ss. On the other hand, it seems to me,
Mr. Du Maurier fails to convert us to belief in the possibility of
such a character as Trilby, and fails to make us wholly sympathise
with his paeans in her praise. It seems psychologically impossible for
a woman to sin so repeatedly as Trilby, and so apparently without any
overwhelming temptation, and yet at the same time to retain her
essential purity. It is a prostitution of the word "love" to excuse
Trilby's temporary amourettes with a "_quia multum amavit_."

[21] His extraordinary article on George Du Maurier in _Harper's
Magazine_ for September, 1897, is, perhaps, so far as style is
concerned, as glaring an example of how not to do it as can be found
in the range of American letters.

[22] Perhaps Mr. George W. Cable is entitled to rank with Mr. Howells
in this respect as a man who refused to disguise his moral convictions
behind his literary art, and thus infallibly and with full
consciousness imperilled his popularity among his own people.

[23] "Stops of Various Quills," by W.D. Howells (Harper & Brothers,
New York, 1895).

XI

Certain Features of Certain Cities

One of the dicta in M. Bourget's "Outre Mer" to which I cannot but
take exception is that which insists on the essential similarity and
monotony of all the cities of the United States. Passing over the
question of the right of a Parisian to quarrel with monotony of street
architecture, I should simply ask what single country possesses cities
more widely divergent than New York and New Orleans, Philadelphia and
San Francisco, Chicago and San Antonio, Washington and Pittsburg? If
M. Bourget merely means that there is a tendency to homogeneity in the
case of modern cities which was not compatible with the picturesque
though uncomfortable reasons for variety in more ancient foundations,
his remark amounts to a truism. For his implied comparison with
European cities to have any point, he should be able to assert that
the recent architecture of the different cities of Europe is more
varied than the contemporary architecture of the United States. This
seems to me emphatically not the case. Modern Paris resembles modern
Rome more closely than any two of the above-named cities resemble each
other; and it is simply the universal tendency to note similarity
first and then unlikeness that makes the brief visitor to the United
States fail to find characteristic individuality in the various great
cities of the