When I set eyes on the sixty buildings which const.i.tute the visible part of Harvard University, I perceived that, just as Kensington had without knowing it been imitating certain streets of Boston, so certain lost little old English towns that even American tourists have not yet reached had without knowing it been imitating the courts and chimneys and windows and doorways and luscious brickwork of Harvard. Harvard had a very mellow look indeed. No trace of the wand! The European in search of tradition would find it here in bulk. I should doubt whether at Harvard modern history is studied through the daily paper--unless perchance it be in Harvard"s own daily paper. The considerableness of Harvard was attested for me by the multiplicity of its press organs. I dare say that Harvard is the only university in the world the offices of whose comic paper are housed in a separate and important building. If there had been a special press-building for Harvard"s press, I should have been startled. But when I beheld the mere comic organ in a s.p.a.cious and costly detached home that some London dailies would envy, I was struck dumb. That sole fact indicated the scale of magnificence at Harvard, and proved that the phenomenon of gold-depreciation has proceeded further at Harvard than at any other public inst.i.tution in the world.
The etiquette of Harvard is nicely calculated to heighten the material splendor of the place. Thus it is etiquette for the president, during his term of office, to make a present of a building or so to the university. Now buildings at Harvard have adopted the excellent habit of never costing less than about half a million dollars. It is also etiquette that the gifts to the university from old students shall touch a certain annual sum; they touch it. Withal, there is no architectural ostentation at Harvard. All the buildings are artistically modest; many are beautiful; scarcely one that clashes with the sober and subtle attractiveness of the whole aggregation. Nowhere is the eye offended.
One looks upon the crimson facades with the same lenient love as marks one"s att.i.tude toward those quaint and lovely English houses (so familiar to American visitors to our isle) that are all picturesqueness and no bath-room. That is the external effect. a.s.suredly entering some of those storied doorways, one would antic.i.p.ate inconveniences and what is called "Old World charm" within.
But within one discovers simply naught but the very latest, the very dearest, the very best of everything that is luxurious. I was ushered into a most princely apartment, grandiose in dimensions, superbly furnished and decorated, lighted with rich discretion, heated to a turn.
Portraits by John Sargent hung on the vast walls, and a score of other manifestations of art rivaled these in the attention of the stranger. No club in London could match this chamber. It was, I believe, a sort of lounge for the students. Anyhow, a few students were lounging in it; only a few--there was no rush for the privilege. And the few loungers were really lounging, in the wonderful sinuous postures of youth. They might have been lounging in a railway station or a barn instead of amid portraits by John Sargent.
The squash-racket court was an example of another kind of luxury, very different from the cunning combinations of pictured walls, books, carved wood, and deep-piled carpets, but not less authentic. The dining-hall seating a thousand simultaneously was another. Here I witnessed the laying of dinner-tables by negroes. I noted that the sudden sight of me instantly convinced one negro, engaged in the manipulation of pats of b.u.t.ter, that a fork would be more in keeping with the Harvard tradition than his fingers, and I was humanly glad thus to learn that the secret reality of table-laying is the same in two continents. I saw not the dining of the thousand. In fact, I doubt whether in all I saw one hundred of the six thousand students. They had mysteriously vanished from all the resorts of perfect luxury provided for them. Possibly they were withdrawn into the privacies of the thousands of suites--each containing bedroom, sitting-room, bath-room, and telephone--which I understood are allotted to them for lairs. I left Harvard with a very clear impression of its frank welcoming hospitality and of its extraordinary luxury.
And as I came out of the final portal I happened to meet a student actually carrying his own portmanteau--and rather tugging at it. I regretted this chance. The spectacle clashed, and ought to have been contrary to etiquette. That student should in propriety have been followed by a Nigerian, Liberian, or Senegambian, carrying his portmanteau.
My visits to other universities were about as brief, stirring, suggestive, and incomplete as those to Columbia and Harvard. I repeat that I never actually saw the educational machine in motion. What it seemed to me that I saw in each case was a tremendous mechanical apparatus at rest, a rich, empty frame, an organism waiting for the word that would break its trance. The fault was, of course, wholly mine. I find upon reflection that the universities which I recall with the most sympathy are those in which I had the largest opportunity of listening to the informal talk of the faculty and its wife. I heard some mighty talking upon occasion--and in particular I sat willing at the feet of a president who could mingle limericks and other drollery, the humanities, science, modern linguistics, and economics in a manner which must surely make him historic.
Education, like most things except high-cla.s.s cookery, must be judged by ultimate results; and though it may not be possible to pa.s.s any verdict on current educational methods (especially when you do not happen to have even seen them in action), one can to a certain extent a.s.sess the values of past education by reference to the demeanor of adults who have been through it. One of the chief aims of education should be to stimulate the great virtue of curiosity. The worst detractors of the American race--and there are some severe ones in New York, London, and Paris!--will not be able to deny that an unusually active curiosity is a marked characteristic of the race. Only they twist that very characteristic into an excuse for still further detraction. They will, for example, point to the "hordes" (a word which they regard as indispensable in this connection) of American tourists who insist on seeing everything of historic or artistic interest that is visible in Europe. The plausible argument is that the ma.s.s of such tourists are inferior in intellect and taste to the general level of Europeans who display curiosity about history or art. Which is probably true. But it ought to be remembered by us Europeans (and in sackcloth!) that the ma.s.s of us with money to spend on pleasure are utterly indifferent to history and art. The European dilettante goes to the Uffizi and sees a shopkeeper from Milwaukee gazing ignorantly at a masterpiece, and says: "How inferior this shopkeeper from Milwaukee is to me! The American is an inartistic race!" But what about the shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens? The shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens will be flirting about on some entirely ba.n.a.l beach--Scarborough or Trouville--and for all he knows or cares Leonardo da Vinci might have been a cabman; and yet the loveliest things in the world are, relatively speaking, at his door! When the European shopkeeper gets as far as Lucerne in August, he thinks that a journey of twenty-four hours ent.i.tles him to rank a little lower than Columbus. It was an enormous feat for him to reach Lucerne, and he must have credit for it, though his interest in art is in no wise thereby demonstrated. One has to admit that he now goes to Lucerne in hordes. Praise be to him! But I imagine that the American horde "hustling for culture" in no matter what historic center will compare pretty favorably with the European horde in such spots as Lucerne.
All general curiosity is, to my mind, righteousness, and I so count it to the American. Not that I think that American curiosity is always the highest form of curiosity, or that it is not limited. With its apparent omnivorousness it is often superficial and too easily satisfied--particularly by mere words. Very seldom is it profound. It is apt to browse agreeably on externals. The American, like Anglo-Saxons generally, rarely shows a pa.s.sionate and yet honest curiosity about himself or his country, which is curiosity at its finest. He will divide things into pleasant and unpleasant, and his curiosity is trained to stop at the frontier of the latter--an Anglo-Saxon device for being comfortable in your mind! He likes to know what others think of him and his country, but he is not very keen on knowing what he really thinks on these subjects himself.
The highest form of curiosity is apt to be painful sometimes. (And yet who that has practised it would give it up?) It also demands intellectual honesty--a quality which has been denied by Heaven to all Anglo-Saxon races, but which nevertheless a proper education ought in the end to achieve. Were I asked whether I saw in America any improvement upon Britain in the supreme matter of intellectual honesty, I should reply, No. I seemed to see in America precisely the same tendency as in Britain to pretend, for the sake of instant comfort, that things are not what they are, the same timid but determined dislike of the whole truth, the same capacity to be shocked by notorious and universal phenomena, the same delusion that a refusal to look at these phenomena is equivalent to the destruction of these phenomena, the same flaccid sentimentality which vitiates practically all Anglo-Saxon art.
And I have stood in the streets of New York, as I have stood in the streets of London, and longed with an intense nostalgia for one hour of Paris, where, amid a deplorable decadence, intellectual honesty is widely discoverable, and where absolutely straight thinking and talking is not mistaken for cynicism.
Another test of education is the feeling for art, and the creation of an environment which encourages the increase of artistic talent. (And be it noted in pa.s.sing that the intellectually honest races, the Latin, have been the most artistic, for the mere reason that intellectual dishonesty is just sentimentality, and sentimentality is the destroying poison of art.) Now the most exacerbating experience that fell to me in America--and it fell more than once--was to hear in discreetly lighted and luxurious drawing-rooms, amid various mural proofs of trained taste, and usually from the lips of an elegantly Europeanized American woman with a sad, agreeable smile: "There is no art in the United States.... I feel like an exile." A number of these exiles, each believing himself or herself to be a solitary lamp in the awful darkness, are dotted up and down the great cities, and it is a curious fact that they bitterly despise one another. In so doing they are not very wrong. For, in the first place, these people, like nearly all dilettanti of art, are extremely unreliable judges of racial characteristics. Their mentality is allied to that of the praisers of time past, who, having read _Tom Jones_ and _Clarissa_, are incapable of comprehending that the immense majority of novels produced in the eighteenth century were nevertheless terrible rubbish. They go to a foreign land, deliberately confine their attention to the artistic manifestations of that country, and then exclaim in ecstasy: "What an artistic country this is! How different from my own!" To the same cla.s.s belong certain artistic visitors to the United States who, having in their own country deliberately cut themselves off from intercourse with ordinary inartistic persons, visit America, and, meeting there the average man and woman in bulk, frown superiorly and exclaim: "This Philistine race thinks of nothing but dollars!" They cannot see the yet quite evident truth that the rank and file of every land is about equally inartistic. Modern Italy may in the ma.s.s be more lyrical than America, but in either architecture or painting Italy is simply not to be named with America.
[Ill.u.s.tration: MITCh.e.l.l TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS--UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO]
Further, and in the second place, these people never did and never will look in the right quarters for vital art. A really original artist struggling under their very noses has small chance of being recognized by them, the reason being that they are imitative, with no real opinion of their own. They a.s.sociate art with Florentine frames, matinee hats, distant museums, and clever talk full of allusions to the dead. It would not occur to them to search for American art in the architecture of railway stations and the draftsmanship and sketch-writing of newspapers and magazines, because they have not the wit to learn that genuine art flourishes best in the atmosphere of genuine popular demand.
Even so, with all their blindness, it is unnatural that they should not see and take pride in the spectacular historical facts which prove their country to be less negligible in art than they would a.s.sert. I do not mean the existence in America of huge and glorious collections of European masters. I have visited some of these collections, and have taken keen pleasure therein. But I perceive in them no national significance--no more national significance than I perceive in the endowment of splendid orchestras to play foreign music under foreign conductors, or in the fashionable crowding of cla.s.sical concerts.
Indeed, it was a somewhat melancholy experience to spend hours in a private palace crammed with artistic loveliness that was apparently beloved and understood, and to hear not one single word disclosing the slightest interest in modern American art. No, as a working artist myself, I was more impressed and rea.s.sured by such a sight as the Innes room at the colossal Art Inst.i.tute of Chicago than by all the collections of old masters in America, though I do not regard Innes as a very distinguished artist. The aforesaid dilettanti would naturally condescend to the Innes room at Chicago"s inst.i.tute, as to the long-sustained, difficult effort which is being made by a school of Chicago sculptors for the monumental ornamentation of Chicago. But the dilettanti have accomplished a wonderful feat of unnaturalness in forgetting that their poor, inartistic Philistine country did provide, _inter alia_, the great writer who has influenced French imaginative writers more deeply than any other foreign writer since Byron--Edgar Allan Poe; did produce one of the world"s supreme poets--Whitman; did produce the greatest pure humorist of modern times; did produce the miraculous Henry James; did produce Stanford White and the incomparable McKim; and did produce the only two Anglo-Saxon personalities who in graphic art have been able to impose themselves on modern Europe--Whistler and John Sargent.
In the matter of graphic art, I have known so many American painters in Paris that I was particularly anxious to see what American painting was like at home. My first adventures were not satisfactory. I trudged through enormous exhibitions, and they filled me with just the same feeling of desolation and misery that I experienced at the Royal Academy, London, or the Societe des Artistes Francais, Paris. In miles of slippery exercise I saw almost nothing that could interest an intelligent amateur who had pa.s.sed a notable portion of his life in studios. The first modern American painting that arrested me was one by Grover, of Chicago. I remember it with grat.i.tude. Often, especially in New York, I was called upon by stay-at-home dilettanti to admire the work of some shy favorite, and with the best will in the world I could not, on account of his too obvious sentimentality. In Boston I was authoritatively informed that the finest painting in the whole world was at that moment being done by a group of Boston artists in Boston. But as I had no opportunity to see their work, I cannot offer an opinion on the proud claim. My gloom was becoming permanent, when one wet day I invaded, not easily, the Macdowell Club, and, while listening to a chorus rehearsal of Liszt"s "St. Elizabeth" made the acquaintance of really interesting pictures by artists such as Irving R. Wiles, Jonas Lie, Henri, Mrs. Johansen, and Brimley, of whom previously I had known nothing. From that moment I progressed. I met the work of James Preston, and of other men who can truly paint.
All these, however, with all their piquant merits, were Parisianized.
They could have put up a good show in Paris and emerged from French criticism with dignity. Whereas there is one American painter who has achieved a reputation on the tongues of men in Europe without (it is said) having been influenced by Europe, or even having exhibited there.
I mean Winslow Homer. I had often heard of Winslow Homer from connoisseurs who had earned my respect, and a.s.suredly one of my reasons for coming to America was to see Winslow Homer"s pictures. My first introduction to his oil-paintings was a shock. I did not like them, and I kept on not liking them. I found them theatrical and violent in conception, rather conventional in design, and repellent in color. I thought the painter"s att.i.tude toward sea and rock and sky decidedly sentimental beneath its wilful harshness. And I should have left America with broken hopes of Winslow Homer if an enthusiast for State-patronized art had not insisted on taking me to the State Museum at Indianapolis.
In this agreeable and interesting museum there happened to be a temporary loan exhibit of water-colors by Winslow Homer. Which water-colors were clearly the productions of a master. They forced me to reconsider my views of Homer"s work in general. They were beautiful; they thrilled; they were genuine American; there is nothing else like them. I shall never forget the pleasure I felt in unexpectedly encountering these summary and highly distinguished sketches in the quietude of Indianapolis. I would have liked to collect a trainful of New York, Chicago, and Boston dilettanti, and lead them by the ears to the unpretentious museum at Indianapolis, and force them to regard fixedly these striking creations. Not that I should expect appreciation from them! (Indianapolis, I discovered, was able to keep perfectly calm in front of the Winslow Homer water-colors.) But their observations would have been diverting.
VIII
CITIZENS
Nothing in New York fascinated me as much as the indications of the vast and mult.i.tudinous straitened middle-cla.s.s life that is lived there; the average, respectable, difficult, struggling existence. I would always regard this medium plane of the social organism with more interest than the upper and lower planes. And in New York the enormity of it becomes spectacular. As I pa.s.sed in Elevated trains across the end of street after street, and street after street, and saw so many of them just alike, and saw so many similar faces mysteriously peering in the same posture between the same curtains through the same windows of the same great houses; and saw canaries in cages, and enfeebled plants in pots, and bows of ribbon, and glints of picture-frames; and saw crowd after dense crowd fighting down on the cobbled roads for the fearful privilege of entering a surface-car--I had, or seemed to have, a composite vision of the general life of the city.
And what sharpened and stimulated the vision more than anything else was the innumerable flashing glimpses of immense torn clouds of clean linen, or linen almost clean, fluttering and shaking in withdrawn courtyards between rows and rows of humanized windows. This domestic detail, repugnant possibly to some, was particularly impressive to me; it was the visible index of what life really is on a costly rock ruled in all material essentials by trusts, corporations, and the grand principle of tipping.
I would have liked to live this life, for a s.p.a.ce, in any one of half a million restricted flats, with not quite enough s.p.a.ce, not quite enough air, not quite enough dollars, and a vast deal too much continual strain on the nerves. I would have liked to come to close quarters with it, and get its subtle and sinister toxin incurably into my system. Could I have done so, could I have partic.i.p.ated in the least of the uncountable daily dramas of which the externals are exposed to the gaze of any starer in an Elevated, I should have known what New York truly meant to New-Yorkers, and what was the real immediate effect of average education reacting on average character in average circ.u.mstances; and the knowledge would have been precious and exciting beyond all knowledge of the staggering "wonders" of the capital. But, of course, I could not approach so close to reality; the visiting stranger seldom can; he must be content with his imaginative visions.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PART OF THE DAILY ROUND OF THE INDOMITABLE NEW YORK WOMAN]
Now and then I had the good-fortune to come across illuminating stories of New York dailiness, tales of no important event, but which lit up for me the whole expanse of existence in the hinterlands of the Elevated.
As, for instance, the following. The tiny young wife of the ambitious and feverish young man is coming home in the winter afternoon. She is forced to take the street-car, and in order to take it she is forced to fight. To fight, physically, is part of the daily round of the average fragile, pale, indomitable New York woman. In the swaying crowd she turns her head several times, and in tones of ever-increasing politeness requests a huge male animal behind her to refrain from pushing. He does not refrain. Being skilled, as a mariner is skilled in beaching himself and a boat on a surfy sh.o.r.e, she does ultimately achieve the inside of the car, and she sinks down therein apparently exhausted. The huge male animal follows, and as he pa.s.ses her, infuriated by her indestructible politeness, he sticks his head against her little one and says, threateningly, "What"s the matter with you, anyway?" He could crush her like a b.u.t.terfly, and, moreover, she is about ready to faint. But suddenly, in uncontrollable anger, she lifts that tiny gloved hand and catches the huge male animal a smart smack in the face. "Can"t you be polite?" she hisses. Then she drops back, blushing, horrified by what she has done. She sees another man throw the aghast male animal violently out of the car, and then salute her with: "Madam, I take off my hat to you." And the tired car settles down to apathy, for, after all, the incident is in its essence part of the dailiness of New York.
The young wife gets home, obsessed by the fact that she has struck a man in the face in a public vehicle. She is still blushing when she relates the affair in a rush of talk to another young wife in the flat next to hers. "For Heaven"s sake don"t tell my husband," she implores. "If he knew he"d leave me forever!" And the young husband comes home, after his own personal dose of street-car, preoccupied, fatigued, nervous, hungry, demanding to be loved. And the young wife has to behave as though she had been lounging all the afternoon in a tea-gown on a soft sofa.
Curious that, although she is afraid of her husband"s wrath, the temptation to tell him grows stronger! Indeed, is it not a rather fine thing that she has done, and was not the salute of the admiring male flattering and sweet? Not many tiny wives would have had the pluck to slap a brute"s face. She tells the young husband. It is an error of tact on her part. For he, secretly exacerbated, was waiting for just such an excuse to let himself go. He is angry, he is outraged--as she had said he would be. What--his wife, _his_-etc., etc.!
A night full of everything except sleep; full of Elevated and rumbling cars, and trumps of autos, and the eternal liveliness of the cobbled street, and all incomprehensible noises, and stuffiness, and the sense of other human beings too close above, too close below, and to the left and to the right, and before and behind, the sense that there are too many people on earth! What New-Yorker does not know the wakings after the febrile doze that ends such a night? The nerves like taut strings; love turned into homicidal hatred; and the radiator d.a.m.nably tapping, tapping!... The young husband afoot and shaved and inexpensively elegant, and he is demanding his fried eggs. The young wife is afoot, too, manoeuvering against the conspiracies of the janitor, who lives far below out of sight, but who permeates her small flat like a malignant influence.... Hear the whistling of the dumb-waiter!... Eggs are demanded, authoritatively, bitterly. If glances could kill, not only that flat but the whole house would be strewn with corpses.... Eggs!...
Something happens, something arrives, something snaps; a spell is broken and horror is let loose. "Take your eggs!" cries the tiny wife, in a pa.s.sion. The eggs fly across the table, and the front of a man"s suit is ruined. She sits down and fairly weeps, appalled at herself. Last evening she was punishing males; this morning she turns eggs into missiles, she a loving, an ambitious, an intensely respectable young wife! As for him, he sits motionless, silent, decorated with the colors of eggs, a graduate of a famous university. Calamity has brought him also to his senses. Still weeping, she puts on her hat and jacket.
"Where are you going?" he asks, solemnly, no longer homicidal, no longer hungry. "I must hurry to the cleaners for your other suit!" says she, tragic. And she hurries....
A shocking story, a sordid story, you say. Not a bit! They are young; they have the incomparable virtue of youthfulness. It is naught, all that! The point of the story is that it ill.u.s.trates New York--a New York more authentic than the s.p.a.ciousness of upper Fifth Avenue or the unnatural dailiness of grand hotels. I like it.
You may see that couple later in a suburban house--a real home for the time being, with a colorable imitation of a garden all about it, and the "finest suburban railway service in the world": the whole being a frame and environment for the rearing of children. I have sat at dinner in such houses, and the talk was of nothing but children; and anybody who possessed any children, or any reliable knowledge of the ways of children, was sure of a respectable hearing and warm interest. If one said, "By the way, I think I may have a photograph of the kid in my pocket," every eye would reply immediately: "Out with it, man--or woman!--and don"t pretend you don"t always carry the photograph with you on purpose to show it off!" In such a house it is proved that children are unmatched as an exhaustless subject of conversation. And the conversation is rendered more thrilling by the sense of partially tamed children-children fully aware of their supremacy--prowling to and fro unseen in muddy boots and torn pinafores, and speculating in their realistic way upon the mysteriousness of adults.
"We are keen on children here," says the youngish father, frankly. He is altered now from the man he was when he inhabited a diminutive flat in the full swirl of New York. His face is calmer, milder, more benevolent, and more resignedly worried. And a.s.suredly no one would recognize in him the youth who howled murderously at university football matches and cried with monstrous ferocity at sight of danger from the opposing colors: "Kill him! Kill him for me! I can"t stand his red stockings coming up the field!" Yet it is the same man. And this father, too, is the fruit of university education; and further, one feels that his pa.s.sion for his progeny is one of the chief causes of American interest in education. He and his like are at the root of the modern university--not the millionaires. In Chicago I was charmed to hear it stoutly and even challengingly maintained that the root of Chicago University was not Mr. Rockefeller, but the parents of Chicago.
a.s.suming that the couple have no children, there is a good chance of catching them later, splendidly miserable, in a high-cla.s.s apartment-house, where the entire daily adventure of living is taken out of your hands and done for you, and you pay a heavy price in order to be deprived of one of the main interests of existence. The apartment-house ranks in my opinion among the more pernicious influences in American life. As an inst.i.tution it is unhappily establishing itself in England, and in England it is terrible. I doubt if it is less terrible in its native land. It is anti-social because it works always against the preservation of the family unit, and because it is unfair to children, and because it prevents the full flowering of an individuality. (n.o.body can be himself in an apartment-house; if he tried that game he would instantly be thrown out.) It is immoral because it fosters bribery and because it is pretentious itself and encourages pretense in its victims.
It is unfavorable to the growth of taste because its decorations and furniture are and must be ugly; they descend to the artistic standard of the vulgarest people in it, and have not even the merit of being the expression of any individuality at all. It is enervating because it favors the creation of a race that can do absolutely nothing for itself.
It is unhealthy because it is sometimes less clean than it seems, and because often it forces its victims to eat in a dining-room whose walls are a distressing panorama of Swiss scenery, and because its cuisine is and must be at best mediocre, since meals at once sound and showy cannot be prepared wholesale.
Some apartment-houses are better than others; many are possibly marvels of organization and value for money. But none can wholly escape the indictment. The inst.i.tution itself, though it may well be a natural and inevitable by-product of racial evolution, is bad. An experienced dweller in apartment-houses said to me, of a seeming-magnificent house which I had visited and sampled: "We pay six hundred dollars for two poor little rooms and a bath-room, and twenty-five dollars a week for board, whether we eat or not. The food is very bad. It is all kept hot for about an hour, on steam, so that every dish tastes of laundry.
Everything is an extra. Telephone--lights--tips--especially tips. I tip everybody. I even tip the _chef_. I tip the _chef_ so that, when I am utterly sick of his fanciness and prefer a mere chop or a steak, he will choose me an eatable chop or steak. And that"s how things go on!"
My true and candid friend, the experienced dweller in apartment-houses, was, I have good reason to believe, an honorable man. And it is therefore a considerable tribute to the malefic influence of apartment-house life that he had no suspicion of the gross anti-social immorality of his act in tipping the _chef_. Clearly it was an act calculated to undermine the _chef"s_ virtue. If all the other experienced dwellers did the same, it was also a silly act, producing no good effect at all. But if only a few of them did it, then it was an act which resulted in the remainder of the victims being deprived of their full, fair chance of getting eatable chops or steaks. My friend"s proper course was obviously to have kicked up a row, and to have kicked up a row in a fashion so clever that the management would not put him into the street. He ought to have organized a committee of protest, he ought to have convened meetings for the outlet of public opinion, he ought to have persevered day after day and evening after evening, until the management had been forced to exclude uneatable chops and steaks utterly from their palatial premises and to exact the honest performance of duty from each and all of the staff. In the end it would have dawned upon the management that inedible food was just as much out of place in the restaurant as counterfeit bills and coins at the cash-desk. The proper course would have been difficult and tiresome. The proper course often is. My friend took the easy, wicked course. That is to say, he exhibited a complete lack of public spirit.
An apartment-house is only an apartment-house; whereas the republic is the republic. And yet I permit myself to think that the one may conceivably be the mirror of the other. And I do positively think that American education does not altogether succeed in the very important business of inculcating public spirit into young citizens. I judge merely by results. Most peoples fail in the high quality of public spirit; and the American perhaps not more so than the rest. Perhaps all I ought to say is that according to my own limited observation public spirit is not among the shining attributes of the United States citizen.
And even to that statement there will be animated demur. For have not the citizens of the United States been conspicuous for their public spirit?...
It depends on what is meant by public spirit--that is, public spirit in its finer forms. I know what I do _not_ mean by public spirit. I was talking once to a member of an important and highly cultivated social community, and he startled me by remarking:
"The major vices do not exist in this community at all."
I was prepared to credit that such Commandments as the Second and Sixth were not broken in that community. But I really had doubts about some others, such as the Seventh and Tenth. However, he a.s.sured me that such transgressions were unknown.
"What do you _do_ here?" I asked.