[20] I confess I should have felt myself on still firmer ground in making the above comparison if I had been able to select "Peter Ibbetson" instead of "Trilby" as the American favourite. It is distinctly the finest, the most characteristic, and the most convincing of Mr. Du Maurier's novels, though it is easy to see why it did not enjoy such a "boom" as its successor. In "Peter Ibbetson" our moral sense does not feel outraged by the fact of the sympathy we have to extend to a man-slayer; we are made to feel that a man may kill his fellow in a moment of ungovernable and not unrighteous wrath without losing his fundamental goodness. On the other hand, it seems to me, Mr. Du Maurier fails to convert us to belief in the possibility of such a character as Trilby, and fails to make us wholly sympathise with his pæans in her praise. It seems psychologically impossible for a woman to sin so repeatedly as Trilby, and so apparently without any overwhelming temptation, and yet at the same time to retain her essential purity. It is a prostitution of the word "love" to excuse Trilby's temporary amourettes with a "quia multum amavit."
[21] His extraordinary article on George Du Maurier in Harper's Magazine for September, 1897, is, perhaps, so far as style is concerned, as glaring an example of how not to do it as can be found in the range of American letters.
[22] Perhaps Mr. George W. Cable is entitled to rank with Mr. Howells in this respect as a man who refused to disguise his moral convictions behind his literary art, and thus infallibly and with full consciousness imperilled his popularity among his own people.
[23] "Stops of Various Quills," by W.D. Howells (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1895).
XI
Certain Features of Certain Cities
One of the dicta in M. Bourget's "Outre Mer" to which I cannot but take exception is that which insists on the essential similarity and monotony of all the cities of the United States. Passing over the question of the right of a Parisian to quarrel with monotony of street architecture, I should simply ask what single country possesses cities more widely divergent than New York and New Orleans, Philadelphia and San Francisco, Chicago and San Antonio, Washington and Pittsburg? If M. Bourget merely means that there is a tendency to homogeneity in the case of modern cities which was not compatible with the picturesque though uncomfortable reasons for variety in more ancient foundations, his remark amounts to a truism. For his implied comparison with European cities to have any point, he should be able to assert that the recent architecture of the different cities of Europe is more varied than the contemporary architecture of the United States. This seems to me emphatically not the case. Modern Paris resembles modern Rome more closely than any two of the above-named cities resemble each other; and it is simply the universal tendency to note similarity first and then unlikeness that makes the brief visitor to the United States fail to find characteristic individuality in the various great cities of the country. We are also too prone to forget that the United States, though continental in its proportions, is after all but a single nation, enjoying the same institutions and speaking practically one tongue; and this of necessity introduces an element of sameness that must be absent from the continent of Europe with which we are apt to compare it. If we oppose to the United States that one European country which approaches it most nearly in size, we shall, I think, find the balance of uniformity does not incline to the American side. When all is said, however, it cannot be denied that there is a great deal of similarity in the smaller and newer towns and cities of the West, and Mr. W.S. Caine's likening them to "international exhibitions a week before their opening" will strike many visitors as very apposite. It is only to the indiscriminate and unhedged form of M. Bourget's statement that objection need be made.
Architecture struck me as, perhaps, the one art in which America, so far as modern times are concerned, could reasonably claim to be on a par with, if not ahead of, any European country whatsoever. I say this with a full realisation of the many artistic nightmares that oppress the soil from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with a perfect recollection of the acres of petty, monotonous, and mean structures in almost every great city of the Union, with a keen appreciation of the witty saying that the American architect often "shows no more self-restraint than a bunch of fire-crackers." It is, however, distinctly true, as Mr. Montgomery Schuyler well puts it, that "no progress can result from the labour of architects whose training has made them so fastidious that they are more revolted by the crudity of the forms that result from the attempt to express a new meaning than by the failure to make the attempt;" and it is in his freedom from this fastidious lack of courage that the American architect is strong. His earlier efforts at independence were, perhaps, hardly fortunate; but he is now entering a phase in which adequate professional knowledge coöperates with good taste to define the limits within which his imagination may legitimately work. I know not where to look, within the last quarter of a century or so, for more tasteful designs, greater sincerity of purpose, or happier adaptations to environment than the best creations of men like Mr. H.H. Richardson, Mr. R.M. Hunt, Mr. J.W. Root, Mr. G.B. Post, and Messrs. McKim, Mead, and White. Some of the new residential streets of places as recent as Chicago or St. Paul more than hold their own, as it seems to me, with any contemporaneous thoroughfares of their own class in Europe. To my own opinion let me add the valuable testimony of Mr. E.A. Freeman, in his "Impressions of the United States" (pp. 246, 247):