ch of happiness, what kind of thing it is. It is pleasure, it is
virtue; what not? All philosophers, so to speak, are but fighting about
the ass' shadow. I saw one who poured water into a mortar, and ground
it with all his might with a pestle of iron, fancying he did a thing
useful; but it remained water only, none the less.' Stoicism, hedonism,
the gospel of 'Sweetness and Light'; what is it, may I ask, that your
aesthetic priests furnish, to feed immortal British souls? Knee
breeches, sun flowers, niello, cretonne, Nanking bowls, lily dados? To
us it savors sorrowfully of that which one of your prophets
foreshadowed, 'Despair, baying as the poet heard her, in the ruins of
old Rome'."

"Beg pardon, Miss Cutting; but you quite surprise me. The tone of many
American papers and magazines led us to suppose, really, that the rosy
dawn of Culture was beginning to flush the night of Philistinism
brooding over your Western world."

"Believe it not. Primeval gloom, raw realism so weigh upon our
apathetic souls, that we rub our eyes and stare at sight of your
aesthetic catechism: 'Harmony, but no system; instinct, but no logic;
eternal growth and no maturity; everlasting movement, and nothing
attained; infinite possibilities of everything; the becoming all
things, the being nothing.' We have too much Philistine honesty to
pretend that we understand that, but like other ambitious parrots we
can commit to memory. One of your seers tells us that: 'Renaissance art
will make our lives like what seems one of the loveliest things in
nature, the iridescent film on the face of stagnant water!' Now it will
require at least a decade, to train us to appreciate the subtile
symphonies of ditch slime. An English friend compassionating my
American stupidity, essayed to initiate me in the cult of 'culture',
and gave me a leaf to study, from the latter-day gospel. I learned it
after a time, as I did the multiplication table. 'Culture steps in, and
points out the grossness of untempered belief. It tells us the beauty
of picturesque untruth; the grotesqueness of unmannerly conviction;
truth and error have kissed each other in a sweet, serener sphere; this
becomes that, and that is something else. The harmonious, the suave,
the well bred waft the bright particular being into a peculiar and
reserved parterre of paradise, where bloom at once the graces of
Panthism, the simplicity of Deism, and the pathos of Catholicism; where
he can sip elegances an