Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/157

COMMONSENSE OF MR. ARNOLD BENNETT 131 to me that the brains and the imagination of America shine superlatively in the conception and ordering of vast organizations of human beings and of machinery, and of the two combined." "The rough broad difference between the American and the European business man is that the latter is anxious to leave his work, while the forraer is anxious to get to it." "The American citizen un- questionably has the most comfortable home in the world." These are all — and even these are reflectors to throw the light more sharply back upon the details. His bravura passages do the same. The most beautiful page in the book is the description of a dynamo. The best single phrase describes the perfect stopping of a train. His nocturne of New York is essentially an enumeration of facilities. And his appreciation of the poetry of the sky-scraper is not complete until he has taken us inside and shown us how it works : — But in the sky-scrapers there is a deeper romanticism than that which disengages itself from them externally. You must enter them in order to appreciate them, in order to respond fully to their complex appeal. . . . You come to those mysterious palisaded shafts with which the building and every other building in New York is secretly honeycombed, and the palisade is opened and an elevator snatches you up. I think of American cities as enormous agglomerations in whose in- most dark recesses innumerable elevators are constantly ascending and descending like the angels of the ladder. . . . The elevator ejects you. You are taken into dazzling daylight, into what is modestly called a business office. . . . You walk from chamber to chamber, and in answer to inquiry learn that the rent of this one suite — among so many — is over thirty-six thousand dollars a year ! And you reflect that, to the beholder in the street, all that is represented by one narrow row of windows, lost in a diminishing chessboard of windows. And you begin to realize what a sky-scraper is, and the poetry of it. So the whole place is anatomized, dismembered,