art had not insisted on taking me to the State Museum at Indianapolis.
In this agreeable and interesting museum there happened to be a
temporary loan exhibit of water-colors by Winslow Homer. Which
water-colors were clearly the productions of a master. They forced me to
reconsider my views of Homer's work in general. They were beautiful;
they thrilled; they were genuine American; there is nothing else like
them. I shall never forget the pleasure I felt in unexpectedly
encountering these summary and highly distinguished sketches in the
quietude of Indianapolis. I would have liked to collect a trainful of
New York, Chicago, and Boston dilettanti, and lead them by the ears to
the unpretentious museum at Indianapolis, and force them to regard
fixedly these striking creations. Not that I should expect appreciation
from them! (Indianapolis, I discovered, was able to keep perfectly calm
in front of the Winslow Homer water-colors.) But their observations
would have been diverting.




VIII

CITIZENS


Nothing in New York fascinated me as much as the indications of the vast
and multitudinous straitened middle-class life that is lived there; the
average, respectable, difficult, struggling existence. I would always
regard this medium plane of the social organism with more interest than
the upper and lower planes. And in New York the enormity of it becomes
spectacular. As I passed in Elevated trains across the end of street