Читать книгу The Land of Contrasts: A Briton's View of His American Kin - James F. Muirhead - Страница 11

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By "society" I do not mean that limited body which, whether as the Upper Ten Thousand of London or as the Four Hundred of New York, usually arrogates the title. Such narrowness of definition seems peculiarly out of place in the vigorous democracy of the West. By society I understand the great body of fairly well-educated and fairly well-mannered people, whose means and inclinations lead them to associate with each other on terms of equality for the ordinary purposes of good fellowship. Such people, not being fenced in by conventional barriers and owning no special or obtrusive privileges, represent much more fully and naturally the characteristic national traits of their country; and their ways and customs are the most fruitful field for a comparative study of national character. The daughters of dukes and princes can hardly be taken as typical English girls, since the conditions of their life are so vastly different from those of the huge majority of the species—conditions which deny a really natural or normal development to all but the choicest and strongest souls. So the daughter of a New York multimillionaire, who has been brought up to regard a British duke or an Italian prince as her natural partner for life, does not look out on the world through genuinely American spectacles, but is biassed by a point of view which may be somewhat paradoxically termed the "cosmopolitan-exclusive." As Mr. Henry James puts it: "After all, what one sees on a Newport piazza is not America; it is the back of Europe."

There are, however, reasons special to the United States why we should not regard the "Newport set" as typical of American society. Illustrious foreign visitors fall not unnaturally into this mistake; even so keen a critic as M. Bourget leans this way, though Mr. Bryce gives another proof of his eminent sanity and good sense by his avoidance of the tempting error. But, as Walt Whitman says, "The pulse-beats of the nation are never to be found in the sure-to-be-put-forward-on-such-occasions citizens." European fashionable society, however unworthy many of its members may be, and however relaxed its rules of admission have become, has its roots in an honourable past; its theory is fine; not all the big names of the British aristocracy can be traced back to strong ales or weak (Lucy) Waters. Even those who desire the abolition of the House of Peers, or look on it, with Bagehot, as "a vapid accumulation of torpid comfort," cannot deny that it is an institution that has grown up naturally with the country, and that it is only now (if even now) that it is felt with anything like universality to be an anomaly. The American society which is typified by the four hundred of New York, the society which marries its daughters to English peers, is in a very different position. It is of mushroom growth even according to American standards; it has theoretically no right to exist; it is entirely at variance with the spirit of the country and contradictory of its political system; it is almost solely conditioned by wealth;[6] it is disregarded if not despised by nine-tenths of the population; it does not really count. However seriously the little cliques of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia may take themselves, they are not regarded seriously by the rest of the country in any degree comparable to the attitude of the British Philistine towards the British Barbarian. Without the appropriate background of king and nobility, the whole system is ridiculous; it has no national basis. The source of its honour is ineradicably tainted. It is the reductio ad absurdum of the idea of aristocratic society. It is divorced from the real body of democracy. It sets no authoritative standard of taste. If anything could reconcile the British Radical to his House of Lords, it would be the rankness of taste, the irresponsible freaks of individual caprice, that rule in a country where there is no carefully polished noblesse to set the pattern. George William Curtis puts the case well: "Fine society is no exotic, does not avoid, but all that does not belong to it drops away like water from a smooth statue. We are still peasants and parvenues, although we call each other princes and build palaces. Before we are three centuries old we are endeavouring to surpass, by imitating, the results of all art and civilisation and social genius beyond the sea. By elevating the standard of expense we hope to secure select society, but have only aggravated the necessity of a labour integrally fatal to the kind of society we seek."

It would, of course, be a serious mistake to assume that, because there are no titles and no theory of caste in the United States, there are no social distinctions worth the trouble of recognition. Besides the crudely obvious elevation of wealth and "smartness" already referred to, there are inner circles of good birth, of culture, and so on, which are none the less practically recognised because they are theoretically ignored. Of such are the old Dutch clans of New York, which still, I am informed, regard families like the Vanderbilts as upstarts and parvenues. In Chicago there is said to be an inner circle of forty or fifty families which is recognised as the "best society," though by no means composed of the richest citizens. In Boston, though the Almighty Dollar now plays a much more important rôle than before, it is still a combination of culture and ancestry that sets the most highly prized hall-mark on the social items. And indeed the heredity of such families as the Quincys, the Lowells, the Winthrops, and the Adamses, which have maintained their superior position for generations, through sheer force of ability and character, without the external buttresses of primogeniture and entail, may safely measure itself against the stained lineage of many European families of high title. The very absence of titular distinction often causes the lines to be more clearly drawn; as Mr. Charles Dudley Warner says: "Popular commingling in pleasure resorts is safe enough in aristocratic countries, but it will not answer in a republic." There is, however, no universal theory that holds good from New York to California; and hence the generalising foreigner is apt to see nothing but practical as well as theoretical equality.

In spite of anything in the foregoing that may seem incompatible, the fact remains that the distinguishing feature of American society, as contrasted with the societies of Europe, is the greater approach to equality that it has made. It is in this sphere, and not in those of industry, law, or politics, that the British observer must feel that the American breathes a distinctly more liberal and democratic air than he. The processes of endosmose and exosmose go on under much freer conditions; the individual particle is much more ready to filtrate up or down to its proper level. Mr. W.D. Howells writes that "once good society contained only persons of noble or gentle birth; then persons of genteel or sacred callings were admitted; now it welcomes to its level everyone of agreeable manners or cultivated mind;" and this, which may be true of modern society in general, is infinitely more true in America than elsewhere. It might almost be asserted that everyone in America ultimately finds his proper social niche; that while many are excluded from the circles for which they think themselves adapted, practically none are shut off from their really harmonious milieu. The process of segregation is deprived to a large extent of the disagreeableness consequent upon a rigid table of precedence. Nothing surprises an American more in London society than the uneasy sense of inferiority that many a distinguished man of letters will show in the presence of a noble lord. No amount of philosophy enables one to rise entirely superior to the trammels of early training and hoary association. Even when the great novelist feels himself as at least on a level with his ducal interlocutor, he cannot ignore the fact that his fellow-guests do not share his opinion. Now, without going the length of asserting that there is absolutely nothing of this kind in the intercourse of the American author with the American railroad magnate, it may be safely stated that the general tone of society in America makes such an attitude rare and unlikely. There social equality has become an instinct, and the ruling note of good society is of pleasant cameraderie, without condescension on the one hand or fawning on the other. "The democratic system deprives people of weapons that everyone does not equally possess. No one is formidable; no one is on stilts; no one has great pretensions or any recognised right to be arrogant." (Henry James.) The spirit of goodwill, of a desire to make others happy (especially when it does not incommode you to do so), swings through a much larger arc in American society than in English. One can be surer of one's self, without either an overweening self-conceit or the assumption of brassy self-assertion.

The main rock of offence in American society is, perhaps, its tendency to attach undue importance to materialistic effects. Plain living with high thinking is not so much of an American formula as one would wish. In the smart set of New York, and in other places mutatis mutandis, this shows itself in an appallingly vulgar and ostentatious display of mere purchase power. We are expected to find something grand in the fact that an entertainment costs so much; there is little recognition of the truth that a man who spends $100 where $10 would meet all the demands of good taste is not only a bad economist, but essentially bourgeois and torné in soul. Even roses are vulgarised, if that be possible, by production in the almost obtrusively handsome variety known as the "American Beauty," and by being heaped up like hay-stacks in the reception rooms. At a recent fashionable marriage in New York no fewer than 20,000 sprays of lily of the valley are reported to have been used. A short time ago a wedding party travelled from Chicago to Burlington (Iowa) on a specially constructed train which cost £100,000 to build; the fortunes of the heads of the few families represented aggregated £100,000,000. The private drawing-room cars of millionaires are too handsome; they do not indicate so much a necessity of taste as a craving to spend. Many of the best hotels are characterised by a tasteless magnificence which annoys rather than attracts the artistic sense. At one hotel I stayed at in a fashionable watering-place the cheapest bedroom cost £1 a night; but I did not find that its costly tapestry hangings, huge Japanese vases, and elaborately carved furniture helped me to woo sweet slumber any more successfully than the simple equipments of an English village inn. Indeed, they rather suggested insomnia, just as the ominous name of "Macbeth," affixed to one of the bedrooms in the Shakespeare Hotel at Stratford-on-Avon, immediately suggested the line "Macbeth doth murder sleep."

This materialistic tendency, however, which its defenders call a higher standard of comfort, is not confined to the circles of the millionaires; it crops out more or less at all the different levels. Americans seem a little more dependent on bodily comforts than Englishmen, a little more apt to coddle themselves, a little less hardy. They are more susceptible to variations of temperature, and hence the prevalent over-heating of their houses, hotels, and railway-cars. A very slight shower will send an American into his overshoes.[7] There is more of a self-conscious effort in the encouragement of manly sports. Americans seldom walk when they can ride. The girls are apt to be annoyed if a pleasure-party be not carried out so as to provide in the fullest way for their personal comfort.

This last sentence suggests a social practice of the United States which, perhaps, may come under the topic we are at present discussing. I mean the custom by which girls allow their young men friends to incur expense in their behalf. I am aware that this custom is on the wane in the older cities, that the most refined girls in all parts of the Union dislike it, that it is "bad form" in many circles. In the bowling-club to which I had the pleasure to belong the ladies paid their subscriptions "like a man;" when I drove out on sleigh-parties, the girls insisted on paying their share of the expense. The fact, however, remains that, speaking generally and taking class for class, the American girl allows her admirers to spend their money on her much more freely than the English girl. A man is considered mean if he does not pay the car-fare of his girl companion; a girl will allow a man who is merely a "friend" to take her to the theatre, fetching her and taking her home in a carriage hired at exorbitant rates. The Illustrated American (Jan. 19, 1895) writes:

The advanced ideas prevalent in this country regarding the relations of the opposite sexes make it not only proper, but necessary, that a young man with serious intentions shall take his sweetheart out, give her presents, send her flowers, go driving with her, and in numberless little ways incur expense. This is all very delightful for her, but to him it means ruin. And at the end he may find that she was only flirting with him.

In fact, whenever a young man and a young woman are associated in any enterprise, it is quite usual for the young man to pay for both. On the whole, this custom seems an undesirable one. It is so much a matter of habit that the American girl usually plays her part in the matter with absolute innocence and unconsciousness; she feels no more obligation than an English girl would for the opening of a door. The young man also takes it as a matter of course, and does not in the least presume on his services. But still, I think, it has a slight tendency to rub the bloom off what ought to be the most delicate and ethereal form of social intercourse. It favours the well-to-do youth by an additional handicap. It throws another obstacle in the track of poverty and thrift. It is contrary to the spirit of democratic equality; the woman who accepts such attentions is tacitly allowing that she is not on the same footing as man. On reflection it must grate a little on the finest feelings. There seems to me little doubt that it will gradually die out in circles to which it would be strange in Europe.

On the whole, however, even with such drawbacks as the above, the social relationship of the sexes in the United States is one of the many points in which the new surpasses the old. The American girl is thrown into such free and ample relations with the American boy from her earliest youth up that she is very apt to look upon him simply as a girl of a stronger growth. Some such word as the German Geschwister is needed to embrace the "young creatures" who, in petticoats or trousers, form the genuine democracy of American youth. Up to the doors of college, and often even beyond them, the boy and girl have been "co-educated;" at the high school the boy has probably had a woman for his teacher, at least in some branches, up to his sixteenth or seventeenth year. The hours of recreation are often spent in pastimes in which girls may share. In some of the most characteristic of American amusements, such as the "coasting" of winter, girls take a prominent place. There is no effort on the part of elders to play the spy on the meetings of boy or girl, or to place obstacles in their way. They are not thought of as opposite sexes; it is "just all the young people together." The result is a spirit of absolute good comradeship. There is little atmosphere of the unknown or the mysterious about the opposite sex. The love that leads to marriage is thus apt to be the product of a wider experience, and to be based on a more intimate knowledge. The sentimental may cry fie on so clear-sighted a Cupid, but the sensible cannot but rejoice over anything that tends to the undoing of the phrase "lottery of marriage."

That the ideal attitude towards and in marriage has been attained in average American society I should be the last to assert. The way in which American wives leave their husbands toiling in the sweltering city while they themselves fleet the time in Europe would alone give me pause. But I am here concerned with the relative and not the absolute; and my contention is that the average marriage in America is apt to be made under conditions which, compared with those of other nations, increase the chances of happiness. A great deal has been said and written about the inconsistency of the marriage laws of the different States, and much cheap wit has been fired off at the fatal facility of divorce in the United States; but I could not ascertain from my own observation that these defects touched any very great proportion of the population, or played any larger part in American society, as I have defined it, than the differences between the marriage laws of England and Scotland do in our own island. M. Bourget, quite arbitrarily and (I think) with a trace of the proverbial Gallic way of looking at the relations of the sexes, has attributed the admitted moral purity of the atmosphere of American society to the coldness of the American temperament and the sera juvenum Venus. It seems to me, however, that there is no call to disparage American virtue by the suggestion of a constitutional want of liability to temptation, and that Mark Twain, in his somewhat irreverent rejoinder, is much nearer the mark when he attributes the prevalent sanctity of the marriage tie to the fact that the husbands and wives have generally married each other for love. This is undoubtedly the true note of America in this particular, though it may not be unreservedly characteristic of the smart set of New York. If the sacred flame of Cupid could be exposed to the alembic of statistics, I should be surprised to hear that the love matches of the United States did not reach a higher percentage than those of any other nation. One certainly meets more husbands and wives of mature age who seem thoroughly to enjoy each other's society.

There is a certain "snap" to American society that is not due merely to a sense of novelty, and does not wholly wear off through familiarity. The sense of enjoyment is more obvious and more evenly distributed; there is a general willingness to be amused, a general absence of the blasé. Even Matthew Arnold could not help noticing the "buoyancy, enjoyment, and freedom from restraint which are everywhere in America," and which he accounted for by the absence of the aristocratic incubus. The nervous fluid so characteristic of America in general flows briskly in the veins of its social organism; the feeling is abroad that what is worth doing is worth doing well. There is a more general ability than we possess to talk brightly on the topics of the moment; there is less lingering over one subject; there is a constant savour of the humorous view of life. The more even distribution of comfort in the United States (becoming, alas! daily less characteristic) adds largely to the pleasantness of society by minimising the semi-conscious feeling of remorse in playing while the "other half" starves. The inherent inability of the American to understand that there is any "higher" social order than his own minimises the feeling of envy of those "above" him. "How dreadful," says the Englishman to the American girl, "to be governed by men to whom you would not speak!" "Yes," is the rejoinder, "and how delightful to be governed by men who won't speak to you!" From this latter form of delight American society is free. Henry James strikes a true note when he makes Miranda Hope (in "A Bundle of Letters") describe the fashionable girl she met at a Paris pension as "like the people they call 'haughty' in books," and then go on to say, "I have never seen anyone like that before—anyone that wanted to make a difference." And her feeling of impersonal interest in the phenomenon is equally characteristic. "She seemed to me so like a proud young lady in a novel. I kept saying to myself all day, 'haughty, haughty,' and I wished she would keep on so." Too much stress cannot easily be laid on this feeling of equality in the air as a potent enhancer of the pleasure of society. To feel yourself patronised—even, perhaps especially, when you know yourself to be in all respects the superior of the patroniser—may tickle your sense of humour for a while, but in the long run it is distinctly dispiriting. The philosopher, no doubt, is or should be able to disregard the petty annoyances arising from an ever-present consciousness of social limitation, but society is not entirely composed of philosophers, even in America; and the sense of freedom and space is unqualifiedly welcome to its members. It is not easy for a European to the manner born to realise the sort of extravagant, nightmare effect that many of our social customs have in the eyes of our untutored American cousins. The inherent absurdities that are second nature to us exhale for them the full flavour of their grotesqueness. The idea of an insignificant boy peer taking precedence of Mr. John Morley! The idea of having to appear before royalty in a state of partial nudity on a cold winter day! The necessity of backing out of the royal presence! The idea of a freeborn Briton having to get out of an engagement long previously formed on the score that "he has been commanded to dine with H.R.H." The horrible capillary plaster necessary before a man can serve decently as an opener of carriage-doors! The horsehair envelopes without which our legal brains cannot work! The unwritten law by which a man has to nurse his hat and stick throughout a call unless his hostess specially asks him to lay them aside!

Mr. Bryce commits himself to the assertion that "Scotchmen and Irishmen are more unlike Englishmen, the native of Normandy more unlike the native of Provence, the Pomeranian more unlike the Wurtemberger, the Piedmontese more unlike the Neapolitan, the Basque more unlike the Andalusian, than the American from any part of the country is to the American from any other." Max O'Rell, on the other hand, writes: "L'habitant du Nord-est des Etats Unis, le Yankee, diffère autant de l'Americain de l'Ouest et du Midi que l'Anglais diffère de l'Allemand ou de l'Espagnol." On this point I find myself far more in accord with the French than with the British observer, though, perhaps, M. Blouët rather overstates his case. Wider differences among civilised men can hardly be imagined than those which subsist between the creole of New Orleans and the Yankee of Maine, the Kentucky farmer and the Michigan lumberer. It is, however, true that there is a distinct tendency for the stamp of the Eastern States to be applied to the inhabitants of the cities, at least, of the West. The founders of these cities are so largely men of Eastern birth, the means of their expansion are so largely advanced by Eastern capitalists, that this tendency is easily explicable. [So far as my observation went it was to Boston rather than to New York or Philadelphia that the educated classes of the Western cities looked as the cynosure of their eyes. Boston seemed to stand for something less material than these other cities, and the subtler nature of its influence seemed to magnify its pervasive force.] None the less do the people of the United States, compared with those of any one European country, seem to me to have their due share of variety and even of picturesqueness. This latter quality is indeed denied to the United States not only by European visitors, but also by many Americans. This denial, however, rests on a limited and traditional use of the word picturesque. America has not the European picturesqueness of costume, of relics of the past, of the constant presence of the potential foeman at the gate. But apart altogether from the almost theatrical romance of frontier life and the now obsolescent conflict with the aborigines, is there not some element of the picturesque in the processes of readjustment by which the emigrants of European stock have adapted themselves and are adapting themselves to the conditions of the New World? In some ways the nineteenth century is the most romantic of all; and the United States embody and express it as no other country. Is there not a picturesque side to the triumph of civilisation over barbarism? Is there nothing of the picturesque in the long thin lines of gleaming steel, thrown across the countless miles of desert sand and alkali plain, and in the mighty mass of metal with its glare of cyclopean eye and its banner of fire-illumined smoke, that bears the conquerors of stubborn nature from side to side of the great continent? Is there not an element of the picturesque in the struggles of the Western farmer? Can anything be finer in its way than a night view of Pittsburg—that "Hell with its lid off," where the cold gleam of electricity vies with the lurid glare of the furnaces and smelting works? I say nothing of the Californian Missions; of the sallow creoles of New Orleans with their gorgeous processions of Mardi-Gras; or of the almost equally fantastic fête of the Veiled Prophet of St. Louis; or of the lumberers of Michigan; or of the Mexicans of Arizona; or of the German beer-gardens of Chicago; or of the swinging lanterns and banners of Chinatown in San Francisco and Mott street in New York; or of the Italians of Mulberry Bend in the latter city; or of the alternating stretches on a long railway journey of forest and prairie, yellow corn-fields and sandy desert; or of many other classes and conditions which are by no means void of material for the artist in pen or brush. All these lend hues that are anything but prosaic to my kaleidoscopic recollections of the United States; but more than all these, the characteristically picturesque feature of American life, stands out the omnipresent negro. It was a thrill to have one's boots blackened by a coloured "professor" in an alley-way of Boston, and to hear his richly intoned "as shoh's you're bawn." It was a delight to see the negro couples in the Public Garden, conducting themselves and their courting, as Mr. Howells has well remarked, with infinitely more restraint and refinement than their Milesian compeers, or to see them passing out of the Charles-street Church in all the Sunday bravery of broadcloth coats, shiny hats, wonderfully laundered skirts of snowy whiteness, and bodices of all the hues of the rainbow. And all through the Union their glossy black faces and gleaming white teeth shed a kind of dusky radiance over the traveller's path. Who but can recall with gratitude the expansive geniality and reassuring smile of the white-coated negro waiter, as compared with the supercilious indifference, if not positive rudeness, of his pale colleague? And what will ever efface the mental kodak of George (not Sambo any more) shuffling rapidly into the dining-room, with his huge flat palm inverted high over his head and bearing a colossal tray heaped up with good things for the guest under his charge? And shall I ever forget the grotesque gravity of the negro brakeman in Louisiana, with his tall silk hat? or the pair of gloves pathetically shared between two neatly dressed negro youths in a railway carriage in Georgia? or the pickaninnies slumbering sweetly in old packing-cases in a hut at Jacksonville, while their father thrummed the soft guitar with friendly grin? It has always seemed to me a reproach to American artists that they fill the air with sighs over the absence of the picturesque in the United States, while almost totally overlooking the fine flesh-tones and gay dressing of the coloured brother at their elbow.

The most conventional society of America is apt to be more or less shrouded by the pall of monotony that attends convention elsewhere, but typical American society—the society of the great mass of Americans—shows distinctly more variety than that of England. In social meetings, as in business, the American is ever on the alert for some new thing: and the brain of every pretty girl is cudgelled in order to provide some novelty for her next party. Hence the progressive euchre, the "library" parties, the "shadow" dances, the conversation parties, and the long series of ingenious games, the adoption of which, for some of us at least, has done much to lighten the deadly dulness of English "small and earlies." Even the sacro-sanctity of whist has not been respected, and the astonished shade of Hoyle has to look on at his favourite game in the form of "drive" and "duplicate." The way in which whist has been taken up in the United States is a good example of the national unwillingness to remain in the ruts of one's ancestors. Possibly the best club-players of England are at least as good as the best Americans, but the general average of play and the general interest in the game are distinctly higher in the United States. Every English whist-player with any pretension to science knows what he has to expect when he finds an unknown lady as his partner, especially if she is below thirty; but in America he will often find himself "put to his trumps" by a bright girl in her teens. The girls in Boston and other large cities have organised afternoon whist-clubs, at which all the "rigour of the game" is observed. Many of them take regular lessons from whist experts; and among the latter themselves are not a few ladies, who find the teaching of their favourite game a more lucrative employment than governessing or journalism. Even so small a matter as the eating of ice-cream may illustrate the progressive nature of American society. Elderly Americans still remember the time when it was usual to eat this refreshing delicacy out of economical wine-glasses such as we have still to be content with in England. But now-a-days no American expects or receives less than a heaping saucer of ice-cream at a time.

Americans are born dancers; they have far more quicksilver in their feet than their English cousins. Perhaps the very best waltzers I have ever danced with were English girls, who understood the poetry of the art and knew how to reflect not merely the time of the music, but its nuances of rhythm and tone. But dancers such as these are like fairies' visits, that come but once or twice in a lifetime; and a large proportion of English girls dance very badly. In America one seldom or never finds a girl who cannot dance fairly, and most of them can claim much warmer adverbs than that. The American invention of "reversing" is admirable in its unexaggerated form, but requires both study and practice; and the reason that it was voted "bad form" in England was simply that the indolence of the gilded youth prevented him ever taking the trouble to master it. Our genial satirist Punch hit the nail on the head: "Shall we—eh—reverse, Miss Lilian?" "Reverse, indeed; it's as much as you can do to keep on your legs as it is."

One custom at American dances struck me as singularly stupid and un-American in its inelasticity. I know not how widespread it is, or how fashionable, but it reigned in circles which seemed to my unsophisticated eyes quite comme il faut. The custom is that by which a man having once asked a lady to dance becomes responsible for her until someone else offers himself as her partner. It probably arose from the chivalrous desire not to leave any girl partnerless, but in practice it works out quite the other way. When a man realises that he may have to retain the same partner for several dances, or even for the greater part of the evening, he will, unless he is a Bayard absolutely sans peur et sans reproche, naturally think twice of engaging a lady from whom his release is problematical. Hence the tendency is to increase the triumphs of the belle, and decrease the chances of the less popular maiden. It is also extremely uncomfortable for a girl to feel that a man has (to use the ugly slang of the occasion) "got stuck" with her; and it takes more adroitness and self-possession than any young girl can be expected to possess to extricate herself neatly from the awkward position. Another funny custom at subscription balls of a very respectable character is that many of the matrons wear their bonnets throughout the evening. But this, perhaps, is not stranger than the fact that ladies wear hats in the theatre, while the men who accompany them are in evening dress—a curious habit which to the uninitiated observer would suggest that the nymphs belonged to a less fashionable stratum than their attendant swains. A parallel instance is that of afternoon receptions, where the hostess and her myrmidons appear in ball costume, while the visitors are naturally in the toilette of the street. The contrast thus evolved of low necks and heavy furs is often very comical. The British convention by which the hostess always dresses as plainly as possible so as to avoid the chance of eclipsing any of her guests, and so chooses to briller par sa simplicité, is in other cases also more honoured in the breach than in the observance in America.

A very characteristic little piece of the social democracy of America is seen at its best in Chicago, though not unknown in other large cities. On the evening of a hot summer day cushions and rugs are spread on the front steps of the houses, and the occupants take possession of these, the men to enjoy their after-dinner cigars, the women to talk and scan the passers-by. The general effect is very genial and picturesque, and decidedly suggestive of democratic sociability. The same American indifference to the exaggerated British love of privacy which leads John Bull to enclose his fifty-foot-square garden by a ten-foot wall is shown in the way in which the gardens of city houses are left unfenced. Nothing can be more attractive in its way than such a street as Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, where the pretty villas stand in unenclosed gardens, and the verdant lawns melt imperceptibly into each other without advertisement of where one leaves off and the other begins, while the fronts towards the street are equally exposed. The general effect is that of a large and beautiful park dotted with houses. The American is essentially gregarious in his instinct, and the possession of a vast feudal domain, with a high wall round it, can never make up to him for the excitement of near neighbours. It may seriously be doubted whether the American millionaire who buys a lordly demesne in England is not doing violence to his natural and national tastes every day that he inhabits it.