New-York tribune., 1872-08-03
AUGUST YORK.

The month which began on Thursday Is es-
pecially the vacation of haTd-workers People
with whom money and leisure are permanent
goods, not rare blessings to be toiled and
prayed for, usually begin to make business
of idleness in June. The long rows of stately
city dwellings are closed and dusty all through
the Spring and Summer. But usually II
is not until the July heat has wasted
their strength to the straining of the last fiber,
and the rpening days and cool nights OF
August begin, that the professional man, artist
clerk, and bOokkeeper take their fortnlghts
holiday, to lay in stock of health and vital
ity that shall carry them through the Winters
fight for bread and butter. The most notice
able fact about the thousands of men who
will next week crowd the boats and railways
leading out Of the cities, is their Ignorance OF
what they want to find, and how to find 1t.
They need rest, pure air, and an entre
change of scene and ideas The exhausted
set of faculties which have been worked well
nigh to death in the last year ought to be put
absolutely to sleep, so TO speak, until the hon-
day is over. In nine cases out OF ten they rush
to Cape May, Saratoga, orsome other crowded
fashionable place of resort or else go N.Y.
ing through the country to examine some new
railroad line. Instead of pure country air,
they breath> the smoke of the locomotive, or
the sitting a, losphere of an eight-by-ten hotel
bedroom they exchange the human swarm OF
Broadway for the same swarm on the dustler
street at Atlantic; the stale commercial and
political gossip of banking room or newspaper
Office for the same gossip in beach or bowling
alley in a word, they change their SKIES
but carry their city life, habits, and thoughts
about them; the man never comes outside OF
his iron mask, and comes back strengthened
neither in brain, muscles nor lungs
With many men, artists and literary men
in especial, August is made n season for lay
ing in a stock not only of health but mate
"rial.r They have grown 80 numerous as to
form a separate class whose movements are
of social Importance aside from their work.
They use this golden month of leisure to
gather in studies and characters into their
sketch and notebooks, while the journalists,
| in like fashion, go cleaning into these new
fields for matter for future leaders
and paragraphs. All this seems to
| casual observer honest and proper enough
! But the truth is that the defect in average
American literature and art lies in the haste
| with which all material is worked up and
thrust crudely before the public Two weeks
in the Yosemite or Yellowstone region gives
us mountain painter in Smith; chance
week in yacht deluges us with marine views
for years afterward from Brown an hours ride
| in O railway car fills tthe notebooks of
our many "coming American novelists
| with characters. Our artists with both pen
and pencil work as it were from hand to
mouth; their bread, in housekeepers' phrase,
ia made of raw -four. 1t would be worth
their while to compare Hawthorne's note
| books with his finished work, to observe how
long tho ideas were suffered to lie fallow
before they were slowly titled and brought
forth into fruit so perfect and enduring.
The real difference, perhaps, lies in the fact
that in one case the work is done from the
lifelong love of art, In the other from the
daily necessity for money; but until that df-
ference is recognized the prospect for both our
art and literature is but that of fungus
! growth, strong and rank for the time it lasts,
but that time will be but day.