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Arnold Bennett - Your United States
they were genuine American; there is nothing else like them. I shall never forget the pleasure I felt in
unexpectedly encountering these summary and highly distinguished sketches in the quietude of
Indianapolis. I would have liked to collect a trainful of New York, Chicago, and Boston dilettanti, and
lead them by the ears to the unpretentious museum at Indianapolis, and force them to regard fixedly these
striking creations. Not that I should expect appreciation from them! (Indianapolis, I discovered, was able
to keep perfectly calm in front of the Winslow Homer water-colors.) But their observations would have
been diverting.
VIII. CITIZENS
Nothing in New York fascinated me as much as the indications of the vast and multitudinous straitened
middle-class life that is lived there; the average, respectable, difficult, struggling existence. I would
always regard this medium plane of the social organism with more interest than the upper and lower
planes. And in New York the enormity of it becomes spectacular. As I passed in Elevated trains across
the end of street after street, and street after street, and saw so many of them just alike, and saw so many
similar faces mysteriously peering in the same posture between the same curtains through the same
windows of the same great houses; and saw canaries in cages, and enfeebled plants in pots, and bows of
ribbon, and glints of picture-frames; and saw crowd after dense crowd fighting down on the cobbled
roads for the fearful privilege of entering a surface-car - I had, or seemed to have, a composite vision of
the general life of the city.
And what sharpened and stimulated the vision more than anything else was the innumerable flashing
glimpses of immense torn clouds of clean linen, or linen almost clean, fluttering and shaking in
withdrawn courtyards between rows and rows of humanized windows. This domestic detail, repugnant
possibly to some, was particularly impressive to me; it was the visible index of what life really is on a
costly rock ruled in all material essentials by trusts, corporations, and the grand principle of tipping.
I would have liked to live this life, for a space, in any one of half a million restricted flats, with not quite
enough space, not quite enough air, not quite enough dollars, and a vast deal too much continual strain on
the nerves. I would have liked to come to close quarters with it, and get its subtle and sinister toxin
incurably into my system. Could I have done so, could I have participated in the least of the uncountable
daily dramas of which the externals are exposed to the gaze of any starer in an Elevated, I should have
known what New York truly meant to New-Yorkers, and what was the real immediate effect of average
education reacting on average character in average circumstances; and the knowledge would have been
precious and exciting beyond all knowledge of the staggering "wonders" of the capital. But, of course, I
could not approach so close to reality; the visiting stranger seldom can; he must be content with his
imaginative visions.
Now and then I had the good-fortune to come across illuminating stories of New York dailiness, tales of
no important event, but which lit up for me the whole expanse of existence in the hinterlands of the
Elevated. As, for instance, the following. The tiny young wife of the ambitious and feverish young man
is coming home in the winter afternoon. She is forced to take the street-car, and in order to take it she is
forced to fight. To fight, physically, is part of the daily round of the average fragile, pale, indomitable
New York woman. In the swaying crowd she turns her head several times, and in tones of
ever-increasing politeness requests a huge male animal behind her to refrain from pushing. He does not
refrain. Being skilled, as a mariner is skilled in beaching himself and a boat on a surfy shore, she does
ultimately achieve the inside of the car, and she sinks down therein apparently exhausted. The huge male
animal follows, and as he passes her, infuriated by her indestructible politeness, he sticks his head against
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