I

The great author had realized one of the dreams of his ambitious
youth, the possession of an ancestral hall in England. It was not so
much the good American's reverence for ancestors that inspired the
longing to consort with the ghosts of an ancient line, as artistic
appreciation of the mellowness, the dignity, the aristocratic aloofness
of walls that have sheltered, and furniture that has embraced,
generations and generations of the dead. To mere wealth, only his astute
and incomparably modern brain yielded respect; his ego raised its
goose-flesh at the sight of rooms furnished with a single check,
conciliatory as the taste might be. The dumping of the old interiors of
Europe into the glistening shells of the United States not only roused
him almost to passionate protest, but offended his patriotism--which he
classified among his unworked ideals. The average American was not an
artist, therefore he had no excuse for even the affectation of
cosmopolitanism. Heaven knew he was national enough in everything else,
from his accent to his lack of repose; let his surroundings be in
keeping.

Orth had left the United States soon after his first successes, and, his
art being too great to be confounded with locality, he had long since
ceased to be spoken of as an American author. All civilized Europe
furnished stages for his puppets, and, if never picturesque nor
impassioned, his originality was as overwhelming as his style. His
subtleties might not always be understood--indeed, as a rule, they were
not--but the musical mystery of his language and the penetrating charm
of his lofty and cultivated mind induced raptures in the initiated,
forever denied to those who failed to appreciate him.