Your United States by Arnold Bennett

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The problem-plays which I saw were just as futile and exasperating as
the commercial English and French varieties of the problem-play, though
they had a trifling advantage over the English in that their most
sentimental passages were lightened by humor, and the odiously insincere
felicity of their conclusions was left to the imagination instead of
being acted ruthlessly out on the boards. The themes of these plays
showed the usual obsession, and were manipulated in the usual attempt to
demonstrate that the way of transgressors is not so very hard after all.
They threw, all unconsciously, strange side-lights on the American man's
private estimate of the American woman, and the incidence of the
applause was extremely instructive.

The most satisfactory play that I saw, "Bought and Paid For," by George
Broadhurst, was not a problem-play, though Mr. Broadhurst is also a
purveyor of problem-plays. It was just an unpretentious fairy-tale about
the customary millionaire and the customary poor girl. The first act
was maladroit, but the others made me think that "Bought and Paid For"
was one of the best popular commercial Anglo-Saxon plays I had ever seen
anywhere. There were touches of authentic realism at the very crisis at
which experience had taught one to expect a crass sentimentality. The
fairy-tale was well told, with some excellent characterization, and very
well played. Indeed, Mr. Frank Craven's rendering of the incompetent
clerk was a masterly and unforgettable piece of comedy. I enjoyed
"Bought and Paid For," and it is on the faith of such plays, imperfect
and timid as they are, that I establish my prophecy of a more glorious
hereafter for the American drama.

VII

EDUCATION AND ART

I had my first glimpses of education in America from the purser of an
illustrious liner, who affirmed the existence of a dog--in fact, his own
dog--so highly educated that he habitually followed and understood human
conversations, and that in order to keep secrets from the animal it was
necessary to spell out the keyword of a sentence instead of pronouncing
it. After this I seemed somehow to be prepared for the American infant
who, when her parents discomfited her just curiosity by the same mean
adult dodge of spelling words, walked angrily out of the room with the
protest: "There's too blank much education in this house for me!"
Nevertheless, she proudly and bravely set herself to learn to spell;
whereupon her parents descended to even worse depths of baseness, and in
her presence would actually whisper in each other's ear. She merely
inquired, with grimness: "What's the good of being educated, anyway?
First you spell words, and when I can spell then you go and whisper!"
And received no adequate answer, naturally.

This captivating creature, whose society I enjoyed at frequent intervals
throughout my stay in America, was a mirror in which I saw the whole
American race of children--their independence, their self-confidence,
their adorable charm, and their neat sauciness. "What _is_ father?" she
asked one day. Now her father happened to be one of the foremost
humorists in the United States; she was baldly informed that he was a
humorist. "What _is_ a humorist?" she went on, ruthlessly, and learned
that a humorist was a person who wrote funny things to make people
laugh. "Well," she said, "I don't honestly think he's very funny at
home." It was naught to her that humorists are not paid to be funny at
home, and that in truth they never under any circumstances are very
funny at home. She just hurled her father from his niche--and then went
forth and boasted of him as a unique peculiarity in fathers, as an
unrivaled ornament of her career on earth; for no other child in the
vicinity had a professional humorist for parent. Her gestures and accent
typified for me the general attitude of youngest America, in process of
education, toward the older generation: an astonishing, amusing,
exquisite, incomprehensible mixture of affection, admiration, trust, and
rather casual tolerating scorn. The children of most countries display a
similar phenomenon, but in America the phenomenon is more acute and
disconcerting than elsewhere.

One noon, in perfect autumn weather, I was walking down the main road of
a residential suburb, and observing the fragile-wheeled station-wagons,
and the ice-wagons enormously labeled "DANGER" (perhaps by the gastric
experts of the medical faculty), and the Colonial-style dwellings, and
the "tinder" boarding-houses, and the towering boot-shine stands, and
the roast-chestnut emporia, and the gasometers flanking a noble and
beautiful river--I was observing all this when a number of young men and
maids came out of a high-school and unconsciously assumed possession of
the street. It was a great and impressive sight; it was a delightful
sight. They were so sure of themselves, the maids particularly; so
interested in themselves, so happy, so eager, so convinced (without any
conceit) that their importance transcended all other importances, so
gently pitiful toward men and women of forty-five, and so positive that
the main function of elders was to pay school-fees, that I was thrilled
thereby. Seldom has a human spectacle given me such exciting pleasure as
this gave. (And they never suspected it, those preoccupied demigods!) It
was the sheer pride of life that I saw passing down the street and
across the badly laid tram-lines! I had never seen anything like it. I
immediately desired to visit schools. Profoundly ignorant of educational
methods, and with a strong distaste for teaching, I yet wanted to know
and understand all about education in America in one moment--the
education that produced that superb stride and carriage in the street! I
failed, of course, in my desire--not from lack of facilities offered,
but partly from lack of knowledge to estimate critically what I saw, and
from lack of time. My experiences, however, though they left my mind
full of enigmas, were wondrous. I asked to inspect one of the best
schools in New York. Had I been a dispassionate sociological student, I
should probably have asked to inspect one of the worst schools in New
York--perhaps one of the gaunt institutions to be found, together with a
cinema-palace and a bank, in almost every block on the East Side. But I
asked for one of the best, and I was shown the Horace Mann School.

* * * * *

The Horace Mann School proved to be a palace where a thousand children
and their teachers lived with extreme vivacity in an atmosphere of ozone
from which all draughts and chilliness had been eliminated. As a
malcontent native of the Isle of Chilly Draughts, this attribute of the
atmosphere of the Horace Mann School impressed me. Dimensionally I found
that the palace had a beginning but no end. I walked through leagues of
corridors and peeped into unnumbered class-rooms, in each of which
children were apparently fiercely dragging knowledge out of nevertheless
highly communicative teachers; and the children got bigger and bigger,
and then diminished for a while, and then grew again, and kept on
growing, until I at last entered a palatial kitchen where some two dozen
angels, robed in white but for the moment uncrowned, were eagerly
crowding round a paradisiacal saucepan whose magic contents formed the
subject of a lecture by one of them. Now these angels were not cherubs;
they were full grown; they never would be any taller than they were; and
I asked up to what age angels were kept at school in America. Whereupon
I learned that I had insensibly passed from the school proper into a
training-school for teachers; but at what point the school proper ended
I never did learn. It seems to me that if I had penetrated through seven
more doors I should have reached Columbia University itself, without
having crossed a definite dividing-line; and, anyhow, the circumstance
was symbolic.

Reluctantly I left the incredible acres of technical apparatus
munificently provided in America for the training of teachers, and,
having risen to the roof and seen infants thereon grabbing at
instruction in the New York breeze, I came again to the more normal
regions of the school. Here, as everywhere else in the United States
(save perhaps the cloak-room department of the Metropolitan
Opera-House), what chiefly struck me was the brilliant organization of
the organism. There was nothing that had not been thought of. A
handsomely dressed mother came into the organism and got as far as the
antechamber of the principal's room. The organization had foreseen her,
had divined that that mother's child was the most important among a
thousand children--indeed, the sole child of any real importance--had
arranged that her progress should be arrested at just that stage, and
had stationed a calm and diplomatic woman to convince her that her child
was indeed the main preoccupation of the Horace Mann School. A pretty
sight--the interview! It charmed me as the sight of an ingenious engine
in motion will charm an engineer.

The individual class-rooms, in some of which I lingered at leisure, were
tonic, bracing, inspiring, and made me ashamed because I was not young.
I saw geography being taught with the aid of a stereoscopic
magic-lantern. After a view of the high street of a village in North
Russia had been exposed and explained by a pupil, the teacher said: "If
anybody has any questions to ask, let him stand up." And the whole class
leaped furiously to its feet, blotting out the entire picture with black
shadows of craniums and starched pinafores. The whole class might have
been famishing. In another room I saw the teaching of English
composition. Although when I went to school English composition was
never taught, I have gradually acquired a certain interest in the
subject, and I feel justified in asserting that the lesson was admirably
given. It was, in fact, the best example of actual pedagogy that I met
with in the United States. "Now can any one tell me--" began the
mistress. A dozen arms of boys and girls shot up with excessive
violence, and, having shot up, they wiggled and waggled with ferocious
impatience in the air; it was a miracle that they remained attached to
their respective trunks; it was assuredly an act of daring on the part
of the intrepid mistress to choose between them.

"How children have changed since my time!" I said to the principal
afterward. "We never used to fling up our hands like that. We just put
them up.... But perhaps it's because they're Americans--"

"It's probably because of the ventilation," said the principal, calmly
corrective. "We never have the windows open winter or summer, but the
ventilation is perfect."

I perceived that it indeed must be because of the ventilation.

More and more startled, as I went along, by the princely lavishness of
every arrangement, I ventured to surmise that it must all cost a great
deal.

"The fees are two hundred and eighty-five dollars in the Upper School."

"Yes, I expected they would be high," I said.

"Not at all. They are the lowest in New York. Smart private schools
will charge five or six hundred dollars a year."

Exhausted, humbled, I at last quitted the warmed Horace Mann ozone for
the harsh and searching atmosphere of the street. And I gazed up at the
pile, and saw all its interiors again in my mind. I had not grasped the
half nor the quarter of what had been so willingly and modestly shown to
me. I had formed no theory as to the value of some of the best juvenile
education in the Eastern States. But I had learned one thing. I knew the
secret of the fine, proud bearing of young America. A child is not a
fool; a child is almost always uncannily shrewd. And when it sees a
splendid palace provided for it, when it sees money being showered upon
hygienic devices for its comfort, even upon trifles for its distraction,
when it sees brains all bent on discovering the best, nicest ways of
dealing with its instincts, when it sees itself the center of a
magnificent pageant, ritual, devotion, almost worship, it naturally
lifts its chin, puts its shoulders back, steps out with a spring, and
glances down confidently upon the whole world. Who wouldn't?

* * * * *

It was an exciting day for me when I paid a call next door to Horace
Mann and visited Columbia University. For this was my first visit of
inspection to any university of any kind, either in the New World or in
the Old. As for an English university education, destiny had deprived me
of its advantages and of its perils. I could not haughtily compare
Columbia with Oxford or Cambridge, because I had never set foot even in
their towns. I had no standards whatever of comparison.

I arose and went out to lunch on that morning, and left the lunch before
anybody else and rushed in an automobile to Columbia; but football had
already begun for the day in the campus costing two million dollars, and
classes were over. I saw five or more universities while I was in
America, but I was not clever enough to catch one of them in the act of
instruction. What I did see was the formidable and magnificent machine,
the apparatus of learning, supine in repose.

And if the spectacle was no more than a promise, it was a very dazzling
promise. No European with any imagination could regard Columbia as other
than a miracle. Nearly the whole of the gigantic affair appeared to have
been brought into being, physically, in less than twenty years. Building
after building, device after device, was dated subsequent to 1893. And
to my mind that was just the point of the gigantic affair. Universities
in Europe are so old. And there are universities in America which are
venerable. A graduate of the most venerable of them told me that
Columbia was not "really" a university. Well, it did seem unreal, though
not in his sense; it seemed magic. The graduate in question told me that
a university could not be created by a stroke of the wand. And yet there
staring me in the face was the evidence that a university not merely
could be created by a stroke of the wand, but had been. (I am aware of
Columbia's theoretic age and of her insistence on it.) The wand is a
modern invention; to deny its effective creative faculty is absurd.

Of course I know what the graduate meant. I myself, though I had not
seen Oxford nor Cambridge, was in truth comparing Columbia with my dream
of Oxford and Cambridge, to her disadvantage. I was capable of saying to
myself: "All this is terribly new. All this lacks tradition." Criticism
fatuous and mischievous, if human! It would be as sapient to imprison
the entire youth of a country until it had ceased to commit the offense
of being young. Tradition was assuredly not apparent in the atmosphere
of Columbia. Moreover, some of her architecture was ugly. On the other
hand, some of it was beautiful to the point of nobility. The library,
for instance: a building in which no university and no age could feel
anything but pride. And far more important than stone or marble was the
passionate affection for Columbia which I observed in certain of her
sons who had nevertheless known other universities. A passionate
affection also perhaps brought into being since 1893, but not to be
surpassed in honest fervency and loyalty by influences more venerable!

Columbia was full of piquancies for me. It delighted me that the Dean of
Science was also consulting engineer to the university. That was
characteristic and fine. And how splendidly unlike Oxford! I liked the
complete life-sized railroad locomotive in the engineering-shops, and
the Greek custom in the baths; and the students' notion of coziness in
the private dens full of shelves, photographs, and disguised beds; and
the visibility of the president; and his pronounced views as to the
respective merits of New York newspapers; and the eagerness of a young
professor of literature in the Faculty Club to defend against my
attacks English Professor A.C. Bradley. I do believe that I even liked
the singular sight of a Chinaman tabulating from the world's press, in
the modern-history laboratory, a history of the world day by day. I can
hardly conceive a wilder, more fearfully difficult way of trying to
acquire the historical sense than this voyaging through hot, fresh
newspapers, nor one more probably destined to failure (I should have
liked to see some of the two-monthly resumes which students in this
course are obliged to write); but I liked the enterprise and the
originality and the daring of the idea; I liked its disdain of
tradition. And, after all, is it weirder than the common traditional
method?

[Illustration: UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS--UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA]

To the casual visitor, such as myself, unused either to universities or
to the vastness of the American scale, Columbia could be little save an
enormous and overwhelming incoherence. It so chiefly remains in my mind.
But the ingenious humanity running through the whole conception of it
was touching and memorable. And although I came away from my visit still
perfectly innocent of any broad theory as to ultimate educational values
in America, I came away also with a deeper and more reassuring
conviction that America was intensely interested in education, and that
all that America had to do in order to arrive at real national, racial
results was to keep on being intensely interested. When America shall
have so far outclassed Europe as to be able to abolish, in university
examinations, what New York picturesquely calls "the gumshoe squad" (of
course now much more brilliantly organized in America than in
Europe), then we shall begin to think that, under the stroke of the
wand, at least one real national, racial result has been attained!

* * * * *

When I set eyes on the sixty buildings which constitute the visible part
of Harvard University, I perceived that, just as Kensington had without
knowing it been imitating certain streets of Boston, so certain lost
little old English towns that even American tourists have not yet
reached had without knowing it been imitating the courts and chimneys
and windows and doorways and luscious brickwork of Harvard. Harvard had
a very mellow look indeed. No trace of the wand! The European in search
of tradition would find it here in bulk. I should doubt whether at
Harvard modern history is studied through the daily paper--unless
perchance it be in Harvard's own daily paper. The considerableness of
Harvard was attested for me by the multiplicity of its press organs. I
dare say that Harvard is the only university in the world the offices of
whose comic paper are housed in a separate and important building. If
there had been a special press-building for Harvard's press, I should
have been startled. But when I beheld the mere comic organ in a spacious
and costly detached home that some London dailies would envy, I was
struck dumb. That sole fact indicated the scale of magnificence at
Harvard, and proved that the phenomenon of gold-depreciation has
proceeded further at Harvard than at any other public institution in the
world.

The etiquette of Harvard is nicely calculated to heighten the material
splendor of the place. Thus it is etiquette for the president, during
his term of office, to make a present of a building or so to the
university. Now buildings at Harvard have adopted the excellent habit of
never costing less than about half a million dollars. It is also
etiquette that the gifts to the university from old students shall touch
a certain annual sum; they touch it. Withal, there is no architectural
ostentation at Harvard. All the buildings are artistically modest; many
are beautiful; scarcely one that clashes with the sober and subtle
attractiveness of the whole aggregation. Nowhere is the eye offended.
One looks upon the crimson facades with the same lenient love as marks
one's attitude toward those quaint and lovely English houses (so
familiar to American visitors to our isle) that are all picturesqueness
and no bath-room. That is the external effect. Assuredly entering some
of those storied doorways, one would anticipate inconveniences and what
is called "Old World charm" within.

But within one discovers simply naught but the very latest, the very
dearest, the very best of everything that is luxurious. I was ushered
into a most princely apartment, grandiose in dimensions, superbly
furnished and decorated, lighted with rich discretion, heated to a turn.
Portraits by John Sargent hung on the vast walls, and a score of other
manifestations of art rivaled these in the attention of the stranger. No
club in London could match this chamber. It was, I believe, a sort of
lounge for the students. Anyhow, a few students were lounging in it;
only a few--there was no rush for the privilege. And the few loungers
were really lounging, in the wonderful sinuous postures of youth. They
might have been lounging in a railway station or a barn instead of amid
portraits by John Sargent.

The squash-racket court was an example of another kind of luxury, very
different from the cunning combinations of pictured walls, books, carved
wood, and deep-piled carpets, but not less authentic. The dining-hall
seating a thousand simultaneously was another. Here I witnessed the
laying of dinner-tables by negroes. I noted that the sudden sight of me
instantly convinced one negro, engaged in the manipulation of pats of
butter, that a fork would be more in keeping with the Harvard tradition
than his fingers, and I was humanly glad thus to learn that the secret
reality of table-laying is the same in two continents. I saw not the
dining of the thousand. In fact, I doubt whether in all I saw one
hundred of the six thousand students. They had mysteriously vanished
from all the resorts of perfect luxury provided for them. Possibly they
were withdrawn into the privacies of the thousands of suites--each
containing bedroom, sitting-room, bath-room, and telephone--which I
understood are allotted to them for lairs. I left Harvard with a very
clear impression of its frank welcoming hospitality and of its
extraordinary luxury.

And as I came out of the final portal I happened to meet a student
actually carrying his own portmanteau--and rather tugging at it. I
regretted this chance. The spectacle clashed, and ought to have been
contrary to etiquette. That student should in propriety have been
followed by a Nigerian, Liberian, or Senegambian, carrying his
portmanteau.

My visits to other universities were about as brief, stirring,
suggestive, and incomplete as those to Columbia and Harvard. I repeat
that I never actually saw the educational machine in motion. What it
seemed to me that I saw in each case was a tremendous mechanical
apparatus at rest, a rich, empty frame, an organism waiting for the word
that would break its trance. The fault was, of course, wholly mine. I
find upon reflection that the universities which I recall with the most
sympathy are those in which I had the largest opportunity of listening
to the informal talk of the faculty and its wife. I heard some mighty
talking upon occasion--and in particular I sat willing at the feet of a
president who could mingle limericks and other drollery, the humanities,
science, modern linguistics, and economics in a manner which must surely
make him historic.

* * * * *

Education, like most things except high-class cookery, must be judged by
ultimate results; and though it may not be possible to pass any verdict
on current educational methods (especially when you do not happen to
have even seen them in action), one can to a certain extent assess the
values of past education by reference to the demeanor of adults who have
been through it. One of the chief aims of education should be to
stimulate the great virtue of curiosity. The worst detractors of the
American race--and there are some severe ones in New York, London, and
Paris!--will not be able to deny that an unusually active curiosity is a
marked characteristic of the race. Only they twist that very
characteristic into an excuse for still further detraction. They will,
for example, point to the "hordes" (a word which they regard as
indispensable in this connection) of American tourists who insist on
seeing everything of historic or artistic interest that is visible in
Europe. The plausible argument is that the mass of such tourists are
inferior in intellect and taste to the general level of Europeans who
display curiosity about history or art. Which is probably true. But it
ought to be remembered by us Europeans (and in sackcloth!) that the mass
of us with money to spend on pleasure are utterly indifferent to history
and art. The European dilettante goes to the Uffizi and sees a
shopkeeper from Milwaukee gazing ignorantly at a masterpiece, and says:
"How inferior this shopkeeper from Milwaukee is to me! The American is
an inartistic race!" But what about the shopkeeper from Huddersfield or
Amiens? The shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens will be flirting
about on some entirely banal beach--Scarborough or Trouville--and for
all he knows or cares Leonardo da Vinci might have been a cabman; and
yet the loveliest things in the world are, relatively speaking, at his
door! When the European shopkeeper gets as far as Lucerne in August, he
thinks that a journey of twenty-four hours entitles him to rank a little
lower than Columbus. It was an enormous feat for him to reach Lucerne,
and he must have credit for it, though his interest in art is in no wise
thereby demonstrated. One has to admit that he now goes to Lucerne in
hordes. Praise be to him! But I imagine that the American horde
"hustling for culture" in no matter what historic center will compare
pretty favorably with the European horde in such spots as Lucerne.

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