Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/68

58 Mountains, that you encounter crudities of a new land. Here we are in a land where fortunes are laid by, and where life takes on the aspect of social fruition, for the attainment of which, with certain spiritual and ethical increments, labor struggles. The average man has not yet entered the primrose paths of literary and artistic dalliance. He is still enamoured of activity; and he is the exceptional individual of a community, perhaps, too, he who is most intensely preoccupied by such gigantic business enterprises as are so obvious in the West, who fills a library with books or a gallery with fine pictures. He is therefore known in the community for his exceptional, perhaps eccentric, traits as he would not be known for them in the far East, where the man who is a collector of precious things of the mind or of the hand of the artist is rather common, and has taken a matter-of-fact sort of place among experts. It is probably the tendency of the Western community which possesses one of the book or picture collectors to exaggerate his accomplishments or achievements; it seems so extraordinary to the man who is doing a hard day's work in "progress" that a captain who is doing infinitely harder and more successful work should have collected an almost unique group of pictures of the Barbizon School, or of some other objects of beauty or of artistic skill.

The difference which I am aiming to explain is shown by the fact that while Mr. Gladstone, the always hurried Mr. Gladstone, was an intelligent collector of ivories and of Wedgwood pottery, no one exclaimed over his knowledge and intelligence in that pastime. An interest in some achievements of aesthetic or of literary culture would naturally be presumed of Mr. Gladstone, or of any one of his place in an old country. His knowledge and his liking for certain beautiful symbols would not be regarded as a trait of character; but in a newer community, where these symbols are not or have not been produced, but whither they have to be imported, anything like an expert knowledge of them, or like a real passion for them, on the part of a busy man, is naturally regarded as a trait of character. There are instances, however, which show that the intensity and the large free mind which make of a man the builder up of new and untrodden lands, and of enormous productive or distributive agencies, in turning aside from his tasks will naturally seek gratification and spiritual repose in the great masterpieces of letters and of arts. And when we wonder if a genius of industry has really acquired a true taste for what he buys, let us measure the soul of such a man against the soul of some of the dealers and critics whose business it is to have and to hold the expert knowledge, and to bargain with it against the purse of the Fortunate.

The man whose lofty and far-seeing imagination has led him to people deserts and the wilderness and to conquer nature for the material welfare of man is at least not necessarily the man of dwarfed or of blunted sensitiveness to the high thoughts and to the beautiful images which have been wrought by men of other gifts. There is more reason for expecting the flowers of art and letters to bloom in the nature of a mighty leader of the material progress of our time than to find them flourishing in the heart which is vitiated by the constant fumes of pleasure. The maker for men of new pathways through hitherto untried lands must have had great perceptions, must have dealt in high courage with problems of a future which he could see only with the inspired vision of prophecy; so is it that such as he is often readier to hear and to comprehend the loftiest speech and the noblest vision of the great masters of the past, or of the present, than is he who may cultivate a taste for the sake of an occupation or of a trade.

The social picture of the Middle West as a whole, however, presents the sexes occupying different intellectual and moral planes. There the woman is indisputably the mistress in all that makes for culture—culture in letters and in art; the man is king in his own active realm. Each is most deferential to the other in that other's sphere. The books on the shelves, the pictures on the wall, are of the woman's choice or selection. The man speaks of her literary or artistic tastes, usually of both combined, with the reverence that is due to her superior intellectual and spiritual gifts and acquirements. She is