NEW YORK AFTER PARIS.

No American not a commercial or otherwise hardened traveller can have a soul so dead as to be incapable of emotion when, on the return from a long trip abroad, he catches sight of the low-lying and insignificant Long Island coast. One's excitement begins, indeed, with the pilot-boat. The pilot-boat is the first concrete symbol of those native and normal relations with one's fellow men, which one has so long observed in infinitely varied manifestation abroad, but always as a spectator and a stranger, and which one is now on the eve of sharing himself. As she comes up swiftly, white and graceful, drops her pilot, crosses the steamer's bows, tacks and picks up her boat in the foaming wake she presents a spectacle beside which the most picturesque Mediterranean craft with colored sails and lazy evolutions appear mistily in the memory as elements of a feeble and conventional ideal. The ununiformed pilot clambers on board, makes his way to the bridge, and takes command with an equal lack of French manner and of English affectation distinctly palpable to the sense sharpened by long absence into observing native characteristics as closely as foreign ones. If the season be right, the afternoon is bright, the range of vision apparently limitless, the sky nearly cloudless, and by contrast with the European firmament almost colorless, the July sun such as no Parisian or Londoner ever saw. The French reproach us with having no word for "patrie" as distinct from "pays;" we have the thing at all events, and cherish it, and it needs only the proximity of the foreigner, from whom in general we are so widely separated, to give our patriotism a tinge of the veriest Chauvinism that exists in France itself. We fancy the feeling old-fashioned, and imagine ours to be the most cosmopolitan, the least prejudiced temperament in the world. But the happening of any one of a dozen things unexpectedly betrays that our cosmopolitanism is in great measure, and so far as sentiment is concerned, a veneer and a disguise. Such a happening is the very change from blue water to gray that announces to the returning American-" Americanized" by Europe, as Emerson says-the nearness of that country which he sometimes thinks he prizes more for

what it stands for than for itself. It is not, he then feels with a flood of emotion, that America is home, but that home is America. America comes suddenly to mean what it never meant before.

Unhappily for this exaltation, ordinary life is not composed of emotional crises. It is ordinary life with a vengeance which one encounters in issuing from the steamer dock and facing again his native city. Paris never looked so lovely, so exquisite, to the sense as it now appears in the memory. All that Parisian regularity, order, decorum, and beauty into which, although a stranger, your own activities fitted so perfectly that you were only half conscious of its existence, was not, then, merely normal, wholly a matter of course. Emerging into West Street amid the solicitations of hackmen, the tinkling jog-trot of the most ignoble horse-cars you have seen since leaving home, the dry dust blowing into your eyes, the gaping black holes of broken pavements, the unspeakable filth, the line of red brick buildings prematurely decrepit, the sagging multitude of telegraph wires, the clumsy electric lights depending before the beer saloon and the groggery, the curious confusion of spruceness and squalor in the aspect of these latter, which also seem legion,-confronting all this for the first time in three years, say, you think with wonder of your disappointment at not finding the Tuileries Gardens a mass of flowers, and with a blush of the times you have told Frenchmen that New York was very much like Paris. New York is at this moment the most foreign-looking city you have ever seen; in going abroad the American discounts the unexpected -returning after the insensible orientation of Europe the contrast with things recently familiar is prodigious, because one is so entirely unprepared for it. One thinks to be at home and finds himself at a spectacle. New York is less like any European city than any European city is like any other. It is distinguished from them alleven from London-by the ignoble character of the res publicæ and the refuge of taste, care, wealth, pride, self-respect even, in private and personal regions. A splendid carriage, liveried servants without and Paris dresses within, rattling over the scandalous paving, splashed by the neglected mud, catching the rusty drippings of the hideous elevated railway, wrenching its axle in the tram-track in avoiding a mountainous wagon-load of commerce on this hand and a garbage cart on that, caught in a jam of horse-cars and a blockade of trucks, finally depositing its dainty freight to pick their way across a sidewalk eloquent of official neglect and private contumely to a shop door or

a residence stoop-such a contrast as this sets us off from Europe very definitely and in a very marked degree.

There is no palpable New York in the sense in which there is a Paris, a Vienna, a Milan. You can touch it at no point. It is not even ocular. There is instead a Fifth Avenue, a Broadway, a Central Park, a Chatham Square. How they have dwindled, by the way. Fifth Avenue might be any one of a dozen London streets in the first impression it makes on the retina and leaves on the mind. The opposite side of Madison Square is but a step away. The spacious hall of the Fifth Avenue Hotel has shrunk to stifling proportions. Thirty-fourth Street is a lane; the City Hall a bandbox; the Central Park a narrow strip of elegant landscape, whose lateral limitations are constantly forced upon the sense by the Lenox Library on one side and a monster apartment house on the other. The American fondness for size-for pure bigness-needs explanation, it appears; we care for size, but inartistically; we care nothing for proportion, which is what makes size count. Everything is on the same scale; there is no play, no movement. An exception should be made in favor of the big business building and the apartment house which have arisen within a few years, and which have greatly accentuated the grotesqueness of the city's sky-line as seen from either the New Jersey or the Long Island shore. They are perhaps rather high than big; many of them were built before the authorities noticed them and followed unequally in the steps of other civilized municipal governments, from that of Rome down, in prohibiting the passing of a fixed limit. But bigness has also evidently been one of their architectonic motives, and it is to be remarked that they are so far out of scale with the surrounding buildings as to avoid the usual commonplace, only by creating a positively disagreeable effect.

Still another reason for the foreign aspect of the New Yorker's native city is the gradual withdrawing of the American element into certain quarters, its transformation or essential modification in others, and in the rest the presence of the lees of Europe. At every step you are forced to realize that New York is the second Irish and the third or fourth German city in the world. However great our success in drilling this foreign contingent of our social army into order, and reason, and self-respect-and it is not to be doubted that this success gives us a distinction wholly new in history-nevertheless our effect upon its members has been rather in the direction of development than of assimilation. We have given them our opportunity, permitted

them the expansion denied them in their own several feudalities, made men of serfs, demonstrated the utility of self-government under the most trying conditions, proved the efficacy of our elastic institutions on a scale truly grandiose, but evidently, so far as New York is concerned, we have done this at the sacrifice of a distinct and obvious nationality. To an observant sense New York is nearly as little national as Port Said. It contrasts absolutely in this respect with Paris, whose assimilating power is prodigious; every foreigner in Paris eagerly seeks Parisianization.

Ocularly, therefore, the "note" of New York seems that of characterless individualism. The monotony of the chaotic composition and movement is, paradoxically, its most abiding impression. And as the whole is destitute of definiteness, of distinction, the parts are, correspondingly, individually insignificant. Where in the world are all the types? one asks one's self in renewing his old walks and desultory wanderings. Where is the New York counterpart of that astonishing variety of types which makes Paris what it is morally and pictorially, the Paris of Balzac as well as the Paris of M. Jean Béraud. Of a sudden the lack of nationality in our familiar literature and art becomes luminously explicable. One perceives why Mr. Howells is so successful in confining himself to the simplest, broadest, most representative representatives, why Mr. James goes abroad invariably for his mise-en-scène and often for his characters, why Mr. Reinhart lives in Paris, and Mr. Abbey in London. New York is this and that, it is incontestably unlike any other great city; but compared with Paris its most impressive trait is its lack of that organic quality which results from variety of types. It has only the variety of individuals which results in monotony. It is the difference between noise and music. Pictorially the general aspect of New York is such that the mind speedily takes refuge in insensitiveness. Its expansiveness seeks exercise in other directions-business, dissipation, study, aestheticism, politics. The life of the senses is no longer possible. This is why one's sense for art is so stimulated by going abroad, and one's sense for art in its freest, frankest, most universal and least special, intense, and enervated development is especially exhilarated by going to Paris. It is why, too, on one's return one can note the gradual decline of his sensitiveness, his severity-the gradual atrophy of a sense no longer called into exercise. "I had no conception before," said a Chicago broker to me one day in Paris with intelligent eloquence, "of a finished city!" Chicago undoubtedly presents a greater

contrast to Paris than does New York, and so perhaps better prepares one to appreciate the Parisian quality, but the returned New Yorker cannot fail to be deeply impressed with the finish, the organic perfection, the elegance and reserve of the Paris mirrored in his memory. Is it possible that the uniformity, the monotony of Paris architecture, the prose note in Parisian taste, should once have weighed upon his spirit? The present writer was once riding on the top of a Paris tram-car, betraying his understanding of English by reading an American newspaper, when that sub-consciousness of moral isolation which the foreigner feels in Paris, as elsewhere, was suddenly and completely destroyed by a next neighbor, who remarked with contemptuous conviction and a Manhattan accent: "When you've seen one block of this infernal town you've seen it all!" He was sure of sympathy in advance. Probably few New Yorkers would have differed with him. The universal light stone and brown paint, the wide sidewalks, the asphalt pavement, the indefinitely multiplied kiosks, the prevalence of a few marked kinds of vehicles, the uniformed workmen and workwomen, the infinite reduplication, in a word, of easily recognized types, is at first mistaken by the New Yorker for that dead level of uniformity which is of all things in the world the most tiresome to him in his own city. After a time, however, he begins to realize three important facts: in the first place these phenomena, which so vividly force themselves on his notice that their reduplication strikes him more than their qualities, are of a quality altogether unexampled in his experience for fitness and agreeableness; in the second place they are details of a whole, members of an organism, and not they but the city which they compose, the "finished city" of the acute Chicagoan, is the spectacle; in the third place they serve as a background for the finest group of monuments in the world. On his return he perceives these things with a melancholy, a non lucendo luminousness. The dead level of Murray Hill uniformity he finds the most agreeable aspect in the city.

And the reason is that Paris has habituated him to the exquisite, the rational pleasure to be derived from that organic spectacle, a "finished city," far more than that Murray Hill is respectable and appropriate, and that almost every other prospect, except in spots of very limited area which emphasize the surrounding ugliness, is acutely displeasing. This latter is certainly very true. We have long reproached ourselves with having no art commensurate with our distinction in other activities, resignedly attributing the lack to our