CHAPTER III

THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND

I walked through New York late at night, shortly after I landed, and had for companions an Englishman who knew the city well and an American. The roar of the traffic had ceased. The streets were almost deserted. Along Fifth Avenue a few motors rushed swiftly, bearing belated revelers to their homes. Save for them, the city was as nearly silent as any city ever is. We talked. It was the Englishman who spoke first.

"New York and the sound of blasting go together," he said. "They are inseparably connected in my mind. New York is built on rock out of material blasted off rock with dynamite. This fact explains New York. It is the characteristic thing about New York. No other city owes its existence in the same way to the force of explosives shattering rock."

"New York," said the American, "is one of the soldiers of Attila the Hun."

The night was warm. He unbuttoned his overcoat as he spoke and flung it back from his chest. He squared his shoulders, looked up at the immensely lofty buildings on each side of us, looked round at the shadow-patched pavements, fixed his eyes finally on the lamps of a motor which was racing toward us from a great distance along the endless avenue. Then he pursued his comparison.

"Attila's soldier," he said, "went through some Roman city with his club over his shoulder. There were round him evidences of old civilizations which puzzled him. He gazed at the temples, the baths, the theaters with wondering curiosity; but he was conscious that he could smash everything and kill every one he saw. He was the barbarian, but he was also the strong man. New York is like that among the cities of the world."

I contributed a borrowed comment on America.

"An Irishman once told me," I said, "that America isn't a country. It's a great space in which there are the makings of a country lying about. He might have said the same sort of thing about New York. There are the makings of a city scattered round."

"Chunks of blasted rock," said the Englishman.

"The Hun had a lot to learn," said the American, "but he was the strong man. He could smash and crush. Nobody else could."

There is a very interesting story or sketch—I do not know how it ought to be described—by the late "O. Henry"—which he called "The Voice of the City." He imagines that certain American cities speak and each of them utters its characteristic word. Chicago says, "I will." Philadelphia says, "I ought." New Orleans says, "I used to." If I had "O. Henry's" genius I should try to concentrate into phrases the voices of the cities I know. I should like to be able to hear distinctly what they all say about themselves. Belfast, I am convinced, says, "I won't." Dublin occasionally murmurs, "It doesn't really matter." So far I seem to get, but there I am puzzled. I should like to hear what Edinburgh says, what Paris says, what Rome would say if something waked her out of her dream. I should be beaten by London, even if I had all his genius, just as "O. Henry" was beaten by New York. He failed to disentangle the _motif_ from the clamorous tumult of mighty chorus with which that city assails the ear. There is a supreme moment which comes in the Waldstein Sonata. The listener is a-quiver with maddening expectation. He is wrought upon with sound until he feels that he must tear some soft thing with his teeth. Then, at the moment when the passion in him becomes intolerable, the great scrap of melody thunders triumphantly over the confusion and it is possible to breathe again. This is just what does not happen in the case of places like London and New York. A Beethoven yet unborn will catch their melodies for us some day and the sonata of great cities will be written. Till he comes it is better to leave the thing alone. Neither blasting nor dynamite is the keyword. Attila's Hun with his club fails us, though he helps a little. And there is more, a great deal more, about New York than the confused massing of materials on the site of what is to be a temple or a railway station.

When I was in New York they were building a large edifice of some kind in Broadway, not far from Thirty-fifth Street. I used to see the work in progress every day, and often stopped to watch the builders for a while. Whenever I think of New York I shall remember the shrill scream of the air drill which made holes in the steel girders. The essential thing about that noise was its suggestion of relentlessness. Perhaps New York is of all cities the most relentless. The steel suffers and shrieks through a long chromatic scale of agony. New York drills a hole, pauses to readjust its terrible force, and then drills again.

That is one aspect of New York. The stranger cannot fail to be conscious of it. It is brought home to him by the rush of the overhead railway in Sixth Avenue, by the hurry of the crowds in Broadway, by the grinding clamor of the subway trains. It is this, no doubt, which has given rise to the theory that New York is a city of hustle. It seems to me a very cruel thing to say of any people that they hustle. The word suggests a disagreeable kind of spurious activity. The hustler is not likely to be efficient. He makes a fine show of doing things; but he does not, somehow, get much done. The hustler is like a football player who is in all parts of the field at different times, sometimes in the forward line, sometimes among the backs, always breathless, generally very much in the way, and contributing less than any one else to the winning of the game for his side. If New York were a city of hustlers, New York would drill no holes in steel girders.

The fact is that America has, in this matter of hustle, been grossly slandered in Europe. I am not sure that the Americans, with a curious perversity, have not slandered themselves, and done as much as any one to keep the hustle myth alive. The American understands the value of not hurrying as well as any one in the world. He has, justly, a high opinion of himself and declines to be a slave to a wretched machine like a clock. I realized this leisureliness the first time I went into a restaurant to get something to eat. I could have smoked a cigarette comfortably between the ordering and the getting of what I ordered. I could have smoked other cigarettes, calmly, as cigarettes ought to be smoked, between each course. American men do actually smoke in this way during meals, and I trace the custom not to an excessive fondness for tobacco but to the leisurely way in which the business of eating is gone about. And it is not in restaurants only that this quiet disregard of time's abominable habit of going on is evident. The New York business man gets through his work—it is evident that he does get through it—without feeling it necessary to give every one the impression that each half hour of the day is dedicated to a separate affair and that the entire time-table will be reduced to chaos if a single minute strays out of its proper compartment into the next.

Perhaps it is because I am Irish that I like this way of doing business. There is a character in one of the late Canon Sheehan's novels who says that there are two things which are plenty in Ireland—water and time. There are undoubtedly places in the world where water is scarce, the Sahara desert for instance; but I suspect that time is quite abundant everywhere though some people affect to believe that it is not. I know English business men who scowl at you if you venture, having settled the little affair which brought you to their office, to make a pleasant remark about the chances of a general election before Christmas. They pretend that they have not time to talk about General Elections. They do this, as Bob Sawyer used to have himself summoned from church, in order to keep up their reputation. They want you to think that they are overwhelmed with pressing things. I have always suspected that, having got rid of their visitor, they spend hours reading about General Elections in the daily papers. The American business man is, apparently, never too busy to enjoy a chat. He invites you to lunch with him when you go to his office. He shows you the points of interest in the neighborhood after luncheon. He discusses the present condition of Ireland, a subject which demands an immense quantity of time. He settles the little matter which brought you to his office with three sentences and a wave of the hand. He does not write you a letter afterwards beginning: "In confirmation of our conversation to-day I note that you are prepared to——" It is, I suppose, a man's temperament which settles which way of doing business he prefers. It is also very largely a question of temper. In my normal mood I prefer the American method. There is a broad humanity about it which appeals to me strongly. But if I have been annoyed by anything early in the day, broken a bootlace, for instance, or lost a collar stud, I would rather do business in the English way. In the one case I like to come in contact with a fellow man, to feel that he has affections and weaknesses like my own. It is pleasant to get to know him personally. In the other case, thanks to the misfortunes of the morning, I am filled with a gloomy hatred of my kind. I want, until the mood has worn off, to see as little as possible of any one and to keep inevitable people at arm's length. It is much easier to do this when the inevitable people also want to keep me at arm's length, and the English business man generally does. The friendliness of the American business man is a little trying sometimes to any one in a bad temper. Sometimes, not always. I remember one occasion on which I was exceptionally cross. I forget what had happened to me in the morning, but it was worse than breaking a bootlace. It may have had something to do with telephones, instruments which generally drive me to fury. At all events, though in a bad temper, I had to go to see a man in his office. He was a man of extraordinarily friendly spirit, even for an American. I dreaded my interview, fearing that I might say something actually rude before it was over. Nothing could have been more soothing than my reception. This wonderful man cast a single quick glance at me as I entered his office. He realized my condition and got through with the wretched necessity which had brought me there with a rapidity and precision which would have done credit to any Englishman. Then he ushered me out again without making or giving me time to make a single remark of a miscellaneous kind. I apologized to him afterwards. He patted me reassuringly on the shoulder.

"That's all right," he said. "I saw the minute you came into the room that you were a bit rattled."

That seems to me a splendid example of tact. I do not suggest that all American business men have this faculty for swift, self-sacrificing sympathy. It must be rare, even in New York. Does it exist at all in England? If I called on an English merchant some morning when the spring was in my blood and I felt that I wanted to leap and spring like a lamb, would he divine my mood, join hands and dance with me on his hearth rug? I doubt it. He would not do it even if I were a hundred times more important than I am. He would not do it if I were chairman of a fantastically prosperous company. Yet it must have been just as hard for my American friend to be austere as it would be for an Englishman to be inanely gay.

I am not a business man myself. I have for many years practiced the art of getting other people to manage my small affairs for me, so perhaps I ought not to write about business men. But an author is always on the horns of a dilemma. He knows he ought not to write about anything that he does not thoroughly understand. But if he confined himself to those subjects, he would never write anything at all. Even if he gave himself some latitude and allowed himself to write about things of which he knows a little, he would still find himself in a narrow place. His best hope is that if he writes freely on every subject that comes into his head he will only be found out by a few people at a time. Sailors will find him out when he writes about the sea. Insurance agents will laugh at his ignorance when he writes about premiums; doctors will be irritated when he sets down what he thinks about measles. But the sailors will believe that he knows a great deal about insurance and disease in general; doctors will think him an expert about ships, and so forth. And there are always far fewer people in any given profession than there are people out of it. The writer has therefore a good hope that those who find him out in any point in which he touches will always be a minority. Minorities do not matter.

It is the consideration of this fact which gives me courage to write about business men, and more courage now to go on and write about buildings. I know nothing about architecture, but the people who do are very few, so that the penalty of being found out will be light.

There does not seem at first glance to be any connection between business men and architecture. But there is a very real one. There is also a private connection of thought in my own mind. It was from the windows of an office, high up in one of the skyscraper buildings, that I got my first comprehensive view of New York. There is, generally, a certain sameness about these bird's-eye views of cities. The bird, and the man who gets into the position of the bird, sees a number of spires of churches sticking up into the sky and below them a huddled mass of roofs. Sometimes tall chimneys assert themselves beside the spires. But the spires are the dominating things. The chimneys may have every appearance of arrogance, but one feels that they are upstarts. The spires hold the place of a recognized aristocracy. The bird, if he were say an eagle, and had not the sparrow's intimate knowledge of the life of the streets, would naturally come to the conclusion that the worship of God is the most potent factor in the life of the European city. He would, perhaps, be wrong, but he would have a good case to make for himself when he was recounting his experiences to the other eagles.

"I have seen," he would say, "these vast nesting places of men, and the spires of the churches are far the most important things in them. They reach up higher than anything else, and there are great numbers of them."

But the eagle would not say that about New York. It is not spires, nor is it factory chimneys which stick up highest there and catch the attention of a spectator from a height. Office buildings are the dominant things. Churches are kept in what many people regard as their proper place. You can see them if you look for them, but they are subordinate. The same thing is true of another view of New York, that marvelous spectacle of the city's profile which you get in the evening from any of the Hudson River ferry boats. The sky line is jagged and the silhouettes are not those of cross-crowned domes or spires, but of large buildings dedicated to commerce.

The philosophic eagle might, reasoning as he did before, leap to the conclusion that God is of little importance in the city of New York; that bank books there count for more than Bibles. I am not at all sure that he would be right. It looks, any one who has seen New York must admit it, as if the American who coined the phrase, "the almighty dollar," had really expressed the faith of his countrymen. But I am inclined to think that he was led into injustice by a desire to be epigrammatic. It may be that my experience was singularly fortunate, but I came to the conclusion that God counts for a good deal in the life of New York and of America generally. I do not mean that any creed has obtained for itself national recognition, or that any particular church has reached a position analogous to that of the English established church. Religion in America seems to me a confused force, which has not yet fully found itself; but it is a force. The desire to do justly, to love mercy, though scarcely perhaps to walk humbly, is present and is coming to be mightier than the dollar.

Yet it is certainly true that the most striking buildings in New York are not ecclesiastical, but commercial. This is a defiance of the old European tradition, a breach even of that feebler tradition which America took over from Europe before she entered into possession of her own soul. I am reminded of Attila's Hun with his contempt for Roman civilization and his confidence in his own strength.

Business used to look askance at magnificence. It was the pride of the London merchant that he managed mighty affairs in an unpretentious counting house. But we are learning from the Americans. Our insurance companies were the first to start building sumptuous habitations for themselves. Banks and other corporations are following their example. Yet even to-day the offices in the city of London are singularly unimpressive to the eye, and many a house with world-wide influence scorns to appeal to the passerby with anything more striking than a "Push" or "Pull" stamped in worn letters on the brass plates of a pair of swinging doors. It was a great tradition, this total lack of ostentation where mighty forces were. At first New York too felt the attraction of it. Wall Street, which is one of the older parts of the city, is not impressive to look at. The Cotton Exchange is a building of a very middling kind. Yet I am inclined to think that the instinct for magnificence displayed by the newer American captains of commerce is sound. I am not considering the advertisement value of a great building. It may be worth something in that way, though grubbiness can also be an effective advertisement. What seems to lie at the back of the display is the desire of life to express itself in sumptuousness. The Venetians, a nation of merchants, felt this and built in the spirit of it. After all, commerce is a very great kind of life. There is energy in it, adventure, romance. It offers opportunities for struggle, promises victory, threatens defeat. Is it any wonder that men absorbed in it should feel the thrill of the "_superbia vitæ_" and build to secure visible embodiment for the emotion? Men have always tried to build finely for their governors. Kings' palaces and parliament houses are impressive everywhere. This was right when kings and parliaments were important. Now that the offices of financiers are much more important than the habitations of law makers, they too are becoming splendid.

It is, I suppose, to be expected that these mighty buildings should have forms which at first are repellent in their strangeness. We, who were nursed in an older artistic tradition, have learned to value, perhaps too highly, restraint and dignity. The outstanding characteristics of the American skyscraper seem to me to be exuberance. I am reminded of the wild spirit of one or two European buildings, of the cloisters of Belem, for instance, though there the sense of exultation expresses itself in a very different way. But the essential spirit is similar. I could imagine the builders chanting as they worked: "Behold ye are gods. Ye are all children of the Highest." They are gods who have not experienced the _tedium vitæ_ of Olympian happiness. But New York is not so drunken with exuberance that it can not build with quiet dignity. Tiffany's shop in Fifth Avenue, and, a little lower down, Altman's great department store, are buildings on which the eye rests with undisturbed satisfaction. The men who built these had more in mind than the erection of houses in which rings or stockings might conveniently be sold. They felt that commerce in jewelry or clothes was in itself a worthy thing which might be undertaken in a lofty spirit, and greatly carried on. There is a feeling of nobility in the proportion of windows and doors, in the severity of the street fronts. These might be palaces of noblemen of an ancient lineage. They are—shops. Has America discovered a dignity in shop-keeping? The station of the Pennsylvania Railway is one of the glories of New York, and here again New York is certainly right, though I—it is a purely personal feeling—am infuriated to find the calm self-restraint of the Greeks associated with anything so blatant as a railway train. Anywhere else in the world the great hall of the Central Station would be the nave of a Cathedral. It is impossible not to feel—even when hurrying for a train—that the porters are really acolytes masquerading for a moment in honor of some fantastic fool's day.

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.