s, the
sense of forest and prairie and sky, are all inexplicably blended with
our notion of the ideal America. Henry James once tried to explain the
difference between Turgenieff and a typical French novelist by saying
that the back door of the Russian's imagination was always open upon
the endless Russian steppe. No one can understand the spirit of
American romance if he is not conscious of this ever-present hinterland
in which our spirits have, from the beginning, taken refuge and found
solace.

We have already noticed, in the chapter on idealism, how swiftly the
American imagination modifies the prosaic facts of everyday
experience. The idealistic glamour which falls upon the day's work
changes easily, in the more emotional temperaments, and at times,
indeed, in all of us, into the fervor of true romance. Then, the
prosaic buying and selling becomes the "game." A combination of buyers
and sellers becomes the "system." The place where these buyers and
sellers most do congregate and concentrate becomes "Wall Street"--a
sort of anthropomorphic monster which seems to buy and sell the bodies
and souls of men. Seen half a continent away, through the mists of
ignorance and prejudice and partisan passion, "Wall Street" has loomed
like some vast Gibraltar. To the broker's clerk who earns his weekly
salary in that street, the Nebraska notion of "Wall Street" is too
grotesque for discussion.

How easily every phase of American business life may take on the hues
of romance is illustrated by the history of our railroads. No wonder
that Bret Harte wrote a poem about the meeting of the eastward and
westward facing engines when the two sections of the Union Pacific
Railroad at last drew near each other on the interminable plains and
the two engines could talk. Of course what they said was poetry. There
was a time when even the Erie Canal was poetic. The Panama Canal
to-day, in the eyes of most Americans, is something other than a mere
feat of engineering. We are doing more than making "the dirt fly." The
canal represents victory over hostile forces, conquest of unwilling
Nature, achievement of what had long been deemed impossible, the making
not of a ditch, but of History.

So with all that American zest for camping, fishing, sailing, racing,
which lies deep in the Anglo-Saxon, and which succeeds to the more
primitive era of actual struggle against savage beasts or treacherous
men or mysterious forests. It is at once an outlet a