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Arnold Bennett - Your United States
And then, in the night and in the rain, you swerve round some corner into the straight, by Grant Park, in
full sight of one of the most dazzling spectacles that Chicago or any other city can offer - Michigan
Avenue on a wet evening. Each of the thousands of electric standards in Michigan Avenue is a cluster of
six huge globes (and yet they will tell you in Paris that the Rue de la Paix is the best-lit street in the
world), and here and there is a red globe of warning. The two lines of light pour down their flame into
the pool which is the roadway, and you travel continually toward an incandescent floor without ever
quite reaching it, beneath mysterious words of fire hanging in the invisible sky!... The automobile stops.
You get out, stiff, and murmur something inadequate about the length and splendor of those boulevards.
"Oh," you are told, carelessly, "those are only the interior boulevards.... Nothing! You should see our
exterior boulevards - not quite finished yet!"
III. THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES
"Here, Jimmy!" said, briskly, a middle-aged administrative person in easy attire, who apparently had
dominion over the whole floor beneath the dome. A younger man, also in easy attire, answered the call
with an alert smile. The elder pointed sideways with his head at my two friends and myself, and
commanded, "Run them through in thirty minutes!" Then, having reached the center of a cuspidor with
all the precision of a character in a Californian novel, he added benevolently to Jimmy, "Make it a dollar
for them." And Jimmy, consenting, led us away.
In this episode Europe was having her revenge on the United States, and I had planned it. How often, in
half a hundred cities of Europe, had I not observed the American citizen seeing the sights thereof at high
speed? Yes, even in front of the Michael Angelo sculptures in the Medici Chapel at Florence had I seen
him, watch in hand, and heard him murmur "Bully!" to the sculptures and the time of the train to his wife
in one breath! Now it was impossible for me to see Washington under the normal conditions of a session.
And so I took advantage of the visit to Washington of two friends on business to see Washington hastily,
as an excursionist pure and simple. I said to the United States, grimly: "The most important and the most
imposing thing in all America is surely the Capitol at Washington. Well, I will see it as you see the
sacred sights of Europe. By me Europe shall be revenged."
Thus it came about that we had hired a kind of carriage known as a "sea-going hack," driven by a negro
in dark blue, who was even more picturesque than the negroes in white who did the menial work in the
classic hotel, and had set forth frankly as excursionists into the streets of Washington, and presently
through the celebrated Pennsylvania Avenue had achieved entrance into the Capitol.
It was a breathless pilgrimage - this seeing of the Capitol. And yet an impressive one. The Capitol is a
great place. I was astonished - and I admit at once I ought not to have been astonished - that the Capitol
appeals to the historic sense just as much as any other vast legislative palace of the world - and perhaps
more intimately than some. The sequence of its endless corridors and innumerable chambers, each
associated with event or tradition, begets awe. I think it was in the rich Senatorial reception-room that I
first caught myself being surprised that the heavy gilded and marmoreal sumptuosity of the decorations
recalled the average European palace. Why should I have been expecting the interior of the Capitol to
consist of austere bare walls and unornamented floors? Perhaps it was due to some thought of Abraham
Lincoln. But whatever its cause, the expectation was naive and derogatory. The young guide, Jimmy,
who by birth and genius evidently belonged to the universal race of guides, was there to keep my ideas
right and my eyes open. He was infinitely precious, and after his own fashion would have done honor to
any public monument in the East. Such men are only bred in the very shadow of genuine history.
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