Through Irish Eyes

by George A. Birmingham

 

THROUGH
IRISH EYES

 

We see Ourselves as George A. Birmingham and Herself see us

CITIZENS of great conquering nations go about the world impressing their customs and habits upon foreign peoples. They can afford to criticize the shortcomings of their neighbors; can, without giving offense, reform what they find amiss.

The Americans, for instance, are great travelers, and they have insisted on the establishment of systems of central heating all the principal hotels of Europe. Other people may like chilly bedrooms. The American does not; and, being perfectly sure that he is right about temperature, he has warmed up Europe until the original inhabitants gasp.

The Germans also travel and are also members of a conquering race. We owe it to the Germans that it is possible to smoke in the restaurant cars of the International Company of “Wagons-lits,” in spite of the fact that notices in three or four languages announce that the practise is forbidden.

The English, another of the world’s dominating nations, have forced an extra meal on the unwilling Latin races, insisting that afternoon tea shall be drunk by every one with whom they come in contact. In alliance with the Americans they have spread the Anglo-Saxon language over the world, holding it to be absurd for Spaniards and Italians not to speak it.

It must be very gratifying to belong to one of these great nations and to feel that you have a natural and indisputable right, not only to criticize sharply what you find wrong in other countries, but to insist that the inhabitants amend their ways. We, alas! being Irish, belong to a small nation which has never conquered anybody. We travel with all the humility proper to those in such a case. We admire, but never venture to criticize. We endeavor on all occasions to adapt ourselves to the customs of other countries. We never venture to suggest that any one should alter his usual way of living for our sakes.

THE AMERICAN OBJECTION TO SEALSKIN

For instance: We made up our minds to visit America. We learned in the course of inquiries about America that the American people have a strong objection to sealskin coats; so strong an objection that they will not allow these garments to be brought into their country. We possessed a coat which I believed to be made of sealskin. Our natural impulse, being merely Irish, was to leave it at home and go through America clad only as Americans think right. It is their country, not ours; and, not being English or German, we felt that we had no right to force our opinions about sealskin coats on them.

Then it occurred to us that our informant might be mistaken. “The Americans,” so we argued, “are a great and free people. They can not really wish to regulate the clothes of casual strangers. Let us write to the American consul and inquire.” We did so and awaited his reply with great anxiety. It reached us after we and the coat were safely in New York.

I am not, even now, quite sure how the Americans really regard sealskin coats. Ours, to my surprise, turned out to be made of the skin of another animal called a musquash. “Herself”—it is thus that we speak of our wives in Ireland—persuaded the custom-house officer that a musquash is not a seal. I myself gave up arguing with him when he asked me where the animal was killed. It seemed to me that he suspected me of having decoyed away and afterward murdered a pet seal of his. The suspicion was so entirely unjust—I have never in my life stolen a pet seal—that I turned away from him in sorrow. I do not therefore know exactly how the argument proceeded; but the coat has gone with us on our travels—a horrible encumbrance, for America in autumn is a very warm country.

The arrival of that American consul’s letter confirmed our earliest impression of the country. The Americans have been grossly slandered in Europe. I am not at all sure that they have not, with a curious perversity, slandered themselves. It is a common belief in Europe that America generally, and New York in particular, is a place of tumultuous rush; that every moment of time is immensely valuable and that everything is done in a hurry. This seems to me a horrible thing to say or think about any people, and I was delighted to find that it was not in the least true. New York is a city of immense leisure.

You go into a restaurant and order something to eat. You have time to smoke a cigarette before you get it. You have time to smoke cigarettes after each course, to smoke comfortably and calmly as men ought to smoke. American men do actually smoke in this way during their meals.

We in Ireland are also wise enough not to set any very great value on time. The English are different. They live hurriedly and are quite absurdly punctual. That, I think, is the reason why we Irish do not get on well in England. We can not persuade ourselves that time is precious. And that is, no doubt, the explanation of the fact, which used to puzzle me greatly, that the Irish get on singularly well in America, especially, I believe, in New York.

All sorts of absurd reasons are given for our success on the western side of the Atlantic. It has even been asserted that we, in some strange way, actually change our natures when we land. The true reason is quite obvious to any one who shakes himself free of the superstition that New York is a city of hustle. It is nothing of the sort, and the Irish succeed in it because they and the Americans are sane on the subject of time. We know that the clock and even the sun were meant to be the servants, not the masters, of men. We treat them as servants, and arrive unashamed a quarter of an hour late for any appointment.

I admire beyond all possibility of expression the sociability of the American people. Their hospitality to strangers is amazing. We Irish have a reputation for easy sociability and friendliness to strangers. We deserve it, perhaps, in Europe. We alone among western European peoples escaped being conquered by the Romans and did not come under the sway of their culture. Therefore we never learned to confuse stranger with enemy, which was the way of the Romans, who derived the two words from the same root. To us, even to this day, a stranger is not necessarily an enemy. But the Americans far outdo us. With them, apparently, a stranger is actually a friend until he proves himself something else. I have never experienced, I could scarcely have imagined, the boundless width of American hospitality.

And I think the Americans must be as friendly with each other as they are with strangers. Their domestic architecture is the best I have ever seen. “Herself,” who is an expert in these matters, assures me that American houses, the private houses of the suburbs of great cities, are astonishingly perfect from the point of view of any responsible for the management of a home. They are also in general very good to look at, beautiful things, not eyesores.

And you can see them. Anybody can see them. In Dublin, which I know well, the man who builds a house also builds a wall round it, a high yellow wall. He does not want the passer-by to see even a chimney-top. In the suburbs of Naples, where many people live in houses which may be nice, the stranger goes for miles between the high walls that guard the privacy of the householders. He is thankful there to be allowed to see a patch of sky.

The Americans have, I take it, no objection to being seen. Their houses stand unsheltered by walls and have broad, attractive verandas which are really sitting-rooms and eating-rooms in fine weather. I am told that this indifference to publicity is a proof of the American devotion to the idea of democracy. I doubt this. In England even ardent Liberals, who are as democratic as any one can be, build very high walls. The delightful openness of the American suburbs is due, I think, to the natural sociability of the people. They do not want to shut others out of their lives.

Inside, the houses have no doors between the rooms, or, if there are doors, they slide into the walls unobtrusively. Here is sociability again. On the other side of the Atlantic the first impulse of any one who enters a room is to shut the door, his object being to keep other people, even his own family, out. Children are trained from their earliest years to shut doors. I can remember a nursery rhyme which chronicled the awful fate of a boy who would not shut doors. He was sent to Singapore—to that particular place, I imagine, because a rhyme for door was necessary.

Nor is it simply the fact that the American houses are centrally heated which has led to the disuse of doors. An Englishman would shut a door in a Turkish bath. So would an Irishman. The Americans do not have doors because they are a sociable people and like to be able to hear each other speak even if they are in different rooms.

TELEPHONE SOCIABILITY

It is, I suppose, this same amazing sociability which accounts for their fondness for telephones. I confess that I prefer writing letters to talking into tubes; but a letter is an impersonal thing. The truly sociable person prefers to telephone even if he is given the wrong number several times, because he can hear his friend’s voice; also perhaps because it is much more difficult for a man who is caught on a telephone to refuse an invitation. In a letter one can always make a good excuse. Few people have sufficient presence of mind to lie convincingly on a telephone.

If I wanted further proof of the sociability of the Americans I should find it in the fact that, when traveling, they are content to sleep in Pullman cars. Here, I confess, they seem to me to carry their virtue to a point where it becomes an actual excess. Friendliness and brotherly love are beautiful things; but it seems extravagant to undress and dress again in a narrow, curtain-sided box merely for the sake of the satisfaction of being able to hear your neighbor snore.

Every traveler is struck by the American sky-scraper buildings, and his observation on the subject lack originality. I do not think the traveler should be blamed for this. He can not help himself. He is always told to look at them directly he lands in New York—even before he lands, if the steamer comes to port in daylight. He is obliged in mere politeness to say something, and it is impossible now to say anything new.

NEW YORK FROM A TOP FLOOR

My own favorite remark about these buildings is, no doubt, as stale as all the others. It concerns the view from the topmost floor of a very high one. I saw New York from this vantage point as I have seen other cities from similar heights, as the bird which flies is supposed to see. In every other city I know the most striking feature of such a view is the spires of churches. In New York—and it must be the same in other American cities—the church spires are dwarfed into insignificance by the babel heights of the buildings devoted to commerce of one kind or another. The sentimental moralist might reflect that these things are an allegory; that the American city sets the dollar above God, because its offices outtop its churches. The sentimental moralist, reflecting thus, would, as usual, be wrong.

It may be that I have been unusually fortunate in my experiences, but it does seem to me that the spirit of American cities gives the lie to their architecture. I am convinced that religion, in some form or other, counts largely, is of greater strength than dollars, in American civic life. And some day architecture is going to express this fact. At present the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York is unfinished: but even now it is expressive in an almost terrifying way. This cathedral promises to be one of the great houses of God in the world. St. Mark’s with its fantastic spires and gorgeous coloring expresses all the past history of Venice and her commerce with the East, all that strange republic learned of the divine. The confused and misty aisles of Westminster Abbey embody in stone a realizable conception of the tumultuous life of London. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine has already caught the spirit of New York.

It is unfinished, inchoate, titanically strong. It, city and cathedral together, is the soldier of the conquering Attila glorying in unbroken victories across ancient civilizations.

No building which I have ever seen gives me the same sense of energy unwilling to abide restraint and strength to endure as well as to do. And that, to the stranger, is the inner soul of New York. I am told, however—I have even seen it stated in a Sunday newspaper, and this carries conviction—that the cathedral is not to be completed in accordance with its original plan. Nothing would induce me to pose as an expert in architecture; but I confess that I view the prospect of a change in the style of the cathedral with dismay.

An American, a citizen of New York, told me one day that he would feel quite at home if he were transplanted to Chicago. I am not sure that he was right. The two cities are very different in spirit, and I can not help feeling that a citizen of one would not be very happy in the other. But I am quite sure that a citizen of Belfast—the city which gave me birth—would not for very long feel himself a stranger in Chicago.

There was, while I was in Chicago, a gathering there of literary men. They dined, I think, and then, as all civilized men do, made speeches. Some one said that Chicago would one day be the world’s center in literature, music, and art. A Belfast man would say the same thing about Belfast if it occurred to him as in any way desirable that Belfast should hold such a position. My own impression is that if either Chicago or Belfast makes up its mind in the matter, the rest of the world may stand aside and let literature, music, and art go to whichever of the two wants them. These two cities possess a self-confidence which is actually sublime, and it is not the self-confidence of foolish braggarts, but is based on a perfectly well-founded conviction of ability.

At present Belfast, in a matter of politics, which interests Belfast more than literature or art, has ordered the rest of the British Empire to stand still and not to go any further with Home Rule for Ireland. The rest of the British Empire is holding up its hands. I can imagine Chicago doing the same sort of thing, should occasion ever arise, and Chicago would do so without the slightest regard to the fact that it might conceivably be mistaken in its belief, or even if right might be overwhelmed by the rest of America.

There are no bounds to what a man can do except those created by his own self distrust. There is nothing beyond the reach of a city which unfalteringly believes in itself. If Chicago, as I hope it may, determines to be, not only the world center of literature, music, and art, but also the New Jerusalem with gates of pearl and streets of gold and the Tree of Life in the midst of it—then Chicago will be the New Jerusalem, and I shall sue humbly for citizen rights.

My petition will be granted, I am sure, for the hospitality of the people of Chicago seems to exceed, if that be possible, even the hospitality of other parts of America; but I shall always feel myself unworthy of the honor. Nor am I confident that I shall be altogether happy there, even under the new perfected conditions of life. I was indeed born in Belfast, but I left that city when I was a young man, and now its spirit, which is also Chicago’s spirit, is a little strange to me. I have dwelt among other peoples and learned self-distrust.

But Chicago is also generous. All magnificently self-confident people are. There is no note of petty jealousy in its judgment of other cities. In this it seems to me to be superior to Belfast. It is, for instance freely admitted in Chicago that Memphis is a good business city. I have never met a Belfast man who would say as much for Dublin. I have no doubt that in this matter Chicago is right as well as generous. I am, at all events, prepared to accept the testimony and to regard Memphis as one of those cities in which business is efficiently done.

THE CITY OF COTTON

The place is full of cotton. I shall never dry my hands on a towel again without looking round to see if there is a piece of white fluff sticking on my sleeve. Lancashire, with all its crowd of sooty towns, jostling each other against railway lines, with its human habitations cowering under the shadow of cotton mills, will hereafter recall to me a vision of broad, flat lands, dotted over with huts like penthouses, of miles and miles of black earth bare of all verdure but covered with low, scrubby bushes with the white cotton hanging from them; of crowds of negroes gay in all the primary colors, dragging sacks after them as they pick the precious stuff which is to clothe hall mankind.

Memphis seems to me to be emerging rapidly from the ruins of one civilization and going boldly forward to take its place in another. I do not suppose that Memphis any longer regrets the past or even remembers very much about those o!d days when there was one accepted solution of the negro problem. Memphis looks forward, not back, and like all progressive communities is less interested in speculative efforts to find a final answer to the sphinx riddle of the black man, than to arrive at some practical way of getting him to do the necessary work. The cotton crop must be picked next year and the year after, picked somehow by negroes, since there is no one else who can pick it; after that—well, no one speculates in futures which are three years ahead.

The men of 1917 must settle their own affairs.

But if Memphis and Clarksdale and the rest of those centers of cotton collection have forgotten the past, it does not quite follow that the past has forgotten them. The spirit of that older civilization abides, haunts the new life like some pathetic ghost, doomed to wander helplessly among people who do not want to see it. There is a certain suavity about Memphis which the stranger feels directly he touches the life of the place. It is a lingering perfume, faint, delicate, but appreciable. I am told that it is to be traced to Europe; that the people of Memphis have closer business relations with England, Austria, and Russia than with the Northern states of their own country. I am told also that we must look for the origin of it to the Cavalier settlers of the Southern states from whom the people there now claim descent. I prefer my hypothesis of the ghost.

Some ghosts smell of sulphur and leave a reek of it behind them. Others betray their presence by the damp, cold, earthy air they bring with them from their tombs. This Memphis ghost, which no one in Memphis sees, is scented with the powder which ladies used on their faces and delicate bodies, great ladies who owned slaves as Madame Esmond did, who were sure of their right to own them.

I should dearly have liked to see a dozen other places, smaller places, far less important even than Clarksdale, places which we passed through on our way from Chicago to Memphis. We made the journey by day and some unimaginative friends told us that it was a dull one. It was nothing of the sort. The train dragged us through the streets of a whole series of towns, meandering pleasantly among shops and along side-walks.

This is the good habit of American trains. In other countries trains, when they come to towns, are driven into tunnels or forced to go round the backs of the houses, so that the travelers see nothing except shirts and stockings hung out to dry. People do not, it appears, welcome trains. In the Middle West the train is an honored guest in every town, and is invited to go along or across the chief streets. This is an enormous advantage to the passengers. They get real glimpses of the life of the places they pass through.

Alas! In our case these were but glimpses. We longed to stop in every one of these towns, to find out what ghosts haunted them or what new spirits inspired them. The domestic conditions of the great cities seemed to us the best in the world. In the suburbs of Indianapolis men have planned and built worthily and beautifully. But the houses of the small towns seem to have been conceived in a mean spirit and built in raw haste. Yet they can not be mean people who live in them. The descendants of the man and woman who pushed their way, mile after painful mile, across the vast distances of this continent must leave mightily inspiring memories. Why are their farmhouses and the habitations of their small towns so mean?

We read—struggling for alternate possession of it—a book of Irvin Cobb’s as we made our journeys. He understood the spirit of these places. We were denied our opportunity through mere prosaic lack of time. Even America, though America has shown its contempt for time, has not yet persuaded the earth to revolve more slowly on its axis. How fine it would be if America would take it in hand to reform the habits of the sun, to get more hours in to the day, more days into the week, six or seven weeks into the month, and so render it possible for the stranger, who has no more than threescore and ten years of life and most of that already gone, to see something of the United States!

There are certain things in America about which I am afraid to write. Not politics. They seem a mere welter, and my guesses might as well be right as the matured opinions of wise statesmen. I am not afraid of them. Nor commerce. Nor literature. Nor newspapers. I could say foolish things about any of these, and I should not be held back from doing so by any feeling of respect or awe. But I am afraid to write about American education. This seems to me the most wonderful thing in America.

I do not in the least mean to suggest that the American undergraduate writes better Latin prose or knows more about chemistry than the undergraduate in England. He may or may not. The matter is unimportant. The American “college girl” may perhaps have down in her note-book a larger number of names of Italian artists and more aphorisms of political science than her sister at Newnham, Girton, or Trinity Hall. I neither know nor care whether she has or not. What moves me to reverent silence is the immense vitality of the American universities and colleges.

It seems to me a significant fact that the Americans have no use for the words “don” and “donnish.” The members of the teaching staffs of the colleges and universities are not a class apart, do not form a caste with traditions of its own and a special out-look upon life. It would be possible to meet a professor—even of English literature—in private life, to talk to him, to be intimate with him and not to discover that he was a professor. This fact may have some connection with the feeling of vitality which the stranger gets when he comes into touch with American education.

I had the good luck to see Yale, Princeton, and Smith College. I not only saw them, but had the chance of talking with men and women who understand them. There is a spirit abroad in them which will profoundly modify American civilization. Sometimes I seemed to catch the breath of it in football fields while undergraduates yelled at each other through megaphones. It was perceptible, plainly, in the morning exercises in chapter. I caught it as I stood at a class-room door and watched a crowd of girls making notes of the words of a lecturer. It was there, somehow, among the cushions and banners which decorate the chambers of students. I dimly realize the greatness of this spirit. It is in touch with far-off divine things. It is also of to-day, of this country and the city streets. I speculate hopefully about the kind of citizenship it will produce in the future.

These boys who shout through megaphones on football fields and decorate their chambers in ways very strange to me, are going after a while to face, I hope to solve, the complex problems of a civilization which seems to have tangled its feet hopelessly in the mass of its great possessions. These eager-eyed young women who crowd along the paths of Smith College and Bryn Mawr are, no doubt, going to bear and rear sons of a new and greater race. The spirit of all-great achievement is hovering almost visibly over their colleges. We, standing outside, wait the event; content if we live long enough to see it.