Not long ago Mr. H. D. Sedgwick contributed to a magazine a study of what he called “The New American Type,”[43] based on an exhibition of English and American portraits, some recent, some a century old. He found that the more recent were conspicuously marked by the signs of unrest and strain. Speaking of Mr. Sargent’s subjects he says, “The obvious qualities in his portraits are disquiet, lack of equilibrium, absence of principle, ... a mind unoccupied by the rightful heirs, as if the home of principle and dogma had been transformed into an inn for wayfarers. Sargent’s women are more marked than his men; women, as physically more delicate, are the first to reveal the strain of physical and psychical maladjustment. The thin spirit of life shivers pathetically in its ‘fleshly dress’; in the intensity of its eagerness it is all unconscious of its spiritual fidgeting on finding itself astray—no path, no blazings, the old forgotten, the new not formed.” The early Americans, he says, “were not limber minded men, not readily agnostic, not nicely sceptical; they were ... eighteenth century Englishmen.” Of Reynolds’ women he observes, “These ladies led lives unvexed; natural affections, a few brief saws, a half-dozen principles, kept their brows smooth, their cheeks ripe, their lips most wooable.” People had “a stable physique and a well-ordered, logical, dogmatic philosophy.” The older portraits “chant a chorus of praise for national character, for class distinctions, for dogma and belief, for character, for good manners, for honor, for contemplation, for vision to look upon life as a whole, for appreciation that the world is to be enjoyed, for freedom from democracy, for capacity in lighter mood to treat existence as a comedy told by Goldoni.”[44] This may or may not be dispassionately just, but it sets forth one side of the case—a side the more pertinent for being unpopular—and suggests a very real though intangible difference between the people of our time and those of a century ago—one which all students must have felt. It is what we feel in literature when we compare the people of Jane Austen with those, let us say, of the author of The House of Mirth.