From Dublin to Chicago: Some Notes on a Tour in America

by George A. Birmingham

The churches of New York are of subordinate interest. Trinity Church has a singularly suggestive position, right opposite the end of Wall Street, God in protest against Mammon. But the building itself might be anywhere in England. I can fancy it in Nottingham or Bath, and there would be no need to alter the place of a stone in it. It is a dignified and beautiful parish church, but it has, as a building, nothing American about it. It has not, apparently, influenced the spirit of New York architecture. The people have not found self-expression in it. St. Patrick's Cathedral, in Fifth Avenue, is a fine, a very fine example of modern Gothic. Except the new Graduate College buildings at Princeton, this cathedral strikes me as the finest example of modern Gothic I have ever seen. But ought New York to have Gothic buildings? Here, I know, I come up against the difficult question. There are those who hold that for certain purposes—for worship and for the dignified ceremonial life of a university—the Gothic building is the one perfect form which man has devised. We cannot better it. All we can do is soak ourselves in the spirit of the men of the great centuries of this style and humbly try to feel as they felt so that we may build as they. It may be granted that we shall devise nothing better. I, for one, gladly admit that St. Patrick's in New York and the Hall at Princeton are conceived in the old spirit and are as perfect as any modern work of the kind is, perhaps as perfect as any modern Gothic work can be. But when all this is said it remains true that the life of New York is not the life of mediæval Rouen, of the London which built Westminster or of the Cologne which paid honor to the Three Kings. Can New York accept as its vision of the divine the conception, however splendid, of those "dear dead days"?

It may well be that I am all wrong in my feeling about modern Gothic, that what is wanting in these buildings is not the spirit which was in the old ones. It may be that, like certain finer kinds of wine, they require maturing. I can conceive that a church which seems remote now, almost to the point of frigidity, may not only seem, but actually be, different two hundred years hence. It is scarcely possible to think that the prayers of generations have no effect upon the walls of the building in which they are uttered. There must cling to the place some aroma, some subtle essence of the reachings after God of generation after generation. The repentances of broken hearts, the supplications of sorrowing women, the vows of strong, hopeful souls, the pieties of meek priests, must be present still among the arches and the dim places above them. Men consecrate their temples, but it takes them centuries to do it. Perhaps Westminster would have left me cold if I had walked its aisles four hundred years ago. This lack of maturity and not, as I suppose, the fact that they do not come of the spirit of our time, may be what is the matter with our newer Gothic buildings.

There is one church in New York—there may be others unknown to me—which gives the impression of having grown out of the life which dwelt in it, in the same sense in which certain English churches, those especially of the Sussex country side, have grown rather than been deliberately and consciously built. This is the unpretentious building known as "The Little Church Round the Corner." The affectionate familiarity of the name suits the place and means more to the discerning soul than any dedication could mean. The student of architecture would perhaps reckon this church contemptible, and having seen it once would bestow no second glance upon it. It is built in no style of recognized orthodoxy. I do not know its history, but it looks as if bits had been added on to it time after time by people who knew nothing and cared nothing for unity of design, but who had in their hearts a genuine love for the building. It is an expression of life, this little church, but not, I think, of the life of New York. It is as if someone had made a little garden and filled it with all kinds of delicate sweet-smelling flowers in a glade of a mighty forest. Within the garden are the flowers, tended and well-beloved. Outside and all around are great trees with gnarled trunks and far-off branches which have fought their own way in desperate competition to the sunlight. I could, I think, worship very faithfully in that "Little Church Round the Corner," but I should have to shut New York out of my heart every time I passed through the doors of it. Just so I can find delight in the sweetness of Keble's "Christian Year," but while I do I must forget the sea, and how "at his word the stormy wind ariseth which lifteth up the waves thereof." I must cease to be in love with the perils of adventuring.

There is one church in New York which seems to me to have caught the spirit of the city, the unfinished cathedral of St. John the Divine. It gives the worshipper within its walls a strange sense of titanic strength striving majestically to express itself in stone. I am told that the building is to be finished in some other way, in accordance with the rules and orthodoxies of some school of architecture. This may not be true, but, even if it is, there still remains the hope that enough has been already done to preserve for the finished work its character of relentless strength. If its builders are brave enough to go as they have begun, this cathedral should rank in the eyes of future generations as one of the great houses of God in the world. St. Mark's, with its fantastic spires and gorgeous coloring, expresses all the past history of Venice and her commerce with the East, all which that strange republic learnt of the Divine, from the glow of Syrian deserts, where sun-baked caravans crawled slowly, and from the heavy scents of Midianitish merchandise in the market places of Damascus. The confused and misty aisles of Westminster embody in stone a realized conception of the tumultuous life of London, of its black river weary with the weight of the untold wealth it bears, of its crowds thronging narrow places, of its streets where past and present look suspiciously into each other's eyes, while things which are to be already push for elbow room. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, standing on the very edge of its steep, broken hill, gives me as no other building does the sense of strength of the kind of strength which will do rather than endure, which is unwilling to abide restraint of any kind.

The building is a fit mate for the skyscrapers, can hold its own among them because its spirit is their spirit, touched with the flame of inspiration by the torch of the divine. The very absence of unity of style seems the crowning glory of it. It is Attila's Hun once more. What did he care that the spoils in which he decked himself were of various fashionings? It is the dynamite blasting living rock. It is, as it seems to me, New York in process of being given in stone an interpretation which neither words nor music have given her yet. It will be a loss, not only to New York but to the world, if the builders of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine allow themselves to be frightened by the spectre of European artistic tradition. They may tame their church, civilize it, curl and comb the seven locks of its hair. If they do, the strength will surely depart from it and it will become a common thing.

CHAPTER IV
HOLIDAY FEVER

We shall always be thankful that we paid a visit to Atlantic City. It is not, I believe, one of the places of which Americans are particularly proud. The trains which connect it with New York have indeed the reputation of being the fastest in the world, but that may not be because every one is in a great hurry to get to Atlantic City. They run at high speed both ways, and it is quite possible that some men may be in an equal hurry to get away. Our friends were certainly a little cold when we said we were going there. Left to ourselves, or meekly following, as we generally do, the advice given to us by well-instructed people, we should not have gone to Atlantic City. But we were shepherded there by circumstance, fate, or whatever the power is called which regulates the minor affairs of life. And we were glad we went. No one, says Tennyson, can be more wise than destiny. Our visit to Atlantic City went to prove the truth of that profound remark.

The mean which destiny used for getting us to Atlantic City was a play. We had a play of our own, and it was produced there for the first time on the west side of the Atlantic. American theatrical managers believe in experimenting with a play in some minor place before taking the plunge of the New York production. They call this—in a phrase not unknown in England—"trying it on the dog." It seems to me rather a good plan. The verdict of the dog is not indeed of great value. Dogs, human dogs, are the same everywhere. They are afraid to say they like anything which has not got the seal of a great city's approval set on it. They take refuge in damning with dubious phrase; and, in fact, no one with any experience much minds what they say. But the experimental production has a value of its own apart from the opinion of the dog. The company shakes down and learns to work together. The first performance in an important place, when the time comes for it, is much more likely to go smoothly if the actors have faced audiences, even audiences of the dog kind, every night for a week beforehand.

We did not understand the philosophy of these dog productions at first, and were therefore a little nervous all the time we were in Atlantic City, but not, I am glad to say, nervous enough to have our enjoyment of the place spoiled. Nothing would induce me to say, or for a single moment to think, that Atlantic City is in any way a characteristic product of American civilization. All our civilizations produce places of this kind. But it is fair, I think, to say that America does this particular thing better than any other country. Superior people might say that America does it worse; but I am not superior. I recognize that the toiling masses have a right to revel during their brief holidays in the way that appeals to them as most delightful. I do not revel in that way myself; but that is not because I have found better ways, but only because I am growing older and prefer to take my humble pleasures quietly. When I was young I enjoyed tumultuous pleasures as much as any one. I revelled with the best of my day in the town of Douglas; and, if I did not get as much out of it as I might now if I were young again, it was only because there was not, in those days, nearly so much in it. The holiday resort has been enormously developed during the last twenty-five years, and America, judging by Atlantic City—and I am told Coney Island is better—is in the very van of human progress.

I have seen Portrush, our humble Irish attempt at a pleasure city. I have seen Blackpool, which far surpasses Portrush in its opportunities for delight. I have seen the Lido, where the Germans bathe. I have seen Brighton, which is spoiled by a want of abandon and a paralyzing respect for gentility. Atlantic City outdoes them all. Atlantic City is Portrush, Blackpool, Brighton, the Lido, and Ostend rolled into one, and then, in all the essential features of such places, raised to the third power, so to speak; multiplied by itself and then multiplied by itself again.