The Project Gutenberg EBook of Roving East and Roving West, by E. V. Lucas
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Title: Roving East and Roving West
Author: E. V. Lucas
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ROVING EAST
AND ROVING WEST
By E. V. Lucas
To
E. L. L.
My Host At Raisina
{Illustration: TWO MEN ADMIRING FUJI FROM A WINDOW From Hokusai's "A
Hundred Views of Fuji"} (Illustrations not available in this file)
"Yes, Sir, there are two objects of curiosity, e.g., the Christian world
and the Mahometan world."—DR. JOHNSON.
"Motion recollected in tranquillity."—WORDSWORTH (very nearly).
CONTENTS
INDIA
NOISELESS FEET
THE SAHIB
THE PASSING SHOW
INDIA'S BIRDS
THE TOWERS OF SILENCE
THE GARLANDS
DELHI
A DAY'S HAWKING
NEW, OR IMPERIAL, DELHI
THE DIVERS
THE ROPE TRICK
AGRA AND FATEHPUR-SIKRI
LUCKNOW
A TIGER
THE SACRED CITY
CALCUTTA
ROSE AYLMER
JOB AND JOE
EXIT
JAPAN
INTRODUCTORY
THE LITTLE LAND
THE RICE FIELDS
SURFACE MATERIALISM
FIRST GLIMPSE OF FUJI
TWO FUNERALS
THE LITTLE GEISHA
MANNERS
THE PLAY
MYANOSHITA
AMERICA
DEMOCRACY AT HOME
SAN FRANCISCO
ROADS GOOD AND BAD
UNIVERSITIES, LOVE AND PRONUNCIATION
FIRST SIGNS OF PROHIBITION
R.L.S.
STORIES AND HUMOURISTS
THE CARS
CHICAGO
THE MOVIES
THE AMERICAN FACE
PROHIBITION AGAIN
THE BALL GAME
SKYSCRAPERS
A PLEA FOR THE AQUARIUM
ENGLISH AND FRENCH INFLUENCES
SKY-SIGNS AND CONEY ISLAND
THE PRESS
TREASURES OF ART
MOUNT VERNON
VERS LIBRE
REVOLT
DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE
BOSTON
PHILADELPHIA
GENERAL REFLECTIONS
INDEX
INDIA
NOISELESS FEET
Although India is a land of walkers, there is no sound of footfalls. Most
of the feet are bare and all are silent: dark strangers overtake one like
ghosts.
Both in the cities and the country some one is always walking. There are
carts and motorcars, and on the roads about Delhi a curious service of
camel omnibuses, but most of the people walk, and they walk ever. In the
bazaars they walk in their thousands; on the long, dusty roads, miles from
anywhere, there are always a few, approaching or receding.
It is odd that the only occasion on which Indians break from their walk
into a run or a trot is when they are bearers at a funeral, or have an
unusually heavy head-load, or carry a piano. Why there is so much
piano-carrying in Calcutta I cannot say, but the streets (as I feel now)
have no commoner spectacle than six or eight merry, half-naked fellows,
trotting along, laughing and jesting under their burden, all with an odd,
swinging movement of the arms.
One of one's earliest impressions of the Indians is that their hands are
inadequate. They suggest no power.
Not only is there always some one walking, but there is always some one
resting. They repose at full length wherever the need for sleep takes
them; or they sit with pointed knees. Coming from England one is struck by
so much inertness; for though the English labourer can be lazy enough he
usually rests on his feet, leaning against walls: if he is a land
labourer, leaning with his back to the support; if he follows the sea,
leaning on his stomach.
It was interesting to pass on from India and its prostrate philosophers
with their infinite capacity for taking naps, to Japan, where there seems
to be neither time nor space for idlers. Whereas in India one has
continually to turn aside in order not to step upon a sleeping figure—the
footpath being a favourite dormitory—in Japan no one is ever doing
nothing, and no one appears to be weary or poor.
India, save for a few native politicians and agitators, strikes one as a
land destitute of ambition. In the cities there are infrequent signs of
progress; in the country none. The peasants support life on as little as
they can, they rest as much as possible and their carts and implements are
prehistoric. They may believe in their gods, but fatalism is their true
religion. How little they can be affected by civilisation I learned from a
tiny settlement of bush-dwellers not twenty miles from Bombay, close to
that beautiful lake which has been transformed into a reservoir, where
bows and arrows are still the only weapons and rats are a staple food. And
in an hour's time, in a car, one could be telephoning one's friends or
watching a cinema!
THE SAHIB
I did not have to wait to reach India for that great and exciting moment
when one is first called "Sahib." I was addressed as "Sahib," to my
mingled pride and confusion, at Marseilles, by an attendant on the steamer
which I joined there. Later I grew accustomed to it, although never, I
hope, blasé; but to the end my bearer fascinated me by alluding to me as
Master—not directly, but obliquely: impersonally, as though it were
some other person that I knew, who was always with me, an alter ego
who could not answer for himself: "Would Master like this or that?" "At
what time did Master wish to be called?"
And then the beautiful "Salaam"!
I was sorry for the English doomed to become so used to Eastern deference
that they cease to be thrilled.
THE PASSING SHOW
It is difficult for a stranger to India, especially when paying only a
brief visit, to lose the impression that he is at an exhibition—in a
section of a World's Fair. How long it takes for this delusion to wear off
I cannot say. All I can say is that seven weeks are not enough. And never
does one feel it more than in the bazaar, where movement is incessant and
humanity is so packed and costumes are so diverse, and where the
suggestion of the exhibition is of course heightened by the merchants and
the stalls. What one misses is any vantage point—anything resembling
a chair at the Café de la Paix in Paris, for instance—where one may
sit at ease and watch the wonderful changing spectacle going past. There
are in Indian cities no such places. To observe the life of the bazaar
closely and be unobserved is almost impossible.
It would be extraordinarily interesting to sit there, beside some
well-informed Anglo-Indian or Indo-Anglian, and learn all the minutiæ of
caste and be told who and what everybody was: what the different ochre
marks signified on the Hindu foreheads; what this man did for a living,
and that; and so forth. Even without such an informant I was never tired
of drifting about the native quarters in whatever city I found myself and
watching the curiously leisurely and detached commercial methods of the
dealers—the money lenders reclining on their couches; the pearl
merchants with their palms full of the little desirable jewels; the
silversmiths hammering; the tailors cross-legged; the whole Arabian Nights
pageant. All the shops seem to be overstaffed, unless an element of
detached inquisitiveness is essential to business in the East. No
transaction is complete without a few watchful spectators, usually youths,
who apparently are employed by the establishment for the sole purpose of
exhibiting curiosity.
I picked up a few odds and ends of information, by degrees, but only the
more obvious: such as that the slight shaving of the Mohammedan's upper
lip is to remove any impediment to the utterance of the name of Allah;
that the red-dyed beards are a record that their wearers have made the
pilgrimage to Mecca; that the respirator often worn by the Jains is to
prevent the death of even a fly in inhalation. I was shown a Jain woman
carefully emptying a piece of wood with holes in it into the road, each
hole containing a louse which had crawled there during the night but must
not be killed. The Jains adore every living creature; the Hindus chiefly
the cow. As for this divinity, she drifts about the cities as though they
were built for her, and one sees the passers-by touching her, hoping for
sanctity or a blessing. A certain sex inequality is, however, only too
noticeable, and particularly in and about Bombay, where the bullock cart
is so common—the bullock receiving little but blows and execration
from his drivers.
The sacred pigeon is also happy in Bombay, being fed copiously all day
long; and I visited there a Hindu sanctuary, called the Pingheripole, for
every kind of animal—a Home of Rest or Asylum—where even
pariah dogs are fed and protected.
I was told early of certain things one must not do: such as saluting with
the left hand, which is the dishonourable one of the pair, and refraining
carefully, when in a temple or mosque, from touching anything at all,
because for an unbeliever to touch is to desecrate. I was told also that a
Mohammedan grave always gives one the points of the compass, because the
body is buried north and south with the head at the north, turned towards
Mecca. The Hindus have no graves.
In India the Occidental, especially if coming from France as I did, is
struck by the absence of any out-of-door communion between men and women.
In the street men are with men, women with women. Most women lower their
eyes as a man approaches, although when the woman is a Mohammedan and
young one is often conscious of a bright black glance through the veil.
There is no public fondling, nothing like the familiar demonstrations of
affection that we are accustomed to in Paris and London (more so during
the War and since) and in New York. Nothing so offends and surprises the
Indian as this want of restraint and shame on our part, and in Japan I
learned that the Japanese share the Indian view.
It seemed to me that the chewing of the betel-nut is more prevalent in
Bombay than elsewhere. One sees it all over India; everywhere are moving
jaws with red juice trickling; but in Bombay there are more vendors of the
rolled-up leaves and more crimson splashes on pavement and wall. It is an
unpleasant habit, but there is no doubt that teeth are ultimately the
whiter for it. Even though I was instructed in the art of betel-nut
chewing by an Indian gentleman of world-wide fame in the cricket field,
from whom I would willingly learn anything, I could not endure the
experience.
Most nations, I suppose, look upon the dances of other nations with a
certain perplexity. Such glimpses, for example, as I had in America of the
movement known as the Shimmie Shake filled me with alarm, while Orientals
have been known to display boredom at the Russian Ballet. Personally I
adore the Russian Ballet, but I found the Nautch very fatiguing. It is at
once too long and too monotonous, but I dare say that if one could follow
the words of the accompanying songs, or cantillations, the result might be
more entertaining. That would not, however, improve the actual dancing, in
which I was disappointed. In Japan, on the other hand, I succumbed
completely to the odd, hypnotic mechanism of the Geisha, the
accompaniments to which are more varied, or more acceptable to my ear,
than the Indian music. But I shall always remember the sounds of the
distant, approaching or receding, snake-charmers' piping, heard through
the heat, as it so often is on Sundays in Calcutta. To my inward ear that
is India's typical melody; and it has relationship to the Punch and Judy
allurement of our childhood.
It was in Bombay that I saw my first fakir, and in Harrison Road,
Calcutta, my last. There had been so long a series in between that I was
able to confirm my first impression. I can now, therefore, generalise
safely when saying that all these strange creatures resemble a blend of
Tolstoi and Mr. Bernard Shaw. Imagine such a hybrid, naked save for a loin
cloth, and smeared all over with dust, and you have a holy man in the
East. The Harrison Road fakir, who passed on his way along the crowded
pavement unconcerned and practically unobserved, was white with ashes and
was beating a piece of iron as a wayward child might be doing. He was
followed by a boy, but no effort was made to collect alms. It is true
philosophy to be prepared to live in such a state of simplicity. Most of
the problems of life would dissolve and vanish if one could reduce one's
needs to the frugality of a fakir. I have thought often of him since I
returned, in London, to all the arrears of work and duty and the
liabilities that accumulate during a long holiday; but never more so than
when confronted by a Peace-time tailor's bill.
INDIA'S BIRDS
One of the first peculiarities of Bombay that I noticed and never lost
sight of was the kites. The city by day is never without these spies,
these sentries. From dawn to dusk the great unresting birds are sailing
over it, silent and vigilant. Whenever you look up, there they are,
criss-crossing in the sky, swooping and swerving and watching. After a
while one begins to be nervous: it is disquieting to be so continually
under inspection. Now and then they quarrel and even fight: now and then
one will descend with a rush and rise carrying a rat or other delicacy in
its claws; but these interruptions of the pattern are only momentary. For
the rest of the time they swirl and circle and never cease to watch.
Bombay also has its predatory crows, who are so bold that it is unsafe to
leave any bright article on the veranda table. Spectacles, for example,
set up a longing in their hearts which they make no effort to control. But
these birds are everywhere. At a wayside station just outside Calcutta, in
the early morning, the passengers all had tea, and when it was finished
and the trays were laid on the platform, I watched the crows, who were
perfectly aware of this custom and had been approaching nearer and nearer
as we drank, dart swiftly to the sugar basins and carry off the lumps that
remained. The crow, however, is, comparatively speaking, a human being;
the kite is something alien and a cause of fear, and the traveller in
India never loses him. His eye is as coldly attentive to Calcutta as to
Bombay.
It is, of course, the indigenous birds of a country that emphasise its
foreignness far more than its people. People can travel. Turbaned heads
are, for example, not unknown in England; but to have green parrots with
long tails flitting among the trees, as they used to flit in my host's
garden in Bombay, is to be in India beyond question. At Raisina we had
mynahs and the babblers, or "Seven Sisters," in great profusion, and also
the King Crow with his imposing tail; while the little striped squirrels
were everywhere. These merry restless little rodents do more than run and
scamper and leap: they seem to be positively lifted into space by their
tails. Their stripes (as every one knows) came directly from the hand of
God, recording for ever how, on the day of creation, He stroked them by
way of approval.
No Indian bird gave me so much pleasure to watch as the speckled
kingfishers, which I saw at their best on the Jumna at Okhla. They poise
in the air above the water with their long bills pointed downwards at a
right-angle to their fluttering bodies, searching the depths for their
prey; and then they drop with the quickness of thought into the stream.
The other kingfisher—coloured like ours but bigger—who waits
on an overhanging branch, I saw too, but the evolutions of the hovering
variety were more absorbing.
When one is travelling by road, the birds that most attract the notice are
the peacocks and the giant cranes; while wherever there are cattle in any
numbers there are the white paddy birds, feeding on their backs—the
birds from which the osprey plumes are obtained. One sees, too, many kinds
of eagle and hawk. In fact, the ornithologist can never be dull in this
country.
Wild animals I had few opportunities to observe, although a mongoose at
Raisina gave me a very amusing ten minutes. At Raisina, also, the jackals
came close to the house at night; and on an early morning ride in a
motorcar to Agra we passed a wolf, and a little later were most impudently
raced and outdistanced by a blackbuck, who, instead of bolting into
security at the sight or sound of man, ran, or rather, advanced—for
his progress is mysterious and magical—beside us for some forty
yards and then,—with a laugh, put on extra speed (we were doing
perhaps thirty miles an hour) and disappeared ahead. All about Muttra we
dispersed monkeys up the trees and into the bushes as we approached. Next
to the parrots it is the monkeys that most convince the traveller that he
is in a strange tropical land. And the flying foxes. Nothing is more
strange than a tree full of these creatures sleeping pendant by day, or
their silent swift black movements by night.
I saw no snakes wild, but in the Bacteriological Laboratory at Parel in
Bombay, which Lt.-Col. Glen Liston controls with so much zeal and
resourcefulness, I was shown the process by which the antidotes to snake
poisoning are prepared, for dispersion through the country. A cobra or
black snake is released from his cage and fixed by the attendant with a
stick pressed on his neck a little below the head. The snake is then
firmly and safely held just above this point between the finger and thumb,
and a tumbler, with a piece of flannel round its edge, is proffered to it
to bite. As the snake bites, a clear yellow fluid, like strained honey in
colour and thickness, flows into the glass from the poison fangs. This
poison is later injected in small doses into the veins of horses kept
carefully for the purpose, and then, in due course, the blood of the
horses is tapped in order to make the anti-toxin. Wonderful are the ways
of science! The Laboratory is also the headquarters of the Government's
constant campaign against malaria and guinea worm, typhoid and cholera,
and, in a smaller degree, hydrophobia. But nothing, I should guess, would
ever get sanitary sense into India, except in almost negligible patches.
THE TOWERS OF SILENCE
The Parsees have made Bombay their own, more surely even than the Scotch
possess Calcutta. Numerically very weak, they are long-headed and
far-sighted beyond any Indian and are better qualified to traffick and to
control. All the cotton mills are theirs, and theirs the finest houses in
the most beautiful sites. When that conflict begins between the Hindus and
the Mohammedans which will render India a waste and a shambles, it is the
Parsees who will occupy the high places—until a more powerful
conqueror arrives.
Bombay has no more curious sight than the Towers of Silence, the Parsee
cemetery; and one of the first questions that one is asked is if one has
visited them. But when the time came for me to ascend those sinister steps
on Malabar Hill I need hardly say that my companion was a many years'
resident of Bombay who, although he had long intended to go there, had
hitherto neglected his opportunities. Throughout my travels I was, it is
pleasant to think, in this way the cause of more sightseeing in others
than they might ever have suffered. To give but one other instance typical
of many—I saw Faneuil Hall in Boston in the company of a Bostonian
some thirty years of age, whose office was within a few yards of this
historic and very interesting building, and whose business is more
intimately associated with culture than any other, but who had never
before crossed the threshold.
The Towers of Silence, which are situated in a very beautiful park, with
little temples among the trees and flowers, consist of five circular
buildings, a model of one of which is displayed to visitors. Inside the
tower is an iron grating on which the naked corpses are laid, and no
sooner are they there than the awaiting vultures descend and consume the
flesh. I saw these grisly birds sitting expectantly in rows on the coping
of the towers, and the sight was almost too gruesome. Such is their
voracity that the body is a skeleton in an hour or so. The Parsees choose
this method of dissolution because since they worship fire they must not
ask it to demean itself with the dead; and both earth and water they hold
also too sacred to use for burial. Hence this strange and—at the
first blush—repellant compromise. The sight of the cemetery that
awaits us in England is rarely cheering, but if to that cemetery were
attached a regiment of cruel and hideous birds of prey we should shudder
indeed. Whether the Parsees shudder I cannot say, but they give no sign of
it. They build their palaces in full view of these terrible Towers, pass,
on their way to dinner parties, luxuriously in Rolls-Royces beside the
trees where the vultures roost, and generally behave themselves as if this
were the best possible of worlds and the only one. And I think they are
wise.
Oriental apathy, or, at any rate, unruffled receptiveness, may carry its
owner very far, and yet if these vultures cause no misgivings, no chills
at the heart, I shall be surprised. As for those olive-skinned Parsee
girls, with the long oval faces and the lustrous eyes—how must it
strike them?
It was not till I went to the caves of Elephanta that I saw vultures in
their marvellous flight. It is here that they breed, and the sky was full
of them at an incredible distance up, resting on their great wings against
the wind, circling and deploying. At this height they are magnificent. But
seen at close quarters they are horrible, revolting. On a day's hunting
which I shall describe later I was in at the death of a gond, or
swamp-deer, at about noon, and we returned for the carcase about three
hours later, only to find it surrounded by some hundreds of these birds
tearing at it in a kind of frenzy of gluttony. They were not in the least
disconcerted by our approach, and not until the bearers had taken sticks
to them would they leave. The heavy half-gorged flapping of a vulture's
wings as it settles itself to a new aspect of its repast is the most
disgusting sight I have seen.
To revert to the Towers of Silence, one is brought very near to death
everywhere in the East. We have our funeral corteges at home, with
sufficient frequency, but they do not emphasize the thought of the
necessary end of all things as do the swathed corpses that one meets so
often being carried through the streets, on their way to this or that
burning place. In Bombay I met several every day, with their bearers and
followers all in white, and all moving with the curious trot that seems to
be reserved for such obsequies. There were always, also, during my stay,
new supplies of fire-wood outside the great Hindu burning ground in
Queen's Road; and yet no epidemic was raging; the city was normal save for
a strike of mill-hands. It is true that I met wedding parties almost
equally often; but in India a wedding party is not, as with us, a
suggestion of new life to replace the dead, for the brides so often are
infants.
One of the differences between the poor of London and the poor of India
may be noticed here. In the East-End a funeral is considered to be a
failure unless its cost is out of all proportion to the survivors' means,
while a wedding is a matter of a few shillings; whereas in India a funeral
is a simple ceremony, to be hurried over, while the wedding festivities
last for weeks and often plunge the family into debts from which they
never recover.
THE GARLANDS
The selective processes of the memory are very curious. It has been
decreed that one of my most vivid recollections of Bombay should be that
of the embarrassment and half-amused self-consciousness of an American
business man on the platform of the railway station for Delhi. Having
completed his negotiatory visit he was being speeded on his way by the
native staff of the firm, who had hung him with garlands like a
sacrificial bull. In the Crawford Market I had watched the florists at
work tearing the blossoms from a kind of frangipani known as the Temple
Flower, in order to string them tightly into chains; and now and again in
the streets one came upon people wearing them; but to find a shrewd and
portly commercial American thus bedecked was a shock. As it happened, he
was to share my compartment, and on entering, just before the train
started, he apologised very heartily for importing so much heavy perfume
into the atmosphere, but begged to be excused because it was the custom of
the country and he didn't like to hurt anyone's feelings. He then stood at
the door, waving farewells, and directly the line took a bend flung the
wreaths out of the window. I was glad of his company, for in addition to
these floral offerings his Bombay associates had provided him with a
barrel of the best oranges that ever were grown—sufficient for a
battalion—and these we consumed at brief intervals all the way to
Delhi.
DELHI
"If you can be in India only so short a time as seven weeks," said an
artist friend of mine—and among his pictures is a sombre
representation of the big sacred bull that grazes under the walls of Delhi
Fort—"why not stay in Delhi all the while? You will then learn far
more of India than by rushing about." I think he was right, although it
was not feasible to accept the advice. For Delhi has so much; it has,
first and foremost, the Fort; it has the Jama Masjid, that immense mosque
where on Fridays at one o'clock may be seen Mohammedans of every age
wearing every hue, thousands worshipping as one; it has the ancient
capitals scattered about the country around it; it has signs and memories
of the Mutiny; it has delectable English residences; and it has the Chadni
Chauk, the long main street with all its curious buildings and crowds and
countless tributary alleys, every one of which is the East crystallised,
every one of which has its white walls, its decorative doorways, its
loiterers, its beggars, its artificers, and its defiance of the bogey,
Progress.
Another thing: in January, Delhi, before the sun is high and after he has
sunk, is cool and bracing.
But, most of all, Delhi is interesting because it was the very centre of
the Mogul dominance, and when one has become immersed in the story of the
great rulers, from Babar to Aurungzebe, one thinks of most other history
as insipid. Of Babar, who reigned from 1526 to 1530, I saw no trace in
India; but his son Humayun (1530-1556) built Indrapat, which is just
outside the walls of Delhi, and he lies close by in the beautiful
mausoleum that bears his name. Humayun's son, Akbar (1556-1605), preferred
Agra to Delhi; nor was Jahangir (1605-1627), who succeeded Akbar, a great
builder hereabout; but with Shah Jahan (1627-1658), Jahangir's son, came
the present Delhi's golden age. He it was who built the Jama Masjid, the
great mosque set commandingly on a mound and gained by magnificent flights
of steps. To the traveller approaching the city from any direction the two
graceful minarets of the mosque stand for Delhi. It was Shah Jahan, price
of Mogul builders, who decreed also the palace in the Fort, to say nothing
(at the moment) of the Taj Mahal at Agra; while two of his daughters,
Jahanara, and Roshanara, that naughty Begam, enriched Delhi too, the
little pavilion in the Gardens that bear Roshanara's name being a gem.
Wandering among these architectural delights, now empty and under alien
protection, it is difficult to believe that their period was as recent as
Cromwell and Milton. But in India the sense of chronology vanishes.
After Shah Jahan came his crafty son, Aurungzebe, who succeeded in keeping
his empire together until 1707, and with him the grandeur of the Grand
Moguls waned and after him ceased to be, although not until the Mutiny was
their rule extinguished. As I have just said, in India the sense of
chronology vanishes, or goes astray, and it is with a start that one is
confronted, in the Museum in Delhi Fort, by a photograph of the last
Mogul!
In Bombay, during my wakeful moments in the hottest part of the day, I had
passed the time and imbibed instruction by reading the three delightful
books of the late E. H. Aitken, who called himself "Eha"—"Behind the
Bungalow," "The Tribes on My Frontier" and "A Naturalist on the Prowl." No
more amusing and kindly studies of the fauna, flora and human inhabitants
of a country can have ever been written than these; and I can suggest, to
the domestically curious mind, no better preparation for a visit to India.
But at Raisina, when the cool evenings set in and it was pleasant to get
near the wood fire, I took to history and revelled in the story of the
Moguls as told by many authorities, but most entertainingly perhaps by
Tavernier, the French adventurer who took service under Aurungzebe. If any
one wants to know what Delhi was like in the seventeenth century during
Aurungzebe's long reign, and how the daily life in the Palace went, and
would learn more of the power and autocracy and splendour and cruelty of
the Grand Moguls, let him get Tavernier's record. If once I began to quote
from it I should never stop; and therefore I pass on, merely remarking
that when you have finished the travels of M. Tavernier, the travels of M.
Bernier, another contemporary French observer, await you. And I hold you
to be envied.
The Palace in the Fort is now but a fraction of what it was in the time of
Aurungzebe and his father, but enough remains to enable the imaginative
mind to reconstruct the past, especially if one has read my two annalists.
One of Bernier's most vivid passages describes the Diwan-i-Am, or Hall of
Public Audience, the building to which, after leaving the modern military
part of the Fort, one first comes, where the Moguls sat in state during a
durbar, and painted and gilded elephants, richly draped, took part in the
obeisances. Next comes the Hall of Private Audiences, where the Peacock
Throne once stood. It has now vanished, but in its day it was one of the
wonders of the world, the tails of the two guardian peacocks being
composed of precious stones and the throne itself being of jewelled gold.
It was for this that one of Shah Jahan's poets wrote an inscription in
which we find such lines as—
By the order of the Emperor the azure of Heaven
was exhausted on its decoration....
The world had become so short of gold on account of
its use in the throne that the purse of the Earth
was empty of treasure....
On a dark night, by the lustre of its rubies and pearls
it can lend stars to a hundred skies....
That was right enough, no doubt, but when our poet went on to say,
As long as a trace remains of existence and space
Shah Jahan shall continue to sit on this throne,
we feel that he was unwise. Such pronouncements can be tested. As it
happened, Shah Jahan was destined, very shortly after the poem was
written, to be removed into captivity by his son, and the rest of his
unhappy life was spent in a prison at Agra. On each end wall of the Hall
of Private Audience is the famous couplet,—
If there is a Paradise on the face of the earth,
It is this, Oh! it is this, Oh! it is this.
I think of the garden and palace of Delhi Fort as the loveliest spot in
India. Not the most beautiful, not the most impressive; but the loveliest.
The Taj Mahal has a greater beauty; the ruined city of Fatehpur-Sikri has
a greater dignity; but for the perfection of domestic regality in design
and material and workmanship, this marble home and mosque and accompanying
garden and terrace could not be excelled. After the Halls of Audience we
come to the seraglio and accompanying buildings, where everything is
perfect and nothing is on the grand scale. The Pearl Mosque could hardly
be smaller; and it is as pure and fresh as a lotus. There is a series of
apartments all in white marble (with inlayings of gold and the most
delicately pierced marble gratings) through which a stream of water used
to run (and it ran again at the Coronation Durbar in 1911, when the Royal
Baths were again made to "function") that must be one of the most magical
of the works of man. Every inch is charming and distinguished. All these
rooms are built along the high wall which in the time of Shah Jahan and
his many lady loves was washed by the Jumna. But to-day the river has
receded and a broad strip of grass intervenes.
A DAY'S HAWKING
One of my best Indian days was that on which Colonel Sir Umar Hayat Khan
took us out a-hawking. Sir Umar is himself something of a hawk—an
impressive figure in his great turban with long streamers, his keen
aquiline features and blackest of hair. All sport comes naturally to him,
whether hunting or shooting, pig-sticking, coursing or falconry; and the
Great War found him with a sportsman's eagerness to rush into the fray,
where he distinguished himself notably.
We found this gallant chieftain in the midst of his retainers on the
further bank of the Jumna, at the end of the long bridge. Here the plains
begin—miles of fields of stubble, with here and there a tree and
here and there a pool or marsh, as far as eye can reach, an ancient walled
city in the near distance being almost the only excrescence. Between the
river and this city was our hunting ground.
With the exception of Sir Umar, two of his friends and ourselves, the
company was on foot; and nothing more like the middle ages did I ever see.
The retainers were in every kind of costume, one having an old pink coat
and one a green; one leading a couple of greyhounds in case we put up a
hare; others carrying guns (for we were prepared for all); while the chief
falconer and his assistants had their hawks on their wrists, and one odd
old fellow was provided with a net, in which a captive live hawk was to
flutter and struggle to attract his hereditary foes, the little birds,
who, deeming him unable to hit back, were to swarm down to deride and defy
and be caught in the meshes.
I may say at once that hawking, particularly in this form, does not give
me much pleasure. There is something magnificent in the flight of the
falcon when it is released and flung towards its prey, but the odds are
too heavy in its favour and the whimperings of the doomed quarry strike a
chill in the heart. We flew our hawks at duck and plovers, and missed
none. Often the first swoop failed, but the deadly implacable pursuer was
instantly ready to swoop again, and rarely was a third manoeuvre
necessary. Man, under the influence of the excitement of the chase, is the
same all the world over, and there was no difference between these Indians
moving swiftly to intervene between the hawk and its stricken prey and an
English boy running to retrieve his rabbit. Their animation and triumph—even
their shouts and cries—were alike.
And so we crossed field after field on our gentle steeds—and no one
admires gentleness in a horse more than I—stopping only to watch
another tragedy of the air, or to look across the river to Delhi and see
the Fort under new conditions. All this country I had so often looked down
upon from those high massive walls, standing in one of the lovely windows
of Shah Jahan's earthly paradise; and now the scene was reversed, and I
began to take more delight in it than in the sport. But at a pond to which
we next came there was enacted a drama so absorbing that everything else
was forgotten, even the heat of the sun.
Upon this pond were three wild-duck at which a falcon was instantly flown.
For a while, however, they kept their presence of mind and refused to
leave the water—diving beneath the surface at the moment that the
enemy was within a foot of them. On went the hawk, in its terrible, cruel
onset, and up came the ducks, all ready to repeat these tactics when it
turned and attacked again. But on one of the party (I swear it was not I),
in order to assist the hawk, firing his gun, two of the ducks became
panic-stricken and left the water, only of course to be quickly destroyed.
It was on the hawk's return journey to the pond to make sure of the third
duck that I saw for the first time in my life—and I hope the last—the
expression on the countenance of these terrible birds in the execution of
their duty: more than the mere execution of duty, the determination to
have no more nonsense, to put an end to anything so monstrous as
self-protection in others; for my horse being directly in the way, he flew
under its neck and for a moment I thought that he was confusing me with
the desired mallard. Nothing more merciless or purposeful did I ever see.
Then began a really heroic struggle on the part of the victim. He timed
his dives to perfection, and escaped so often that the spirit of chivalry
would have decreed a truce. But blood had been tasted, and, the desire
being for more, the guns were again discharged. Not even they, however,
could divert the duck from his intention of saving his life, and he dived
away from the shot, too.
It was at this moment that assistance to the gallant little bird arrived—not
from man, who was past all decency, but from brother feathers. Out of a
clear sky suddenly appeared two tern, dazzling in their whiteness, and
these did all in their power to infuriate the hawk and lure him from the
water. They flew round him and over him; they called him names; they said
he was a bully and that all of us (which was true) ought to be ashamed of
ourselves; they daunted and challenged and attacked. But the enemy was too
strong for them. A fusillade drove them off, and once again we were free
to consider the case of the duck, who was still swimming anxiously about,
hoping against hope. More shots were fired, one of the boys waded in with
a stick, and the dogs were added to the assault; and in the face of so
determined a bombardment the poor little creature at last flew up, to be
struck down within a few seconds by the insatiable avenger.
That was the crowning event of the afternoon. Thereafter we had only small
successes, and some very pronounced failures when, as happened several
times, a bird flew for safety through a tree, and the hawk, following, was
held up amid the branches. One of the birds thus to escape was a blue jay
of brilliant beauty. We also got some hares. And then we loitered back
under the yellowing sky, and Sir Umar Hayat Khan ceased suddenly to be a
foe of fur and feathers and became a poet, talking of sunsets in India and
in England as though the appreciation of tender beauty were his only
delight.
NEW, OR IMPERIAL, DELHI
There have been seven Delhis; and it required no little courage to
establish a new one—the Imperial capital—actually within sight
of most of them; but the courage was forthcoming. Originally the position
was to be to the north of the present city, where the Coronation Durbar
spread its canvas, but Raisina was found to be healthier, and it is there,
some five miles to the south-west, that the new palaces are rising from
the rock. Fatehpur-Sikri is the only city with which the New Delhi can be
compared; but not Akbar himself could devise it on a nobler scale. Akbar's
centralising gift and Napoleon's spacious views may be said to combine
here, the long avenues having kinship with the Champs Elysées, and
Government House and the Secretariat on the great rocky plateau at Raisina
corresponding to the palace on Fatehpur-Sikri's highest point. The
splendour and the imagination which designed the lay-out of Imperial Delhi
cannot be over-praised, and under the hands of Sir Edwin Lutyens and Mr.
Herbert Baker some wonderful buildings are coming to life. The city, since
it is several square miles in extent, cannot be finished for some years,
but it may be ready to be the seat of Government as soon as 1924.
As I have said, the old Delhis are all about the new one. On the Grand
Trunk road out of Delhi proper, which goes to Muttra and Agra, you pass,
very quickly, on the left, the remains of Firozabad, the capital of Firoz
Shah in the later thirteenth century. Two or three miles further on is
Indrapat on its hill overlooking the Jumna, surrounded by lofty walls. It
is as modern as the sixteenth century, but is now in ruins. At Indrapat
reigned Humayun, the son of the mighty Babar (who on his conquering way to
Delhi had swum every river in advance of his army) and the father of the
mighty Akbar. I loitered long within Indrapat's massive walls, which are
now given up to a few attendants and an occasional visitor, and like all
the monuments around Delhi are most carefully conserved under the Act for
that purpose, which was not the least of Lord Curzon's Viceregal
achievements. Among the buildings which still stand, rising from the turf,
is Humayun's library. It was here that he met his end—one tradition
relating that he fell in the dark on his way to fetch a book, and another
that his purpose had been less intellectually amatory.
Another mile and we come, still just beside the Grand Trunk road, to
Humayun's Tomb, which stands in a vast garden where green parrots
continually chatter and pursue each other. There is something very
charming—a touch of the truest civilisation, if civilisation means
the art of living graciously—in the practice of the old Emperors and
rulers, of building their mausoleums during their lifetime and using them,
until their ultimate destiny was fulfilled, as pleasure resorts. To this
enchanting spot came Humayun and his ladies full of life, to be insouciant
and gay. Then, his hour striking, Humayun's happy retreat became Humayun's
Tomb. He died in 1556, when Queen Mary, in England, was persecuting
Protestants. The Tomb is in good repair and to the stranger to the East
who has not yet visited Agra and seen the Taj Mahal (which has a similar
ground plan), it is as beautiful as need be. Humayun's cenotaph, in plain
white marble, is in the very centre. Below, in the vault immediately
beneath it, are his remains. Other illustrious dust is here, too; and some
less illustrious, such as that of Humayun's barber, which reposes beneath
a dome of burning-blue tiles in a corner of the garden.
From the upper galleries of the Emperor's mausoleum the eye enjoys various
rich prospects—the valley of the Jumna pulsating in the heat, the
walls of the New Delhi at Raisina almost visibly growing, and, to the
north, Delhi itself, with the twin towers of the great mosque over all.
Down the Grand Trunk road, immediately below, are bullock wagons and
wayfarers, and here and there is a loaded camel. Across the road is a
curious little group of sacred buildings whither some of the wayfarers no
doubt are bent on a pilgrimage; for here is the shrine of the Saint
Nizam-ud-din Aulia, who worked miracles during his life and died during
the reign of our Edward II—in 1324.
On visiting his shrine (which involved the usual assumption of overshoes
to prevent our infidel leather from contaminating the floor), we fell,
after evading countless beggars and would-be guides, into the hands of a
kindly old man who pressed handfuls of little white nuts upon us and who
remains in my memory as the only independent Mussulman priest in India,
for he refused a tip. In this respect nothing could be more widely
separated than his conduct and that of the three priests of the Jama
Masjid in Delhi, who, discovering us on the wall, just before the Friday
service began, held up the service for several minutes while they
explained their schedule of gratuities—beginning with ten rupees for
the High Priest—and this after we had already provided for the
attendant who had supplied the overshoes and had led us to the point of
vantage! I thought how amusing it would be if a visitor to an English
cathedral—where money usually has to pass, as it is—were
surrounded by the Dean, Archdeacon, Canons and Minor Canons, with
outstretched hands, and had to buy his way to a sight of the altar,
according to the status of each. The spectacle would be as odd to us, as
it must be to the French or Italians—and even perhaps Americans—to
see a demand for an entrance fee on the Canterbury portals.
Were we to continue on the Grand Trunk road for a few miles, first
crossing a noble Mogul bridge, we should come to a little walled city,
Badapur, where a turning due west leads to another Delhi of the past,
Tughlakabad, and on to yet another, the remains of Lal Kot, where the
famous Minar soars to the sky.
One of the most pleasing effects of the New Delhi is the series of vistas
which the lay-out provides. It has been so arranged that many of the
avenues radiating from the central rock on which Government House and the
Secretariat are being set are closed at their distant ends by historic
buildings. Standing on the temporary tower which marks this centre one is
able to see in a few moments all the ruined cities that I have mentioned.
The Kutb Minar is the most important landmark in the far south, although
the eye rests most lovingly on the red and white comeliness of the tomb of
Safdar Jang in the middle distance—which, with Humayun's Tomb, makes
a triangle with the new Government House. Within that triangle are the
Lodi tombs, marking yet another period in the history of Delhi, the Lodis
being the rulers who early in the fifteenth century were defeated by
Babar.
The Kutb Minar enclosure, which is a large garden, where beautiful
masonry, flowers, trees and birds equally flourish, commemorates the
capture of Delhi by Muhammad bin Sam in 1193, the battle being directed by
his lieutenant, Kutb-ud-din. From that time until the Mutiny in 1857 Delhi
was under Mohammedan rule. One of the first acts of the conqueror was to
destroy the Hindu temple that stood here and erect the mosque that now
takes its place, and he then built the great tower known as the Kutb
Minar, or Tower of Victory, which ascends in diminishing red and white
storeys to a height of 235 feet, involving the inquisitive view-finder in
a climb of 379 steps. On the other side of the mosque are the beginnings
of a second tower, which, judging by the size of the base, was to have
risen to a still greater height, but it was abandoned after 150 feet. Its
purpose was to celebrate for ever the glory of the Emperor Ala-ud-din
(1296-1316).
In front of the mosque is the Iron Pillar which has been the cause of so
much perplexity both to antiquaries and chemists, and meat and drink to
Sanscrit scholars. The pillar has an inscription commemorating an early
monarch named Chandra who conquered Bengal in the fifth century, and it
must have been brought to this spot for re-erection. But its refusal to
rust, and the purity of its constituents, are its special merits. To me
the mysteries of iron pillars are without interest, and what I chiefly
remember of this remarkable pleasaunce is the exquisite stone carvings of
the ruined cloisters and the green parrots that play among the trees.
THE DIVERS
As we were leaving the Kutb after a late afternoon visit, my host and I
were hailed excitedly by an elderly man whose speech was incomprehensible,
but whose gestures indicated plainly enough that there was something
important up the hill. The line of least resistance being the natural one
in India, we allowed him to guide us, and came after a few minutes, among
the ruins of the citadel of Lal Kot, to one of those deep wells gained by
long flights of steps whither the ladies of the palaces used to resort in
the hottest weather. Evening was drawing on and the profundities of this
cavern were forbiddingly gloomy; nor was the scene rendered more alluring
by the presence of three white-bearded old men, almost stark naked and
leaner than greyhounds, who shivered and grimaced, and suggested nothing
so much as fugitives from the grave. They were, however, not only alive,
but athletically so, being professional divers who earned an exceedingly
uncomfortable living by dropping, feet first, from the highest point of
the building into the water eighty feet below.
One of them indicating his willingness—more than willingness,
eagerness—to perform this manoeuvre for two rupees, we agreed, and
placing us on a step from which the best view could be had, he fled along
the gallery to the top of the shaft, and after certain preliminary
movements, to indicate how perilous was the adventure, and how chilly the
evening, and how more than worth two rupees it was, he committed his body
to the operations of the law of gravity. We saw it through the apertures
in the shaft on its downward way and then heard the splash as it reached
the distant water, while a crowd of pigeons who had retired to roost among
the masonry dashed out and away. The diver emerged from the well and came
running up the steps towards us, while his companion scarecrows fled also
to the top of the shaft and one after the other dropped down, too; so that
in a minute or so we were surrounded by three old, dripping men, each
demanding two rupees. Useless to protest that we had desired but one of
them to perform: they pursued us into the open, and even clung to our
knees, and of course we paid—afterwards to learn that one rupee for
the lot was a lavish guerdon.
One meets with these divers continually, wherever there is a pool sacred
or otherwise; but some actually leap into the water and do not merely
drop. At the shrine of the Saint Nizam-ud-din, near Humayun's Tomb, I
found them—but there they were healthy-looking youths—and
again at Fatehpur-Sikri. But for this sporadic diving, the wrestling bouts
which are common everywhere, the Nautch and the jugglers, India seems to
have no pastimes.
THE ROPE TRICK
The returning traveller from India is besieged by questioners who want to
know all about the most famous of the jugglers' performances. In this
trick the magician flings a rope into the air, retaining one end in his
hand, and his boy climbs up it and disappears. I did not see it.
AGRA AND FATEHPUR-SIKRI
All the Indian cities that I saw seemed to cover an immense acreage,
partly because every modern house has its garden and compound. In a
country where land is cheap and servants are legion there need be no
congestion, and, so far, the Anglo-Indian knows little or nothing of the
embarrassments of dwellers in New York or London. To every one in India
falls naturally a little faithful company of assistants to oil the wheels
of life—groom, gardener, butler and so forth—and a spacious
dwelling-place to think of England in, and calculate the variable value of
the rupee, and wonder why the dickens So-and-so got his knighthood. Agra
seemed to me to be the most widespreading city of all; but very likely it
is not. In itself it is far from being the most interesting, but it has
one building of great beauty—the Pearl Mosque in the Fort—and
one building of such consummate beauty as to make it a place of pilgrimage
that no traveller would dare to avoid—the Taj Mahal. Whether or not
the Taj Mahal is the most enchanting work of architecture in the world I
leave it to more extensive travellers to say. To my eyes it has an
unearthly loveliness which I make no effort to pass on to others.
The Taj Mahal was built by that inspired friend of architecture, Shah
Jahan, as the tomb of the best beloved of his wives, Arjmand Banu, called
Mumtaz-i-Mahal or Pride of the Palace. There she lies, and there lies her
husband. I wonder how many of the travellers who stand entranced before
this mausoleum, in sunshine and at dusk or under the moon, and who have
not troubled about its history, realise that Giotto's Tower in Florence is
three centuries older, and St. Peter's in Rome antedates it by a little,
and St. Paul's Cathedral in London is only twenty or thirty years younger.
Yet so it is. In India one falls naturally into the way of thinking of
everything that is not of our own time as being of immense age, if not
prehistoric.
Opinions differ as to the respective beauties of Agra Fort and Delhi Fort,
but in so far as the enclosures themselves are considered I give my vote
unhesitatingly to Delhi. Yet when one thinks also of what can be seen from
the ramparts, then the palm goes instantly to Agra, for its view of the
Taj Mahal. It is tragic, walking here, to think of the last days of Shah
Jahan, who brought into being both the marble palace and the wonderful
Moti-Masjid or marble mosque. For in 1658 his son, Aurungzebe, deposed him
and for the rest of his life he was imprisoned in these walls.
His grandfather, Akbar, the other great Agra builder, was made of sterner
stuff. All Shah Jahan's creations—the Taj, the marble mosque, the
palaces both here and at Delhi, even the great Jama Masjid at Delhi,—have
a certain sensuous quality. They are not exactly decadent, but they
suggest sweetness rather than strength. The Empire had been won, and Shah
Jahan could indulge in luxury and ease. But Akbar had had to fight, and he
remained to the end a man of action, and we see his character reflected in
his stronghold Fatehpur-Sikri, which one visits from Agra and never
forgets. If I were asked to say which place in India most fascinated me
and touched the imagination I think I should name this dead city.
Akbar, the son of Babar, is my hero among the Moguls, and this was Akbar's
chosen home, until scarcity of water forced him to abandon it for Agra.
Akbar, the noblest of the great line of Moguls whose splendour ended in
1707 with the death of Aurungzebe, came to the throne in 1556, only eight
years before Shakespeare was born, and died in 1605, and it is interesting
to realise how recent were his times, the whole suggestion of
Fatehpur-Sikri being one of very remote antiquity. Yet when it was being
built so modern a masterpiece as Hamlet was being written and
played. Those interested in the Great Moguls ought really to visit
Fatehpur-Sikri before Delhi or Agra, because Akbar was the grandfather of
Shah Jahan. But there can be no such chronological wanderings in India.
Have we not already seen Humayun's Tomb, outside Delhi?—and Humayun
was Akbar's father.
They say the leopard and the jackal keep
The courts where Akbar gloried....
—this adaptation of FitzGerald's lines ran through my mind as we passed
from room to room and tower to tower of Fatehpur-Sikri. There is nothing
to compare with it, except perhaps Pompeii. And in that comparison one
realises how impossible it is at a hazard to date an Indian ruin, for,
as I have said, Fatehpur-Sikri is from the days of Elizabeth, while
Pompeii was destroyed in the first century, and yet Pompeii in many ways
seems less ancient.
The walls of Fatehpur-Sikri are seven miles round and the city rises to
the summits of two steep hills. It was on the higher one that Akbar set
his palace. Civilisation has run a railway through the lower levels; the
old high road still climbs the hill under the incredibly lofty walls of
the palace. The royal enclosure is divided into all the usual courtyards
and apartments, but they are on a grander scale. Also the architecture is
more mixed. Here is the swimming bath; here are the cool, dark rooms for
the ladies of the harem in the hottest days, with odd corners where Akbar
is said to have played hide-and-seek with them; here is the hall where
Akbar, who kept an open mind on religion, listened to, and disputed with,
dialecticians of varying creeds—himself seated in the middle, and
the doctrinaires in four pulpits around him; here is the Mint; here is the
house of the Turkish queen, with its elaborate carvings and decorations;
here is the girls' school, with a courtyard laid out for human chess, the
pieces being slave-girls; here is a noble mosque; here is the vast court
where the great father of his people administered justice, or what
approximated to it, and received homage. Here are the spreading stables
and riding school; here is even the tomb of a favourite elephant.
And here is the marble tomb of the Saint, the Shaikh Salim, whose holiness
brought it about that the Emperor became at last the father of a son—none
other than Jahangir. The shrine is visited even to this day by childless
wives, who tie shreds of their clothing to the lattice-work of a marble
window as an earnest of their maternal worthiness. It is visited also by
the devout for various purposes, among others by those whose horses are
sick and who nail votive horseshoes to the great gate. According to
tradition the mother of Jahangir was a Christian named Miriam, and her
house and garden may be seen, the house having the traces of a fresco
which by those who greatly wish it can be believed to represent the
Annunciation. Tradition, however, is probably wrong, and the princess was
from Jaipur and a true Mussulwoman.
From every height—and particularly from the Panch Mahal's roof—one
sees immense prospects and realises what a landmark the stronghold of
Fatehpur-Sikri must have been to the dwellers in the plains; but no view
is the equal of that which bursts on the astonished eyes at the great
north gateway, where all Rajputana is at one's feet. I do not pretend to
any exhaustive knowledge of the gates of the world, but I cannot believe
that there can be others set as this Gate of Victory is in the walls of a
palace, at the head of myriad steps, on the very top of a commanding rock
and opening on to thousands of square miles of country. Having seen the
amazing landscape one descends the steps to the road, and looking up is
astonished and exalted by seeing the gate from below. Nothing so grand has
ever come into my ken. The Taj Mahal is unforgettingly beautiful; but this
glorious gate in the sky has more at once to exercise and stimulate the
imagination and reward the vision.
On the gate are the words: "Isa (Jesus), on whom be peace, said: 'The
world is a bridge; pass over it, but build no house on it. The world
endures but an hour; spend it in devotion.'"
Having seen Fatehpur-Sikri, where Akbar lived and did more than build a
house, it is a natural course to return to Agra by way of Sikandra, where
he was buried. Sikandra is like the Taj Mahal and Humayun's Tomb in
general disposition—the mausoleum itself being in the centre of a
garden. But it is informed by a more sombre spirit. The burial-place of
the mighty Emperor is in the very heart of the building, gained by a
sloping passage lit by an attendant with a torch. Here was Akbar laid,
while high above, on the topmost stage of the mausoleum, in the full
light, is his cenotoph of marble, with the ninety-nine names of Allah
inscribed upon it. Near the cenotaph is a marble pillar on which once was
set the Koh-i-noor diamond, chief of Akbar's treasures. To-day it is part
of the English regalia.
LUCKNOW
The Ridge at Delhi is a sufficiently moving reminder of the Indian Mutiny;
but it is at Lucknow that the most poignant phases are re-enacted. At
Delhi may be seen, preserved for ever, the famous buildings which the
British succeeded in keeping—Hindu Rao's house, and the Observatory,
and Flagstaff Tower, the holding of which gave them victory; while in the
walls of the Kashmir Gate our cannon balls are still visibly imbedded.
There is also the statue of John Nicholson in the Kudsia Garden, and in
the little Museum of the Fort are countless souvenirs.
But Lucknow was the centre of the tragedy, and the Residency is preserved
as a sacred spot. Not even the recent Great War left in its track any more
poignant souvenirs of fortitude and disaster than the little burial ground
here, around the ruins of the church, where those who fell in the Mutiny
and those who fought or suffered in the Mutiny are lying. Long ago as it
was—1857—there are still a few vacant lots destined to be
filled. Chief of the tombstones that bear the honoured names is that of
the heroic defender who kept upon the topmost roof the banner of England
flying. It has the simple and touching inscription: "Here lies Henry
Lawrence, who tried to do his duty. May the Lord have mercy on his soul!"
In the Residency every step of the siege and relief can be followed. I was
there first on a serene evening after rain; and but for some tropical
trees it might have been an English scene. All that was lacking was a
thrush or blackbird's note; but the grass was as soft and green as at home
and the air as sweet. I shall long retain the memory of the contrast
between the incidents which give this enclosure its unique place in
history and the perfect calm brooding over all. And whenever any one calls
my attention to a Bougainvillaea I shall say, "Ah! But you should see the
Bougainvillaea in the Residency garden at Lucknow."
Everywhere that I went in India I found this noble lavish shrub in full
flower, but never wearing such a purple as at Lucknow. The next best was
in the Fort at Delhi. It was not till I reached Calcutta that I caught any
glimpse of the famous scarlet goldmore tree in leaf; but I saw enough to
realise how splendid must be the effect of an avenue of them. Bombay,
however, was rich in hedges of poinsettia, and they serve as an
introduction to the goldmore's glory.
Before leaving the Residency I should like to quote a passage from the
little brochure on the defence of Lucknow which Sir Harcourt Butler, the
Governor of the United Provinces, with characteristic thoughtfulness has
prepared for the use of his guests. "The visitor to the Residency," he
wrote, thinking evidently of a similar evening to that on which we visited
it, "who muses on the past and the future, may note that upon the spot
where the enemy's assault was hottest twin hospitals for Europeans and
Indians have been erected by Oudh's premier Taluqdar, the Maharaja of
Balrampur; and as the sun sets over the great city, lingering awhile on
the trim lawns and battered walls which link the present with the past, a
strong hope may come to him, like a distant call to prayer, that old
wounds may soon be healed, and old causes of disunion may disappear, and
that Englishmen and Indians, knit together by loyalty to their beloved
Sovereign, may be as brothers before the altar of the Empire, bearing the
Empire's burden, and sharing its inestimable privileges, and, it may be,
adding something not yet seen or dreamt of to its world-wide and
weather-beaten fame."
I left Lucknow with regret, and would advise any European with time to
spare, and the desire to be at once civilised and warm, to think seriously
of spending a winter there instead of in the illusory sunshine of the
Riviera, or the comparative barbarity of Algiers. The journey is longer,
but the charm of the place would repay.
A TIGER
To have the opportunity of hunting a tiger—on an elephant too—which
by a stroke of luck fell to me, is to experience the un-English character
of India at its fullest. Almost everything else could be reproduced
elsewhere—the palaces, the bazaars, the caravans, the mosques and
temples with their worshippers—but not the jungle, the Himalayas,
the vast swamps through which our elephants waded up to the Plimsoll, the
almost too painful ecstasies of the pursuit of an eater of man.
The master of the chase, who has many tigers to his name, was Sir Harcourt
Butler, whose hospitality is famous, so large and warm is it, and so
minute, and it was because he was not satisfied that the ordinary
diversions of the "Lucknow Week" were sufficient for his guests, that he
impulsively arranged a day's swamp-deer shooting on the borders of Nepaul.
The time was short, or of elephants there would have been seventy or more;
as it was, we were apologised to (there were only about six of us) for the
poverty of the supply, a mere five and twenty being obtainable. But to
these eyes, which had never seen more than six elephants at once, and
those in the captivity either of a zoo or a circus, a row of five and
twenty was astounding. They were waiting for us on the plain, at a spot
distant some score of miles by car, through improvised roads, from the
station, whither an all-night railway journey had borne us. The name of
the station, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten: there was no room in my
heated brain for such trifles; but I have forgotten nothing else.
It was after an hour and a half's drive in the cool and spicy early
morning air—between the fluttering rags on canes which told the
drivers how to steer—that we came suddenly in sight of some distant
tents and beside them an immense long dark inexplicable mass which through
the haze seemed now and then to move. As we drew nearer, this mass was
discerned to be a row of elephants assembled in line ready to salute the
Governor. The effect was more impressive and more Eastern than anything I
had seen. Grotesque too—for some had painted faces and gilded toes,
and not a few surveyed me with an expression in which the comic spirit was
too noticeable. Six or seven had howdahs, the rest blankets: those with
howdahs being for the party and its leader, Bam Bahadur, a noted shikaree;
and the others to carry provisions and bring back the spoil. On the neck
of each sat an impassive mahout.
To one to whom the pen is mightier than the gun and whose half a century's
bag contains only a few rabbits, a hedgehog and a moorhen, it is no
inconsiderable ordeal to be handed a repeating rifle and some dozens of
cartridges and be told that that is your elephant—the big one there,
with the red ochre on its forehead. To be on an elephant in the jungle
without the responsibilities of a lethal weapon would be sufficient thrill
for one day: but to be expected also to deal out death was too much. In
the company of others, however, one can do anything; and I gradually
ascended to the top, not, as the accomplished hunters did, by placing a
foot on the trunk and being swung heavenwards, but painfully, on a ladder;
by my side being a very keen Indian youth, the son of a minor chieftain,
who spoke English perfectly and was to instruct me in Nimrod's lore.
And so the procession started, and for a while discomfort set acutely in,
for the movement of a howdah is short and jerky, and it takes some time
both to adjust oneself to it and to lose the feeling that the elephant
sooner or later—and probably sooner—must trip and fall. But
the glory of the morning, the urgency of our progress, the novelty and
sublimity of the means of transport, the strangeness of the scene, and my
companion's speculations on the day's promise, overcame any personal want
of ease and I forgot myself in the universal. Our destination was a series
of marshes some six miles away, where the gonds—or swamp-deer—were
usually found, and we were divided up, some elephants, of which mine was
one, taking the left wing, with instructions on reaching a certain spot to
wait there for the deer who would move off in that direction; others
taking the right wing; and others beating up the middle.
We began with a trial of nervous stamina—for a river far down in its
bed below us almost immediately occurred, and this had to be crossed. I
abandoned all hope as the elephant descended the bank almost, as it
seemed, perpendicularly, and plunged into the water with an enormous
splash. But after he had squeeged through, extricating himself with a
gigantic wrench, the ground was level for a long while, and there was time
to look around and recollect one's fatalism. Far ahead in a blue mist were
the Himalayas. All about were unending fields, with here and there white
cattle grazing. Cranes stretched their necks above the grass; now and then
a herd of blackbuck (which were below our hunting ambitions) scampered
away; the sky was full of wild-duck and other water-fowl.
Of the hunting of the gond I should have something to say had not a
diversion occurred which relegated that lively and elusive creature to an
obscure place in the background. We had finished the beat, and most of us
had emerged from the swamp to higher ground where an open space, or
maidan, corresponding to a drive in an English preserve, but on the grand
scale, divided it from the jungle—all our thoughts being set upon
lunch—when suddenly across this open space passed a blur of yellow
and black only a few yards from the nearest elephant. It was so unexpected
and so quick that even the trained eyes of my companion were uncertain.
"Did you see?" he asked me in a voice of hushed and wondering awe.﹃Could
that have been a tiger?﹄I could not say, but I understood his excitement.
For the tiger is the king of Indian carnivorae, the most desired of all
game. Hunters date their lives by them: such and such a thing happened not
on the anniversary of their wedding day; not when their boy went to
Balliol; not when they received the K.C.I.E.; but in the year that they
shot this or that man-eater.
That a tiger had really chanced upon us we soon ascertained. Also that it
had been hit by the rifle on the first elephant and had disappeared into
the jungle, which consisted hereabouts of a grass some twenty feet high,
bleached by the sun.
A Council of War followed, and we were led by Bam Bahadur on a rounding-up
manoeuvre. According to his judgment the tiger would remain just inside
the cover, and our duty was therefore to make a wide detour and then
advance in as solid a semicircle as possible upon him and force him again
into the open, where the hunter who had inflicted the first wound was to
remain stationed. Accordingly all the rest of us entered the jungle in
single file, our elephants treading down the grass with their great
irresistible feet or wrenching it away with their invincible trunks. It
was now that the shikaree was feeling the elephant shortage. Had there
been seventy-five instead of only twenty-five, he said, all would be well:
he could then form a cordon such as no tiger might break through. For lack
of these others, when the time came to turn and advance upon our prey he
caused fires to be lighted here and there where the gaps were widest, so
that we forged onwards not only to the accompaniment of the shrill cries
of the mahouts and the noise of plunging and overwhelming elephants, but
to the fierce roar and crackle of burning stalks.
And thus, after an hour in this bewildering tangle, with the universe
filled with sound and strangeness, and the scent of wood smoke mingling
with the heat of the air, and the lust of the chase in our veins, we drew
to the spot where the animal was guessed to be hiding, and knew that the
guess was true by the demeanour of the elephants. Real danger had suddenly
entered into the adventure; and they showed it. A wounded tiger at bay can
do desperate things, and some of the elephants now refused to budge
forward any more, or complied only with terrified screams. Some of the
unarmed mahouts were also reluctant, and shouted their fears. But the
shikaree was inexorable. There the tiger was, and we must drive it out.
Closer and closer we drew, until every elephant's flank was pressing
against its neighbour, the outside ones being each at the edge of the open
space; in the middle of which was the twenty-fifth with its vigilant rider
standing tense with his rifle to his shoulder. The noise was now
deafening. Every one was uttering something, either to scare the tiger or
to encourage the elephants or his neighbour or possibly himself; while now
and then from the depths of the grass ahead of us came an outraged growl,
with more than a suggestion of contempt in it for such unsportsmanship as
could array twenty-five elephants, half a hundred men and a dozen rifles
against one inoffensive wild beast.
And then suddenly the grass waved, there was a rustle and rush and a snarl
of furious rage, and once again a blur of yellow and black crossed the
open space. Six or more reports rang out, and to my dying day I shall
remember, with mixed feelings, that one of these reports was the result of
pressure on a trigger applied by a finger belonging to me. That the tiger
was hit again—by other bullets than mine—was certain, but
instead of falling it disappeared into the jungle on the other side of the
maidan, and again we were destined to employ enclosing tactics. It was now
intensely hot, but nobody minded; and we were an hour and a half late for
lunch, but nobody minded: the chase was all! The phrase "out for blood"
had taken on its literal primitive meaning.
The second rounding-up was less simple than the first, because the tiger
had more choice of hiding places; but again our shikaree displayed his
wonderful intuition, and in about an hour we had ringed the creature in.
That this was to be the end was evident from the electrical purposefulness
which animated the old hands. The experienced shots were carefully
disposed, and my own peace of mind was not increased by the warning "If
the tiger leaps on your elephant, don't shoot"—the point being that
novices can be very wild with their rifles under such conditions. As the
question "What shall I do instead?" was lost in the tumult, the latter
stages of this momentous drama were seen by these eyes less steadily and
less whole than I could have wished. But I saw the tiger spring, growling,
at an elephant removed some four yards from mine, and I saw it driven back
by a shot from one of the native hunters. And then when, after another
period of anxious expectancy, it emerged again from the undergrowth, and
sprang towards our host, I saw him put two bullets into it almost
instantaneously; and the beautiful obstinate creature fell, never to rise
again.
THE SACRED CITY
The devout Hindu knows in Benares the height of ecstasy: but, if I am
typical, the European experiences there both discomfort and inquietude.
Nowhere else in India did I feel so foreign, so alien. To be of cool
Christian traditions and an Occidental, an inquisitive sightseer among
these fervent pilgrims intent upon their pious duties and rapt in
exaltation and unthinking inflexible belief, was in itself disconcerting,
almost to the point of shame; while the pilgrims were so remarkably of a
different world, a different era, that one felt lost.
This, however, is not all. India is never too sanitary, except where the
English are in their own strongholds, but Benares—at any rate the
parts which the tourist must visit—is least scrupulous in such
matters. The canonization of the cow must needs carry a penalty with it,
and Benares might be described as a sanctified byre without any labouring
Hercules in prospect. Godliness it may have, but cleanliness is very
distant. The streets, too, seem to be narrower and more congested than
those in any other city; so that it is often embarrassingly difficult to
treat the approaching ruminants with the respect due to them. Fortunately
they are seldom anything but mild and unaggressive. Part perplexed, part
inquisitive, and part contemptuous, they are met everywhere, while in one
of the temples in which the unbeliever may (to his great contentment) do
no more than stand at the entrance, they are frankly worshipped. In
another temple monkeys are revered too, careering about the walls and
courtyards and being fed by the curious and the devout.
Holiness is not only the peculiar characteristic of Benares: it is also
its staple industry. In the streets there is a shrine at every few feet,
while the shops where little lingams are for sale must be numbered by
hundreds.
The chief glory of Benares is, however, the Ganges, on one side of which
is the teeming sweltering city with its palaces and temples heaped high
for two or three miles, and bathers swarming at the river's edge; while
the other bank is flat and bare. A watering-place front on the ocean's
shore does not end more suddenly and completely. There is nothing that I
have seen with which to compare the north bank of the Ganges, with the
morning sun on its many-coloured façades and towers, but Venice. As one is
rowed slowly down the river it is of Venice that one instinctively thinks.
As in Venice, the palaces are of various colours, pink and red and yellow
and blue, and the sun has crumbled their façades in the same way. But
there is this difference—that over the Benares roofs the monkeys
scamper.
Gradually Venice is forgotten as the novel interest of the scene captures
one's whole attention. At each of the ghauts (a landing place or steps)
variegated masses of pilgrims—no matter how early the hour, and to
see them rightly one ought to start quite by six—are making their
ablutions and deriving holiness from the yellow tide. You saw them
yesterday trudging wearily through the streets, the sacred city at last
reached; and here they are in their thousands, brown and glistening. They
are of every age: quite old white-bearded men and withered women,
meticulously serious in their ritual, and then boys and girls deriving
also a little fun from their immersion. Here and there the bathing ghaut
is diversified by a burning ghaut, and one may catch a glimpse of the
extremities of the corpse twisting among the faggots. Here and there is a
boat or raft in which a priest is seated under his umbrella, fishing for
souls as men in punts on the Thames fish for roach. And over all is the
pitiless sun, hot even now, before breakfast, but soon to be unbearable.
I was not sorry when the voyage ended and we returned to the Maharajah's
Guest House for a little repose and refreshment, before visiting the early
Buddhist stronghold at Sarnath, the "Deer Park," where the Master first
preached his doctrine and whither his five attendants sought a haven after
they had forsaken him. Drifting about its ruins and contemplating the
glorious capital of the famous Asoka column—all that has been
preserved—I found myself murmuring the couplet,—
With a friendly Buddhist priest I seek respite from
the strife
And manifold anomalies which go to make up life—
but the odds are that even the early Buddhists were not immune.
CALCUTTA
Calcutta and Bombay are strangely different—so different that they
can only be contrasted. Bombay, first and foremost, has the sea, and I can
think of nothing more lovely than the sunsets that one watches from the
lawn of the Yacht Club or from the promenade on Warder Road. Calcutta has
no sea—nothing but a very difficult tidal river. Calcutta, again,
has no Malabar Hill. But then Bombay has no open space to compare with the
Maidan; and for all its crowded bazaars it has no street so diversified
and interesting as Harrison Road. It has no Chinatown. Its climate is
enervating where that of Calcutta, if not bracing—and no one could
call it that—at any rate does not extract every particle of vigour
from the European system.
But the special glory of Calcutta is the Maidan, that vast green space
which, unlike so many parks, spreads itself at the city's feet. One does
not have to seek it: there it is, with room for every one and a
race-course and a cricket-ground to boot. And if there is no magic in the
evening prospect such as the sea and its ships under the flaming or
mysterious enveiling sky can offer to the eye at Bombay, there is a
quality of golden richness in the twilight over Calcutta, as seen across
the Maidan, through its trees, that is unique. I rejoiced in it daily.
This twilight is very brief, but it is exquisite.
It is easier in Calcutta to be suddenly transported to England than in any
other Indian city that I visited. There are, it is true, more statues of
Lord Curzon than we are accustomed to; but many of the homes are quite
English, save for the multitude of servants; Government House, serene and
spacious and patrician, is a replica of Kedlestone Hall in Derbyshire: the
business buildings within and without are structurally English, and the
familiar Scotch accent sounds everywhere; but the illusion is most
complete in St. John's Church, that very charming, cool, white and
comfortable sanctuary, in the manner of Wren, and in St. Andrew's too.
Secluded here, the world shut off, one might as well be in some urban
conventicle at home on a sunny August day, as in the glamorous East. St.
John's particularly I shall remember: its light, its distinction, its
surrounding verdancy.
ROSE AYLMER
Ah, what avails the sceptred race,
Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine!
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and sighs
I consecrate to thee.
One curious task which I set myself in Calcutta was to find Rose Aylmer's
grave, for it was there that, in 1800, the mortal part of the lady whom
Landor immortalised was buried. But I tried in vain. I walked for hours
amid the sombre pyramidal tombs beneath which the Calcutta English used to
be laid, among them, in 1815, Thackeray's father, but I found no trace of
her whom I sought. I have seen many famous cemeteries, all depressing,
from Kensal Green to Genoa, from Rock Creek to Montmartre, but none can
approach in its forlorn melancholy the tract of stained and crumbling
sarcophagi packed so close as almost to touch each other, in the burial
ground off Rawdon Street and Park Street. Let no one establish a monument
of cement over me. Any material rather than that!
JOB AND JOE
If I did not find Rose Aylmer's tomb, I found, in St. John's pleasant
God's Acre, the comely mausoleum of Job Charnock, and this delighted me,
because for how long has been ringing in my ears that line—
"The tall pale widow is mine, Joe, the little brown
girl's for you."
which I met with so many years ago in "The Light That Failed," where the
Nilghai sings it to his own music! He got it, he said, from a tombstone,
in a distant land; and the tombstone is now incorporated with Job
Charnock's, the distant land being India; but the verses I have had to
collect elsewhere. I found them in Calcutta, in my host's library.
Joe was Joseph, or Josiah, Townsend, a pilot of the Ganges, and tradition
has it that he and Job Charnock, who, as an officer of the East India
Company, founded Calcutta in 1690, saved a pretty young Hindu widow from
ascending her husband's funeral pyre and committing suttee. Tradition
states further that Job Charnock and his bride﹃lived lovingly for many
years and had several children,﹄until in due time she was buried in the
mausoleum at St. John's, where her husband sacrificed a cock on each
anniversary of her death ever after. The story has been examined and found
to be improbable, but Charnock was a bold fellow who might easily have
started many legends; and the poem remains, and if there is a livelier, I
should like to know of it. I have been at the agreeable pains of
reconstructing the verses as they were probably written, so that there are
two more than the Nilghai sang. The whole is a very curious haunting
ballad, leaving us with the desire to know much more of the lives of both
men—Job Charnock the frontiersman, and Joseph Townsend,﹃skilful and
industrious, a kind father and a useful friend,﹄who could navigate not
only the Ganges but the shifting Hooghli. Rarely can so much mixed
autobiography and romance have been packed into six stanzas—and here
too the adventurous East and West meet:—
I've shipped my cable, messmates, I'm dropping down
with the tide;
I have my sailing orders while ye at anchor ride,
And never, on fair June morning, have I put out to sea
With clearer conscience, or better hope, or heart more light and free.
An Ashburnham! A Fairfax! Hark how the corslets ring!
Why are the blacksmiths out to-day, beating those men at the spring?
Ho, Willie, Hob and Cuddie!—bring out your boats amain,
There's a great red pool to swim them o'er, yonder in Deadman's Lane.
Nay, do not cry, sweet Katie—only a month afloat
And then the ring and the parson, at Fairlight Church, my doat.
The flower-strewn path—the Press Gang! No, I shall never see
Her little grave where the daisies wave in the breeze on Fairlight Lee.
"Shoulder to shoulder, Joe, my boy, into the crowd like a wedge!
Out with the hangers, messmates, but do not strike with the edge!"
Cries Charnock, "Scatter the faggots! Double that Brahmin in two!
The tall pale widow is mine, Joe, the little brown girl for you."
Young Joe (you're nearing sixty), why is your hide so dark?
Katie had fair soft blue eyes—who blackened yours? Why, hark!
The morning gun! Ho, steady! The arquebuses to me;
I've sounded the Dutch High Admiral's heart as my lead doth sound the
sea.
Sounding, sounding the Ganges—floating down with the tide,
Moor me close by Charnock, next to my nut-brown bride.
My blessing to Katie at Fairlight—Howell, my thanks to you—
Steady!—We steer for Heaven through scud drifts cold and blue.
EXIT
I arrived in Bombay on the last day of 1919 and embarked at Calcutta for
Japan on the evening of February 17th, seven weeks later. But to embark at
Calcutta is not to leave it, for we merely dropped down the river a short
distance that night, and for the next day and a half we were in the
Hooghli, sounding all the way. It is a difficult river to emerge from; nor
do I recommend any one else to travel, as I did, on a boat with a forward
deck cargo of two or three hundred goats on the starboard side and half as
many monkeys on the port, with a small elephant tethered between and a
cage of leopards adjacent. These, the property of an American dealer in
wild animals, were intended for sale in the States; all but one of the
leopards, which, being lame, he had decided to kill, to provide a "robe"
for his wife. Nothing could be more different than the careless aimless
activities of the monkeys I had seen among the trees between Agra and
Delhi and scampering over the parapets of Benares, all thieves and
libertines with a charter, and the restriction of these poor cowering
mannikins, overcrowded in their cages, with an abysmal sorrow in their
eyes. Many died on the voyage, and I think the Indian Government should
look into the question of their export very narrowly.
JAPAN
INTRODUCTORY
I ought not to write about Japan at all, for I was there but three short
weeks, and rain or snow fell almost all the time, and I sailed for America
on the very day that the cherry blossom festivities began. But—well,
there is only one Fujiyama, and it is surpassingly beautiful and
satisfying—the perfect mountain—and I should feel contemptible
if I did not add my eulogy of it—my gratitude—to all the
others.
Since, then, I am to say something of Fuji, let the way be paved.
THE LITTLE LAND
One is immediately struck, on landing at Kobe—and continually after—by
the littleness of Japan. The little flimsy houses, the little flimsy
shops, the small men, the toylike women, the tiny children, as numerous
and like unto each other as the pebbles on the shore—these are
everywhere. But although small of stature the Japanese men are often very
powerfully built and many of them suggest great strength. They are taking
to games, too. While I was in the country baseball was a craze, and boys
were practising pitching and catching everywhere, even in the streets of
the cities.
Littleness—with which is associated the most delicate detail and
elaborate finish—is the mark also of modern Japanese art. In the
curiosity shops whatever was massive or largely simple was Chinese. Even
the royal palaces at Kyoto are small, the rooms, exquisite as they are,
with perfect joinery and ancient paintings, being seldom more than a few
feet square, with very low ceilings. I went over two of these palaces,
falling into the hands, at each, of English-speaking officials whose
ciceronage was touched with a kind of rapture. At the Nijo, especially,
was my guide an enthusiast, becoming lyrical over the famous cartoons of
the "Wet Heron" and the "Sleeping Sparrows."
In India I had grown accustomed to removing my shoes at the threshold of
mosques. There it was out of deference to Allah, but in Japan the
concession is demanded solely in the interests of floor polish, and you
take your shoes off not only in palaces and houses but in some of the
shops. It gave one an odd burglarious feeling to be creeping noiselessly
from room to room of the Nijo; but there was nothing to steal. The place
was empty, save for decoration.
There is a certain amplitude in some of the larger Kyoto temples, with
their long galleries and massive gateways, but these only serve to
accentuate the littleness elsewhere. In the principal Kyoto temple I had
for guide a minute Japanese with the ecstatic passion for trifles that
seems to mark his race. A picture representing the miracle of the
"Fly-away Sparrows," as he called them, was the treasure on which he
concentrated, and next to that he drew my attention to the boards of the
gangway uniting two buildings, which, as one stepped on them, emitted a
sound that the Japanese believe to resemble the song of Philomela. To me
it brought no such memory, and the fact that this effect, common in Japan,
is technically known as "a nightingale squeak," perhaps supports my
insensitiveness.
If old Japan is to be found anywhere it is in Kyoto—in spite of its
huge factory chimneys. In Tokio, complete European dress is common in the
streets, but in Kyoto it is the exception. Tokio also wears boots, but
Kyoto is noisy with pattens night and day. Not only are there countless
shops in Kyoto given up to porcelain, carvings, screens, bronzes, old
armour, and so forth, but no matter how trumpery the normal stock in trade
of the other shops, a number of them have a little glass case—a shop
within a shop, as it were—in which a few rare and ancient articles
of beauty are kept. A great deal of Japan is expressed in this pretty
custom.
THE RICE FIELDS
My first experience of Japanese scenery of any wildness was gained while
shooting the rapids of the Katsuragava, an exciting voyage among boulders
in a shallow and often very turbulent stream in a steep and craggy valley
a few miles from Kyoto. Previous to this expedition I had seen, from the
train, only the trim rice fields,—each a tiny parallelogram with its
irrigation channels as a boundary, so carefully tended that there is not a
weed in the whole country. Japan is cut up into these absurd little
squares, of which twenty and more would go into an ordinary English field.
Often the terminal posts are painted a bright red; often a little row of
family tombs is there too. The watermill is a common object of the
country. But birds are few and animals one sees never. Indeed in all my
three weeks I saw no four-footed animals, except a dead rat, two pigs and
one cat. I am excluding of course beasts of draught—horses and
bullocks—which are everywhere. Not a cow, not a sheep, not a dog!
but that there are cattle is proved by the proverbial excellence of Kobe
steaks, which I tested and can swear to. In all my three weeks, both in
cities and the country, I saw only one crying child. Of children there
were millions, mostly boys, but only one was unhappy.
SURFACE MATERIALISM
In spite of Kyoto's eight hundred temples I could not get any but a
materialistic concept of its inhabitants; and elsewhere this impression
was emphasised. A stranger cannot, of course, know; he can but record his
feelings, without claiming any authority for them. But I am sure I was
never in a country where I perceived fewer indications of any spiritual
life. Every one is busy; every one seems to be happy or at any rate not
discontented; every one chatters and laughs and is, one feels, a fatalist.
Sufficient unto the day! After all, it is the women of a nation that
chiefly keep burning the sacred flame and pass it on; but in Japan, I
understand, the women are far too busy in pleasing the men to have time
for such duties; Japan is run by men for men. It is an unwritten law that
a woman must never be anything but gay in her lord's presence, must never
for a moment claim the privilege of peevishness.
As an instance of the Japanese woman's indifference to fate and readiness
to oblige, I may say that we had on our ship two or three hundred girls in
charge of a duenna or so, who were bound for Honolulu to be married to
Japanese settlers there, to whom their photographs had been forwarded.
These girls are known as "Picture Brides." At Honolulu their new
proprietors awaited them, and I suppose identified and appropriated them,
although to the European eye one face differed no whit from another.
The Japanese have the practical qualities that consort with materialism.
They are quick to supply creature comforts; their hotels are well-managed;
their cooks are excellent; their sign-posts are numerous and, I believe,
very circumstantial; at the railway stations are lists of the show places
in the neighbourhood; the telephone is general. But there are strange
failings. The roads, for example, are often very bad, although so many
motor-cars exist. Even in Tokio the puddles and mud are abominable. There
is no fixed rule to force rickshaw men to carry bells. There is no rule of
the road at all, so that the driver of a vehicle must be doubly alert,
having to make up his mind not only as to what he is going to do himself,
but also what the approaching driver is probably going to do. From time to
time, I believe, a rule of the road has been tried, but it has always
broken down.
The rickshaw bells are the more important, because the Japanese are not
observant. They may see Fuji and stand for hours worshipping a spray of
cherry blossom, but they do not see what is coming. Normally they look
down.
The rickshaw is comfortable and speedy; but to be drawn about by a
fellow-creature is a humiliating experience and I never ceased to feel too
conspicuous and ashamed. I discovered also how easy it is to lose one's
temper with these men. I used to sit and wonder if there had ever been a
runaway, and I never hired a rickshaw without thinking of Mr. Anstey's
story of the talking horse.
FIRST GLIMPSE OF FUJI
I left Kyoto for Yokohama on Wednesday night, March 17, 1920, at eleven,
and Thursday, March 18, 1920, thus remains with me as a red-letter day,
for it was then, at about half-past seven in the morning, that, lifting
the blind of my sleeping compartment, I saw—almost within reach, as
it seemed, dazzlingly white under its snow against a clear blue sky, with
the sun flooding it with glory—Fujiyama. I was to see it again
several times—for I went to Myanoshita for that purpose—but
never again so startlingly and wonderfully as this.
When I am asked to name in a word the most beautiful thing I saw on my
travels I mention Fujiyama instantly. There is nothing else to challenge
it. Perhaps had I seen Everest from Darjeeling I might have a different
story to tell; but I missed it. The Taj? Yes, the Taj is a divine work of
man; but it has not the serene lofty isolation of this sublime mountain,
rising from the plain alone and immense with almost perfect symmetry.
I was not to see Fujiyama again for a week or so, but in the meanwhile I
saw the Daibutsu, the giant figure of Buddha, at Kamakura, in all its
bland placidity. These were the only big things I found in Japan.
TWO FUNERALS
Yokohama is industrial and dirty everywhere but on the drive beside the
harbour, and on the Bluff, where the rich foreigners live. I visited one
house on this pleasant eminence and there was nothing in it to suggest
that it was in Japan any more than in, say, Cheltenham. The form was
English, the furniture was English, the pictures and books were English;
photographs of school and college cricket elevens gave it the final home
touch. Only in the garden were there exotic indications. The English
certainly have the knack of carrying their atmosphere with them. I had
noticed that often in India; but this Yokohama villa was the completest
exemplification.
Wandering about the city I came one morning on a funeral procession that
ought to have pleased Henry Ward Beecher, who, on the only occasion on
which I heard him, when he was very old and I was very young, urged upon
his hearers the importance of bright colours and flowers instead of the
ordinary habiliments and accoutrements of woe. For when a soul is on its
way to paradise, he said, we should be glad. The Yokohama cortege was
headed by men bearing banners; then came girls all in white, riding in
rickshaws; then the gaudy hearse; then priests in rickshaws; and finally
the relations and friends. The effect conveyed was not one of melancholy;
but even if every one had been in black, impressiveness would have been
wanting, for no one can look dignified in a rickshaw.
Compared, however, with a funeral which I saw in Hong-Kong, the Yokohama
ceremony was solemnity in essence. The Hong-Kong obsequies were those of a
tobacco-magnate's wife and the widower had determined to spare no expense
on their thoroughness. He had even offered, but without success, to
compensate the tramway company for a suspension of the service, the result
of his failure being that every few minutes the procession was held up to
permit the cars to go by; which meant that instead of taking only two
hours to pass any given point, it took three. The estimated cost of the
funeral was one hundred thousand dollars and all Hong-Kong was there to
see.
To Chinese eyes it doubtless had a sombre religious character, but to us
it was merely a diverting spectacle of incredible prolongation. We were
not wholly to blame in missing its sanctity, for the participants, who
were more like mummers than mourners, had all been hired and were enjoying
the day off. For the most part they merely wore their fancy dress and
walked and talked or played instruments, but now and then there was a
dragon and a champion boxing it and these certainly earned their money. At
intervals came bearers with trays on which were comforts for the next
world or symbolical devices, while, to infinity both in front and behind,
banners and streamers and lanterns danced and jogged above all. A
miracle-show of the middle ages can have been not unlike it.
THE LITTLE GEISHA
I left Japan, as I have said, just before the cherry-blossom festivities
began, but I was able to see a number of the dances—which never
change but are passed with exactitude, step for step, gesture for gesture
and expression for expression, from one geisha to another—as
performed by a child who was being educated for the profession. Although
so young she knew accurately upwards of sixty dances, and the pick of
these she executed for a few spectators, in a little fragile paper-walled
house outside Yokohama, while her adoring aunt played the wistful
repetitive accompaniments.
The little creature—a mere watch-chain ornament—had a typical
Japanese face, half mask, half mischief, and a tiny high voice which now
and then broke into the dance. But dances, strictly speaking, they are
not. They are really posturing and the manoeuvres of a fan. To me they are
strangely fascinating, and, with the music, almost more so than our
Western ballets. But there is a difference between the ballet and the
geisha dances, and it is so wide that there is no true comparison; for
whereas the ballet stimulates and excites, these Japanese movements
hypnotise and lull.
MANNERS
The public manners of the Japanese are not good. In all my solitary walks
about Myanoshita I met with no single peasant who passed the time of day,
and in the streets of Tokio English people were being jostled and stared
at and treated without respect. It was a moment when Americans were
unpopular, and the theory was broached that for fear of missing the chance
to be rude to an American the Japanese became rude to all outlanders
indiscriminately. One indeed gathered the impression that, except in
Kyoto, which is a backwater, foreigners are no longer wanted.﹃Japan for
the Japanese﹄would seem to be the motto: one day, not far distant, to be
amended to "The World for Japan." I shall never forget the humiliation I
suffered in a stockbroker's office in Tokio, into which, seeing the words
"English spoken" over the door, I had ventured in the hope of being
directed to an address I was seeking. Not a word of English did any one
know, but the whole staff left its typewriters and desks to come and
laugh. I was always willing to remove the gravity of Japanese children by
my grotesque Occidentalism, but I have a very real objection to being a
butt for the ridicule of grown-ups. Such an incident could not have
occurred, I believe, anywhere else. But it is not only the foreigners to
whom the Japanese are rude: they do nothing for their fellows either. The
want of chivalry in trains and trams was conspicuous.
The ceremonial manners of the Japanese can, however, be more precise and
formal than any I ever witnessed. A wedding reception chanced to be in
progress in my Tokio hotel one afternoon, and through the open door I had
glimpses of Japanese gentlemen in frock coats bowing to Japanese ladies
and making perfect right angles as they did so. So elaborate indeed were
the courtesies that to Western eyes they bordered dangerously on
burlesque.
The destination that I was seeking when I entered the stockbroker's office
was a certain book-store, and when I eventually found it I was asked a
question by a Japanese youth that still perplexes me. It was in the
English section, the principal volumes in which, as imported to supply
Japanese demands, were American, and all bore either upon success in
engineering and other professions and crafts, or on the rapid acquirement
of wealth. "How to double your income in a week"; "How to get rich
quickly"; "How to succeed in business"; and so forth; all preaching, in
fact, the new gospel which is doing Japan no good. There were also,
however, a certain number of novels, and one of the customers, a boy who
looked as though he were still at school, noting my English appearance,
brought a translation of Maupassant to me and asked me what "soul" meant—"A
Woman's Soul" being the new title. Now I defy any one with no Japanese to
make it clear to a Japanese boy with very little English what a woman's
soul is.
THE PLAY
At Tokio I was present for an hour or so at a performance in a national
theatre. It had been in progress for a long time when I entered and would
continue long after I left, for that is the Japanese custom. In London
people with too little to do are on occasion prepared to spend the whole
day outside theatres waiting for the doors to open. They will then witness
a two and a half hours' performance. But in Japan the plays go on from
eleven a.m. to eleven p.m. and the audience bring their sustenance and
tobacco with them. The seats are mats on the ground, and the actors reach
the stage by a passage through the auditorium as well as from the wings.
The scenery is very elementary, and there is always a gate which has to be
opened when the characters pass through and closed after them, although it
is isolated and has no contiguous wall or fence.
None of our Western morbid desire for novelty, I am told, troubles the
Japanese play-goer, who is prepared to witness the same drama, usually
based on an historical event or national legend thoroughly familiar to
him, for ever and ever. It is as though the theatres in England were given
up exclusively to, say, Shakespeare's Henry IV, V and VI sequence. On the
occasion of my visit there was little of what we call acting, but endless
elocution. During the performance the attendants walk about, with the
persistence of constables during a London police-court hearing, carrying
refreshments and little charcoal stoves. The signal for the next act is a
deafening clicking noise made by one of the stage hands on two sticks,
which gradually rises to a shattering crescendo as the curtain is drawn
aside. It must be understood that the theatre that I am describing was set
apart for national drama. In others there are topical farces and laughter
is continuous; but I did not visit any. On board ship, however, we had a
series of performances of such pieces by the Japanese cabin attendants and
waiters, many of whom were professional actors. The Japanese passengers
enjoyed them immensely.
MYANOSHITA
A whole week of my too short stay was given to Myanoshita, whither I was
driven by the impossibility of retaining a room in either Yokohama or
Tokio, and where I stayed willingly on, out of delight in the place
itself. After being cooped up for so long on ships, and kept inactive
under the heat of India, it was like a new existence to take immense walks
among these mountains in the keen rarified air, even though there was both
rain and snow. Myanoshita stands some four thousand feet high and is
situated in a valley in which are many summer cottages and health resorts.
The heart of this Alpine settlement is the Fujiya Hotel, where I was
living, which is kept by an enterprising Americanised and Europeanised
Japanese proprietor and his very charming wife, Madame Yamaguchi, whose
father was the founder of the house, and, I believe, the discoverer of the
district, and who herself is famous as a gracious hostess throughout
Japan. No hotel so well or so thoughtfully administered have I ever stayed
in; nor was I ever in another where the water for the bath gushes in from
a natural hot spring. But hot springs are numerous in this region, while
there is a gorge which I visited, some four miles distant, where boiling
sulphur hisses and bubbles for ever and aye.
Many of the Myanoshita dishes were new to me and welcome. There is an
excellent salad called "Slow," and the bamboo, which is Japan's best
friend—serving the nation in scores of ways: as fences, as walls, as
water-pipes, as supports, as carrying-poles, as thatch, as fishing-rods—here
found its way into the salad bowl and was not distasteful. The custom of
drinking a glass of orange juice before breakfast might well be adopted
with us; but not the least of the oddities of England which I realised as
I moved about the earth is our unwillingness to eat fruit. Japan also has
a perfect mineral water, "Tansan."
When not making long expeditions to catch new glimpses of Fuji I roamed
about the hill-sides among the little villages, or leaned over crazy
bridges to watch the waterfalls beneath; for there is water everywhere,
tumbling down to the distant ocean, a wedge of which can be seen from the
hotel windows. This Japanese valley might be in Switzerland, save for the
absence of any but human life. Not a cow, not a goat.
The labourers wear blue linen smocks, usually with some device upon them,
and they merge into the landscape as naturally as French or Belgian
peasants. These men, whether working on the soil or the roads, or engaged
in cutting bamboos or building houses, wear the large straw hats that one
sees in the old Japanese prints. Nothing has changed in their dress. But
the modernized Japanese, the dweller in the cities or casual visitor to
the country, pins his faith to the bowler. The bowler is so much his
favourite headgear that he wears it often with native costume on his body.
Perhaps it is to Japan that all the bowlers have gone, now that London has
taken to the soft Homburg. It was odd to meet groups of these bizarre
little men among the precipices: even stranger perhaps were their little
ladies, especially on Sunday, in the gayest Japanese clothes, their faces
plastered with rice powder and cigarettes in their mouths. Too many of
them are disfigured by gold teeth, which are so common in Japan as to be
almost the rule. An English resident assured me that I must not assume
that the Japanese teeth are therefore unusually defective: often the gold
is merely ostentation, a visible sign that the owner of the auriferous
mouth is both alive to American progress and can afford it.
Even in Myanoshita Fujiyama has to be sought for and climbed for, the
walls of rock that form the valley being so high and enclosing. But the
result is worth every effort. Immediately above the hotel is a hill from
whose summit the upper part of the enchanted mountain can be seen, and I
ascended tortuously to this point within an hour of my arrival. The next
day I walked to Lake Hakone (where the Emperor has a summer palace), some
eight miles away, in the hope of getting Fuji's white crest reflected on
its surface; but a veil of mist enshrouded all. And then twice I went to
the edge of the watershed at the head of the valley: once struggling
through the snow to the Otome Pass, on an immemorial and nearly
perpendicular bridle path, and once by the modern road to the tunnel
which, with characteristic address, the Japanese have bored through the
rock, thus reducing a very steep gradient.
In the tunnel the icicles were hanging several feet long and as big as
masts, and the air was biting. But one emerged suddenly upon a prospect
the wonder of which probably cannot be excelled—a vast plain far
below, made up of verdure and villages and lakes, with distant surrounding
heights, and immediately in front, filling half the sky, Fuji himself. It
is from this point, and from the ancient Otome Pass, a mile or so away on
the same ridge, that the symmetry of the mountain is most perfect; and
here one can best appreciate the simplicity of it, the quiet natural ease
with which it rises above its neighbours. There was more snow on the
slopes than when I had seen it from the train a few days before; and the
sky again was without a cloud. I have never been so conscious of majestic
serenity, without any concomitant feeling of awe. Fuji is both sublime and
human.
No other country has a symbol like this. When the Japanese think of Japan
they visualise Fuji: returning exiles crowd the decks for the first
glimpse of it; departing exiles with tears in their eyes watch it
disappear. There is not a shop window but has Fuji in some representation;
it is found in every house; its contours are engraved on teaspoons,
embossed on ash-trays. You cannot escape from its counterfeits; but if you
have seen it you do not mind.
When on my way home I found myself in an American picture gallery, either
in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston or New York, I lingered longest in the
rooms where the coloured prints of the Japanese masters hang—and
America has very fine collections, particularly in Boston—and I
stood longest before those landscapes by Hokusai and Hiroshige in which
Fuji occurs. Hokusai in particular venerated the mountain, and in many of
his most beautiful pictures people are calling to each other to admire
some new and marvellous aspect of it. It was he who drew Fuji as seen
through the arch of a breaking wave! I was looking at the British Museum's
example of this daring print only a few days ago, and, doing so, living my
Myanoshita days again.
There is much in Japan that is petty, much that is too material and not a
little that is disturbing; but Fuji is there too, dominating all, calm and
wise and lovely beyond description, and it would be Fuji that lured me
back.
AMERICA
DEMOCRACY AT HOME
My first experience of democracy-in-being followed swiftly upon boarding
the steamboat for San Francisco, when "Show this man Number 231" was the
American steward's command to a cabin boy. I had no objection to being
called a man: far from it; but after years of being called a gentleman it
was startling. This happened at Yokohama; and when, in the Customs House
at San Francisco, a porter wheeling a truck broke through a queue of us
waiting to obtain our quittances, with the careless warning,﹃Out of the
way, fellers!﹄I knew that here was democracy indeed.
I confess to liking it, although I was to be brought up with another jolt
when a notice-board on a grass-plot suddenly confronted me, bearing the
words:—
{Illustration: KEEP OFF. THIS MEANS YOU.}
But I like it. I like the tradition which, once your name is written in
the hotel reception book, makes you instantly "Mr. Lucas" to every one in
the place. There is a friendliness about it: the hotel is more of a home,
or at any rate, less of a barrack, because of it. And yet this universal
camaraderie has some odd lapses into formality. The members of clubs in
America are far more ceremonious with each other than we are in England.
In English clubs the prefix "Mr." is a solecism, but in American clubs I
have watched quite old friends and associates whose greetings have been
marked almost by pomposity and certainly by ritual. Yet Americans, I
should say, are heartier than we; more happy to be with each other; less
critical and exacting. They certainly spend less time in discussing each
other's foibles. That may be because the dollar is so much more an
absorbing theme, but more likely it is because America is a democracy, and
the theory of democracy, as I understand it, is to assume that every man
is a good fellow until the reverse is proved. I should not like to say
that the theory of those of us who live under a monarchy is the opposite,
but it seemed to me that Americans are more ready than we to be sociable
and tolerant.
Try as I might I could never be quick enough to get in first with that
delightful American greeting, "Pleased to meet you," or﹃Glad to know you,
Mr. Lucas.﹄I pondered long on the best retort and at last formulated
this, but never dared to use it for fear that its genuineness might be
suspected: "I shall be sorry when we have to part."
SAN FRANCISCO
It was in San Francisco that I learned—and very quickly—that
it is as necessary to visit America in order to know what Americans are
like as it is to leave one's own country in order to know more about that.
Americans when abroad are less hearty, less revealing. They are either
suffering from a constraint or an over-assertiveness; and both moods may
be due to not being at home. In neither case are they so natural as at
home. I suppose that on soil not our own we all tend to be a little
over-anxious to proclaim our nationality, to maintain the distinction. In
our hats can perhaps be too firmly planted the invisible flag of our
country.
Be this as it may, I very quickly discerned a difference between Americans
in America and in England. I found them simple where I had thought of them
as the reverse, and now, after meeting others in various parts of the
country, even in complex and composite New York, I should say that
simplicity is the keynote of the American character. It is in his
simplicity that the American differs most from the European. Such
simplicity is perfectly consistent with the impatience, the desire for
novelty, for brevity, of the American people. We think of them as always
wishing to reduce life to formulae, as unwilling to express any surprise,
and these tendencies may easily be considered as signs of a tiring
civilisation. But in reality they are signs of youth too.
ROADS GOOD AND BAD
San Francisco I shall chiefly recollect (apart from personal reasons) for
the sparkling freshness and vigour of the air; for the extent and variety
of Golden Gate Park, where I found a bust of Beethoven, but no sign of
Bret Harte; for the vast reading-room in the library at Berkeley, a
university which is so enchantingly situated, beneath such a sun, and in
sight of such a bay, that I marvel that any work can be done there at all;
and for the miles and miles of perfect tarmac roads fringed with burning
eschscholtzias and gentle purple irises. That was in April. I found
elsewhere in America no roads comparable with these. Even around
Washington their condition was such that to ride in a motor-car was to
experience all the alleged benefits of horseback, while in the
Adirondacks, anywhere off the noble Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Highway,
with its "T.R." blazonings along the route, one's liver was bent and
broken. While I was in America the movement to purchase Roosevelt's house
as a national possession was in full swing, but this Memorial Highway
strikes the imagination with more force. That was an inspiration, and I
hope that the road will never be allowed to fall into disrepair.
UNIVERSITIES, LOVE AND PRONUNCIATION
Watching the young men and maidens crowding to a lecture in the Hearst
Amphitheatre at Berkeley, under that glorious Californian sky, I was
struck by the sensible, frank intimacy of them all, and envied them the
advantages that must be theirs over the English methods of segregation at
the same age, which, by creating shyness and destroying familiarity, tends
to retard if not destroy the natural understanding which ought to subsist
between them and if it did would often make life afterwards so much
simpler.
I asked one of the professors to what extent marriages were made in
Berkeley, but he had no statistics. All he could say was that Cupid was
very little trouble to the authorities and that Mr. Hoover and Mrs. Hoover
first met each other as students at Stanford. And then I asked an
ex-member of one of the Sororities and she said that at college one was a
good deal in love and a good deal out of it. The romance rarely persisted
into later life.
She pronounced romance with the accent on the first syllable, whereas
somewhere half-way across the Atlantic the accent passes to the second;
and why such illogical things should be is a mystery. The differences can
be very disconcerting, especially if one refuses to give way. I had an
experience to the point when talking with some one in Chicago and wishing
to answer carefully his question as to the conditions under which the poor
of our great cities live. These are, in my observation, infinitely worse
in England than in America. Indeed I hardly saw any poor in America at all—not
poverty as we understand it. But I could not frame my reply because
"squalor" (which we pronounce as though it rhymed with "mollor") was the
only fitting epithet and he had just used it himself, pronouncing it in
the American way—or at any rate in his American way—with a
long "a." So I turned the subject.
Neither nation has any monopoly of reasonableness in pronunciation. The
American way of saying "advertisement" is more sensible than ours of
saying﹃adver´tisment,﹄since we say "advertise" too. But then, although
the Americans say "inquire," just as we do, they illogically put the
stress on the first syllable when they talk about an﹃in´quiry.﹄The Tower
of Babel is thus carried up one storey higher. The original idea was
merely to confuse languages; it cannot ever have been wished that two
friendly peoples should speak the same language differently.
But I have wandered far from Berkeley and Stanford. I am not sure as to my
course of conduct if I had a daughter of seventeen, but I am quite
convinced that if I had a son of that age I should send him to an American
university for two or three years after his English school. He should then
become a citizen of the Anglo-Saxon world indeed.
FIRST SIGNS OF PROHIBITION
We had met Prohibition first at Honolulu, not a few of the passengers
receiving the shock of their lives on learning at the hotel that only
"soft drinks" were permitted. Our second reminder of the new regime came
as we entered American waters off the Golden Gate and the ship's bar was
formally closed. And then, in San Francisco, we found "dry" land indeed.
In this connection let me say that in the hotel I made acquaintance with
an official of great power who was new to me: the buttoned boy who
rejoices in the proud title of Bell Captain. He gave me a private insight
into his precocity (but that is not the word, for all boys in America are
men too), and into his influence, by offering to supply me with forbidden
fruit, in the shape of whisky, at the modest figure of $25 a bottle. He
did not, however, say dollars: like most of his compatriots (and it is a
favourite word with them) he said something between "dollars" and
"dallars."
I had, a few days later, in Chicago, a similarly friendly offer from a
policeman of whom I had inquired the way. Recognizing an English accent,
he had instantly divined what my dearest wish must be. I then asked him
how prohibition was affecting the people on his beat. He said that a few
drunkards were less comfortable and a few wives more serene; but for the
most part he had seen no increase of happiness, and the extra money that
it provided was spent either on the movies, dress, or "other foolishness."
I did not allow him to refresh me. After a course of American "tough"
fiction, of which "Susan Lenox" remains most luridly in the memory, I had
a terror of all professional upholders of the law.
R.L.S.
Coming by chance upon the Robert Louis Stevenson memorial at San
Francisco, on the edge of Chinatown, I copied its inscription, and in case
any reader of these notes may have forgotten its trend I copy it again
here; for I do not suppose that its application was intended to cease with
the Californian city. It is counsel addressed to the individual, but since
nations are but individuals in quantity such ideals cannot be repeated
amiss:
To be honest; to be kind; to earn a little; to spend a little less; to
make upon the whole a family happier for his presence; to renounce when
that shall be necessary and not to be embittered; to keep a few friends,
but these without capitulation; above all, on the same grim condition, to
keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that man has of
fortitude and delicacy.
It is a far cry from San Francisco to Saranac, yet Stevenson is their
connecting chain, with the late Harry Widener's amazing collection of
Stevensoniana, in his memorial library at Harvard, as a link. The Saranac
cottage, which on the day of my visit was surrounded by the sweetest lilac
blooms that ever perfumed the air, is still a place of pilgrimage, and one
by one new articles of interest are being added to the collection. It was
pleasant indeed to find an English author thus honoured. Later, in Central
Park, New York, I was to find statues of Shakespeare, Burns and Sir Walter
Scott.
It was, oddly enough, in the Adirondacks that I came upon my only
experience of simplified spelling in the land of its birth. It was in that
pleasant home from home, the Lake Placid Club, where one is adjured to
close the door "tyt" as one leaves a room; where one drinks "cofi"; and
where that most necessary and mysterious of the functionaries of life, the
physician, is able to watch his divinity dwindle and his dignity disappear
under the style "fizisn."
STORIES AND HUMOURISTS
I heard many stories in America, where every one is a raconteur, but none
was better than this, which my San Francisco host narrated, from his own
experience, as the most perfect example of an honest answer ever given.
When a boy, he said, he was much in the company of an old trapper in the
Californian mountains. During one of their expeditions together he noticed
that a camp meeting was to be held, and out of curiosity he persuaded
Reuben to attend it with him. Perched on a back seat, they were watching
the scene when an elderly Evangelical sister placed herself beside the old
hunter, laid her hand on his arm, and asked him if he loved Jesus. He
pondered for some moments and then replied thus: "Waal, ma'am, I can't go
so far as to say that I love Him. I can't go so far as that. But, by gosh,
I'll say this—I ain't got nothin' agin Him."
The funniest spontaneous thing I heard said was the remark of a farmer in
the Adirondacks in reply to my question, Had they recovered up there, from
the recent war? "Yes," he said, they had; adding brightly, "Quite a war,
wasn't it?"
In a manner of speaking all Americans are humourists. Just as all French
people are wits by reason of the epigrammatic structure of their language,
so are all Americans humourists by reason of the national stores of
picturesque slang and analogy to which they have access. I think that this
tendency to resort to a common stock instead of striving after individual
exactitude and colour is to be deplored. It discourages thought where
thought should be encouraged. Adults are, of course, beyond redemption,
but parents might at least do something about it with their children. One
of the cleverest American writers whom I met made no effort whatever to
get beyond these accepted phrases as he narrated one racy incident after
another. With the pen in his hand (or, more probably, the typewriter under
his fingers) his sense of epithet is precise; but in his conversational
stories men were as mad "as Sam Hill," injuries hurt "like hell," and a
knapsack was as heavy "as the devil." We all laughed; but he should have
had more of the artist's pride.
Three American professional humourists whom I had the good fortune to meet
and be with for some time were Irvin Cobb, Don Marquis, and Oliver
Herford, each authentic and each so different. Beneath Mr. Cobb's fun is a
mass of ripe experience and sagacity. However playful he may be on the
surface one is aware of an almost Johnsonian universality beneath. It
would not be extravagant to call his humour the bloom on the fruit of the
tree of knowledge (I am talking now only of the three as I found them in
conversation). Don Marquis, while equally serious (and all the best
humourists are serious at heart), has a more grotesque fancy and is more
of a reformer, or, at any rate, a rebel. His dissatisfaction with
hypocrisy provoked a scorn that Mr. Cobb is too elemental to entertain.
Some day perhaps Don Marquis will induce an editor to print the exercises
in unorthodoxy which he has been writing and which, in extract, he
repeated to us with such unction; but I doubt it. They are too searching.
But that so busy a man should turn aside from his work to dabble in
religious satire seemed to me a very interesting thing; for nothing is so
unprofitable—except to the honest soul of him who conceives it.
One of Don Marquis's more racy stories which I recollect is of a loafer in
a country town who had the habit of dropping into the store every day at
the time the free cheese was set on the counter, and buying very little in
return. When the time came for the privilege to be withdrawn the loafer
was outraged and aghast. Addressing the storekeeper (his friend for years)
he summed up his ungenerosity in these terms: "Your soul, Henry," he said,
"is so mean, that if there were a million souls like it in the belly of a
flea, they'd be so far apart they couldn't hear each other holler."
As for Oliver Herford, he is an elf, a sprite, a creature of fantasy, who
may be—and, I rejoice to say, is—in this world, but certainly
is not of it. This Oliver is in the line of Puck and Mercutio and Lamb and
Hood and other lovers and makers of nonsense, and it is we who ask for
"more." He had just brought out his irresponsible but very searching
exercise in cosmogony, "This Giddy Globe," dedicated to President Wilson
("with all his faults he quotes me still") and this was the first
indigenous work I read on American soil. Oliver Herford is perhaps best
known by his "Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten," and there is a kitten also in
"This Giddy Globe":
"Hurray!" cried the Kitten, "Hurray!"
As he merrily set the sails,
"I sail o'er the ocean to-day
To look at the Prince of Wales."
—this was when the Prince was making his triumphant visit to New York
in 1919—
"But, Kitten," I said dismayed,
"If you live through the angry gales
You know you will be afraid
To look at the Prince of Wales."
Said the Kitten, "No such thing!
Why should he make me wince?
If a Cat may look at a King
A Kitten may look at a Prince!"
This reminds me that the story goes that when the Prince expressed his
admiration for Fifth Avenue he was congratulated upon having﹃said a
mouthful.﹄Beyond a mouthful, as an encomium of sagacity or sensationalism
in speech, there is but one advance and that is when one says "an earful."
THE CARS
The journey from San Francisco to Chicago, once the fruit country is
passed, is drearily tedious, and I was never so tired of a train. The
spacious compartments that one travelled in on the Indian journeys, where
there are four arm-chairs and a bath-room, are a bad preparation for the
long narrow American cars packed with humanity, and for the very
inadequate washing-room, which is also the negro attendant's bed-chamber:
"Although," he explained to me,﹃when the car isn't full I always sleep in
Berth Number 1.﹄If the night could be indefinitely prolonged, these
journeys would be more tolerable; but for the general comfort the sleeping
berths must be converted into seats at an early hour. In addition to
books, I had, as a means of beguilement, the society of a returned exile
from the Philippines, who told me the story of his life, showed me the
necklace he was taking home to his daughter's wedding, and asked my advice
as to the wisdom or unwisdom of marrying again, the lady of his wavering
choice having been at school with him in New England and being now a widow
in Nebraska with property of her own. Besides being thus garrulous and
open, he was the most helpful man I ever met, acting as a nurse to the
three or four restless children in the car, and even producing from his
bag a pair of scissors and a bottle of gum with which to make dolls' paper
clothes. Never in my life have I called a stranger "Ed" on such short
acquaintance; never have I been called "Poppa" so often by the peevish
progeny of others.
It was on this train that I began to realise how much thirstier the
Americans are than we. The passengers were continually filling and
emptying the little cups that are stacked beside the fountains in the
corridors, and long before we reached Chicago the cups had all been used.
In England only children drink water at odd times and they not to excess.
But in America every one drinks water, and the water is there for
drinking, pure and cold and plentiful. It is beside the bed, in the
corners of offices, awaiting you at meals, jingling down the passages of
hotels, bubbling in the streets. In English restaurants, water bottles are
rarely supplied until asked for; in our hotel bedrooms they seldom bear
lifting to the light. As to whether the general health of the Americans is
superior or inferior to ours by reason of this water-drinking custom, I
have no information; but figures would be interesting.
CHICAGO
In Chicago the weather was wet and cold, and it was not until after I had
left that I learned of the presence there of certain literary collections
which I may now perhaps never see. But I spent much time in the Museum,
where there is one of the finest Hobbemas in the world, and where two such
different creative artists as Claude Monet and Josiah Wedgwood are
especially honoured. But the chief discovery for me was the sincere and
masterly work in landscape of George Inness, my first impression of whom
was to be fortified when I passed on to Boston, and reinforced in the
Hearn collection in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
It was in Chicago, in the Marshall Field Book Department—which is to
ordinary English bookshops like a liner to a houseboat—that I first
realised how intense is the interest which America takes in foreign
contemporary literature. In England the translation has a certain vogue—Mrs.
Garnett's supple and faithful renderings of Turgenev, Tolstoi,
Dostoievski, and Tchekov have, for example, a great following—but we
do not adventure much beyond the French and the Russians; whereas I learn
that English versions of hundreds of other foreign books are eagerly
bought in America. Such curiosity seems to me to be very sensible. I was
surprised also to find tables packed high with the modern drama. In
England the printed play is not to the general taste.
It was in Chicago that I found "window-shopping" at its most enterprising.
In San Francisco the costumiers' windows were thronged all Sunday, but in
Chicago they are brilliantly lighted till midnight, long after closing
hours, so that late passers-by may mark down desirable things to buy on
the morrow.
The spirited equestrian statue of General John A. Logan, in a waste space
by Michigan Avenue, which I could see from my bedroom window, was my first
and by no means the least satisfying experience of American sculpture on
its native soil—to be face to face with St. Gaudens' figure of
"Grief" in Rock Creek Cemetery, at Washington, having long been a desire.
In time I came to see that beautiful conception, and I saw also the fine
Shaw monument in Boston, fine both in idea and in execution; and the
Sheridan, by the Plaza Hotel in New York; and the Farragut in Madison
Square; and the Pilgrim in Philadelphia—all the work of the same
firm, sensitive hand, a replica of whose Lincoln is now to be seen at
Westminster.
The statue seems almost as natural a part of civic ornament in America as
it is in France, and is not in England; and the standard as a rule is
high. In particular I like the many horsemen—Anthony Wayne
dominating the landscape at Valley Forge; and George Washington again and
again, and not least in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia (where there is
also a bronze roughrider realistically set on a cliff—as though from
Ambrose Bierce's famous story—by Frederic Remington). American
painters can too often suggest predecessors, usually French, but the
sculptors have a strength and directness of their own, and it would not
surprise me if some of the best statues of the future came from their
country. No one would say that all American civic sculpture is good. There
is a gigantic bust of Washington Irving behind New York's Public Library
which would be better away; nor are the lions that guard that splendid
institution superabundantly leonine; but the traveller is more charmed
than depressed by the marble and bronze effigies that meet his eye—and
few witnesses have been able to say that of England. Among the more
remarkable public works I might name the symbolical figures on the steps
of the Boston Free Library, and the frieze in deep relief on the
Romanesque church on Park Avenue in New York, and I found something big
and impressive in the Barnard groups at Harrisburg. Many of the little
bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum—at the other extreme—are
exquisite.
THE MOVIES
We have our cinema theatres in England in some abundance, but the cinema
is not yet in the blood here as in America. In America picture-palaces are
palaces indeed—with gold and marble, and mural decorations, built to
seat thousands—and every newspaper has its cinema page, where the
activities of the movie stars in their courses are chronicled every
morning. Moreover, America is the home of the industry; and rightly so,
for it has, I should say, been abundantly proved that Americans are the
only people who really understand both cinema acting and cinema
production. Italy, France and England make a few pictures, but their
efforts are half-hearted: not only because acting for the film is a new
and separate art, but because atmospheric conditions are better in America
than in Europe.
It was in Chicago that I had my only opportunity of seeing cinema stars in
the flesh. The rain falling, as it seems to do there with no more effort or
fatigue to itself than in Manchester, I had, one afternoon, to change my
outdoor plans and take refuge at the matinee of a musical comedy called
"Sometime," with Frank Tinney in the leading part. Tinney, I may say,
during his engagement in London some years ago, became so great a
favourite that one performer has been flourishing on an imitation of him
ever since. The play had been in progress only for a few minutes when
Frank, in his capacity as a theatre doorkeeper, was presented by his
manager with a tip. A dialogue, which to the trained ear was obviously
more or less an improvisation, then followed:
Manager: "What will you do with that dollar, Frank?"
Frank: "I shall go to the movies. I always go to the movies when
there's a Norma Talmadge picture. Ask me why I always go to the movies
when there's a Norma Talmadge picture."
Manager: "Why do you always go to the movies when there's a Norma
Talmadge picture, Frank?"
Frank: "I go because, I go because she's my favourite actress. (Applause.)
Ask me why Norma Talmadge is my favourite actress."
Manager: "Why is Norma Talmadge your favourite actress, Frank?"
Frank:﹃Norma Talmadge is my favourite actress because she is
always saving her honour. I've seen her saving it seventeen times. (To
the audience) You like Norma Talmadge, don't you?﹄(Applause from
the audience.)
Frank: "Then wouldn't you like to see her as she really is? (To
a lady sitting with friends in a box.) Stand up, Norma, and let the
audience see you."
Here a slim lady with a tense, eager, pale face and a mass of hair
stood up and bowed. Immense enthusiasm.
Frank: "That's Norma Talmadge. You do like saving your honour,
don't you, Norma? And now (to the audience) wouldn't you like to
see Norma's little sister, Constance? (More applause.) Stand up,
Constance, and let the audience see you."
Here another slim lady bowed her acknowledgments and the play was
permitted to proceed.
What America is going to do with the cinema remains to be seen, but I, for
one, deplore the modern tendency of novelists to be lured by American
money to write for it. If the cinema wants stories from novelists let it
take them from the printed books. One has but to reflect upon what might
have happened had the cinema been invented a hundred years ago, to realise
my disturbance of mind. With Mr. Lasky's millions to tempt them Dickens
would have written "David Copperfield" and Thackeray "Vanity Fair," not
for their publishers and as an endowment to millions of grateful readers
in perpetuity, but as plots for the immediate necessity of the film, with
a transitory life of a few months in dark rooms. Of what new﹃David
Copperfields﹄and "Vanity Fairs" the cinema is to rob us we shall not
know; but I hold that the novelist who can write a living book is a
traitor to his art and conscience if he prefers the easy money of the
film. Readers are to be considered before the frequenters of Picture
Palaces. His privilege is to beguile and amuse and refresh through the
ages: not to snatch momentary triumphs and disappear.
The evidence of the moment is more on the side of the pessimist than the
optimist. I found in America no trace of interest in such valuable records
as the Kearton pictures of African jungle life or the Ponting records of
the Arctic Zone. For the moment the whole energy of the gigantic cinema
industry seemed to be directed towards the filming of human stories and
the completest beguilement, without the faintest infusion of instruction
or idealism, of the many-headed mob. In short, to provide "dope." Whether
so much "dope" is desirable, is the question to be answered. That poor
human nature needs a certain amount, is beyond doubt. But so much? And do
we all need it, or at any rate deserve it? is another question. Sometimes
indeed I wonder whether those of us who have our full share of senses
ought to go to the cinema at all. It may be that its true purpose is to be
the dramatist of the deaf.
THE AMERICAN FACE
Perhaps it is one of the travellers' illusions (and we are very
susceptible to them), but I have the impression that American men are more
alike than the English are. It may be because there are fewer
idiosyncrasies in male attire, for in America every one wears the same
kind of hat; but I think not. In spite of the mixed origin of most
Americans, a national type of face has been evolved to which they seem
satisfied almost universally to pay allegiance. Again and again in the
streets I have been about to accost strangers to whom I felt sure I had
recently been introduced, discovering just in time that they were merely
doubles. In England I fancy there is more individuality in appearance. If
it is denied that American faces are more true to one type than ours, I
shall reopen the attack by affirming that American voices are beyond
question alike. My position in these two charges may be illustrated by
notices that I saw fixed to gates at the docks in San Francisco. On one
were the words "No Smoking"; on the other "Positively No Smoking."
And what about the science of physiognomy? I have been wondering if
Lavater is to be trusted outside Europe. In China and Japan I was
continually perplexed, for I saw so many men who obviously were successful—leaders
and controllers—but who were without more than the rudiments of a
nose on which to support their glasses; and yet I have been brought up to
believe that without a nose of some dimensions it was idle to hope for
worldly eminence. Again, in America, is it possible that all these massive
chins and firm aquiline beaks are ruling the roost and reaching whatever
goal they set out for? I doubt it.
The average American face is, I think, keener than ours and healthier. One
sees fewer ruined faces than in English cities, fewer men and women who
have lost self-respect and self-control. The American people as a whole
strike the observer as being more prosperous, more alert and ambitious,
than the English. Where I found mean streets they were always in the
occupation of aliens.
To revert to the matter of clothes, the American does as little as
possible to make things easy for the conjectural observer. In England one
can base guesses of some accuracy on attire. In a railway carriage one can
hazard without any great risk of error the theory that this man is in
trade and that in a profession, that another is a stockbroker, and a
fourth a country squire. But America is full of surprises, due to the
uniformity of clothing and a certain carelessness which elevates comfort
to a ritual. The man you think of as a millionaire may be a drummer, the
drummer a millionaire. Again, in England people are known to a certain
extent by the hotels they stay at, the restaurants they eat at, and the
class in which they travel. Such superficial guides fail one in America.
PROHIBITION AGAIN
I can best indicate, without the mechanical assistance of dates, the time
of my sojourn in New York by saying that, during those few weeks, Woodrow
Wilson's successor was being sought, the possibility of the repeal of the
Prohibition Act was a matter of excited interest, and "Babe" Ruth was the
national hero. During this period I saw the President sitting on the
veranda of the White House; I had opportunities of honouring Prohibition
in the breach as well as in the observance; and these eyes were
everlastingly cheered and enriched by the spectacle of the "Babe" (who is
a baseball divinity) lifting a ball over the Polo Ground pavilion into
Manhattan Field. I hold, then, that I cannot be said to have been unlucky
or to have wasted my time.
I found (this was in the spring of 1920) Prohibition the universal topic:
could it last, and should it last? In England we are accused of talking
always of the weather. In America, where there is no weather, nothing but
climate, that theme probably was never popular. Even if it once were,
however, it had given way to Prohibition. At every lunch or dinner table
at which I was present Prohibition was a topic. And how could it be
otherwise?—for if my host was a "dry" man, he had to begin by
apologising for having nothing cheering to offer, and if he possessed a
cellar it was impossible not to open the ball by congratulating him on his
luck and his generosity. Meanwhile the guests were comparing notes as to
the best substitutes for alcoholic beverages, exchanging recipes, or
describing their adventures with private stills.
I visited a young couple in a charming little cottage in one of the garden
cities near New York, and found them equally divided in their solicitude
over a baby on the top floor and a huge jar in the basement which needed
constant skimming if the beer was to be worth drinking.
One effect of Prohibition which I was hoping for, if not actually
expecting, failed to materialise. I had thought that the standard of what
are called T.B.M. (Tired Business Men) theatrical shows might be higher if
the tendency of alcohol to make audiences more tolerant (as it undoubtedly
can do in London) were no longer operative. But these entertainments
seemed, under teetotallers, no better.
THE BALL GAME
After seeing my first ball game or so I was inclined to suggest
improvements; but now that I have attended more I am disposed to think
that those in authority know more about it than I do, and that such
blemishes as it appears to have are probably inevitable. For one thing, I
thought that the outfield had too great an advantage. For another, not
unassociated with that objection, I thought that the home-run hit was not
sufficiently rewarded above the quite ordinary hit—"bunch-hit," is
it?—that brings in a man or men. In the English game of "Rounders,"
the parent of baseball, a home-run hit either restores life to a man
already out or provides the batting side with a life in reserve. To put a
premium of this kind on so noble an achievement is surely not fantastic.
So I thought. And yet I see now that the game must not be lengthened, or
much of its character would go. It is its concentrated American fury that
is its greatest charm. If a three-day cricket match were so packed with
emotion we should all die of heart failure.
I thought, too, that it is illogical that a ground stroke behind the
diamond should be a no-ball, and yet, should that ball be in the air and
caught, the striker should be out. I thought it an odd example of lenience
to allow the batsman as many strokes behind the catcher as he chanced to
make. But the more baseball I see the more it enchants me as a spectacle,
and these early questionings are forgotten.
Baseball and cricket cannot be compared, because they are as different as
America and England; they can only be contrasted. Indeed, many of the
differences between the peoples are reflected in the games; for cricket is
leisurely and patient, whereas baseball is urgent and restless. Cricket
can prosper without excitement, while excitement is baseball's life-blood,
and so on: the catalogue could be indefinitely extended. But, though a
comparison is futile, it may be interesting to note some of the
divergences between the games. One of the chief is that baseball requires
no specially prepared ground, whereas cricket demands turf in perfect
order. Bad weather, again, is a more serious foe to the English than to
the American game, for if the turf is soaked we cannot go on, and hence
the number of drawn or unfinished matches in the course of a season. A two
hours' game, such as baseball is, can, however, always be played off.
In baseball the pitcher's ball must reach the batter before it touches the
ground; in cricket, if the ball did not touch the ground first and reach
the batsman on the bound, no one would ever be out at all, for the other
ball, the full-pitch as we call it, is, with a flat bat, too easy to hit,
for our bowlers swerve very rarely: it is the contact with the ground
which enables them to give the ball its extra spin or break. Full-pitches
are therefore very uncommon. In cricket a bowler who delivered the ball
with the action of a pitcher would be disqualified for "throwing": it is
one of the laws of cricket that the bowler's elbow must not be bent.
In cricket (I mean in the first-class variety of the game) the decisions
of the umpire are never questioned, either by players or public.
In baseball there are but two strokes for the batter: either the "swipe,"
or "slog," as we call it, where he uses all his might, or the "bunt,"
usually a sacrificial effort; in cricket there are scores of strokes,
before the wicket, behind it, and at every angle to it. These the
cricketer is able to make because the bat is flat and wide, and he holds
it both vertically and at a slant, as occasion demands, and is allowed, at
his own risk, to run out to meet the ball. In the early days of cricket, a
hundred and fifty years ago, the bat was like a baseball club, but curved,
and the only strokes then were much what the only baseball strokes are now—the
full-strength hit and the stopping hit. So long as the pitcher delivers
the ball in the air it is probable that the baseball club will remain as
it is; but should the evolution of the game allow the pitcher to make use
of the ground, then the introduction of a flattened club is probable. But
let us not look ahead. All that we can be sure of is that, since baseball
is American, it will change.
To resume the catalogue of contrast. In baseball the batsman must run for
every fair hit; in cricket he may choose which hits to run for.
In baseball a man's desire is to hit the ball in the air beyond the
fielders; in cricket, though a man would like to do this, his side is
better served if he hits every ball along the ground.
In baseball no man can have more than a very small number of hits in a
match; in cricket he can be batting for a whole day, and then again before
the match is over. There are instances of batsmen making over 400 runs
before being out.
Another difference between the games is that in cricket we use a new ball
only at the beginning of a fresh inning (of which there cannot be more
than four in a match) and when each 200 runs have been scored; and (this
will astonish the American reader) when the ball is hit among the people
it is returned. I have seen such rapid voluntary surrenders at baseball
very seldom, and so much of a "fan" have I become that the spectacle has
always been accompanied in my breast by pain and contempt. I had the
gratification of receiving from the burly John McGraw an autograph ball as
a souvenir of a visit to the Polo Ground. I put it in my pocket hurriedly,
conscious of the risk I ran among a nation of ball-stealers in possessing
such a trophy; and I got away with it. But I am sure that had it been a
ball hit out of the ground by the mighty "Babe" Ruth, which—recovering
it by some supernatural means—he had handed to me in public, I
should not have emerged alive, or, if alive, not in the ball's company.
In cricket the wicket-keeper, who, like the baseball catcher, is
protected, although he has no mask, is the most difficult man to obtain,
because he has the hardest time and the least public approbation; in
baseball the catcher is a hero and every boy aspires to his mitt.
In cricket no player makes more than three hundred pounds a season, unless
it is his turn for his one and only benefit, when he may make a thousand
pounds more. But most players do not reach such a level of success that a
benefit is their lot. But baseballers earn enormous sums.
If a match could be arranged between eleven cricketers and eleven
baseballers, the cricketers to be allowed to bowl and the baseballers to
pitch, the cricketers to use their own bats and the baseballers their own
clubs, I fancy that the cricketers would win; for the difficulty of
hitting our bowling with a club would be greater than of hitting their
pitching with a bat. But their wonderful fielding and far more accurate
and swifter throwing than ours might just save them. Such throwing we see
only very rarely, for good throwing is no longer insisted upon in cricket,
much to the game's detriment. That old players should lose their shoulders
is natural—and, of course, our players remain in first-class cricket
for many years longer than ball champions—but there is no excuse for
the young men who have taken advantage of a growing laxity in this matter.
Chief of the few cricketers who throw with any of the terrible precision
of a baseball field is Hobbs. It must be borne in mind, however, that
cricket does not demand such constant throwing at full speed as baseball
does; for in cricket, as I have said, the batsman may choose what hits he
will run for, and if he chooses only the perfectly safe ones the fieldsmen
are never at high pressure. There is also nothing in cricket quite to
compare with base-stealing.
When it comes to catching, the percentage of missed catches is far higher
at cricket than at baseball; but there are good reasons for this. One is
that in baseball a glove is worn; another that in baseball all catches
come to the fieldsmen with long or sufficient notice. The fieldsmen are
all, except the catcher, in front of the batsmen; there is nothing to
compare with the unexpected nimbleness that our point and slips have to
display.
In the hypothetical contest that I have suggested, between baseballers and
cricketers, if the conditions were nominally equal and the cricketers had
to pitch like baseballers and the baseballers to use the English bat, why
then the baseballers would win handsomely.
Baseball, I fancy, will not be acclimatised in England. We had our chance
when London was full of American soldiers and we did not take it. But we
were very grateful to them for playing the game in our midst, for the
authorities were so considerate as to let them play on Sundays (which we
are never allowed to do) and I was one of those who hoped that this might
be the thin end of the wedge and Sunday cricket also be permitted. But no;
when the war was over and the Americans left us, the old Sabbatarianism
reasserted itself. If, however, we ever exchanged national games, and
cricket were played in America and baseball in England, it is the English
spectator who would have the better of the exchange. I am convinced that
although we should quickly find baseball diverting, nothing would ever
persuade an American crowd to be otherwise than bored by cricket.
SKYSCRAPERS
Perhaps if I had reached New York from the sea the skyscrapers would have
struck me more violently. But I had already seen a few in San Francisco
(and wondered at and admired the courage which could build so high after
the earthquake of 1906), and more in Chicago, all ugly; so that when I
came to New York and found that the latest architects were not only
building high, but imposing beauty on these mammoth structures, surprise
was mingled with delight. No matter how many more millions of dollars are
expended on that strange medley of ancient forms which go to make up New
York's new Cathedral, where Romanesque and Gothic seem already to be ready
for their divorce, the Woolworth Building will be New York's true fane.
Mr. Cass Gilbert, the designer of that graceful immensity, not only gave
commerce its most notable monument (to date), but removed for ever the
slur upon skyscrapers. The Woolworth Building does not scrape the sky; it
greets it, salutes it with a beau geste. And I would say something
similar of the Bush Building, with its alabaster chapel in the air which
becomes translucent at night; and the Madison Square Tower (whose clock
face, I noticed, has the amazing diameter of three storeys); and the
Burroughs Welcome Building on 41st Street, with its lovely perpendicular
lines; and that immense cube of masonry on Park Avenue which bursts into
flower, so to speak, at the top in the shape of a very beautiful loggia.
But even if these adornments become, as I hope, the rule, one could not
resent the ordinary structural elephantiasis a moment after realising New
York's physical conditions. A growing city built on a narrow peninsula is
unable to expand laterally and must, therefore, soar. The problem was how
to make it soar with dignity, and the problem has been solved.
In the old days when brown stone was the only builders' medium New York
must have been a drab city indeed; or so I gather from the few ancient
typical residences that remain. There are a few that are new, too, but for
the most part the modern house is of white stone. Gayest of all is, I
suppose, that vermilion-roofed florist's on Fifth Avenue.
One has to ascend the Woolworth Building to appreciate at a blow with what
discretion the original settlers of New York made their choice. It is
interesting, too, to watch Broadway—which, for all I know, is the
longest street in the world—starting at one's feet on its lawless
journey to Albany: lawless because it is almost the only sinuous thing in
this city of parallelograms and has the effrontery to cross diagonally
both Fifth Avenue and Sixth. Before leaving the Woolworth Building, I
would say that there seemed to me something rather comically paradoxical
in being charged 50 cents for access to the top of a structure which was
erected to celebrate the triumph of a commercial genius whose boast it was
to have made his fortune out of articles sold at a rate never higher than
10 cents.
Having dallied sufficiently on the summit—there are a trifle of
fifty-eight floors, but an express lift makes nothing of them—I
continued the implacable career of the tripper by watching for a while the
deafening kerb market, which presented on that morning an odd appearance,
more like Yarmouth beach than a financial centre, for there had been rain,
and all the street operators were in sou'westers and sea-boots. There can
be spasms of similar excitement in London, in the neighbourhood of Capel
Court, but we have nothing that compares so closely with this crowd as
Tattersall's Ring at Epsom just before the Derby.
A PLEA FOR THE AQUARIUM
It was a relief to resume my programme by entering that abode of the dumb
and detached—the aquarium in Battery Park. For the kerb uproar﹃the
uncommunicating muteness of fishes﹄was the only panacea. The Bronx Zoo is
not, I think, except in the matter of buffalo and deer paddocks, so good
as ours in London, but it has this shining advantage—it is free. So
also is the Aquarium in Battery Park, and it was pleasing to see how
crowded the place can be. In England all interest in living fish, except
as creatures to be coaxed towards hooks and occasionally retained there,
has vanished; on the site of old Westminster Aquarium the Wesleyans now
manage their finances and determine their circuits, while the Brighton
Aquarium, once famous all the world over, is a variety hall with barely a
fin to its name.
After seeing the aquarium in Honolulu, which is like a pelagic rainbow
factory, and the aquarium in New York with all its strange and beautiful
denizens, I am a little ashamed of our English apathy. To maintain picture
galleries, where, however beautiful and chromatic, all is dead, and be
insensitive to the loveliness of fish, in hue, in shape and in movement,
is not quite pardonable.
ENGLISH AND FRENCH INFLUENCES
In essentials America is American, but when it comes to inessentials, to
trimmings, her dependence on old England was noticeable again and again as
I walked about New York. The fashion which, at the moment, the print shops
were fostering was for our racing, hunting and coaching coloured prints of
a century ago, while in the gallery of the distinguished little Grolier
Club I found an exhibition of the work of Randolph Caldecott and Kate
Greenaway. In such old bookshops as I visited all the emphasis was—just
then—laid upon Keats and Lamb and Shelley, whose first editions and
presentation copies seem to be continually making the westward journey. I
had not been in New York twenty-four hours before Keats' "Lamia," 1820—with
an inscription from the author to Charles Lamb—the very copy from
which, I imagine, Lamb wrote his review, was in my hands; but it would
have been far beyond my means even if the pound were not standing at 3.83.
These "association" books, in which American collectors take especial
pleasure, can be very costly. At a sale soon after I left New York, seven
presentation copies of Dickens' books, containing merely the author's
signed inscription, realised 4870 dollars. To continue, in Wanamaker's old
curiosity department I found little but English furniture and odds and
ends, at prices which in their own country would have been fantastically
high. In the "Vanity Fair" department, however (as I think it is called),
the source was French. I suppose that French influence must be at the back
of all the costumiers and jewellers of New York, but the shops themselves
are far more spacious than those in Paris and not less well-appointed.
Tiffany's is a palace; all it lacks is a name, but its splendid anonymity
is, I take it, a point of honour.
It used to be said that good Americans when they died went to Paris. The
Parisian lure no doubt is still powerful; but every day I should guess
that more of Paris comes to America. The upper parts of New York have
boulevards and apartment houses very like the real thing, and I noticed
that the architecture of France exerts a special attraction for the rich
man decreeing himself a pleasure dome. There are millionaires' residences
in New York that might have been transplanted not only from the Avenue du
Bois de Boulogne, but from Touraine itself; while when I made my
pilgrimage to Mr. Widener's, just outside Philadelphia, I found
Rembrandt's "Mill," and Manet's dead bull-fighter, and a Vermeer, and a
little meadow painted divinely by Corot, and El Greco's family group, and
Donatello's St. George, and one of the most lovely scenes that ever was
created by Turner's enchanted brush, all enshrined in a palace which Louis
Seize might have built.
But America is even more French than this. Her women can be not less soignées
than those of France, although they suggest a cooler blood and less
dependence on male society; her bread and coffee are better than France's
best. Moreover, when it comes to night and the Broadway constellations
challenge the darkness, New York leaves Paris far behind. For every
cabaret and supper resort that Paris can provide, New York has three; and
for every dancing floor in Paris, New York has thirty. Good Americans,
however, will still remain faithful to their old posthumous love, if only
for her wine.
Apropos of American women, their position struck me as very different from
the position of women with us. English women are deferential to their
husbands; they are content to be relegated to the background on all
occasions when they are not wanted. They are dependent. They seldom wear
an air of triumph and rarely take the lead. But American women are
complacent and assured, they do most of the talking, make most of the
plans: if they are not seen, it is because they are in the background;
they are either active prominently elsewhere or are high on pedestals.
With each other they are mostly or often humorously direct, whereas with
men they seem to adopt an ironical or patronising attitude. American women
seem also to have a curious power of attracting to themselves other women
who admire them and foster their self-esteem. And, for all that I know,
these satellites have satellites too. Their federacy almost amounts to a
solid secret society; not so much against men, for men must provide the
sinews of war and other comforts, but for their own satisfaction. Both
sexes appear not to languish when alone.
SKY-SIGNS AND CONEY ISLAND
All visitors to New York speak of the exhilaration of its air, and I can
but repeat their testimony. After the first few days the idea of going to
bed became an absurdity.
Among the peculiarly beautiful effects that America produces, sky signs
must be counted high. I had seen some when in San Francisco against the
deep Californian night, and they captivated the startled vision; but the
reckless profusion and movement of the Great White Way, as I turned out of
42nd Street on my first evening in New York, came as something more than a
surprise: a revelation of wilful gaiety. We have normally nothing in
England to compare with it. Nor can we have even our Earl's Court
exhibition imitations of it so long as coal is so rare and costly. But
though we had the driving power for the electricity we could never get
such brilliance, for the clear American atmosphere is an essential ally.
In our humid airs all the diamond glints would be blurred.
For the purest beauty of traceries of light against a blue background one
must go, however, not to Broadway, which is too bizarre, but to Luna Park
on Coney Island. Odd that it should be there, in that bewildering medley
of sound and restlessness, that an extreme of loveliness should be found;
but I maintain that it is so, that nothing more strangely and voluptuously
beautiful could be seen than all those minarets and domes, with their
lines and curves formed by myriad lamps, turning by contrast the heavens
into an ocean of velvet blue, mysterious and soft and profound.
Only periodically—when we have exhibitions at Earl's Court or at
Olympia—is there in England anything like Coney Island. At Blackpool
in August, and on Hampstead Heath on Bank Holidays, a corresponding spirit
of revelry is attempted, but it is not so natural, and is vitiated by a
self-conscious determination to be gay and by not a little vulgarity. The
revellers of Steeplechase Park seemed to me to be more genuine even than
the crowds that throng the Fête de Neuilly; and a vast deal happier.
One very striking difference between Coney Island and the French fair is
the absence of children from New York's "safety-valve," as some one
described it to me. I saw hardly any. It is as though once again the
child's birthday gifts had been appropriated by its elders; but as a
matter of fact the Parks of Steeplechase and Luna were, I imagine,
designed deliberately for adults. Judging by the popularity of the chutes
and the whips, the switchbacks and the witching waves, eccentric movement
has a peculiar attraction for the American holiday-maker. As some one put
it, there is no better way, or at any rate no more thorough way, of
throwing young people together. Middle-aged people, too. But the observer
receives no impression of moral disorder. High spirits are the rule, and
impropriety is the exception. Even in the auditorium at Steeplechase Park,
where the cognoscenti assemble to witness the discomfiture of the
uninitiated, there is nothing but harmless laughter as the skirts fly up
before the unsuspected blast. Such a performance in England, were it
permitted, would degenerate into ugliness; in France, too, it would make
the alien spectator uncomfortable. But the essential public chastity of
the Americans—I am not sure that I ought not here to write
civilisation of the Americans—emerges triumphant.
It was at Coney Island that I came suddenly upon the Pig Slide and had a
new conception of what quadrupeds can do for man.
The Pig Slide, which was in one of the less noisy quarters of Luna Park,
consisted of an enclosure in which stood a wooden building of two storeys,
some five yards wide and three high. On the upper storey was a row of six
or eight cages, in each of which dwelt a little live pig, an infant of a
few weeks. In the middle of the row, descending to the ground, was an
inclined board, with raised edges, such as is often installed in
swimming-baths to make diving automatic, and beneath each cage was a hole
a foot in diameter. The spectators and participants crowded outside the
enclosure, and the thing was to throw balls, which were hired for the
purpose, into the holes. Nothing could exceed the alert and eager interest
taken by the little pigs in the efforts of the ball-throwers. They
quivered on their little legs; they pressed their little noses against the
bars of the cages; their little eyes sparkled; their tails (the only
public corkscrews left in America) curled and uncurled and curled again:
and with reason, for whereas if you missed—as was only too easy—nothing
happened: if you threw accurately the fun began, and the fun was also
theirs.
This is what occurred. First a bell rang and then a spring released the
door of the cage immediately over the hole which your ball had entered, so
that it swung open. The little pig within, after watching the previous
infirmity of your aim with dejection, if not contempt, had pricked up his
ears on the sound of the bell, and now smiled a gratified smile,
irresistible in infectiousness, and trotted out, and, with the smile
dissolving into an expression of absolute beatitude, slid voluptuously
down the plank: to be gathered in at the foot by an attendant and returned
to its cage all ready for another such adventure.
It was for these moments and their concomitant changes of countenance that
you paid your money. To taste the triumph of good marksmanship was only a
fraction of your joy; the greater part of it consisted in liberating a
little prisoner and setting in motion so much ecstasy.
THE PRESS
America is a land of newspapers, and the newspapers are very largely the
same. To a certain extent many of them are exactly the same, for the
vastness of the country makes it possible to syndicalise various features,
so that you find Walt Mason's sagacious and merry and punctual verse,
printed to look like prose but never disappointing the ear, in one of the
journals that you buy wherever you are, in San Francisco, Salt Lake City,
Chicago or New York; and Mr. Montagu's topical rhymes in another; and the
daily adventures of Mutt and Jeff, who are national heroes, in a third.
Every day, for ever, do those and other regular features occur in certain
of the papers: which is partly why no American ever seems to confine
himself, as is our custom, to only one.
Another and admirable feature of certain American papers is a column
edited by a man of letters, whose business it is to fill it every day,
either with the blossoms of his own intelligence or of outside
contributors, or a little of each: such a column as Don Marquis edits for
The Sun, called "The Sundial," and Franklin R. Adams for The
Tribune, called "The Conning Tower," and Christopher Morley for the
New York Evening Post, called "The Bowling Green." Perhaps the
unsigned "Way of the World" in our Morning Post is the nearest
London correlative.
These columns are managed with skill and catholicity, and they impart an
element of graciousness and fancy into what might otherwise be too
materialistic a budget. A journalist, like myself, is naturally delighted
to find editors and a vast public so true to their writing friends. Very
few English editors allow their subscribers the opportunity of
establishing such steady personal relations; and in England, in
consequence, the signed daily contribution from one literary hand is very
rare—to an American observer probably mysteriously so. The daily
cartoon is common with us; but in London, for example, I cannot think of
any similar literary feature that is signed in full. We have C.E.B.'s
regular verse in the Evening News and "The Londoner's" daily essay
in the same paper, and various initials elsewhere; but, with us, only the
artists are allowed their names. Now, in America every name, everywhere,
is blazoned forth.
Whatever bushel measures may be used for in the United States the
concealing of light is no part of their programme.
Another feature of American daily journals comparatively unknown in
England is the so-called comic pictorial sequence. All the big papers have
from one to half a dozen of these sequences, each by a different artist.
Bud Fisher with "Mutt and Jeff" comes first in popularity, I believe, and
then there are his rivals and his imitators. Nothing more inane than some
of these series could be invented; and yet they persist and could not, I
am told, be dropped by any editor who thought first of circulation.
After the individual contributions have been subtracted, all the
newspapers are curiously alike. The same reporters might be on every one;
the same sub-editors; the same composers of head-lines. If we think of
Americans as too capable of cynical levity it is largely because of these
head-lines, which are always as epigrammatic as possible, always
light-hearted, often facetious, and often cruel. An unfortunate woman's
failure at suicide after killing her husband was thus touched off in one
of the journals while I was in New York:
POOR SHOT AT HERSELF BUT SUCCEEDS IN LODGING BULLET IN SPOUSE.
When it comes to the choice of news, one cannot believe that American
editors are the best friends of their country. I am holding no brief for
many English editors; I think that our papers can be common too, and can
be too ready to take things by the wrong handle; but I think that more
vulgarising of life is, at present, effected by American journalists than
by English. There are, however, many signs that we may catch up.
Profusion is a characteristic of the American newspaper. There is too much
of everything. And when Sunday comes with its masses of reading matter
proper to the Day of Rest one is appalled. One thing is certain—no
American can find time to do justice both to his Sunday paper and his
Maker. It is principally on Sunday that one realises that if Matthew
Arnold's saying that every nation has the newspapers it deserves is true,
America must have been very naughty. How the Sunday editions could be
brought out while the paper-shortage was being discussed everywhere, as it
was during my visit, was a problem that staggered me. But that the
shortage was real I was assured, and jokes upon it even got into the music
halls: a sure indication of its existence.﹃If the scarcity of paper gets
more acute,﹄I heard a comedian say, "they'll soon have to make shoes of
leather again."
But it is not only the Sunday papers that are so immense. I used to hold
the Saturday Evening Post in my hands, weighed down beneath its
bulk, and marvel that the nation that had time to read it could have time
for anything else. The matter is of the best, but what would the prudent,
wise and hard-working philosopher who founded it so many years ago—Benjamin
Franklin—say if he saw its lure deflecting millions of readers from
the real business of life?
When we come to consider the American magazines—to which class the
Saturday Evening Post almost belongs—and the English, there
is no comparison. The best American magazines are wonderful in their
quality and range, and we have nothing to set beside them. It is
astonishing to think how different, in the same country, daily and monthly
journalism can be. Omitting the monthly reviews, Blackwood is, I
take it, our finest monthly miscellany; and all of Blackwood could
easily and naturally be absorbed in one of the American magazines and be
illustrated into the bargain, and still leave room for much more. And the
whole would cost less! Why England is so poorly and pettily served in the
matter of monthly magazines is something of a mystery; but part of the
cause is the rivalry of the papers, and part the smallness of our
population. But I shall always hold that we deserve more good magazines
than we have now.
TREASURES OF ART
I was fortunate in being in New York when the Metropolitan Museum
celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its birth, for I was therefore able
to enjoy not only its normal treasures but such others as had been
borrowed for birthday presents, which means that I saw Mrs. H. E.
Huntington's Vermeer, as well as the supreme Marquand example of that
master; more than the regular wealth of Rembrandts, Manet's "Still Life,"
Gauguin's "Women by the River," El Greco's "View of Toledo," Franz Hals'
big jovial Dutchman from Mr. Harry Goldman's walls, and Bellini's
"Bacchanale"—to say nothing of the lace in galleries 18 and 19, Mr.
Morgan's bronze Eros from Pompeii, and the various cases of porcelain from
a score of collections. But without extra allurements I should have been
drawn again and again to this magnificent museum.
Two of the principal metropolitan donors—Altman and Hearn—were
the owners of big dry goods stores, while Marquand, whose little Vermeer
is probably the loveliest thing in America, was also a merchant. In future
I shall look upon all the great emporium proprietors as worthy of
patronage, on the chance of their being also beneficent collectors of
works of art. This thought, this hope, is more likely to get me into a
certain Oxford Street establishment than all the rhetoric and special
pleading of Callisthenes.
The Frick Gallery was not accessible; but I was privileged to roam at will
both in Mr. Morgan's library and in Mr. H. E. Huntington's, in each of
which I saw such a profusion of unique and unappraisable autographs as I
had not supposed existed in private hands. Rare books any one with money
can have, for they are mostly in duplicate; but autographs and
"association" books are unique, and America is the place for them. I had
known that it was necessary to cross the Atlantic in order to see the
originals of many of the pictures of which we in London have only the
photographs. I knew that the bulk of the Lamb correspondence was in
America, and at Mr. Morgan's I saw the author's draft of the essay on
"Roast Pig," and at Mr. Newton's, in Philadelphia, the original of﹃Dream
Children,﹄an even more desirable possession; I knew that America had
provided an eager home for everything connected with Keats and Shelley and
Stevenson; but it was a surprise to find at Mr. Morgan's so wide a range
of MSS., extending from Milton to Du Maurier, and from Bacon to "Dorian
Gray"; while at Mr. Huntington's I had in my hands the actual foolscap
sheets on which Heine composed his "Florentine Nights."
I ought, you say, to have known this before. Maybe. But that ignorance in
such matters is no monopoly of mine I can prove by remarking that many an
American collector with whom I have talked was unaware that the library of
Harvard University is the possessor of all the works of reference—mostly
annotated—which were used by Thomas Carlyle in writing his
"Cromwell" and his "Frederick the Great," and they were bequeathed by him
in his will to Harvard University because of his esteem and regard for the
American people, "particularly the more silent part of them."
My hours in these libraries, together with a glimpse of the Widener room
at Harvard and certain booksellers' shelves, gave me some idea of what
American collectors have done towards making the New World a treasury of
the Old, and I realised how more and more necessary it will be, in the
future, for all critics of art in whatever branch, and of literature in
whatever branch, and all students even of antiquity, if they intend to be
thorough, to visit America. This I had guessed at, but never before had
known.
The English traveller lighting upon so many of the essentially English
riches as are conserved in American libraries, and particularly when he
has not a meagre share of national pride, cannot but pause to wonder how
it came about—and comes about—that so much that ought to be in
its own country has been permitted to stray.
In England collectors and connoisseurs are by no means rare. What, then,
were they doing to let all these letters of Keats and Shelley, Burns and
Byron, Lamb and Johnson—to name for the moment nothing else—find
their resting-place in America? The dollar is very powerful, I know, but
should it have been as pre-eminently powerful as this? Need it have
defeated so much patriotism?
Pictures come into a different category, for every artist painted more
than one picture. I have experienced no shade of resentment towards their
new owners in looking at the superb collections of old and new foreign
masters in the American public and private galleries; for so long as there
are enough examples of the masters to go round, every nation should have a
share. With MSS., however, it is different. Facsimiles, such as the Boston
Bibliographical Society's edition of Lamb's letters, would serve for the
rest of the world, and the originals should be in their author's native
land. But that is a counsel of perfection. The only thing to do is to grin
and bear it, and feel happy that these unique possessions are preserved
with such loving pride and care. Any idea of retaliation on America on the
part of England by buying up the MSS. of the great American writers, such
as Franklin and Poe, Hawthorne and Emerson, Thoreau and Lowell, Holmes and
Whitman, was rendered futile by the discovery that Mr. Morgan possesses
these too. I had in his library all the Breakfast Table series in my
hands, together with a play by Poe not yet published.
MOUNT VERNON
Mention of the beautiful solicitude with which these treasures are
surrounded, suggests the reflection that the old country has something to
learn from the new in the matter of distinguished custodianship. We have
no place of national pilgrimage in England that is so perfect a model as
Washington's home at Mount Vernon. It is perhaps through lack of a figure
of the Washington type that we have nothing to compare with it; for any
parallel one must rather go to Fontainebleau; but certain shrines are ours
and none of them discloses quite such pious thoroughness as this. When I
think of the completeness of the preservation and reconstruction of Mount
Vernon, where, largely through the piety of individuals, a thousand
personal relics have been reassembled, so that, save for the sightseers,
this serene and simple Virginian mansion is almost exactly as it was, I am
filled with admiration. For a young people largely in a hurry to find time
to be so proud and so reverent is a significant thing.
Nor is this spirit of pious reverence confined to national memorials.
Longfellow's Wayside Inn in Massachusetts, although still only a hostelry,
compares not unfavourably with Dove Cottage at Grasmere and Carlyle's
house in Chelsea. The preservation is more minute. But to return to Mount
Vernon, the orderliness of the place is not its least noticeable feature.
There is no mingling of trade with sentiment, as at Stratford-on-Avon, for
example. Within the borders of the estate everything is quiet. I have
never seen Americans in church (not, I hasten to add, because they
abstain, but because I did), but I am sure that they could not, even
there, behave more as if the environment were sacred. To watch the crowds
at Mount Vernon, and to contemplate the massive isolated grandeur of the
Lincoln Memorial now being finished at Washington, is to realise that
America, for all its superficial frivolity and cynicism, is capable of a
very deep seriousness.
VERS LIBRE
It would have been pedantic, while in America, to have abstained from an
effort at vers libre.
REVOLT
I had been to the Metropolitan Museum looking at beautiful things and
rejoicing in them.
And then I had to catch a train and go far into the country, to Paul
Smith's.
And as the light lessened and the brooding hour set in I looked out of the
window and reconstructed some of the lovely things I had seen—the
sculptures and the paintings, the jewels and the porcelain: all the fine
flower of the arts through the ages.
It seemed marvellous beyond understanding that such perfection could
exist, and I thought how wonderful it must be to be God and see His
creatures rising now and again to such heights.
And then I came to a station where there was to be a very long wait, and I
went to an inn for a meal.
It was a dirty neglected place, with a sullen unwashed man at the door,
who called raspingly to his wife within.
And when she came she was a slattern, with dishevelled hair and a soiled
dress and apron, and she looked miserable and worn out.
She prepared a meal which I could not eat, and when I went to pay for it I
found her sitting dejectedly in a chair looking with a kind of dumb
despair at the day's washing-up still to do.
And as I walked up and down the road waiting for the car I thought of this
woman's earlier life when she was happy.
I thought of her in her courtship, when her husband loved her and they
looked forward to marriage and he was tender and she was blithe.
They probably went to Coney Island together and laughed with the rest.
And it seemed iniquitous that such changes should come about and that
merry girls should grow into sluts and slovens, and ardent young husbands
should degenerate into unkempt bullies, and houses meant for happiness
should decay, and marriage promises all be forgotten.
And I felt that if the world could not be better managed than that I never
wanted to see any of God's artistic darlings at the top of their form
again and the Metropolitan Museum could go hang.
DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE
I believe that few statements about America would so surprise English
people as that it has beautiful architecture. I was prepared to find
Boston and Cambridge old-fashioned and homelike—Oliver Wendell
Holmes had initiated me; I had a distinct notion of the cool spaciousness
of the White House and the imposing proportions of the Capitol and, of
course, I knew that one had but to see the skyscrapers of New York to
experience the traditional repulsion! But of the church of St. Thomas on
Fifth Avenue I had heard nothing, nor of Mr. Morgan's exquisite library,
nor of the Grand Central terminus, nor of the Lincoln Memorial at
Washington, nor of the bland charm of Mount Vernon. Nor had I expected to
find Fifth Avenue so dignified and cordial a thoroughfare.
Even less was I prepared for such metal work and stone work as is to be
seen in some of the business houses—such as, for example, the new
Guaranty Trust offices, both on Broadway and in Fifth Avenue. Even the
elevators (for which we in England, in spite of our ancient lethargy, have
a one-syllable word) are often finished with charming taste.
Least of all did I anticipate the maturity of America's buildings. Those
serene façades on Beacon Street overlooking Boston Common, where the
Autocrat used to walk (and I made an endeavour to follow his identical
footsteps, for he was my first real author)—they are as satisfying
as anything in Georgian London. And I shall long treasure the memory of
the warm red brick and easy proportions of the Boston City Hall and
Faneuil Hall, and Independence Hall at Philadelphia seen through a screen
of leaves. But in England (and these buildings were English once) we still
have many old red brick buildings; what we have not is anything to
correspond with the spacious friendly houses of wood which I saw in the
country all about Boston and at Cambridge—such houses as that which
was Lowell's home—each amid its own greenery. Nowhere, however, did
I see a more comely manor house of the old Colonial style than Anthony
Wayne's, near Daylesford, in Pennsylvania. In England only cottages are
built of wood, and I rather think that there are now by-laws against that.
Not all the good country houses, big and little, are, however, old.
American architects in the past few years seem to have developed a very
attractive type of home, often only a cottage, and I saw a great number of
these on the slopes of the Hudson, all the new ones combining taste with
the suggestion of comfort. The conservation of trees wherever possible is
an admirable feature of modern suburban planning in America. In England
the new suburb too often has nothing but saplings. In America, again, the
houses, even the very small ones, are more often detached than with us.
BOSTON
Once the lay-out of New York has been mastered—its avenues and
numbered cross streets—it is the most difficult city in the world in
which to lose one's way. But Boston is different. I found Boston hard to
learn, although it was a pleasant task to acquire knowledge, for I was led
into some of the quietest little Georgian streets I have ever been in,
steep though some of them were, and along one of the fairest of green
walks—that between the back of Beacon Street and the placid Charles.
Against Boston I have a certain grudge, for I could find no one to direct
me to the place where the tea was thrown overboard. But that it was
subjected to this indignity we may be certain—partly from the
testimony of subsequent events not too soothing to English feelings, and
partly from the unpopularity which that honest herb still suffers on
American soil. Coffee, yes; coffee at all times; but no one will take any
but the most perfunctory interest in the preparation of tea. I found the
harbour; I traversed wharf after wharf; but found no visible record of the
most momentous act of jettison since Jonah. In the top room, however, of
Faneuil Hall, in the Honourable Artillery Company's headquarters, the more
salient incidents of the struggle which followed are all depicted by
enthusiastic, if not too talented, painters; and I saw in the distance the
monument on Bunker's Hill.
My cicerone must be excused, for he was a Boston man, born and bred, and I
ought never to have put him to the humiliation of confessing his natural
ignorance. But the record is there, and legible enough. The tablet (many
kind correspondents have informed me since certain of these notes appeared
in the Outlook) is at 495 Atlantic Avenue, in the water-front
district, just a short walk from the South Station, and it has the
following inscription:
HERE FORMERLY STOOD
GRIFFIN'S WHARF
at which lay moored on Dec. 16, 1773, three British ships with cargoes of
tea. To defeat King George's trivial but tyrannical tax of three pence a
pound, about ninety citizens of Boston, partly disguised as Indians,
boarded the ships, threw the cargoes, three hundred and forty-two chests
in all, into the sea and made the world ring with the patriotic exploit of
the
BOSTON TEA PARTY
"No! ne'er was mingled such a draught
In palace, hall, or arbor,
As freemen brewed and tyrants quaffed
That night in Boston Harbor."
Boston has a remarkable art gallery and museum, notable for its ancient
Chinese paintings, its collection of Japanese prints—one of the best
in the world, I believe—and a dazzling wall of water-colours by Mr.
Sargent. It was here that I saw my first Winslow Homers—two or three
rapid sketches of fishermen in full excitement—and was conquered by
his verve and actuality. In the Metropolitan Museum in New York I found
him again in oils and my admiration increased. Surely no one ever can have
painted the sea with more vividness, power and truth! We have no example
of his work in any public gallery in London; nor have we anything by W. M.
Chase, Arthur B. Davies, Swain Gifford, J. W. Alexander, George Inness, or
De Forest Brush. It is more than time for another American Exhibition. As
it is, the only modern American artists of whom there is any general
knowledge in England are Mr. Sargent, Mr. Epstein and Mr. Pennell, and the
late E. A. Abbey, G. H. Boughton, and Whistler. Other Americans painting
in our midst are Mr. Mark Fisher, R.A., Mr. J. J. Shannon, R.A., Mr. J.
McLure Hamilton, and Mr. G. Wetherbee.
The Boston Gallery is the proud possessor of the rough and unfinished but
"speaking" likeness of George Washington by his predestined limner Gilbert
Stuart, and also a companion presentment of Washington's wife. Looking
upon this lady's countenance and watching a party of school girls who were
making the tour of the rooms, not uncomforted on their arduous adventure
by chocolate and other confections, it occurred to me that if America
increases her present love of eating sweets, due, I am told, not a little
to Prohibition, George Washington will gradually disappear into the
background and Martha Washington, who has already given her name to a very
popular brand of candy, will be venerated instead, as the Sweet Mother of
her Country.
An American correspondent sends me the following poem in order to explain
to me the deviousness of Boston's principal thoroughfare. The poet is Mr.
Sam Walter Foss:—
One day through the primeval wood
A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail, as all calves do.
Since then two hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.
The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell-wether sheep
Pursued the trail o'er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him too,
As good bell-wethers always do.
And from that day o'er hill and glade
Through those old woods a path was made,
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because 'twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed—do not laugh—
The first migrations of that calf,
And through this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wabbled when he walked.
The forest path became a lane
That bent and turned and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And travelled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street,
And then before men were aware,
A city's crowded thoroughfare,
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis.
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed the zigzag calf about;
And o'er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way
And lost one hundred years a day;
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.
A moral lesson this might teach,
Were I ordained and called to preach.
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in and forth and back
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the paths that others do.
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh
Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah, many things this tale might teach—But
I am not ordained to preach.
PHILADELPHIA
I was fortunate in the city over which William Penn, in giant effigy,
keeps watch and ward, in having as guide, philosopher and friend Mr. A.
Edward Newton, the Johnsonian, and the author of one of the best examples
of "amateur" literature that I know—"The Amenities of
Book-Collecting." Mr. Newton took me everywhere, even to the little
seventeenth-century Swedish church, which architecturally may be described
as the antipodes of Philadelphia's newer glory, the Curtis Building, where
editors are lodged like kings and can be attained to (if at all) only
through marble halls. We went to St. Peter's, where, suddenly awaking
during the sermon, one would think oneself to be in a London city church,
and to the Historical Museum, where I found among the Quaker records many
of my own ancestors and was bewildered amid such a profusion of relics of
Penn, Washington and Franklin. In the old library were more traces of
Franklin, including his famous electrical appliance, again testifying to
the white flame with which American hero-worship can burn; and we found
the sagacious Benjamin once more at the Franklin Inn Club, where the
simplicity of the eighteenth century mingles with the humour and culture
of the twentieth. We then drove through several miles of Fairmount Park,
stopping for a few minutes in the hope of finding the late J. G. Johnson's
Vermeer in the gallery there; but for the moment it was in hiding, the
walls being devoted to his Italian pictures.
Finally we drew up at the gates of that strange and imposing Corinthian
temple which might have been dislodged from its original site and hurled
to Philadelphia by the first Quaker, Poseidon—the Girard College.
This solemn fane we were permitted to enter only on convincing the porter
that we were not ministers of religion—an easy enough task for Mr.
Newton, who wears with grace the natural abandon of a Voltairean, but a
difficult one for me. Why Stephen Girard, the worthy﹃merchant and
mariner﹄who endowed this institution, was so suspicious of the cloth, no
matter what its cut, I do not know; no doubt he had his reasons; but his
prejudices are faithfully respected by his janitor, whose eye is a very
gimlet of suspicion. However, we got in and saw the philanthropist's tomb
and his household effects behind those massive columns.
That evening I spent in Mr. Newton's library among Blake and Lamb and
Johnson autographs and MSS., breaking the Tenth Commandment with a
recklessness that would have satisfied and delighted Stephen Girard's
gatekeeper; and the next day we were off to Valley Forge to see with what
imaginative thoughtfulness the Government has been transforming
Washington's camp into a national park and restoring the old landmarks. It
was a fine spring day and the woods were flecked with the white and pink
blossoms of the dogwood—a tree which in England is only an
inconspicuous hedgerow bush but here has both charm and importance and
some of the unexpectedness of a tropical growth. I wish we could
acclimatise it.
The memorial chapel now in course of completion on one of the Valley Forge
eminences seemed to me a very admirable example not only of modern Gothic
but of votive piety. And such a wealth of American symbolism cannot exist
elsewhere. But in the severe little cottage where Washington made his
headquarters, down by the stream, with all his frugal campaigning
furniture and accessories in their old places, I felt more emotion than in
the odour of sanctity. The simple reality of it conquered the stained
glass.
GENERAL REFLECTIONS
Looking back on it all I realise that America never struck me as a new
country, although its inhabitants often seemed to be a new people. The
cities are more mature than the citizens. New York, Chicago, Boston,
Philadelphia, Washington—all have an air of permanence and age. The
buildings, even the most fantastic, suggest indigenousness, or at least
stability; nor would the presence of more ancient structures increase this
effect. To the eye of the ordinary Englishman accustomed to work in what
we call the City, in Fleet Street, in the Strand, in Piccadilly, or in
Oxford Street, New York would not appear to be a younger place than
London, and Boston might easily strike him as older. Nor is London more
than a little older, except in spots, such as the Tower and the Temple and
the Abbey, and that little Tudor row in Holborn, all separated by vast
tracts of modernity. Indeed, I would almost go farther and say that London
sets up an illusion of being newer even than New York by reason of its
more disturbing street traffic both in the roads and on the footways, and
the prevalence of the gaily coloured omnibuses which thunder along so many
thoroughfares in notable contrast with the sedate and sober vehicles that
serve Fifth Avenue and are hardly seen elsewhere.
Meanwhile an illusion of antiquity is set up by New York's habit of
commingling business houses and private residences, which surely belongs
to an older order of society. In London we have done away with such a
blend. Our nearest approach to Fifth Avenue is, I suppose, Regent Street;
but there are no mansions among the shops of Regent Street. Our shops are
there and our mansions are elsewhere, far away, in what we call
residential quarters—such as Park Lane, Queen's Gate, Mayfair, the
Bayswater Road, and Grosvenor Square. To turn out of Fifth Avenue into the
quiet streets where people live is to receive a distinct impression of
sedateness such as New York is never supposed to convey. One has the same
feeling in the other great American cities.
But when it comes to their inhabitants there are to the English eye fewer
signs of maturity. I have never been able to get rid of the idea that
every one I have met in America, no matter how grave a senior, instead of
being really and self-consciously in the thick of life, is only getting
ready to begin. Perhaps this is due in part to the pleasure—the
excitement almost—which American business men—and all
Americans are business men—take in their work. They not merely do
it, but they enjoy doing it and they watch themselves doing it. They seem
to have a knack of withdrawing aside and observing themselves as from the
stalls, not without applause. In other words, they dramatise continually.
Now, one does not do this when one is old—it is a childish game—and
it is another proof that they are younger than we, who do not enjoy our
work, and indeed, most of us, are ashamed of it and want the world to
believe that we live like the lilies on private means.
Similarly, many Americans seem, when they talk, to be two persons: one the
talker, and the other the listener charmed by the quality of his
discourse. There is nothing detrimental in such duplicity. Indeed, I think
I have a very real envy of it. But one of the defects of the listening
habit is perhaps to make them too rhetorical, too verbose. It is odd that
the nation that has given us so much epigrammatic slang and the telegraph
and the telephone and the typewriter should have so little of what might
be called intellectual short-hand. But so it is. Too many Americans are
remorseless when they are making themselves clear.
Yet the passion for printed idiomatic sententiousness and arresting
trade-notices is visible all the time. You see it in the newspapers and in
the shops. I found a children's millinery shop in New York with this
laconic indication of its scope, in permanent letters, on the plate-glass
window: "Lids for Kids." A New York undertaker, I am told, has affixed to
all his hearses the too legible legend: "You may linger, but I'll get you
yet."
When it comes to descriptive new words, coined rapidly to meet occasions,
we English are nowhere compared with the Americans. Could there be
anything better than the term "Nearbeer" to reveal at a blow the character
of a substitute for ale? I take off my hat, too, to "crape-hanger," which
leaves "kill-joy" far in the rear. But "optience" for a cinema audience,
which sees but does not hear, though ingenious, is less admirable.
Although I found the walls of business offices in New York and elsewhere
decorated with pithy counsel to callers, and discouragements to
irrelevance, such as "Come to the point but don't camp on it,"﹃To hell
with yesterday,﹄and so forth, I am very doubtful if with all these
suggestions of practical address and Napoleonic efficiency the American
business man is as quick and decisive as ours can be. There is more
autobiography talked in American offices than in English; more getting
ready to begin.
I have, however, no envy of the American man's inability to loaf and
invite his soul, as his great democratic poet was able to do. I think that
this unfamiliarity with armchair life is a misfortune. That article of
furniture, we must suppose, is for older civilisations, where men have
either, after earning the right to recline, taken their ease gracefully,
or have inherited their fortune and are partial to idleness. It consorts
ill with those who are still either continually and restlessly in pursuit
of the dollar or are engaged in the occupation of watching dollars
automatically arrive.
One of the things, I take it, for Americans to learn is how to transform
money into a friend. So many men who ought to be quietly rejoicing in
their riches seem still to be anxious and acquisitive; so many men who
have become suddenly wealthy seem to be allowing their gains to ruin their
happiness. For the nation's good nearly every one, I fancy, has too much
money.
My experience is that England has almost everything to learn from America
in the matter of hotels. I consider American second and third-class hotels
to be better in many ways than our best. Every American restaurant, of
each grade, is better than the English equivalent; the appointments are
better, the food is served with more distinction and often is better too.
When it comes to coffee, there is no comparison whatever: American coffee
is the best in the world. Only quite recently has the importance of the
complete suite entered the intelligence of the promoters of English
hotels, and in myriads of these establishments, called first class, there
is still but one bathroom to twenty rooms. Heating coils and hot and cold
water in the rooms are even more rare: so rare as to be mentioned in the
advertisements. Telephones in the rooms are rarer. In too many hotels in
England there is still no light at the head of the bed. But we have
certain advantages. For example, in English restaurants there is always
something on the table to eat at once—hors d'oeuvres or bread
and butter. In America there is too often nothing ready but iced water—an
ungenial overture to any feast—and you must wait until your order
has been taken. Other travellers, even Americans, have agreed with me that
it would be more comfortable if the convention which decrees that the
waiter shall bring everything together could be overruled. Something﹃to
go on with﹄is a great ameliorative, especially when one is hungry and
tired.
In thus commending American hotels over English it is, however, only right
to admit that the American hotels are very much more expensive.
While on the subject of eating, I would say that for all their notorious
freedoms Americans have a better sense of order than we. Their policemen
may carry their batons drawn, and even swing them with a certain insolent
defiance or even provocation, but New York goes on its way with more
precision and less disturbance than London, and every one is smarter, more
alert. The suggestion of a living wage for all is constant. It is indeed
on this sense of orderliness that the success of certain of the American
time-saving appliances is built. The Automat restaurants, for example,
where the customer gets all his requirements himself, would never do in
London. The idea is perfect; but it requires the co-operation of the
customer, and that is what we should fail to provide. The spotless
cleanliness and mechanical exactitude of these places in New York would
cease in London, and gradually they would decline and then disappear. At
heart, we in England dislike well-managed places. Nor can I see New York's
public distribution of hot water adopted in London. Such little geysers as
expel steam at intervals through the roadway of Fifth Avenue will never, I
fear, be found in Regent Street or Piccadilly. Our communism is very
patchy.
There are some unexpected differences between America and England. It is
odd, for instance, to find a nation from whom we get most of our tobacco
and who have the reputation of even chewing cigars, with such strict rules
against smoking. In the Music Halls, which are, as a rule, better than
ours, smoking is permitted only in certain parts. Public decorum again is,
I should say, more noticeable in an American than an English city, and yet
both in San Francisco and New York I dined in restaurants—not late—between
7 and 8—and not furtive hole-in-corner places,—where girls
belonging to the establishment, wearing almost nothing at all, performed
the latest dances, with extravagant and daring variations of them, among
the tables. In London this kind of thing is unknown. In Paris it occurs
only in the night cafés. It struck me as astonishing—and probably
not at all to the good—that it should be an ordinary dinner
accompaniment.
I was asked while I was in America to set down some of the chief things
that I missed. I might easily have begun with walking-sticks, for until I
reached New York I seemed to be the only man in America who carried one,
although a San Francisco friend confessed to sometimes "wearing a cane" on
Sundays. I missed a Visitors' Book either at the British Embassy in
Washington or at the White House. After passing through India, where one's
first duty is to enter one's name in these volumes, it seemed odd that the
same machinery of civility should be lacking. I missed any system of
cleaning boots during the night, in the hotels; but I soon became
accustomed to this, and rather enjoyed visiting the "shine parlours," in
one of which was this crisp notice:﹃If you like our work, tell your
friends; if you don't like it, tell us.﹄I missed gum-chewing.
But it was on returning to England that I began really to take notice.
Then I found myself missing America's cleanliness, America's despatch, its
hotel efficiency, its lashings of cream, its ice on every hand. All this
at Liverpool! I missed later the petrol fountains all about the roads, a
few of which I had seen in India, at which the motorist can replenish; but
these surely will not be long in coming. I don't want England to be
Americanised; I don't want America to cease to be a foreign country; but
there are lessons each of us can learn.
If I were an American, although I travelled abroad now and then (and I
hold that it is the duty of a man to see other lands but live in his own)
I should concentrate on America. It is the country of the future. I am
glad I have seen it and now know something—however slight—about
it at first hand. I made many friends there and amassed innumerable
delightful memories. But what is the use of eight weeks? I am ashamed not
to have gone there sooner, and humiliated by the brevity of my stay. I
have had the opportunity only to lift a thousand curtains, get a glimpse
of the entertainment on the other side and drop them again. I should like
to go there every other year and have time: time to make the acquaintance
of a naturalist and learn from him the names of birds and trees and
flowers; time to loiter in the byways; time to penetrate into deeper
strata where intimacies strike root and the real discoveries are made;
time to discern beneath the surface, so hard and assured, something fey,
something wistful, the sense of tears.
INDEX
Adirondacks, etc.
Agra and its Fort
Aitken, E. H., his three books
Akbar
America, its democracy
its humour
its slang
its trains
its women
its newspapers
its MSS.
its hotels
its maturity
American painters in England
Americans, at home and abroad
Americans, their clothes
their physiognomy
their disturbing wealth
Aquariums
Architecture in America
"Association" books
Baker, Mr. Herbert
Bam Bahadur, that great hunter
Baseball and cricket
Beecher, Henry Ward
Benares
Berkeley University
Bernier on the Moguls
Betel-nut chewing
Birds in India
Blackbuck, the agile
Bombay—Towers of Silence
Boston
Butler, H.E., Sir Harcourt
Calcutta—the piano-carriers
its snake charmers
and the Maidan
and its English buildings
its old cemetery
Charnock, Job
Chicago, its hospitable policeman
its pictures
Cinema, the
Cobb, Mr. Irvin
Comparisons between America and England
Coney Island
Cow-worship in India
Cricket and baseball
Curzon, Lord, his preservation of ancient buildings
Dances in India and Japan
Delhi—the camel omnibuses
its architecture
and the Mutiny
Fort
Dickens, Charles, presentation copies
"Eha," his three books
Elephanta, caves of
Fakirs in India
Fatehpur-Sikri
Faneuil Hall, Boston
Fifth Avenue
Foss, Mr. Samuel W., his Boston poem
Franklin, Benjamin
Fujiyama
Funerals in India and England
Ganges, the
Geisha dances
Gilbert, Mr. Cass
Girard, Stephen
Goschen, Lord, wounds the tiger
Hakone, Lake
Hawking
Herford, Mr. Oliver
Hindus, the, and animals
Hokusai
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Hong-Kong, funeral at
Honolulu
Hooghli, the
Hotels in America
Humayun's Tomb
Huntington, Mr. H. E.
Jahan, Shah, his buildings
Jains, the, their preservation of life
Japan—its lack of idlers
and animal life
its women
its American reading
Japanese, their small stature
materialism
public manners
their gold teeth
Journalism in America
Katsuragava rapids
Keats' Lamia, 1820
Kesteven, Sir Charles, his library
Khan, Sir Umar Hayat
Kohinoor, the
Kutb Minar, the
Kyoto, its temples
Lake Placid Club
Lamb, Mr. A. M., his distress at Honolulu
Charles, first editions
manuscripts
Landor, Walter Savage
Lavater abroad
Lincoln Memorial
Liston, Lt.-Col. Glen
Lucknow and the Mutiny
its delectability
Lutyens, Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A., goes hawking
and Imperial Delhi
and the priests
and the divers
hunts the tiger
Marquis, Mr. Don
Moguls, the
Mohammedan customs
priests
Monkeys
Morgan, Mr. J. Pierpont
Mount Vernon
Mutiny, the
Myanoshita
Nautch, the
Nawanagar, the Jam of
New or Imperial Delhi
New York, its skyscrapers
its buildings
its aquarium
its shops
its dances
its sky signs
its pictures
its MSS.
its maturity
Newspapers in America
Newton, Mr. A. Edward
Otome Pass
Painters, American, in England
Parsees, the
Peacock Throne, the
Philadelphia
Pictures in America
Prince of Wales in New York
Prohibition
Pronunciation in America
Ranjitsinhji, Prince
Rickshaws
Roosevelt, Theodore, his Memorial Road
"Rose Aylmer"
Ruth, "Babe"
San Francisco
Saranac
Saturday Evening Post, the
Scott, Mr. A. P., his house
Sculpture in America
Shaw, Mr. Bernard
Simplified spelling
Skyscrapers
Skysigns
Slang in America
Snake-poison antidotes
St. Gaudens, Augustus
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Swamp-deer hunting
Swan, Mr. Thomas, his despair at Honolulu
Taj Mahal, the
Talmadge, Constance
Norma
Tavernier on the Moguls
Theatre, the, in Japan
Tiger hunt, a
Tinney, Frank
Tokio, its dress
its theatre
Tolstoi, Count Leo
Towers of Silence
Townsend, Joe, his ballad
Valley Forge
Venice and Benares
Vers Libre
Vultures
Washington
George
Martha
Wayne, Anthony
Wayside Inn, the
Wheeler, Mr. Charles Stetson, his story
Women in America
in Japan
Woolworth Building, the
Yamaguchi, Madame
Yokohama
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