If, therefore, we take "The Manxman" and "Trilby" as types of what specially appeals to the reading public of England and America, we should conclude that the Englishman calls for strength and directness, the American for delicacy and suggestiveness. The former does not insist so much on originality of theme, if the handling be but new and clever; there are certain elementary passions and dramatic situations of which the British public never wearies. The American does not clamour for telling "curtains," if the character-drawing be keen, the conversations fresh, sparkling, and humorous. John Bull likes vividness and solidity of impasto; Jonathan's eye is often more pleasantly affected by a delicate gradation of half-tones. The one desires the downright, the concrete, the real; the other is titillated by the subtle, the allusive, the half-spoken. The antithesis is between force and finesse, between the palpable and the impalpable.[20]

If anybody but George Du Maurier could have written "Trilby," it seems to me it would have been an American rather than a full-blooded Englishman. The keenness of the American appreciation of the book corresponds to elements in the American nature. The Anglo-French blend of Mr. Du Maurier's literary genius finds nearer analogues in American literature than in either English or French.

The best writing of our American cousins has, of course, much that it shares with our own, much that is purely English in source and inspiration. Longfellow, for instance, might almost have been an Englishman, and his great popularity in England probably owed nothing to the attraction exercised by the unfamiliar. The English traits, moreover, are often readily discernible even in those works that smack most of the soil. When, however, we seek the differentiating marks of American literature, we find that many of them are also characteristics of the writings of Mr. Du Maurier, while they are much less conspicuous in those of Mr. Hall Caine. Among such marks are its freshness and spontaneity, untrammelled by authority or tradition; its courage in tackling problems elsewhere tabooed; its breezy intrepidity, rooted half in conscious will and half in naive ignorance. Besides these, we find features that we should hardly have expected on a priori grounds. A wideness of sweep and elemental greatness in proportion to the natural majesty of the huge new continent are hardly present; Walt Whitman remains an isolated phenomenon. Instead, we meet in the best American literature an almost aristocratic daintiness and feeling for the refined and select. As compared with the British school, the leading American school is marked by an increased delicacy of finesse, a tendency to refine and refine, a perhaps exaggerated dread of the platitude and the commonplace, a fondness for analysis, a preference for character over event, an avoidance of absolutely untempered seriousness and solidity. Mr. Bryce notes that the verdicts of the best literary circles of the United States often seem to "proceed from a more delicate and sympathetic insight" than ours.

This fastidiousness of the best writers and critics of America is by no means inconsistent with the existence of an enormous class of half-educated readers, who devour the kind of "literature" provided for them, and batten in their various degrees on the productions of Mr. E.P. Roe, Miss Laura Jean Libbey, or the Sunday War-Whoop. The evolution of democracy in the literary sphere is exactly analogous to its course in the political sphere. In both there is the same tendency to go too far, to overturn the good and legitimate authority as well as the bad and oppressive; both are apt, to use the homely German proverb, "to throw the baby out of the bath along with the dirty water." This lack of discrimination leads to the rushing in of fools where angels might well fear to tread. All sorts of men try to write books, and all sorts of men think they are able to judge them. The old standard of authority is overthrown, and for a time no other takes its place with the great mass of the reading public. This state of affairs is, however, by no means one that need make us despair of the literary future of America. It reminds me of the mental condition of a kindly American tourist who once called at our office in Leipsic to give us the benefit of the corrections he had made on "Baedeker's Handbooks" during his peregrination of Europe. "Here," he said, "is one error which I am absolutely sure of: you call this a statue of Minerva; but I know that's wrong, because I saw Pallas carved on the pedestal!" When I told this tale to English friends, they saw in it nothing but a proof of the colossal ignorance of the travelling American. To my mind, however, it redounded more to the credit of America than to its discredit. It showed that Americans of defective education felt the need of culture and spared no pains to procure it. A London tradesman with the education of my American friend would probably never extend his ideas of travelling beyond Margate, or at most a week's excursion to "Parry." But this indefatigable tourist had visited all the chief galleries of Europe, and had doubtless greatly improved his taste in art and educated his sense of the refined and beautiful, even though his book-learning had not taught him that the same goddess might have two different names.

The application of this anecdote to the present condition of American literature is obvious. The great fact is that there is an enormous crowd of readers, and the great hope is that they will eventually work their way up through Miss Laura Jean Libbey to heights of purer air. America has not so much degraded a previously existing literary palate as given a taste of some sort to those who under old-world conditions might never have come to it. In American literature as in American life we find all the phenomena of a transition period—all the symptoms that might be expected from the extraordinary mixture of the old and the new, the childlike and the knowing, the past and the present, in this Land of Contrasts. The startling difference between the best and the worst writers is often reflected in different works by the same author; or a real and strong natural talent for writing will be found conjoined with an extraordinary lack of education and training. An excellent piece of English—pithy, forcible, and even elegant—will often shatter on some simple grammatical reef, such as the use of "as" for "that" ("he did not know as he could"), or of the plural for the singular ("a long ways off"). Mr. James Lane Allen, the author of a series of refined and delicately worded romances, can write such phrases as "In a voice neither could scarce hear" and "Shake hands with me and tell me good-by." ("The Choir Invisible," pp. 222, 297.)

I know not whether the phrase "was graduated," applied not to a vernier, but to a student, be legitimate or not; it is certainly so used by the best American writers. Another common American idiom that sounds queer to British ears is, "The minutes were ordered printed" (for "to be printed"). Misquotations and misuse of foreign phrases are terribly rife; and even so spirited and entertaining a writer as Miss F.C. Baylor will write: "This Jenny, with the esprit de l'escalier of her sex, had at once divined and resented" ("On Both Sides," p. 26). In the same way one is constantly appalled in conversation by hearing college graduates say "acrost" for "across" and making other "bad breaks" which in England could not be conjoined with an equal amount of culture and education.

The extreme fastidiousness and delicacy of the leading American writers, as above referred to, may be to a large extent accounted for by an inevitable reaction against the general tendency to the careless and the slipshod, and is thus in its way as significant and natural a result of existing conditions as any other feature of American literature. Perhaps a secondary cause of this type of writing may be looked for in the fact that so far the spirit of New England has dominated American literature. Even those writers of the South and West who are freshest in their material and vehicle are still permeated by the tone, the temper, the method, the ideals, of the New England school. And certainly Allibone's dictionary of authors shows that an enormous proportion of American writers are to this day of New England origin or descent.

Among living American writers the two whose names occur most spontaneously to the mind as typical examples are, perhaps, Henry James and W.D. Howells. Of these the former has identified himself so much with European life and has devoted himself so largely to European subjects that we, perhaps, miss to some extent the American atmosphere in his works, though he undoubtedly possesses the American quality of workmanship in a very high degree. Or, to put it in another way, his touch is indisputably American, while his accessories, his staffage, are cosmopolitan. His American hand has become dyed to that it works in. This, however, is more true of his later than of his earlier works. That imperishable little classic "Daisy Miller" is a very exquisite and typical specimen of the American suggestiveness of style; indeed, as I have hinted (Chapter IV.), its suggestiveness almost overshot the mark and required the explanation of a dramatic key. His dislike of the obvious and the commonplace sometimes leads Mr. James to become artificial and even obscure,[21] but at its best his style is as perspicuous as it is distinguished, dainty, and subtle; there is, perhaps, no other living artist in words who can give his admirers so rare a literary pleasure in mere exquisiteness of workmanship.

Mr. Howells, unlike Mr. James, is purely and exclusively American, in his style as in his subject, in his main themes as in his incidental illustrations, in his spirit, his temperament, his point of view. No one has written more pleasantly of Venice; but just as surely there is a something in his Venetian sketches which no one but an American could have put there. Mr. James may be as patriotic a citizen of the Great Republic, but there is not so much tangible evidence of the fact in his writings; Mr. Howells may be as cosmopolitan in his sympathies as Mr. James, but his writings alone would hardly justify the inference. Mr. Howells also possesses a bonhomie, a geniality, a good-nature veiled by a slight mask of cynicism, that may be personal, but which strikes one as also a characteristic American trait. Mr. James is not, I hasten to say, the reverse of this, but he shows a coolness in his treatment, a lordly indifference to the fate of his creations, an almost pitiless keenness of analysis, which savour a little more of an end-of-the-century European than of a young and genial democracy.

Mr. Howells is, perhaps, not always so well appreciated in his own country as he deserves—and this in spite of the facts that his novels are widely read and his name is in all the magazines. What I mean is, that in the conversation of the cultured circles of Boston or New York too much stress is apt to be laid on the prosaic and commonplace character of his materials. There are, perhaps, unusually good reasons for this point of view. Cromwell's wife and daughters would probably prefer to have him painted wartless, but posterity wants him warts and all. So those to whom the average—the very average—American is an every-day and all-day occurrence cannot abide him in their literature; while we who are removed by the ocean of space can enjoy these pictures of common life, as enabling us, better than any idealistic romance or study of the rare and extraordinary, to realise the life of our American cousins. To those who can read between the lines with any discretion, I should say that novels like "Silas Lapham" and "A Modern Instance" will give a clearer idea of American character and tendencies than any other contemporary works of fiction; to those who can read between the lines—for it is obvious that the commonplace and the slightly vulgar no more exhaust the field of society in the United States than elsewhere. But to me Mr. Howells, even when in his most realistic and sordid vein, always suggests the ideal and the noble; the reverse of the medal proclaims loudly that it is the reverse, and that there is an obverse of a very different kind to be seen by those who will turn the coin. It seems to me that no very great palaeontological skill is necessary to reconstruct the whole frame of the animal from the portion that Mr. Howells sets up for us. His novels remind me of those maps of a limited area which indicate very clearly what lies beyond, by arrows on their margins. In nothing does Mr. Howells more clearly show his "Americanism" than in his almost divinely sympathetic and tolerant attitude towards commonplace, erring, vulgar humanity. "Ah, poor real life, which I love!" he writes somewhere; "can I make others share the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face!" We must remember in reading him his own theory of the duty of the novelist. "I am extremely opposed to what we call ideal characters. I think their portrayal is mischievous; it is altogether offensive to me as an artist, and, as far as the morality goes, I believe that when an artist tries to create an ideal he mixes some truth up with a vast deal of sentimentality, and produces something that is extremely noxious as well as nauseous. I think that no man can consistently portray a probable type of human character without being useful to his readers. When he endeavors to create something higher than that, he plays the fool himself and tempts his readers to folly. He tempts young men and women to try to form themselves upon models that would be detestable in life, if they were ever found there."

Perhaps the delicacy of Mr. Howells' touch and the gentle subtlety of his satire are nowhere better illustrated than in the little drawing-room "farces" of which he frequently publishes one in an American magazine about Christmas time. I call them farces because he himself applies that name to them; but these dainty little comediettas contain none of the rollicking qualities which the word usually connotes to English ears. They have all the finesse of the best French work of the kind, combined with a purity of atmosphere and of intent that we are apt to claim as Anglo-Saxon, and which, perhaps, is especially characteristic of America. One is tired of hearing, in this connection, of the blush that rises to the innocent girl's cheek; but why should even those who are supposed to be past the age of blushing not also enjoy humour unspiced by even a suggestion of lubricity? The "Mikado" and "Pinafore" have done yeoman's service in displacing the meretricious delights of Offenbach and Lecocq; and Howells' little pieces yield an exquisite, though innocent, enjoyment to those whose taste in farces has not been fashioned and spoiled by clumsy English adaptations or imitations of intriguing levers-de-rideau, and to those who do not associate the name of farce with horse-play and practical joking. They form the best illustration of what has been described as Mr. Howells' "method of occasionally opening up to the reader through the bewilderingly intricate mazes of his dialogue clear perceptions of the true values of his characters, imitating thus the actual trick of life, which can safely be depended on to now and then expose meanings that words have cleverly served the purpose of concealing." If I hesitate to call them comediettas "in porcelain," it is because the suggested analogy falls short, owing to the greater reconditeness, the purer intellectual quality, of Mr. Howells' humour as compared with Mr. Austin Dobson's. So intensely American in quality are these scenes from the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Willis Campbell, Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, and their friends, that it sometimes seems to me that they might almost be used as touchstones for the advisability of a visit to the United States. If you can appreciate and enjoy these farces, go to America by all means; you will have a "good time." If you cannot, better stay at home, unless your motive is merely one of base mechanic necessity; you will find the American atmosphere a little too rare.

A recent phase of Mr. Howells' activity—that, namely, in which, like Mr. William Morris, he has boldly risked his reputation as a literary artist in order to espouse unpopular social causes of whose justice he is convinced—will interest all who have hearts to feel as well as brains to think. He made his fame by consummately artistic work, addressed to the daintiest of literacy palates; and yet in such books as "A Hazard of New Fortunes" and "A Traveller from Altruria" he has conscientiously taken up the defence and propagation of a form of socialism, without blanching before the epicure who demands his literature "neat" or the Philistine householder who brands all socialistic writings as dangerous. Mr. Howells, however, knows his public; and the reforming element in him cannot but rejoice at the hearing he has won through its artistic counterpart. No one of his literary brethren of any importance has, so far as I know, emulated his courage in this particular. Some, like Mr. Bellamy, have made a reputation by their socialistic writings; none has risked so magnificent a structure already built up on a purely artistic foundation. It is mainly on account of this phase of his work, in which he has not forsaken his art, but makes it "the expression of his whole life and the thought and feeling mature life has brought to him," that Mr. Howells has been claimed as the American novelist, the best delineator of American life.[22]

Mr. Howells the poet is not nearly so well known as Mr. Howells the novelist; and there are doubtless many European students of American literature who are unaware of the extremely characteristic work he has done in verse. The accomplished critic, Mr. R.H. Stoddard, writes thus of a volume of poems published by Mr. Howells about three years ago:[23] "There is something here which, if not new in American poetry, has never before made itself so manifest there, never before declared itself with such vivacity and force, the process by which it emerged from emotion and clothed itself in speech being so undiscoverable by critical analysis that it seems, as Matthew Arnold said of some of Wordsworth's poetry, as if Nature took the pen from his hand and wrote in his stead." These poems are all short, and their titles (such as "What Shall It Profit?" "The Sphinx," "If," "To-morrow," "Good Society," "Equality," "Heredity," and so forth) sufficiently indicate that they do not rank among the lighter triflings with the muse. Their abiding sense of an awful and inevitable fate, their keen realisation of the startling contrasts between wealth and poverty, their symbolical grasp on the great realities of life and death, and the consummate skill of the artistic setting are all pervaded with something that recalls the paintings of Mr. G.F. Watts or the visions of Miss Olive Schreiner. One specimen can alone be given here:

"The Bewildered Guest

"I was not asked if I should like to come. I have not seen my host here since I came, Or had a word of welcome in his name. Some say that we shall never see him, and some That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know Why we were bid. How long I am to stay I have not the least notion. None, they say, Was ever told when he should come or go. But every now and then there bursts upon The song and mirth a lamentable noise, A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys Dumb in our breasts; and then, someone is gone. They say we meet him. None knows where or when. We know we shall not meet him here again."

Mr. Howells has, naturally enough, the defects of his qualities; and if it were my purpose here to present an exhaustive study of his writings, rather than merely to touch lightly upon his "American" characteristics, it would be desirable to consider some of these in this place. In his desire to avoid the merely pompous he sometimes falls into the really trifling. His love of analysis runs away with him at times; and parts of such books as "A World of Chance" must weary all but his most undiscriminating admirers. His self-restraint sometimes disappoints us of a vivid colour or a passionate throb which we feel to be our due. His humour and his satire occasionally pass from the fine to the thin.

It is, however, with Mr. Howells in his capacity of literary critic alone that my disappointment is too great to allow of silence. For the exquisiteness of a writer like Mr. Henry James he has the keenest insight, the warmest appreciation. His thorough-going conviction in the prime necessity of realism even leads him out of his way to commend Gabriele d'Annunzio, in whom some of us can detect little but a more than Zolaesque coarseness with a total lack of Zola's genius, insight, purpose, or philosophy. But when he comes to speak of a Thackeray or a Scott, his attitude is one that, to put it in the most complimentary form that I can think of, reminds us strongly of Homeric drowsiness. The virtue of James is one thing and the virtue of Scott is another; but surely admiration for both does not make too unreasonable a demand on catholicity of palate? Mr. Howells could never write himself down an ass, but surely in his criticism of the "Wizard of the North" he has written himself down as one whose literary creed is narrower than his human heart. The school of which Mr. Henry James is a most accomplished member has added more than one exquisite new flavour to the banquet of letters; but it may well be questioned whether a taste for these may not be acquired at too dear a cost if it necessitates a loss of relish for the steady good sense, the power of historic realisation, the rich humanity, and the marvellously fertile imagination of Walter Scott. It is not, I hope, a merely national prejudice that makes me oppose Mr. Howells in this point, though, perhaps, there is a touch of remonstrance in the reflection that that great novelist seems to have no use for the Briton in his works except as a foil or a butt for his American characters.

In considering Mr. Howells as an exponent of Americanism in literature, we have left him in an attitude almost of Americanus contra mundum—at any rate in the posture of one who is so entirely absorbed by his delight in the contemporary and national existence around him as to be partially blind to claims separated from him by tracts of time and space. My next example of the American in literature is, I think, to the full as national a type as Mr. Howells, though her Americanism is shown rather in subjective character than in objective theme. Miss Emily Dickinson is still a name so unfamiliar to English readers that I may be pardoned a few lines of biographical explanation. She was born in 1830, the daughter of the leading lawyer of Amherst, a small and quiet town of New England, delightfully situated on a hill, looking out over the undulating woods of the Connecticut valley. It is a little larger than the English Marlborough, and like it owes its distinctive tone to the presence of an important educational institute, Amherst College being one of the best-known and worthiest of the smaller American colleges. In this quiet little spot Miss Dickinson spent the whole of her life, and even to its limited society she was almost as invisible as a cloistered nun except for her appearances at an annual reception given by her father to the dignitaries of the town and college. There was no definite reason either in her physical or mental health for this life of extraordinary seclusion; it seems to have been simply the natural outcome of a singularly introspective temperament. She rarely showed or spoke of her poems to any but one or two intimate friends; only three or four were published during her lifetime; and it was with considerable surprise that her relatives found, on her death in 1886, a large mass of poetical remains, finished and unfinished. A considerable selection from them has been published in three little volumes, edited with tender appreciation by two of her friends, Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd and Col. T.W. Higginson.

Her poems are all in lyrical form—if the word form may be applied to her utter disregard of all metrical conventions. Her lines are rugged and her expressions wayward to an extraordinary degree, but "her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music," and the "thought-rhymes" which she often substitutes for the more regular assonances appeal "to an unrecognised sense more elusive than hearing" (Mrs. Todd). In this curious divergence from established rules of verse Miss Dickinson may be likened to Walt Whitman, whom she differs from in every other particular, and notably in her pithiness as opposed to his diffuseness; but with her we feel in the strongest way that her mode is natural and unsought, utterly free from affectation, posing, or self-consciousness.

Colonel Higginson rightly finds her nearest analogue in William Blake; but this "nearest" is far from identity. While tenderly feminine in her sympathy for suffering, her love of nature, her loyalty to her friends, she is in expression the most unfeminine of poets. The usual feminine impulsiveness and full expression of emotion is replaced in her by an extraordinary condensation of phrase and feeling. In her letters we find the eternal womanly in her yearning love for her friends, her brooding anxiety and sympathy for the few lives closely intertwined with her own. In her poems, however, one is rather impressed with the deep well of poetic insight and feeling from which she draws, but never unreservedly. In spite of frequent strange exaggeration of phrase one is always conscious of a fund of reserve force. The subjects of her poems are few, but the piercing delicacy and depth of vision with which she turned from death and eternity to nature and to love make us feel the presence of that rare thing, genius. Hers is a wonderful instance of the way in which genius can dispense with experience; she sees more by pure intuition than others distil from the serried facts of an eventful life. Perhaps, in one of her own phrases, she is "too intrinsic for renown," but she has appealed strongly to a surprisingly large band of readers in the United States, and it seems to me will always hold her audience. Those who admit Miss Dickinson's talent, but deny it to be poetry, may be referred to Thoreau's saying that no definition of poetry can be given which the true poet will not somewhere sometime brush aside. It is a new departure, and the writer in the Nation (Oct. 10, 1895) is probably right when he says: "So marked a new departure rarely leads to further growth. Neither Whitman nor Miss Dickinson ever stepped beyond the circle they first drew."

It is difficult to select quite adequate samples of Miss Dickinson's art, but perhaps the following little poems will give some idea of her naked simplicity, terseness, oddness,—of her method, in short, if we can apply that word to anything so spontaneous and unconscious:

"I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us. Don't tell! They'd banish us, you know.

"How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog, To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!"

* * * * *

"I taste a liquor never brewed, From tankards scooped in pearl; Not all the vats upon the Rhine Yield such an alcohol!

"Inebriate of air am I, And debauchee of dew, Reeling, through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue.

"When landlords turn the drunken bee Out of the foxglove's door, When butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more!

"Till seraphs swing their snowy hats, And saints to windows run, To see the little tippler Leaning against the sun!"

* * * * *

"But how he set I know not. There seemed a purple stile Which little yellow boys and girls Were climbing all the while,

"Till when they reached the other side, A dominie in grey Put gently up the evening bars, And led the flock away."

* * * * *

"He preached upon 'breadth' till it argued him narrow— The broad are too broad to define; And of 'truth' until it proclaimed him a liar— The truth never flaunted a sign. Simplicity fled from his counterfeit presence As gold the pyrites would shun. What confusion would cover the innocent Jesus To meet so enabled a man!"

The "so enabled a man" is a very characteristic Dickinsonian phrase. So, too, are these:

"He put the belt around my life— I heard the buckle snap." "Unfitted by an instant's grace For the contented beggar's face I wore an hour ago."

* * * * *

"Just his sigh, accented, Had been legible to me."

* * * * *

"The bustle in a house The morning after death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon earth— The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity."

Her interest in all the familiar sights and sounds of a village garden is evident through all her verses. Her illustrations are not recondite, literary, or conventional; she finds them at her own door. The robin, the buttercup, the maple, furnish what she needs. The bee, in particular, seems to have had a peculiar fascination for her, and hums through all her poems. She had even a kindly word for that "neglected son of genius," the spider. Her love of children is equally evident, and no one has ever better caught the spirit of

"Saturday Afternoon

"From all the jails the boys and girls Ecstatically leap, Beloved, only afternoon That prison doesn't keep.

"They storm the earth and stun the air, A mob of solid bliss. Alas! that frowns could lie in wait For such a foe as this!"

The bold extravagance of her diction (which is not, however, mere extravagance) and her ultra-American familiarity with the forces of nature may be illustrated by such stanzas as:

"What if the poles should frisk about And stand upon their heads! I hope I'm ready for the worst, Whatever prank betides."

* * * * *

"If I could see you in a year, I'd wind the months in balls, And put them each in separate drawers Until their time befalls.

"If certain, when this life was out, That yours and mine should be, I'd toss it yonder like a rind, And taste eternity."

For her the lightnings "skip like mice," the thunder "crumbles like a stuff." What a critic has called her "Emersonian self-possession" towards God may be seen in the little poem on the last page of her first volume, where she addresses the Deity as "burglar, banker, father." There is, however, no flippancy in this, no conscious irreverence; Miss Dickinson is not "orthodox," but she is genuinely spiritual and religious. Inspired by its truly American and "actuel" freedom, her muse does not fear to sing of such modern and mechanical phenomena as the railway train, which she loves to see "lap the miles and lick the valleys up," while she is fascinated by the contrast between its prodigious force and the way in which it stops, "docile and omnipotent, at its own stable door." But even she can hardly bring the smoking locomotive into such pathetic relations with nature as the "little brig," whose "white foot tripped, then dropped from sight," leaving "the ocean's heart too smooth, too blue, to break for you."

Her poems on death and the beyond, on time and eternity, are full of her peculiar note. Death is the "one dignity" that "delays for all;" the meanest brow is so ennobled by the majesty of death that "almost a powdered footman might dare to touch it now," and yet no beggar would accept "the eclat of death, had he the power to spurn." "The quiet nonchalance of death" is a resting-place which has no terrors for her; death "abashed" her no more than "the porter of her father's lodge." Death's chariot also holds Immortality. The setting sail for "deep eternity" brings a "divine intoxication" such as the "inland soul" feels on its "first league out from land." Though she "never spoke with God, nor visited in heaven," she is "as certain of the spot as if the chart were given." "In heaven somehow, it will be even, some new equation given." "Christ will explain each separate anguish in the fair schoolroom of the sky."

"A death-blow is a life-blow to some Who, till they died, did not alive become; Who, had they lived, had died, but when They died, vitality begun."

The reader who has had the patience to accompany me through these pages devoted to Miss Dickinson will surely own, whether in scoff or praise, the essentially American nature of her muse. Her defects are easily paralleled in the annals of English literature; but only in the liberal atmosphere of the New World, comparatively unshadowed by trammels of authority and standards of taste, could they have co-existed with so much of the highest quality.

A prominent phenomenon in the development of American literature—so prominent as to call for comment even in a fragmentary and haphazard sketch like the present—is the influence exercised by the monthly magazine. The editors of the leading literary periodicals have been practically able to wield a censorship to which there is no parallel in England. The magazine has been the recognised gateway to the literary public; the sweep of the editorial net has been so wide that it has gathered in nearly all the best literary work of the past few decades, at any rate in the department of belles lettres. It is not easy to name many important works of pure literature, as distinct from the scientific, the philosophical, and the instructive, that have not made their bow to the public through the pages of the Century, the Atlantic Monthly, or some one or other of their leading competitors. And probably the proportion of works by new authors that have appeared in the same way is still greater. There are, possibly, two sides as to the value of this supremacy of the magazine, though to most observers the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages. Among the former may be reckoned the general encouragement of reading, the opportunities afforded to young writers, the raising of the rate of authors' pay, the dissemination of a vast quantity of useful and salutary information in a popular form. Perhaps of more importance than any of these has been the maintenance of that purity of moral tone in which modern American literature is superior to all its contemporaries. Malcontents may rail at "grandmotherly legislation in letters," at the undue deference paid to the maiden's blush, at the encouragement of the mealy-mouthed and hypocritical; but it is a ground of very solid satisfaction, be the cause what it may, that recent American literature has been so free from the emasculate fin-de-siecle-ism, the nauseating pseudo-realism, the epigrammatic hysteria, that has of late been so rife in certain British circles. Moreover, it is impossible to believe that any really strong talent could have been stifled by the frown of the magazine editor. Walt Whitman made his mark without that potentate's assistance; and if America had produced a Zola, he would certainly have come to the front, even if his genius had been hampered with a burden of more than Zolaesque filth.

It is undoubtedly to the predominance of the magazine, among other causes, that are due the prevalence and perfection of the American short story. It has often been remarked that French literature alone is superior in this genre; and many of the best American productions of the kind can scarcely be called second even to the French in daintiness of phrase, sureness of touch, sense of proportion, and skilful condensation of interest. Excellent examples of the short story have been common in American literature from the times of Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe down to the present day. Mr. Henry James, perhaps, stands at the head of living writers in this branch. Miss Mary E. Wilkins is inimitable in her sketches of New England, the pathos, as well as the humour of which she touches with a master hand. It is interesting to note that, foreign as her subject would seem to be to the French taste, her literary skill has been duly recognised by the Revue des Deux Mondes. Bret Harte and Frank Stockton are so eminently short-story writers that the longer their stories become, the nearer do they approach the brink of failure. Other names that suggest themselves in a list that might be indefinitely extended are those of Miss Jewett, Mrs. Elizabeth Phelps Ward, Mr. Richard Harding Davis, Mr. T.B. Aldrich, Mr. Thos. Nelson Page, Mr. Owen Wister, Mr. Hamlin Garland, Mr. G.W. Cable, and (in a lighter vein) Mr. H.C. Bunner.

This chapter may fitly close with a straw of startling literary contrast, that seems to me alone almost enough to bring American literature under the rubric of this volume's title. If a critic familiar only with the work chiefly associated with the author's name were asked to indicate the source of the following quotations, I should be surprised if he were to guess correctly in his first hundred efforts. Indeed, I should not be astonished if some of his shots missed the mark by centuries of time as well as oceans of space. One hesitates to use lightly the word Elizabethan; but at present I do not recall any other modern work that suggests it more strongly than some of the lines I quote below:

"So wanton are all emblems that the cloak Which folds a king will kiss a crooked nail As quickly as a beggar's gabardine Will do like office."

* * * * *

"Thou art so like to substance that I'd think Myself a shadow ere thyself a dream."

* * * * *

"Not so much beauty, sire, As would make full the pocket of thine eye."

* * * * *

"A vein That spilt its tender blue upon her eyelid, As though the cunning hand that dyed her eyes Had slipped for joy of its own work."

* * * * *

"What am I who doth rail against the fate That binds mankind? The atom of an atom, Particle of this particle the earth, That with its million kindred worlds doth spin Like motes within the universal light. What if I sin—am lost—do crack my life Against the gateless walls of Fate's decree? Is the world fouler for a gnat's corpse? Nay, The ocean, is it shallower for the drop It leaves upon a blade of grass?"

* * * * *

"There is a boy in Essex, they do say, Can crack an ox's ribs in one arm-crotch."

All these passages are taken from the tragedy of "Athelwold," written by Miss Amelie Rives, the author of a novel entitled "The Quick and the Dead."

FOOTNOTES:

[20] I confess I should have felt myself on still firmer ground in making the above comparison if I had been able to select "Peter Ibbetson" instead of "Trilby" as the American favourite. It is distinctly the finest, the most characteristic, and the most convincing of Mr. Du Maurier's novels, though it is easy to see why it did not enjoy such a "boom" as its successor. In "Peter Ibbetson" our moral sense does not feel outraged by the fact of the sympathy we have to extend to a man-slayer; we are made to feel that a man may kill his fellow in a moment of ungovernable and not unrighteous wrath without losing his fundamental goodness. On the other hand, it seems to me, Mr. Du Maurier fails to convert us to belief in the possibility of such a character as Trilby, and fails to make us wholly sympathise with his paeans in her praise. It seems psychologically impossible for a woman to sin so repeatedly as Trilby, and so apparently without any overwhelming temptation, and yet at the same time to retain her essential purity. It is a prostitution of the word "love" to excuse Trilby's temporary amourettes with a "quia multum amavit."

[21] His extraordinary article on George Du Maurier in Harper's Magazine for September, 1897, is, perhaps, so far as style is concerned, as glaring an example of how not to do it as can be found in the range of American letters.

[22] Perhaps Mr. George W. Cable is entitled to rank with Mr. Howells in this respect as a man who refused to disguise his moral convictions behind his literary art, and thus infallibly and with full consciousness imperilled his popularity among his own people.

[23] "Stops of Various Quills," by W.D. Howells (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1895).



XI

Certain Features of Certain Cities

One of the dicta in M. Bourget's "Outre Mer" to which I cannot but take exception is that which insists on the essential similarity and monotony of all the cities of the United States. Passing over the question of the right of a Parisian to quarrel with monotony of street architecture, I should simply ask what single country possesses cities more widely divergent than New York and New Orleans, Philadelphia and San Francisco, Chicago and San Antonio, Washington and Pittsburg? If M. Bourget merely means that there is a tendency to homogeneity in the case of modern cities which was not compatible with the picturesque though uncomfortable reasons for variety in more ancient foundations, his remark amounts to a truism. For his implied comparison with European cities to have any point, he should be able to assert that the recent architecture of the different cities of Europe is more varied than the contemporary architecture of the United States. This seems to me emphatically not the case. Modern Paris resembles modern Rome more closely than any two of the above-named cities resemble each other; and it is simply the universal tendency to note similarity first and then unlikeness that makes the brief visitor to the United States fail to find characteristic individuality in the various great cities of the country. We are also too prone to forget that the United States, though continental in its proportions, is after all but a single nation, enjoying the same institutions and speaking practically one tongue; and this of necessity introduces an element of sameness that must be absent from the continent of Europe with which we are apt to compare it. If we oppose to the United States that one European country which approaches it most nearly in size, we shall, I think, find the balance of uniformity does not incline to the American side. When all is said, however, it cannot be denied that there is a great deal of similarity in the smaller and newer towns and cities of the West, and Mr. W.S. Caine's likening them to "international exhibitions a week before their opening" will strike many visitors as very apposite. It is only to the indiscriminate and unhedged form of M. Bourget's statement that objection need be made.

Architecture struck me as, perhaps, the one art in which America, so far as modern times are concerned, could reasonably claim to be on a par with, if not ahead of, any European country whatsoever. I say this with a full realisation of the many artistic nightmares that oppress the soil from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with a perfect recollection of the acres of petty, monotonous, and mean structures in almost every great city of the Union, with a keen appreciation of the witty saying that the American architect often "shows no more self-restraint than a bunch of fire-crackers." It is, however, distinctly true, as Mr. Montgomery Schuyler well puts it, that "no progress can result from the labour of architects whose training has made them so fastidious that they are more revolted by the crudity of the forms that result from the attempt to express a new meaning than by the failure to make the attempt;" and it is in his freedom from this fastidious lack of courage that the American architect is strong. His earlier efforts at independence were, perhaps, hardly fortunate; but he is now entering a phase in which adequate professional knowledge cooeperates with good taste to define the limits within which his imagination may legitimately work. I know not where to look, within the last quarter of a century or so, for more tasteful designs, greater sincerity of purpose, or happier adaptations to environment than the best creations of men like Mr. H.H. Richardson, Mr. R.M. Hunt, Mr. J.W. Root, Mr. G.B. Post, and Messrs. McKim, Mead, and White. Some of the new residential streets of places as recent as Chicago or St. Paul more than hold their own, as it seems to me, with any contemporaneous thoroughfares of their own class in Europe. To my own opinion let me add the valuable testimony of Mr. E.A. Freeman, in his "Impressions of the United States" (pp. 246, 247):

I found the modern churches, of various denominations, certainly better, as works of architecture, than I had expected. They may quite stand beside the average of modern churches in England, setting aside a few of the very best.... But I thought the churches, whose style is most commonly Gothic of one kind or another, decidedly less successful than some of the civil buildings. In some of these, I hardly know how far by choice, how far by happy accident, a style has been hit upon which seemed to me far more at home than any of the reproductions of Gothic. Much of the street architecture of several cities has very successfully caught the leading idea of the true Italian style.

New York, the gateway to America for, perhaps, nine out of ten visitors, is described by Mr. Richard Grant White, the American writer, as "the dashing, dirty, demi-rep of cities." Mr. Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras, calls it "an iron-fronted, iron-footed, and iron-hearted town." Miss Florence Marryat asserts that New York is "without any exception the most charming city she has ever been in." Miss Emily Faithful admits that at first it seems rough and new, but says that when one returns to it from the West, one recognises that it has everything essential in common with his European experiences. In my own note-book I find that New York impressed me as being "like a lady in ball costume, with diamonds in her ears, and her toes out at her boots."

Here, then, is evidence that New York makes a pretty strong impression on her guests, and that this impression is not by any means the same in every case. New York is evidently a person of character, and of a character with many facets. To most European visitors it must, on the whole, be somewhat of a disappointment; and it is not really an advantageous or even a characteristic portal to the American continent. For one thing, it is too overwhelmingly cosmopolitan in the composition of its population to strike the distinctive American note. It is not alone that New York society imitates that of France and England in a more pronounced way than I found anywhere else in America, but the names one sees over the shops seem predominantly German and Jewish, accents we are familiar with at home resound in our ears, the quarters we are first introduced to recall the dinginess and shabbiness of the waterside quarters of cities like London and Glasgow. More intimate acquaintance finds much that is strongly American in New York; but this is not the first impression, and first impressions count for so much that it seems to me a pity that New York is for most travellers the prologue to their American experiences.

The contrasts between the poverty and wealth of New York are so extreme as sometimes to suggest even London, where misery and prosperity rub shoulders in a more heartrending way than, perhaps, anywhere else in the wide world. But the contrasts that strike even the most unobservant visitor to the so-called American "metropolis" are of a different nature. When I was asked by American friends what had most struck me in America, I sometimes answered, if in malicious mood, "The fact that the principal street of the largest and richest city in the Union is so miserably paved;" and, indeed, my recollections of the holes in Broadway, and of the fact that in wintry weather I had sometimes to diverge into University Place in order to avoid a mid-shin crossing of liquid mud in Broadway, seem as strange as if they related to a dream.[24] New York, again, possesses some of the most sumptuous private residences in the world, often adorned in particular with exquisite carvings in stone, such as Europeans have sometimes furnished for a cathedral or minster, but which it has been reserved for republican simplicity to apply to the residence of a private citizen.[25] Yet it is by no means ausgeschlossen, as the Germans say, that the pavement in front of this abode of luxury may not be seamed by huge cracks and rents that make walking after nightfall positively dangerous.

Fifth Avenue is not, to my mind, one of the most attractive city streets in the United States, but it is, perhaps, the one that makes the greatest impression of prosperity. It is eminently solid and substantial; it reeks with respectability and possibly dulness. It is a very alderman among streets. The shops at its lower end, and gradually creeping up higher like the modest guest of the parable, make no appeal to the lightly pursed, but are as aristocratic-looking as those of Hanover Square. Its hotels and clubs are equally suggestive of well-lined pockets. Its churches more than hint at golden offertories; and the visitor is not surprised to be assured (as he infallibly will be) that the pastor of one of them preaches every Sunday to "two hundred and fifty million dollars." Even the beautiful Roman Catholic cathedral lends its aid to this impression, and encourages the faithful by a charge of fifteen to twenty-five cents for a seat. The "stoops" of the lugubrious brown sandstone houses seem to retain something more of their Dutch origin than the mere name. The Sunday Parade here is better dressed than that of Hyde Park, but candour compels me to admit, at the expense of my present point, considerably less stiff and non-committal. Indeed, were it not for the miserable horses of the "stage lines" Fifth Avenue might present a clean bill of unimpeachable affluence.

Madison Avenue, hitherto uninvaded by shops, rivals Fifth Avenue in its suggestions of extreme well-to-do-ness, and should be visited, if for no other reason, to see the Tiffany house, one of the most daring and withal most captivating experiments known to me in city residences.

Unlike those of many other American cities, the best houses of New York are ranged side by side without the interposition of the tiniest bit of garden or greenery; it is only in the striking but unfinished Riverside Drive, with its grand views of the Hudson, that architecture derives any aid whatsoever from natural formations or scenic conditions. The student of architecture should not fail to note the success with which the problem of giving expression to a town house of comparatively simple outline has often been tackled, and he will find many charming single features, such as doors, or balconies, or windows. Good examples of these are the exquisite oriel and other decorative features of the house of Mr. W.K. Vanderbilt, by Mr. Hunt, in Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 52d Street, and specimens will also be found in 34th, 36th, 37th, 43d, 52d, 56th, and 57th Streets, near their junction with Fifth Avenue. The W.H. Vanderbilt houses (Fifth Avenue, between 50th and 51st Streets) have been described as "brown-stone boxes with architecture applique;" but the applied carving, though meaningless enough as far as its position goes, is so exquisite in itself as to deserve more than a passing glance. The iron railings which surround the houses are beautiful specimens of metal-work. The house of Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, a little farther up the avenue, with its red brick and slates, and its articulations and dormers of grey limestone, is a good example of an effective use of colour in domestic architecture—an effect which the clear, dry climate of New York admits and perpetuates.[26] The row of quiet oldtime houses on the north side of Washington Square will interest at least the historical student of architecture, so characteristic are they of times of restfulness and peace to which New York has long been a stranger. Down towards the point of the island, in the "city" proper, the visitor will find many happy creations for modern mercantile purposes, besides such older objects of architectural interest as Trinity Church and the City Hall, praised by Professor Freeman and many other connoisseurs of both continents. Among these business structures may be named the "Post Building," the building of the Union Trust Company (No. 80 Broadway), and the Guernsey Building (also in Broadway). At the extreme apex of Manhattan Island lie the historic Bowling Green and Battery Park, the charm of which has not been wholly annihilated by the intrusion of the elevated railway. Here rises the huge rotunda of Castle Garden, through which till lately all the immigrants to New York made their entry into the New World. Surely this has a pathetic interest of its own when we consider what this landing meant to so many thousands of the poor and needy. A suitable motto for its hospitable portals would have been, "Imbibe new hope, all ye who enter here."

As I have said, there is no lack of good Americanism in New York. Let the Englishman who does not believe in an American school of sculpture look at St. Gaudens' statue of Admiral Farragut in Madison Square, and say where we have a better or as good a single figure in any of our streets. Let him who thinks that fine public picture galleries are confined to Europe go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[27] with its treasures by Rembrandt and Rubens, Holbein and Van Dyck, Frans Hals and Teniers, Reynolds and Hogarth, Meissonier and Detaille, Rosa Bonheur and Troyon, Corot and Breton. Let the admirer of engineering marvels, after he has sufficiently appreciated the elastic strength of the Brooklyn Suspension Bridge, betake himself to the other end of the island and enjoy the more solid, but in their way no less imposing, proportions of the Washington Bridge over the Harlem, and let him choose his route by the Ninth-avenue Elevated Railroad with its dizzy curve at 110th street. And, finally, let not the lover of the picturesque fail to enjoy the views from the already named Riverside Drive, the cleverly created beauties of Central Park, and the district known as Washington Heights.

The Englishman in New York will probably here make his first acquaintance with the American system of street nomenclature; and if he at once masters its few simple principles, it will be strange if he does not find it of great utility and convenience. The objection usually made to it is that the numbering of streets, instead of naming them, is painfully arithmetical, bald, and uninteresting; but if a man stays long enough to be really familiar with the streets, he will find that the bare numbers soon clothe themselves with association, and Fifth Avenue will come to have as distinct an individuality as Broadway, while 23d Street will call up as definite a picture of shopping activity as Bond Street or Piccadilly. The chief trouble is the facility of confusing such an address as No. 44 East 45th Street with No. 45 East 44th Street; and so natural is an inversion of the kind that one is sometimes heedless enough to make it in writing one's own address.

The transition from New York to Boston in a chapter like this is as inevitable as the tax-collector, though perhaps less ingenuity is now spent in the invention of anecdotes typical of the contrasts between these two cities since Chicago, by the capture of the World's Fair, drew upon herself the full fire of the satire-shotted guns of New York's rivalry. It seems to me, however, that in many ways there is much more similarity between New York and Chicago than between New York and Boston, and that it is easier to use the latter couple than the former to point a moral or adorn a tale. In both New York and Chicago the prevailing note is that of wealth and commerce, the dominant social impression is one of boundless material luxury, the atmosphere is thick with the emanations of those who hurry to be rich. I hasten to add that of course this is largely tempered by other tendencies and features; it would be especially unpardonable of me to forget the eminently intellectual, artistic, and refined aspects of New York life of which I was privileged to enjoy glimpses. In Boston, however, there is something different. Mere wealth, even in these degenerate days, does not seem to play so important a part in her society. The names one constantly hears or sees in New York are names like Astor, Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Bradley-Martin, names which, whatever other qualities they connote, stand first and foremost for mere crude wealth. In Boston the prominent public names—the names that naturally occur to my mind as I think of Boston as I saw it—are Oliver Wendell Holmes, the poet and novelist; Eliot, the college president; Francis Walker, the political economist; Higginson, the generous cultivator of classical music; Robert Treat Paine, the philanthropist; Edward Everett Hale; and others of a more or less similar class. Again, in New York and in Chicago (Pullman, Marshall Field, Armour) the prominent names are emphatically men of to-day and seem to change with each generation. In Boston we have the names of the first governor and other leaders of the early settlers still shining in their descendants with almost undiminished lustre. The present mayor of Boston, for example, is a member of a family the name of which has been illustrious in the city's annals for two hundred years. He is the fifth of his name in the direct line to gain fame in the public service, and the third to occupy the mayor's chair. No less than sixteen immediate members of the family are recorded in the standard biographical dictionaries of America.

While doubtless the Attic tales of Boeotian dulness were at least as often well invented as true, it is perhaps the case that there is generally some ground for the popular caricatures of any given community. I duly discounted the humorous and would-be humorous stories of Boston's pedantry that I heard in New York, and found that as a rule I had done right so to do. Blue spectacles are not more prominent in Boston than elsewhere; its theatres do not make a specialty of Greek plays; the little boys do not petition the Legislature for an increase in the hours of school. There yet remains, however, a basis of truth quite large enough to show the observer how the reputation was acquired. It is a solemn fact that what would appear in England as "No spitting allowed in this car" is translated in the electric cars of Boston into: "The Board of Health hereby adjudges that the deposit of sputum in street-cars is a public nuisance."[28] The framer of this announcement would undoubtedly speak of the limbs of a piano and allude to a spade as an agricultural implement. And in social intercourse I have often noticed needless celerity in skating over ice that seemed to my ruder British sense quite well able to bear any ordinary weight, as well as a certain subtlety of allusiveness that appeared to exalt ingenuity of phrase at the expense of common sense and common candour. Too high praise cannot easily be given to the Boston Symphony Concerts; but it is difficult to avoid a suspicion of affectation in the severe criticism one hears of the conductor whenever he allows a little music of a lighter class than usual to appear on the programme.

Boston is, in its way, as prolific of contrasts as any part of the United States. There is certainly no more cultivated centre in the country, and yet the letter r is as badly maltreated by the Boston scholar as by the veriest cockney. To the ear of Boston centre has precisely the same sound as the name of the heroine of Wagner's "Flying Dutchman," and its most cultivated graduates speak of Herbert Spencah's Datar of Ethics. The critical programmes of the Symphony Concerts are prepared by one of the ablest of living musical critics, and are scholarly almost to excess; yet, as the observant Swiss critic, M. Wagniere, has pointed out, their refined and subtle text has to endure the immediate juxtaposition of the advertisements of tea-rooms and glove-sellers. Boston has the deserved reputation of being one of the best-governed cities in America, yet some of its important streets seldom see a municipal watering-cart, dust flies in clouds both summer and winter, and myriads of life-endangering bicycles shoot through its thoroughfares at night without lamps. The Boston matron holds up her hands in sanctified horror at the freedom of Western manners, and yet it is a local saying, founded on a solid basis of fact, that Kenney & Clark (a well-known firm of livery-stable keepers) are the only chaperon that a Boston girl needs in going to or from a ball. The Bostonians are not the least intelligent of mortals, and yet I know no other city in America which is content with such an anomalous system of hack hire, where no reduction in rate is made for the number of persons. One person may drive in a comfortable two-horse brougham to any point within Boston proper for 50 cents; two persons pay $1, three persons $1.50, and so on. My advice to a quartette of travellers visiting Boston is to hire four carriages at once and go in a procession, until they find a liveryman who sees the point.

One acute observer has pointed out that it is the men of New York who grow haggard, wrinkled, anxious-looking, and prematurely old in their desperate efforts to provide diamonds and balls and Worth costumes and trips to Europe for their debonair, handsome, easy-going, and well-nourished spouses and daughters; while the men of Boston are "jolly dogs, who make money by legitimate trade instead of wild speculation, and show it in their countenances, illumined with the light of good cigars and champagne and other little luxuries," while their womankind are constantly worried by the New England conscience, and constantly creating anxieties for themselves where none exist. There is indeed a large amount of truth in this description, if allowance be made for pardonable exaggeration. It is among the women of Boston that one finds its traditional mantle of intellectuality worn most universally, and it is among the women of New York that one finds the most characteristic displays of love of pleasure and social triumphs. It is, perhaps, not a mere accident that the daughters of Boston's millionaires seem to marry their fellow-citizens rather than foreign noblemen. "None of their money goes to gild rococo coronets."

I have a good deal of sympathy with a Canadian friend who exclaimed: "Oh, Boston! I don't include Boston when I speak of the United States." Max O'Rell has similarly noted that if you wish to hear severe criticism of America you have only to go to Boston. "La on loue Boston et Angleterre, et l'on debine l'Amerique a dire d'experts." It would be a mistake, however, to infer that Boston is not truly American, or that it devotes itself to any voluntary imitation of England. In a very deep sense Boston is one of the most intensely American cities in the Union; it represents, perhaps, the finest development of many of the most characteristic ideals of Americanism. Its resemblances to England seem to be due to the simple fact that like causes produce like results. The original English stock by which Boston was founded has remained less mixed here than, perhaps, in any other city of America; and the differences between the descendants of the Puritans who emigrated and the descendants of those of them who remained at home are not complicated by a material infusion of alien blood in either case. The independence of the original settlers, their hatred of coercion and tyranny, have naturally grown with two centuries and a half of democracy; even the municipal administration has not been wholly captured by the Irish voter. The Bostonian has, to a very appreciable extent, solved the problem of combining the virtues of democracy with the manners of aristocracy; and I know not where you will find a better type of the American than the Boston gentleman: patriotic with enlightened patriotism; finely mannered even to the class immediately below his own; energetic, but not a slave to the pursuit of wealth; liberal in his religion, but with something of the Puritan conscience still lying perdu beneath his universalism; distributing his leisure between art, literature, and outdoor occupations; a little cool in his initial manner to strangers, but warmly hospitable when his confidence in your merit is satisfied. We, in England, may well feel proud that the blood which flows in the veins of the ideal Bostonian is as distinctly and as truly English as that of our own Gladstones and Morleys, our Brownings and our Tennysons.

Prof. Hugo Muensterberg, of Berlin, writes thus of Boston and Chicago: "Ja, Boston ist die Hauptstadt jenes jungen, liebenswerthen, idealistischen Amerikas und wird es bleiben; Chicago dagegen ist die Hochburg der alten protzigen amerikanischen Dollarsucht, und die Weltausstellung schliesslich ist ueberhaupt nicht Amerika, sondern chicagosirtes Europa." Whatever may be thought of the first part of this judgment, the second member of it seems to me rather unfair to Chicago and emphatically so as regards the Chicago exhibition.

Since 1893 Chicago ought never to be mentioned as Porkopolis without a simultaneous reference to the fact that it was also the creator of the White City, with its Court of Honour, perhaps the most flawless and fairy-like creation, on a large scale, of man's invention. We expected that America would produce the largest, most costly, and most gorgeous of all international exhibitions; but who expected that she would produce anything so inexpressibly poetic, chaste, and restrained, such an absolutely refined and soul-satisfying picture, as the Court of Honour, with its lagoon and gondolas, its white marble steps and balustrades, its varied yet harmonious buildings, its colonnaded vista of the great lake, its impressive fountain, its fairy-like outlining after dark by the gems of electricity, its spacious and well-modulated proportions which made the largest crowd in it but an unobtrusive detail, its air of spontaneity and inevitableness which suggested nature itself, rather than art? No other scene of man's creation seemed to me so perfect as this Court of Honour. Venice, Naples, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Athens, Constantinople, each in its way is lovely indeed; but in each view of each of these there is some jarring feature, something that we have to ignore in order to thoroughly lose ourselves in the beauty of the scene. The Court of Honour was practically blameless; the aesthetic sense of the beholder was as fully and unreservedly satisfied as in looking at a masterpiece of painting or sculpture, and at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense of amplitude and grandeur such as no single work of art could produce. The glamour of old association that illumines Athens or Venice was in a way compensated by our deep impression of the pathetic transitoriness of the dream of beauty before us, and by the revelation it afforded of the soul of a great nation. For it will to all time remain impossibly ridiculous to speak of a country or a city as wholly given over to the worship of Mammon which almost involuntarily gave birth to this ethereal emanation of pure and uneconomic beauty.

Undoubtedly there are few things more dismal than the sunless canons which in Chicago are called streets; and the luckless being who is concerned there with retail trade is condemned to pass the greater part of his life in unrelieved ugliness. Things, however, are rather better in the "office" quarter; and he who is ready to admit that exigency of site gives some excuse for "elevator architecture" will find a good deal to interest him in its practice at Chicago. Indeed, no one can fail to wonder at the marvellous skill of architectural engineering which can run up a building of twenty stories, the walls of which are merely a veneer or curtain. Few will cavil at the handsome and comfortable equipment of the best interiors; but, given the necessity of their existence, the wide-minded lover of art will find something to reward his attention even in their exteriors. In many instances their architects have succeeded admirably in steering a middle course between the ornate style of a palace on the one hand and the packing case with windows on the other; and the observer might unreservedly admire the general effect were it not for the crick in his neck that reminds him most forcibly that he cannot get far enough away for a proper estimate of the proportions. Any city might feel proud to count amid its commercial architecture such features as the entrance of the Phenix Building, the office of the American Express Company, and the monumental Field Building, by Richardson, with what Mr. Schuyler calls its grim utilitarianism of expression; and the same praise might, perhaps, be extended to the Auditorium, the Owings Building, the Rookery, and some others. In non-commercial architecture Chicago may point with some pride to its City Hall, its University, its libraries, the admirable Chicago Club (the old Art Institute), and the new Art Institute on the verge of Lake Michigan. Of its churches the less said the better; their architecture, regarded as a studied insult to religion, would go far to justify the highly uncomplimentary epithet Mr. Stead applied to Chicago.

In some respects Chicago deserves the name City of Contrasts, just as the United States is the Land of Contrasts; and in no way is this more marked than in the difference between its business and its residential quarters. In the one—height, narrowness, noise, monotony, dirt, sordid squalor, pretentiousness; in the other—light, space, moderation, homelikeness. The houses in the Lake Shore Drive, the Michigan Boulevard, or the Drexel Boulevard are as varied in style as the brown-stone mansions of New York are monotonous; they face on parks or are surrounded with gardens of their own; they are seldom ostentatiously large; they suggest comfort, but not offensive affluence; they make credible the possession of some individuality of taste on the part of their owners. The number of massive round openings, the strong rusticated masonry, the open loggie, the absence of mouldings, and the red-tiled roofs suggest to the cognoscenti that Mr. H.H. Richardson's spirit was the one which brooded most efficaciously over the domestic architecture of Chicago. The two houses I saw that were designed by Mr. Richardson himself are undoubtedly not so satisfactory as some of his public buildings, but they had at least the merit of interest and originality; some of the numerous imitations were by no means successful.

The parks of Chicago are both large and beautiful. They contain not a few very creditable pieces of sculpture, among which Mr. St. Gaudens' statue of Lincoln is conspicuous as a wonderful triumph of artistic genius over unpromising material. The show of flowers in the parks is not easily paralleled in public domains elsewhere. Of these, rather than of its stockyards and its lightning rapidity in pig-sticking, will the visitor who wishes to think well of Chicago carry off a mental picture.

The man who has stood on Inspiration Point above Oakland and has watched the lights of San Francisco gleaming across its noble bay, or who has gazed down on the Golden Gate from the heights of the Presidio, must have an exceptionally rich gallery of memory if he does not feel that he has added to its treasures one of the most entrancing city views he has ever witnessed. The situation of San Francisco is indeed that of an empress among cities. Piled tier above tier on the hilly knob at the north end of a long peninsula, it looks down on the one side over the roomy waters of San Francisco Bay (fifty miles long and ten miles wide), backed by the ridge of the Coast Range, while in the other direction it is reaching out across the peninsula, here six miles wide, to the placid expanse of the Pacific Ocean. On the north the peninsula ends abruptly in precipitous cliffs some hundreds of feet high, while a similar peninsula, stretching southwards, faces it in a similar massive promontory, separated by a scant mile of water. This is the famous Golden Gate, the superb gateway leading from the ocean to the shelters of the bay. To the south the eye loses itself among the fertile valleys of corn and fruit stretching away toward the Mexican frontier.

When we have once sated ourselves with the general effect, there still remains a number of details, picturesque, interesting, or quaint. There is the Golden Gate Park, the cypresses and eucalypti at one end of which testify to the balminess of the climate, while the sand-dunes at its other end show the original condition of the whole surface of the peninsula, and add to our admiration of nature a sense of respectful awe for the transforming energy of man. Beyond Golden Gate Park we reach Sutro Heights, another desert that has been made to blossom like the rose. Here we look out over the Pacific to the musically named Farralone Islands, thirty miles to the west. Then we descend for luncheon to the Cliff House below, and watch the uncouth gambols of hundreds of fat sea-lions (Spanish lobos marinos), which, strictly protected from the rifle or harpoon, swim, and plunge, and bark unconcernedly within a stone's throw of the observer. The largest of these animals are fifteen feet long and weigh about a ton; and it is said that certain individuals, recognisable by some peculiarity, are known to have frequented the rocks for many years. On our way back to the lower part of the city we use one of the cable-cars crawling up and down the steep inclines like flies on a window-pane; and we find, if the long polished seat of the car be otherwise unoccupied, that we have positive difficulty in preventing ourselves slipping down from one end of the car to the other. By this time the strong afternoon wind[29] has set in from the sea, and we notice with surprise that the seasoned Friscans, still clad in the muslins and linens that seemed suitable enough at high noon, seek by preference the open seats of the locomotive car, while we, puny visitors, turn up our coat-collars and flee to the shelter of the "trailer" or covered car. As we come over "Nob Hill" we take in the size of the houses of the Californian millionaires, note that they are of wood (on account of the earthquakes?), and bemoan the misdirected efforts of their architects, who, instead of availing themselves of the unique chance of producing monuments of characteristically developed timber architecture, have known no better than to slavishly imitate the incongruous features of stone houses in the style of the Renaissance. Indeed, we shall feel that San Francisco is badly off for fine buildings of all and every kind. If daylight still allows we may visit the Mission Dolores, one of the interesting old Spanish foundations that form the origin of so many places in California, and if we are historically inclined we may inspect the old Spanish grants in the Surveyor-General's office. Those of us whose tastes are modern and literary may find our account in identifying some of the places in R.L. Stevenson's "Ebb Tide," and it will go hard with us if we do not also meet a few of his characters amid the cosmopolitan crowd in the streets or on the wharves. At night we may visit China without the trouble of a voyage, and perambulate a city of 25,000 Celestials under the safe guidance of an Irish-accented detective. So often have the features of Chinatown been described—its incense-scented joss-houses, its interminable stage-plays, its opium-joints, its drug-stores with their extraordinary remedies, its curiosity shops, and its restaurants—that no repetition need be attempted here. We leave it with a sense of the curious incongruity which allows this colony of Orientals to live in the most wide-awake of western countries with an apparently almost total neglect of such sanitary observances as are held indispensable in all other modern municipalities. It is certain that no more horrible sight could be seen in the extreme East than the so-called "Hermit of Chinatown," an insane devotee who has lived for years crouched in a miserable little outhouse, subsisting on the offerings of the charitable, and degraded almost beyond the pale of humanity by his unbroken silence, his blank immobility, and his neglect of all the decencies of life. And this is an American resident, if not an American citizen! If the reader is as lucky as the writer, he may wind up the day with a smart shock of earthquake; and if he is equally sleepy and unintelligent (which Heaven forefend!), he may miss its keen relish by drowsily wondering what on earth they mean by moving that very heavy grand piano overhead at that time of night.

"Two-thirds of them come here to die, and they can't do it." This was said by the famous Mr. Barnum about Colorado Springs; and the active life and cheerful manners of the condemned invalids who flourish in this charming little city go far to confirm the truth concealed beneath the jest. The land has insensibly sloped upwards since the traveller left the Mississippi behind him, and he now finds himself in a flowery prairie 6,000 feet above the sea level, while close by one of the finest sections of the Rocky Mountains rears its snowy peaks to a height of 6,000 to 8,000 feet more. The climate resembles that of Davos, and like it is preeminently suited for all predisposed to or already affected with consumption; but Colorado enjoys more sunshine than its Swiss rival, and has no disagreeable period of melting snow. The town is sheltered by the foothills, except to the southeast, where it lies open to the great plains; and, being situated where they meet the mountains, it enjoys the openness and free supply of fresh air of the seashore, without its dampness. The name is somewhat of a misnomer, as the nearest springs are those of Manitou, about five miles to the north.

Colorado Springs may be summed up as an oasis of Eastern civilisation and finish in an environment of Western rawness and enterprise. It has been described as "a charming big village, like the well-laid-out suburb of some large Eastern city." Its wide, tree-shaded streets are kept in excellent order. There is a refreshing absence of those "loose ends" of a new civilisation which even the largest of the Western cities are too apt to show. No manufactures are carried on, and no "saloons" are permitted. The inhabitants consist very largely of educated and refined people from the Eastern States and England, whose health does not allow them to live in their damper native climes. The tone of the place is a refreshing blend of the civilisation of the East and the unconventionalism of the West. Perhaps there is no pleasanter example of extreme social democracy. The young man of the East, unprovided with a private income, finds no scope here for his specially trained capacities, and is glad to turn an honest penny and occupy his time with anything he can get. Thus there are gentlemen in the conventional sense of the word among many of the so-called humbler callings, and one may rub shoulders at the charming little clubs with an Oxford-bred livery-stable keeper or a Harvard graduate who has turned his energies toward the selling of milk. Few visitors to Colorado Springs will fail to carry away a grateful and pleasant impression of the English doctor who has found vigorous life and a prosperous career in the place of exile to which his health condemned him in early manhood, and who has repaid the place for its gift of vitality by the most intelligent and effective championship of its advantages. These latter include an excellent hotel and a flourishing college for delicate girls and boys.

Denver, a near neighbour of Colorado Springs (if we speak more Americano), is an excellent example, both in theory and practice, of the confident expectation of growth with which new American cities are founded. The necessary public buildings are not huddled together as a nucleus from which the municipal infant may grow outwards; but a large and generous view is taken of the possibilities of expansion. Events do not always justify this sanguine spirit of forethought. The capitol at Washington still turns its back on the city of which it was to be the centre as well as the crown. In a great number of cases, however, hope and fact eventually meet together. The capitol of Bismarck, chief town of North Dakota, was founded in 1883, nearly a mile from the city, on a rising site in the midst of the prairie. It has already been reached by the advancing tide of houses, and will doubtless, in no long time, occupy a conveniently central situation. Denver is an equally conspicuous instance of the same tendency. The changes that took place in that city between the date of my visit to it and the reading of the proof-sheets of "Baedeker's United States" a year or so later demanded an almost entire rewriting of the description. Doubtless it has altered at least as much since then, and very likely the one or two slightly critical remarks of the handbook of 1893 are already grossly libellous. Denver quadrupled its population between 1880 and 1890. The value of its manufactures and of the precious ores smelted here reaches a fabulous amount of millions of dollars. The usual proportion of "million" and "two million dollar buildings" have been erected. Many of the principal streets are (most wonderful of all!) excellently paved and kept reasonably clean. But the crowning glory of Denver for every intelligent traveller is its magnificent view of the Rocky Mountains, which are seen to the West in an unbroken line of at least one hundred and fifty miles. Though forty miles distant, they look, owing to the purity of the atmosphere, as if they were within a walk of two or three hours. Denver is fond of calling herself the "Queen City of the Plains," and few will grudge the epithet queenly if it is applied to the possession of this matchless outlook on the grandest manifestations of nature. If the Denver citizen brags more of his State Capitol, his Metropole Hotel (no accent, please!), and his smelting works than of his snow-piled mountains and abysmal canons, he only follows a natural human instinct in estimating most highly that which has cost him most trouble.