for quiet, but not for melancholy. It is a slatternly city, but curiously easy, curiously comfortable. It does not spur one, but neither does it threaten. Nothing aspires in Baltimore, but nothing forbids.

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It is perhaps worth while to repeat that all this applies to the center of the city only. Baltimore has charming suburbs. Indeed, there is some foundation for the claim that the modern "development" was invented in the Maryland metropolis. Certainly Roland Park was one of the earliest of its type in this country. Now one finds miles of streets laid out according to the best landscape engineering and lined with houses the design of each of which has passed an exacting test. In these suburbs not even the editor of the "Ladies' Home Journal" could find a flaw. They are as impeccable as Mr. George F. Babbitt's model home in Zenith. But they are no more native to Baltimore than are their counterparts around every other American city. Overnight they might be detached from their present connection and attached to Cleveland, or Atlanta, or Kansas City, and no one would note anything strange the next morning.

What is typical of Baltimore, architecturally, is the famous red-brick block with white marble steps. The existence of extensive marble quarries just outside the city made such steps relatively cheap a few decades ago; and in the Victorian era the spotlessness of her steps was the basis of a housewife's reputation in the neighborhood. One shudders to think of the backaches those quarries have indirectly caused.

In those days old George Washington, standing on the top of his Doric column in Mount Vernon Place, could look over and beyond the houses of all the rulers of the city. To-day the monument is in downtown Baltimore, its simple loveliness an incongruous element there, while the rulers have retired over the hills and far away. More and more of the red-brick blocks each year are given over to the Afro-American, the Slav and the neo-Roman, none of whom wastes backaches on white marble steps.

Yet the evacuation is not accomplished with cheers and happy laughter, but with a sort of reluctance. Baltimore becomes modern, but morosely. She clings to her remnants of antiquity, such as, for example, the Camden Street Station of the Baltimore and Ohio and the Charles Street Station of the Pennsylvania. Go-getterism is not to her fancy; she accepts it, but with a certain disdain.

One who will walk in Charles Street at the proper hour on any fine afternoon may behold a marvelnamely, the spirit of Baltimore incarnate. It is a great lady, perhaps eighty years old, but still erect, taking the air as she has taken it in good weather these sixty years. When she began the practice, Charles Street was the promenade of the fashionable, and everybody who was anybody was seen there in the afternoon. To-day it is to the ordinary person a clanging, howling, screeching bedlam through which trucks, trolleys, taxis, horse-drawn vehicles and private automobiles fight their way, while along the sidewalks surge mobs drawn from all the four corners of

the earth. Hard-driven traffic cops fight valiantly for control, but at that, crossing Charles Street is frequently a hair-raising adventure to ordinary persons.

But a great lady of Baltimore is not an ordinary person, and you know it the moment she comes in sight. This one, in particular, is unmistakable. She is invariably clad in black silk, yards and yards of it and of the stiffest, with a touch of white at throat and wrists. Her one concession to Time is an ebony cane. It is her sole concession, to man or to nature. She is small of stature, and her countenance is certainly not formidable; but she has The Presence. When that small, black figure moves down Charles Street, it is as if the cathedral had suddenly started out for a stroll. She takes the road, all of it, and Charles Street instantly recognizes its place and gets out of her way. She strolls along the swarming sidewalks, and Serbs, Croats and Slovenes jostle each other into the gutter to clear her path. She saunters into the stream of traffic; and policemen, instead of exploding into picturesque blasphemy, whirl upon the charging monsters with white gloves uplifted. Motormen and taxidrivers slam on the brakes and pray. There is the squealing of tortured steel, the clangor of bumpers suddenly meeting; rubber slides hissing over the asphalt. But the great lady saunters through untouched, and (this is the miracle) nobody swears. For she is so obviously a great lady that all Charles Street knows she has always the right of way.

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Baltimore city is in some respects the great lady. She has her habits

which she disdains to alter merely to avoid being run over by a deplorably hasty and noisy world. But neither will she enter into vulgar disputation with any one. She simply holds to her course, supremely confident that the lesser breeds will scatter before her. Does the nation adopt an Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, contrary to Baltimore's notion of what is fitting and proper? She does not explode into vituperation; she merely shrugs and instructs her police officers to attend strictly to the business of enforcing the laws of the city and of Maryland, letting prohibition severely alone. Does the Ku Klux Klan rise to high tide on all sides of this, the colony founded by Catholic Baron Baltimore as a refuge for his coreligionists? She shrugs again and does nothing beyond seeing to it that nobody throws a brick at a Klan parade. Do the Catholics of New York rush en masse to the banner of Al Smith? Baltimore promptly elects a Methodist mayor over a Catholic, and meditates the possibility of seizing the Democratic nomination for the Episcopalian Ritchie.

The rest of the country, noting these peculiarities, arrives at the conclusion that Baltimore is the most tolerant city on the Atlantic seaboard, and begins to accept at face value the "Evening Sun's" designation of the commonwealth as the Maryland Free State. But tolerance is an effect, not a cause. The cause of Baltimore's tolerance is her towering self-sufficiency. She is so supremely confident of her ability to deal effectively with Catholics, Ku Klux, or prohibition enforcement agents that she can afford to be tolerant of them

C

ULTURE is the bouquet, the aroma, of experience. We connect it with education, yet we all feel that education is only a possible ingredient-not every educated person is cultured, not every cultured person has enjoyed, in any formal sense, a preliminary education. A witty Frenchman says that culture is what remains when you have forgotten what you learned; yet culture is more than a residuum-it is an active habit of the mind and heart. Without the activity it might still be a good thing to have, but it would hardly be a virtue.

The word is a farmer's image, suggesting rich ground, plowing, and crops. Cultivated earth owes much to the dead things which go into it, and much to the tilling, to the turning up into sunshine and rain; but we still should not call it cultivated if it produced nothing. The harvest must be a double benefit, helpful in an immediate way, but providing something in addition, which time will turn back into the soil.

It is this creative function which distinguishes culture from something which too often borrows its name. Some of us, healthy barbarians that we are, feel a resentful emotion surging whenever we encounter that false culture which is a barren man

ner, an outward resemblance to something which once, in some other time and place, was fruitful. When we hear the American boy, returned from Oxford, talking like an English boy, and simulating an English reaction to life, we have the conviction that all is not well. When we see in our churches or colleges an aping of some architecture which long ago had a natural expression of life, but which never of itself would grow out of American conditions, we suspect that some one or something has gone spiritually off the track. Is this culture? Should I be cultured if I could write like Arnold or Pater? It is just because the barbarian is healthy that he suspects this dead momentum of what was originally a vital present. The true culture would involve as much of the past, but it would circle through the moment in which we now breathe, it would be a putting forth of modern energies, it would take the color of the earth out of which it is now springing.

Academic minds are said to cherish the false, echoing culture. I fear it is rather the general human mind which rests gratefully on the accomplishments of others, and refuses to pay the laborious and daily price of remaining alive. To be sure, the

academic mind is liable to think that the classics are so many reservoirs or tanks, out of which culture may be sucked in interminable semester courses. But my neighbor, whose business is life-insurance, speaks of his tables and his policies with the same faith, as though the benefits of human experience were acquired through semiannual premiums; and my other neighbor, a kindly family man, speaks of the home as though it were an absolute state or locality, from which society is at present running away, but which will wait patiently where it belongs until society sees its error and comes back. Perhaps it needs some intelligence to see that whenever man has used the classics, he has changed them. Whenever the great Greek and Latin authors really fertilized the human spirit, really became culture, they entered into our lives, produced results and at last emerged, chemically changed, the classics of a later day, fit to inspire later generations in their turn. Greek literature, having entered the soul of the Renaissance, became something the Greeks could not, perhaps would not, have produced. Greek civilization, having enchanted the modern English spirit, sees itself remade in Arnold or in Jowett. In the process, something quite serious has happened to Homer and Plato. Yet if Jowett has changed the great philosopher, why not admit that no other result was possible, if Plato was to be truly a cultural force. We cannot be Plato. When Plato cultivates us, the harvest is from ourselves.

fertilizing that history becomes a succession of harvest-times, and the high accomplishments of each climax, having been worshiped and loved, slowly dissolve into the universal human heart, dissolve, that is, into new seeds of thought, of feeling, of conduct. The ancient materialists found grandeur in the progress of matter through the living forms which had temporary use for it, back to a limp and dusty state, and back again at last to a new-molded body. Grandeur and gruesomeness, both; what a pilgrimage might not the dust of a king go on, or Cæsar's clay! And what disposal may we not be making of ancient beauty, when we brush off our hat! But the progress of emotions and ideas is grander still. This is culture, if we could trace all its paths the effect on man of the pictures he has seen, the music he has heard, the books he has read. If we but knew, doubtless a fine sunset, now and then, meeting an eye that passes on bright fire to the heart, has changed history.

It is a happy dispensation of nature that we can refine our qualities and gifts by employing them. Whatever inheritance enters into us by way of books or art, whatever contacts with the past, the fruitful beginnings of culture, yet we shall acquire subtlety of sense only by turning them back into life. The person who is merely filled with learning is crude; he fails lamentably and obviously to discriminate among the experiences his fate offers. In the highest things he is impractical, because he cannot make his highest self to function. Who cannot discriminate, cannot live. Taste is well enough, and humor, but a full life is