caccia o

di pesca non sono che un pretesto per la stessa cosa che lo spudorato

uomo di lettere fa senza alcun pretesto. Lo sport è poesia muta. Sarebbe

facile per uno straniero, prendendosi qualche libertà con i fatti,

fare una satira su quella specie di silenzioso Shelley che decide infine

di sparare all’allodola. Sarebbe facile rispondere a questi poetici

suggerimenti dicendo che egli stesso potrebbe essere responsabile della rovina dei

cori dove un tempo i dolci uccelli cantavano, o che l’uccello immortale

rischiava d’essere mortale quando egli usciva col fucile. Ma queste

satire internazionali non sono mai giuste; e i veri rapporti tra un

inglese e un uccello inglese sono assai più delicati. Sarebbe

altrettanto facile e altrettanto ingiusto proporre una simile satira contro la

democrazia americana; e rappresentare gli americani come meri uccelli della stessa piuma

che non sanno far altro che stormire insieme. Ma questo tralascerebbe il fatto

che almeno non è la piuma bianca; che la democrazia è capace di

sfida e di morte per un’idea. Toccando le anime delle grandi nazioni,

queste critiche sono generalmente false proprio perché sono critiche.

Ma quando siamo ben sicuri di gioire della forza di una nazione, allora

e non prima siamo giustificati nel giudicarne la debolezza. Sono ben sicuro

di gioire di ogni successo democratico senza arrière pensée; e

nessuno che mi conosca mi attribuirà un ghigno recondito verso l’uguaglianza

civica. E ammesso ciò, penso davvero che vi sia un pericolo nella

gregarietà della società americana. Il pericolo della democrazia non è

l’anarchia; al contrario, è la monotonia. Ed è a questo proposito che

tutta la mia esperienza ha accresciuto la mia convinzione che gran parte di ciò che

si chiama emancipazione femminile non è stata che l’incremento della convenzione

femminile. Ora, i maschi di ogni comunità sono fin troppo convenzionali;

erano le femmine a essere individuali e a criticare le convenzioni della

tribù. Se anche le femmine diventano convenzionali, c’è il pericolo che l’

individualità vada perduta. Ciò invero non è peculiare dell’America; è

comune all’intero mondo industriale moderno, e a tutto ciò che

sostituisce l’atmosfera impersonale dello Stato all’atmosfera personale della

casa. Ma in America è accentuato dalla curiosa

contraddizione che gli americani in teoria apprezzano e perfino venerano l’

individuo. Ma l’individualismo resta il nemico dell’individualità. Dove gli

uomini cercano di competere l’uno con l’altro cercano di copiarsi l’un l’

other. They become featureless by ‘featuring’ the same part.

Personality, in becoming a conscious ideal, becomes a common ideal. In

this respect perhaps there is really something to be learnt from the

Englishman with his turn or twist in the direction of private life.

Those who have travelled in such a fashion as to see all the American

hotels and none of the American houses are sometimes driven to the

excess of saying that the Americans have no private life. But even if

the exaggeration has a hint of truth, we must balance it with the

corresponding truth; that the English have no public life. They on their

side have still to learn the meaning of the public thing, the republic;

and how great are the dangers of cowardice and corruption when the very

State itself has become a State secret.

The English are patriotic; but patriotism is the unconscious form of

nationalism. It is being national without understanding the meaning of a

nation. The Americans are on the whole too self-conscious, kept moving

too much in the pace of public life, with all its temptations to

superficiality and fashion; too much aware of outside opinion and with

too much appetite for outside criticism. But the English are much too

unconscious; and would be the better for an increase in many forms of

consciousness, including consciousness of sin. But even their sin is

ignorance of their real virtue. The most admirable English things are

not the things that are most admired by the English, or for which the

English admire themselves. They are things now blindly neglected and in

daily danger of being destroyed. It is all the worse that they should be

destroyed, because there is really nothing like them in the world. That

is why I have suggested a note of nationalism rather than patriotism for

the English; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not as the

nature of things. We say of some ballad from the Balkans or some peasant

costume in the Netherlands that it is unique; but the good things of

England really are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars and

revolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique. The particular kind

of beauty there is in an English village, the particular kind of humour

there is in an English public-house, are things that cannot be found in

lands where the village is far more simply and equally governed, or

where the vine is far more honourably served and praised. Yet we shall

not save them by merely sinking into them with the conservative sort of

contentment, even if the commercial rapacity of our plutocratic reforms

would allow us to do so. We must in a sense get far away from England in

order to behold her; we must rise above patriotism in order to be

practically patriotic; we must have some sense of more varied and remote

things before these vanishing virtues can be seen suddenly for what they

are; almost as one might fancy that a man would have to rise to the

dizziest heights of the divine understanding before he saw, as from a

peak far above a whirlpool, how precious is his perishing soul.

The Future of Democracy

The title of this final chapter requires an apology. I do not need to be

reminded, alas, that the whole book requires an apology. It is written

in accordance with a ritual or custom in which I could see no particular

harm, and which gives me a very interesting subject, but a custom which

it would be not altogether easy to justify in logic. Everybody who goes

to America for a short time is expected to write a book; and nearly

everybody does. A man who takes a holiday at Trouville or Dieppe is not

confronted on his return with the question, ‘When is your book on France

going to appear?’ A man who betakes himself to Switzerland for the

winter sports is not instantly pinned by the statement, ‘I suppose your

History of the Helvetian Republic is coming out this spring?’ Lecturing,

at least my kind of lecturing, is not much more serious or meritorious

than ski-ing or sea-bathing; and it happens to afford the holiday-maker

far less opportunity of seeing the daily life of the people. Of all this

I am only too well aware; and my only defence is that I am at least

sincere in my enjoyment and appreciation of America, and equally sincere

in my interest in its most serious problem, which I think a very serious

problem indeed; the problem of democracy in the modern world. Democracy

may be a very obvious and facile affair for plutocrats and politicians

who only have to use it as a rhetorical term. But democracy is a very

serious problem for democrats. I certainly do not apologise for the word

democracy; but I do apologise for the word future. I am no Futurist; and

any conjectures I make must be taken with the grain of salt which is

indeed the salt of the earth; the decent and moderate humility which

comes from a belief in free will. That faith is in itself a divine

doubt. I do not believe in any of the scientific predictions about

mankind; I notice that they always fail to predict any of the purely

human developments of men; I also notice that even their successes prove

the same truth as their failures; for their successful predictions are

not about men but about machines. But there are two things which a man

may reasonably do, in stating the probabilities of a problem, which do

not involve any claim to be a prophet. The first is to tell the truth,

and especially the neglected truth, about the tendencies that have

already accumulated in human history; any miscalculation about which

must at least mislead us in any case. We cannot be certain of being

right about the future; but we can be almost certain of being wrong

about the future, if we are wrong about the past. The other thing that

altro. Diventano privi di tratti proprio ‘rappresentando’ la stessa parte.

La personalità, divenendo un ideale conscio, diventa un ideale comune. Sotto

questo aspetto forse c’è davvero qualcosa da imparare dall’

inglese con la sua piega o torsione in direzione della vita privata.

Chi ha viaggiato in modo tale da vedere tutti gli alberghi americani e

nessuna delle case americane è talora spinto all’

eccesso di dire che gli americani non hanno vita privata. Ma anche se

l’esagerazione ha un’ombra di verità, dobbiamo bilanciarla con la

verità corrispondente; che gli inglesi non hanno vita pubblica. Essi dal canto

loro devono ancora imparare il significato della cosa pubblica, la repubblica;

e quanto grandi siano i pericoli di viltà e corruzione quando lo Stato

stesso è divenuto un segreto di Stato.

Gli inglesi sono patriottici; ma il patriottismo è la forma inconscia del

nazionalismo. È essere nazionali senza comprendere il significato di una

nazione. Gli americani sono nel complesso troppo consci di sé, tenuti in moto

troppo al ritmo della vita pubblica, con tutte le sue tentazioni alla

superficialità e alla moda; troppo consapevoli dell’opinione altrui e con

troppo appetito per la critica altrui. Ma gli inglesi sono fin troppo

inconsapevoli; e trarrebbero giovamento da un aumento di molte forme di

coscienza, compresa la coscienza del peccato. Ma perfino il loro peccato è

ignoranza della loro vera virtù. Le cose inglesi più ammirevoli non sono

le cose più ammirate dagli inglesi, o per le quali gli

inglesi ammirano sé stessi. Sono cose ora ciecamente trascurate e in

quotidiano pericolo d’essere distrutte. Ed è tanto peggio che siano

distrutte, perché non c’è davvero nulla di simile a esse al mondo. Ecco

perché ho suggerito una nota di nazionalismo piuttosto che di patriottismo per gli

inglesi; il potere di vedere la loro nazione come una nazione e non come la

natura delle cose. Diciamo di qualche ballata dei Balcani o di qualche costume

contadino dei Paesi Bassi che è unico; ma le cose belle dell’

Inghilterra sono davvero uniche. Proprio il nostro isolamento dalle guerre continentali e dalle

ricostruzioni rivoluzionarie le ha mantenute uniche. La particolare specie

di bellezza che c’è in un villaggio inglese, la particolare specie di umorismo

che c’è in una taverna pubblica inglese, sono cose che non si trovano in

terre dove il villaggio è governato assai più semplicemente ed equamente, o

dove la vite è servita e lodata assai più onorevolmente. Eppure non le

salveremo semplicemente sprofondando in esse con quella specie conservatrice di

contentezza, anche se la rapacità commerciale delle nostre riforme plutocratiche

ce lo consentisse. Dobbiamo in un certo senso allontanarci molto dall’Inghilterra per

poterla contemplare; dobbiamo elevarci al di sopra del patriottismo per essere

praticamente patriottici; dobbiamo avere un certo senso di cose più varie e remote

prima che queste virtù svanenti possano essere viste d’improvviso per ciò che

sono; quasi come si potrebbe immaginare che un uomo debba salire alle

più vertiginose altezze della comprensione divina prima di vedere, come da una

vetta ben sopra un gorgo, quanto sia preziosa la sua anima peritura.

Il Futuro della Democrazia

Il titolo di questo capitolo finale richiede una scusa. Non ho bisogno che mi si

rammenti, ahimè, che l’intero libro richiede una scusa. È scritto

in conformità a un rito o a un’usanza in cui non vedevo nulla di particolarmente

nocivo, e che mi dà un soggetto molto interessante, ma un’usanza che

non sarebbe del tutto facile giustificare secondo logica. Chiunque vada

in America per breve tempo è tenuto a scrivere un libro; e quasi

tutti lo fanno. Un uomo che si prende una vacanza a Trouville o a Dieppe non è

affrontato al ritorno con la domanda: ‘Quando esce il tuo libro sulla Francia

?’ Un uomo che si reca in Svizzera per gli

sport invernali non viene subito inchiodato dall’affermazione: ‘Suppongo che la tua

Storia della Repubblica Elvetica esca questa primavera?’ Tenere conferenze,

almeno il mio genere di conferenze, non è molto più serio o meritorio

dello sciare o del bagnarsi in mare; e per giunta offre al villeggiante

assai minore occasione di vedere la vita quotidiana della gente. Di tutto ciò

sono fin troppo bene consapevole; e la mia sola difesa è che sono almeno

sincero nel mio godimento e apprezzamento dell’America, e altrettanto sincero

nel mio interesse per il suo problema più serio, che ritengo un problema davvero

serio; il problema della democrazia nel mondo moderno. La democrazia

può essere una faccenda molto ovvia e facile per plutocrati e politici

che devono solo usarla come termine retorico. Ma la democrazia è un

problema molto serio per i democratici. Non mi scuso certo per la parola

democrazia; ma mi scuso per la parola futuro. Non sono un futurista; e

ogni congettura che faccio va presa con quel granello di sale che è

invero il sale della terra; la decorosa e moderata umiltà che

viene dalla fede nel libero arbitrio. Quella fede è in sé un divino

dubbio. Non credo a nessuna delle previsioni scientifiche sull’

umanità; noto che esse mancano sempre di prevedere alcuno dei puramente

umani sviluppi degli uomini; noto anche che perfino i loro successi provano

la stessa verità dei loro fallimenti; perché le loro previsioni riuscite non

riguardano gli uomini ma le macchine. Ma ci sono due cose che un uomo

può ragionevolmente fare, nell’esporre le probabilità di un problema, che non

implicano alcuna pretesa d’essere un profeta. La prima è dire la verità,

e specialmente la verità trascurata, sulle tendenze che si sono

già accumulate nella storia umana; ogni errore di calcolo sulle quali

deve almeno fuorviarci in ogni caso. Non possiamo essere certi di avere

ragione sul futuro; ma possiamo essere quasi certi di avere torto

sul futuro, se abbiamo torto sul passato. L’altra cosa che

he can do is to note what ideas necessarily go together by their own

nature; what ideas will triumph together or fall together. Hence it

follows that this final chapter must consist of two things. The first is

a summary of what has really happened to the idea of democracy in recent

times; the second a suggestion of the fundamental doctrine which is

necessary for its triumph at any time.

The last hundred years has seen a general decline in the democratic

idea. If there be anybody left to whom this historical truth appears a

paradox, it is only because during that period nobody has been taught

history, least of all the history of ideas. If a sort of intellectual

inquisition had been established, for the definition and differentiation

of heresies, it would have been found that the original republican

orthodoxy had suffered more and more from secessions, schisms, and

backslidings. The highest point of democratic idealism and conviction

was towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the American

Republic was ‘dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.’ It

was then that the largest number of men had the most serious sort of

conviction that the political problem could be solved by the vote of

peoples instead of the arbitrary power of princes and privileged orders.

These men encountered various difficulties and made various compromises

in relation to the practical politics of their time; in England they

preserved aristocracy; in America they preserved slavery. But though

they had more difficulties, they had less doubts. Since their time

democracy has been steadily disintegrated by doubts; and these political

doubts have been contemporary with and often identical with religious

doubts. This fact could be followed over almost the whole field of the

modern world; in this place it will be more appropriate to take the

great American example of slavery. I have found traces in all sorts of

intelligent quarters of an extraordinary idea that all the Fathers of

the Republic owned black men like beasts of burden because they knew no

better, until the light of liberty was revealed to them by John Brown

and Mrs. Beecher Stowe. One of the best weekly papers in England said

recently that even those who drew up the Declaration of Independence did

not include negroes in its generalisation about humanity. This is quite

consistent with the current convention, in which we were all brought up;

the theory that the heart of humanity broadens in ever larger circles of

brotherhood, till we pass from embracing a black man to adoring a black

beetle. Unfortunately it is quite inconsistent with the facts of

American history. The facts show that, in this problem of the Old South,

the eighteenth century was more liberal than the nineteenth century.

There was more sympathy for the negro in the school of Jefferson than

in the school of Jefferson Davis. Jefferson, in the dark estate of his

simple Deism, said the sight of slavery in his country made him tremble,

remembering that God is just. His fellow Southerners, after a century of

the world’s advance, said that slavery in itself was good, when they did

not go farther and say that negroes in themselves were bad. And they

were supported in this by the great and growing modern suspicion that

nature is unjust. Difficulties seemed inevitably to delay justice, to

the mind of Jefferson; but so they did to the mind of Lincoln. But that

the slave was human and the servitude inhuman—that was, if anything,

clearer to Jefferson than to Lincoln. The fact is that the utter

separation and subordination of the black like a beast was a progress;

it was a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and experiment; a

triumph of science over superstition. It was ‘the way the world was

going,’ as Matthew Arnold reverentially remarked in some connection;

perhaps as part of a definition of God. Anyhow, it was not Jefferson’s

definition of God. He fancied, in his far-off patriarchal way, a Father

who had made all men brothers; and brutally unbrotherly as was the

practice, such democratical Deists never dreamed of denying the theory.

It was not until the scientific sophistries began that brotherhood was

really disputed. Gobineau, who began most of the modern talk about the

superiority and inferiority of racial stocks, was seized upon eagerly by

the less generous of the slave-owners and trumpeted as a new truth of

science and a new defence of slavery. It was not really until the dawn

of Darwinism, when all our social relations began to smell of the

monkey-house, that men thought of the barbarian as only a first and the

baboon as a second cousin. The full servile philosophy has been a modern

and even a recent thing; made in an age whose invisible deity was the

Missing Link. The Missing Link was a true metaphor in more ways than

one; and most of all in its suggestion of a chain.

By a symbolic coincidence, indeed, slavery grew more brazen and brutal

under the encouragement of more than one movement of the progressive

sort. Its youth was renewed for it by the industrial prosperity of

Lancashire; and under that influence it became a commercial and

competitive instead of a patriarchal and customary thing. We may say

with no exaggerative irony that the unconscious patrons of slavery were

Huxley and Cobden. The machines of Manchester were manufacturing a great

many more things than the manufacturers knew or wanted to know; but they

were certainly manufacturing the fetters of the slave, doubtless out of

the best quality of steel and iron. But this is a minor illustration of

the modern tendency, as compared with the main stream of scepticism

which was destroying democracy. Evolution became more and more a vision

può fare è notare quali idee necessariamente vadano insieme per loro

natura; quali idee trionferanno insieme o cadranno insieme. Ne

consegue che questo capitolo finale deve constare di due cose. La prima è

un riepilogo di ciò che è realmente accaduto all’idea di democrazia nei tempi

recenti; la seconda un’indicazione della dottrina fondamentale che è

necessaria al suo trionfo in ogni tempo.

Gli ultimi cent’anni hanno visto un generale declino dell’idea

democratica. Se resta qualcuno a cui questa verità storica appaia un

paradosso, è solo perché durante quel periodo a nessuno è stata insegnata la

storia, meno che mai la storia delle idee. Se fosse stata istituita una sorta di

Inquisizione intellettuale, per la definizione e differenziazione

delle eresie, si sarebbe trovato che l’ortodossia repubblicana

originaria aveva sofferto sempre più di secessioni, scismi e

ricadute. Il punto più alto dell’idealismo e della convinzione democratica

fu verso la fine del Settecento, quando la Repubblica

Americana fu ‘consacrata al principio che tutti gli uomini sono uguali’. Fu

allora che il maggior numero di uomini ebbe la più seria specie di

convinzione che il problema politico potesse essere risolto dal voto dei

popoli anziché dal potere arbitrario di principi e ordini privilegiati.

Questi uomini incontrarono varie difficoltà e fecero vari compromessi

in rapporto alla politica pratica del loro tempo; in Inghilterra

conservarono l’aristocrazia; in America conservarono la schiavitù. Ma benché

avessero più difficoltà, avevano meno dubbi. Dal loro tempo la

democrazia è stata costantemente disgregata dai dubbi; e questi dubbi politici

sono stati contemporanei e spesso identici ai dubbi

religiosi. Questo fatto potrebbe seguirsi su quasi tutto il campo del

mondo moderno; in questa sede sarà più appropriato prendere il

grande esempio americano della schiavitù. Ho trovato tracce in ogni sorta di

ambienti intelligenti di una straordinaria idea secondo cui tutti i Padri della

Repubblica possedevano uomini neri come bestie da soma perché non sapevano far di

meglio, finché la luce della libertà fu loro rivelata da John Brown

e dalla signora Beecher Stowe. Uno dei migliori settimanali d’Inghilterra ha detto

di recente che perfino coloro che redassero la Dichiarazione d’Indipendenza non

inclusero i negri nella sua generalizzazione sull’umanità. Ciò è del tutto

coerente con la convenzione corrente, in cui tutti siamo stati allevati;

la teoria che il cuore dell’umanità si allarga in cerchi sempre più ampi di

fratellanza, finché passiamo dall’abbracciare un uomo nero all’adorare un nero

scarafaggio. Purtroppo è del tutto incoerente con i fatti della

storia americana. I fatti mostrano che, in questo problema del Vecchio Sud,

il Settecento era più liberale dell’Ottocento.

C’era più simpatia per il negro nella scuola di Jefferson che

nella scuola di Jefferson Davis. Jefferson, nell’oscura condizione del suo

semplice deismo, disse che la vista della schiavitù nel suo paese lo faceva tremare,

ricordando che Dio è giusto. I suoi conterranei del Sud, dopo un secolo di

progresso del mondo, dicevano che la schiavitù in sé era buona, quando non si

spingevano oltre a dire che i negri in sé erano cattivi. Ed erano

sorretti in ciò dal grande e crescente sospetto moderno che la

natura sia ingiusta. Le difficoltà parevano inevitabilmente ritardare la giustizia, alla

mente di Jefferson; ma altrettanto facevano alla mente di Lincoln. Ma che lo

schiavo fosse umano e la servitù disumana—questo era, semmai,

più chiaro a Jefferson che a Lincoln. Il fatto è che la totale

separazione e subordinazione del nero come una bestia era un progresso;

era una crescita dell’illuminismo e della sperimentazione ottocenteschi; un

trionfo della scienza sulla superstizione. Era ‘il verso in cui il mondo

andava’, come Matthew Arnold osservò reverente in qualche contesto;

forse come parte di una definizione di Dio. Comunque, non era la definizione

di Dio secondo Jefferson. Egli immaginava, nel suo remoto modo patriarcale, un Padre

che aveva reso tutti gli uomini fratelli; e per quanto brutalmente poco fraterna fosse la

pratica, simili deisti democratici non sognarono mai di negare la teoria.

Non fu se non quando cominciarono i sofismi scientifici che la fratellanza fu

davvero contestata. Gobineau, che avviò gran parte del discorso moderno sulla

superiorità e inferiorità dei ceppi razziali, fu avidamente afferrato dai

meno generosi tra gli schiavisti e sbandierato come una nuova verità della

scienza e una nuova difesa della schiavitù. Non fu davvero se non all’alba

del darwinismo, quando tutte le nostre relazioni sociali cominciarono a puzzare di

serraglio di scimmie, che gli uomini pensarono al barbaro solo come a un primo e al

babbuino come a un secondo cugino. La piena filosofia servile è stata una cosa moderna

e perfino recente; foggiata in un’epoca la cui divinità invisibile era l’

Anello Mancante. L’Anello Mancante era una vera metafora in più modi di

uno; e soprattutto nella sua allusione a una catena.

Per una simbolica coincidenza, invero, la schiavitù si fece più sfrontata e brutale

sotto l’incoraggiamento di più d’un movimento di stampo

progressista. La sua giovinezza le fu rinnovata dalla prosperità industriale del

Lancashire; e sotto quell’influsso divenne una cosa commerciale e

competitiva anziché patriarcale e consuetudinaria. Possiamo dire

senza ironia esagerata che i patroni inconsapevoli della schiavitù furono

Huxley e Cobden. Le macchine di Manchester fabbricavano assai

più cose di quante i fabbricanti sapessero o volessero sapere; ma

fabbricavano di certo i ceppi dello schiavo, senza dubbio col

migliore acciaio e ferro. Ma questa è un’illustrazione minore della

tendenza moderna, rispetto alla corrente principale dello scetticismo

che stava distruggendo la democrazia. L’evoluzione divenne sempre più una visione

of the break-up of our brotherhood, till by the end of the nineteenth

century the genius of its greatest scientific romancer saw it end in the

anthropophagous antics of the Time Machine. So far from evolution

lifting us above the idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at least

with a logical and potential argument for eating them. In the case of

the American negroes, it may be remarked, it does at any rate permit the

preliminary course of roasting them. All this materialistic hardening,

which replaced the remorse of Jefferson, was part of the growing

evolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of the human race,

or rather that there was really no such thing as the human race. The

South had begun by agreeing reluctantly to the enslavement of men. The

South ended by agreeing equally reluctantly to the emancipation of

monkeys.

That is what had happened to the democratic ideal in a hundred years.

Anybody can test it by comparing the final phase, I will not say with

the ideal of Jefferson, but with the ideal of Johnson. There was far

more horror of slavery in an eighteenth-century Tory like Dr. Johnson

than in a nineteenth-century Democrat like Stephen Douglas. Stephen

Douglas may be mentioned because he is a very representative type of the

age of evolution and expansion; a man thinking in continents, like Cecil

Rhodes, human and hopeful in a truly American fashion, and as a

consequence cold and careless rather than hostile in the matter of the

old mystical doctrines of equality. He ‘did not care whether slavery was

voted up or voted down.’ His great opponent Lincoln did indeed care

very much. But it was an intense individual conviction with Lincoln

exactly as it was with Johnson. I doubt if the spirit of the age was not

much more behind Douglas and his westward expansion of the white race. I

am sure that more and more men were coming to be in the particular

mental condition of Douglas; men in whom the old moral and mystical

ideals had been undermined by doubt but only with a negative effect of

indifference. Their positive convictions were all concerned with what

some called progress and some imperialism. It is true that there was a

sincere sectional enthusiasm against slavery in the North; and that the

slaves were actually emancipated in the nineteenth century. But I doubt

whether the Abolitionists would ever have secured Abolition. Abolition

was a by-product of the Civil War; which was fought for quite other

reasons. Anyhow, if slavery had somehow survived to the age of Rhodes

and Roosevelt and evolutionary imperialism, I doubt if the slaves would

ever have been emancipated at all. Certainly if it had survived till the

modern movement for the Servile State, they would never have been

emancipated at all. Why should the world take the chains off the black

man when it was just putting them on the white? And in so far as we owe

the change to Lincoln, we owe it to Jefferson. Exactly what gives its

real dignity to the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a

primitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up the

tables of an ancient law, against the trend of the nineteenth century;

repeating, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are

created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc.,’ to a

generation that was more and more disposed to say something like this:

‘We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all

things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity

and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,’ and so

on. I do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have founded

a state; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would never

have overthrown a slave state. What it did do, as I have said, was to

produce some very wonderful literary and artistic flights of sceptical

imagination. The world did have new visions, if they were visions of

monsters in the moon and Martians striding about like spiders as tall as

the sky, and the workmen and capitalists becoming two separate species,

so that one could devour the other as gaily and greedily as a cat

devours a bird. No one has done justice to the meaning of Mr. Wells and

his original departure in fantastic fiction; to these nightmares that

were the last apocalypse of the nineteenth century. They meant that the

bottom had fallen out of the mind at last, that the bridge of

brotherhood had broken down in the modern brain, letting up from the

chasms this infernal light like a dawn. All had grown dizzy with degree

and relativity; so that there would not be so very much difference

between eating dog and eating darkie, or between eating darkie and

eating dago. There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt

that we were the superior sort.

Against all this irresistible force stood one immovable post. Against

all this dance of doubt and degree stood something that can best be

symbolised by a simple example. An ape cannot be a priest, but a negro

can be a priest. The dogmatic type of Christianity, especially the

Catholic type of Christianity, had riveted itself irrevocably to the

manhood of all men. Where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils it

could not save itself even by surrender. It could not gradually dilute

democracy, as could a merely sceptical or secular democrat. There stood,

in fact or in possibility, the solid and smiling figure of a black

bishop. And he was either a man claiming the most towering spiritual

privileges of a man, or he was the mere buffoonery and blasphemy of a

monkey in a mitre. That is the point about Christian and Catholic

democracy; it is not that it is necessarily at any moment more

della disgregazione della nostra fratellanza, finché sul finire dell’

Ottocento il genio del suo più grande romanziere scientifico la vide finire nelle

antropofaghe pagliacciate della Macchina del Tempo. Ben lungi dal sollevarci

l’evoluzione al di sopra dell’idea di rendere schiavi gli uomini, essa ci forniva almeno

un argomento logico e potenziale per mangiarli. Nel caso dei

negri americani, si può notare, essa consente in ogni caso il

preliminare procedimento di arrostirli. Tutto questo indurimento materialistico,

che rimpiazzò il rimorso di Jefferson, faceva parte del crescente

sospetto evoluzionistico che i selvaggi non fossero parte della razza umana,

o meglio che non esistesse affatto una cosa come la razza umana. Il

Sud aveva cominciato acconsentendo con riluttanza all’asservimento degli uomini. Il

Sud finì acconsentendo con eguale riluttanza all’emancipazione delle

scimmie.

Ecco cosa era accaduto all’ideale democratico in cent’anni.

Chiunque può verificarlo confrontando la fase finale, non dirò con

l’ideale di Jefferson, ma con l’ideale di Johnson. C’era assai

più orrore della schiavitù in un Tory del Settecento come il dottor Johnson

che in un democratico dell’Ottocento come Stephen Douglas. Stephen

Douglas può essere menzionato perché è un tipo molto rappresentativo dell’

età dell’evoluzione e dell’espansione; un uomo che pensava per continenti, come Cecil

Rhodes, umano e fiducioso in un modo davvero americano, e di

conseguenza freddo e noncurante piuttosto che ostile in fatto delle

vecchie dottrine mistiche dell’uguaglianza. A lui ‘non importava se la schiavitù fosse

votata a favore o contro’. Al suo grande avversario Lincoln importava invece

moltissimo. Ma era una convinzione individuale intensa in Lincoln

esattamente come lo era in Johnson. Dubito che lo spirito del tempo non fosse

assai più dietro Douglas e la sua espansione verso ovest della razza bianca. Sono

sicuro che sempre più uomini venivano a trovarsi nella particolare

condizione mentale di Douglas; uomini in cui i vecchi ideali morali e mistici

erano stati minati dal dubbio ma solo con un effetto negativo di

indifferenza. Le loro convinzioni positive riguardavano tutte ciò che

alcuni chiamavano progresso e altri imperialismo. È vero che ci fu un

sincero entusiasmo settoriale contro la schiavitù nel Nord; e che gli

schiavi furono effettivamente emancipati nell’Ottocento. Ma dubito

che gli abolizionisti avrebbero mai ottenuto l’Abolizione. L’Abolizione

fu un sottoprodotto della Guerra Civile; che fu combattuta per tutt’altre

ragioni. Comunque, se la schiavitù fosse in qualche modo sopravvissuta all’età di Rhodes

e di Roosevelt e dell’imperialismo evoluzionistico, dubito che gli schiavi

sarebbero mai stati emancipati affatto. Di certo, se fosse sopravvissuta fino al

moderno movimento per lo Stato Servile, non sarebbero mai stati

emancipati affatto. Perché il mondo dovrebbe togliere le catene all’uomo

nero mentre stava appunto mettendole al bianco? E nella misura in cui dobbiamo

il mutamento a Lincoln, lo dobbiamo a Jefferson. Proprio ciò che conferisce la sua

vera dignità alla figura di Lincoln è che egli sta lì a invocare un

primitivo primo principio dell’età dell’innocenza, e a levare in alto le

tavole di un’antica legge, contro la corrente dell’Ottocento;

ripetendo: ‘Riteniamo queste verità di per sé evidenti; che tutti gli uomini sono

creati uguali, che sono dotati dal loro Creatore, ecc.’, a una

generazione sempre più disposta a dire qualcosa del genere:

‘Riteniamo queste verità abbastanza probabili per i pragmatisti; che tutte le

cose che sembrano uomini si sono in qualche modo evolute, essendo dotate dall’eredità

e dall’ambiente di nessun eguale diritto, ma di ben ineguali torti’, e così

via. Non credo che quel credo, lasciato a sé, avrebbe mai fondato

uno stato; e sono abbastanza certo che, lasciato a sé, non avrebbe mai

rovesciato uno stato schiavista. Ciò che invece fece, come ho detto, fu

produrre alcuni straordinari voli letterari e artistici di scettica

immaginazione. Il mondo ebbe davvero nuove visioni, se pur erano visioni di

mostri nella Luna e di marziani che incedevano come ragni alti quanto il

cielo, e degli operai e dei capitalisti che diventavano due specie separate,

sì che l’una potesse divorare l’altra allegramente e avidamente come un gatto

divora un uccello. Nessuno ha reso giustizia al significato del signor Wells e

della sua originale novità nella narrativa fantastica; a questi incubi che

furono l’ultima apocalisse dell’Ottocento. Significavano che il

fondo era infine caduto dalla mente, che il ponte della

fratellanza era crollato nel cervello moderno, lasciando salire dagli

abissi questa luce infernale come un’alba. Tutto era divenuto vertiginoso di gradi

e di relatività; sicché non ci sarebbe stata poi gran differenza

tra mangiare un cane e mangiare un moro, o tra mangiare un moro e

mangiare un tanghero. C’erano diverse specie di scimmie; ma non c’era dubbio

che noi fossimo la specie superiore.

Contro tutta questa forza irresistibile stava un palo immobile. Contro

tutta questa danza di dubbio e di gradi stava qualcosa che meglio si può

simboleggiare con un semplice esempio. Una scimmia non può essere prete, ma un negro

può essere prete. Il tipo dogmatico di Cristianesimo, specialmente il

tipo cattolico di Cristianesimo, si era saldato irrevocabilmente alla

umanità di tutti gli uomini. Là dove la sua fede era fissata da credi e concili

non poteva salvarsi nemmeno con la resa. Non poteva diluire gradualmente la

democrazia, come poteva un democratico meramente scettico o laico. Là stava,

in atto o in potenza, la solida e sorridente figura di un vescovo

nero. Ed egli era o un uomo che rivendicava i più torreggianti privilegi

spirituali di un uomo, oppure era la mera buffoneria e bestemmia di una

scimmia in mitria. Ecco il punto riguardo alla cristiana e cattolica

democrazia: non è che essa sia necessariamente in ogni momento più

democratic, it is that its indestructible minimum of democracy really is

indestructible. And by the nature of things that mystical democracy was

destined to survive, when every other sort of democracy was free to

destroy itself. And whenever democracy destroying itself is suddenly

moved to save itself, it always grasps at rag or tag of that old

tradition that alone is sure of itself. Hundreds have heard the story

about the mediaeval demagogue who went about repeating the rhyme

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?

Many have doubtless offered the obvious answer to the question, ‘The

Serpent.’ But few seem to have noticed what would be the more modern

answer to the question, if that innocent agitator went about propounding

it. ‘Adam never delved and Eve never span, for the simple reason that

they never existed. They are fragments of a Chaldeo-Babylonian mythos,

and Adam is only a slight variation of Tag-Tug, pronounced Uttu. For the

real beginning of humanity we refer you to Darwin’s _Origin of

Species_.’ And then the modern man would go on to justify plutocracy to

the mediaeval man by talking about the Struggle for Life and the

Survival of the Fittest; and how the strongest man seized authority by

means of anarchy, and proved himself a gentleman by behaving like a cad.

Now I do not base my beliefs on the theology of John Ball, or on the

literal and materialistic reading of the text of Genesis; though I think

the story of Adam and Eve infinitely less absurd and unlikely than that

of the prehistoric ‘strongest man’ who could fight a hundred men. But I

do note the fact that the idealism of the leveller could be put in the

form of an appeal to Scripture, and could not be put in the form of an

appeal to Science. And I do note also that democrats were still driven

to make the same appeal even in the very century of Science. Tennyson

was, if ever there was one, an evolutionist in his vision and an

aristocrat in his sympathies. He was always boasting that John Bull was

evolutionary and not revolutionary, even as these Frenchmen. He did not

pretend to have any creed beyond faintly trusting the larger hope. But

when human dignity is really in danger, John Bull has to use the same

old argument as John Ball. He tells Lady Clara Vere de Vere that ‘the

gardener Adam and his wife smile at the claim of long descent’; their

own descent being by no means long. Lady Clara might surely have scored

off him pretty smartly by quoting from ‘Maud’ and ‘In Memoriam’ about

evolution and the eft that was lord of valley and hill. But Tennyson has

evidently forgotten all about Darwin and the long descent of man. If

this was true of an evolutionist like Tennyson, it was naturally ten

times truer of a revolutionist like Jefferson. The Declaration of

Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created

all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they

were certainly evolved unequal.

There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine

origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world

will find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of

sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds.

Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of

constraining the tyrant. An idealist may say to a capitalist, ‘Don’t you

sometimes feel in the rich twilight, when the lights twinkle from the

distant hamlet in the hills, that all humanity is a holy family?’ But it

is equally possible for the capitalist to reply with brevity and

decision, ‘No, I don’t,’ and there is no more disputing about it further

than about the beauty of a fading cloud. And the modern world of moods

is a world of clouds, even if some of them are thunderclouds.

For I have only taken here, as a convenient working model, the case of

negro slavery; because it was long peculiar to America and is popularly

associated with it. It is more and more obvious that the line is no

longer running between black and white but between rich and poor. As I

have already noted in the case of Prohibition, the very same arguments

of the inevitable suicide of the ignorant, of the impossibility of

freedom for the unfit, which were once applied to barbarians brought

from Africa are now applied to citizens born in America. It is argued

even by industrialists that industrialism has produced a class submerged

below the status of emancipated mankind. They imply that the Missing

Link is no longer missing, even from England or the Northern States, and

that the factories have manufactured their own monkeys. Scientific

hypotheses about the feeble-minded and the criminal type will supply the

masters of the modern world with more and more excuses for denying the

dogma of equality in the case of white labour as well as black. And any

man who knows the world knows perfectly well that to tell the

millionaires, or their servants, that they are disappointing the

sentiments of Thomas Jefferson, or disregarding a creed composed in the

eighteenth century, will be about as effective as telling them that they

are not observing the creed of St. Athanasius or keeping the rule of St.

Benedict.

The world cannot keep its own ideals. The secular order cannot make

secure any one of its own noble and natural conceptions of secular

perfection. That will be found, as time goes on, the ultimate argument

for a Church independent of the world and the secular order. What has

become of all those ideal figures from the Wise Man of the Stoics to the

democratic Deist of the eighteenth century? What has become of all that

purely human hierarchy of chivalry, with its punctilious pattern of the

democratica; è che il suo indistruttibile minimo di democrazia è davvero

indistruttibile. E per la natura delle cose quella mistica democrazia era

destinata a sopravvivere, quando ogni altra specie di democrazia era libera di

distruggere sé stessa. E ogniqualvolta la democrazia che distrugge sé stessa è d’improvviso

spinta a salvarsi, si aggrappa sempre a qualche brandello di quell’antica

tradizione che sola è sicura di sé. Centinaia hanno udito la storia

del demagogo medievale che andava ripetendo la rima

Quando Adamo vangava ed Eva filava,

chi era allora il gentiluomo?

Molti hanno senza dubbio offerto la risposta ovvia alla domanda: ‘Il

Serpente’. Ma pochi paiono aver notato quale sarebbe la risposta più moderna

alla domanda, se quell’innocente agitatore andasse in giro proponendo

la questione. ‘Adamo non vangò mai ed Eva non filò mai, per la semplice ragione che

non esisterono mai. Sono frammenti di un mito caldeo-babilonese,

e Adamo è solo una lieve variante di Tag-Tug, pronunciato Uttu. Per il

vero principio dell’umanità vi rimandiamo all’_Origine delle

Specie_ di Darwin’. E poi l’uomo moderno proseguirebbe giustificando la plutocrazia all’

uomo medievale col parlare della Lotta per la Vita e della

Sopravvivenza del Più Adatto; e di come l’uomo più forte si impadronì dell’autorità per

mezzo dell’anarchia, e dimostrò d’essere un gentiluomo comportandosi da mascalzone.

Ora, io non fondo le mie credenze sulla teologia di John Ball, né sulla

lettura letterale e materialistica del testo della Genesi; benché ritenga

la storia di Adamo ed Eva infinitamente meno assurda e improbabile di quella

del preistorico ‘uomo più forte’ che poteva battersi con cento uomini. Ma

noto il fatto che l’idealismo del livellatore poteva essere posto nella

forma di un appello alla Scrittura, e non poteva essere posto nella forma di un

appello alla Scienza. E noto anche che i democratici erano ancora spinti

a fare lo stesso appello perfino nel secolo stesso della Scienza. Tennyson

era, se mai ve ne fu uno, un evoluzionista nella sua visione e un

aristocratico nelle sue simpatie. Si vantava sempre che John Bull fosse

evoluzionario e non rivoluzionario, a differenza di quei francesi. Non

pretendeva d’avere alcun credo oltre il fioco confidare nella più ampia speranza. Ma

quando la dignità umana è davvero in pericolo, John Bull deve usare lo stesso

vecchio argomento di John Ball. Dice a Lady Clara Vere de Vere che ‘il

giardiniere Adamo e sua moglie sorridono alla pretesa di lunga discendenza’; ché la loro

propria discendenza non è affatto lunga. Lady Clara avrebbe di certo potuto segnare

un bel punto contro di lui citando da ‘Maud’ e ‘In Memoriam’ sull’

evoluzione e sul tritone che fu signore di valle e colle. Ma Tennyson ha

evidentemente dimenticato tutto di Darwin e della lunga discendenza dell’uomo. Se

ciò era vero di un evoluzionista come Tennyson, era naturalmente dieci

volte più vero di un rivoluzionario come Jefferson. La Dichiarazione d’

Indipendenza fonda dogmaticamente tutti i diritti sul fatto che Dio creò

tutti gli uomini uguali; ed è giusto; perché se non furono creati uguali,

furono certamente evoluti disuguali.

Non c’è fondamento per la democrazia se non in un dogma sulla divina

origine dell’uomo. È un fatto perfettamente semplice che il mondo moderno

scoprirà sempre più essere un fatto. Ogni altro fondamento è una sorta di

confusione sentimentale, piena di echi meramente verbali dei credi più antichi.

Quelle associazioni verbali sono sempre vane per il fine vitale di

costringere il tiranno. Un idealista può dire a un capitalista: ‘Non ti

capita talora di sentire, nel ricco crepuscolo, quando le luci brillano dal

lontano villaggio tra i colli, che tutta l’umanità è una sacra famiglia?’ Ma è

del pari possibile che il capitalista risponda con brevità e

decisione: ‘No, non mi capita’, e non c’è più da disputarne oltre

di quanto si disputi della bellezza di una nube che sfuma. E il mondo moderno degli umori

è un mondo di nubi, anche se alcune di esse sono nubi di tempesta.

Perché ho preso qui soltanto, come comodo modello di lavoro, il caso della

schiavitù dei negri; perché fu a lungo peculiare dell’America ed è popolarmente

associata a essa. È sempre più evidente che la linea non corre

più tra bianco e nero ma tra ricco e povero. Come ho

già notato nel caso del Proibizionismo, gli stessissimi argomenti

dell’inevitabile suicidio degli ignoranti, dell’impossibilità della

libertà per gli inadatti, che un tempo si applicavano ai barbari portati

dall’Africa, ora si applicano ai cittadini nati in America. Si sostiene

perfino da industriali che l’industrialismo ha prodotto una classe sommersa

al di sotto della condizione dell’umanità emancipata. Lasciano intendere che l’Anello

Mancante non manca più, nemmeno in Inghilterra o negli Stati del Nord, e

che le fabbriche hanno fabbricato le proprie scimmie. Le ipotesi

scientifiche sul debole di mente e sul tipo criminale forniranno ai

padroni del mondo moderno sempre più scuse per negare il

dogma dell’uguaglianza nel caso del lavoro bianco non meno che nero. E ogni

uomo che conosce il mondo sa perfettamente bene che dire ai

milionari, o ai loro servi, che stanno deludendo i

sentimenti di Thomas Jefferson, o trascurando un credo composto nel

Settecento, sarà press’a poco efficace quanto dir loro che

non osservano il credo di sant’Atanasio o non custodiscono la regola di san

Benedetto.

Il mondo non sa custodire i propri ideali. L’ordine secolare non sa render

sicura alcuna delle sue nobili e naturali concezioni di perfezione

secolare. Questo si rivelerà, col passare del tempo, l’ultimo argomento

a favore di una Chiesa indipendente dal mondo e dall’ordine secolare. Che ne è

stato di tutte quelle figure ideali, dal Saggio degli Stoici al

deista democratico del Settecento? Che ne è stato di tutta quella

gerarchia puramente umana della cavalleria, col suo puntiglioso modello del

good knight, its ardent ambition in the young squire? The very name of

knight has come to represent the petty triumph of a profiteer, and the

very word squire the petty tyranny of a landlord. What has become of all

that golden liberality of the Humanists, who found on the high

tablelands of the culture of Hellas the very balance of repose in beauty

that is most lacking in the modern world? The very Greek language that

they loved has become a mere label for snuffy and snobbish dons, and a

mere cock-shy for cheap and half-educated utilitarians, who make it a

symbol of superstition and reaction. We have lived to see a time when

the heroic legend of the Republic and the Citizen, which seemed to

Jefferson the eternal youth of the world, has begun to grow old in its

turn. We cannot recover the earthly estate of knighthood, to which all

the colours and complications of heraldry seemed as fresh and natural as

flowers. We cannot re-enact the intellectual experiences of the

Humanists, for whom the Greek grammar was like the song of a bird in

spring. The more the matter is considered the clearer it will seem that

these old experiences are now only alive, where they have found a

lodgment in the Catholic tradition of Christendom, and made themselves

friends for ever. St. Francis is the only surviving troubadour. St.

Thomas More is the only surviving Humanist. St. Louis is the only

surviving knight.

It would be the worst sort of insincerity, therefore, to conclude even

so hazy an outline of so great and majestic a matter as the American

democratic experiment, without testifying my belief that to this also

the same ultimate test will come. So far as that democracy becomes or

remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic.

In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly

undemocratic. Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond

the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at

least of patronage. Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen

slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in

method but in aim; since they are but the negations of the human

appetites of property and personality. Eighteenth-century ideals,

formulated in eighteenth-century language, have no longer in themselves

the power to hold all those pagan passions back. Even those documents

depended upon Deism; their real strength will survive in men who are

still Deists; and the men who are still Deists are more than Deists. Men

will more and more realise that there is no meaning in democracy if

there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no meaning in

anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an

authority that is the author of our rights. There is truth in every

ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that

finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of

Jove. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them

as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures

may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats

existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land

of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went

forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.

buon cavaliere, la sua ardente ambizione nel giovane scudiero? Lo stesso nome di

cavaliere è giunto a rappresentare il meschino trionfo di un profittatore, e la

stessa parola scudiero la meschina tirannia di un latifondista. Che ne è stato di tutta

quella dorata liberalità degli Umanisti, che trovarono sugli alti

altipiani della cultura dell’Ellade quel medesimo equilibrio di quiete nella bellezza

che più manca al mondo moderno? La stessa lingua greca che

essi amavano è divenuta una mera etichetta per professori intabaccati e snob, e un

mero bersaglio per utilitaristi dozzinali e mezzi istruiti, che ne fanno un

simbolo di superstizione e reazione. Siamo vissuti fino a vedere un tempo in cui

la leggenda eroica della Repubblica e del Cittadino, che pareva a

Jefferson l’eterna giovinezza del mondo, ha cominciato a invecchiare a sua

volta. Non possiamo riconquistare la condizione terrena della cavalleria, alla quale tutti

i colori e le complicazioni dell’araldica parevano freschi e naturali come

fiori. Non possiamo rivivere le esperienze intellettuali degli

Umanisti, per i quali la grammatica greca era come il canto di un uccello in

primavera. Più si considera la questione, più chiaro apparirà che

queste antiche esperienze sono ormai vive soltanto là dove hanno trovato

ricovero nella tradizione cattolica della Cristianità, e si sono fatte

amiche per sempre. San Francesco è l’unico trovatore superstite. San

Tommaso Moro è l’unico Umanista superstite. San Luigi è l’unico

cavaliere superstite.

Sarebbe dunque la peggiore specie di insincerità concludere anche

un abbozzo così vago di una materia tanto grande e maestosa come l’esperimento

democratico americano, senza testimoniare la mia convinzione che anche a questo

verrà la medesima prova ultima. Nella misura in cui quella democrazia diverrà o

rimarrà cattolica e cristiana, quella democrazia rimarrà democratica.

Nella misura in cui non lo farà, diverrà selvaggiamente e malvagiamente

antidemocratica. I suoi ricchi gozzoviglieranno con una brutale indifferenza ben oltre

il debole feudalesimo che serba qualche ombra di responsabilità o almeno

di patronato. I suoi schiavi-salariati o sprofonderanno in una pagana

schiavitù, o cercheranno sollievo in teorie che sono distruttive non solo nel

metodo ma nel fine; poiché non sono che le negazioni degli umani

appetiti di proprietà e di personalità. Gli ideali del Settecento,

formulati nel linguaggio del Settecento, non hanno più in sé

il potere di trattenere tutte quelle passioni pagane. Persino quei documenti

dipendevano dal Deismo; la loro vera forza sopravvivrà negli uomini che sono

ancora Deisti; e gli uomini che sono ancora Deisti sono più che Deisti. Gli uomini

si renderanno sempre più conto che non v’è senso nella democrazia se

non v’è senso in nulla; e che non v’è senso in

nulla se l’universo non ha un centro di significato e un’

autorità che è l’autore dei nostri diritti. V’è verità in ogni

antica favola, e ve n’è qui persino qualcosa nella fantasia che

trova il simbolo della Repubblica nell’uccello che recava i fulmini di

Giove. Gufi e pipistrelli vaghino pure dove vogliono nelle tenebre, e per loro

come per gli scettici l’universo può non avere centro; nibbi e avvoltoi

indugino pure a piacere sulle carogne, e per loro come per i plutocrati

l’esistenza può non avere origine né fine; ma fu là, lontano nella terra

delle leggende, dove gli istinti trovano le loro immagini vere, che si levò il grido

che la libertà è un’aquila, la cui gloria è fissare il sole.