And then there is prosperity. America is a half-populated country teeming with natural wealth. Business methods are unhampered, except perhaps in the East, by the old traditions belonging to a vanished form of society. The traditions of an age of feudalism, of agriculture and of craftsmanship have done much to cramp the efficient and rational development of industrialism in Europe. The greater part of America started with a clean slate. In California there is one motor car to every three inhabitants. Considering the Californian circumstances, it is not to be wondered at.
American vitality is a function, mathematically speaking, of the prosperity and the modernity. An insufficiently nourished human being requires a great deal of rest. Reduced to an Indian diet, Americans would be a good deal less interested than they actually are in business efficiency, uplift and the Charleston. They would spend most of their spare time in doze, or in the doze’s first cousin: meditation. But they have enough to eat—a great deal more than enough, in fact. They can afford to hustle; indeed they must hustle or else die of plethora. Men and women who wash down beefsteaks with glasses of rich creamy milk need to do something pretty strenuous in order to keep alive at all.
The psychological effects of prosperity are hardly less striking than the physical. In less fortunate countries the precariousness of existence keeps large classes of the population in a state of chronic fear. Unemployment is a haunting apprehension, both to manual workers and to those who wear black coats. So little is needed in Europe to precipitate the man of the middle class into the abysses of lower classdom; the bottomless pit of poverty, into which so many of the manual workers have already fallen, gapes before his feet. Fear haunts and for ever darkly impends. Fear is the enemy of life; it inhibits every function of the mind and body. That is why, in the less fortunate parts of Europe, vitality is so low.
In America this fear hardly exists; there is no reason why any one should fail to earn good wages. Nor is the fall from the status of the clerk to that, shall we say, of the factory hand discreditable, as it would be in the older countries, where the prejudice against manual labour as something fundamentally degrading and unrespectable still lingers. The middle classes are therefore largely relieved of their terror of losing caste. Liberated from fear, the Americans live with confidence, and therefore with enhanced vitality. A generous extravagance, undreamed of in other parts of the world, is the American rule. Men and women earn largely and spend what they have on the national pleasures, which are all social and stimulative of vitality.
Modernity also tends to heighten vitality—or to be more exact, it affects the expression of vitality, externalising it in the form of vehement action. The joyful acceptance of change, which so profoundly influences American industry, business methods and domestic architecture, reacts on the affairs of daily, personal life. Pleasure is associated with a change of place and environment, finally with mere movement for its own sake. People leave their homes if they want entertainment. They externalise their vitality in visiting places of public amusement, in dancing and motoring—in doing anything that is not quietly sitting by their own fireside (or rather by their own radiator).
What is known as “night life” flourishes in America as nowhere else in the world. And nowhere, perhaps, is there so little conversation. In America vitality is given its most obviously vital expression. Hence there appears to be even more vitality in the Americans than perhaps there really is. A man may have plenty of vitality and yet keep still; his motionless calm may be mistaken for listlessness. There can be no mistake about people who dance and rush about. American vitality is always obviously manifested. It expresses itself vigorously to the music of the drum and saxophone, to the ringing of telephone bells and the roar of street cars. It expresses itself in terms of hastening automobiles, of huge and yelling crowds, of speeches, banquets, “drives,” slogans, sky signs. It is all movement and noise, like the water gurgling out of a bath—down the waste. Yes, down the waste.
America is popularly supposed to be a country of puritanism. And so it is, as any one who travels across it can discover. But what the traveller also discovers—to his vast surprise, if he happens to have arrived with conventional opinions about the country—is that a Rabelaisian looseness is just as characteristic of contemporary America as puritanical strictness. In Philadelphia the respectable booksellers do not stock Mr. Cabell’s Jurgen. In Boston the Watch and Ward Society suppresses the American Mercury, and in the same city one at least of my own novels has to be sold under the counter as though it were whisky.
I have been in Middle Western hotels where it was considered indecent for my wife to smoke a cigarette in the public rooms. And though I have not visited the Southern States, I have read in the newspapers the most extraordinary accounts of the persecutions to which unfaithful wives and errant husbands are liable there. It would be possible to quote many other examples of American puritanism. The list would be long and curious. These few specimens, however, are sufficient to prove the old contention that America is a puritanical country.
But it is also and simultaneously one of the least puritanical countries I have ever visited. In the theatres of New York it is possible to see plays of a character which can hardly be paralleled in any other city of the world. I do not speak of the displays of naked women; these have now become too commonplace to be remarked on—except, perhaps, in a country colonised by the Pilgrim Fathers. And in any case, Puritans tolerate spectacles and actions much more willingly than they tolerate words. It is only during the last few months that the Lord Chamberlain of England has finally brought himself to license the public performance of Bernard Shaw’s play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
Countless performances, whose appeal was frankly pornographic, have been licensed during the quarter-century of Mrs. Warren’s exile from the stage. Shaw’s crime was to have discussed frankly and seriously the subject of prostitution. He broached certain ideas, used certain words. Puritans like to wear the fig leaf over the mouth. This puritanical idiosyncrasy renders all the more remarkable the verbal frankness of many of the plays current in New York during the past months—plays in which there was no exposure of skin, but where spades were openly called spades, and often worse, more intimate names.
I remember, for example, a play called Cradle Snatchers. It was a Restoration comedy brought up to date—Wycherley without the wit. Indeed, it was a little more than Restoration. Its theme, which concerns three middle-aged ladies, who hire three young men as lovers, is very close to that of a comedy of Fletcher’s, The Custom of the Country, which Dryden, when defending the Restoration Theatre against the attacks of Jeremy Collier, pronounced to be far more indecent than any play written in his own day.
Nor was this play an isolated phenomenon. Sex lived up to its simple name. Lulu Belle and The Shanghai Gesture were no less remarkable. The fruitiest passage in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was playing when I passed through Chicago, had a robustly Rabelaisian humour, which I for one enormously enjoyed. But what did Mr. Sumner of the New York Vice Society think of those Gargantuan jokes? What about chaste Mr. Chase from Boston? And what would have been the reaction of those two lineal descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers to the casual, light-hearted references to homosexuality which I heard at more than one burlesque show and cabaret? I wonder.
It is not alone in the theatre that this spirit of anti-puritanism exhibits itself; it is also in American life. In one part of the country cigarette smoking will be forbidden, and the self-appointed censors of public morality will hold up passing automobiles and demand to see the marriage certificates of their occupants. In another the relations of the sexes will be easy, intimate and (how shall I phrase it?) chronically amorous. Fresh from the conventionalities and decorum of Paris and London, the stranger coming to the West Coast will be astonished by the amount of casual embracement, squeezing and public kissing which he sees going on, among the most respectable members of society, in restaurants and dancing-places.
He will be astonished by the frankness with which people discuss their intimate affairs—in voices, moreover, so loud that the most private details are reverberatingly audible for yards around. He will be impressed by the almost Congolese style of dancing, while that general atmosphere of hilarious inebriation which pervades the night life of all American cities will make him wonder whether a little less Prohibition—which means a little less whisky—might not perhaps be a good thing. In modern America the Rome of Cato and the Rome of Heliogabalus co-exist and flourish with an unprecedented vitality.
LONDON
So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the
