shion an image of our
decadence, or our arrest, so grandly, so perfectly dull and
uninteresting, that it would fix all the after-ages with the sovereign
authority of a masterpiece? Here, he tremblingly glowed to realize, was
opportunity, not for him, indeed, but for some more modern, more
divinely inspired lover of the mediocre, to eternize our typelessness
and establish himself among the many-millioned heirs of fame. It had
been easy--how easy it had been!--to catch the likeness of those
formative times in which he had lived and wrought; but the triumph and
the reward of the new artist would be in proportion to the difficulty of
seizing the rich, self-satisfied, ambitionless, sordid commonplace of a
society wishing to be shut up in a steam-heated, electric-lighted palace
and fed fat in its exclusiveness with the inexhaustible inventions of an
overpaid chef. True, the strong, simple days of the young republic, when
men forgot themselves in the struggle with the wild continent, were
past; true, the years were gone when the tremendous adventure of tearing
from her heart the iron and the gold which were to bind her in lasting
subjection gave to fiction industrial heroes fierce and bold as those of
classic fable or mediaeval romance. But there remained the days of the
years which shall apparently have no end, but shall abound forever in an
inexhaustible wealth of the sort wishing not so much to rise itself as
to keep down and out all suggestion of the life from which it sprang.

The sort of type which would represent this condition would be vainly
sought in any exceptionally opulent citizen of that world. He would
have, if nothing else, the distinction of his unmeasured millions, which
would form a poetry, however sordid; the note of the world we mean is
indistinction, and the protagonist of the fiction seeking to portray its
fads and characters must not have more than two or three millions at the
most. He, or better she, were better perhaps with only a million, or a
million and a half, or enough to live handsomely in eminent inns, either
at home or abroad, with that sort of insolent half-knowledge to which
culture is contemptible; which can feel the theatre, but not literature;
which has passed from the horse to the automobile; which has its moral
and material yacht, cruising all social coasts and making port in none
where there is not a hotel or cottage life as empty and exclusive as its
own. Even in trying to understate t