utting up a big
building without feeling that it was time to pull it down again; and
that somebody began to dig up the first foundations while somebody else
was putting on the last tiles. This fills the whole of this brilliant
and bewildering place with a quite unique and unparalleled air of rapid
ruin. Ruins spring up so suddenly like mushrooms, which with us are the
growth of age like mosses, that one half expects to see ivy climbing
quickly up the broken walls as in the nightmare of the Time Machine, or
in some incredibly accelerated cinema.

There is no sight in any country that raises my own spirits so much as
a scaffolding. It is a tragedy that they always take the scaffolding
away, and leave us nothing but a mere building. If they would only take
the building away and leave us a beautiful scaffolding, it would in most
cases be a gain to the loveliness of earth. If I could analyse what it
is that lifts the heart about the lightness and clarity of such a white
and wooden skeleton, I could explain what it is that is really charming
about New York; in spite of its suffering from the curse of
cosmopolitanism and even the provincial superstition of progress. It is
partly that all this destruction and reconstruction is an unexhausted
artistic energy; but it is partly also that it is an artistic energy
that does not take itself too seriously. It is first because man is here
a carpenter; and secondly because he is a stage carpenter. Indeed there
is about the whole scene the spirit of scene-shifting. It therefore
touches whatever nerve in us has since childhood thrilled at all
theatrical things. But the picture will be imperfect unless we realise
something which gives it unity and marks its chief difference from the
climate and colours of Western Europe. We may say that the back-scene
remains the same. The sky remained, and in the depths of winter it
seemed to be blue with summer; and so clear that I almost flattered
myself that clouds were English products like primroses. An American
would probably retort on my charge of scene-shifting by saying that at
least he only shifted the towers and domes of the earth; and that in
England it is the heavens that are shifty. And indeed we have changes
from day to day that would seem to him as distinct as different
magic-lantern slides; one view showing the Bay of Naples and the next
the North Pole. I do not mean, of course, that there are no changes in
American weather; but as a matt