Chapter III: Prologue (1)

A play is a play in so much as it furnishes a fragment of actual life. Being only a fragment, and thus literally torn out of the mass of life, it is bound to be sketchy; to a certain extent even superficial. Particularly is this the case where the scene shifts between five places radically different in elements and ideals. The author can only present the (to her) most impressive aspects of the several pictures, trusting to her sincerity to bridge the gaps her enforced brevity must create. And first she invites you to look at the piece in rehearsal.

I

IN REHEARSAL

(New York)

I

THE CAST

Thanks to the promoters of _opéra bouffe_ we are accustomed as a universe to screw our eye to a single peep-hole in the curtain that conceals a nation, and innocently to accept what we see therefrom as typical of the entire people. Thus England is generally supposed to be inhabited by a blond youth with a top-hat on the back of his head, and a large boutonnière overwhelming his morning-coat. He carries a loud stick, and says “Ah,” and is invariably strolling along Piccadilly. In France, the youth has grown into a bad, bold man of thirty--a _boulevardier_, of course--whose features consist of a pair of inky moustaches and a wicked leer. He sits at a table and drinks absinthe, and watches the world go by. The world is never by chance engaged elsewhere; it obligingly continues to go by.

Spain has a rose over her ear, and listens with patience to a perpetual guitar; Austria forever is waltzing upstairs, while America is known to be populated by a sandy-haired person of no definite age or embellishments, who spends his time in the alternate amusements of tripling his fortune and ejaculating “I guess!” He has a white marble mansion on Fifth Avenue, and an office in Wall Street, where daily he corners cotton or sugar or crude oil--as the fancy strikes him. And he is bounded on every side by sky-scrapers.

Like most widely accepted notions, this is picturesque but untrue. The Americans of America, or at least the New Yorkers of New York, are not the handful of men cutting off coupons in mahogany offices “down-town”; nor the silken, sacheted women gliding in and out of limousines, with gold purses. They are the swarm of shop-keepers and “specialists,” mechanics and small retailers, newspaper reporters and petty clerks, such as flood the Subways and Elevated railways of New York morning and night; fighting like savages for a seat. They are the army of tailors’ and shirt-makers’ and milliners’ girls who daily pour through the cross-streets, to and from their sordid work; they are the palely determined hordes who batter at the artistic door of the city, and live on nothing a week. They are the vast troops of creatures born under a dozen different flags, whom the city has seduced with her golden wand, whom she has prostituted to her own greed, whom she will shortly fling away as worthless scrap--and who love her with a passion that is the root and fibre of their souls.

So much for the actual New Yorkers, as contrasted with the gilded nonentity of musical comedy and best-selling fiction. As for New York itself, it has the appearance of behind the scenes at a gigantic theatre. Coming into the harbour is like entering the house of a great lady by the back door. Jagged rows of match-like buildings present their blank rear walls to the river, or form lurid bills of advertisement for somebody’s pork and beans; huge barns of ferry terminuses overlap with their galleries the narrow streets beneath; slim towers shoot up, giddy and dazzling-white, in the midst of grimy tenements and a hideous black network of elevated railways; the domes of churches and of pickle factories, the turrets of prisons and of terra cotta hotels, the electric signs of theatres and of cemetery companies, are mingled indiscriminately in a vast, hurled-together heap. While everywhere great piles of stone and steel are dizzily jutting skyward, ragged and unfinished.

It is plain to be seen that here life is in preparation--a piece in rehearsal; with the scene-shifters a bit scarce, or untutored in their business. One has the uncomfortable sensation of having been in too great haste to call; and so caught the haughty city on her moving-in day. This breeds humility in the visitor, and indulgence for the poor lady who is doing her best to set her house to rights. It is a splendid house, and a distinctly clever lady; and certainly in time they will adjust themselves to one another and to the world outside. For the present they loftily enjoy a gorgeous chaos.

Into this the stranger is landed summarily, and with no pause of railway journey before he attacks the city. London, Paris, Madrid, may discreetly withdraw a hundred miles or more further from the impatient foreigner: New York confronts him brusquely on the pier. And from his peaceful cabin he is plunged into a vortex of hysterical reunions, rushing porters, lordly customs officials, newspaper men, express-agents, bootblacks and boys shouting “Tel-egram!” He has been on the dock only five minutes, when he realizes that the dock itself is unequivocally, uncompromisingly New York.

Being New York, it has at once all the conveniences and all the annoyances known to man, there at his elbow. One can talk by long distance telephone from the pier to any part of the United States; or one can telegraph a “day letter” or a “night letter” and be sure of its delivery in any section of the three-thousand mile continent by eight o’clock next morning. One can check one’s trunks, when they have passed the customs, direct to one’s residence--whether it be Fifth Avenue, New York, or Nob Hill, San Francisco; time, distance, the clumsiness of inanimate things, are dissipated before the eyes of the dazzled stranger.

On the other hand, before even he has set foot on American soil, he becomes acquainted with American arrogance, American indifference, the fantasy of American democracy. The national attitude of I-am-as-good-as-you-are has been conveyed to him through the surly answers of the porter, the cheerful familiarity of the customs examiner, the grinning impudence of the express-man. These excellent public servants would have the foreigner know once and for all that he is in a land where all men are indisputably proven free and equal, every minute. The extremely interesting fact that all men are most unequal--slaves to their own potentialities--has still to occur to the American. He is in the stage of doing, not yet of thinking; therefore he finds disgrace in saying “sir” to another man, but none in showing him rudeness.

In a civilization like that of America, where the office-boy of today is the millionaire of tomorrow, and the millionaire of today tomorrow will be begging a job, there cannot exist the hard and fast lines which in older worlds definitely fix one man as a gentleman, another as his servant. Under this management of lightning changes, the most insignificant of the chorus nurses (and with reason) the belief that he may be jumped overnight into the leading rôle. There is something rather fine in the desperate self-confidence of every American in the ultimate rise of his particular star. Out of it, I believe, grows much of that feverish activity which the visitor to New York invariably records among his first impressions. One has barely arrived, and been whirled from the dock into the roar and rush of Twenty-third Street and Broadway, when he begins to realize the relentless energy of the place.

The very wind sweeps along the tunnel-like streets, through the rows of monster buildings, with a speed that takes the breath. In the fiercest of the gale, at the intersection of the two great thoroughfares of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, rises the solid, serene bulk of the Flatiron Building--like a majestic Wingèd Victory breasting the storm. Over to the right, in Madison Square, Metropolitan Tower rears its disdainful white loftiness; far above the dusky gold and browns of old Madison Square Garden; above the dwarfed Manhattan Club, the round Byzantine dome of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church. But the Flatiron itself has the proudest site in New York; facing, to the north, on one side the tangle and turmoil of Broadway--its unceasing whirr of business, business, business; on the other side, the broad elegance and dignity of Fifth Avenue, with its impressive cavalcade of mounted police. While East and West, before this giant building, rush the trams and traffic of Twenty-third Street; and to the South lie the arches of aristocratic old Washington Square.

It is as though at this converging point one gathers together all the outstanding threads in the fabric of the city, to visualize its central pattern. And the outstanding types of the city here are gathered also. One sees the ubiquitous “businessman,” in his careful square-shouldered clothes, hurrying from bus to tram, or tearing down-town in a taxi; the almost ubiquitous business-woman, trig and quietly self-confident, on her brisk up-town walk to the office; and the out-of-town woman “shopper,” with her enormous hand-bag, and the anxious-eyed Hebrew “importer” (whose sign reads _Maison Marcel_), and his stunted little errand-girl darting through the maze of traffic like a fish through well-known waters; the idle young man-about-town, immortalized in the sock and collar advertisements of every surface car and Subway; and the equally idle young girl, in her elaborate sameness the prototype of the same cover of the best magazines: even in one day, there comes to be a strange familiarity about all these people.

They are peculiar to their own special class, but within that class they are as like as peas in a pod. They have the same features, wear the same clothes even to a certain shade, and do the same things in identically the same day. With all about them shifting, progressing, alternating from hour to hour, New Yorkers, in themselves, remain unaltered. Or, if they change, they change together as one creature--be he millionaire or Hebrew shop-keeper, doctor of divinity or manager of comic opera. For, of all men under the sun, the New Yorker is a type; acutely suspicious of and instinctively opposed to anything independent of the type. Hence, in spite of the vast numbers of different peoples brought together on Manhattan Island, we find not a community of Americans growing cosmopolitan, but a community of cosmopolitans forced to grow New Yorkers. This, under the potent influence of extreme American adaptability, they do in a remarkably short time; the human potpourri who five years ago had never seen Manhattan, today being indistinguishable in the representative city mass.

Walk out Fifth Avenue at the hour of afternoon parade, or along Broadway on a matinée day: the habitués of the two promenades differ only in degree. Broadway is blatant. Fifth Avenue is desperately toned-down. On Broadway, voices and millinery are a few shades more strident, self-assertion a few shades more arrogant than on the less ingenuous Avenue. Otherwise, what do you find? The same over-animated women, the same over-languid young girls; wearing the same velvets and furs and huge corsage bouquets, and--unhappily--the same pearl powder and rouge, whether they be sixteen or sixty, married or demoiselle. Ten years ago New York could boast the loveliest, naturally beautiful galaxy of young girls in the world; today, since the onslaught of French fashion and artificiality, this is no longer true. On the other hand, it is pitiable to see the hard painted lines and fixed smile of the women of the world in the faces of these girls of seventeen and eighteen who walk up and down the Avenue day after day to stare and be stared at with almost the boldness of a boulevard _trotteuse_.

_Underwood & Underwood_

THE AFTERNOON PARADE ON FIFTH AVENUE]

Foreigners who watch them from club windows write enthusiastic eulogies in their praise. To me they seem a terrible travesty on all that youth is meant to be. They take their models from pictures of French demi-mondaines shown in ultra-daring race costumes, in the Sunday newspapers; and whom they fondly believe to be great ladies of society. I had almost said that from head to foot they are victims of an entirely false conception of beauty and grace; but when it comes to their feet, they are genuine American, and, so, frank and attractive. Indeed there is no woman as daintily and appropriately shod as the American woman, whose trim short skirts betray this pleasant fact with every step she takes.

Nowhere, however, is appearance and its detail more misrepresentative than in New York. Strangers exclaim at the opulence of the frocks and furs displayed by even the average woman. They have no idea that the average woman lives in a two-by-four hall bedroom--or at best a three-room flat; and that she has saved and scrimped, or more probably gone into debt to acquire that one indispensable good costume. Nor could they imagine that her chief joy in a round of sordid days is parade in it as one of the luxurious throng that crowd Fifth Avenue and its adjacent tea-rooms from four till six every afternoon.

Not only the women of Manhattan itself revel in this daily scene; but their neighbors from Brooklyn, Staten Island, Jersey City and Newark pour in by the hundreds, from the underground tubes and the ferries that connect these places with New York. The whole _raison d’être_ of countless women and girls who live within an hour’s distance of the city is this everyday excursion to their Mecca: the leisurely stroll up Fifth Avenue from Twenty-third Street, down from Fifty-ninth; the cup of tea at one of the rococo hotels along the way. It is a routine of which they never seem to tire--a monotony always new to them. And the pathetic part of it is that while they all--the indigent “roomers,” the anxious suburbanites, and the floating fraction of tourists from the West and South--fondly imagine they are beholding the Four Hundred of New York society, they are simply staring at each other!

And accepting each other naïvely at their clothes value. The woman of the hall bedroom receives the same appreciative glance as the woman with a bank account of five figures; provided that outwardly she has achieved the same result. The prime mania of New York is results--or what appear to be results. Every sky-scraper in itself is an exclamation-point of accomplishment. And the matter is not how one accomplishes, but how much; so that the more sluggish European can feel the minutes being snatched and squeezed by these determined people round him and made to yield their very utmost before being allowed to pass into telling hours and days.

With this goes an air of almost offensive competency--an air that is part of the garments of the true New Yorker; as though he and he alone can compass the affair towards which he is forever hurrying. There is about him, always, the piquant insinuation that he is keeping someone waiting; that he can. I have been guilty of suspecting that this attitude, together with his painstakingly correct clothes, constitute the chief elements in the New Yorker’s game of “bluff.” Let him wear what the ready-made tailor describes as “snappy” clothes, and he is at once respected as successful. A man may be living on one meal a day, but if he can contrive a prosperous appearance, together with the preoccupied air of having more business than he can attend to, he is in the way of being begged to accept a position, at any moment.

No one is so ready to be “bluffed” as the American who spends his life “bluffing.” In him are united the extremes of ingenuousness and shrewdness; so that often through pretending to be something he is not, he does actually come to be it. A Frenchman or a German or an Englishman is born a barber; he remains a barber and dies a barber, like his father and grandfather before him. His one idea is to be the best barber he can be; to excell every other barber in his street. The American scorns such lack of “push.” If his father is a barber, he himself learns barbering only just well enough to make a living while he looks for a “bigger job.” His mind is not on pleasing his clients, but on himself--five, ten, twenty years hence.

He sees himself a confidential clerk, then manager’s assistant, then manager of an independent business--soap, perhaps; he sees himself taken into partnership, his wife giving dinners, his children sent to college. And so vivid are these possibilities to him, reading and hearing of like histories every day in the newspapers and on the street, that unconsciously he begins to affect the manners and habits of the class he intends to make his own. In an astonishingly short time they are his own; which means that he has taken the main step towards the realization of his dream. It is the outward and visible signs of belonging which eventually bring about that one does belong; and no one is quicker to grasp this than the obscure American. He has the instincts of the born climber. He never stops imitating until he dies; and by that time his son is probably governor of the State, and his daughter married to a title. What a people! As a Frenchman has put it, “_il n’y a que des phenomènes!_”

One cannot conclude an introductory sketch of some of their phenomena without a glance at their amazing architecture. The first complacent question of the newspaper interviewer to every foreigner is: “What do you think of our sky-scrapers?” And one is certainly compelled to do a prodigious deal of thinking about them, whether he will or no. For they are being torn down and hammered up higher, all over New York, till conversation to be carried on in the street must needs become a dialogue in monosyllabic shouts; while walking, in conjunction with the upheavals of new Subway tunnelling, has all the excitements of traversing an earthquake district.

_Underwood & Underwood_

A PATCH OF THE CRAZY-QUILT BROADWAY, FROM 42d STREET]

This perpetual transition finds its motive in the enormous business concentrated on the small island of Manhattan, and the constant increase in office space demanded thereby. The commerce of the city persistently moves north, and the residents flee before it; leaving their fine old Knickerbocker homes to be converted into great department stores, publishing houses, but above all into the omnivorous office-building. The mass of these are hideous--dizzy, squeezed-together abortions of brick and steel--but here and there among the horrors are to be found examples of true if fantastic beauty. The Flatiron Building is one, the Woolworth Building (especially in its marvellous illumination by night) another, the new colonnaded offices of the Grand Central Station a third. Yet the general impression of New York architecture upon the average foreigner is of illimitable confusion and ugliness.

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.

That is, that he earns in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars a month. With this he can afford to pay the household expenses, to dress himself and his wife a bit better than their position demands, to subscribe to two or three of the ten-cent magazines, and to do a play on Broadway now and then. Mrs. John of course is a matinée fiend, and has the candy habit. These excesses must be provided for; also John’s five-cent cigars and his occasional mild “spree with the boys.” For the rest, they are a prudent couple; methodically religious, inordinately moral; banking a few dollars every month against the menacing rainy-day, and, if this has not arrived by vacation time in August, promptly spending the money on the lurid delights of Atlantic City or some other ocean resort. Thence they return haggard but triumphant, with a coat of tan laboriously acquired by wetting faces and arms, and then sitting for hours in the broiling sun--to impress the Tom Smiths in the flat next door that they have had a “perfectly grand time.”

A naïve, hard-working, kindly couple, severely conventional in their prejudices, impressionable as children in their affections, and with a certain persistent cleverness that shoots beyond the limitations of their type, and hints to them of the habits and manners of a finer. In them the passionate motive of self-development that dominates all American life has so far found an outlet only in demand for the conveniences and material comforts of the further advanced whom they imitate. When in the natural course of things they turn their eyes towards the culture of the Man Higher Up, they will obtain that, too. And meanwhile does not Mrs. Brown have her Tennyson Club, and John his uniform edition of Shakespeare?

Some New Yorkers who shudder at Harlem are not as lucky. I was once the guest of a lady who had just moved into her sumptuous new home on Riverside Drive. My rooms, to quote the first-class hotel circular, were replete with every luxury; I could turn on the light from seven different places; I could make the chairs into couches or the couches into chairs; I could talk by one of the marvellous ebony and silver telephones to the valet or the cook, or if I pleased to Chicago. There was nothing mortal man could invent that had not been put in those rooms, including six varieties of reading-lamps, and a bed-reading-table that shot out and arranged itself obligingly when one pushed a button.

But there was nothing to read. Apologetically, I sought my hostess. Would she allow me to pilfer the library? For a moment the lady looked blank. Then, with a smile of relief, she said: “Of course! You want some magazines. How stupid of the servants. I’ll have them sent to you at once; but you know we have no library. I think books are so ugly, don’t you?”

I am not hopelessly addicted to veracity, but I will set my hand and seal to this story; also to the fact that in all that palace of the superfluous there was not to my knowledge one book of any sort. Even the favourite whipped-cream novel of society was wanting; but magazines of every kind and description littered the place. The reason for this apparently inexplicable state of affairs is simple; time is money; therefore not to be expended without calculation. In the magazine the rushed business man, and the equally rushed business or society woman, has a literary quick-lunch that can be swallowed in convenient bites at odd moments during the day.

Is the business man dining out? He looks at the reviews of books he has not read on the way to his office in the morning; criticisms of plays he has not seen, on the way back at night. Half an hour of magazine is made thus to yield some eight hours of theatre and twenty-four of reading books--and his _vis-à-vis_ at dinner records at next day’s tea party, “what a well-informed man that Mr. Worriton is! He seems to find time for everything.”

Is the society woman “looking in” at an important reception? Between a fitting at her dressmaker’s, luncheon, bridge and two teas, she catches up the last Review from the pocket of her limousine, and runs over the political notes, war news, foreign events of the week. Result: “that Mrs. Newrich is really a remarkable woman!” declares the distinguished guest of the reception to his hostess. “Such a breadth of interest, such an intelligent outlook! It is genuine pleasure to meet a woman who shows some acquaintance with the affairs of the day.”

And so again they hoodwink one another, each practicing the same deceptive game of superficial show; yet none suspecting any of the rest. And the magazine syndicates flourish and multiply. In this piece that is in preparation, the actors are too busy proving themselves capable of their parts really to take time to become so. To succeed with them, you must offer your dose in tabloids: highly concentrated essence of whatever it is, and always sugar-coated. Then they will swallow it promptly, and demand more. Remember, too, that what they want in the way of “culture” is not drama, or literature, or music; but excitement--of admiration, pity, the erotic or the sternly moral sense. Their nerves must be kept at a certain perpetual tension. He who overlooks this supreme fact, in creating for them, fails.

There are in America today some thousands of men and women who have taken the one step further than their fellows in that they realize this, and so are able shrewdly to pander to the national appetites. The result is a continuous outpouring of novels and short stories, plays and hybrid songs, such as in a less vast and less extravagant country would ruin one another by their very multitude; but which in the United States meet with an appalling success. Appalling, because it is not a primitive, but a too exotic, fancy that delights in them. For his mind as for his body, the American demands an overheated dwelling; when not plunged within the hectic details of a “best-seller,” by way of recreation, he is apt to be immersed in the florid joys of a Broadway extravaganza.

These unique American productions, made up of large beauty choruses, magnificent scenery, gorgeous costumes, elaborate fantasies of ballet and song, bear the same relation to actual drama that the best-sellers bear to literature, and are as popular. The Hippodrome, with its huge stage accommodating four hundred people, and its enormous central tank for water spectacles, is easily first among the extravaganza houses of New York. Twice a day an eager audience, drawn from all classes of metropolitan and transient society, crowds the great amphitheatre to the doors. The performance prepared for them is on the order of a French révue: a combination circus and vaudeville, held together by a thin thread of plot that permits the white-flannelled youth and bejewelled maiden, who have faithfully exclaimed over each new sensation of the piece, finally to embrace one another, with the novel cry of “at last!”

Meanwhile kangaroos engage in a boxing match, hippopotami splash most of the reservoir over the “South Sea Girls”; the Monte Carlo Casino presents its hoary tables as background for the “Dance of the Jeunesse Dorée,” and Maoris from New Zealand give an imitation of an army of tarantulas writhing from one side of the stage to another. The climax is a stupendous _tableau en pyramide_ of fountains, marble staircases, gilded thrones, and opalescent canopies; built up, banked, and held together by girls of every costume and complexion. Nothing succeeds in New York without girls; the more there are, the more triumphant the success. So the Hippodrome, being in every way triumphant, has mountains of them: tall girls and little girls, Spanish girls, Japanese girls, Hindoo girls and French girls; and at the very top of the peak, where the “spot” points its dazzling ray, the American girl, wrapped in the Stars and Stripes of her apotheosis. _Ecco!_ The last word has been said; applause thunders to the rafters; the flag is unfurled, to show the maiden in the victorious garb of a Captain of the Volunteers; and the curtain falls amid the lusty strains of the national anthem. Everybody goes home happy, and the box office nets five thousand dollars. They know the value of patriotism, these good Hebrews.

This sentiment, always near the surface with Americans, grows deeper and more fervid as it localizes; leading to a curiously intense snobbism on the part of one section of the country towards another. Thus New York society sniffs at Westerners; let them approach the citadel ever so heavily armed with gold mines, they have a long siege before it surrenders to them. On the other hand, the same society smiles eagerly upon Southerners of no pocket-books at all; and feeds and fêtes and fawns upon them, because they are doomed, the minute their Southern accent is heard, to come of “a good old family.” The idea of a decayed aristocracy in two-hundred-year-old America is not without comedy, but in the States Southerners are taken very solemnly, by themselves as by everyone else.

My friend of the æsthetic antipathy to books (really a delightful person) is a Southerner--or was, before gathered into the fold of the New York Four Hundred. She apologized for taking me to the Horse Show (which she thought might amuse me, however), because “no one goes any more. It’s all Middle West and commuters.” For the benefit of those imperfect in social geography I must explain that Middle West is the one thing worse than West, and that commuters are those unfortunates without the sacred pale, who are forced to journey to and from Manhattan by ferries or underground tubes. They are the butt of comic newspaper supplements, topical songs, and society witticisms; also the despised and over-charged “out-of-town customers” of the haughty Fifth Avenue importer.

For the latter (a phenomenon unique to New York) has her own system of snobbism, quite as elaborate as that of her proudest client. They are really a remarkable mixture of superciliousness and abject servility, these Irish and Hebrew “Madame Celestes,” whose thriving establishments form so conspicuous a part of the important avenue. As exponents of the vagaries of American democracy, they deserve a paragraph to themselves.

Each has her rococo shop, and her retinue of mannequin assistants garbed in the extreme of fashion; each makes her yearly or bi-yearly trip to Paris, from which she returns with strange and bizarre creations, which she assures her patrons are the “only thing” being worn by _Parisiennes_ this season. Now even the untutored male knows that there is never an “only thing” favoured by the capricious and original _Parisienne_; but that she changes with every wind, and in all seasons wears everything under the sun (including ankle-bracelets and Cubist hats), provided it has the one hall-mark: _chic_.

But Madame New York meekly accepts the Irish lady’s dictum, and arrays herself accordingly--with what result of extravagant monotony we shall see later on. Enough for the present that she is absolutely submissive to the vulgar taste and iron decrees of the rubicund “Celeste” from Cork, and that the latter alternately condescends and grovels to her, in a manner amazing to the foreigner, who may be looking on. Yet on second thoughts it is quite explicable: after the habit of all Americans, native or naturalized, “Celeste” cannot conceal that she considers herself “as good as” anyone, if not a shade better than some. At the same time, again truly American, she worships the dollars madame represents (and whose aggregate she can quote to a decimal), and respects the lady in proportion. Hence her bewildering combinations of “certainly, Madame--it shall be exactly as Madame orders,” with “Oh, _my dear_, I wouldn’t have that! Why, girlie, that on you with your dark skin would look like sky-blue on an Indian! But, see, dear, here’s a pretty pink model”--etc., etc.

And so it continues, unctuous deference sandwiched between endearments and snubs throughout the entire conference of shopkeeper and customer; and the latter takes it all as a matter of course, though, if her own husband should venture to disagree with her on any point of judgment, she would be furious with him for a week. When I commented to one lady on these familiar blandishments and criticisms of shop people in New York, she said indulgently: “Oh, they all do it. They don’t mean anything; it’s only their way.”

Yet I have heard that same lady hotly protest against the wife of a Colorado silver magnate (whom she had known for years) daring to address her by her Christian name. “That vulgar Westerner!” she exclaimed; “the next thing she’ll be calling me dear!”

Democracy remains democracy as long as it cannot possibly encroach upon the social sphere; the moment the boundary is passed, however, and the successful “climber” threatens equal footing with the _grande dame_ on the other side, herself still climbing in England or Europe, anathema! The fact is, that Americans, like all other very young people, seek to hide their lack of assurance--social and otherwise--by an aggressive policy of defense which they call independence; but which is verily snobbism of the most virulent brand. From the John Browns to the multimillionaires with daughters who are duchesses, they are intent on emphasizing their own position and its privileges; unconscious that if they themselves were sure of it so would be everyone else.

But inevitably the actors must stumble and stammer, and insert false lines, before finally they shall “feel” their parts, and forge ahead to the victory of finished performance.

III

OFF DUTY

When one ponders what the New Yorker in his leisure hours most enjoys, one answers without hesitation: feeding. The word is not elegant, but neither is the act, as one sees it in process at the mammoth restaurants. Far heavier and more prolonged than mere eating and drinking is this serious cult of food on the part of the average Manhattanite. It has even led to the forming of a distinct “set,” christened by some satirical outsider: “Lobster Society.”

Here are met the moneyed plutocrat and his exuberant “lady friend,” the mauve-waistcoated sporting man, the society _déclassée_ with her gorgeous jewels and little air of tragedy, the expansive Hebrew and his chorus girl, the gauche out-of-town couple with their beaming smiles and last season’s clothes: all that hazy limbo that hovers on the social boundary-line, but hovers futilely--and that seeks to smother its disappointment with elaborate feasts of over-rich food.

_Underwood & Underwood_

“NEW YORK’S FINEST”: THE FAMOUS MOUNTED POLICE SQUAD]

It is amazing the thousands of these people that there are--New York seems to breed them faster than any other type; and the hundreds of restaurants they support. Every hotel has its three or four huge dining-rooms, its Palm Garden, Dutch Grill, etc.; but, as all these were not enough, shrewd Frenchmen and Germans and Viennese have dotted the city with _cafés_ and _brauhausen_ and _Little Hungaries_, to say nothing of the alarming Egyptian and Turkish abortions that are the favourite erection of the American restaurateur himself.

The typical New York feeding-place from the outside is a palace in terra cotta; from the inside, a vast galleried room or set of rooms, upheld by rose or ochre marble pillars, carpeted with thick red rugs, furnished with bright gilt chairs and heavily damasked, flower-laden tables--the whole interspersed and overtopped and surrounded by a jumble of fountains, gilt-and-onyx Sphinxes, caryatids, centaurs, bacchantes, and heaven knows what else of the superfluous and disassociated. To reach one’s table, one must thread one’s way through a maze of lions couchant, peacocks with spread mother o’ pearl tails, and opalescent dragons that turn out to be lights: proud detail of the “million dollar decorative scheme” referred to in the advertisements of the house. Finally anchored in this sea of sumptuousness, one is confronted with the dire necessity of ordering a meal from a menu that would have staggered Epicurus.

There is the table d’hôte of nine courses--any one of them a meal in itself; or there is the bewildering _carte du jour_, from which to choose strawberries in December, oranges in May, or whatever collection of ruinous exotics one pleases. The New Yorker himself goes methodically down the list, from oysters to iced pudding; impartial in his recognition of the merits of lobster bisque, _sole au gratin_, creamed sweetbreads, porterhouse steak, broiled partridge and Russian salad. He sits down to this orgy about seven o’clock, and rises--or is assisted to rise--about ten or half past, unless he is going on to a play, in which case he disposes of his nine courses with the same lightning execution displayed at his quick-lunch, only increasing his drink supply to facilitate the process.

Meanwhile there is the “Neapolitan Quartet,” and the Hungarian Rhapsodist, and the lady in the pink satin blouse who sings “The Rosary,” to amuse our up-to-date Nero. I wonder what the Romans would make of the modern cabaret? Like so many French importations, stripped in transit of their saving coat of French _esprit_, the cabaret in American becomes helplessly vulgar. Extreme youth cannot carry off the risqué, which requires the salt of worldly wisdom; it only succeeds in being rowdy. And the noisy songs, the loud jokes, the blatant dances--all the spurious clap-trap which in these New York feeding-resorts passes for amusement--point to the most youthful sort of rowdyism: to a popular discrimination still in embryo. But the New Yorker dotes on it--the cabaret, I mean; if for no other reason, because it satisfies his passion for getting his money’s worth. He is ready to pay a handsome price, but he demands handsome return, and no “extras” if you please.

When the ten-cent charge for bread and butter was inaugurated by New York restaurateurs last Spring, their patrons were furious; it hinted of the parsimonious European charge for “cover.” But if the short-sighted proprietors had quietly added five cents to the price of each article on the menu, it would have passed unnoticed: it is not paying that the American minds, it is “being done.” Conceal from him this humiliating consciousness, and he will empty his pockets. Thus, at the theatre, seats are considerably higher than in European cities, but they are also far more comfortable; and include a program, sufficient room for one’s hat and wrap, the free services of the usher, and as many glasses of the beloved ice-water as one cares to call for. People would not tolerate being disturbed throughout the performance by the incessant demands for a “_petite service_” and other supplements that persecute the Continental theatre-goer; while as for being forced to leave one’s wraps in a _garde-robe_, and to pay for the privilege of fighting to recover them, the independent American would snort at the bare idea. He insists on a maximum amount of comfort for his money, and on paying for it in a lump sum, either at the beginning or at the end. Convenience, the almighty god, acknowledges no limits to its sway.

It was convenience that until recently made it the custom for the average New York play-goer to appear at the theatre in morning dress. The tired business man could afford to go to the play, but had not the energy to change for it; so, naturally, his wife and daughter did not change either, and the orchestra presented a commonplace aspect, made up of shirtwaists and high-buttoned coats. Now, however, following the example of society, people are beginning to break away from this unattractive austerity; and theatre audiences are enlivened by a sprinkling of light frocks and white shirts.

We have already commented on the most popular type of dramatic amusement in America: the extravaganza, and musical comedy so-called; it is time now to mention the gradually developing legitimate drama, which has its able exponents in Augustus Thomas, Edward Sheldon, Eugene Walter, the late Clyde Fitch, and half a dozen others of no less insight and ability. Their plays present the stirring and highly dramatic scenes of American business and social life (using social in its original sense); and while for the foreigner many of the situations lose their full significance--being peculiar to America, in rather greater degree than French plays are peculiar to France, and English to England--even he must be impressed with the vivid realism and powerful climax of the best American comedies.

The nation as a whole is vehemently opposed to tragedy in any form, and demands of books and plays alike that they invariably shall end well. Such brilliant exceptions as Eugene Walter’s “The Easiest Way” and Sheldon’s “The Nigger,” only prove the rule that the successful piece must have a “happy ending.” High finance plays naturally an important part as nucleus of plots; also the marriage of working girls with scions of the Upper Ten. But the playwright has only to look into the newspapers, in this country of perpetual adventure, to find enough romance and sensation to fill every theatre in New York.

It seems almost as though the people themselves are surfeited with the actual drama that surrounds them, for they are rather languid as an audience, and must be piqued by more and more startling “thrillers” before moved to enthusiasm. Even then their applause is usually directed towards the “star,” in whom they take far keener interest than in the play itself. It is interesting to follow this passionate individualism of the nation that dominates its amusements as well as its activities. The player, not the play’s the thing with Americans; and on theatrical bills the name of the principal actor or actress is always given the largest type, the title of the piece next largest; while the author is tucked away like an afterthought in letters that can just be seen.

The acute American business man, who is always a business man, whether financing a railroad or a Broadway farce, is not slow to profit by the _penchant_ of the public for “big” names. By means of unlimited advertising and the right kind of notoriety, he builds up ordinary actors into valuable theatrical properties. Given a comedian of average talent, average good looks, and an average amount of magnetism, _and_ a clever press agent: he has a star! This brilliant being draws five times the salary of the leading lady of former years (a woman star is obviously a shade or two more radiant than a man), and in return has only to confide her life history and beauty recipés to her adoring public, via the current magazines. Furthermore stars are received with open arms by Society (which leading ladies were not), and may be divorced oftener than other people without injury--rather with distinct advantage--to their reputation. Each new divorce gives a fillip to the public curiosity, and so brings in money to the box office.

Not only in the field of the “legitimate” is a big name the all-important asset of an artist. Ladies who have figured in murder trials, gentlemen whom circumstantial evidence alone has failed to prove assassins, are eagerly sought after by enterprising vaudeville managers, who beg them to accept the paltry sum of a thousand dollars a week, for showing themselves to curious crowds, and delivering a ten-minute monologue on the deficiencies of American law! How or why the name has become “big” is a matter of only financial moment; and Americans of rigid respectability flock to stare at ex-criminals, members of the under-world temporarily in the limelight, and young persons whose sole claim to distinction lies in the glamour shed by one-time royal favour. Thanks to press agents and newspapers, the affairs of this motley collection--as indeed of “stars” of every lustre--are so constantly and so intimately before the public, that one hears people of all classes discussing them as though they were their lifelong friends.

Thus at the theatre: “Oh, no, the play isn’t anything, but I come to see Laura Lee. Isn’t she stunning? You ought to see her in blue--she says herself blue’s her colour. I don’t think much of these dresses she’s wearing tonight; she got them at Héloïse’s. Now generally she gets her things at Robert’s--she says Robert just suits her _genre_.”

Again, at the restaurant: “How seedy May Morris is looking--there she is, over by the window. You know she divorced her first husband because he made her pay the rent, and now she’s leading a cat-and-dog life with this one because he’s jealous of the manager. That’s Mrs. Willy Spry who just spoke to her; well, I didn’t know she knew _her_!”

What they do not know about celebrities of all sorts would be hard to teach Americans, particularly the women. They can tell you how many eggs Caruso eats for breakfast, and describe to the last rosebush Maude Adams’ country home; their interest in the drama and music these people interpret trails along tepidly, in wake of their worship for the successful individual. Americans are not a musical people. They go to opera because it is fashionable to be seen there, and to concerts and recitals for the most part because they confer the proper æsthetic touch. But only a handful have any real knowledge or love of music, and that handful is continually crucified by the indifference of the rest. I can think of no more painful experience for a sincere music-lover than to attend a performance at the Metropolitan Opera; and this not only because people are continually coming in and going out, destroying the continuity of the piece, but because the latter itself is carelessly executed and often faulty. Here again the quartet of exorbitantly paid stars are charged with the success of the entire performance; the conductor is an insignificant quantity, and the chorus goes its lackadaisical way unheeded--even smiling and exchanging remarks in the background, with no one the wiser. From a box near the stage I once saw two priests in “_Aïda_” jocosely tweak one another’s beards just at the moment of the majestic _finale_. Why not? The audience, if it pays attention to the opera at all, pays it to Caruso and Destinn and Homer--to the big name and the big voice; not to petty detail such as chorus and _mise-en-scène_.