Watching the young men and maidens crowding to a lecture in the Hearst Amphitheatre at Berkeley, under that glorious Californian sky, I was struck by the sensible, frank intimacy of them all, and envied them the advantages that must be theirs over the English methods of segregation at the same age, which, by creating shyness and destroying familiarity, tends to retard if not destroy the natural understanding which ought to subsist between them and if it did would often make life afterwards so much simpler.
I asked one of the professors to what extent marriages were made in Berkeley, but he had no statistics. All he could say was that Cupid was very little trouble to the authorities and that Mr. Hoover and Mrs. Hoover first met each other as students at Stanford. And then I asked an ex-member of one of the Sororities and she said that at college one was a good deal in love and a good deal out of it. The romance rarely persisted into later life.
She pronounced romance with the accent on the first syllable, whereas somewhere half-way across the Atlantic the accent passes to the second; and why such illogical things should be is a mystery. The differences can be very disconcerting, especially if one refuses to give way. I had an experience to the point when talking with some one in Chicago and wishing to answer carefully his question as to the conditions under which the poor of our great cities live. These are, in my observation, infinitely worse in England than in America. Indeed I hardly saw any poor in America at all—not poverty as we understand it. But I could not frame my reply because "squalor" (which we pronounce as though it rhymed with "mollor") was the only fitting epithet and he had just used it himself, pronouncing it in the American way—or at any rate in his American way—with a long "a." So I turned the subject.
Neither nation has any monopoly of reasonableness in pronunciation. The American way of saying "advertisement" is more sensible than ours of saying "adver´tisment," since we say "advertise" too. But then, although the Americans say "inquire," just as we do, they illogically put the stress on the first syllable when they talk about an "in´quiry." The Tower of Babel is thus carried up one storey higher. The original idea was merely to confuse languages; it cannot ever have been wished that two friendly peoples should speak the same language differently.
But I have wandered far from Berkeley and Stanford. I am not sure as to my course of conduct if I had a daughter of seventeen, but I am quite convinced that if I had a son of that age I should send him to an American university for two or three years after his English school. He should then become a citizen of the Anglo-Saxon world indeed.
We had met Prohibition first at Honolulu, not a few of the passengers receiving the shock of their lives on learning at the hotel that only "soft drinks" were permitted. Our second reminder of the new regime came as we entered American waters off the Golden Gate and the ship's bar was formally closed. And then, in San Francisco, we found "dry" land indeed. In this connection let me say that in the hotel I made acquaintance with an official of great power who was new to me: the buttoned boy who rejoices in the proud title of Bell Captain. He gave me a private insight into his precocity (but that is not the word, for all boys in America are men too), and into his influence, by offering to supply me with forbidden fruit, in the shape of whisky, at the modest figure of $25 a bottle. He did not, however, say dollars: like most of his compatriots (and it is a favourite word with them) he said something between "dollars" and "dallars."
I had, a few days later, in Chicago, a similarly friendly offer from a policeman of whom I had inquired the way. Recognizing an English accent, he had instantly divined what my dearest wish must be. I then asked him how prohibition was affecting the people on his beat. He said that a few drunkards were less comfortable and a few wives more serene; but for the most part he had seen no increase of happiness, and the extra money that it provided was spent either on the movies, dress, or "other foolishness." I did not allow him to refresh me. After a course of American "tough" fiction, of which "Susan Lenox" remains most luridly in the memory, I had a terror of all professional upholders of the law.
Coming by chance upon the Robert Louis Stevenson memorial at San Francisco, on the edge of Chinatown, I copied its inscription, and in case any reader of these notes may have forgotten its trend I copy it again here; for I do not suppose that its application was intended to cease with the Californian city. It is counsel addressed to the individual, but since nations are but individuals in quantity such ideals cannot be repeated amiss:
To be honest; to be kind; to earn a little; to spend a little less; to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence; to renounce when that shall be necessary and not to be embittered; to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation; above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that man has of fortitude and delicacy.
It is a far cry from San Francisco to Saranac, yet Stevenson is their connecting chain, with the late Harry Widener's amazing collection of Stevensoniana, in his memorial library at Harvard, as a link. The Saranac cottage, which on the day of my visit was surrounded by the sweetest lilac blooms that ever perfumed the air, is still a place of pilgrimage, and one by one new articles of interest are being added to the collection. It was pleasant indeed to find an English author thus honoured. Later, in Central Park, New York, I was to find statues of Shakespeare, Burns and Sir Walter Scott.
It was, oddly enough, in the Adirondacks that I came upon my only experience of simplified spelling in the land of its birth. It was in that pleasant home from home, the Lake Placid Club, where one is adjured to close the door "tyt" as one leaves a room; where one drinks "cofi"; and where that most necessary and mysterious of the functionaries of life, the physician, is able to watch his divinity dwindle and his dignity disappear under the style "fizisn."
I heard many stories in America, where every one is a raconteur, but none was better than this, which my San Francisco host narrated, from his own experience, as the most perfect example of an honest answer ever given. When a boy, he said, he was much in the company of an old trapper in the Californian mountains. During one of their expeditions together he noticed that a camp meeting was to be held, and out of curiosity he persuaded Reuben to attend it with him. Perched on a back seat, they were watching the scene when an elderly Evangelical sister placed herself beside the old hunter, laid her hand on his arm, and asked him if he loved Jesus. He pondered for some moments and then replied thus: "Waal, ma'am, I can't go so far as to say that I love Him. I can't go so far as that. But, by gosh, I'll say this—I ain't got nothin' agin Him."
The funniest spontaneous thing I heard said was the remark of a farmer in the Adirondacks in reply to my question, Had they recovered up there, from the recent war? "Yes," he said, they had; adding brightly, "Quite a war, wasn't it?"
In a manner of speaking all Americans are humourists. Just as all French people are wits by reason of the epigrammatic structure of their language, so are all Americans humourists by reason of the national stores of picturesque slang and analogy to which they have access. I think that this tendency to resort to a common stock instead of striving after individual exactitude and colour is to be deplored. It discourages thought where thought should be encouraged. Adults are, of course, beyond redemption, but parents might at least do something about it with their children. One of the cleverest American writers whom I met made no effort whatever to get beyond these accepted phrases as he narrated one racy incident after another. With the pen in his hand (or, more probably, the typewriter under his fingers) his sense of epithet is precise; but in his conversational stories men were as mad "as Sam Hill," injuries hurt "like hell," and a knapsack was as heavy "as the devil." We all laughed; but he should have had more of the artist's pride.
Three American professional humourists whom I had the good fortune to meet and be with for some time were Irvin Cobb, Don Marquis, and Oliver Herford, each authentic and each so different. Beneath Mr. Cobb's fun is a mass of ripe experience and sagacity. However playful he may be on the surface one is aware of an almost Johnsonian universality beneath. It would not be extravagant to call his humour the bloom on the fruit of the tree of knowledge (I am talking now only of the three as I found them in conversation). Don Marquis, while equally serious (and all the best humourists are serious at heart), has a more grotesque fancy and is more of a reformer, or, at any rate, a rebel. His dissatisfaction with hypocrisy provoked a scorn that Mr. Cobb is too elemental to entertain. Some day perhaps Don Marquis will induce an editor to print the exercises in unorthodoxy which he has been writing and which, in extract, he repeated to us with such unction; but I doubt it. They are too searching. But that so busy a man should turn aside from his work to dabble in religious satire seemed to me a very interesting thing; for nothing is so unprofitable—except to the honest soul of him who conceives it.
One of Don Marquis's more racy stories which I recollect is of a loafer in a country town who had the habit of dropping into the store every day at the time the free cheese was set on the counter, and buying very little in return. When the time came for the privilege to be withdrawn the loafer was outraged and aghast. Addressing the storekeeper (his friend for years) he summed up his ungenerosity in these terms: "Your soul, Henry," he said, "is so mean, that if there were a million souls like it in the belly of a flea, they'd be so far apart they couldn't hear each other holler."
As for Oliver Herford, he is an elf, a sprite, a creature of fantasy, who may be—and, I rejoice to say, is—in this world, but certainly is not of it. This Oliver is in the line of Puck and Mercutio and Lamb and Hood and other lovers and makers of nonsense, and it is we who ask for "more." He had just brought out his irresponsible but very searching exercise in cosmogony, "This Giddy Globe," dedicated to President Wilson ("with all his faults he quotes me still") and this was the first indigenous work I read on American soil. Oliver Herford is perhaps best known by his "Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten," and there is a kitten also in "This Giddy Globe":
"Hurray!" cried the Kitten, "Hurray!"As he merrily set the sails,"I sail o'er the ocean to-dayTo look at the Prince of Wales."—this was when the Prince was making his triumphant visit to New Yorkin 1919—"But, Kitten," I said dismayed,"If you live through the angry galesYou know you will be afraidTo look at the Prince of Wales."Said the Kitten, "No such thing!Why should he make me wince?If a Cat may look at a KingA Kitten may look at a Prince!"
This reminds me that the story goes that when the Prince expressed his admiration for Fifth Avenue he was congratulated upon having "said a mouthful." Beyond a mouthful, as an encomium of sagacity or sensationalism in speech, there is but one advance and that is when one says "an earful."
The journey from San Francisco to Chicago, once the fruit country is passed, is drearily tedious, and I was never so tired of a train. The spacious compartments that one travelled in on the Indian journeys, where there are four arm-chairs and a bath-room, are a bad preparation for the long narrow American cars packed with humanity, and for the very inadequate washing-room, which is also the negro attendant's bed-chamber: "Although," he explained to me, "when the car isn't full I always sleep in Berth Number 1." If the night could be indefinitely prolonged, these journeys would be more tolerable; but for the general comfort the sleeping berths must be converted into seats at an early hour. In addition to books, I had, as a means of beguilement, the society of a returned exile from the Philippines, who told me the story of his life, showed me the necklace he was taking home to his daughter's wedding, and asked my advice as to the wisdom or unwisdom of marrying again, the lady of his wavering choice having been at school with him in New England and being now a widow in Nebraska with property of her own. Besides being thus garrulous and open, he was the most helpful man I ever met, acting as a nurse to the three or four restless children in the car, and even producing from his bag a pair of scissors and a bottle of gum with which to make dolls' paper clothes. Never in my life have I called a stranger "Ed" on such short acquaintance; never have I been called "Poppa" so often by the peevish progeny of others.
It was on this train that I began to realise how much thirstier the Americans are than we. The passengers were continually filling and emptying the little cups that are stacked beside the fountains in the corridors, and long before we reached Chicago the cups had all been used. In England only children drink water at odd times and they not to excess. But in America every one drinks water, and the water is there for drinking, pure and cold and plentiful. It is beside the bed, in the corners of offices, awaiting you at meals, jingling down the passages of hotels, bubbling in the streets. In English restaurants, water bottles are rarely supplied until asked for; in our hotel bedrooms they seldom bear lifting to the light. As to whether the general health of the Americans is superior or inferior to ours by reason of this water-drinking custom, I have no information; but figures would be interesting.
In Chicago the weather was wet and cold, and it was not until after I had left that I learned of the presence there of certain literary collections which I may now perhaps never see. But I spent much time in the Museum, where there is one of the finest Hobbemas in the world, and where two such different creative artists as Claude Monet and Josiah Wedgwood are especially honoured. But the chief discovery for me was the sincere and masterly work in landscape of George Inness, my first impression of whom was to be fortified when I passed on to Boston, and reinforced in the Hearn collection in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
It was in Chicago, in the Marshall Field Book Department—which is to ordinary English bookshops like a liner to a houseboat—that I first realised how intense is the interest which America takes in foreign contemporary literature. In England the translation has a certain vogue—Mrs. Garnett's supple and faithful renderings of Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoievski, and Tchekov have, for example, a great following—but we do not adventure much beyond the French and the Russians; whereas I learn that English versions of hundreds of other foreign books are eagerly bought in America. Such curiosity seems to me to be very sensible. I was surprised also to find tables packed high with the modern drama. In England the printed play is not to the general taste.
It was in Chicago that I found "window-shopping" at its most enterprising. In San Francisco the costumiers' windows were thronged all Sunday, but in Chicago they are brilliantly lighted till midnight, long after closing hours, so that late passers-by may mark down desirable things to buy on the morrow.
The spirited equestrian statue of General John A. Logan, in a waste space by Michigan Avenue, which I could see from my bedroom window, was my first and by no means the least satisfying experience of American sculpture on its native soil—to be face to face with St. Gaudens' figure of "Grief" in Rock Creek Cemetery, at Washington, having long been a desire. In time I came to see that beautiful conception, and I saw also the fine Shaw monument in Boston, fine both in idea and in execution; and the Sheridan, by the Plaza Hotel in New York; and the Farragut in Madison Square; and the Pilgrim in Philadelphia—all the work of the same firm, sensitive hand, a replica of whose Lincoln is now to be seen at Westminster.
The statue seems almost as natural a part of civic ornament in America as it is in France, and is not in England; and the standard as a rule is high. In particular I like the many horsemen—Anthony Wayne dominating the landscape at Valley Forge; and George Washington again and again, and not least in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia (where there is also a bronze roughrider realistically set on a cliff—as though from Ambrose Bierce's famous story—by Frederic Remington). American painters can too often suggest predecessors, usually French, but the sculptors have a strength and directness of their own, and it would not surprise me if some of the best statues of the future came from their country. No one would say that all American civic sculpture is good. There is a gigantic bust of Washington Irving behind New York's Public Library which would be better away; nor are the lions that guard that splendid institution superabundantly leonine; but the traveller is more charmed than depressed by the marble and bronze effigies that meet his eye—and few witnesses have been able to say that of England. Among the more remarkable public works I might name the symbolical figures on the steps of the Boston Free Library, and the frieze in deep relief on the Romanesque church on Park Avenue in New York, and I found something big and impressive in the Barnard groups at Harrisburg. Many of the little bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum—at the other extreme—are exquisite.
We have our cinema theatres in England in some abundance, but the cinema is not yet in the blood here as in America. In America picture-palaces are palaces indeed—with gold and marble, and mural decorations, built to seat thousands—and every newspaper has its cinema page, where the activities of the movie stars in their courses are chronicled every morning. Moreover, America is the home of the industry; and rightly so, for it has, I should say, been abundantly proved that Americans are the only people who really understand both cinema acting and cinema production. Italy, France and England make a few pictures, but their efforts are half-hearted: not only because acting for the film is a new and separate art, but because atmospheric conditions are better in America than in Europe.
It was in Chicago that I had my only opportunity of seeing cinema stars in the flesh. The rain falling, as it seems to do there with no more effort or fatigue to itself than in Manchester, I had, one afternoon, to change my outdoor plans and take refuge at the matinee of a musical comedy called "Sometime," with Frank Tinney in the leading part. Tinney, I may say, during his engagement in London some years ago, became so great a favourite that one performer has been flourishing on an imitation of him ever since. The play had been in progress only for a few minutes when Frank, in his capacity as a theatre doorkeeper, was presented by his manager with a tip. A dialogue, which to the trained ear was obviously more or less an improvisation, then followed:
Manager: "What will you do with that dollar, Frank?"
Frank: "I shall go to the movies. I always go to the movies when there's a Norma Talmadge picture. Ask me why I always go to the movies when there's a Norma Talmadge picture."
Manager: "Why do you always go to the movies when there's a Norma Talmadge picture, Frank?"
Frank: "I go because, I go because she's my favourite actress. (Applause.) Ask me why Norma Talmadge is my favourite actress."
Manager: "Why is Norma Talmadge your favourite actress, Frank?"
Frank: "Norma Talmadge is my favourite actress because she is always saving her honour. I've seen her saving it seventeen times. (To the audience) You like Norma Talmadge, don't you?" (Applause from the audience.)
Frank: "Then wouldn't you like to see her as she really is? (To a lady sitting with friends in a box.) Stand up, Norma, and let the audience see you."
Here a slim lady with a tense, eager, pale face and a mass of hair stood up and bowed. Immense enthusiasm.
Frank: "That's Norma Talmadge. You do like saving your honour, don't you, Norma? And now (to the audience) wouldn't you like to see Norma's little sister, Constance? (More applause.) Stand up, Constance, and let the audience see you."
Here another slim lady bowed her acknowledgments and the play was permitted to proceed.
What America is going to do with the cinema remains to be seen, but I, for one, deplore the modern tendency of novelists to be lured by American money to write for it. If the cinema wants stories from novelists let it take them from the printed books. One has but to reflect upon what might have happened had the cinema been invented a hundred years ago, to realise my disturbance of mind. With Mr. Lasky's millions to tempt them Dickens would have written "David Copperfield" and Thackeray "Vanity Fair," not for their publishers and as an endowment to millions of grateful readers in perpetuity, but as plots for the immediate necessity of the film, with a transitory life of a few months in dark rooms. Of what new "David Copperfields" and "Vanity Fairs" the cinema is to rob us we shall not know; but I hold that the novelist who can write a living book is a traitor to his art and conscience if he prefers the easy money of the film. Readers are to be considered before the frequenters of Picture Palaces. His privilege is to beguile and amuse and refresh through the ages: not to snatch momentary triumphs and disappear.
The evidence of the moment is more on the side of the pessimist than the optimist. I found in America no trace of interest in such valuable records as the Kearton pictures of African jungle life or the Ponting records of the Arctic Zone. For the moment the whole energy of the gigantic cinema industry seemed to be directed towards the filming of human stories and the completest beguilement, without the faintest infusion of instruction or idealism, of the many-headed mob. In short, to provide "dope." Whether so much "dope" is desirable, is the question to be answered. That poor human nature needs a certain amount, is beyond doubt. But so much? And do we all need it, or at any rate deserve it? is another question. Sometimes indeed I wonder whether those of us who have our full share of senses ought to go to the cinema at all. It may be that its true purpose is to be the dramatist of the deaf.
Perhaps it is one of the travellers' illusions (and we are very susceptible to them), but I have the impression that American men are more alike than the English are. It may be because there are fewer idiosyncrasies in male attire, for in America every one wears the same kind of hat; but I think not. In spite of the mixed origin of most Americans, a national type of face has been evolved to which they seem satisfied almost universally to pay allegiance. Again and again in the streets I have been about to accost strangers to whom I felt sure I had recently been introduced, discovering just in time that they were merely doubles. In England I fancy there is more individuality in appearance. If it is denied that American faces are more true to one type than ours, I shall reopen the attack by affirming that American voices are beyond question alike. My position in these two charges may be illustrated by notices that I saw fixed to gates at the docks in San Francisco. On one were the words "No Smoking"; on the other "Positively No Smoking."
And what about the science of physiognomy? I have been wondering if Lavater is to be trusted outside Europe. In China and Japan I was continually perplexed, for I saw so many men who obviously were successful—leaders and controllers—but who were without more than the rudiments of a nose on which to support their glasses; and yet I have been brought up to believe that without a nose of some dimensions it was idle to hope for worldly eminence. Again, in America, is it possible that all these massive chins and firm aquiline beaks are ruling the roost and reaching whatever goal they set out for? I doubt it.
The average American face is, I think, keener than ours and healthier. One sees fewer ruined faces than in English cities, fewer men and women who have lost self-respect and self-control. The American people as a whole strike the observer as being more prosperous, more alert and ambitious, than the English. Where I found mean streets they were always in the occupation of aliens.
To revert to the matter of clothes, the American does as little as possible to make things easy for the conjectural observer. In England one can base guesses of some accuracy on attire. In a railway carriage one can hazard without any great risk of error the theory that this man is in trade and that in a profession, that another is a stockbroker, and a fourth a country squire. But America is full of surprises, due to the uniformity of clothing and a certain carelessness which elevates comfort to a ritual. The man you think of as a millionaire may be a drummer, the drummer a millionaire. Again, in England people are known to a certain extent by the hotels they stay at, the restaurants they eat at, and the class in which they travel. Such superficial guides fail one in America.
I can best indicate, without the mechanical assistance of dates, the time of my sojourn in New York by saying that, during those few weeks, Woodrow Wilson's successor was being sought, the possibility of the repeal of the Prohibition Act was a matter of excited interest, and "Babe" Ruth was the national hero. During this period I saw the President sitting on the veranda of the White House; I had opportunities of honouring Prohibition in the breach as well as in the observance; and these eyes were everlastingly cheered and enriched by the spectacle of the "Babe" (who is a baseball divinity) lifting a ball over the Polo Ground pavilion into Manhattan Field. I hold, then, that I cannot be said to have been unlucky or to have wasted my time.
I found (this was in the spring of 1920) Prohibition the universal topic: could it last, and should it last? In England we are accused of talking always of the weather. In America, where there is no weather, nothing but climate, that theme probably was never popular. Even if it once were, however, it had given way to Prohibition. At every lunch or dinner table at which I was present Prohibition was a topic. And how could it be otherwise?—for if my host was a "dry" man, he had to begin by apologising for having nothing cheering to offer, and if he possessed a cellar it was impossible not to open the ball by congratulating him on his luck and his generosity. Meanwhile the guests were comparing notes as to the best substitutes for alcoholic beverages, exchanging recipes, or describing their adventures with private stills.
I visited a young couple in a charming little cottage in one of the garden cities near New York, and found them equally divided in their solicitude over a baby on the top floor and a huge jar in the basement which needed constant skimming if the beer was to be worth drinking.
One effect of Prohibition which I was hoping for, if not actually expecting, failed to materialise. I had thought that the standard of what are called T.B.M. (Tired Business Men) theatrical shows might be higher if the tendency of alcohol to make audiences more tolerant (as it undoubtedly can do in London) were no longer operative. But these entertainments seemed, under teetotallers, no better.
After seeing my first ball game or so I was inclined to suggest improvements; but now that I have attended more I am disposed to think that those in authority know more about it than I do, and that such blemishes as it appears to have are probably inevitable. For one thing, I thought that the outfield had too great an advantage. For another, not unassociated with that objection, I thought that the home-run hit was not sufficiently rewarded above the quite ordinary hit—"bunch-hit," is it?—that brings in a man or men. In the English game of "Rounders," the parent of baseball, a home-run hit either restores life to a man already out or provides the batting side with a life in reserve. To put a premium of this kind on so noble an achievement is surely not fantastic. So I thought. And yet I see now that the game must not be lengthened, or much of its character would go. It is its concentrated American fury that is its greatest charm. If a three-day cricket match were so packed with emotion we should all die of heart failure.
I thought, too, that it is illogical that a ground stroke behind the diamond should be a no-ball, and yet, should that ball be in the air and caught, the striker should be out. I thought it an odd example of lenience to allow the batsman as many strokes behind the catcher as he chanced to make. But the more baseball I see the more it enchants me as a spectacle, and these early questionings are forgotten.
Baseball and cricket cannot be compared, because they are as different as America and England; they can only be contrasted. Indeed, many of the differences between the peoples are reflected in the games; for cricket is leisurely and patient, whereas baseball is urgent and restless. Cricket can prosper without excitement, while excitement is baseball's life-blood, and so on: the catalogue could be indefinitely extended. But, though a comparison is futile, it may be interesting to note some of the divergences between the games. One of the chief is that baseball requires no specially prepared ground, whereas cricket demands turf in perfect order. Bad weather, again, is a more serious foe to the English than to the American game, for if the turf is soaked we cannot go on, and hence the number of drawn or unfinished matches in the course of a season. A two hours' game, such as baseball is, can, however, always be played off.
In baseball the pitcher's ball must reach the batter before it touches the ground; in cricket, if the ball did not touch the ground first and reach the batsman on the bound, no one would ever be out at all, for the other ball, the full-pitch as we call it, is, with a flat bat, too easy to hit, for our bowlers swerve very rarely: it is the contact with the ground which enables them to give the ball its extra spin or break. Full-pitches are therefore very uncommon. In cricket a bowler who delivered the ball with the action of a pitcher would be disqualified for "throwing": it is one of the laws of cricket that the bowler's elbow must not be bent.
In cricket (I mean in the first-class variety of the game) the decisions of the umpire are never questioned, either by players or public.
In baseball there are but two strokes for the batter: either the "swipe," or "slog," as we call it, where he uses all his might, or the "bunt," usually a sacrificial effort; in cricket there are scores of strokes, before the wicket, behind it, and at every angle to it. These the cricketer is able to make because the bat is flat and wide, and he holds it both vertically and at a slant, as occasion demands, and is allowed, at his own risk, to run out to meet the ball. In the early days of cricket, a hundred and fifty years ago, the bat was like a baseball club, but curved, and the only strokes then were much what the only baseball strokes are now—the full-strength hit and the stopping hit. So long as the pitcher delivers the ball in the air it is probable that the baseball club will remain as it is; but should the evolution of the game allow the pitcher to make use of the ground, then the introduction of a flattened club is probable. But let us not look ahead. All that we can be sure of is that, since baseball is American, it will change.
To resume the catalogue of contrast. In baseball the batsman must run for every fair hit; in cricket he may choose which hits to run for.
In baseball a man's desire is to hit the ball in the air beyond the fielders; in cricket, though a man would like to do this, his side is better served if he hits every ball along the ground.
In baseball no man can have more than a very small number of hits in a match; in cricket he can be batting for a whole day, and then again before the match is over. There are instances of batsmen making over 400 runs before being out.
Another difference between the games is that in cricket we use a new ball only at the beginning of a fresh inning (of which there cannot be more than four in a match) and when each 200 runs have been scored; and (this will astonish the American reader) when the ball is hit among the people it is returned. I have seen such rapid voluntary surrenders at baseball very seldom, and so much of a "fan" have I become that the spectacle has always been accompanied in my breast by pain and contempt. I had the gratification of receiving from the burly John McGraw an autograph ball as a souvenir of a visit to the Polo Ground. I put it in my pocket hurriedly, conscious of the risk I ran among a nation of ball-stealers in possessing such a trophy; and I got away with it. But I am sure that had it been a ball hit out of the ground by the mighty "Babe" Ruth, which—recovering it by some supernatural means—he had handed to me in public, I should not have emerged alive, or, if alive, not in the ball's company.
In cricket the wicket-keeper, who, like the baseball catcher, is protected, although he has no mask, is the most difficult man to obtain, because he has the hardest time and the least public approbation; in baseball the catcher is a hero and every boy aspires to his mitt.
In cricket no player makes more than three hundred pounds a season, unless it is his turn for his one and only benefit, when he may make a thousand pounds more. But most players do not reach such a level of success that a benefit is their lot. But baseballers earn enormous sums.
If a match could be arranged between eleven cricketers and eleven baseballers, the cricketers to be allowed to bowl and the baseballers to pitch, the cricketers to use their own bats and the baseballers their own clubs, I fancy that the cricketers would win; for the difficulty of hitting our bowling with a club would be greater than of hitting their pitching with a bat. But their wonderful fielding and far more accurate and swifter throwing than ours might just save them. Such throwing we see only very rarely, for good throwing is no longer insisted upon in cricket, much to the game's detriment. That old players should lose their shoulders is natural—and, of course, our players remain in first-class cricket for many years longer than ball champions—but there is no excuse for the young men who have taken advantage of a growing laxity in this matter. Chief of the few cricketers who throw with any of the terrible precision of a baseball field is Hobbs. It must be borne in mind, however, that cricket does not demand such constant throwing at full speed as baseball does; for in cricket, as I have said, the batsman may choose what hits he will run for, and if he chooses only the perfectly safe ones the fieldsmen are never at high pressure. There is also nothing in cricket quite to compare with base-stealing.
When it comes to catching, the percentage of missed catches is far higher at cricket than at baseball; but there are good reasons for this. One is that in baseball a glove is worn; another that in baseball all catches come to the fieldsmen with long or sufficient notice. The fieldsmen are all, except the catcher, in front of the batsmen; there is nothing to compare with the unexpected nimbleness that our point and slips have to display.
In the hypothetical contest that I have suggested, between baseballers and cricketers, if the conditions were nominally equal and the cricketers had to pitch like baseballers and the baseballers to use the English bat, why then the baseballers would win handsomely.
Baseball, I fancy, will not be acclimatised in England. We had our chance when London was full of American soldiers and we did not take it. But we were very grateful to them for playing the game in our midst, for the authorities were so considerate as to let them play on Sundays (which we are never allowed to do) and I was one of those who hoped that this might be the thin end of the wedge and Sunday cricket also be permitted. But no; when the war was over and the Americans left us, the old Sabbatarianism reasserted itself. If, however, we ever exchanged national games, and cricket were played in America and baseball in England, it is the English spectator who would have the better of the exchange. I am convinced that although we should quickly find baseball diverting, nothing would ever persuade an American crowd to be otherwise than bored by cricket.
Perhaps if I had reached New York from the sea the skyscrapers would have struck me more violently. But I had already seen a few in San Francisco (and wondered at and admired the courage which could build so high after the earthquake of 1906), and more in Chicago, all ugly; so that when I came to New York and found that the latest architects were not only building high, but imposing beauty on these mammoth structures, surprise was mingled with delight. No matter how many more millions of dollars are expended on that strange medley of ancient forms which go to make up New York's new Cathedral, where Romanesque and Gothic seem already to be ready for their divorce, the Woolworth Building will be New York's true fane. Mr. Cass Gilbert, the designer of that graceful immensity, not only gave commerce its most notable monument (to date), but removed for ever the slur upon skyscrapers. The Woolworth Building does not scrape the sky; it greets it, salutes it with abeau geste. And I would say something similar of the Bush Building, with its alabaster chapel in the air which becomes translucent at night; and the Madison Square Tower (whose clock face, I noticed, has the amazing diameter of three storeys); and the Burroughs Welcome Building on 41st Street, with its lovely perpendicular lines; and that immense cube of masonry on Park Avenue which bursts into flower, so to speak, at the top in the shape of a very beautiful loggia. But even if these adornments become, as I hope, the rule, one could not resent the ordinary structural elephantiasis a moment after realising New York's physical conditions. A growing city built on a narrow peninsula is unable to expand laterally and must, therefore, soar. The problem was how to make it soar with dignity, and the problem has been solved.
In the old days when brown stone was the only builders' medium New York must have been a drab city indeed; or so I gather from the few ancient typical residences that remain. There are a few that are new, too, but for the most part the modern house is of white stone. Gayest of all is, I suppose, that vermilion-roofed florist's on Fifth Avenue.
One has to ascend the Woolworth Building to appreciate at a blow with what discretion the original settlers of New York made their choice. It is interesting, too, to watch Broadway—which, for all I know, is the longest street in the world—starting at one's feet on its lawless journey to Albany: lawless because it is almost the only sinuous thing in this city of parallelograms and has the effrontery to cross diagonally both Fifth Avenue and Sixth. Before leaving the Woolworth Building, I would say that there seemed to me something rather comically paradoxical in being charged 50 cents for access to the top of a structure which was erected to celebrate the triumph of a commercial genius whose boast it was to have made his fortune out of articles sold at a rate never higher than 10 cents.
Having dallied sufficiently on the summit—there are a trifle of fifty-eight floors, but an express lift makes nothing of them—I continued the implacable career of the tripper by watching for a while the deafening kerb market, which presented on that morning an odd appearance, more like Yarmouth beach than a financial centre, for there had been rain, and all the street operators were in sou'westers and sea-boots. There can be spasms of similar excitement in London, in the neighbourhood of Capel Court, but we have nothing that compares so closely with this crowd as Tattersall's Ring at Epsom just before the Derby.