III

THE DAMNED

THE Americans who become so bewitched with the Old World as to reside in it may be rightly divided into three classes: Vulgarians, Natural Nobles, and the Inner Temple. The Vulgarians are those who frankly like the good things of the world, and find they get more for their money in Europe than at home. The Natural Nobles are those Americans who discern in themselves a kindred natal aristocracy which binds them to Europe. They feel as if they had been changed at birth and were really European persons of family, with coats of arms, good accents, and men-servants. They cannot remember a time when they did not feel like fine ladies and gentlemen. They hold the hands of the real nobles very tightly when they meet them, and look in their eyes very lovingly. They are really long-lost brothers to dukes and kings, to barons, and to persons with old names and good manners, -indeed, to almost anyone who has the run of the great houses or small houses where the sacred society of refined and titled Europe

congregates. A holy smell, as of incense, pervades the habitations of the elect in Europe; a gentle radiation of influence causes the Natural Noble from America to purr and raise his back and rub himself against the knees of the great,-yea, even against the chairs and wainscoting.

The Inner Temple consists of the intellectuals. These are people who, in the way of books and letters, pictures, small talk, and parlour education, find themselves happy in Europe and unhappy in America. They are often staunch democrats in social sympathy, but they melt before the finesse of European cultivation. Crudity is their bugbear.

It will be seen that all of these classes run into one another, and are really portions of a sort of spiral hierarchy, made up of Americans who are sensitive towards the refinements of (1) cookery, (2) social manners, and (3) æsthetic expression. The Vulgarians are the most robust of the three classes, for they proclaim the lowness of their aims, and they frankly enjoy contact with one another. They are the tiers état, the good bourgeoisie of the American Colony. These bourgeois are, of course, despised by the Natural Nobles, whose illusion it is that they themselves associate only with

foreigners. The Vulgarians are especially unpleasant to them, because the Vulgarians are in their way; the Vulgarians are a reproach to them, a travesty of them. The Vulgarians make the path of the Natural Nobles difficult in Europe in a thousand ways. Often a Natural Noble has sisters and brothers who are Vulgarians; for Natural Nobility is a personal sanctification, an illumination, a grace rather than an inheritance. In this it differs from the older European nobility, which depends upon externals. The American noble is noble by virtue of an inner revelation.

When I was a child of about seven I was taken to St. Cloud, and on that day the Spirit descended upon me and I became one of the Elect. It was in a great drawingroom, with miles of polished parquet flooring and hundreds of spindle chairs, gilded more completely than it would be thought possible to gild anything,-gold chairs they looked like, and many crystal chandeliers, and many tall windows and many mirrors and cheval-glasses. I was struck dumb with delight, and I said to myself, "This is the sort of thing that I like! It is native to me; I have always been waiting for this! It must be that I am a king!"

In this early experience of my own I seem to see an explanation of the American Colony in Europe. From the Vulgarian to the Inner Temple, the American Colonist in Europe feels that he is really at home. He is in Abraham's bosom. All the beginning of his life was an unpleasant dream. All of that early New York, all of that deadly Boston, ne compte plus.

The Inner Temple has, of course, a better developed metaphysical consciousness than the other two classes. The Inner Temple is the Flower of the Bean-"the bean-flower's boon," as Browning would say. It is the perfect gentian of a rootless flower, and it blossoms in the boudoir of a Spirit that lives in vacuo. These intellectuals have found their heaven, too. Why, they are as much at home in books and in pictures as the worm is in the chestnut.

IV

ABBÉS AND CUPS OF CHOCOLATE

Now I must make a digression, at the risk of fatiguing the reader, and must tell him that there has always existed in Europe a whole society of critical cleverness which

runs behind the progress of the arts like dogs. at a fair. The parlour oracle was a common character in Roman society, as one may see in Horace. So is the man that knows the last joke or the last news. It has always been a game in Europe to surprise people in the drawing-room, to give the quip, to show oneself to be au courant, to take the trick in conversation,—and, above all, to shun crudity. This game of shunning crudity is to-day a living part of the Roman Empire which shines in the drawing-rooms of every European capital, and which, by the way, anyone can learn to play in the course of two weeks. It is a shallow, foolish gamea bore of a game; but the bon-ton has always played it, and always will. Men of real importance who move in the beau monde play it out of habit, and a whole world of insignificant people play it because it is their religion.

This drawing-room world of social and æsthetic chatter draws such vitality as it has from the deep currents of national life that flow about it and over it. It is a fringe of those real intellectual worlds which lie invisible in the great peoples of Europe. It is a sort of servants' dining-hall, which implies the existence of masters and of royal folk