THOSE UNITED STATES.*

THERE are two ways of writing about a country that one has but cursorily examined. One may write of it with the pontifical solemnity of Mr. Sipling's Padgett, perfectly complacent in delusion ; or one may say in effect : "This is how it struck

me. My impressions are very likely quite unjustifiable and misleading. I give them for what they are worth. My excuse in that first impressions are vivid. They fade rapidly, and it is impossible to recapture them." When a writer takes this position criticism is misplaced and even useless. The only questions one cares to ask are : "Is the book entertaining P Does it make one think " Mr. Arnold Bennett does take up this position, and undoubtedly does justify it by his brilliance.

We agree with him that further knowledge of the United States might make him retract most of his opinions. The only point we have to insist on is that his visit of seven weeks to the United States has enabled him to write eight chapters which are extraordinarily readable and in which he displays excellently his characteristic power of weaving a fabric of intellectual substance out of very fine threads of observation.

The essential artist in Mr. Bennett is expressed by his un- varying power of selection. He rejects with courage—and rejection requires courage. His books are full of minute details, and yet these are not universally minute. He will seize on certain things as symbolical of the whole, and by fully describing the symbols he suggests adequately all that they stand for. Thus his second chapter in this book is about streets. Every city, with the citizens therein, may be judged by its streets. Therefore, to describe the streets of New York is to describe New York. And among the streets of New York the quintessential street is Fifth Avenue. In a single street you have an epitome of the grandiosity and complexity of New York. That is the logic implicit in Mr. Bennett's bold and interesting method. We must not overvalue it as a method of analyzing national habits. We shall say as little as possible of his

criticism of the Americans as a people, for it does not pretend to be wide or deep, and choose for mention rather his opinions on things which permit a quick judgment to be almost as good as a slow one. What, for instance, is the impression made by sky-scrapers on an acute and liberal mind like Mr. Bennett's ? He says :— " The sky-scrapers that cluster about the lower end of Broadway —their natural home—were as impressive as I could have desired, but not architecturally. For they could only be felt, not seen. And even in situations where the sky-scraper is properly visible, it is, as a rule, to my mind, architecturally a failure. I regret for my own sake that I could not be more sympathetic toward the existing sky-scraper as an architectural entity, because I had assuredly no European prejudice against the sky-scraper as such. The objection of most people to the sky-scraper is merely that it is unusual—the instinctive objection of most people to everything that is original enough to violate tradition I, on the contrary, as a convinced modernist, would applaud the unusualness of the sky-scraper. Nevertheless, I cannot possibly share the feelings of patriotic New Yorkers who discover architectural grandeur in, say, the Flat-Iron Building or the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building. To me they confuse the poetical idea of these buildings with the buildings themselves. I eagerly admit that the bold prow-like notion of the Flat-Iron cutting northward is a splendid • Thou Vsitelt Sista, By Arnelcl Bennett. Loudon: Martin Seeker. [5.,404 notion, an inspiring notion ; it thrills. But the building itself is ugly—nay, it ia adverbially ugly; and no reading of poetry into it will make it otherwise. . . . In any case, a great deal of the poetry of New York is due to the sky-scraper. At dusk the effect of the massed sky-scrapers illuminated from within, as seen from any high building up-town, is prodigiously beautiful, and it is unique in the cities of this world. The early night effect of the whole town, topped by the aforesaid Metropolitan tower, seen from the New Jersey shore, is stupendous, and resembles some enchanted city of the next world rather than of this."

In Chicago Mr. Bennett was impressed chiefly by the faith and daring of the civic designers of the great boulevards, both exterior and interior. And these things, in Mr. Bennett's opinion, are only the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, for in Chicago more than in any other city he visited he detected the stirring of a new spirit of high-

mindedness in political and municipal life. Readers of news- papers who have watched Mr. Roosevelt's connexion with Chicago may attribute the change to him, but we have not Mr. Bennett's sanction for this conclusion. We dare say that, in common with other English Radicals, he would withhold it, even though Mr. Roosevelt's programme has become frankly Radical.

Ruskin used to argue absurdly that as a railway station was devoted to an abominably ugly purpose it was a mistake to try to make it beautiful or noble. All one could do for a railway station, he thought, was to make it so plain that it did not attract more attention to itself than was absolutely necessary ; it should never excite distress by pretence—by mingling motives and suggesting achievements that could never be. Very different were the thoughts aroused in Mr. Bennett by the terminus of the Pennsylvania Railroad in New York.

"I frankly surrendered myself to the domination of this extra- ordinary building. I did not compare. I knew there could be no comparison. Whenever afterward I heard, as I often did, enlightened, Europe-loving citizens of the United States complain that the United States was all very well, but there was no art in the United States, the image of this tremendous masterpiece would rise before me, and I was inclined to say : 'Have you ever crossed Seventh Avenue, or are you merely another of those who have been to Europe and learned nothing ? ' The Pennsylvania station is full of the noble qualities that fine and heroic imagina- tion alone can give. That there existed a railroad man poetic and audacious enough to want it, architects with genius powerful enough to create it, and a public with heart enough to love it— these things are for me a surer proof that the American is a great race than the existence of any quantity of wealthy universities, museums of classic art, associations for prison reform, or deep- delved safe-deposit vaults crammed with bonds. Such a monu- ment does not spring up by chance; it is part of the slow flowering of a nation's secret spirit !"

Mr. Bennett praises no other single accomplishment in the United States so warmly as this railway station, with the single exception, perhaps, of Mr. Winslow Homer's water-

colours, and in this case he complains that Americans in general do not recognize the art that is at their own doors. But in examining the attitude of Americans towards all art and all life he has for them the same condemnation that he directs against the whole Anglo-Saxon race. He admires their curiosity, which is to his mind righteousness, but he finds that it stops short of the highest form. Perfect curiosity, he says, demands intellectual honesty, and Americans have

this no more than Englishmen have it.

"I seemed to see in America precisely the same tendency as in Britain to pretend, for the sake of instant comfort, that things are not what they are, the same timid but determined dislike of the whole truth, the same capacity to be shocked by notorious and universal phenomena, the same delusion that a refusal to look at these phenomena is equivalent to the destruction of these phenomena, the same flaccid sentimentality which vitiates prac- tically all Anglo-Saxon art. And I have stood in the streets of New York, as I have stood in the streets of London, and longed with an intense nostalgia for one hour of Paris, where, amid a deplorable decadence, intellectual honesty is widely discoverable, and where absolutely straight thinking and talking is not mistaken for cynicism."

We know what this means. It means too often that a man

whose mind does not turn readily to what is disagreeable is condemned as being too timid to be truthful. In most cases it is an absurd conclusion, yet it is wielded by some persona as a weapon of intellectual intimidation. It is quite easy (and lamentably common) for a modernist to despise Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray for no better reason than that unpleasant subjects did not attract them.

The finest passage in the book occurs in the last chapter on "Human Citizens," which is also the finest chapter. Mr.

Bennett writes of family life, and of life in apartment- houses :—

" 'We are keen on children here,' says the youngish father, frankly. He is altered now from the man he was when he inhabited a diminutive flat in the full swirl of New York. His face is calmer, milder, more benevolent, and more resignedly worried. And assuredly no one would recognize in him the youth who howled murderously at university football matches, and cried with monstrous ferocity at sight of danger from the opposing colours : Kill him! Kill him for me I can't stand his red stockings coming up the field!' Yet it is the same man. And this father, too, is the fruit of university education; and further, one feels that his passion for his progeny is one of the chief causes of American interest in education. He and his like are at the root of the modern university—not the millionaires. In Chicago I was charmed to hear it stoutly and even challengingly maintained that the root of Chicago University was not Mr. Rockefeller, but the parents of Chicago. "Assuming that the couple have no children, there is a good chance of catching them later, splendidly miserable, in a high- class apartment-house, where ths entire daily adventure of living is taken out of your hands and done for you, and you pay a heavy price in order to be deprived of one of the main interests of existence. The apartment-house ranks, in my opinion, among the more pernicious influences in American life. As an institution it is unhappily establishing itself in England, and in England it is terrible. I doubt if it is less terrible in its native land. It is anti-social because it works always against the preservation of the family unit, and because it is unfair to children, and because it prevents the full flowering of an individuality. (Nobody can brnlimself in an apartment-house; if he tried that game he would instantly be thrown out.")

If anyone else had written that Mr. Bennett might possibly have said that it was vitiated by the defect of sentiment. But it is both good and true, and we pay Mr. Bennett the compliment of believing that he well knows it.

Among the other objects of Mr. Bennett's admiration which may be mentioned are—the American Telephone Service, the business man's faculty of delegating authority so that many of his subordinates have an inspiriting pride of office, the heating of houses, and the organization of hotels. His main object of detestation is an incompetent interviewer, the most incompetent being he who invents when there is no need to invent.

As Mr. Bennett grows older, and possibly wiser, in writing he tends to make his own rules of grammar, and to use words which we should have expected him to repudiate. We are all against pedantry, but Mr. Bennett as critic is himself not averse from comparatively pedantic objections. He uses " epithet " as though it meant a substantive—and that not even a descriptive substantive in apposition. "Exhaustless" is a bad word. What is an "exhaust," except when it is a part of an internal combustion engine P " Odour " is a fearful elegance when it is used invariably for "smell." There is a floundering jocularity on page 52. On page 5 Mr. Bennett seems to accept the belief of the sportsman he quotes that partridges sit in trees. These are small points, but perhaps worthy of his attention. The book is a delightful example of whipping up cream for the top of a pudding. It is pleasant to the eye and light to eat. Perhaps some day Mr. Bennett will give us the pudding itself.