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6/Allocating Resources to the Project
6-1
Chapter 6
Allocating Resources to the Project
This chapter extends the previous one on scheduling into the area of allocating resources
among the activities of a project, or among multiple projects competing for the same resources.
The chapter begins with a discussion of expediting project completion times and highlights that
by selectively choosing which activities to crash and by how much, we can determine the
minimum cost for all possible project completion time. The use of Excel’s Solver optimization
routine to facilitate this analysis is also presented. Next, the chapter moves on to the topic of
resource loading and in particular highlights the problems of over scheduling resources. The
topics of resource leveling and resource allocation naturally follow in the subsequent sections.
Finally, the chapter concludes with an overview of several of the concepts Goldratt raises in his
provocative book Critical Chain.
Cases and Readings
A case appropriate to the subject of this chapter is:
Harvard: 9-613-020 Space Constructors, Inc. This 3-page case involves a simple project where
partial crashing has already been planned but more, and less, crashing is also to be considered.
The network has some special characteristics that offer some worthwhile lessons for the
student.

6-2
Answers to Review Questions
1. Given the fact that a project’s resource requirements are clearly spelled out in the
project’s action plan, why are PMs so concerned with resource allocation?
There can be a variety of reasons why resource allocation is of concern to the PM despite
having a properly completed project plan. For example:
• The project plan only lists general categories of resource requirements such as
engineering, purchasing, marketing, and production. In these cases, the project
manager must still arrange to get the specific resources (e.g., personnel, equipment)
needed.
• The project plan may only specify how much of the resource is needed and the
precedence between the activities’ relationships; it may not specify exactly when the
PM will need these resources.
• Although the project plan specifies the amount of a resource needed for a particular
project, there may not be a mechanism in use that balances the load of resources
across multiple projects. This can lead to conflicts and the creation of bottleneck
resources.
2. Explain the difference between a project that has a fixed delivery day and one that has a
fixed limit on resource usage.
A project with a fixed delivery date can vary the level of resources used to meet a firm
project completion date.
A project with a fixed limit on resource usage cannot obtain additional resources but can
possibly delay the project completion date.
Why might a PM be interested in this difference?
The reason this distinction is important is that it specifies which of the fundamental trade-
offs the project manager can exercise. In the case of projects with fixed delivery dates, only
performance and cost (resource usage) can be varied. In projects with fixed resource usage
levels, only schedule and performance can be varied.
3. What does it mean to “fast track” a project?
Fast-tracking is a technique whereby key stages of the project are overlapped.

6-3
In the construction industry, this might entail beginning construction before the design and
planning are finished. In the pharmaceutical industry this may entail developing the
production process as the new drugs are being developed and tested.
4. List as many things as you can think of that should be entered into a specific resource’s
calendar.
Information that should be entered into a resource’s calendar include:
• The resource’s availability (e.g., days in week available, total hours available per
week, hours available each day).
• Times the resource will not be available (e.g., lunch, weekends, holidays, vacations,
scheduled maintenance), and
• Resource cost (e.g., cost per unit of usage, cost for overtime and overuse, known
changes in future resource cost).
5. Explain why project-oriented firms require excess resource capacity.
In project oriented firms there is much more uncertainty about the timing of resource
needs since the resources primarily move between projects rather than moving between
projects and a functional department. Therefore, extra resource capacity is needed as a
buffer given the greater level of uncertainty present.
6. The arrival and departure times of commercial aircraft are carefully scheduled. Why,
then, is it so important to have excess capacity in the airport control tower?
Although the arrival and departure times may be carefully scheduled, we all know that
actual arrivals and departures often deviate significantly from these schedules. Therefore, a
significant amount of uncertainty is present and greatly complicates the ability of the
airport control system to handle arrivals and departures.
Indeed unplanned events (e.g., weather delays, equipment malfunctions, late flight crews,
and so on) often cascade through the system further compounding the problem. Therefore,
excess capacity in control towers is needed as a buffer given this level of uncertainty.
Clearly, the cost of not having this capacity greatly exceeds the cost of some idle capacity.
7. Explain the difference in the problems faced by a PM who is short of secretarial resources
and one who is short of a “Walt.”
The PM that is short of secretarial resources does not face that great of a problem as this
type of resource is relatively abundant and not usually critical to the project’s ultimate
success or failure. The PM that is short of a “Walt” (i.e., an individual with expertise and
knowledge in a critical area) faces a much more daunting problem because a Walt is a

6-4
scarce resource that is important to the project’s successful completion and there are no
readily available substitutes for a Walt.
8. When allocating scarce resources to several different projects at the same time, why is it
important to make sure that all resource calendars are on the same time base (i.e.,
hourly, daily, or weekly …)?
One reason it is important to ensure the resource calendars are on the same time base is
because task duration is not usually dictated by the number of labor hours required to
complete the task, but rather by the calendar time required to complete it. This may involve
waiting for materials (e.g., concrete, glue) to cure, or equipment to warm up, etc.
9. List and describe the three most common criteria by which to evaluate different resource
allocation priority rules.
The three major criteria are:
• Schedule slippage … a measure of the delay suffered by projects as a result of the
application of a resource allocation priority rule.
• Resource utilization … a measure of the total resource cost (including costs such as
the cost of hiring, firing, and maintaining resource inventories) under different
allocation rules.
• In-process inventory … a measure of the cost of unfinished work in the system.
10. Why is the problem of allocating scarce resources to a set of projects similar to the
problem of scheduling a job shop?
In a job shop allocating resources (equipment and workers) to jobs or orders is required. In
projects, a similar allocation is required where specific resources must be allocated to
various projects when they are needed, which represent the jobs.
11. What is meant by the term “student syndrome”?
The “student syndrome” refers to situations in which people wait until the last possible
minute to begin a task. Its name is derived from the belief that students often delay the
start of an assignment until just before it is due. This isn’t necessarily a foolish or lazy
decision since often the task will change at the last minute, thus invalidating much of the
work that was earlier spent on it.

6-5
12. Describe in your own words what is meant by Goldratt’s critical chain.
Traditionally, in project management the concept of the critical path is used. More
specifically, the critical path is defined as the path(s) that if delayed will delay the
completion of the entire project.
One shortcoming of the critical path approach is that it only considers task precedence
information and does not consider issues related to resource usage. The critical chain
addresses this concern and considers both technical precedence relationships as well as the
resources that will be used to complete the tasks. Therefore, the critical chain refers to the
longest chain of consecutively dependent events including both technological as well as
resource dependencies.
How does it work?
The critical chain works by defining two sources that can delay the completion of the
project. One source of delay is uncertainty in the tasks that comprise the critical chain. A
project buffer is added to guard against these uncertainties. The second source of delay is
uncertainty in the tasks external to the critical chain. A feeding buffer is added to these
paths to help ensure they do not delay the tasks on the critical chain.
Suggested Answers to Discussion Questions
1. Describe the fundamental trade-offs when deciding whether or not to crash a project.
The fundamental trade-off in crashing a project is between schedule and budget.
Specifically, crashing entails employing additional resources (cost) in order to reduce the
project’s completion time.
If the decision is made to crash, what additional trade-offs must be made?
If it is decided to crash a project other trade-offs may then be necessary in terms of the
completion time of other projects and perhaps the performance of this and other projects.
2. Discuss the advantages of “labor pools” in a project – oriented company.
The main advantages of “labor pools” versus dedicating workers to specific projects are:
• Less waiting time for key resources.
• The ability to level resource usage, and
• The ability to substitute one worker for another should one become unavailable.
Are there any potential disadvantages with the use of pools?

6-6
Potential drawbacks include:
• Workers who do not identify with a particular project.
• Personnel who may not be well trained in specific tasks required by the assignment.
• Fewer opportunities for job enlargement.
All of these may lead to lower levels of job satisfaction, as well as lower morale and
motivation.
3. What purpose(s) might be served by using each of the following priority rules for
allocating scarce resources?
a. As late as possible.
b. Shortest task duration time first.
c. Minimum slack first.
a. Starting a task as late as possible … preserves resources and delays cash flows as long as
possible.
b. Allocating resources to tasks with the shortest durations first maximizes the number of
tasks that can be completed within a certain time period. This tends to get the little
messy tasks out of the way so workers can give their full attention to the bigger, more
important tasks.
c. The minimum slack priority rule is used to minimize the number of late activities.
4. Linking a group of projects together with pseudoactivities creates a sort of superproject.
What does this mean, and why would anyone want to do it?
Just as a project consists of tasks and activities with precedence relationships, a
superproject can be thought of as consisting of a group of projects with precedence
relationships. In the superproject, pseudoactivities are used to show any precedence
relationships among the projects. These precedence relationships may be actual
technological constraints (e.g., the product development project must be completed before
the process development project) or simply a reflection of management’s priorities.
The reason for creating a superproject is to help identify important relationships and
dependencies across the projects and use this information to better plan the usage of key
resources.
5. Projects A and B are both nearing completion. You are managing a super important
project C that requires an immediate input of resource being used by both projects A and
B, but is otherwise unavailable. Project A has an S-shaped life cycle. Project B’s life cycle
is J-shaped. From which (or both or neither) do you borrow the resource? Why?

6-7
In this case it would be best to borrow from project A. In an S-shaped project, fewer
resources will have little impact on project A’s performance as it nears completion.
Conversely, in a J-shaped project, taking resources away from project B as it nears
completion will dramatically reduce its performance.
6. Goldratt suggested that to avoid the student syndrome,” it is a good idea to set the
activity durations so short that there is a high probability that the task will not be finished
on time. On the other hand, it has long been known that setting up people for failure is
strongly demotivating. What should the PM do?
There is a delicate balance between setting goals that people believe are impossible to
achieve and therefore result in demotivating the team versus stretch goals that serve to
motivate the team.
The project manager should not set goals that have extremely low probabilities of success,
but may find it desirable to set goals that do have a reasonable chance of not being met
(say 40 to 60 percent).
7. Describe as many types of resource allocation problems as you can, based on the
situations described in the chapter.
The chapter identifies three types of resource allocation problems:
• Available resources (resource loading).
• Scarce resources – single projects.
• Scarce resources – multiple projects.
Resource loading recognizes the existence of needed resources and ensures that they are
allocated to the project when needed. An example would be a construction site where the
electrical work is subcontracted to an external supplier. The main task is to determine that
the external firm can have the necessary skilled work force on site at the appropriate time.
Scarce resources are those with limited availability and the key elements of the project have
to be scheduled around that availability of the resource - even if a firm has just a single
project. An example of this situation would be the reliance of a construction site on a
specific piece of equipment such as a crane.
The allocation of scare resources becomes far more complex when the same resources are
need on more than one project. In this case, the utilization of the resource on project A will
also have an impact on project B (and, possibly, other projects). As indicated in the chapter,
the company will need to apply one of the six priority rules to determine which project shall
have the first use of the scarce resource.

6-8
Solutions to Exercises
1. This project involves the landscaping of a building site.
a. The Gantt chart for the project.
b. Assuming a five day week, the critical path is: A-C-D-E-G and the project duration is 14 days.

6-9
c. Since each resource is assigned 100 per cent to each task, the resource constraints are:
• Resource X is over utilized on the Friday of week 1, Monday of week 2, and Tuesday
of week 3.
• Resource W is over utilized on Tuesday of week 3.
d. After leveling the resources, the project duration is 17 days and the critical path is
A-B-C-D-E-F-G. Because of the scarcity of resources the critical path now includes all
activities.
e. If it is necessary to shorten the project duration without overallocating the resources then
there are several options:
• Since resource X is required by all activities, it makes the most sense to consider
adding this resource first. Adding an additional X resource would shorten the
project by 2 days which would allow tasks B and C to be done simultaneously.
• Adding an additional X and W would shorten the project by 3 days. The extra X
would allow tasks B and C to be done simultaneously and adding an extra W would
further allow tasks E and F to be done simultaneously.
• Adding an additional Y does not help reduce the time with any combination of
additional X and W resources.
• Other possibilities might involve relaxing the predecessor relationships, reducing the
assigned resources to some of the tasks, and so on.

6-10
The project duration is 13 weekdays when the resources work weekends and after leveling.
2. Provided are the predecessors, normal time, normal cost, crash time and crash cost for an
eight activity (a to h) project.
a. The network for this project is as follows:
The critical path is b-c-e-h. The project duration and cost for the all normal level of project
activity is 20 days and $400, respectively.
b. The crash costs per day for all activities are shown in column F.
1
2
3
4
5
6
a
b c
d
e
g
h
f
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
A B C D E F
Normal Normal Crash Crash Crash
Activity Time Cost Time Cost Cost/Day
a 5 $50 3 $150 50
b 4 $40 2 $200 80
c 7 $70 6 $160 90
d 2 $20 1 $50 30
e 3 $30
f 8 $80 5 $290 70
g 5 $50 4 $100 50
h 6 $60 3 $180 40

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6-11
c. The spreadsheet below was created to find the optimal way of getting to an 18-day delivery
time. As shown, the total normal cost is $400 (cell C14) and the total crash cost is $80 (cell
I14) for a total project cost of $480 (cell B2). The 18 day duration was achieved by crashing
activity h 2 days (cell H13).
The optimal solution using Solver was found in the following way:
• Cell I14 was specified as the target cell to minimize.
• The ranges H6:H13 and B18:B22 were specified as the changing cells.
The following constraints were added:
• H6:H13 < G6:G13 (maximum amount each activity can be crashed)
• B18 > J7 (node 2)
• B19 > B18 + J8 (node 3)
• B19 > J6 (node 3)
• B20 > B19 + J9 (node 4)
• B21 > B18 + J11 (node 5)
• B21 > B19 + J10 (node 5)
• B22 > B20 + J12 (node 6)
• B22 > B21 + J13 (node 6)
• B22 < B1 (node 6 – project deadline)
• 6:H13 > 0 and B18:B22 > 0 (all decision variables must be > 0)
• The “Assume linear model” check box was also selected.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
A B C D E F G H I J
Deadline: 18
Total Cost: $480
Normal Normal Crash Crash Crash Max Crash Amt Crashing Actual
Activity Time Cost Time Cost Cost/Day Amt to Crash Cost Time
a 5 $50 3 $150 50 2 0.0 0.0 5
b 4 $40 2 $200 80 2 0.0 0.0 4
c 7 $70 6 $160 90 1 0.0 0.0 7
d 2 $20 1 $50 30 1 0.0 0.0 2
e 3 $30 0 0.0 0.0 3
f 8 $80 5 $290 70 3 0.0 0.0 8
g 5 $50 4 $100 50 1 0.0 0.0 5
h 6 $60 3 $180 40 3 2.0 80.0 4
Total $400 $80
Event
Node Time
2 4
3 11
4 13
5 14
6 18

6-12
d. The optimal 16-day project duration can be found by entering 16 in cell B1 and then
resolving using Solver. The optimal solution calls for crashing activity h 3 days, b 1 day, and
d 1 day. The cost of completing the project in 16 days is $400 + $230 = $630.
e. If all activities are crashed as much as possible, the project can be completed in 14 days.
Entering 14 in cell B1 and resolving, it is discovered that the project can be completed in 14
days at a cost of $400 + $ 400 = $800.
3. Given the following AOA network, what is the first activity to be given extra resource?
The following Table shows the activity, duration, successors, critical followers, and slack
associated with each of the four activities:
Activity Duration Successors Critical Followers Slack
a 4 d d 6
b 3 c,d c,d 0
c 7 d d 0
d 5 None None 0
a. Using the shortest task first priority rule for the critical path: Task b has the shortest
duration.
b. Minimum slack first … Tasks b, c, and d all have zero slack.
c. Most critical followers … Task b has the largest number of critical followers.
d. Most successors … Task b has the largest number of successors.

6-13
4. Given the project shown in Figure 5-10 of Chapter 5 and the fact that the facility used by
activities c and d is scarce, which activity would benefit from each of the rules?
The following Table shows the activity, slack, critical followers, duration, and latest start
time for activities c and d:
Activity Slack Followers Critical Followers Duration Latest Start Time
c 3 f,i None 3 8
d 2 g,h,j h,j 4 7
a. Using the minimum slack rule: Activity dD has the least amount of slack and therefore
would get the facility first using this rule.
b. Most followers … d has the most followers and would get the facility first.
c. Most critical followers … d has the most critical followers and would get the facility first.
d. Shortest task first … c has a smaller duration and would get the facility first.
e. With the “as late as possible” priority rule, the latest start times are used. In this case
activity c has a LS of 8 and d has a LS of 7. In using this rule it only makes sense to assign the
facility to the resource with the earliest LS or activity d.

6-14
5. Consider the following activity information and the constraint that the project must be
completed in 16 weeks.
The above worksheet was used with Excel Solver to find the solution. Solver was set to
minimize N11 by changing cells K4, K7, K9, and K10 subject to the constraints:
• J19 = 16
• K4 ≥ L4
• K7 ≥ L7
• K9 ≥ L9
• K10 ≥ L10

6-15
6. Consider the project network below. Suppose the duration of both activities A and D can be
reduced to 1 day, at a cost of $15 per day of reduction. Also, activities E, G, and H can be
reduced in duration by 1 day, at a cost of $25 per day of reduction. What is the least-cost
approach to crash the project 2 days? What is the shortest “crashed” duration, the new
critical path, and the cost of crashing?
Activity
Normal
Time
Crash
Time
Δ
Time
Slope
$
A 4 1 3 $15
B 3 3 0 $-
C 1 1 0 $-
D 5 1 4 $15
E 4 3 1 $25
F 1 1 0 $-
G 3 2 1 $25
H 5 4 1 $25
I 2 2 0 $-
J 1 1 0 $-

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nations, isolated by the most enviable geographical felicity in the world
from the narrowing influences of international jealousy apparent to every
American who travels in Europe, is increasingly less concerned at criticism
than a struggling provincial republic of half its size. And along with our
self-confidence and our carelessness of "abroad," it is only with the grosser
element among us that national conceit has deepened; in general, we are apt
to fancy we have become cosmopolitan in proportion as we have lost our
provincialism. With us surely the individual has not withered, and if the
world has become more and more to him, it is because it is the world at
large and not the pent-up confines of his own country’s history and extent.
"La patrie" in danger would be quickly enough rescued—there is no need to
prove that over again, even to our own satisfaction; but in general "la
patrie" not being in any danger, being on the contrary apparently on the
very crest of the wave of the world, it is felt not to need much of one’s
active consideration, and passively indeed is viewed by many people,
probably, as a comfortable and gigantic contrivance for securing a free field
in which the individual may expand and develop. "America," says Emerson,
"America is Opportunity." After all, the average American of the present
day says, a country stands or falls by the number of properly expanded and
developed individuals it possesses. But the happening of any one of a dozen
things unexpectedly betrays that all this 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 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 sudden 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 the spectacle. New York is less like any
European city than any European city is like any other. It is distinguished
from them all—even 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 its 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 ancient 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. The aspect of Fifty-seventh Street between
Broadway and Seventh Avenue, for example, is certainly that of the world
upside down: a Gothic church utterly concealed, not to say crushed, by
contiguous flats, and confronted by the overwhelming "Osborne," which
towers above anything in the neighborhood, and perhaps makes the most
powerful impression that the returned traveler receives during his first week
or two of strange sensations. Yet the "Osborne’s" dimensions are not very
different from those of the Arc de l’Étoile. It is true it does not face an
avenue of majestic buildings a mile and a half long and two hundred and
thirty feet wide, but the association of these two structures, one a private
enterprise and the other a public monument, together with the obvious
suggestions of each, furnish a not misleading illustration of both the
spectacular and the moral contrast between New York and Paris, as it
appears unduly magnified no doubt to the sense surprised to notice it at all.
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 in the direction of
development rather 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. Thus compared, it seems to have 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, æstheticism, 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
progressive 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? Riding once on
the top of a Paris tramway, betraying an understanding of English by
reading an American newspaper, that sub-consciousness of moral isolation
which the foreigner feels in Paris as elsewhere, was suddenly and
completely destroyed by my 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 felt 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 multipled 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 nevertheless 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 any 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 frankly reproached ourselves with having
no art commensurate with our distinction in other activities, resignedly

attributing the lack to our hitherto necessary material preoccupation. But
what we are really accounting for in this way is our lack of Titians and
Bramantes. We are for the most part quite unconscious of the character of
the American æsthetic substratum, so to speak. As a matter of fact, we do
far better in the production of striking artistic personalities than we do in the
general medium of taste and culture. We figure well invariably at the Salon.
At home the artist is simply either driven in upon himself, or else awarded
by a naïve clientèle, an eminence so far out of perspective as to result
unfortunately both for him and for the community. He pleases himself,
follows his own bent, and prefers salience to conformability for his work,
because his chief aim is to make an effect. This is especially true of those of
our architects who have ideas. But these are the exceptions, of course, and
the general aspect of the city is characterized by something far less
agreeable than mere lack of symmetry; it is characterized mainly by an all-
pervading bad taste in every detail into which the element of art enters or
should enter—that is to say, nearly everything that meets the eye.
However, on the other hand, Parisian uniformity may depress
exuberance, it is the condition and often the cause of the omnipresent good
taste. Not only is it true that, as Mr. Hamerton remarks, "in the better
quarters of the city a building hardly ever rises from the ground unless it
has been designed by some architect who knows what art is, and endeavors
to apply it to little things as well as great"; but it is equally true that the
national sense of form expresses itself in every appurtenance of life as well
as in the masses and details of architecture. In New York our noisy diversity
not only prevents any effect of ensemble and makes, as I say, the old
commonplace brown stone regions the most reposeful and rational
prospects of the city, but it precludes also, in a thousand activities and
aspects, the operation of that salutary constraint and conformity without
which the most acutely sensitive individuality inevitably declines to a lower
level of form and taste. La mode, for example, seems scarcely to exist at all;
or at any rate to have taken refuge in the chimney-pot hat and the tournure.
The dude, it is true, has been developed within a few years, but his
distinguishing trait of personal extinction has had much less success and is
destined to a much shorter life than his appellation, which has wholly lost
its original significance in gaining its present popularity. Every woman one
meets in the street has a different bonnet. Every street car contains a
millinery museum. And the mass of them may be judged after the

circumstance that one of the most fashionable Fifth Avenue modistes flaunts
a sign of enduring brass announcing "English Round Hats and Bonnets."
The enormous establishments of ready-made men’s clothing seem not yet to
have made their destined impression in the direction of uniformity. The
contrast in dress of the working classes with those of Paris is as
conspicuously unfortunate æsthetically, as politically and socially it may be
significant; ocularly, it is a substitution of a cheap, faded, and ragged
imitation of bourgeois costume for the marvel of neatness and propriety
which composes the uniform of the Parisian ouvrier and ouvrière.
Broadway below Tenth Street is a forest of signs which obscure the
thoroughfare, conceal the buildings, overhang the sidewalks, and exhibit
severally and collectively a taste in harmony with the Teutonic and Semitic
enterprise which, almost exclusively, they attest. The shop-windows’ show,
which is one of the great spectacles of Paris, is niggard and shabby; that of
Philadelphia has considerably more interest, that of London nearly as much.
Our clumsy coinage and countrified currency; our eccentric book-bindings;
that class of our furniture and interior decoration which may be described as
American rococo; that multifariously horrible machinery devised for
excluding flies from houses and preventing them from alighting on dishes,
for substituting a draught of air for stifling heat, for relieving an entire
population from that surplusage of old-fashioned breeding involved in
shutting doors, for rolling and rattling change in shops, for enabling you to
"put only the exact fare in the box"; the racket of pneumatic tubes, of
telephones, of aerial trains; the practice of reticulating pretentious façades
with fire-escapes in lieu of fire-proof construction; the vast mass of our
nickel-plated paraphernalia; our zinc cemetery monuments; our comic
valentines and serious Christmas cards, and grocery labels, and "fancy" job-
printing and theater posters; our conspicuous cuspadores and our
conspicuous need of more of them; the "tone" of many articles in our most
popular journals, their references to each other, their illustrations; the
Sunday panorama of shirt-sleeved ease and the week-day fatigue costume
of curl papers and "Mother Hubbards" general in some quarters; our
sumptuous new bar-rooms, decorated perhaps on the principle that le
mauvais goût mène au crime—all these phenomena, the list of which might
be indefinitely extended, are so many witnesses of a general taste, public
and private, which differs cardinally from that prevalent in Paris.

In fine, the material spectacle of New York is such that at last, with some
anxiety, one turns from the external vileness of every prospect to seek
solace in the pleasure that man affords. But even after the wholesome
American reaction has set in, and your appetite for the life of the senses is
starved into indifference for what begins to seem to you an unworthy ideal;
after you are patriotically readjusted and feel once more the elation of living
in the future owing to the dearth of sustenance in the present—you are still
at the mercy of perceptions too keenly sharpened by your Paris sojourn to
permit blindness to the fact that Paris and New York contrast as strongly in
moral atmosphere as in material aspect. You become contemplative, and
speculate pensively as to the character and quality of those native and
normal conditions, those Relations, which finally you have definitely
resumed. What is it—that vague and pervasive moral contrast which the
American feels so potently on his return from abroad? How can we define
that apparently undefinable difference which is only the more sensible for
being so elusive? Book after book has been written about Europe from the
American standpoint—about America from the European standpoint. None
of them has specified what everyone has experienced. The spectacular and
the material contrasts are easily enough characterized, and it is only the
unreflecting or the superficial who exaggerate the importance of them. We
are by no means at the mercy of our appreciation of Parisian spectacle, of
the French machinery of life. We miss or we do not miss the Salon Carré,
the view of the south transept of Notre Dame as one descends the rue St.
Jacques, the Théâtre Français, the concerts, the Luxembourg Gardens, the
excursions to the score of charming suburban places, the library at the
corner, the convenient cheap cab, the manners of the people, the quiet, the
climate, the constant entertainment of the senses. We have in general too
much work to do to waste much time in regretting these things. In general,
work is by natural selection so invariable a concomitant of our unrivaled
opportunity to work profitably, that it absorbs our energies so far as this
palpable sphere is concerned. But what is it that throughout the hours of
busiest work and closest application, as well as in the preceding and
following moments of leisure and the occasional intervals of relaxation,
makes everyone vaguely perceive the vast moral difference between life
here at home and life abroad—notably life in France? What is the subtle
influence pervading the moral atmosphere in New York, which so markedly

distinguishes what we call life here from life in Paris or even in
Pennedepie?
It is, I think, distinctly traceable to the intense individualism which
prevails among us. Magnificent results have followed our devotion to this
force; incontestably, we have spared ourselves both the acute and the
chronic misery for which the tyranny of society over its constituent parts is
directly responsible. We have, moreover, in this way not only freed
ourselves from the tyranny of despotism, such for example as is exerted
socially in England and politically in Russia, but we have undoubtedly
developed a larger number of self-reliant and potentially capable social
units than even a democratic system like that of France, which sacrifices the
unit to the organism, succeeds in producing. We may truly say that, material
as we are accused of being, we turn out more men than any other
nationality. And if some Frenchman points out that we attach an esoteric
sense to the term "man," and that at any rate our men are not better adapted
than some others to a civilized environment which demands other qualities
than honesty, energy, and intelligence, we may be quite content to leave him
his objection, and to prefer what seems to us manliness, to civilization
itself. At the same time we cannot pretend that individualism has done
everything for us that could be desired. In giving us the man it has robbed
us of the milieu. Morally speaking, the milieu with us scarcely exists. Our
difference from Europe does not consist in the difference between the
European milieu and ours; it consists in the fact that, comparatively
speaking of course, we have no milieu. If we are individually developed, we
are also individually isolated to a degree elsewhere unknown. Politically we
have parties who, in Cicero’s phrase, "think the same things concerning the
republic," but concerning very little else are we agreed in any mass of any
moment. The number of our sauces is growing, but there is no
corresponding diminution in the number of our religions. We have no
communities. Our villages even are apt, rather, to be aggregations. Politics
aside, there is hardly an American view of any phenomenon or class of
phenomena. Every one of us likes, reads, sees, does what he chooses. Often
dissimilarity is affected as adding piquancy of paradox. The judgment of the
ages, the consensus of mankind, exercise no tyranny over the individual
will. Do you believe in this or that, do you like this or that, are questions
which, concerning the most fundamental matters, nevertheless form the
staple of conversation in many circles. We live all of us apparently in a

divine state of flux. The question asked at dinner by a lady in a neighboring
city of a literary stranger, "What do you think of Shakespeare?" is not
exaggeratedly peculiar. We all think differently of Shakespeare, of
Cromwell, of Titian, of Browning, of George Washington. Concerning
matters as to which we must be fundamentally disinterested, we permit
ourselves not only prejudice but passion. At the most we have here and
there groups of personal acquaintance only, whose members are in accord in
regard to some one thing, and quickly crystallize and precipitate at the
mention of something that is really a corollary of the force which unites
them. The efforts that have been made in New York, within the past twenty
years, to establish various special milieus, so to speak, have been pathetic in
their number and resultlessness. Efforts of this sort are of course doomed to
failure, because the essential trait of the milieu is spontaneous existence, but
their failure discloses the mutual repulsion which keeps the molecules of
our society from uniting. How can it be otherwise when life is so
speculative, so experimental, so wholly dependent on the personal force and
idiosyncrasies of the individual? How shall we accept any general verdict
pronounced by persons of no more authority than ourselves, and arrived at
by processes in which we are equally expert? We have so little consensus as
to anything, because we dread the loss of personality involved in submitting
to conventions, and because personality operates centrifugally alone. We
make exceptions in favor of such matters as the Copernican system and the
greatness of our own future. There are things which we take on the credit of
the consensus of authorities, for which we may not have all the proofs at
hand. But as to conventions of all sorts, our attitude is apt to be one of
suspicion and uncertainty. Mark Twain, for example, first won his way to
the popular American heart by exposing the humbugs of the Cinque-cento.
Specifically the most teachable of people, nervously eager for information,
Americans are nevertheless wholly distrustful of generalizations made by
anyone else, and little disposed to receive blindly formularies and
classifications of phenomena as to which they have had no experience. And
of experience we have necessarily had, except politically, less than any
civilized people in the world.
We are infinitely more at home amid universal mobility. We want to act,
to exert ourselves, to be, as we imagine, nearer to nature. We have our tastes
in painting as in confectionery. Some of us prefer Tintoretto to Rembrandt,
as we do chocolate to cocoanut. In respect of taste it would be impossible

for the gloomiest skeptic to deny that this is an exceedingly free country. "I
don’t know anything about the subject (whatever the subject may be), but I
know what I like," is a remark which is heard on every hand, and which
witnesses the sturdiness of our struggle against the tyranny of conventions
and the indomitable nature of our independent spirit. In criticism the
individual spirit fairly runs a-muck; it takes its lack of concurrence as
credentials of impartiality often. In constructive art everyone is occupied
less with nature than with the point of view. Mr. Howells himself displays
more delight in his naturalistic attitude than zest in his execution, which,
compared with that of the French naturalists, is in general faint-hearted
enough. Everyone writes, paints, models, exclusively the point of view.
Fidelity in following out nature’s suggestions, in depicting the emotions
nature arouses, a sympathetic submission to nature’s sentiment, absorption
into nature’s moods and subtle enfoldings, are extremely rare. The artist’s
eye is fixed on the treatment. He is "creative" by main strength. He is
penetrated with a desire to get away from "the same old thing," to "take it"
in a new way, to draw attention to himself, to shine. One would say that
every American nowadays who handles a brush or designs a building, was
stimulated by the secret ambition of founding a school. We have in art thus,
with a vengeance, that personal element which is indeed its savor, but
which it is fatal to make its substance. We have it still more conspicuously
in life. What do you think of him, or her? is the first question asked after
every introduction. Of every new individual we meet we form instantly
some personal impression. The criticism of character is nearly the one
disinterested activity in which we have become expert. We have for this a
peculiar gift, apparently, which we share with gypsies and money-lenders,
and other people in whom the social instinct is chiefly latent. Our gossip
takes on the character of personal judgments rather than of tittle-tattle. It
concerns not what So-and-So has done, but what kind of a person So-and-
So is. It would hardly be too much to say that So-and-So never leaves a
group of which he is not an intimate without being immediately, impartially
but fundamentally, discussed. To a degree not at all suspected by the author
of the phrase, he "leaves his character" with them on quitting any
assemblage of his acquaintance.
The great difficulty with our individuality and independence is that
differentiation begins so soon and stops so far short of real importance. In
no department of life has the law of the survival of the fittest, that principle

in virtue of whose operation societies become distinguished and admirable,
had time to work. Our social characteristics are inventions, discoveries, not
survival. Nothing with us has passed into the stage of instinct. And for this
reason some of our "best people," some of the most "thoughtful" among us,
have less of that quality best characterized as social maturity than a Parisian
washerwoman or concierge. Centuries of sifting, ages of gravitation toward
harmony and homogeneity, have resulted for the French in a delightful
immunity from the necessity of "proving all things" remorselessly laid on
every individual of our society. Very many matters, at any rate, which to the
French are matters of course, our self-respect pledges us to a personal
examination of. The idea of sparing ourselves trouble in thinking occurs to
us far more rarely than to other peoples. We have certainly an insufficient
notion of the superior results reached by economy and system in this
respect.
In one of Mr. Henry James’s cleverest sketches, Lady Barberina, the
English heroine marries an American and comes to live in New York. She
finds it dull. She is homesick without quite knowing why. Mr. James is at
his best in exhibiting at once the intensity of her disgust and the
intangibility of its provocation. We are not all like "Lady Barb." We do not
all like London, whose materialism is only more splendid, not less
uncompromising than our own; but we cannot help perceiving that what
that unfortunate lady missed in New York was the milieu—an environment
sufficiently developed to permit spontaneity and free play of thought and
feeling, and a certain domination of shifting merit by fixed relations which
keeps one’s mind off that disagreeable subject of contemplation, one’s self.
Everyone seems acutely self-conscious; and the self-consciousness of the
unit is fatal, of course, to the composure of the ensemble. The number of
people intently minding their P’s and Q’s, reforming their orthoepy,
practicing new discoveries in etiquette, making over their names, and in
general exhibiting that activity of the amateur known as "going through the
motions" to the end of bringing themselves up, as it were, is very noticeable
in contrast with French oblivion to this kind of personal exertion. Even our
simplicity is apt to be simplesse. And the conscientiousness in educating
others displayed by those who are so fortunate as to have reached perfection
nearly enough to permit relaxation in self-improvement, is only equaled by
the avidity in acquisitiveness displayed by the learners themselves.
Meantime the composure born of equality, as well as that springing from

unconsciousness, suffers. Our society is a kind of Jacob’s ladder, to
maintain equilibrium upon which requires an amount of effort on the part of
the personally estimable gymnasts perpetually ascending and descending, in
the highest degree hostile to spontaneity, to serenity, and stability.
Naturally, thus, everyone is personally preoccupied to a degree unknown
in France. And it is not necessary that this preoccupation should concern
any side of that multifarious monster we know as "business." It may relate
strictly to the paradox of seeking employment for leisure. Even the latter is
a terribly conscious proceeding. We go about it with a mental deliberateness
singularly in contrast with our physical precipitancy. But it is mainly
"business," perhaps, that accentuates our individualism. The condition of
désœuvrement is positively disreputable. It arouses the suspicion of
acquaintance and the anxiety of friends. Occupation to the end of money-
getting is our normal condition, any variation from which demands
explanation, as little likely to be entirely honorable. Such occupation is, as I
said, the inevitable sequence of the opportunity for it, and is the wiser and
more dignified because of its necessity to the end of securing independence.
What the Frenchman can secure merely by the exercise of economy is with
us only the reward of energy and enterprise in acquisition—so
comparatively speculative and hazardous is the condition of our business.
And whereas with us money is far harder to keep, and is moreover
something which it is far harder to be without than is the case in France, the
ends of self-respect, freedom from mortification, and getting the most out of
life, demand that we should take constant advantage of the fact that it is
easier to get. Consequently everyone who is, as we say, worth anything, is
with us adjusted to the prodigious dynamic condition which characterizes
our existence. And such occupation is tremendously absorbing. Our
opportunity is fatally handicapped by this remorseless necessity of
embracing it. It yields us fruit after its kind, but it rigorously excludes us
from tasting any other. Everyone is engaged in preparing the working
drawings of his own fortune. There is no co-operation possible, because
competition is the life of enterprise.
In the resultant manners the city illustrates Carlyle’s "anarchy plus the
constable." Never was the struggle for existence more palpable, more
naked, and more unpictorial. "It is the art of mankind to polish the world,"
says Thoreau somewhere, "and everyone who works is scrubbing in some
part." Everyone certainly is here at work, yet was there ever such scrubbing

with so little resultant polish? The disproportion would be tragic if it were
not grotesque. Amid all "the hurry and rush of life along the sidewalks," as
the newspapers say, one might surely expect to find the unexpected. The
spectacle ought certainly to have the interest of picturesqueness which is
inherent in the fortuitous. Unhappily, though there is hurry and rush
enough, it is the bustle of business, not the dynamics of what is properly to
be called life. The elements of the picture lack dignity—so completely as to
leave the ensemble quite without accent. More incidents in the drama of real
life will happen before midnight to the individuals who compose the orderly
Boulevard procession in Paris than those of its chaotic Broadway
counterpart will experience in a month. The latter are not really more
impressive because they are apparently all running errands and include no
flâneurs. The flâneur would fare ill should anything draw him into the
stream. Everything being adjusted to the motive of looking out for one’s
self, any of the sidewalk civility and mutual interest which obtain in Paris
would throw the entire machine out of gear. Whoever is not in a hurry is in
the way. A man running after an omnibus at the Madeleine would come into
collision with fewer people and cause less disturbance than one who should
stop on Fourteenth Street to apologize for an inadvertent jostle, or to give a
lady any surplusage of passing room. He would be less ridiculous. A friend
recently returned from Paris told me that, on several street occasions, his
involuntary "Excuse me!" had been mistaken for a salutation and answered
by a "How do you do?" and a stare of speculation. Apologies of this class
sound to us, perhaps, like a subtle and deprecatory impeachment of our
large tolerance and universal good nature.
In this way our undoubted self-respect undoubtedly loses something of
its bloom. We may prefer being jammed into street-cars and pressed against
the platform rails of the elevated road to the tedious waiting at Paris 'bus
stations—to mention one of the perennial and principal points of contrast
which monopolize the thoughts of the average American sojourner in the
French capital. But it is terribly vulgarizing. The contact and pressure are
abominable. To a Parisian the daily experience in this respect of those of
our women who have no carriages of their own, would seem as singular as
the latter would find the Oriental habit of regarding the face as more
important than other portions of the female person to keep concealed. But
neither men nor women can persist in blushing at the intimacy of rudeness
to which our crowding subjects them in common. The only resource is in

blunted sensibility. And the manners thus negatively produced we do not
quite appreciate in their enormity because the edge of our appreciation is
thus necessarily dulled. The conductor scarcely ceases whistling to poke
you for your fare. Other whistlers apparently go on forever. Loud talking
follows naturally from the impossibility of personal seclusion in the
presence of others. Our Sundays have lost secular decorum very much in
proportion as they have lost Puritan observance. If we have nothing quite
comparable with a London bank holiday, or with the conduct of the popular
cohorts of the Epsom army; if only in "political picnics" and the excursions
of "gangs" of "toughs" we illustrate absolute barbarism, it is nevertheless
true that, from Central Park to Coney Island, our people exhibit a
conception of the fitting employment of periodical leisure which would
seem indecorous to a crowd of Belleville ouvriers. If we have not the cad,
we certainly possess in abundance the species "hoodlum," which, though
morally far more refreshing, is yet aesthetically intolerable; and the
hoodlum is nearly as rare in Paris as the cad. Owing to his presence and to
the atmosphere in which he thrives, we find ourselves, in spite of the most
determined democratic convictions, shunning crowds whenever it is
possible to shun them. The most robust of us easily get into the frame of
mind of a Boston young woman, to whom the Champs-Élysées looked like
a railway station, and who wished the people would get up from the
benches and go home. Our life becomes a life of the interior; wherefore, in
spite of a climate that permits walks abroad, we confine out-door existence
to Newport lawns and camps in the Adirondacks; and whence proceeds that
carelessness of the exterior which subordinates architecture to "household
art," and makes of our streets such mere thoroughfares lined with "homes."
The manners one encounters in street and shop in Paris are, it is well
known, very different from our own. But no praise of them ever quite
prepares an American for their agreeableness and simplicity. We are always
agreeably surprised at the absence of elaborate manner which eulogists of
French manners in general omit to note; and indeed it is an extremely
elusive quality. Nothing is further removed from that intrusion of the
national gemüthlichkeit into so impersonal a matter as affairs, large or
small, which to an occasional sense makes the occasional German manner
enjoyable. Nothing is farther from the obsequiousness of the London
shopman, which rather dazes the American than pleases him. Nothing, on
the other hand, is farther from our own bald dispatch. With us every

shopper expects, or at any rate is prepared for, obstruction rather than
facilitation on the seller’s side. The drygoods counter, especially when the
attendant is of the gentler sex, is a kind of chevaux-de-frise. The retail
atmosphere is charged with an affectation of unconsciousness; not only is
every transaction impersonal, it is mechanical; ere long it must become
automatic. In many cases there is to be encountered a certain defiant
attitude to the last degree unhappy in its effects on the manners involved—a
certain self-assertion which begs the question, else unmooted, of social
equality, with the result for the time being of the most unsocial relation
probably existing among men. Perfect personal equality for the time being
invariably exists between customer and tradesman in France; the man or
woman who serves you is first of all a fellow-creature; a shop, to be sure, is
not a conversazione, but if you are in a loquacious or inquisitive mood you
will be deemed neither frivolous nor familiar—nor yet an inanimate
obstacle to the flow of the most important as well as the most impetuous of
the currents of life.
Certainly, in New York, we are too vain of our bustle to realize how
mannerless and motiveless it is. The essence of life is movement, but so is
the essence of epilepsy. Moreover the life of the New Yorker who chases
street-cars, eats at a lunch counter, drinks what will "take hold" quickly at a
bar he can quit instantly, reads only the head-lines of his newspaper, keeps
abreast of the intellectual movement by inspecting the display of the
Elevated Railway newsstands while he fumes at having to wait two minutes
for his train, hastily buys his tardy ticket of sidewalk speculators, and leaves
the theater as if it were on fire—the life of such a man is, notwithstanding
all its futile activity, varied by long spaces of absolute mental stagnation, of
moral coma. Not only is our hurry not decorous, not decent; it is not real
activity, it is as little as possible like the animated existence of Paris, where
the moral nature is kept in constant operation, intense or not as the case may
be, in spite of the external and material tranquillity. Owing to this lack of a
real, a rational activity, our individual civilization, which seems when
successful a scramble, and when unlucky a sauve qui peut, is, morally as
well as spectacularly, not ill described in so far as its external aspect is
concerned by the epithet flat. Enervation seems to menace those whom
hyperæsthesia spares.

"We go to Europe to become Americanized," says Emerson, but France
Americanizes us less in this sense than any other country of Europe, and
perhaps Emerson was not thinking so much of her democratic development
into social order and efficiency as of the less American and more feudal
European influences, which do indeed, while we are subject to them,
intensify our affection for our own institutions, our confidence in our own
outlook. One must admit that in France (which nowadays follows our ideal
of liberty perhaps as closely as we do hers of equality and fraternity, and
where consequently our political notions receive few shocks) not only is the
life of the senses more agreeable than it is with us, but the mutual relations
of men are more felicitous also. And alas! Americans who have savored
these sweets cannot avail themselves of the implication contained in
Emerson’s further words—words which approach nearer to petulance than
anything in his urbane and placid utterances—"those who prefer London or
Paris to America may be spared to return to those capitals." "Il faut vivre,
combattre, et finir avec les siens," says Doudan, and no law is more
inexorable. The fruits of foreign gardens are, however delectable, enchanted
for us; we may not touch them; and to pass our lives in covetous inspection
of them is as barren a performance as may be imagined. For this reason the
question "Should you like better to live here or abroad?" is as little practical
as it is frequent. The empty life of the "foreign colonies" in Paris is its
sufficient answer. Not only do most of us have to stay at home, but for
everyone except the inconsiderable few who can better do abroad the work
they have to do, and except those essentially un-American waifs who can
contrive no work for themselves, life abroad is not only less profitable but
less pleasant. The American endeavoring to acclimatize himself in Paris
hardly needs to have cited to him the words of Epictetus: "Man, thou hast
forgotten thine object; thy journey was not to this, but through this"—he is
sure before long to become dismally persuaded of their truth. More speedily
than elsewhere perhaps, he finds out in Paris the truth of Carlyle’s
assurance: "It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man. That he cannot
work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled." For the work which
insures the felicity of the French life of the senses and of French human
relations he cannot share; and, thus, the question of the relative
attractiveness of French and American life—of Paris and New York—
becomes the idle and purely speculative question as to whether one would
like to change his personal and national identity.

And this an American may permit himself the chauvinism of believing a
less rational contradiction of instinct in himself than it would be in the case
of anyone else. And for this reason: that in those elements of life which tend
to the development and perfection of the individual soul in the work of
fulfilling its mysterious destiny, American character and American
conditions are especially rich. Bunyan’s genius exhibits its characteristic
felicity in giving the name of Hopeful to the successor of that Faithful who
perished in the town of Vanity. It would be a mark of that loose
complacency in which we are too often offenders, to associate the scene of
Faithful’s martyrdom with the Europe from which definitively we set out
afresh a century ago; but it is impossible not to recognize that on our
forward journey to the celestial country of national and individual success,
our conspicuous inspiration and constant comforter is that hope whose
cheering ministrations the "weary Titans" of Europe enjoy in far narrower
measure. Living in the future has an indisputably tonic effect upon the
moral sinews, and contributes an exhilaration to the spirit which no sense of
attainment and achieved success can give. We are after all the true idealists
of the world. Material as are the details of our preoccupation, our sub-
consciousness is sustained by a general aspiration that is none the less
heroic for being, perhaps, somewhat naïf as well. The times and moods
when one’s energy is excited, when something occurs in the continuous
drama of life to bring sharply into relief its vivid interest and one’s own
intimate share therein, when nature seems infinitely more real than the
societies she includes, when the missionary, the pioneer, the constructive
spirit is aroused, are far more frequent with us than with other peoples. Our
intense individualism happily modified by our equality, our constant, active,
multiform struggle with the environment, do at least, as I said, produce
men; and if we use the term in an esoteric sense we at least know its
significance. Of our riches in this respect New York alone certainly gives no
exaggerated idea—however it may otherwise epitomize and typify our
national traits. A walk on Pennsylvania Avenue; a drive among the "homes"
of Buffalo or Detroit—or a dozen other true centers of communal life which
have a concrete impressiveness that for the most part only great capitals in
Europe possess; a tour of college commencements in scores of spots
consecrated to the exaltation of the permanent over the evanescent; contact
in any wise with the prodigious amount of right feeling manifested in a
hundred ways throughout a country whose prosperity stimulates generous

impulse, or with the number of "good fellows" of large, shrewd, humorous
views of life, critical perhaps rather than constructive, but at all events
untouched by cynicism, perfectly competent and admirably confident, with
a livelier interest in everything within their range of vision than can be felt
by anyone mainly occupied with sensuous satisfaction, saved from boredom
by a robust imperviousness, ready to begin life over again after every
reverse with unenfeebled spirit, and finding, in the working out of their own
personal salvation according to the gospel of necessity and opportunity, that
joy which the pursuit of pleasure misses—experiences of every kind, in
fine, that familiarize us with what is especially American in our civilization,
are agreeable as no foreign experiences can be, because they are above all
others animating and sustaining. Life in America has for everyone, in
proportion to his seriousness, the zest that accompanies the "advance on
Chaos and the Dark." Meantime, one’s last word about the America
emphasized by contrast with the organic and solidaire society of France, is
that, for insuring order and efficiency to the lines of this advance, it would
be difficult to conceive too gravely the utility of observing attentively the
work in the modern world of the only other great nation that follows the
democratic standard, and is perennially prepared to make sacrifices for
ideas.
[From French Traits, by W. C. Brownell. Copyright, 1888, 1889, by Charles Scribner’s
Sons.]

THE TYRANNY OF THINGS
EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN
A TRAVELER newly returned from the Pacific Ocean tells pleasant stories
of the Patagonians. As the steamer he was in was passing through
Magellan’s Straits some natives came out to her in boats. They wore no
clothes at all, though there was snow in the air. A baby that came along with
them made some demonstration that displeased its mother, who took it by
the foot, as Thetis took Achilles, and soused it over the side of the boat into
the cold seawater. When she pulled it in, it lay a moment whimpering in the
bottom of the boat, and then curled up and went to sleep. The missionaries
there have tried to teach the natives to wear clothes, and to sleep in huts;
but, so far, the traveler says, with very limited success. The most shelter a
Patagonian can endure is a little heap of rocks or a log to the windward of
him; as for clothes, he despises them, and he is indifferent to ornament.
To many of us, groaning under the oppression of modern conveniences,
it seems lamentably meddlesome to undermine the simplicity of such
people, and enervate them with the luxuries of civilization. To be able to
sleep out-o-doors, and go naked, and take sea-baths on wintry days with
impunity, would seem a most alluring emancipation. No rent to pay, no
tailor, no plumber, no newspaper to be read on pain of getting behind the
times; no regularity in anything, not even meals; nothing to do except to
find food, and no expense for undertakers or physicians, even if we fail;
what a fine, untrammeled life it would be! It takes occasional contact with
such people as the Patagonians to keep us in mind that civilization is the
mere cultivation of our wants, and that the higher it is the more our
necessities are multiplied, until, if we are rich enough, we get enervated by
luxury, and the young men come in and carry us out.
We want so many, many things, it seems a pity that those simple
Patagonians could not send missionaries to us to show us how to do
without. The comforts of life, at the rate they are increasing, bid fair to bury
us soon, as Tarpeia was buried under the shields of her friends the Sabines.
Mr. Hamerton, in speaking of the increase of comfort in England, groans at

the "trying strain of expense to which our extremely high standard of living
subjects all except the rich." It makes each individual of us very costly to
keep, and constantly tempts people to concentrate on the maintenance of
fewer individuals means that would in simpler times be divided among
many. "My grandfather," said a modern the other day, "left $200,000. He
was considered a rich man in those days; but, dear me! he supported four or
five families—all his needy relations and all my grandmother’s." Think of
an income of $10,000 a year being equal to such a strain, and providing
suitably for a rich man’s large family in the bargain! It wouldn’t go so far
now, and yet most of the reasonable necessaries of life cost less to-day than
they did two generations ago. The difference is that we need so very many
comforts that were not invented in our grandfather’s time.
There is a hospital, in a city large enough to keep a large hospital busy,
that is in straits for money. Its income from contributions last year was
larger by nearly a third than its income ten years ago, but its expenses were
nearly double its income. There were some satisfactory reasons for the
discrepancy—the city had grown, the number of patients had increased,
extraordinary repairs had been made—but at the bottom a very large
expenditure seemed to be due to the struggle of the managers to keep the
institution up to modern standards. The patients are better cared for than
they used to be; the nurses are better taught and more skillful;
"conveniences" have been greatly multiplied; the heating and cooking and
laundry work is all done in the best manner with the most approved
apparatus; the plumbing is as safe as sanitary engineering can make it; the
appliances for antiseptic surgery are fit for a fight for life; there are
detached buildings for contagious diseases, and an out-patient department,
and the whole concern is administered with wisdom and economy. There is
only one distressing circumstance about this excellent charity, and that is
that its expenses exceed its income. And yet its managers have not been
extravagant: they have only done what the enlightened experience of the
day has considered to be necessary. If the hospital has to shut down and the
patients must be turned out, at least the receiver will find a well-appointed
institution of which the managers have no reason to be ashamed.
The trouble seems to be with very many of us, in contemporary private
life as well as in institutions, that the enlightened experience of the day
invents more necessaries than we can get the money to pay for. Our opulent
friends are constantly demonstrating to us by example how indispensably

convenient the modern necessaries are, and we keep having them until we
either exceed our incomes or miss the higher concerns of life in the effort to
maintain a complete outfit of its creature comforts.
And the saddest part of all is that it is in such great measure an American
development. We Americans keep inventing new necessaries, and the
people of the effete monarchies gradually adopt such of them as they can
afford. When we go abroad we growl about the inconveniences of European
life—the absence of gas in bedrooms, the scarcity and sluggishness of
elevators, the primitive nature of the plumbing, and a long list of other
things without which life seems to press unreasonably upon our endurance.
Nevertheless, if the res angustæ domi get straiter than usual, we are always
liable to send our families across the water to spend a season in the practice
of economy in some land where it costs less to live.
Of course it all belongs to Progress, and no one is quite willing to have it
stop, but it does a comfortable sufferer good to get his head out of his
conveniences sometimes and complain.
There was a story in the newspapers the other day about a Massachusetts
minister who resigned his charge because someone had given his parish a
fine house, and his parishioners wanted him to live in it. His salary was too
small, he said, to admit of his living in a big house, and he would not do it.
He was even deaf to the proposal that he should share the proposed
tenement with the sewing societies and clubs of his church, and when the
matter came to a serious issue, he relinquished his charge and sought a new
field of usefulness. The situation was an amusing instance of the
embarrassment of riches. Let no one to whom restricted quarters may have
grown irksome, and who covets larger dimensions of shelter, be too hasty in
deciding that the minister was wrong. Did you ever see the house that
Hawthorne lived in at Lenox? Did you ever see Emerson’s house at
Concord? They are good houses for Americans to know and remember.
They permitted thought.
A big house is one of the greediest cormorants which can light upon a
little income. Backs may go threadbare and stomachs may worry along on
indifferent filling, but a house will have things, though its occupants go
without. It is rarely complete, and constantly tempts the imagination to
flights in brick and dreams in lath and plaster. It develops annual thirsts for
paint and wall-paper, at least, if not for marble and wood-carving. The

plumbing in it must be kept in order on pain of death. Whatever price is put
on coal, it has to be heated in winter; and if it is rural or suburban, the grass
about it must be cut even though funerals in the family have to be put off
for the mowing. If the tenants are not rich enough to hire people to keep
their house clean, they must do it themselves, for there is no excuse that
will pass among housekeepers for a dirty house. The master of a house too
big for him may expect to spend the leisure which might be made
intellectually or spiritually profitable, in acquiring and putting into practice
fag ends of the arts of the plumber, the bell-hanger, the locksmith, the
gasfitter, and the carpenter. Presently he will know how to do everything
that can be done in the house, except enjoy himself. He will learn about
taxes, too, and water-rates, and how such abominations as sewers or new
pavements are always liable to accrue at his expense. As for the mistress,
she will be a slave to carpets and curtains, wall-paper, painters, and women
who come in by the day to clean. She will be lucky if she gets a chance to
say her prayers, and thrice and four times happy when she can read a book
or visit with her friends. To live in a big house may be a luxury, provided
that one has a full set of money and an enthusiastic housekeeper in one’s
family; but to scrimp in a big house is a miserable business. Yet such is
human folly, that for a man to refuse to live in a house because it is too big
for him, is such an exceptional exhibition of sense that it becomes the
favorite paragraph of a day in the newspapers.
An ideal of earthly comfort, so common that every reader must have
seen it, is to get a house so big that it is burdensome to maintain, and fill it
up so full of jimcracks that it is a constant occupation to keep it in order.
Then, when the expense of living in it is so great that you can’t afford to go
away and rest from the burden of it, the situation is complete and boarding-
houses and cemeteries begin to yawn for you. How many Americans, do
you suppose, out of the droves that flock annually to Europe, are running
away from oppressive houses?
When nature undertakes to provide a house, it fits the occupant. Animals
which build by instinct build only what they need, but man’s building
instinct, if it gets a chance to spread itself at all, is boundless, just as all his
instincts are. For it is man’s peculiarity that nature has filled him with
impulses to do things, and left it to his discretion when to stop. She never
tells him when he has finished. And perhaps we ought not to be surprised

that in so many cases it happens that he doesn’t know, but just goes ahead
as long as the materials last.
If another man tries to oppress him, he understands that and is ready to
fight to death and sacrifice all he has, rather than submit; but the tyranny of
things is so subtle, so gradual in its approach, and comes so masked with
seeming benefits, that it has him hopelessly bound before he suspects his
fetters. He says from day to day, "I will add thus to my house;" "I will have
one or two more horses;" "I will make a little greenhouse in my garden;" "I
will allow myself the luxury of another hired man;" and so he goes on
having things and imagining that he is richer for them. Presently he begins
to realize that it is the things that own him. He has piled them up on his
shoulders, and there they sit like Sindbad’s Old Man and drive him; and it
becomes a daily question whether he can keep his trembling legs or not.
All of which is not meant to prove that property has no real value, or to
rebut Charles Lamb’s scornful denial that enough is as good as a feast. It is
not meant to apply to the rich, who can have things comfortably, if they are
philosophical; but to us poor, who have constant need to remind ourselves
that where the verbs to have and to be cannot both be completely inflected,
the verb to be is the one that best repays concentration.
Perhaps we would not be so prone to swamp ourselves with luxuries and
vain possessions that we cannot afford, if it were not for our deep-lying
propensity to associate with people who are better off than we are. It is
usually the sight of their appliances that upsets our little stock of sense, and
lures us into an improvident competition.
There is a proverb of Solomon’s which prophesies financial wreck or
ultimate misfortune of some sort to people who make gifts to the rich.
Though not expressly stated, it is somehow implied that the proverb is
intended not as a warning to the rich themselves, who may doubtless
exchange presents with impunity, but for persons whose incomes rank
somewhere between "moderate circumstances" and destitution. That such
persons should need to be warned not to spend their substance on the rich
seems odd, but when Solomon was busied with precept he could usually be
trusted not to waste either words or wisdom. Poor people are constantly
spending themselves upon the rich, not only because they like them, but
often from an instinctive conviction that such expenditure is well invested. I
wonder sometimes whether this is true.

To associate with the rich seems pleasant and profitable. They are apt to
be agreeable and well informed, and it is good to play with them and enjoy
the usufruct of all their pleasant apparatus; but, of course, you can neither
hope nor wish to get anything for nothing. Of the cost of the practice, the
expenditure of time still seems to be the item that is most serious. It takes a
great deal of time to cultivate the rich successfully. If they are working
people their time is so much more valuable than yours, that when you visit
with them it is apt to be your time that is sacrificed. If they are not working
people it is worse yet. Their special outings, when they want your company,
always come when you cannot get away from work except at some great
sacrifice, which, under the stress of temptation, you are too apt to make.
Their pleasuring is on so large a scale that you cannot make it fit your times
or necessities. You can’t go yachting for half a day, nor will fifty dollars
take you far on the way to shoot big game in Manitoba. You simply cannot
play with them when they play, because you cannot reach; and when they
work you cannot play with them, because their time then is worth so much a
minute that you cannot bear to waste it. And you cannot play with them
when you are working yourself and they are inactively at leisure, because,
cheap as your time is, you can’t spare it.
Charming and likeable as they are, and good to know, it must be
admitted that there is a superior convenience about associating most of the
time with people who want to do about what we want to do at about the
same time, and whose abilities to do what they wish approximate to ours. It
is not so much a matter of persons as of times and means. You cannot make
your opportunities concur with the opportunities of people whose incomes
are ten times greater than yours. When you play together it is at a sacrifice,
and one which you have to make. Solomon was right. To associate with
very rich people involves sacrifices. You cannot even be rich yourself
without expense, and you may just as well give over trying. Count it, then,
among the costs of a considerable income that in enlarging the range of
your sports it inevitably contracts the circle of those who will find it
profitable to share them.

[From Windfalls of Observation, by Edward Sandford Martin. Copyright, 1893, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons.]

FREE TRADE VS. PROTECTION IN LITERATURE
SAMUEL MCCHORD CROTHERS
IN the old-fashioned text-book we used to be told that the branch of
learning that was treated was at once an art and a science. Literature is
much more than that. It is an art, a science, a profession, a trade, and an
accident. The literature that is of lasting value is an accident. It is something
that happens. After it has happened, the historical critics busy themselves in
explaining it. But they are not able to predict the next stroke of genius.
Shelley defines poetry as the record of "the best and happiest moments
of the best and happiest minds." When we are fortunate enough to happen
in upon an author at one of these happy moments, then, as the country
newspaper would say, "a very enjoyable time was had." After we have said
all that can be said about art and craftsmanship, we put our hopes upon a
happy chance. Literature cannot be standardized. We never know how the
most painstaking work may turn out. The most that can be said of the
literary life is what Sancho Panza said of the profession of knight-errantry:
"There is something delightful in going about in expectation of accidents."
After a meeting in behalf of Social Justice, an eager, distraught young
man met me, in the streets of Boston, and asked:
"You believe in the principle of equality?"
"Yes."
"Don’t I then have just as much right to be a genius as Shakespeare
had?"
"Yes."
"Then why ain’t I?"
I had to confess that I didn’t know.
It is with this chastened sense of our limitations that we meet for any
organized attempt at the encouragement of literary productivity. Matthew
Arnold’s favorite bit of irreverence in which he seemed to find endless
enjoyment was in twitting the unfortunate Bishop who had said that

"something ought to be done" for the Holy Trinity. It was a business-like
proposition that involved a spiritual incongruity.
A confusion of values is likely to take place when we try to "do
something" for American Literature. It is an object that appeals to the
uplifter who is anxious to "get results." But the difficulty is that if a piece of
writing is literature, it does not need to be uplifted. If it is not literature, it is
likely to be so heavy that you can’t lift it. We have been told that a man by
taking thought cannot add a cubit to his stature. It is certainly true that we
cannot add many cubits to our literary stature. If we could we should all be
giants.
When literary men discourse with one another about their art, they often
seem to labor under a weight of responsibility which a friendly outsider
would seek to lighten. They are under the impression that they have left
undone many things which they ought to have done, and that the Public
blames them for their manifold transgressions.
That Great American Novel ought to have been written long ago. There
ought to be more local color and less imitation of European models. There
ought to have been more plain speaking to demonstrate that we are not
squeamish and are not tied to the apron strings of Mrs. Grundy. There ought
to be a literary center and those who are at it ought to live up to it.
In all this it is assumed that contemporary writers can control the literary
situation.
Let me comfort the over-strained consciences of the members of the
writing fraternity. Your responsibility is not nearly so great as you imagine.
Literature differs from the other arts in the relation in which the producer
stands to the consumer. Literature can never be made one of the protected
industries. In the Drama the living actor has a complete monopoly. One
might express a preference for Garrick or Booth, but if he goes to the
theater he must take what is set before him. The monopoly of the singer is
not quite so complete as it once was. But until canned music is improved,
most people will prefer to get theirs fresh. In painting and in sculpture there
is more or less competition with the work of other ages. Yet even here there
is a measure of natural protection. The old masters may be admired, but
they are expensive. The living artist can control a certain market of his own.
There is also a great opportunity for the artist and his friends to exert
pressure. When you go to an exhibition of new paintings, you are not a free

agent. You are aware that the artist or his friends may be in the vicinity to
observe how First Citizen and Second Citizen enjoy the masterpiece.
Conscious of this espionage, you endeavor to look pleased. You observe a
picture which outrages your ideas of the possible. You mildly remark to a
bystander that you have never seen anything like that before.
"Probably not," he replies, "it is not a picture of any outward scene, it
represents the artist’s state of mind."
"O," you reply, "I understand. He is making an exhibition of himself."
It is all so personal that you do not feel like carrying the investigation
further. You take what is set before you and ask no questions.
But with a book the relation to the producer is altogether different. You
go into your library and shut the door, and you have the same sense of
intellectual freedom that you have when you go into the polling booth and
mark your Australian ballot. You are a sovereign citizen. Nobody can know
what you are reading unless you choose to tell. You snap your fingers at the
critics. In the "tumultuous privacy" of print you enjoy what you find
enjoyable, and let the rest go.
Your mind is a free port. There are no customs house officers to examine
the cargoes that are unladen. The book which has just come from the press
has no advantage over the book that is a century old. In the matter of
legibility the old volume may be preferable, and its price is less. Whatever
choice you make is in the face of the free competition of all the ages.
Literature is the timeless art.
Clever writers who start fashions in the literary world should take
account of this secrecy of the reader’s position. It is easy enough to start a
fashion, the difficulty is to get people to follow it. Few people will follow a
fashion except when other people are looking at them. When they are alone
they relapse into something which they enjoy and which they find
comfortable.
The ultimate consumer of literature is therefore inclined to take a
philosophical view of the contentions among literary people, about what
seem to them the violent fluctuations of taste. These fashions come and go,
but the quiet reader is undisturbed. There are enough good books already
printed to last his life-time. Aware of this, he is not alarmed by the cries of
the "calamity howlers" who predict a famine.

From a purely commercial viewpoint, this competition with writers of all
generations is disconcerting. But I do not see that anything can be done to
prevent it. The principle of protection fails. Trades-unionism offers no
remedy. What if all the living authors should join in a general strike! We
tremble to think of the army of strike-breakers that would rush in from all
centuries.
From the literary viewpoint, however, this free competition is very
stimulating and even exciting. To hold our own under free trade conditions,
we must not put all our thought on increasing the output. In order to meet
the free competition to which we are exposed, we must improve the quality
of our work. Perhaps that may be good for us.

DANTE AND THE BOWERY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
IT is the conventional thing to praise Dante because he of set purpose
"used the language of the market-place," so as to be understanded of the
common people; but we do not in practice either admire or understand a
man who writes in the language of our own market-place. It must be the
Florentine market-place of the thirteenth century—not Fulton Market of to-
day. What infinite use Dante would have made of the Bowery! Of course,
he could have done it only because not merely he himself, the great poet,
but his audience also, would have accepted it as natural. The nineteenth
century was more apt than the thirteenth to boast of itself as being the
greatest of the centuries; but, save as regards purely material objects,
ranging from locomotives to bank buildings, it did not wholly believe in its
boasting. A nineteenth-century poet, when trying to illustrate some point he
was making, obviously felt uncomfortable in mentioning nineteenth-century
heroes if he also referred to those of classic times, lest he should be
suspected of instituting comparisons between them. A thirteenth-century
poet was not in the least troubled by any such misgivings, and quite simply
illustrated his point by allusions to any character in history or romance,
ancient or contemporary, that happened to occur to him.
Of all the poets of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman was the only
one who dared use the Bowery—that is, use anything that was striking and
vividly typical of the humanity around him—as Dante used the ordinary
humanity of his day; and even Whitman was not quite natural in doing so,
for he always felt that he was defying the conventions and prejudices of his
neighbors, and his self-consciousness made him a little defiant. Dante was
not defiant of conventions: the conventions of his day did not forbid him to
use human nature just as he saw it, no less than human nature as he read
about it. The Bowery is one of the great highways of humanity, a highway
of seething life, of varied interest, of fun, of work, of sordid and terrible
tragedy; and it is haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk through the
pages of the Inferno. But no man of Dante’s art and with Dante’s soul

would write of it nowadays; and he would hardly be understood if he did.
Whitman wrote of homely things and every-day men, and of their greatness,
but his art was not equal to his power and his purpose; and, even as it was,
he, the poet, by set intention, of the democracy, is not known to the people
as widely as he should be known; and it is only the few—the men like
Edward FitzGerald, John Burroughs, and W. E. Henley—who prize him as
he ought to be prized.
Nowadays, at the outset of the twentieth century, cultivated people
would ridicule the poet who illustrated fundamental truths, as Dante did six
hundred years ago, by examples drawn alike from human nature as he saw
it around him and from human nature as he read of it. I suppose that this
must be partly because we are so self-conscious as always to read a
comparison into any illustration, forgetting the fact that no comparison is
implied between two men, in the sense of estimating their relative greatness
or importance, when the career of each of them is chosen merely to
illustrate some given quality that both possess. It is also probably due to the
fact that an age in which the critical faculty is greatly developed often tends
to develop a certain querulous inability to understand the fundamental
truths which less critical ages accept as a matter of course. To such critics it
seems improper, and indeed ludicrous, to illustrate human nature by
examples chosen alike from the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Castle Garden and
the Piræus, alike from Tammany and from the Roman mob organized by the
foes or friends of Cæsar. To Dante such feeling itself would have been
inexplicable.
Dante dealt with those tremendous qualities of the human soul which
dwarf all differences in outward and visible form and station, and therefore
he illustrated what he meant by any example that seemed to him apt. Only
the great names of antiquity had been handed down, and so, when he spoke
of pride or violence or flattery, and wished to illustrate his thesis by an
appeal to the past, he could speak only of great and prominent characters;
but in the present of his day most of the men he knew, or knew of, were
naturally people of no permanent importance—just as is the case in the
present of our own day. Yet the passions of these men were the same as
those of the heroes of old, godlike or demoniac; and so he unhesitatingly
used his contemporaries, or his immediate predecessors, to illustrate his
points, without regard to their prominence or lack of prominence. He was
not concerned with the differences in their fortunes and careers, with their

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