Your United States, Arnold Bennett [ebook reader browser .TXT] 📗

should be at once very dear, very bad, and most inconveniently scarce, baffled and still baffles me. The sum of real annoyance daily inflicted on a rich and busy but craven-hearted city like New York by the eccentricity of its taxicab organization must be colossal.

As to the condition of the roadways, the vocabulary of blame had been exhausted long before I arrived. Two things, however, struck me in New York which I had not heard of by report: the greasiness of the streets, transforming every automobile into a skidding death-trap at the least sign of moisture, and the leisureliness of the road-works. The busiest part of Thirty-fourth Street, for example--no mean artery, either--was torn up when I came into New York, and it was still torn up when I left. And, lastly, why are there no island refuges on Fifth Avenue? Even at the intersection of Fifth and Broadway there is no oasis for the pursued wayfarer. Every European city has long ago decided that the provision of island refuges in main thoroughfares is an act of elementary justice to the wayfarer in his unequal and exhausting struggle with wheeled traffic.

All these criticisms, which are severe but honest, would lose much of their point if the general efficiency of the United States and its delightful genius for organization were not so obvious and so impressive to the European. In fact, it is precisely the brilliant practical qualities of the country which place its idiosyncrasies in the matter of transit in so startling a light.... I would not care to close this section without a grateful reference to the very natty electric coupes, usually driven by ladies, which are so refreshing a feature of the streets of Chicago, and to the virtues of American private automobiles in general.

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It is remarkable that a citizen who cheerfully and negligently submits to so many various inconveniences outside his home should insist on having the most comfortable home in the world, as the American citizen unquestionably has! Once, when in response to an interviewer I had become rather lyrical in praise of I forget what phenomenon in the United States, a Philadelphia evening newspaper published an editorial article in criticism of my views. This article was entitled "Offensive Flattery." Were I to say freely all that I thought of the American private house, large or small, I might expose myself again to the same accusation.

When I began to make the acquaintance of the American private house, I felt like one who, son of an exiled mother, had been born abroad and had at length entered his real country. That is to say, I felt at home. I felt that all this practical comfort and myself had been specially destined for each other since the beginning of time, and that fate was at last being fulfilled. Freely I admit that until I reached America I had not understood what real domestic comfort, generously conceived, could be. Certainly I had always in this particular quarreled with my own country, whose average notion of comfort still is to leave the drawing-room (temperature 70 deg.--near the fire) at midnight, pass by a windswept hall and staircase (temperature 55 deg.) to a bedroom full of fine fresh air (temperature 50 deg. to 40 deg.), and in that chamber, having removed piece by piece every bit of warm clothing, to slip, imperfectly protected, between icy sheets and wait for sleep. Certainly I had always contested the joyfulness of that particular process; but my imagination had fallen short of the delicious innumerable realities of comfort in an American home.

Now, having regained the "barbaric seats" whence I came, I read with a peculiar expression the advertisements of fashionable country and town residences to rent or for sale in England. Such as: "Choice residence. Five reception-rooms. Sixteen bedrooms. Bathroom--" Or: "Thoroughly up-to-date mansion. Six reception-rooms. Splendid hall. Billiard-room. Twenty-four bedrooms. Two bath-rooms--" I read this literature (to be discovered textually every week in the best illustrated weeklies), and I smile. Also I wonder, faintly blushing, what Americans truly _do_ think of the residential aspects of European house-property when they first see it. And I wonder, without blushing, to what miraculous degree of perfected comfort Americans would raise all their urban traffic if only they cared enough to keep the professional politician out of their streets as strictly as they keep him out of their houses.

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The great American hotel, too, is a wondrous haven for the European who in Europe has only tasted comfort in his dreams. The calm orderliness of the bedroom floors, the adequacy of wardrobes and lamps, the reckless profusion of clean linen, that charming notice which one finds under one's door in the morning, "You were called at seven-thirty, and answered," the fundamental principle that a bedroom without a bath-room is not a bedroom, the magic laundry which returns your effects duly starched in eight hours, the bells which are answered immediately, the thickness of the walls, the radiator in the elevator-shaft, the celestial invention of the floor-clerk--I could catalogue the civilizing features of the American hotel for pages. But the great American hotel is a classic, and to praise it may seem inept. My one excuse for doing so is that I have ever been a devotee of hotels, and once indeed wrote a whole book about one. When I told the best interviewer in the United States that my secret ambition had always been to be the manager of a grand hotel, I was quite sincere. And whenever I saw the manager of a great American hotel traversing with preoccupied and yet aquiline glance his corridors and public rooms, I envied him acutely.

The hospitality of those corridors and public rooms is so wide and comprehensive that the ground floor and mezzanine of a really big hotel in the United States offer a spectacle of humanity such as cannot be seen in Europe; they offer also a remarkable contrast to the tranquillity of their own upper stories, where any eccentricity is vigorously discouraged. I think that it must be the vast tumult and promiscuity of the ground floor which is responsible for the relative inferiority of the restaurant in a great American hotel. A restaurant should be a paramount unit, but as a fact in these hotels it is no more than an item in a series of resorts, several of which equal if they do not surpass it in popular interest. The Americans, I found, would show more interest in the barber-shop than in the restaurant. (And to see the American man of business, theoretically in a hurry, having his head bumped about by a hair-cutter, his right hand tended by one manicurist, his left hand tended by another manicurist, his boots polished by a lightning shiner, and his wits polished by the two manicurists together--the whole simultaneously--this spectacle in itself was possibly a reflection on the American's sense of proportion.) Further, a restaurant should be a sacred retreat, screened away from the world; which ideal is foreign to the very spirit of the great American hotel.

I do not complain that the representative celebrated restaurants fail to achieve an absolutely first-class cuisine. No large restaurant, either in the United States or out of it, can hope to achieve an absolutely first-class cuisine. The peerless restaurant is and must be a little one. Nor would I specially complain of the noise and thronging of the great restaurants, the deafening stridency of their music, the artistic violence of their decorations; these features of fashionable restaurants are now universal throughout the world, and the philosopher adapts himself to them. (Indeed, in favor of New York I must say that in one of the largest of its restaurants I heard a Chopin ballade well played on a good piano--and it was listened to in appreciative silence; event quite unique in my experience. Also, the large restaurant whose cuisine nearest approaches the absolutely first-class is in New York, and not in Europe.) Nor would I complain that the waiter in the great restaurant neither understands English nor speaks a tongue which resembles English, for this characteristic, too, is very marked across the Atlantic. (One night, in a Boston hotel, after lingual difficulties with a head-waiter, I asked him in French if he was not French. He cuttingly replied in waiter's American: "I _was_ French, but now I am an American." In another few years that man will be referring to Great Britain as "the old country.") ...

No; what disconcerts the European in the great American restaurant is the excessive, the occasionally maddening slowness of the service, and the lack of interest in the service. Touching the latter defect, the waiter is not impolite; he is not neglectful. But he is, too often, passively hostile, or, at best, neutral. He, or his chief, has apparently not grasped the fact that buying a meal is not like buying a ton of coal. If the purchaser is to get value for his money, he must enjoy his meal; and if he is to enjoy the meal, it must not merely be efficiently served, but it must be efficiently served in a sympathetic atmosphere. The supreme business of a good waiter is to create this atmosphere.... True, that even in the country which has carried cookery and restaurants to loftier heights than any other--I mean, of course, Belgium, the little country of little restaurants--the subtle ether which the truly civilized diner demands is rare enough. But in the great restaurants of the great cities of America it is, I fancy, rarer than anywhere else.


VI


SPORT AND THE THEATER

I remember thinking, long before I came to the United States, at the time when the anti-gambling bill was a leading topic of American correspondence in European newspapers, that a State whose public opinion would allow even the discussion of a regulation so drastic could not possibly regard "sport" as sport is regarded in Europe. It might be very fond of gambling, but it could not be afflicted with the particular mania which in Europe amounts to a passion, if not to a religion. And when the project became law, and horse-racing was most beneficially and admirably abolished in the northeastern portion of the Republic, I was astonished. No such law could be passed in any European country that I knew. The populace would not suffer it; the small, intelligent minority would not care enough to support it; and the wealthy oligarchical priest-patrons of sport would be seriously convinced that it involved the ruin of true progress and the end of all things. Such is the sacredness of sport in Europe, where governments audacious enough to attack and overthrow the state-church have never dared to suggest the suppression of the vice by which alone the main form of sport lives ...

So that I did not expect to find the United States a very "sporting" country. And I did not so find it. I do not wish to suggest that, in my opinion, there is no "sport" in the United States, but only that there is somewhat less than in Western Europe; as I have already indicated, the differences between one civilization and another are always slight, though they are invariably exaggerated by rumor.

I know that the "sporting instinct"--a curious combination of the various instincts for fresh air, destruction, physical prowess, emulation, devotion, and betting--is tolerably