He doesn’t know how. He can’t think how. And there’s an end of it. But these queer, weird, hard, sad, drab manufacturing cities--what great writer has yet sung the song of them? Truly I do not recall one at present clearly. Dickens gives some suggestion of what he considered the misery of the poor; and in “Les Miserables” there is a touch of grim poverty and want here and there. But this is something still different. This is creative toil on a vast scale, and it is a lean, hungry, savage, animal to contemplate. I know it is because I have studied personally Fall River, Patterson and Pittsburgh, and I know what I’m talking about. Life runs at a gaunt level in those places. It’s a rough, hurtling world of fact. I suppose it is not any different in England. I looked at the manufacturing towns as we flashed by in the night and got the same feeling of sad commiseration and unrest. The homes looked poor and they had a deadly sameness; the streets were narrow and poorly lighted. I was eager to walk over one of these towns foot by foot. I have the feeling that the poor and the ignorant and the savage are somehow great artistically. I have always had it. Millet saw it when he painted “The Man with the Hoe.” These drab towns are grimly wonderful to me. They sing a great diapason of misery. I feel hunger and misery there; I feel lust and murder and life, sick of itself, stewing in its own juice; I feel women struck in the face by brutal men; and sodden lives too low and weak to be roused by any storm of woe. I fancy there are hungry babies and dying mothers and indifferent bosses and noble directors somewhere, not caring, not knowing, not being able to do anything about it, perhaps, if they did. I could weep just at the sight of a large, drab, hungry manufacturing town. I feel sorry for ignorant humanity. I wish I knew how to raise the low foreheads; to put the clear light of intellect into sad, sodden eyes. I wish there weren’t any blows, any hunger, any tears. I wish people didn’t have to long bitterly for just the little thin, bare necessities of this world. But I know, also, that life wouldn’t be as vastly dramatic and marvelous without them. Perhaps I’m wrong. I’ve seen some real longing in my time, though. I’ve longed myself and I’ve seen others die longing.