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A Hero and Some Other Folks

Jean Valjean

The hero is not a luxury, but a necessity. We can no more do without him than we can do without the sky. Every best man and woman is at heart a hero-worshiper. Emerson acutely remarks that all men admire Napoleon because he was themselves in possibility. They were in miniature what he was developed. For a like though nobler reason, all men love heroes. They are ourselves grown tall, puissant, victorious, and sprung into nobility, worth, service. The hero electrifies the world; he is the lightning of the soul, illuminating our sky, clarifying the air, making it thereby salubrious and delightful. What any elect spirit did, inures to the credit of us all. A fragment of Lowell's clarion verse may stand for the biography of heroism:

"When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west; And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time;"

such being the undeniable result and history of any heroic service.

But what was the old hero's chief failure? The answer is, He lacked conscience. Duty had no part in his scheme of action, nor in his vocabulary of word or thought. Our word "virtue" is the bodily importation of the old Roman word "virtus," but so changed in meaning that the Romans could no more comprehend it than they could the Copernican theory of astronomy. With them, "virtus" meant strength--that only--a battle term. The solitary application was to fortitude in conflict. With us, virtue is shot through and through with moral quality, as a gem is shot through with light, and monopolizes the term as light monopolizes the gem. This change is radical and astonishing, but discloses a change which has revolutionized the world. The old hero was conscienceless--a characteristic apparent in Greek civilization. What Greek patriot, whether Themistocles or Demosthenes, applied conscience to patriotism? They were as devoid of practical conscience as a Metope of the Parthenon was devoid of life. Patriotism was a transient sentiment. Demosthenes could become dumb in the presence of Philip's gold; and in a fit of pique over mistreatment at the hands of his brother-citizens, Themistocles became a traitor, and, expatriated, dwelt a guest at the Persian court. Strangely enough--and it is passing strange--the most heroic personality in Homer's Iliad, the Greek's "Bible of heroisms," was not the Atridae, whether Agamemnon or Menelaus; not Ajax nor Achilles, nor yet Ulysses; but was Hector, the Trojan, who appears to greater advantage as hero than all the Grecian host. And Homer was a Greek! This is strange and unaccountable irony. Say once more, the old hero's lack was conscience. He, like his gods and goddesses, who were deified infamies, was a studied impurity. Jean Valjean is a hero, but a hero of a new type.

Literature is a sure index of a civilization. Who cares to settle in his mind whether the world grows better, may do so by comparing contemporaneous literature with the reading of other days. "The Heptameron," of Margaret of Navarre, is a book so filthy as to be nauseating. That people could read it from inclination is unthinkable; and to believe that a woman could read it, much less write it, taxes too sorely our credulity. In truth, this work did not, in the days of its origin, shock the people's sensibilities. A woman wrote it, and she a sister of Francis I of France, and herself Queen of Navarre, and a pure woman. And her contemporaries, both men and women, read it with delight, because they had parted company with blushes and modesty. Zola is less voluptuous and filthy than these old tales. Some things even Zola curtains. Margaret of Navarre tears the garments from the bodies of men and women, and looks at their nude sensuality smilingly. Of Boccaccio's "Decameron," the same general observations hold; save that they are less filthy, though no less sensual. In the era producing these tales, witness this fact: The stories are represented as told by a company of gentlemen and ladies, the reciter being sometimes a man, sometimes a woman; the place, a country villa, whither they had fled to escape a plague then raging in Florence. The people, so solacing themselves in retreat from a plague they should have striven to alleviate by their presence and ministries, were the gentility of those days, representing the better order of society, and told stories which would now be venal if told by vulgar men in some tavern of ill-repute. That Boccaccio should have reported these tales as emanating from such a company is proof positive of the immodesty of those days, whose story is rehearsed in the "Decameron." Rousseau's "Confessions" is another book showing the absence of current morality in his age. Notwithstanding George Eliot's panegyric, these memoirs are the production of unlimited conceit, of a practical absence of any moral sensitiveness; and while Rousseau could not be accused of being sensual, nor amorous and heartless as Goethe, he yet shows so crude a moral state as to render him unwholesome to any person of ordinary morals in the present day. His "Confessions," instead of being naive, strike me as being distinctly and continuously coarse. A man and woman who could give their children deliberately to be farmed out, deserting them as an animal would not, and this with no sense of loss or compunction, nor even with a sense of the inhumanity of such procedure--such a man and woman tell us how free-love can degrade a natively virtuous mind. Such was Rousseau; and his "Confessions" are like himself, unblushing, because shameless. These books reflect their respective ages, and are happily obsolete now. Such memoirs and fictions in our day are unthinkable as emanating from respectable sources; and if written would be located in vile haunts in the purlieus of civilization. Gauged by such a test, the world is seen to be better, and immensely better. We have sailed out of sight of the old continent of coarse thinking, and are sailing a sea where purity of thought and expression impregnate the air like odors. The old hero, with his lewdness and rhodomontade, is excused from the stac like a fish through well-known waters; the idle young man-about-town, immortalized in the sock and collar advertisements of every surface car and Subway; and the equally idle young girl, in her elaborate sameness the prototype of the same cover of the best magazines: even in one day, there comes to be a strange familiarity about all these people.

They are peculiar to their own special class, but within that class they are as like as peas in a pod. They have the same features, wear the same clothes even to a certain shade, and do the same things in identically the same day. With all about them shifting, progressing, alternating from hour to hour, New Yorkers, in themselves, remain unaltered. Or, if they change, they change together as one creature--be he millionaire or Hebrew shop-keeper, doctor of divinity or manager of comic opera. For, of all men under the sun, the New Yorker is a type; acutely suspicious of and instinctively opposed to anything independent of the type. Hence, in spite of the vast numbers of different peoples brought together on Manhattan Island, we find not a community of Americans growing cosmopolitan, but a community of cosmopolitans forced to grow New Yorkers. This, under the potent influence of extreme American adaptability, they do in a remarkably short time; the human potpourri who five years ago had never seen Manhattan, today being indistinguishable in the representative city mass.

Foreigners who watch them from club windows write enthusiastic eulogies in their praise. To me they seem a terrible travesty on all that youth is meant to be. They take their models from pictures of French demi-mondaines shown in ultra-daring race costumes, in the Sunday newspapers; and whom they fondly believe to be great ladies of society. I had almost said that from head to foot they are victims of an entirely false conception of beauty and grace; but when it comes to their feet, they are genuine American, and, so, frank and attractive. Indeed there is no woman as daintily and appropriately shod as the American woman, whose trim short skirts betray this pleasant fact with every step she takes.

Nowhere, however, is appearance and its detail more misrepresentative than in New York. Strangers exclaim at the opulence of the frocks and furs displayed by even the average woman. They have no idea that the average woman lives in a two-by-four hall bedroom--or at best a three-room flat; and that she has saved and scrimped, or more probably gone into debt to acquire that one indispensable good costume. Nor could they imagine that her chief joy in a round of sordid days is parade in it as one of the luxurious throng that crowd Fifth Avenue and its adjacent tea-rooms from four till six every afternoon.

And accepting each other na?vely at their clothes value. The woman of the hall bedroom receives the same appreciative glance as the woman with a bank account of five figures; provided that outwardly she has achieved the same result. The prime mania of New York is results--or what appear to be results. Every sky-scraper in itself is an exclamation-point of accomplishment. And the matter is not how one accomplishes, but how much; so that the more sluggish European can feel the minutes being snatched and squeezed by these determined people round him and made to yield their very utmost before being allowed to pass into telling hours and days.

With this goes an air of almost offensive competency--an air that is part of the garments of the true New Yorker; as though he and he alone can compass the affair towards which he is forever hurrying. There is about him, always, the piquant insinuation that he is keeping someone waiting; that he can. I have been guilty of suspecting that this attitude, together with his painstakingly correct clothes, constitute the chief elements in the New Yorker's game of "bluff." Let him wear what the ready-made tailor describes as "snappy" clothes, and he is at once respected as successful. A man may be living on one meal a day, but if he can contrive a prosperous appearance, together with the preoccupied air of having more business than he can attend to, he is in the way of being begged to accept a position, at any moment.

No one is so ready to be "bluffed" as the American who spends his life "bluffing." In him are united the extremes of ingenuousness and shrewdness; so that often through pretending to be something he is not, he does actually come to be it. A Frenchman or a German or an Englishman is born a barber; he remains a barber and dies a barber, like his father and grandfather before him. His one idea is to be the best barber he can be; to excell every other barber in his street. The American scorns such lack of "push." If his father is a barber, he himself learns barbering only just well enough to make a living while he looks for a "bigger job." His mind is not on pleasing his clients, but on himself--five, ten, twenty years hence.

One cannot conclude an introductory sketch of some of their phenomena without a glance at their amazing architecture. The first complacent question of the newspaper interviewer to every foreigner is: "What do you think of our sky-scrapers?" And one is certainly compelled to do a prodigious deal of thinking about them, whether he will or no. For they are being torn down and hammered up higher, all over New York, till conversation to be carried on in the street must needs become a dialogue in monosyllabic shouts; while walking, in conjunction with the upheavals of new Subway tunnelling, has all the excitements of traversing an earthquake district.

This perpetual transition finds its motive in the enormous business concentrated on the small island of Manhattan, and the constant increase in office space demanded thereby. The commerce of the city persistently moves north, and the residents flee before it; leaving their fine old Knickerbocker homes to be converted into great department stores, publishing houses, but above all into the omnivorous office-building. The mass of these are hideous--dizzy, squeezed-together abortions of brick and steel--but here and there among the horrors are to be found examples of true if fantastic beauty. The Flatiron Building is one, the Woolworth Building another, the new colonnaded offices of the Grand Central Station a third. Yet the general impression of New York architecture upon the average foreigner is of illimitable confusion and ugliness.

It is because the American in art is a Futurist. He so far scorns the ideal as to have done with imagination altogether; substituting for it an invention so titanic in audacity that to the untrained it appears grotesque. In place of the ideal he has set up the one thing greater: truth. And as truth to every man is different how can he hope for concurrence in his masterpiece? The sky-scraper is more than a masterpiece: it is a fact. A fact of violence, of grim struggle, and of victory; over the earth that is too small, and the winds that rage in impotence, and the heavens that heretofore have been useless. It is the accomplished fact of man's dauntless determination to wrest from the elements that which he sees he needs; and as such it has a beauty too terrible to be described.

Here are the two prime motives waging war in the American drama of today. Time is money; whether for the American it is to mean anything more is still a question. Meanwhile every time-saving convenience that can be invented is put at his disposal, be he labouring man or governor of a state. And, as we have seen in the case of the sky-scraper, little or no heed is paid to the form of finish of the invention; its beauty is its practicability for immediate and exhaustive use.

Take that most useful of all, for example: the hotel. An Englishman goes to a hotel when he is obliged to, and then chooses the quietest he can find. Generally it has the appearance of a private house, all but the discreet brass plate on the door. He rings for a servant to admit him; his meals are served in his rooms, and weeks go by without his seeing another guest in the house. The idea is to make the hotel in as far as possible duplicate the home.

In America it is the other way round; the New Yorker in particular models his home after his hotel, and seizes every opportunity to close his own house and live for weeks at a time in one of the huge caravanseries that gobble up great areas of the city. "It is so convenient," he tells you, lounging in the gaudy lobby of one of these hideous terra-cotta structures. "No servant problem, no housekeeping worries for madame, and everything we want within reach of the telephone bell!"

Quite true, when the pompadoured princess below-stairs condescends to answer it. Otherwise you may sit in impotent rage, ten stories up, while she finishes a twenty-minute conversation with her "friend" or arranges to go to a "show" with the head barber; for in all this palace of marble staircases and frescoed ceilings, Louis Quinze suites and Russian baths there is not an ordinary bell in the room to call a servant. Everything must be ordered by telephone; and what boots it that there is a telegraph office, a stock exchange bureau, a ladies' outfitting shop, a railroad agency, a notary, a pharmacist and an osteopath in the building--if to control these conveniences one must wander through miles of corridors and be shot up and down a dozen lifts, because the telephone girl refuses to answer?

From personal experience, I should say that the servant problem is quite as tormenting in hotels as in most other American establishments. The condescension of these worthies, when they deign to supply you with some simple want, is amazing. Not only in hotels, but in well-run private houses, they seize every chance for conversation, and always turn to the subject of their own affairs--their former prosperity, the mere temporary necessity of their being in service, and their glowing prospects for the future. They insist on giving you their confidential opinion of the establishment in which you are a guest, and which is invariably far inferior to others in which they have been employed. They comment amiably on your garments, if they are pleased with them, or are quite as ready to convey that they are not. And woe to him who shows resentment! He may beseech their service henceforth in vain. If, however, he meekly accepts them as they are, they will graciously be pleased to perform for him the duties for which they are paid fabulous wages.

Women especially grow into hotel fungi of this description, sitting about the hot, over-decorated lobbies and in the huge, crowded restaurants, with nothing to do but stare and be stared at. They are a curious by-product of the energetic, capable American woman in general; and one thinks there might be salvation for them in the "housekeeping" worries they disdainfully repudiate. Still, it cannot be denied that with the serious problem of servants and the exorbitant prices of household commodities a home is far more difficult to maintain in America than in the average modern country. Hospitality under the present conditions presents features slightly careworn; and the New York hostess is apt to be more anxious than charming, and to end her career on the dismal verandas of a sanatorium for nervous diseases.

That is, that he earns in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars a month. With this he can afford to pay the household expenses, to dress himself and his wife a bit better than their position demands, to subscribe to two or three of the ten-cent magazines, and to do a play on Broadway now and then. Mrs. John of course is a matin?e fiend, and has the candy habit. These excesses must be provided for; also John's five-cent cigars and his occasional mild "spree with the boys." For the rest, they are a prudent couple; methodically religious, inordinately moral; banking a few dollars every month against the menacing rainy-day, and, if this has not arrived by vacation time in August, promptly spending the money on the lurid delights of Atlantic City or some other ocean resort. Thence they return haggard but triumphant, with a coat of tan laboriously acquired by wetting faces and arms, and then sitting for hours in the broiling sun--to impress the Tom Smiths in the flat next door that they have had a "perfectly grand time."

A na?ve, hard-working, kindly couple, severely conventional in their prejudices, impressionable as children in their affections, and with a certain persistent cleverness that shoots beyond the limitations of their type, and hints to them of the habits and manners of a finer. In them the passionate motive of self-development that dominates all American life has so far found an outlet only in demand for the conveniences and material comforts of the further advanced whom they imitate. When in the natural course of things they turn their eyes towards the culture of the Man Higher Up, they will obtain that, too. And meanwhile does not Mrs. Brown have her Tennyson Club, and John his uniform edition of Shakespeare?

Some New Yorkers who shudder at Harlem are not as lucky. I was once the guest of a lady who had just moved into her sumptuous new home on Riverside Drive. My rooms, to quote the first-class hotel circular, were replete with every luxury; I could turn on the light from seven different places; I could make the chairs into couches or the couches into chairs; I could talk by one of the marvellous ebony and silver telephones to the valet or the cook, or if I pleased to Chicago. There was nothing mortal man could invent that had not been put in those rooms, including six varieties of reading-lamps, and a bed-reading-table that shot out and arranged itself obligingly when one pushed a button.

But there was nothing to read. Apologetically, I sought my hostess. Would she allow me to pilfer the library? For a moment the lady looked blank. Then, with a smile of relief, she said: "Of course! You want some magazines. How stupid of the servants. I'll have them sent to you at once; but you know we have no library. I think books are so ugly, don't you?"

I am not hopelessly addicted to veracity, but I will set my hand and seal to this story; also to the fact that in all that palace of the superfluous there was not to my knowledge one book of any sort. Even the favourite whipped-cream novel of society was wanting; but magazines of every kind and description littered the place. The reason for this apparently inexplicable state of affairs is simple; time is money; therefore not to be expended without calculation. In the magazine the rushed business man, and the equally rushed business or society woman, has a literary quick-lunch that can be swallowed in convenient bites at odd moments during the day.

Is the society woman "looking in" at an important reception? Between a fitting at her dressmaker's, luncheon, bridge and two teas, she catches up the last Review from the pocket of her limousine, and runs over the political notes, war news, foreign events of the week. Result: "that Mrs. Newrich is really a remarkable woman!" declares the distinguished guest of the reception to his hostess. "Such a breadth of interest, such an intelligent outlook! It is genuine pleasure to meet a woman who shows some acquaintance with the affairs of the day."

And so again they hoodwink one another, each practicing the same deceptive game of superficial show; yet none suspecting any of the rest. And the magazine syndicates flourish and multiply. In this piece that is in preparation, the actors are too busy proving themselves capable of their parts really to take time to become so. To succeed with them, you must offer your dose in tabloids: highly concentrated essence of whatever it is, and always sugar-coated. Then they will swallow it promptly, and demand more. Remember, too, that what they want in the way of "culture" is not drama, or literature, or music; but excitement--of admiration, pity, the erotic or the sternly moral sense. Their nerves must be kept at a certain perpetual tension. He who overlooks this supreme fact, in creating for them, fails.

There are in America today some thousands of men and women who have taken the one step further than their fellows in that they realize this, and so are able shrewdly to pander to the national appetites. The result is a continuous outpouring of novels and short stories, plays and hybrid songs, such as in a less vast and less extravagant country would ruin one another by their very multitude; but which in the United States meet with an appalling success. Appalling, because it is not a primitive, but a too exotic, fancy that delights in them. For his mind as for his body, the American demands an overheated dwelling; when not plunged within the hectic details of a "best-seller," by way of recreation, he is apt to be immersed in the florid joys of a Broadway extravaganza.

These unique American productions, made up of large beauty choruses, magnificent scenery, gorgeous costumes, elaborate fantasies of ballet and song, bear the same relation to actual drama that the best-sellers bear to literature, and are as popular. The Hippodrome, with its huge stage accommodating four hundred people, and its enormous central tank for water spectacles, is easily first among the extravaganza houses of New York. Twice a day an eager audience, drawn from all classes of metropolitan and transient society, crowds the great amphitheatre to the doors. The performance prepared for them is on the order of a French r?vue: a combination circus and vaudeville, held together by a thin thread of plot that permits the white-flannelled youth and bejewelled maiden, who have faithfully exclaimed over each new sensation of the piece, finally to embrace one another, with the novel cry of "at last!"

This sentiment, always near the surface with Americans, grows deeper and more fervid as it localizes; leading to a curiously intense snobbism on the part of one section of the country towards another. Thus New York society sniffs at Westerners; let them approach the citadel ever so heavily armed with gold mines, they have a long siege before it surrenders to them. On the other hand, the same society smiles eagerly upon Southerners of no pocket-books at all; and feeds and f?tes and fawns upon them, because they are doomed, the minute their Southern accent is heard, to come of "a good old family." The idea of a decayed aristocracy in two-hundred-year-old America is not without comedy, but in the States Southerners are taken very solemnly, by themselves as by everyone else.

My friend of the aesthetic antipathy to books is a Southerner--or was, before gathered into the fold of the New York Four Hundred. She apologized for taking me to the Horse Show , because "no one goes any more. It's all Middle West and commuters." For the benefit of those imperfect in social geography I must explain that Middle West is the one thing worse than West, and that commuters are those unfortunates without the sacred pale, who are forced to journey to and from Manhattan by ferries or underground tubes. They are the butt of comic newspaper supplements, topical songs, and society witticisms; also the despised and over-charged "out-of-town customers" of the haughty Fifth Avenue importer.

For the latter has her own system of snobbism, quite as elaborate as that of her proudest client. They are really a remarkable mixture of superciliousness and abject servility, these Irish and Hebrew "Madame Celestes," whose thriving establishments form so conspicuous a part of the important avenue. As exponents of the vagaries of American democracy, they deserve a paragraph to themselves.

And so it continues, unctuous deference sandwiched between endearments and snubs throughout the entire conference of shopkeeper and customer; and the latter takes it all as a matter of course, though, if her own husband should venture to disagree with her on any point of judgment, she would be furious with him for a week. When I commented to one lady on these familiar blandishments and criticisms of shop people in New York, she said indulgently: "Oh, they all do it. They don't mean anything; it's only their way."

Yet I have heard that same lady hotly protest against the wife of a Colorado silver magnate daring to address her by her Christian name. "That vulgar Westerner!" she exclaimed; "the next thing she'll be calling me dear!"

But inevitably the actors must stumble and stammer, and insert false lines, before finally they shall "feel" their parts, and forge ahead to the victory of finished performance.

OFF DUTY

When one ponders what the New Yorker in his leisure hours most enjoys, one answers without hesitation: feeding. The word is not elegant, but neither is the act, as one sees it in process at the mammoth restaurants. Far heavier and more prolonged than mere eating and drinking is this serious cult of food on the part of the average Manhattanite. It has even led to the forming of a distinct "set," christened by some satirical outsider: "Lobster Society."

The typical New York feeding-place from the outside is a palace in terra cotta; from the inside, a vast galleried room or set of rooms, upheld by rose or ochre marble pillars, carpeted with thick red rugs, furnished with bright gilt chairs and heavily damasked, flower-laden tables--the whole interspersed and overtopped and surrounded by a jumble of fountains, gilt-and-onyx Sphinxes, caryatids, centaurs, bacchantes, and heaven knows what else of the superfluous and disassociated. To reach one's table, one must thread one's way through a maze of lions couchant, peacocks with spread mother o' pearl tails, and opalescent dragons that turn out to be lights: proud detail of the "million dollar decorative scheme" referred to in the advertisements of the house. Finally anchored in this sea of sumptuousness, one is confronted with the dire necessity of ordering a meal from a menu that would have staggered Epicurus.

It was convenience that until recently made it the custom for the average New York play-goer to appear at the theatre in morning dress. The tired business man could afford to go to the play, but had not the energy to change for it; so, naturally, his wife and daughter did not change either, and the orchestra presented a commonplace aspect, made up of shirtwaists and high-buttoned coats. Now, however, following the example of society, people are beginning to break away from this unattractive austerity; and theatre audiences are enlivened by a sprinkling of light frocks and white shirts.

We have already commented on the most popular type of dramatic amusement in America: the extravaganza, and musical comedy so-called; it is time now to mention the gradually developing legitimate drama, which has its able exponents in Augustus Thomas, Edward Sheldon, Eugene Walter, the late Clyde Fitch, and half a dozen others of no less insight and ability. Their plays present the stirring and highly dramatic scenes of American business and social life ; and while for the foreigner many of the situations lose their full significance--being peculiar to America, in rather greater degree than French plays are peculiar to France, and English to England--even he must be impressed with the vivid realism and powerful climax of the best American comedies.

The nation as a whole is vehemently opposed to tragedy in any form, and demands of books and plays alike that they invariably shall end well. Such brilliant exceptions as Eugene Walter's "The Easiest Way" and Sheldon's "The Nigger," only prove the rule that the successful piece must have a "happy ending." High finance plays naturally an important part as nucleus of plots; also the marriage of working girls with scions of the Upper Ten. But the playwright has only to look into the newspapers, in this country of perpetual adventure, to find enough romance and sensation to fill every theatre in New York.

It seems almost as though the people themselves are surfeited with the actual drama that surrounds them, for they are rather languid as an audience, and must be piqued by more and more startling "thrillers" before moved to enthusiasm. Even then their applause is usually directed towards the "star," in whom they take far keener interest than in the play itself. It is interesting to follow this passionate individualism of the nation that dominates its amusements as well as its activities. The player, not the play's the thing with Americans; and on theatrical bills the name of the principal actor or actress is always given the largest type, the title of the piece next largest; while the author is tucked away like an afterthought in letters that can just be seen.

Not only in the field of the "legitimate" is a big name the all-important asset of an artist. Ladies who have figured in murder trials, gentlemen whom circumstantial evidence alone has failed to prove assassins, are eagerly sought after by enterprising vaudeville managers, who beg them to accept the paltry sum of a thousand dollars a week, for showing themselves to curious crowds, and delivering a ten-minute monologue on the deficiencies of American law! How or why the name has become "big" is a matter of only financial moment; and Americans of rigid respectability flock to stare at ex-criminals, members of the under-world temporarily in the limelight, and young persons whose sole claim to distinction lies in the glamour shed by one-time royal favour. Thanks to press agents and newspapers, the affairs of this motley collection--as indeed of "stars" of every lustre--are so constantly and so intimately before the public, that one hears people of all classes discussing them as though they were their lifelong friends.

In the jerky, syncopated measures, one can almost hear between beats the familiar rush of feet, hurrying along--stumbling--halting abruptly--only to fly ahead faster. Ragtime is the pell-mell, helter-skelter, headlong spirit of America expressed in tune; and no other people, however charmed by its peculiar fascination and wild swing, can play or dance to it like Americans. It is instinctive with them; where classical music, so called, is a laboriously acquired taste.

New Yorkers in particular take their artistic hobbies very seriously; not only music and the conventional arts, but all those occult and mystic off-shoots that abound wherever there are idle people. To assuage the ennui that dogs excessive wealth, they devote themselves to all sorts of cults and intricate beliefs. Swamis, crystal-gazers, astrologers, mind-readers, and Messiahs of every kind and colour reap a luxurious harvest in New York. Women especially have a new creed for every month in the year; and discuss "the aura," and "the submerged self," and the "spiritual significance of colour," with profound solemnity. On being presented to a lady, you are apt to be asked your birth date, the number of letters in your Christian name, your favourite hue, and other momentous questions that must be cleared away before acquaintance can proceed, or even begin at all.

"John?" cries the lady. "I knew you were a John, the minute I saw you! Now, what do you think I am?"

You are sure to say a "Mabel" where she is an "Edith," or a Gladys where she is a Helen, or to commit some other blunder which takes the better part of an hour to be explained to you. Week-end parties are perfect hot-beds of occultism, each guest striving to out-argue every other in the race to gain proselytes for his religion of the moment.

The American house-party on the whole is a much more serious affair than its original English model. The anxious American hostess never quite gains that casual, easy manner of putting her house at the disposal of her guests, and then forgetting it and them. She must be always "entertaining," than which there is no more dreary persecution for the long-suffering visitor. Except for this, her hospitality is delightful; and it is a joy to leave the dust and roar of New York, and motor out to one of the many charming country houses on Long Island or up the Hudson for a peaceful week-end. Americans show great good sense in clinging to their native Colonial architecture, which lends itself admirably to the simple, well-kept lawns and old-fashioned gardens. In comparison with country estates of the old world, one misses the dignity of ancient stone and trees; but gains the airy openness and many luxuries of modern comfort.

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