FTEN have I sat on a ferry boat plying between Oakland and San Francisco and studied the faces of the thronging occupants, comparing them with those familiar to me for a lifetime on the ferries between New York and Jersey City or Brooklyn. The difference, I felt, was definite and striking. The Californians were far livelier, more alert and elate in expression; in a word, they looked happier. And their talk, their bodily motions, their whole bearing, carried out the impression. No observer who has been visiting the coast for so long a period as myself can have failed to notice this characteristic. In all their contacts with life, Californians, set beside easterners, exhibit what might be called an innocent paganism. They believe in happiness as a daily mood and product, and are able to extract it as they go along. The refrain of the darky song is their motto:

I's going to live anyhow till I die, die, die.

They have what one would be tempted to call a Continental vivacity and gaiety were it not that one fails mostly to find it in like measure abroad. The only European city I have seen that is a rival of San Francisco for what seems the pleasure mood, is Stockholm. It is entirely missing in Berlin or Paris, and, of course, in London.

In truth, why should not California give this effect of insouciance and good cheer? Her climate (all the rest is weather, says Mark Twain), with nature a seeming friend the year around and the sun soaking one's body through.

with genial content - surely, this is enough to account for it. Throw in a scenic backdrop so high colored and picturesque as to suggest the stage metaphor, and add for good measure an appealingly romantic history, with its involvements of Spanish and Indians, the chromatic spectacle of types blent of Occident and Orient, and reason sufficient is given.

It all reminds you of how true it is that climate explains man; all his developments, in whatever direction, root in the soil and the diurnal changes of nature. Imagine Calvinism born and bred on the Pacific coast! You can't; it is a contradiction in terms; and for the simple reason that the God of California could never be a wrathy God. Italy, another sun blessed land, uses affectionate diminutives in referring to deity: the language caresses the Virgin and the saints. God's prevailing attitude in California's favored region is symbolized by a smile. Pan and Bacchus seem the natural deities. Prohibition has a peculiar incongruity in grapeland. And this truth applies with increased force as one moves south to Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and the other coastwise cities. The reason San Francisco can be jauntily lightmooded as she dances or goes to business on top of a momentarily quiescent upheaval of the earth is that a little thing like that is not sufficient to detach a native from the conviction that the sun god is on his side. A Berkeley friend of mine across the Bay, to whose house I went on a day when a slight

seismic disturbance had occurred early in the morning, on my referring to it as an event, replied, "Yes, it was a pretty little quake, wasn't it?" There you are! They flirt with an earthquake almost as if it were a woman. In fine, California, having its own special brand of climate, has developed a point of view that is independent and individual.

All this can well be borne in mind when literature and the arts, whether as product or effect, are in consideration. Having its own climate, as indicated, California has also its own orientation; it is the only section of the land which, in matters pertaining to culture, gives the impression of not yielding to the centripetal pull of New York. It develops and enjoys its own art, takes its very cosmopolitan views direct from Europe or the Orient, and is not to be bullied into hasty admiration of a thing because it happens to have the eastern cachet. Indeed, not seldom in my experience has a bland unawareness been manifested at some reference to a New York success book, a poem, a picture as if the news, if news at all, were negligible. I never could quite make out, at times, whether this lack of response was a pose, or honest indifference. In any case, there it was, and rather refreshing when compared with the meek imitation of or timid deference to New York on the part of other large American cities.

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Of course, much in the cultural life of the Pacific coast looks directly to its unique setting: here we come back to climate again. California is naturally the habitat or at least the practice ground of artists; their studios dot the shore line and blossom in the back hills. The scenery, at my first acquaintance with it in 1900, struck me as almost comically like a stage set in a playhouse. It was so definitely flamboy

In such an environment the great democratic art of the theatre has an unexampled opportunity. The now famous Mission Play at San Gabriel, outside Pasadena, and the Pilgrimage Play at Hollywood are now features of the tourist's quest nobody can afford to miss: they could hardly have found rootage elsewhere. The Community Playhouse of Pasadena, erecting its own artistic theatre in the indigenous style California has so richly developed, is another illustration of an independent art growth. Or as you sit among the scented eucalyptus trees in the open air Greek Theatre at Berkeley, you get a vivid impression of what the classic theatre of old must have been beside the blue Ægean – outdoors, with stars and winds and sound of waters for accompaniment. Nowhere else can that bygone sentiment be so delicately duplicated. Nor could the Bohemian Club revels, an annual event, be imagined as staged anywhere else in the world so fittingly as among the great redwood trees north of the coast city. So, too, with the still crude art of the screen, which yet has possibilities that make it of interest in the total artistic expression of America; everybody knows how truly California is camera land.

But when we turn to the actual outgiving of literature from the coast,

some puzzles confront us. Virile and valid writers aplenty have come out of that fecund soil, or as sojourners have been associated with it: Richard Realf wrote some of his finest lyrics there; Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Helen Hunt, Charles Warren Stoddard, are a few of the elder dispensation; Frank Norris, Jack London, Mrs. Atherton, Stephen Crane, have continued the tradition; and present day authors such as Harry Leon Wilson, Stewart Edward White, George Sterling, come to mind as resident, if importations. If the list has a diminuendo sound as we approach the twentieth century and move on into it, nevertheless there is a steady line, the torch has been handed down, and doubtless will continue to be.

Can the California writers, past and present, be grouped under a common denominator? Do they as a whole contribute something definite to swell the diapason of the national orchestra? It is a temptation to escape the question by superficially replying: "California is romantic." And there is some color for the claim. "Ramona" is a romance; so, notoriously, is "The Outcasts of Poker Flat"; each in its kind, this is equally true of "The Jumping Frog", "The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter", and "The Call of the Wild". Kate Douglas Wiggin's "The Birds' Christmas Carol" might be described as fathered by Dickens, with the maternal assistance of California - twin romantic influences! And a later author like Mrs. Atherton reveals herself as incurably romantic, though so earnestly set on that independent, forthright pursuit of realistic "truth" which she so admires in European lands. But what of Norris's "McTeague", grim enough in its realism, surely, albeit equally melodramatic in framework of plot? One

thinks of that powerful story afresh since under the title "Greed" it is now launched in filmdom.

But viewing Norris in the full sweep of his work, it is not so easy to place. him in a category; really big men chafe at narrow confines of definition. His finest imaginative creation, for some of us at least, is "The Octopus"; yet that member of his incomplete trilogy was conceived as a truthful study of the processes by which wheat, a great typical American product, was brought into the world to feed the people thereof; the social historian's aim, one must call it. It may be suspected that if one went into the matter carefully, it would be found that when a real Californian does drab work, tending toward ugly "truth", it is testimony to some change of environment and influence: as when Norris went to Harvard to pursue his labors there during his formative period. Ambrose Bierce, that strange sardonic genius who even yet has hardly come into his own of general recognition, seems at first blush an exception. Though he was not native to California, one instinctively places him there by virtue of a long association as editor, newspaper man, and story teller. His sombre, bitter work, does it reflect that state in any fashion? Yes, surely in the lurid melodrama of his short story masterpieces. Such work is as far removed from grey humdrum as it is from the cheery chirruping of the Pollyanna view. It is richly romantic in contrast with the presentation of the sober average life of middle class American life by a Howells. So true is this, that some critics still call Bierce fantastic, insincere, unreal. Proof that California had for him somewhat of stimulation and renewal lies in the fact that he flourished there for

years and made his most distinctive contribution, whereas when he was transplanted to New York City he could not get equal lodgment.

Yet Californians, whether in large centres like Los Angeles and San Francisco or in smaller communities such as Pasadena, Santa Barbara, and San Diego, are too cosmopolitan and aware to be romantic in the same sense in which the term is applied to the south. It may be said that they lean to that æsthetic romanticism which cares less for the ugly, low keyed rendering of life familiar in New York and Chicago. They like color, verve, variety gay audacity and the rhythmic pulsations born of sea waters and shot through with sun values. They are romantic in their taste for literature in the sense that they are avid for the picturesque, the sensational, and the sharply dramatic if not tragic contrasts of life. Things-asthey-are for them include much that is piquant and appealing. But of that kindly, easygoing acceptance of human beings as ever noble and of life's solutions as likely to be comfortable, one would not accuse them. The Bret Harte view seems very old fashioned today. Esthetic rather than spiritual romanticism, let us say, is the preference. Kathleen Norris's "Certain People of Importance", product of a native Californian, has an effect of eastern manufacture, because it is so distinctively of the Howells-James tradition.

In addressing such organizations as the Browning Clubs of Pasadena and San Francisco, I made the mental note: "These people care a lot about Ibsen's joie de vivre, but they are open eyed to its tragic realities." There is a fearlessness born of the sun; but not so much a faith in the brighter issuance of fate as a determination to "seize the

day" (the Horatian carpe diem). Since the day offers a piquant spectacle, a good deal of creature comfort, and a heightened vibration in mere living, why not be glad of it and in it? Californians gamble on the good, and believe they get it as they go along. An admirable trait may be noted in the tendency to back up a native author. The Pacific coast patrons of letters are not inclined to wait for the east to settle the matter. A book is likely to be judged on its merits; they are neither hoodwinked by patriotism nor awed by counter judgments and pronunciamentos. This obviously is a corollary to the earlier statement concerning their critical independence. It must be comfortable for the local writers, and must help to keep art alive at the other end of the country.

Any comparison of northern and southern California, with culture in mind - the things of the mind and the spirit naturally flowering in artistic expression in literature and the other arts must make the point that in the north it is deeper seated and more native, with a consequent longer record of accomplishment. Los Angeles still has an effect of being a tourist town. Yet fast and increasingly, folk of leisure, training, and ideals that blossom out in the various forms of art are settling thereabouts, and beginning to make their impress. The future looks bright to an observer's eye. Even today, if one were wishing to initiate some movement of æsthetic significance, as in the applied arts, education, music, or the theatre, one would be likely to meet more sympathetic response in California than in the east, with its clutter of activities, and hurried tempo. Meanwhile, San Francisco sits on its hills proudly overlooking the marvelous Bay, smiles, and remembers how brilliantly it

got on the literary map back in the middle years of the nineteenth century!

In this little study of Pacific coast reactions, California is used illustratively because it is so distinctive and has been so much longer self expressive in the things of culture. But this is not to ignore the powerful younger development in the states lying still farther to the north. Oregon and Washington, with cities like Spokane, Seattle, and Portland as centres of activity, have, and still more will have, their own story to tell. Material might, and much of beauty, together

with the vigorous optimism of a forward looking civilization, will surely be translated into the higher products. I wish there were space here to quote, as one specimen of what this land in the extreme north may be expected to contribute, the superb poem by Mary Carolyn Davies entitled "Autumn in Oregon". It is an authentic imaginative utterance of local sentiment, set to music and vibrant with emotion. And it is but one note in a larger composition. . . . But this is a story that comes later, and is still in the telling.