osture and costume possible for man, are seated at the windows,
where they may enjoy the outside procession during the boresome
processes of the shave and the hair-cut. In the windows of the downtown
shops, with no pretence whatever of the curtains customary in the East,
men clerks disrobe and re-robe life-sized female models of an appalling
nude flesh-likeness. They dress these helpless ladies in all the
fripperies of femininity from the wax out, oblivious to the flippant
comments of gathering crowds. It's all a part of that civic candor
somehow. Nowhere I think are eyes so clear, glances so direct and
expressions so frank as in California. Nowhere is conversation and
discussion more straightforward and courageous.

All that I have written thus far is only by way of preliminary to
showing you what the background of the Native Son has been and to
explaining why Europe does not dazzle him much and the East not at
all. Remember that he is instinctively an athlete and that he has never
dissipated his magnificent strength in fighting weather. If he is a
little--mind you, I say only a little--inclined to use that strength on
more entertaining dissipation, he is as likely to restore the balance by
much physical exercise.

There I go again! Enormous! Superb! Splendid! Spacious! You see how
impossible it is to keep your vocabulary down when California is your
subject. Another moment and I shall be saying more unique.

Remember that all his life he has gazed on beauty--beauty tragic and
haunting, beauty gorgeous and gay. Remember he is accustomed to enormous
sizes; superb heights; splendid distances; spacious vistas. That
California does not produce an annual crop of megalo-maniacs is the best
argument I know for the superiority of heredity over environment.

Remember, too, that all his life the Native Son has soaked in an art
atmosphere potentially as strong and individual as ancient Greece or
renaissance Italy. The dazzling country side, the sulphitic brew of
races, the cosmopolitan "city" have taken care of that. That art-spirit
accounts for such minor California phenomena as photography raised
to unequalled art levels and shops whose simple beautiful interiors
resemble the private galleries of art collectors; it accounts for such
major phenomena as the Stevenson monument, the "Lark", the annual Grove
Play of the Bohemian Club, and the Exposition of 1915.

The tiny monument to Stevenson, tucked away in a corner soaked wit