tiles in the church of St. Julien-les-Pauvres have the modernness that belongs to something that is made, rather than hewn, while the fortifications, even the feudal institution of the concierge, at one bound carry you back into the Middle Ages. But all of it, classic and actual, the concentrated essence of two thousand years of living and dying and thinking and acting, is a tapestry of a million threads, a mosaic of a thousand shades, which in one way or another has something to offer everybody. And to this day each individual adds to it his quota, whether in the secular bookselling of the Latin Quarter, or in the singing of gay little old songs over the butter and eggs at the market; finds his reference point in it, the means by which he is enabled to share his thought with someone else. He may distinguish a red thread or a gold, he may look for blue glass or for white, but its tone is determined by the background to which it belongs.

Thus background fences us in from our loneliness; gives us a place in eternity from which we can start, to which we can come back. It is our spiritual home. It is the four walls which shut out nothingness with all its terrors, which out of everything constrains a choice. With the familiar stones of Paris under our feet, with ancient sites and ancient habits, our mind finds the fulcrum necessary for its movement. Perhaps we do not even know the actual events and personalities which are thick around us. But they are there, in every pore of the ancient city that has never grown old. As in a current, we find ourselves carried along by it without any effort on our own part. The back woodsman washes his shirt in the forest stream and the action drifts away, lost in space. The workman scrubs his blue shirt on the stone wall bordering the Seine, as thousands of his kind have done before him, and his action is one more bead on the connecting string of events. The familiar action counts, has meaning, continuity. Is it not true therefore that the greater part of creative work is actual background and background alone? Is not the effort of creation alone so huge that the means, the tools, must be at hand, for it not to exhaust itself halfway?

The would-be creator in new surroundings is at pains to supply himself with background, atmosphere. Why? Why is there a Greenwich Village? Why do people wear their hair long because

they follow particular vocations? Why must they have old furniture, or Japanese decorations, or Russian samovars-something, in short, which is more than chairs and tables? Why do people found art colonies, retire to the woods, speak of "atmosphere" as though you could transport it in your bag? And why does it all seem a little absurd, when in Paris, more perhaps than anywhere, it is just as much a part of natural life as meat and drink and clothing? It is because the creator in a newer country is faced with the gigantic task not only of creating the fragment which he shall add to the sum total of achievement, but of creating it, as it were, almost out of the void, of hewing a statuette out of a cliff instead of out of a block of marble already cut and proportioned. Who shall even see his statuette for the material which surrounds it? In Paris the clearing has long been made; the material is ordered, the marble cut; alone it remains to form the conception-work enough indeed for a single mind. The background is there, rich and compelling. The creator is never crushed under the weight of his material. There is more indeed than this. It is not the artist who makes the work of art alone. It is the public who can understand and sympathize, who can receive what he has to give who complete the work of art. Without it, the picture, the statue, does not exist any more than a wireless message exists till someone has heard it, or a literature until someone has been able to read it. Background, such as you find in Paris, implies this other half of art-perhaps indeed is the other half. It is appreciation at its highest, almost an invitation to the artist to get to work. The new Exchange Market in Paris is illustrative of this appreciation all ready to hand. In it impecunious painters show their pictures to grocers and butchers and bakers and exchange them for bread and meat and wine. And your grocer and your butcher and your baker will gladly give the meat and drink for the pictures that they want, that indeed they consider a need. Thus here is an immense throng, all ready made for appreciation; no aristocracy of amateurs, but a general public all more or less with a need. More and more this capacity for appreciation strikes one in Paris. In the Cluny Museum is a Madonna of a distinctly German type. "Rather Gretchen-like," was the comment of a little French maid out for

a holiday, as naturally as though she were a professional art critic, noting down "influences". They know their history, too, in a real and vivid way. The little daughter of the concierge was asked which of his two wives Napoleon liked the better. To the general surprise she answered Marie Louise. And why? "Because she gave him a son," was the essentially French reply. The working-man will comment on Napoleon as though he had only just died. It is as real to him as is the long tradition of wars. The extraordinary stoicism of the French during the last war was the more remarkable when contrasted with the demeanors of other nations. There was something matter-of-fact about the Parisians under the attentions of Big Bertha, which made one feel how much it was in the blood. This also was part of their background. Their fathers had given them their stoicism. Thus the Paris background with all its myriad elements does carry the artist along in its strong current quite irresistibly, so that his own swimming really counts for all that it is worth, so that he has overcome the gravity of material instead of being impeded by the solid ground. This is one part played by background in the art of creation. There are others, some wholly advantageous, some hampering, deterring.

Where there is everything to choose, there is nothing to choose. The limitation of choice by background lends the mind profundity, since it becomes deep where it is prevented from being wide. Experiment here gives way largely to tradition, such as is instanced in the spaciousness of Paris. This spaciousness could be understood as applied to a show part of Paris, such as the Champs Elysées; but, held firmly in tradition by background, the Parisian hardly thinks whether his town shall be spacious or not. It is only a question of how spacious it shall be, and that even when he is dealing with quarters that in other cities are the stepchildren of the architect. His prisons, his asylums, his hospitals, have the same wide boulevards, beautifully tree-lined. The workmen's quarters themselves have none of the inutterable dinginess of London, the unkemptness of New York. In this wide spaciousness, whether materially in the buildings or spiritually in the attitude towards art, economy of means reaches perhaps its highest point. Spacing-it is already done by spacing,

by the sense which not only produces a beautiful building, but captures its surroundings as well. And curiously this applies even in the medieval feature of the courtyards. Perhaps more than anyone, the Parisian has discovered that confinement is the one means of appreciating space.

The background of Paris is indeed the rich soil in which things grow nearly of themselves. Fertilized by a thousand thoughts and happenings, it not only promotes growth as a matter of course, but in its depth and richness allows of secret growth, of that conception in the darkness through which alone life comes. Sheltered, hidden from the vulgar gaze, the embryo thought can gather strength until it can support the light of day. It is not withered at the start by the too fierce glare of publicity. Perhaps indeed the greatest thoughts have never been uttered, unable to bear the rough birth into words. The stillness, the quiet, the comfort, even, of background is perhaps the sole means of containing man's instinct for action, for facts instead of knowledge, for knowledge instead of wisdom, enabling him to bear the stress and suffering which thought implies. And with the deeper capacity for suffering goes also the capacity for enjoyment. Big things are not necessary for the enjoyment of the Parisian. His cafés with their blue siphons and yellow brioches; his Sunday walks; a visit from a friend as he sits in his little shop on Sunday afternoons and sells you quarter-pounds of coffee; his bottle of wine, his Sunday dinner, the little bird that he has bought or the gold-fish in a bowl; his pleasure in a new suit or the new hat of Madame; his visit to the theatre or a concert; his pride in Paris itself, almost as though he had built it-all this has the immense spontaneity and naturalness, such as, curiously, is rarely seen except in extreme youth. It makes for that French gaiety and humor which are the birthright of the people which has enabled them to bear for centuries the amazing suffering of the European conflicts and never lose their joy in living, which seems all the lighter and gayer for the solid background against which it deploys itself.

And the reverse side of background-the side which, together with the noble city, provides the horrible little box-like houses of the suburbs, the Parisian's little beloved ideal of country life.

You have the terrible rustic arbors made of cement, the dark and dreary interiors of many a Paris house, the dreadful blue and yellow tiles which seem to belong to the period of the Tour Eiffel, the garish taste for artificial flowers and funeral pomp, the mausoleum of the salon. The Parisian's taste is as extremely bad as it is extremely good. His age-long thrift which sells oranges peeled in order to utilize the skins is cruelly extravagant of human life. Of modern aids, of light and cleanliness in the individual home, as opposed to general principles, he will have none. He has always done it; he will always do it. There is also his laborious bureaucracy, his passion for red-tape, the inverse quality of his love of little things. There are his beautiful manners, his exquisite turns of phrase, together with a talent for pushing and shoving which is over-developed. There is his tradition of the fine gesture, which sent his officers to battle in white kid gloves and which to-day makes an appeal to sentiment in a crowded tram effective, where mere common sense would fail. Most of all there is his narrow nationalism. Here is his background, unsurpassed, wonderful. Here is his Paris, without doubt the most beautiful city on earth. Well, it is so. Why look any further? On the contrary, it is almost a disloyalty to look outside. Paris is self-sufficient, self-sufficing, the cynosure of every eye, the model for every other city. Even the Paris air -why of a truth it is not as other airs. But here again, these curious divergencies are something like the faults and irritating qualities of someone who is dead. We like to say of So-and-so. "He always would do this," and we say it affectionately, half humorously, just because at the time it annoyed us. We remember it more lovingly than the things which pleased, perhaps because it was more characteristic, more inexcusable. These are the impertinences of great things. Background indeed needs a certain amount of impertinence in all its solemn grandeur. There is a wonderful impertinence in blue and yellow tiles, within a stone's throw of the Sainte Chapelle; in the charming manners and turns of speech together with sudden fierce tempers of the moment. It illuminates the classic edifice of background into which the individual humanities have been built smoothly and impersonally; it makes possible the new thing. Background itself, as