The Muse in Town and lived, of free choice, the simple country life." Have poets of old chosen Nature as priestess rather than as pal? Nowadays, at any rate, they are not only living in the city-they are writing verses about the city they inhabit. They have discovered the beauty of lamp-posts and hurdy-gurdies or else have read the essay in the London Spectator to the effect that the poet "who would really fix the public attention" must cut loose from the "exhausted past" and choose subjects "of present import and therefore both of interest and novelty." To be sure, Matthew Arnold (who preserves this sermon for us by embedding it in one of his essays) did not by any means give it his pontifical approbation. He annotates-ponderously correct: The modernness or antiquity of an action has nothing to do with its fitness for poetical representation; this depends upon its inherent qualities. . . . Poetical works belong to the domain of our permanent passions: let them interest these and the voice of all subordinate claims upon them is at once silenced. The preoccupation of contemporary poets with city life is, I take it, natural enough. In the first place, they do live in the city, for the most part; and the life of our great cities is, not only unprecedentedly rich in contrast and antithesis, but, thanks to Time's whirligig, a spectacle of considerable freshness. Here in America the cities are themselves new. Moreover, ours is a time of exceptional social fermentation, and one is most conscious of this in city streets. Finally, many a poet must feel, with Mr. Edmund Gosse, that we moderns are hampered by past triumphs in the ancient art. Every 'one-for more than a century at least has written about the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la. Therefore it only remains for Mrs. Gilman to write of the flowers that wilt in the shop-window: "I hear, in raw, unwelcome dawns, It is, however, in a spirit of mockery that "It is spring to-day; I know the sight- Mr. Eaton has a sense of humor-but not all the city poets are with him in that. The realistic, the naturalistic novel has, of course, been a notable fact of the last two generations. From Flaubert and Maupassant down to George Moore and Arnold Bennett is not only a long but a much-read story. What wonder if the poets that live in the square, and sometimes find time to read novels, can't help noticing that some of the novelists they used to dine with at the table d'hôte ride in motors now, and subscribe to bond issues? Not that the poets are mercenary-yet the influence does count. And if the realistic spirit expresses itself in much of our verse nowadays, the fact is equally striking that the two most read British poets of the day, John Masefield and Alfred Noyes, stick pretty closely to narrative. The tale's the thing. Matthew Arnold is right as rain when he protests that time-spirit considerations should not guide us far in evaluating verse since our honest enjoyment of poetry does not really depend on either time or place. So far as local color goes, all the world loves a pedler, as George Moore wrote one time, with a sarcastic eye fixed upon M. Loti and Mr. Kipling; but if the pedler's pack contains naught but glad rags we soon weary of looking at them, and send him pedler-packing. The poet has more delicate perceptions than the rest of us, and more subtle intuitions. He points to beauties that we have walked by without seeing; he kindles the sense of "impassioned What impresses me most of all in reading recollection" that has always been a large the newer poetry of our city life is the fact part of romance. He offers refreshment, repose, and exaltation. He has seen a vision or dreamed a dream-and shares it with us. But surely Matthew Arnold would agree that the poet has a right to lodge his muse in the square-if he (and she) prefer town lodgings to country. And I can't see that it is a question of political or economic principles; for myself, I can admire standpat melody or Socialist without prejudice. Boys, priests, and harlots, drunkards, students, thieves:" a passenger list that would have appealed, indifferently, to François Villon and Walt Whitman. Yes, our junior choir is acting literally upon Zola's dictum that the city street (above ground or below) is both pathetic and worthy of depiction; its mingled beauty and horror "enough for any poet." One recalls Stedman's "Pan in Wall Street," written almost fifty years ago, with its address to "the heart of Nature, beating still": "With throbs her vernal passion taught her- Or by the Arethusan water! And, only yesterday, I read a poem by Mr. that already the cult of the foul for the foul's sake is waning-and the cult of the distressing just because it is distressing. Perhaps at best-or worst-it was only an affectation. Baudelaire and Verlaine were, in their little way, great poets; yet I know of no great poets among their imitators, conscious or innocent; and here in America we have no sufferers from Baudelirium who measure up to Arthur Symons, even. But what may be more important than all this is the fact that the country and its images are always lurking in the background of your city poet and his verses. Nature poetry wears a new yet somewhat torn maskthrough which her ruddy face now and again shows. Bees hum, and sometimes their humming puts the man-made machinery out of running order, and drowns all the urban cacophony. One, at least, of the young innovators is conscious of the truth about the city since Mr. John Hall Wheelock has, in "Love in the City," written these stanzas that I do not weary of: "Within the modern world deformed and vast Lurks everlastingly-though all men denyThe awful Force that in the ages past Walked on the waves and cried on Calvary. "I feel it in the crowded city street, 'Mid iron walls and wheels and clanging cars, I feel it in my pulses as they beatThe monstrous Secret that propels the stars." Emerson foresaw all that has happened in our poetry since his own time. That ascents in aeroplanes and rides in automobiles and crowded passages in cars that race through the city's entrails-that all these matters should furnish inspiration to the twentieth-century poet would in no wise have shocked him. "Readers of poetry see the factory village," wrote Emerson, "and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these, for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital Circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own." The poet, who is the seer, the namer, reattaches things to Nature-to paraphrase the essayist. Even the monstrosities of our cities form a part of the whole. Now that city poetry is losing somewhat of its blatant novelty and self-consciousness, one is more than ever conscious of this truth. Let our poets forget, however, their Fleurs de Mal-for not so are all the Fleurs du Pavé that are theirs for the picking. NEW tance to appreciate these aspects of the skyscraper; one must view them from banal Brooklyn or from the St. George ferrybound for one of New York's constituent but outmoded banlieux. And in seeing the shining towers of Manhattan rising above the narrow island and the lower buildings of the side streets, one asks one's self if the real wonder (granting the confusion of New York's peoples and traditions and interests) isn't the fact that the narrow little island has even as orderly an architecture as it has. JEW YORK is as a very mirror of America in that its state is always one of becoming. So that New York's sky-scrapers express, not symmetry-but New York. The architecture is assimilative-like the national genius. The sky- The height of New York's buildings has line is confused-like America's become something of a legend. And yet "The Next Ruin" destiny. The style is mixed-like the proportion of really towering structures the people on the sidewalk. "The is much smaller than men realize-even in city is too vast," a French visitor recently New York. For the most part, the skylamented; "a collection of towns-English, scrapers are confined to, or near, one street, Greek, Italian, Jewish, Chinese-and towns in one part of the city. Up-town there are of a kind as yet untried: amorphous and un- some tall hotels. That is all. Out of over balanced, modern towns which have not yet ninety thousand buildings on Manhattan found their type of beauty." And in the Island, only a thousand exceed ten stories. mingling of the architectural schools and There are but fifty over twenty stories; but types within the same block or even the nine (with the tenth just contracted for) over same structure is mirrored the mingling of thirty. But the tradition persists. Back races and colors and creeds within the melt- in the nineties, when Lafcadio Hearn was ing-pot of men and women. frightened by the "cascading thunder" of these streets, he described "the houses eleven stories high" as "trying to climb into the moon." Eleven stories frighten no one to-day-not even though he be a timid outcast of exotic tastes and myopic vision; yet only two decades have gone by. Will men smile at the thought of fifty stories being wonderful-in twenty years? M. Lanson, the French professor I have quoted, finds New York's down-town streets too narrow for the height of the sky-scrapers: "It is as if you set down the Arch of Triumph and the Eiffel Tower in the rue Quincampoix." And then he likens the sky-line to a dentillated jawbone as M. Gorky did before him. It is a good image: that of dog-teeth that tear human flesh and sometimes destroy human nature, shadowed for us in soulless agglomerations of brick and steel and stone. Yet something too is missed. There is, in the line of the Metropolitan Tower, freely adapted from the Campanile of Venice, and in the Alpine pinnacles of the Woolworth Building, an element of aspiration. Mr. Dana Burnett has written in a daily newspaper verses in praise of that building: "You are God in a sermon of stone, The dim God that we search at your feet; But we do not look up from the street." The poetry is not faultless, any more than the architecture-but it too aspires. The Gothic cathedral is not alone in raising arms toward the blue heaven. But one needs dis No-they will not smile. Unless unforeseen conditions arise, the tendency must, in the future, move toward lateral expansion. Esthetic objections are likely to gain in their force and they are already being buttressed by the argument of the almighty dollar. Sky-scrapers do not pay. They do not, speaking generally, pay either owner or community. Boston has from the start severely limited the height of buildings, and Boston realty men are sure that this limitation has tended to maintain values instead of holding them down. Chicago real-estate interests oppose the digging of subways, on the ground that this would tend toward the development of one central sky-scraper section and the abandonment of other districts by "big business." In New York sky-scrapers it is found increasingly difficult to rent the lower floors. Also, once a cer tain size is reached, their elevators eat up too much floor space-and on every floor; the competition between the rival sky-scrapers is costly, too; and as the buildings grow larger and larger, so do their expenses of upkeep and service grow out of all proportion. Two and a half per cent on the investment is what sky-scrapers average in earning power —if you deduct depreciation. Nor are they economically any great asset for the community. They entail the installation of high-pressure water-mains, for fire protection; their torrents burst the city sewers, and new ones must be digged. And not only do these vaster structures dwarf more modest buildings-they rob them of all sunlight. Worst of all, the terror of fire and panic hangs like a cloud over the Towers of Mammon, that seem from a little distance so faëry-like in their dresses of frozen lace. The romance of the cities of Europe lies in their past-its memories and monuments. The romance of New York is present-and future. A turbaned prince who came to the city of towers some years since was led to one of the tallest at noon, and shot to the top of it in a steel car that travelled an upright track. On that great platform above the toiling, trailing city, with its vista of chasms and needle-like steeples and linebroken housetops and rivers and islands and sea, the Oriental sank to his knees, and, facing the East, made his prayer to Allah. He professed to be greatly moved by the sight of New York-it impressed him more than Rome or Paris or London. “But what will you do when these high houses fall?" he asked; "for surely they are not for alway." "I was coming out of New York harbor a month ago, and looking at the sky-scrapers," says some one in a modern novel; "and suddenly it hit me in the mind: 'That's just the next ruin.'” "Just the next ruin." then? And what I ORIGINALS BY GREAT MASTERS FOR N these days of admirable photographic facsimiles lovers of art who are not also wealthy will generally and sensibly content themselves with their favorite artists in reproduction. But there is a class of amateur who must have for full enjoyment the very touch of the master's hand, and cannot accept permanently any form of transcription however skilful. At first sight the case of an impecunious amateur of this type seems tragic enough. Originals by the great masters apparently do not fall at small prices, while contemporary painting and sculpture of merit is properly paid for in figures out of question for those of small income a class which comprises the great majority of well-informed art-lovers. But this impression of the inaccessibility of fine originals to persons of small means, is erroneous. Whoever can devote a hundred dollars a year to the decoration of his walls or the enrichment of his cabinets may gradually accumulate important original works by great masters. Whoever is limited to an annual expenditure of ten dollars need not despair of adding every year to his collection some meritorious example from a master's hand. Naturally here is no question of the major works of noted artists. But happily the great artists have not insisted monotonously on leaving only major works. Many of them have adventured in the field of etching, engraving, or lithography, and frequently such recreations, with all the savor of the artist's personality, combine the ease and freshness proper to the sketch. From the sixteenth century to the present day many painters and sculptors have thus multiplied their authentic designs, and the owner of a print from a plate which Dürer engraved has in every sense an original Dürer. Let us test the matter in the case of recent artists. Few of us could hope to obtain the smallest fragment that Corot's or Delacroix's brush had touched, but at a trifling expense one may buy an etching by Corot himself instinct with his idyllic naturalism, or an original lithograph full of the peculiar nervous energy of Delacroix. Or if "The Sower," and one or two etchings are to be had at what the Italians call mild prices. If one's taste be still more modern, a number of the Whistler etchings, including some of the best, are within the reach of all but the poorest amateur. Manet has left etchings; Pisarro, Rafaelli, and Renoir also. The admirer of Fantin-Latour's discreet and lovely design may have it quite at its best in lithographs costing perhaps two evenings away from the theatre. One could hardly hope to own a Rodin bronze or marble, but there are dry-points which reveal admirably the powerful ease of his draughtsmanship. If one's gusto be for the monumental, Puvis may serve with his rare, but not dear, lithographs. If wholesome brio be preferred, the etched portraits and nudes of Anders Zorn can be had by the collector who will fund his allowance for a couple of years or more. Frank Brangwyn's big etchings offer opportunities for those who love swing, speed, and VOL. LVI.-44 art of Alden Weir, one might by taking thought procure one of his dry-points, and unless I am mistaken, the lamented Twachtman left an etching or two. Unhappily our strongest landscape men, Homer Martin, Wyant, and Inness, did not work on the stone or copper, nor did La Farge, while Winslow Homer's big etched versions of his own pictures go far to justify Whistler's prejudice against the large plate. It is impracticable to catalogue the American artists who have occasionally etched, but I may mention with regretful admiration one who has at the point of success eschewed both etching and painting, the architect C. A. Platt. Already I see the scornful look of the impecunious amateur whose tastes are of antiquarian sort. What has he to do with these mere contemporaneities, what magic shall draw from his lean pocketbook the veritable originals of the great masters of |