But I spent much time in
the Museum, where there is one of the finest Hobbemas in the world, and
where two such different creative artists as Claude Monet and Josiah
Wedgwood are especially honoured. But the chief discovery for me was the
sincere and masterly work in landscape of George Inness, my first
impression of whom was to be fortified when I passed on to Boston, and
reinforced in the Hearn collection in the Metropolitan Museum in New
York.
It was in Chicago, in the Marshall Field Book Department--which is to
ordinary English bookshops like a liner to a houseboat--that I first
realised how intense is the interest which America takes in foreign
contemporary literature. In England the translation has a certain vogue
--Mrs. Garnett's supple and faithful renderings of Turgenev, Tolstoi,
Dostoievski, and Tchekov have, for example, a great following--but we do
not adventure much beyond the French and the Russians; whereas I learn
that English versions of hundreds of other foreign books are eagerly
bought in America. Such curiosity seems to me to be very sensible. I was
surprised also to find tables packed high with the modern drama. In
England the printed play is not to the general taste.
It was in Chicago that I found "window-shopping" at its most
enterprising. In San Francisco the costumiers' windows were thronged all
Sunday, but in Chicago they are brilliantly lighted till midnight, long
after closing hours, so that late passers-by may mark down desirable
things to buy on the morrow.
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