nbeautiful, unhealthy in her life, and overlooked, as it seems to me,
her all-pervading charm. One must be a pessimist indeed to feel no
exhilaration on coming in contact with such intensity of upward-striving
life as meets one on every hand in this league-long island city,
stretching oceanward between her eastern Sound and her western estuary,
and roofed by a radiant dome of smokeless sky. "Upward-striving life," I
say, for everywhere and in every branch of artistic effort the desire
for beauty is apparent, while at many points the achievement is
remarkable and inspiriting. I speak, of course, mainly of material
beauty; but it is hard to believe that so marked an impulse toward the
good as one notes in architecture, painting, sculpture, and literature,
can be unaccompanied by a cognate impulse toward moral beauty, even in
relation to civic life. The New Yorker's pride in New York is much more
alert and active than the Londoner's pride in London; and this feeling
must ere long make itself effective and dominant. For the great
advantage, it seems to me, that America possesses over the Old World is
its material and moral plasticity. Even among the giant structures of
this city, one feels that there is nothing rigid, nothing oppressive,
nothing inaccessible to the influence of changing conditions. If the
buildings are Cyclopean, so is the race that reared them. The material
world seems as clay on the potter's wheel, visibly taking on the impress
of the human spirit; and the human spirit, as embodied in this superbly
vital people, seems to be visibly thrilling to all the forces of
civilisation.

One of the latest, and certainly one of the most keen-sighted, of
English travellers in America is Mr. G.W. Steevens, a master journalist
if ever there was one. I turn to his _Land of the Dollar_ and I find New
York writ down "uncouth, formless, piebald, chaotic." "Never have I
seen," says Mr. Steevens, "a city more hideous.... Nothing is given to
beauty; everything centres in hard utility." Mr. Steevens must forgive
me for saying that this is simply libellous. It is true, I do not quote
him fairly: I omit his laudatory antitheses. The truncated phrase in the
above passage reads in the original "more hideous or more splendid," and
after averring that "nothing is given to beauty," Mr. Steevens
immediately proceeds to celebrate the beauty of many New York buildings.
Are we to understand, then, that the architects thought of nothing but