In Chicago the weather was wet and cold, and it was not until after
I had left that I learned of the presence there of certain literary
collections which I may now perhaps never see. But I spent much time in
the Museum, where there is one of the finest Hobbemas in the world, and
where two such different creative artists as Claude Monet and Josiah
Wedgwood are especially honoured. But the chief discovery for me was
the sincere and masterly work in landscape of George Inness, my first
impression of whom was to be fortified when I passed on to Boston, and
reinforced in the Hearn collection in the Metropolitan Museum in New
York.
It was in Chicago, in the Marshall Field Book Department--which is to
ordinary English bookshops like a liner to a houseboat--that I first
realised how intense is the interest which America takes in foreign
contemporary literature. In England the translation has a certain
vogue--Mrs. Garnett's supple and faithful renderings of Turgenev,
Tolstoi, Dostoievski, and Tchekov have, for example, a great
following--but we do not adventure much beyond the French and the
Russians; whereas I learn that English versions of hundreds of other
foreign books are eagerly bought in America. Such curiosity seems to
me to be very sensible. I was surprised also to find tables packed high
with the modern drama. In England the printed play is not to the general
taste.
It was in Chicago that I found "window-shopping" at its most
enterprising. In San Francisco the costumiers' windows were thronged all
Sunday, but in Chicago they are brilliantly lighted till midnight, long
after closing hours, so that late passers-by may mark down desirable
things to buy on the morrow.
The spirited equestrian statue of General John A. Logan, in a waste
space by Michigan Avenue, which I could see from my bedroom window, was
my first and by no means the least satisfying experience of American
sculpture on its native soil--to be face to face with St. Gaudens'
figure of "Grief" in Rock Creek Cemetery, at Washington, having long
been a desire. In time I came to see that beautiful conception, and
I saw also the fine Shaw monument in Boston, fine both in idea and in
execution; and the Sheridan, by the Plaza Hotel in New York; and the
Farragut in Madison Square; and the Pilgrim in Philadelphia--all the
work of the same firm, sensitive hand, a replica of whose Lincoln is now
to be seen at Westminster.
The statue seems almost as natural a part of civic ornament in America
as it is in France, and is not in England; and the standard as a rule is
high. In particular I like the many horsemen--Anthony Wayne dominating
the landscape at Valley Forge; and George Washington again and again,
and not least in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia (where there is also a
bronze roughrider realistically set on a cliff--as though from Ambrose
Bierce's famous story--by Frederic Remington). American painters can
too often suggest predecessors, usually French, but the sculptors have
a strength and directness of their own, and it would not surprise me if
some of the best statues of the future came from their country. No one
would say that all American civic sculpture is good. There is a gigantic
bust of Washington Irving behind New York's Public Library which would
be better away; nor are the lions that guard that splendid institution
superabundantly leonine; but the traveller is more charmed than
depressed by the marble and bronze effigies that meet his eye--and
few witnesses have been able to say that of England. Among the more
remarkable public works I might name the symbolical figures on the
steps of the Boston Free Library, and the frieze in deep relief on the
Romanesque church on Park Avenue in New York, and I found something big
and impressive in the Barnard groups at Harrisburg. Many of the little
bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum--at the other extreme--are exquisite.