the question of finance. He who is worth his million and intends
spending a fortnight in Chicago, will do well to take his million with
him. He may bring some of it away, but that will depend entirely upon
his own capacity for economy. Before registering at the hotel let him be
sure to secure his return ticket, for it is a long walk from Chicago to
New York. These remarks are not intended to discourage all who are not
millionaires from visiting the exhibition. It can be done with less
money. The writer has himself accomplished it. In fact, it is only fair
to say that many of the stories of extortion which have come from the
White City are much exaggerated. The most successful brigands are in the
city of Chicago, and not at the Fair.
The writer can testify, from his own personal experience, that a very
good lunch can be procured in the State of Illinois for less than one
hundred dollars. Thirty dollars is more than enough for a sandwich, and
a glass of water can be purchased anywhere for less than ninety cents.
While to walk by the _cafés_ and restaurants and look upon others who
are eating, costs the promenader nothing whatever. But these moderate
prices do not obtain at your hotel. The object of keeping a hotel is,
like some other occupations, partly to make money. The Chicago
hotel-keeper does not ignore this fact. [Illustration: THE QUESTION OF
FINANCE.]
His ideas of the relation of profit to expenditure are well calculated
to startle the guest of reasonable expectations. If the guest is not
overweeningly ambitious and is satisfied to sleep in a closet or hang
from the stairs, his expenses need be no greater than if he occupied a
handsome suite of rooms at any first-class New York hotel. But if he
insists on having a real chamber, larger even than his own bathroom at
home, and with a real window in it, then he must pay. And it is then
that he begins to discover why his landlord keeps a hotel. Any previous
extravagances in the way of horses, real estate, or precious stones are
as nothing to the present outlay. He finds that the rate per diem is, as
far as he can judge, based upon the supposition that the hotel is to be
closed to-morrow and must be paid for to-day. And real estate is high,
even in Chicago. In matters of nourishment, the wealth of Ormus is of no
avail, unless the waiter receives a tip exceeding in value the
handsomest Christmas present ever given to a dearest friend.
Within the grounds there is little extortion, thanks to the firmness of
the ruling powers.
[Illustration: CAFÉ IN THE MIDWAY PLAISANCE.]
But let not the Chicagoan whose eye may fall upon these lines suppose
for an instant that they are intended as reflections on his character.
The city that secured the prize is simply fulfilling its inevitable
destiny. Had New York drawn the plum we should have witnessed a worse
extortion, with the added mortification of a much inferior exhibition.
Moreover, there is no public spirit in New York, and there is a great
deal of it in Chicago. This sentiment alone is more than enough to make
the difference between success and failure. The woods are full of
citizens willing to begin at sunrise and discourse to you until midnight
of the wonders of Chicago. In ordinary times this burning desire to
impart just that kind of information is not always appreciated by the
outside world; but in times of fairs the spirit that prompts it becomes
a mighty engine. It was soon demonstrated that these citizens could work
as well as talk, and as a result the White City has risen as from a
fairy’s wand.
The important question for the individual citizen is whether it is worth
his while to go to this fair. And this, of course, depends altogether
upon his purse, his stomach, his back, his legs, nerves, wife, children,
and business. He may never have another such opportunity for mental
expansion and physical discomfort. It is a marvel of architectural
beauty. It is days of instruction, of art and science, of surprise and
exasperation, of mental development, fatigue, and financial ruin. In the
end his personal preferences, however, will probably have little to do
with it. All the world are going, and he must go too.
THE ART OF THE WHITE CITY
_By Will H. Low_
On the way west to the White City, to “the stately pleasure-dome
decreed,” where the arts of civilization by the unwritten law of
International Expositions hold their court, the observant traveller
finds abundant food for thought. Beyond Niagara, assuming his point of
departure to be New York, he sees in the landscape through which he is
whirled a continuous sweep of flat farming land, but little water;
fences everywhere, trees sparsely scattered, and plain box-like houses
telling only of shelter; abundant barns differing little from the
dwellings, and from time to time towns of varied nomenclature ranging
from Delhi to Kalamazoo. Through the horizontal blur caused by the speed
of the train through which all this is seen, there appear, principally
about the stations, figures which lend a languid interest to the dead
level of monotony.
The human interest of the picture, however, tells the same story as the
landscape--a story of hard work, of material reward, an acquiescence in
the law by which labor gains bread and shelter, and little else.
Occasionally, in the immediate vicinity of the stations, there is some
attempt at adornment, generally confined to “tidying up” the
surroundings; but around the farm-houses few or no flowers, little or no
attempt to beautify the home, nothing of the almost frantic suburban
effort of the East which has made the country kaleidoscopically varied
with color, for the most part bad, yet giving hope that the next
generation will do better, and pointing at least to a desire for beauty.
Individual effort, unseen along the route, may be slandered by the
preceding, but such for many monotonous miles seemed the foreground of
the picture we were journeying to see.
At last a plain, varied by marshes, through which boarded walks running
at right angles, with an occasional house here and there, testified to
the various suburban excrescences of a great city; then a dome or two,
towers, flags fluttering in the sun, innumerable trains, clangor of
bells and shrieking of whistles; and with Chicago seven miles away,
hidden in a pall of smoke, the White City was at hand.
There are certain mastering impressions in one’s life, certain scenes
which stamp the memory, and, like the priceless _kakemono_ which the
reverent Japanese withdraws from hiding when in the mood to
[Illustration: LIGHTING THE NATURAL GAS TORCHES ON THE ROOF OF THE
ADMINISTRATION BUILDING.]
enjoy it, rise obedient to one’s thought in aftertime. Such a memory is
that of a first sunny morning in Paris: a ride from the Madeleine across
the Place de la Concorde, along the Tuileries Gardens and the Louvre,
across the Seine with the island and Notre Dame in the distance, and
then through older Paris to the gardens of the Luxembourg. Or again, a
certain early moonlit evening in Florence, with the Duomo looming at the
end of the street, Giotto’s Campanile standing sentinel at its side, the
narrow street to the Piazza della Signoria with its Palazzo Vecchio and
the Loggia dei Lanzi, thence by the side of the Uffizi to the Arno and
across the Ponte Vecchio up to the Pitti Palace. These memories, common
to so many, are often gained on ground made familiar through study of
guide-books and photographs which, instead of dulling realization, add
to it the zest of more thorough appreciation. In like manner, study,
discussion, photographs, and engravings prepare one for the Columbian
Exposition; but the first few hours of living in its architectural
dreamland gives reality to the shadowy preconception, and adds the
priceless gift of another masterpiece to memory’s picture-gallery.
It is probably impracticable in any case, and when we think of the
transformation that this prairie has witnessed in two short years, quite
impossible, in the case of the Exposition, to keep the approaches of a
great popular resort in any degree beautiful. Here we have on the land
side of the Fair the usual assemblage of cheap shows, lemonade venders,
and the like, which line the unsightly fence and make up what a friend
has dubbed the Sideway Unpleasant. The fence is hard to pardon in a land
where energy is predominant, desire to do the best not wanting, and
_staff_ abundant. A high white wall enclosing the substantial fabric of
their dream would have done much to give the western approach something
of the festal magnificence which the architects have given to the
entrance by the Peristyle at the lake side.
[Illustration: AT NIGHT ON THE MIDWAY PLAISANCE.]
But once within, to pick flaws criticism must take a higher flight than
one, frankly astonished at the goodness of it all, is disposed to permit
it to. Nothing is perfect in this mundane sphere, but this effort on
lines as yet untrodden by these States has such measure of success that
one is proud to feel that this has been done in our own time, in one’s
own country, by men of one’s own race--the race that peoples our
seaboard, fills our manufacturing towns, tills our great farms, and
stretching westward extracts precious metals here and cultivates
orange-groves and vineyards there; the race which is daily urged, on the
“whaleback” steamer from the city to the Fair, to purchase its
chewing-gum before the boat starts, as none is sold after leaving the
pier; the race that is so cosmopolitan, so made up from strange and
opposing elements, and is withal so homogeneous, so American--and proud,
above all, to feel that this curious people have had, at the crucial
moment, the good sense to be inconsistent, to make haste slowly, to
defer to the few, to make their Exposition the most beautiful before
setting to work to make it, as things needs must be here, the biggest in
all creation.
[Illustration: INDIAN GIRL AND BULL, MODELLED BY FRENCH & POTTER.]
To be of this race and a follower of the arts; to have noted for years
the growth of public desire for
[Illustration]
art and the frequent lapses to indifference on its part; to have seen
that our artists as they grow in strength and numbers claimed the right
to do something larger and finer and better than the private house, the
portrait statue, or the _genre_ picture; and then to come here, where
for the first time they have found opportunity, and where the alliance
of architecture, sculpture, and painting has produced its first work, to
find that first work surprisingly good, is to feel proud not alone for
the valiant craftsmen who have produced this result, but for the country
at large which has stood behind them, and above all for the solid men
of the city of Chicago who have planned the work so bravely and so
wisely. So many elements enter into an enterprise of this kind that to a
community like ours (unaided by a parental government which, as in
France, takes upon itself, as one of its functions, the provision of
public pageant and amusement, and keeps as it were all the material in
stock) the problem was more than difficult, and the solution, solved as
it has been, most surprising. Eighteen months ago in Paris, as I stood
with a French friend in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, he said,
indicating the colossal construction, “I suppose that at Chicago you
will have a tower bigger than that, and that your exposition will be a
triumph of that sort of thing.” “I suppose that it may,” was the answer;
but the tower which is such a blot on Paris, diminishing in scale her
most beautiful monuments, is nowhere to be seen in Chicago, and though
the bones and sinews of the Liberal Arts building may be a “triumph of
that sort of thing,” its flesh of staff effectively covers and adorns it
without concealment of construction or strength, but with due
consideration paid to beauty.
To house the exhibits, to provide for instruction, and to make a
pleasure-ground for the people (it could be urged from a utilitarian
point of view) might indeed have been done more simply, or, as the
phrase runs, in a more “business-like” way. One rugged old farmer I
overheard, as I stood leaning on the balustrade at the back of the
MacMonnies fountain, as he pulled his wife away from the contemplation
of the charming group of mermaids and sea-babies who disport themselves
in the wake of Columbia’s triumphal galley, “Come along, Maria, I never
see no use in them things; women with fishes’ tails.” Maria went along,
but I fancied that Maria’s daughter lingered a moment, and she may have
found the “use” of the artist in the social system. At any rate, the
Chicago business man who individually and collectively represents the
controlling power of this vast enterprise knew the use of beauty, and
with the sagacity born of commercial success called to his aid the men
most eminent in their professions, and then--left them alone.
Arguing without absolute knowledge, is it not easy to imagine that many
times during the two years spent in constructing these superb
structures, the heart of the business man must have failed him in seeing
this child of his creation grow in beauty and strength to be sure, but
at a cost of so many millions? No record exists, it is safe to say, of
any questioning. The artists had been called in, they were doing their
work loyally; and no less loyally, through financial crisis, business
depression, and public indifference, the business man performed his part
of the contract. He had pledged himself to the whole country to do his
best, the pledge had been given and accepted in the hour when he bore
the coveted privilege to hold the Exposition away from competing cities,
and the Court of Honor shows how well the pledge has been kept. A detail
of organization, one of the many which would make the history of the
Exposition most interesting if written, was told the other day, and is
so characteristic of the spirit in which the Fair has been put through,
that it is worth incorporating here. At a time when the Exposition had
reached the limits of all possible insurance, when every sound insurance
company in the world was carrying all the risks it was able to take, the
Exposition concluded to do its own insurance, the details of which
procedure need not be gone into here. At this time there were a number
of pictures, about nine in all, which had been promised for the Loan
Collection of Foreign Masterpieces, and were not forthcoming because of
the inability of the Exposition to procure special insurance policies
which had been promised when, long before, the owners of the pictures
had consented to lend them. There seemed no way out of the difficulty,
when the simple question was asked of the head of the Art Department, if
it was essential to the completeness of the Loan Collection that these
pictures should be in it? To which was answered, that if not essential,
it was at least desirable; whereat this business man gave instructions
that the owners of the pictures be at once communicated with and
informed that he would personally guarantee them against loss if they
would allow the pictures to come. As this little show of public spirit
involved a personal liability of over two hundred thousand dollars, the
figures may be considered eloquent enough to find place in such a paper
as this.
The wisdom of a large policy is to be found on every hand. The
Exposition has been called a dream, and as it is so soon to vanish may
well be one; but if the intent had been to deceive, it could hardly have
been made more deceptive. To one in the gondolas or the launches
speeding between these walls, they stand as though for all time; and for
one walking in the long arcades, detail and veracity of construction
force themselves on the attention most plausibly. It has been too often
described how the architects, adopting certain dimensions, have obtained
a conformity of effect; but that once obtained, they have shown the
greatest freedom, and though all of them are men of many works, they
have never perhaps been more happily inspired. The Administration
building is the appropriate crown to the buildings leading up to it, and
Mr. McKim’s Agricultural building is characterized by great charm of
proportion, and though heavily charged with sculptured decoration is in
nowise overloaded. In addition to the very decorative sculptures due to
Mr. Martiny, there is on this building some of the most satisfactory
ornament in purely classical vein that I can remember on any modern
structure. In fact, though the treatment of this group of buildings is
thoroughly classic, it is pleasant to record the belief that in no other
country would the traditions have been so well observed and at the same
time so revivified as in ours. Our men owe their education to the Old
World, chiefly to France; but it seems as though a certain separation
from the influences of their schools had given them an independence
which their foreign schoolmates lack. It is probable that had Paris in
1889 adopted the programme followed here the result would have been as
correct, as thorough, as noble as this; but the result as a whole would
have been colder, and lacking in the individual character observable
here, where every man seems to continue the tradition rather than follow
it. Mr. Post had long accustomed us to his capacity to build big and
well; but never to build so big and so well as in the Liberal Arts
building. When sailing along the lake-front one appreciates the
immensity of the structure, which seems to equal that of all the other
buildings combined; but near at hand one feels its beauty more than its
bigness, and the simplicity by which this result is arrived at. The
portals, taking almost all the decorative features, are admirable. Mr.
Atwood’s Fine Arts building is perhaps the best where all is so good,
owing almost nothing to its decorative features--which, as the building
is to be permanent, one may hope to see changed. The frieze of the
Parthenon should hardly be borrowed to grace so fine a modern building.
At night Mr. Atwood’s building is seen in all its beauty of proportion,
and the nights when it is illuminated best of all. The torches running
along the top of the building burn great flames of natural gas, and the
illumination is at once simple and effective. On the roof of the
Administration building something of the same effect is obtained in
conjunction with the electric light outlining the dome; but as the
torches on the Fine Arts building are seen against the sky, the effect
is finer.
Night and electric light play a great part in the spectacular side of
the Fair. Solomon in all his glory never saw such a sight as the plain
people of this continent have had on illumination nights this summer.
Innumerable incandescent lights sparkle along the cornices and
pediments; the top of the wall inclosing the grand basin is outlined in
fire; search-lights from the top of the Liberal Arts building cut their
wide swaths of light in gigantic circles, resting for a moment here and
there to bring out now this detail or to throw into dazzling relief a
[Illustration: CENTRAL PORTION OF MACMONNIES FOUNTAIN--EFFECT OF
ELECTRIC-LIGHT.]
sculptured figure or beast. It lingers longest on MacMonnies’s fountain,
the fitting jewel resting lightly on the bosom of this Venetian beauty
whom but yesterday we called Chicago; and well it may, as in a degree
the fountain is the _clou_ of the Exposition. It seems but fair to call
this fountain the most important of all the decorative sculptures. Every
exposition has its great fountain, and the choice of Mr. MacMonnies to
execute this one was most happy. Our sculptors as a rule have had too
little opportunity to exercise the decorative side of their art, and we
do not possess as does France a small army of sculptors who can be, as
they were in ’89, turned loose to decorate a great exposition with
groups and figures. It demands not only a decorative instinct but
practice as well, a certain habit of and delight in handling huge masses
of form which men who are capable perhaps of graver and more ponderated
work may lack or have lost. Thus fifteen years ago Saint-Gaudens, fresh
from school and filled with its traditions, would have in the course of
natural selection been the man for the work; but with years and widening
experience it is a question whether he would have undertaken to design
and carry out in the short space of time that which his brilliant pupil
has undertaken and carried through with all the audacity and fire of
youth, tempered by a delicacy of taste which gives it after all its
greatest value. Anything more typical of the youth and hope which we
fondly believe to be the characteristic of our nation is hard to
conceive; and if, as is to be so greatly desired, the monument is to be
made permanent (which the completeness of the modelling of individual
parts, an unusual quality in works like this, would render easy), it
might well stand to represent an era. Mr. French’s massive and dignified
figure of America may be taken as the matron of this generation, tried
and made strong through war; but MacMonnies’s epitome of youth
represents the future of our as yet experimental civilization, and
though the boat is propelled by the arts and sciences, it is the young
girl who fills such a large part in our experiment who is really to the
fore. It is Smith and Wellesley who row with the young girl enthroned;
and _vogue la galère_, with pleasant waters ahead and a safe port at
last!
Of Mr. Saint-Gaudens we have only a figure of Columbus, which he has
signed in collaboration with another of his pupils, Miss Mary G.
Lawrence. It is a good exemplification of what has already been said
that at the first glance this figure seems almost out of place here. It
is of a character--the highest character--of work which depends on the
most serious study. Conception and pose are reduced to the simplest,
almost archaic form, and while it does not seem quite as successful, it
is of the same family as the Lincoln here in Chicago or the Deacon
Chapin in Springfield. The best of the sculpture here, while subject to
the limitations twice mentioned, has perhaps gained a quality more
essentially American by the absence of what may be called the ready-made
decorative quality. The quadriga on the Peristyle, by French & Potter,
the Indian girl and the bull, and indeed all the figures and animals at
which these artists have worked together, are thoroughly satisfactory as
decoration, and more native and appropriate to our soil than the lighter
touch and greater facility of the sculpture at the exhibition on the
Champ de Mars would have been.