In that novel the “local color” will be found in the blood and bones: it will not be smeared over the outside surface with a flannel rag. And men and women will read the story and talk about it and think about it, just as they are reading and talking and thinking about “Trilby” now.
Did you ever hear any one talk about Mr. Du Maurier’s “local color”? I never did.
But it was for the best of reasons that the barbed-wire fence was stretched across the city just below Cooper Union, although it shut out from view a quarter of the town in which may be found a greater and more interesting variety of human life and customs than in any other region that I know of. Of course this literary quarantine was not effected for the benefit of men and women of clean, intelligent, cultivated minds, but to avoid giving offense to the half-educated and quarter-bred folks whose dislike for what they consider “low” and “vulgar” is only equaled by their admiration of all that is “genteel” and their impassioned interest in the doings of “carriage company.”
I have sometimes accompanied parties of sight-seers through what was to them an entirely unknown territory, south of the barbed-wire fence, and I have noticed in almost every instance that it was only the men and women of a high social and intellectual grade who showed any true interest in, or appreciation of, what they saw there. There have been others in these little expeditions who looked to me as if they stood in perpetual fear of running across some of their own relations, and one of these once gravely assured me that Hester Street was not at all “nice.”
Chinatown is to me a singularly attractive spot, because of its vivid colors, its theatre, joss-house, restaurants, and opium-joints--those mysterious dens in which the Occident and Orient are brought into the closest companionship, while the fumes of the burning “dope” cloy the senses, and outcasts from every clime--the Chinese highbinder jostling against the Broadway confidence man--smoke and drink side by side, talking the while with a looseness of tongue that would be impossible under any influence other than that of opium. Mr. William Norr, a New York reporter, has told us a great many interesting and curious things about the human types--Caucasian as well as Mongolian--to be found in this quarter, and his book, _Stories from Chinatown_, possesses the rare merit of being absolutely true in color, fact, and detail.