r-colors by Winslow Homer. Which
water-colors were clearly the productions of a master. They forced me to
reconsider my views of Homer's work in general. They were beautiful;
they thrilled; they were genuine American; there is nothing else like
them. I shall never forget the pleasure I felt in unexpectedly
encountering these summary and highly distinguished sketches in the
quietude of Indianapolis. I would have liked to collect a trainful of
New York, Chicago, and Boston dilettanti, and lead them by the ears to
the unpretentious museum at Indianapolis, and force them to regard
fixedly these striking creations. Not that I should expect appreciation
from them! (Indianapolis, I discovered, was able to keep perfectly calm
in front of the Winslow Homer water-colors.) But their observations
would have been diverting.

VIII

CITIZENS

Nothing in New York fascinated me as much as the indications of the vast
and multitudinous straitened middle-class life that is lived there; the
average, respectable, difficult, struggling existence. I would always
regard this medium plane of the social organism with more interest than
the upper and lower planes. And in New York the enormity of it becomes
spectacular. As I passed in Elevated trains across the end of street
after street, and street after street, and saw so many of them just
alike, and saw so many similar faces mysteriously peering in the same
posture between the same curtains through the same windows of the same
great houses; and saw canaries in cages, and enfeebled plants in pots,
and bows of ribbon, and glints of picture-frames; and saw crowd after
dense crowd fighting down on the cobbled roads for the fearful privilege
of entering a surface-car--I had, or seemed to have, a composite vision
of the general life of the city.

And what sharpened and stimulated the vision more than anything else was
the innumerable flashing glimpses of immense torn clouds of clean linen,
or linen almost clean, fluttering and shaking in withdrawn courtyards
between rows and rows of humanized windows. This domestic detail,
repugnant possibly to some, was particularly impressive to me; it was
the visible index of what life really is on a costly rock ruled in all
material essentials by trusts, corporations, and the grand principle of
tipping.

I would have liked to live this life, for a space, in any one of half a
million restricted flats, with not quite enough space, not quite enough
air