THE GARBAGE CAN

BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL

IF Main Street stretches from San Francisco to New York, I know, without seeing, that the way is marked not by milestones but by garbage cans. For my experience is that of the American street, short or long, the garbage can has become an indispensable feature. It no longer hides itself in alleys or slums, but in the highly respectable quarter of the highly respectable town it makes a public exhibition of what would have been called "slops" in primitive days when "slops" were not thought fit for public gaze. I have counted as many as eleven neatly ranged before a stately private residence, as many as twenty-five in front of an eminently correct hotel, and, appalled, I ask myself what must be the number reached on his daily rounds by a policeman given to statistics. Sometimes they are grouped on the curbstone, sometimes more modestly by the area railing, often in the middle of the pavement, a trap for the unwary; but always, morning, noon and night, somewhere in full view, providing for the observant man the opportunity to learn who feasts on lobster or fasts on cabbage, who runs up big bills for flowers or economizes on coal. Occasionally the garbage is collected, but by dumping it into uncovered carts from which it blows right and left, through open doors and windows, back into the houses and so straight into the cans again, our sanitary authorities have arranged that the garbage can is today as permanent an ornament of our streets as the letter box or the lamp post.

It is an ornament that old-fashioned people scarcely think desirable, and, personally, I would rather learn inside a man's house whether lobster or cabbage is the more frequent dish at his table, would rather judge by the fragrance and warmth of his rooms how many flowers he buys and how much coal he burns. But the younger generation must be of another way of thinking, for if the garbage can were to them the offense it is to me, they

would have invented long ago means of getting rid of it. In my London flat, if mine were not promptly emptied and promptly returned, up four flights of stairs to my scullery, by ten o'clock in the morning, somebody as promptly wanted to know why, and surely we are not such centuries behind the English as not to have found out how to do what they manage without trouble. Nor can I believe that custom, marvelous as are the miracles it works, has turned the garbage can into a thing of beauty in young America's eyes, or that chance, for all its usual perversity, should have hit upon it as the sort of symbol tea was to our ancestors—the breaking point in our endurance of oppression. Still meek as lambs, we accepted the Eighteenth Amendment; but interfere with our garbage, and then-!

However, the more I think about it, the less I find that anybody else does. Nobody is disturbed or pleased by the presence of the garbage can, because everybody is blind to it. And as nobody cares one way or the other, there it remains at everybody's door, a symbol, after all; not of national independence, however, but of the easy national indifference with which we fall into the easy national habit of slovenliness.

No one expects the great nation, any more than the great man, to be great all the time. But the great nation has not the great man's privilege of privacy for its slippered ease. It must wear its slippers-if it wears them at all-in public, no matter how down at the heels they are, or how out at the toes. That America, as a nation, has intervals of greatness it has not waited for me to discover-modesty is not our predominant fault; that it has also its intervals of rest and enjoys them in unspeakable untidiness, is as little of a state secret. In fact, to flaunt this untidiness in the public's face seems part of the enjoyment. Certainly, the Government is at pains to set the example at national headquarters. If it was at its greatest when it built for our President and our Legislators houses as beautiful in their dignity and simplicity as Democracy is reputed to be and never is, it has remained ever since at its most slovenly in the street that joins them together. It had the chance to make of Pennsylvania Avenue an American Champs-Elysées; it has made it instead a colossal national garbage can filled to overflowing with shanties,

odds and ends of Chinatown, cheap lunch counters, dilapidated hotels-all the refuse of the nation's capital. And, in these matters, the country flatters Washington excessively by excess of imitation. New York, feeling its responsibility as our biggest town, does so in the biggest way. Nowhere else is the contrast so sharp between America's achievements in moments of inspiration and America's neglect in moments of relaxation. A few years ago, necessity and architects contrived to transform it into a city of palaces-a glorified Genoa or Florence and to group those palaces in unbelievable beauty just where they command the most unbelievably beautiful harbor in the world. Almost at once, necessity becoming less rigid and the city government discovering the zone law, sky scrapers with no palatial pretense were built, destroying scale and sky line, knocking the composition all to pieces. Fifth Avenue, as a street, is no less impressive than the Upper Bay as a harbor. But if its splendor is unrivalled, so also is the squalor of the near slums where our aliens multiply. Here and there, at some special corner of its vast length, architect and sculptor have worked together for an effect that the stateliest of the stately old towns of France or Spain or Italy could not disdain. But, nobody apparently caring, the most effective of these corners has been quickly overshadowed by a gigantic arrangement of brick bandboxes, with a gilded cock set up on top as if to crow in insolent derision.

Americans with eyes to see, when they come home to New York straight from Paris, will tell you that on landing it shocked them as hideous beyond endurance. But New York is not hideous. Paris is not without architectural calamities; only, as a genius for order is the greatest of the great gifts France has given to the world, even architectural calamities there are kept within restraint. The modern French architect may and does go astray in a building, but his mistakes are seldom allowed to destroy the design of the street or the town of which they are a part. He modifies where we, in our easy-going way, exaggerate the discord. Whatever our object, whether beauty or utility, our greatness gives out before the end, too often at just the wrong moment; but used as we have become to discord in everything, we no longer mind it in anything. New York builds a subway which

is the admiration of engineers everywhere, and fills it with noise that threatens Blackwell's Island as the end of the journey. American trolley cars are models for the nations of the earth, and on the richest streets at home we let them grow filthier and filthier, day by day, until the most powerful hose and biggest scrubbing brush could not wash off the grime. And in both subway and trolley, we push and elbow and fight our way through masses of perspiring humanity, priding ourselves on our civilized system of transit and, in our complacent ignorance, pitying the poor foreigner for those cars marked "Horses Eight, Men TwentyFour," of whose use we have not the most remote idea and have never troubled to ask.

Our parks are our glory, and their trees, transported at great cost, perish for want of the right care; their bushes and flowers planted with great pains are at the mercy of winter's skaters and summer's loafers for want of the right regulations. Our main roads have been improved almost incredibly since pre-motor days, even the old tumble-down fences making way in places for hedges of roses and honeysuckle, and at every turn we deface them with billboards, the curse of the country. We import fine cart horses from the north of France, and in our large cities they and their progeny do their work in a condition and with harness that would disgrace the sorriest hack of a backwoods town. Our money draws the most renowned singers in the world to the Metropolitan Opera House and, in our costliest clothes, we listen to them from boxes and stalls in urgent need of the upholsterer's attention. We are so generous with our Post Office that it earns a deficit, and yet its officials, in carrying a book so short a distance as from Brooklyn to Manhattan, will mangle the corners beyond repair. Our shops are models of arrangement, and the carelessly done up parcels they send out would fill the Paris or London shopkeeper with confusion.

But to the accumulation of examples there is no end. Politics alone would supply a chapter-a volume-a library— requiring an army of officials a lifetime to compile. In all that is important, as in all that is insignificant, the same bewildering contrast presents itself. Ask any American who has lived long out of his own country what strikes him most on his return, and,

if he is truthful, he will answer: The extraordinary luxury side by side with the more extraordinary down-at-the-heel shabbiness. We can build up but we cannot keep up; and national untidiness has come to seem as inevitable as national enterprise.

To criticize one's own country is, by the American who wears his patriotism upon his sleeve, held to be a crime; in his belief, I suppose, that the great thought of ourselves, if persevered in, will achieve greatness for us. But some wise men teach that only by the search for evil-the daily examination of consciencecan evil be got rid of and, as our greatness is reserved for rare intervals and our slovenliness is with us every day, their teaching is at least worth putting to the test. Certainly, if we go on much longer as we are going, there is no telling where we shall end. Already our eyes are so shut to the prevailing slovenliness that it is not creeping, but leaping by bounds into the essential things of life. Nations decay and perish; towns and all that is in them vanish. The most refreshing political fruits of today wither and rot over night. Art, and art alone, survives the passing generations and what they call their civilization, and upon art the national untidiness is intruding not only art in the usual more limited sense, but art in the broader definition that includes spoken and written language as well as painting, sculpture and engraving, architecture and music.

Our greatness in all these branches of art, if measured by our means to attain it, would be prodigious. How fantastically unreal the number and wealth of our schools, colleges and universities would have seemed to students of those earlier ages when education was for the few, and the few had to work hard to get it! But how amazing the puny mouse that is all the marvelous mountain of education has so far been delivered of! And how incomprehensible the new methods—mental discipline, once the chief end of education, subordinated to marks, examinations, diplomas; children playing their way into their studies and directing the play themselves; grammar a back number and parsing as extinct as we fancied the plesiosaurus until yesterday; subjects that require effort to master comfortably dropped; thought a superfluous accomplishment; the most pleased-with-themselves scholars fast drifting from the old foundations and throwing