It is because the American in art is a Futurist. He so far scorns the ideal as to have done with imagination altogether; substituting for it an invention so titanic in audacity that to the untrained it appears grotesque. In place of the ideal he has set up the one thing greater: truth. And as truth to every man is different (only standard being relatively fixed) how can he hope for concurrence in his masterpiece? The sky-scraper is more than a masterpiece: it is a fact. A fact of violence, of grim struggle, and of victory; over the earth that is too small, and the winds that rage in impotence, and the heavens that heretofore have been useless. It is the accomplished fact of man’s dauntless determination to wrest from the elements that which he sees he needs; and as such it has a beauty too terrible to be described.
II
CONVENIENCE VS. CULTURE
Here are the two prime motives waging war in the American drama of today. Time is money; whether for the American it is to mean anything more is still a question. Meanwhile every time-saving convenience that can be invented is put at his disposal, be he labouring man or governor of a state. And, as we have seen in the case of the sky-scraper, little or no heed is paid to the form of finish of the invention; its beauty is its practicability for immediate and exhaustive use.
Take that most useful of all, for example: the hotel. An Englishman goes to a hotel when he is obliged to, and then chooses the quietest he can find. Generally it has the appearance of a private house, all but the discreet brass plate on the door. He rings for a servant to admit him; his meals are served in his rooms, and weeks go by without his seeing another guest in the house. The idea is to make the hotel in as far as possible duplicate the home.
In America it is the other way round; the New Yorker in particular models his home after his hotel, and seizes every opportunity to close his own house and live for weeks at a time in one of the huge caravanseries that gobble up great areas of the city. “It is so convenient,” he tells you, lounging in the gaudy lobby of one of these hideous terra-cotta structures. “No servant problem, no housekeeping worries for madame, and everything we want within reach of the telephone bell!”
Quite true, when the pompadoured princess below-stairs condescends to answer it. Otherwise you may sit in impotent rage, ten stories up, while she finishes a twenty-minute conversation with her “friend” or arranges to go to a “show” with the head barber; for in all this palace of marble staircases and frescoed ceilings, Louis Quinze suites and Russian baths there is not an ordinary bell in the room to call a servant. Everything must be ordered by telephone; and what boots it that there is a telegraph office, a stock exchange bureau, a ladies’ outfitting shop, a railroad agency, a notary, a pharmacist and an osteopath in the building—if to control these conveniences one must wander through miles of corridors and be shot up and down a dozen lifts, because the telephone girl refuses to answer?
From personal experience, I should say that the servant problem is quite as tormenting in hotels as in most other American establishments. The condescension of these worthies, when they deign to supply you with some simple want, is amazing. Not only in hotels, but in well-run private houses, they seize every chance for conversation, and always turn to the subject of their own affairs—their former prosperity, the mere temporary necessity of their being in service, and their glowing prospects for the future. They insist on giving you their confidential opinion of the establishment in which you are a guest, and which is invariably far inferior to others in which they have been employed. They comment amiably on your garments, if they are pleased with them, or are quite as ready to convey that they are not. And woe to him who shows resentment! He may beseech their service henceforth in vain. If, however, he meekly accepts them as they are, they will graciously be pleased to perform for him the duties for which they are paid fabulous wages.
Hotel servants constitute the aristocracy among “domestics,” as they prefer to call themselves; just as hotel dwellers—of the more luxurious type—constitute a kind of aristocracy among third-rate society in New York. These people lead a strange, unreal sort of existence, living as it were in a thickly gilded, thickly padded vacuum, whence they issue periodically into the hands of a retinue of hangers-on: manicures, masseurs, hair-dressers, and for the men a train of speculators and sporting parasites. In this world, where there are no definite duties or responsibilities, there are naturally no fixed hours for anything. Meals occur when the caprice of the individual demands them—breakfast at one, or at three, if he likes; dinner at the supper hour, or, instead of tea, a restaurant is always at his elbow. With the same irresponsibility, engagements are broken or kept an hour late; agreements are forfeited or forgotten altogether; order of any sort is unknown, and the only activity of this large class of wealthy people is a hectic, unregulated striving after pleasure.
Women especially grow into hotel fungi of this description, sitting about the hot, over-decorated lobbies and in the huge, crowded restaurants, with nothing to do but stare and be stared at. They are a curious by-product of the energetic, capable American woman in general; and one thinks there might be salvation for them in the “housekeeping” worries they disdainfully repudiate. Still, it cannot be denied that with the serious problem of servants and the exorbitant prices of household commodities a home is far more difficult to maintain in America than in the average modern country. Hospitality under the present conditions presents features slightly careworn; and the New York hostess is apt to be more anxious than charming, and to end her career on the dismal verandas of a sanatorium for nervous diseases.
But society the world round has very much the same character. For types peculiar to a country, one must descend the ladder to rungs nearer the native soil; in New York there are the John Browns of Harlem, for example. No one outside America has heard of Harlem. Does the loyal Englishman abroad speak of Hammersmith? Does the Frenchman en voyage descant on the beauties of the Batignolles? These abominations are locked within the national bosom; only Hyde Park and the Champs Elysées and Fifth Avenue are allowed out for alien gaze. Yet quite as emphatic of New York struggle and achievement as the few score millionaire palaces along the avenue are the tens of thousands of cramped Harlem flats that overspread the northern end of the island from One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street to the Bronx. For tens of thousands of John Browns have daily to wage war in the deadly field of American commercial competition, in order to pay the rent and the gas bill, and the monthly installment on the furniture of these miniature homes. They have not, however, to pay for the electric light, or the hot-water heating, or a dozen other comforts which are a recurring source of amazement to the foreigner in such a place. For twenty dollars a month, John Brown and his wife are furnished not only with three rooms and a luxurious porcelain bath in a white-tiled bathroom; but also the use of two lifts, the inexhaustible services of the janitor, a comfortable roof garden in summer, and an imposing entrance hall downstairs, done in imitation Carrara marble and imitation Cordova leather. With this goes a still more imposing address, and Mrs. John can rouse the eternal envy of the weary Sixth Avenue shop-girl by ordering her lemon-squeezer or two yards of linoleum sent to “Marie Antoinette Court,” or “The Cornwallis Arms.” The shop-girl understands that Mrs. John’s husband is a success.