Читать книгу People of Destiny: Americans as I saw them at Home and Abroad - Philip Gibbs - Страница 7

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As a professional onlooker of life (and it is a poor profession, as I must admit) it has always been my habit to study national and social types in any country where I happen to be. I find an untiring interest in this, and prefer to sit in a French café, for example, watching the people who come in and out, and hearing scraps of conversation that pass across the table, to the most thrilling theatrical entertainment. And I find more interest in "common" people than in the uncommonly distinguished, by fame and power. To me the types in a London omnibus or a suburban train are more absorbing as a study than a group of generals or a party of statesmen, and I like to discover the lives of the world's nobodies, their way of thought and their outlook on the world, by the character in their faces and their little social habits. In that way one gets a sense of the social drama of a country and of the national ideals and purpose. So when I went to the United States after four and a half years in the war zone, where I had been watching another kind of drama, hideous and horrible in spite of all its heroism, I fell into my old habit of searching for types and studying characters. I had unusual opportunity. New York and many other cities opened their hearts and their houses to me in a most generous way, and I met great numbers of people of every class and kind.

The first people I met, before I had stepped off my ship of adventure, were young newspaper men who searched the ship like a sieve for any passenger who had something in his life or brain worth telling to the world. I was scared of them, having heard that they could extract the very secrets of one's soul by examination of the third degree; but I found them human and friendly fellows who greeted me cheerily and did not take up much time when they set me up like a lay-figure on the boat deck, turned on the "movie"-machine, snap-shotted me from various angles, and offered me American cigarettes as a sign of comradeship. I met many other newspaper men and women in the United States; those who control the power of the press—the masters of the machine which shapes the mind of peoples—and those who feed its wheels with words. Because I had some history to tell, the word-writers lay in wait for me, found my telephone number in any hotel of any town before I knew it myself, tapped at my bedroom door when I was in the transition stage between day and evening clothes, and asked questions about many things of which I knew nothing at all, so that I had to camouflage my abysmal depths of ignorance.

They know their job, those American reporters, and I was impressed especially by the young women. There was one girl who sat squarely in front of me, fixed me with candid gray eyes, and for an hour put me through an examination about my sad past until I had revealed everything. There is nothing that girl doesn't know about me, and I should blush to meet her again. She did not take a single note—by that I knew her as a good journalist—and wrote two columns of revelation with most deadly accuracy and a beautiful style. Another girl followed me round a picture-gallery listening to casual remarks among a group of friends, and wrote an article on art-criticism which left me breathless with admiration at her wit and knowledge, of which I took the credit. One young man, once a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, boarded the train at New York, bought me a drawing-room for private conversation, and by the time we reached Philadelphia made it entirely futile for me to give a lecture, because he had it all in his memory, and wrote the entire history of everything I had seen and thought through years of war, in next day's paper. I liked a young Harvard man who came to see me in Boston. He had a modesty and a winning manner which made me rack my brains to tell him something good, and I admired his type, so clean and boyish and quick in intelligence. He belonged to the stuff of young America, as I saw it in the fields of France, eager for service whatever the risk. I met the editorial staffs of many newspapers, and was given a luncheon by the proprietor and editors of one great newspaper in New York which is perhaps the biggest power in the United States to-day. All the men round me were literary types, and I saw in their faces the imprint of hard thought, and of hard work more strenuous, I imagine, than in the newspaper life of any other country of the world. They all had an absorbing interest in the international situation after the armistice, and knew a good deal about the secret workings of European policy. A young correspondent just back from Russia made a speech summing up his experiences and conclusions, which were of a startling kind, told with the utmost simplicity and bluntness. The proprietor took me into his private room, and outlined his general policy on world affairs, of which the first item on his program was friendship with England.... I found among newspaper men a sense of responsibility with which they are not generally credited, and wonderfully alert and open minds; also, apart from their own party politics and prejudices, a desire for fair play and truth. The Yellow Press still has its power, and it is a malign influence in the United States, but the newspapers of good repute are conducted by men of principle and conviction, and their editorial and literary staffs have a high level of talent, representing much, I think, of the best intelligence of America.