ng "the
end of a living chain." In Boston, "much more beautiful than its
name," he companioned again with the Autocrat and recalled how in his
own youth English and American literature seemed to be one thing.
Indeed he was there reminded even "of English things that have
largely vanished from England." Washington he saw both as a beautiful
city and an idea--"a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without
personal commerce." And in Nashville, Tennessee it was "with a sort
of intensity of feeling" that he found himself "before a dim and
faded picture; and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of
Andrew Jackson, watchful like a white eagle."

The things Chesterton chose for description all have relevance to the
main thesis of the book which has often been missed and which emerges
most clearly in the first and the last chapters. He insists always
that he writes as a foreigner--and indeed repeats frequently that it
is by keeping our own distinct nationality that Englishmen and
Americans will best understand and like one another--but he writes
also as a man not unconscious of history. Thus writing, the older
cities represent to him one trend in the States and New York another.
I am sorry to say that he does not appreciate New York as he ought,
because of his dislike of cosmopolitanism. Its beauty he sees as
breath-taking: not solid and abiding but a kind of fairyland. The
lights on Broadway evoked from him the exclamation "What a glorious
garden of wonders this would be for anyone who was lucky enough to be
unable to read," and he imagines a simple peasant who fancies that
they must be announcing in letters of fire: "Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity," and must be put up on occasion of some great national
feast, whereas they are but advertising signs put up to make money.

The Skyline seemed to him most lovely: "vertical lines that suggest a
sort of rush upwards, as of great cataracts topsy turvy--the strong
daylight finds everywhere the broken edges of things and the sort of
hues we see in newly turned earth or the white sections of
trees. . . ." He feels the intense "imaginative pleasure of those
dizzy turrets and dancing fires." But he ends with the note that
really spoilt New York for him: "If those nightmare buildings were
really all built for nothing, how noble they would be."

Advertisement, Big Business, Monopoly might have invaded the old
traditionary cities of America as they had those of England, but New
Yo